A middle class slave to the payroll who claims she has no time to join The New Arts Activist Society

Tonight my friend told met that she didn't have any time to join an arts society club. She said that people who stay on the payroll, working for the man, have no time to do things like that. And then she sighed. 

She has been very tired recently. I think it's because she needs some new energy. She's going through the mid-life crisis too. Last year was full of self doubt for her and still is, in a way. Going through the mid-life thing is a big deal for a lot of people. A lot of them get a divorce and take up hobbies. Some become more happy after. Others really regret it, particularly when they have been dating someone 15 years younger for two years and find out that they can't really party that much, or that they really didn't wish for any more kids. 

Play a role, express yourself, rule the payroll

I once saw an interview with an old Swedish film director. It was about him as an artist. He said that the thing he regretted the most was not expressing himself the way he really wanted to. 

In her heart my friend is authentically an artist, but she is also a married woman and a mother of two.  She is successful in her creative field but I believe she needs another outlet because she is torn between the role of the middle class woman, who slaves on the payroll on goes to soccer matches, and an artist who once ran and sometimes *roamed* free in foreign cities. She needs to express herself more. More chaotically. Less middle-classy. 

She randomly becomes very frustrated because of the patriarchy and sometimes she thinks that the world is coming to an end and that we should all hoard stuff and have chickens and bunkers. She hates it how middle-aged women become "invisible" as she describes it. She has also fantasised about having a big pink vagina fountain in her garden, that pees and squirts and does different variations of spurts. I understand her on so many levels but let's face it. Something needs to be done about this. Otherwise she might go into the classic middle age, middle-class crash landing. 

I think I won't have to convince her much to join the New Arts Activist Society. It would be something in the spirit of the Dada Movement. As long as there is fun involved she's likely to last. We used to arrange and host lot's of weird and fun parties in the nineties. And we were both DJs. And lot's of other things. 

We should never be slaves to a suppressing payroll or any enforced roll for that matter. Don't be a bug, stuck on a bed, Kafka told us that slavery sucks. So here is the manifesto. The message. Loud and clear!

Don't let the social contract of the middle class suppress you.
Don't let the heteronormative suppress you.
Don't let their assumptions and expectations get you down.
Don't let The Man you are working for suppress you.
Make your own money.
Fuck the Patriarchy! 

Long live the New Arts Activist Society!

#feelingpumped #naas #m.ar.s

To write

My friends keep telling me to write more

Not to write more, but to tell stories from my head. I am always writing interviews anyway but they are a different kind of writing. It's documenting through someone else. 

To write is obviously a skill like any other. A set of skills. 

A chef is what comes to mind when I think of a comparable skill that is more commonly appreciated. The chaos of nature has created an infinite source of raw material for the chef to choose from. His or her job is to prepare the raw materials, combine them together, work them, put them on a plate and serve the neat outcome to the hungry (or curious) person at the table - and this is exactly what a writer does. Any kind of writer. 

A plumber or a specialist in linoleum laying might read this and become insulted that I didn't use them as an example for a  that compares to a writer but the difference is super clear. Writers and chefs have living things to choose from when it comes to work material while carpenters, bricklayers, plumbers and shipbuilders can count on their logs, rocks, pipes and metal. 

This is not to say that the raw material of a writer has no reliability to it. That is people and their behaviour. People seem to behave and move in ways that can very often be predicted, and sometimes even relied upon. Particularly people in groups and over a long span of time. These descriptions are best to be read in the Bible, the Saga of Njál (Brennu-Njáls saga) or Snorra Edda. 

Muscle memory

Many crafts find their way into the muscle memory of the woman or man who work on their craft. A good seamstress can create wonders, not to mention those who work with ceramics and tiles. They do their detailed jobs flawlessly and move on a focused, but fast pace. 

Drivers, bodyguards and waiters have a super fascinating skillset. I guess exactly the same skillset that people need when they are on a soccer field, navigating a crowd while keeping your eye on a target. 

My skills, pace and how many times I hit the back button on the keyboard depends on how much sleep and caffeine I've had. For the past year I've had the routine of drinking one cup of coffee per day. Maybe I should increase my caffeine intake and go to bed earlier.  Could be an idea. The eternal search for balance. 

My pace on the keyboard right now is a little below normal but that's ok. When I used to write journals my handwriting was often slow so that it could be more readable. It also gave me a little buffer on the sentences. Go slower, think it over. 

Writing with hand can be more interesting than writing on a keyboard because sometimes you can spot your mood by the way you write. This is very clear to me in the journals I wrote from I was circa nineteen to twenty three. Sometimes my handwriting was wild. Sometimes calm. Same things on my mind, most of the time, just different intensity, the rise and fall of different emotions used to vary. 

Anyway

I used to write a lot of poetry at that time. Publish some, even read one on TV, but mostly we read them out loud for listeners at poetry nights held at clubs, bars and cafés. I read my stuff with a lot of other people who now do this as a main job, publish books by numbers.

I often feel guilty that I didn't continue on this artistic path and became a blue collar journalist instead. Mixing jobs. Writing about lipsticks. Creating a popular website about lipsticks and art. Getting by as a single mom. But hey. Maybe I'm not ready? Maybe I'll never be ready? Maybe I have too many stories to tell and when I think about it get's overwhelming?

I am just going use this blog until I make further decisions A revival of an old blog is a good place to start. Like a chef experiencing with his food skills in the kitchen of a kindergarten. Yeah! I'm King I'd say in the spirit of Kanye. 

I can start by telling you a story that will appear in another blogpost.

The structure of The Ozark

Recently I have been watching a tv series called The Ozarks. For years friends have been pressing on me to watch it, and I even know a guy who wrote some of it, but for some reason I didn't get myself to turn it on until very recently. I instantly got hooked as my friends had predicted.

I am fashinated by how those different classes of people operate together and how quickly their very complex problems escalate and how fast they can solve them, each in their own way. The mean guys are also some of the most disgusting that I have seen. The FBI cop and Ruth’s redneck dad. Ruth is probably my favorite although I hope she won't become too tame in the next episodes.

The huge power roles played by middle aged women in the series is cool for obvious feminist reasons and the writers have all the archetypical elements under control. Buddy the mentor, Darlene the evil witch, whatshisface the evil father, and the gay redneck dad who became his sons ghost mentor (I cant remember their names). And then of course the Romeo and Juliet element in it. The love affair between Charlotte and Wyatt. Uptown girl and downtown boy etc.etc. I have just finished the second series and now it’s time to begin the third one. It would be in my nerdian spirit to write recaps in the next few days.

Later!


The sound of silence

 The sound of silence comes when you allow every single muscle in your body to relax

The habit of shutting down the computer after using it

I remember in the late in the 90's when people had it as a rule, to shut every software down and then finally the computer itself after using it. Some even disconnected from the router or unplugged the internet cord.

Did you do that and do you think it is a habit we should pick up again?

This invisible history and it´s non objective reality

Until recently I didn't quite realise what a big role a certain search engine company has played in my life. I remember when it first started it was a rebellious answer to another established computer company that had, for a long time, sold their own software as a neccesary part of the computer. They were dominant on the market. 

The new search engine was supposed to be cool with a weird name and you could also have email and lots of gigabite storage for free. It seemed like a better option than hotmail so you moved over and soon everyone did. Then they started slowly sending out all kinds of products. Like a free image editor with lots of online storage for photos. And a map. And later a full blown visual map of almost every house, in every city, in every corner of the world.  Now they also have a tv channel. And zoom like software, and a contact storage with calendar planning, reminders and all sorts of other things that I seem to use every day. 

By detecting my behaviour and desisions this search engine company must have gained deep insight into so many things that I have done and thougth about through out the years. the people I have met and all the places I have been at. It´s like turbo psycholgyst on mental steroids who has observed you for years.

Let´s visualise apps as objects

I sometimes visualise a person, like a touristy type, standing somewere totally surrounded with all the stuff you find on your smartphone. Let's start

A record player
A radio
A camera
A few clocks
A calendar
A phone book
Some letter paper and lots of envelopes
Bank books and credit cards
Some pinball games
A remote control
A tracing device
A synthesiser with lots, lots of instrumental sounds
A dj deck
A visual board
A note book
A video camera
Sound editing device
A calculator
A compass
Parking meters
Airplane tickets
Facial recocnition device
Live video broadcasting device
A guitar tuner
A scale
A step counter
Lots of books
Some security cameras
Lots of videotapes
An enourmous collection of photoalbums
Morse coding device

and the list goes on

The cultural growth, that has been going on in cyberspace since the search engine company with the cool name and it's older sibling, the Fruit, finally took over, has been too overwhelming to describe.

What we have now is a very big non objective reality (or maybe singulary objective reality since it's all in one device), that affects and/or controls our behaviour to a small or a large degree.
It gives you something to think about.