General nonsense

Seahawks + Dodging Deer = Another Commute

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This morning/middle of the night made for an awful commute. During the first third of the drive, the roads were clear, but every kilometer or so, I encountered big groups of deer playing in the road. I must have seen 100 deer in about 100 kilometers. I also saw a rabbit, which I have never seen around here, and two foxes. This winter, strangely, has been mostly devoid of moose. It occurred to me that my driving amounted to little more than dodging deer, which would not be a bad name for a video game. I got to use the whole road, just as the Seattle-based 1990s comedy sketch show, Almost Live encouraged Ballard drivers to do. You pay taxes on the whole thing – randomly weave all over the road!

On the second third of the road, most of it was covered with ice that had been covered over by snow. So many cars were off the road and so many tow trucks were pulling the cars out. The whole thing made me not only not want to drive but made me think seriously about the merits of living somewhere warmer – Hawai’i once more? Australia (perhaps much too warm)? Uruguay?

Thanks to the middle-of-night driving, I did not get to see my Seattle Seahawks win against the San Francisco 49s in their playoff game. It sounds like the Seahawks did not play at their best in the first half, so I know I would just have been getting angry and sick watching it anyway. By the time I was done driving the first two-thirds of the seemingly interminable three-hour commute and stopped off at a petrol station in Uddevalla, the Seahawks had claimed their place in the Super Bowl (versus the Denver Broncos). All kinds of mentions of it are going around the internet already – but it seems funny that the two places in the entire US to pass laws making recreational marijuana legal are the two places that send their football teams to the Super Bowl.

Tuareg – Nice high school boys – Destined for sleep

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Listening to some music from Mali thinking about going to sleep, and then one of my French-man army said to me, “You bet!”

This took me back suddenly to elementary and high school. I am sure lots of boys there were nice, but there is only one I remember being absolutely nice. A calm politeness that was beyond his years, above the hubbub of adolescence. A quiet politeness that went beyond what was normal for anyone, actually. He was the kind of boy who borrowed a pencil one day and brought you a whole new pencil the next day to replace it.

I was destined, though, to be close friends with girls who had huge crushes on this guy. I suppose for me he appeared a lot like I appeared to many people – not genderless, but somehow not in the mix when it came to adolescent dating and awkward hormonal expressions of interest. He seemed “above” it. He probably wasn’t, but it just seemed like he was not at school to be flirting and dating.

In elementary school or junior high, he made fun of the term “You bet” – or he said it jokingly because someone didn’t like it. I don’t remember exactly how it went, but suddenly the emphatic exclamation, “You bet!” reminded me of this guy. Naturally he happens to be one of the few people from that era who has no online presence. I have no real idea what he is doing but assume he’s still one of the nicest guys I have ever met. It is rare that a person is genuinely nice without any kind of agenda or ulterior motive. I know I am a cynic, but once a while, faith is restored, at least in part.

This kind of random thought springs to mind when I am trying to sleep – entirely without success.

Made in Sweden – It might surprise you

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Most people have clear ideas of things that are Swedish – Volvo, IKEA, Abba. It’s also easy, being in Sweden, to imagine that everyone knows what’s Swedish and what isn’t. But I realized that there are a few things that are very much Swedish that a lot of people (outside Sweden and Scandinavia) don’t realize. Even some really major companies.

H&M (Hennes & Mauritz) – Late last year when I was in the US, a giant new H&M store was opening in a shopping mall near where my parents live. I had to explain to virtually everyone that it’s a Swedish giant. No one I talked to seemed to have a clue. One person thought it was Dutch; another thought, improbably, Korean. But no one guessed Swedish.

Spotify – Spotify has spread all over the world to become almost like the “Google” of streaming music, i.e. synonymous with the idea of streaming music the way Google is with search. But people outside Scandinavia seem blissfully unaware of the Swedish roots of the near-ubiquitous Spotify service.

Skype – Skype revolutionized instant communications. But again, an everyday convenience and household name technology is not recognized outside northern Europe as a Swedish invention.

Tetra Pak –You probably use Tetra Pak or some facsimile of it every day without knowing it – but probably did not know that the paper-based packaging, developed in Sweden, was a revolutionary change in packaging.

Electrolux – the world’s second-largest appliance company. You know, all the white goods!

And a little older …

Celsius scale – Swede Anders Celsius invented the 100-point thermometer scale used globally.

Music falling on the spooky, dark, winter-wonderland drive

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I arrived home after three+ hours of driving to trudge through ankle-deep snow – snow is everywhere. No big surprise. I cannot complain – winter did not come until late this year.

To get here to this calm, quiet, still cottage in the woods, I drove through some unpleasant conditions. All day in Gothenburg the temperature hovered around 0C while a snowy-sleet fell all day, creating a dubious, slick concoction on the road. It was a harrowing, treacherous drive at various points.

I actually break the trip into thirds. The first third is all motorway, which was largely clear – but it was extremely windy, trafficky and the further north I drove, the thicker the snow that started to fall (and the thicker the layer that already covered the ground).

The second of the three parts of my trip starts to become more winding and rural but is still not the worst part. There were a few blinding snow flurries, and the wind, particularly when crossing large open fields, blew mountains of snow up from the roadway into the line of vision.

By the final leg of the trip, which consists of considerably more rugged roads, winding, hilly and unkept, snow and wind were whirling, mildly blizzard-like, the roads were covered – no lines visible at all. The two vehicles that got behind me expressed their displeasure and impatience with my caution with some angry tailgating. My caution was warranted – in three different spots on the road, large groups of deer were just standing in the road. If I had not been going as slowly as I was, we’d have just plowed right into them.

There was a time, long ago, that driving in these kinds of conditions would have scared the hell out of me. I have let go of the fear and nervousness and embraced a healthy respect for the force of weather and just moved forward. Good advice for most things.

“Yo – here’s another little piece of advice…” Reggie Watts – “Fuck Shit Stack”

Advice: “Sing your life – any fool can think of words that rhyme”

I ask virtually every person I meet to sing for me. Mostly to see what their reaction will be. I like to know what people will do in that kind of unexpected situation. Most people are pretty shy and won’t just break into song. Some need coaxing, such as the shy boy from Karlstad who eventually sang – and once he started could not stop, with lovely patriotic songs about Värmland. Some, like an old ex, would never do it at all. Others burst into enthusiastic singing immediately, such as an Egyptian doctor I once met who sang a long and mournful-sounding song in Arabic; my lovely French friend who regaled me with a most rousing version of one of the worst songs I have ever heard, “Mon fils ma bataille” while waiting on the train platform at Aulnay-sous-Bois after he misguided us and put us on the wrong train to the airport, and then the people who are musicians already – they are always ready to go with a song.

Of late I got to hear the most intentionally whiny, horrible version of Snow Patrol’s “Chasing Cars”. I can’t stop thinking about it and laughing. It is especially good because the guy singing it to me is Scottish, and he is snide and sneering about it and puts a special emphasis on the word “world” – making it sound like it has a whole lot more syllables in it than it actually does. My god, I love it.

Erudite Google Doodles

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In high school I was one of those nerds who enthusiastically volunteered to take part in stuff like Academic Decathlon and Knowledge Bowl. One year we had to study Dian Fossey and her work with the mountain gorillas of Rwanda. My friends and I actually found a plastic toy gorilla on the ground in one of the schools where one of our competitions took place, and we named him “Digit” after one of the gorillas in Fossey’s group at Karisoke Research Center and who figured prominently in the film, Gorillas in the Mist. We took that toy gorilla everywhere (from places near, such as all over the state for our competitions, to places far, such as Japan and Germany) until one of those in our group irresponsibly lost him. I somehow hope he is still traveling and having adventures as we had always hoped for him, wherever he is. (Assigning human traits and adventures to inanimate objects is nothing new to me.)

Google Doodle for Dian Fossey

Google Doodle for Dian Fossey

I was thrilled when I opened Google today and say this creative, evocative Google Doodle on the screen, celebrating Dian Fossey’s 82nd birthday. (She was murdered in 1985.) Lately the Doodles have been fabulous – with one recently marking the 123rd birthday of Zora Neale Hurston, the difficult writer who was a star of the Harlem Renaissance movement and whose work, particularly the seminal Their Eyes Were Watching God, is a staple of American high school and college reading lists.

The same can be said for the recent Google Doodle of French writer Simone de Beauvoir. Much cooler than my words can convey.

I don’t know if these semi-obscure Google Doodles raise awareness or not – but I love that they exist and maybe make a few people dig into things they would not otherwise have been exposed to.

Winter has come to Sweden – Temperature drop

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Winter usually arrives much earlier than this. But no, this winter, everything waited for January. Last week it was +7C and raining.

This morning when I drove in the warmest temperature I saw was -8C (about 17.6F) and the coldest was -17C (1.4F), which was at my house.

Winter took its time to show up with a vengeance.

Why I Changed My Mind: Liz Phair

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How does an artist follow up on a masterpiece? Liz Phair’s debut album, Exile in Guyville, is widely perceived as a singular feat – a musical masterpiece. To come out with such a powerhouse achievement as one’s first offering is of course both a blessing and a curse. Nothing – in reality or perception – will ever live up to the promise, raw talent, the tapping into something very personal and universal that Phair’s first album ignited. It’s like many genius debuts. Living up to that standard or to the hype is an impossible feat. (Think the Stone Roses debut – they never came close to that brilliance and took a damn long time to produce a second album, which was mediocre entertainment at best, especially by comparison.)

That said, I would argue that Phair’s follow-up, Whip-Smart, was quite a neat, tidy and catchy sophomore effort. In fact, it is one of those rare albums, like Exile in Guyville or Nine Inch Nails’s Pretty Hate Machine that has nary a misstep, and thus invites repeated listens to the entire album and not just one song here or there. (I have given a lot of thought to how important the whole album used to be.)

I felt slightly less enthusiastic with Phair’s third album, Whitechocolatespaceegg. It was quite different, but upon many listens, over time, I enjoy it and find myself thinking of songs from the album and singing them to myself at times. I don’t keep returning to the album as I do with the first two, but it’s still not at all bad.

While I won’t say that I detest her self-titled album from 2003, I can only say that it sounds considerably less sophisticated (although more commercially polished – not necessarily a good thing), a whole lot more desperate and some of the songs sound like a woman knocking on middle-age trying to convince herself (and the rest of the world) that she’s still hot. A lot of people would applaud this, but the way Phair went about it just felt like taking ten steps backwards in terms of songwriting. Her work on Exile was quite sexually explicit but felt important, like commentary or a look at the inner processing that takes place when engaging in a whole lot of casual and often meaningless sex. It never felt gratuitous or calculated as a shock maneuver, even if in many cases it did shock. The more recent self-titled album screamed out, “I’m still here. I need attention, so let’s talk about my sex life with a younger man!”

Considered, reconsidered: Fine and dandy if that kind of attention-grabbing promotion worked, but it was the beginning of the end of my being a Liz Phair fan. Or at least it made me a far more discerning skeptic. I will never discount the impact of the earlier work and absolutely won’t say that Phair is not gifted enough to surprise me.

The Mind-Boggling Stuff We Do to “Fit In”

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Thinking about youth and the stuff we do because everyone else is doing it so we better do it too to try to fit in. In so many ways I went against the grain – particularly at a time when people were most desperate to fit in (adolescence/early teen years). By then I did not care anymore.I escaped all the dangerous teen peer pressures one hears about (the parties, drugs, drinking, teenager pregnancy or whatever) because I had a firm grasp on the fact that that was not who I was and that was not what I wanted.

But when I was a child, I was so cripplingly shy that I felt I had to engage socially somehow, and the worst nightmare for a person like me was something I frequently tried and hated. This was the obligatory childhood sleepover. So many times I was invited to someone’s house to spend the night – and I went. In fact I would beg to do it, even when my parents did not want me to. Either inviting someone to my house or going to theirs – hell, sheer hell. I spent the entire time miserable, counting the minutes until it was over – no matter how close the friend was. But usually I did not have really close friends for very long… because I was too shy and insular and could not hang on to them, they would move away, we would be placed in a different class each year and thus be separated (and that was enough to cleave a friendship in two for little kids), because because because. No good reasons. Just that I was as much a drifter then as I am now. My brother has friends who date almost to pre-verbal times in his life. I would have been lucky in my early years to keep a friend through one school year.

This is not true now in adulthood at all – no matter where I move in the world, I have held on to close friendships, although some of course drift. But I attribute this to the fact that I have always been trying to have adult-style friendships even when my peers were not capable of having those kinds of friendships. (Not that I never engaged in any of the sniping and backstabbing of teen times, but when I reflect, I think the times I did that were almost always in an effort to cheer someone else up – yeah, I know, tearing down someone else to make another person laugh is not that mature – but it’s what I had at the time.) I have been trying all along to be the good, solid, trustworthy friend a person could turn to in any kind of crisis. For the people I loved and cared about most, of course. I have also been a careless friend to those who just were not as important – or in times when I really needed to focus more on myself.

My point – the dreaded sleepover. I am not sure at what point I fully embraced my hatred for the sleepover… the forced sleepover I was trying to incorporate into my life. I spent all of elementary school engaging in this wholly awful, awkward experience just to seem “normal”. I remember even reaching a certain level of desperation, inviting people who were mostly just people I sort of knew at school and thought were “cool” (until I spent a few hours with them outside of school and realized I had no desire ever to talk to them again). THE-WORST-EXPERIENCES-EVER. Yes, so bad, it requires all caps. So bad that some of the residue lingers in my brain quite vividly, despite these things happening almost 30 years ago.

I never wanted to be that kind of social – I don’t like sharing my space or time generally – and now I am very selective about who shares my space. But such selectivity never came into play, and I shudder to think of the time I spent with so many people who were like a specially designed form of irritant – sandpaper just for me.

Once I finally got over this shyness (when I was 12 or so), which happened suddenly when I woke up one day realizing that I had no idea how I could feel inferior to or intimidated by people who were basically idiots, I guess I felt that I was living in a freer way – living in my own, albeit developing, identity. There were plenty of ups and downs, but I think I was living and choosing friends in a more authentic way, not just driven by what I felt I should do. While this is still sometimes a tricky road to navigate (balancing being humane toward people and reserving my time and friendship for those I feel are deserving), especially on a personal level, the concept of living without bring guided by feelings of “should do”/obligation is a powerful directive that I have taken to heart.

Why I Can Never Make Up My Mind: John Edwards

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“Today, under George W. Bush, there are two Americas, not one: One America that does the work, another that reaps the reward. One America that pays the taxes, another America that gets the tax breaks. One America – middle-class America – whose needs Washington has long forgotten, another America – narrow-interest America – whose every wish is Washington’s command. One America that is struggling to get by, another America that can buy anything it wants, even a Congress and a president.” – John Edwards, 2004

Poverty – particularly among the working poor – has really only started to become a headline-worthy issue in the last four or five years when a significant number of people who had perhaps been just on the edge of poverty fell into it thanks to the economic collapse of 2008. At various points in history, of course, poverty and welfare have appeared on the mass media radar, and occasionally escaped from the lips of politicians. Mostly it has been all talk or has been negative, “shaming” talk (much like the 1980s rhetoric of Ronald Reagan demonizing the mythical “welfare queen”).

John Edwards, in focusing on poverty and inequality in America, may have been well ahead of the curve by focusing with laser-like intensity and precision – at the risk of his own political rise. Of course his penis and lies about what he was doing with it unzipped and undid him faster than his dedication to poverty-related issues, which is a shame when you look back on his rhetoric and ideas about America. He has been, as this article in The Atlantic described, been whitewashed from the Democratic Party, despite the fact that the platform the party stands on today is one he essentially built himself. I acknowledge that. It’s easy to gloss over the good Edwards did and would have tried to do given the mess he made of his personal life.

Who among us does not make a mess of our personal life? Most of us screw up – sometimes on a grand scale – but most of us are not in the public eye and won’t suffer serious consequences – like becoming a national joke, destroying whatever is left of our very public marriage, sacrificing any and all chance of holding political office. Unfortunately, Edwards’s fight against economic inequality will always be overshadowed by his personal choices and lies.

Edwards championed those who can rarely speak for themselves and highlighted hard truths about class and economic divisions in America (that many Americans, struggling or not, do not like to admit about America. But it is still hard to make my mind about him – I suppose my approach can be as complex as who Edwards actually is. It is not as though by making very poor decisions and very public mistakes (more than once) negates his role as a thought leader, activist or intelligent man. I suppose it just means that he was perhaps not that well-suited to become president.

Why I Changed My Mind: Lucy Liu

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The other day I wrote a lot about Julianne Nicholson (and every time I write “Julianne” I am very tempted to write “Julianne Moore” since she springs to mind first) – which made me think a lot about the cast of Ally McBeal – one of the shows I have disliked most in my prolific television-viewing history. Many actors associated with the show earned my dislike simply because they were in the show. Some have redeemed themselves in other ways – at least partially – including Lucy Liu.

Lucy Liu has a long television history that I won’t recount. Her bit parts here and there in her early career were not memorable or offensive, but only worth mentioning to note that she has been around for a long time, paying her dues.

She has also been in a bunch of high-profile films, like Charlie’s Angels, which I could do without (even if I am quite sure she was, to use a phrase I would never use but am today, kick-ass in her role).  Perhaps more notable – and about when I started to change my mind about her – the Kill Bill films from Quentin Tarantino. Liu owned her role as O-Ren Ishii and is actually one of the more memorable parts of the Kill Bill series for me.

Another role that made me think twice was Liu’s presence in the musical Chicago. The first time I saw it, I hated it but sat through it anyway. Subsequent viewings have softened my feelings – and I have begun to appreciate it. Liu’s role as Kitty Baxter was not huge – but it was another that remains memorable.

I caught Liu’s roles in the inane Cashmere Mafia (not sure that one is forgivable), the sometimes very entertaining Dirty Sexy Money and ultimately a surprising role that I found quite redeeming, Officer Jessica Tang in the underappreciated cop drama, Southland.

Considered, reconsidered: Where I went from just appreciating Liu and feeling she had been fully absolved of her Ally McBeal and Cashmere Mafia guilt to actually really liking her has been her starring role in Elementary with Jonny Lee Miller. Her serenity and subdued smarts play well off Miller’s portrayal of the over-the-top mad genius, Sherlock Holmes. Liu embraces what has traditionally been a male role and turns it into something all her own in the Elementary version of this classic tale.