Some videos

Still megabusy with the book. Complications happening all the time. Here's some of my favourite internet videos for your enjoyment.

Book work

Been light blogging the last week. I'm entering the last stressed-out phase of putting together the new Facts-compilation.
The good news: It's gonna be great
The bad news: No time for blogging

Here's some pics of the new office though:












Russian gasmasks 4ever










Work area, half-done













Skylight, which may seem nice, until you try sitting under it on a hot sunny day. Ant under a magnifying glass-effect. I've covered up half of it with silver foil. When I get a taller ladder, I'll cover up the rest.
Yes, this is Finland, land of the sauna, but this is ridiculous.

Cheers to all the wonderfully talented and kind people which have been sending me guest entries to the book. It's not gonna be a good book. It's gonna be the best.

Report from a bad day

I had a pretty bad day on tuesday. I wrote this in my phone:

Who hasn't felt like blowing up a bus every time your dinner gets burned,
every time there's a stone in your shoe?
Who hasn't felt like driving a truck full of explosives into a police station
because you missed a deadline, because your girlfriend has this time of the month?

If I feel bad, it's only fair that everybody else should feel as bad.

I'm not surprised that terrorism exists, what surprises me, is that their motives
are so pure.

I sent it off to Tanja, she called within five minutes and asked if I was alrite. I tried telling her I found that thing funny, it was meant as a nihilist joke. She didn't believe me. I still think it's funny, in a very twisted way, of course.

Chaplin

Ho ho ho
Just saw Chaplin's 'Modern Times'. What a movie.

Our friend starts the show with getting a nervous breakdown and sabotaging the steel mill he's working at. He's taken to a mental hospital.

Upon release he manages to get arrested for communism. In prison, he gets high on cocaine and beats up four men. This makes him a hero and he is pardoned.

On his release, he finds poverty pretty bad and he's not too keen on working, so he does his best to get back into prison. That's when he hooks up with an underage streetgirl and finds motivation to work.

He tries working as a nightguard, but spend a bit too much time rollerskating and getting drunk. In the end, they finally succeed as bar entertainers (Charlie sings a saucy song in french/spanish and makes some lewd gestures), but the law puts a stop to it. They escape and skip town as fugitives. Roll credits.

Fun fact: Fascist exploitative steel mill tycoon is a spitting image of real life fascist exploitative car tycoon Henry Ford.

*sigh* They just don't make those anarchist movies like they used to...

Nazca live vids

Moving went smooth. Big thanks to Timo and Lauri for helping out!
Still no internet in the new office, but I can still post from home.

Here's some edits I did of last saturdays gig. Enjoy!

Sell me Down the River




One Day Understand

Cameraphone fun.

I'm busy moving, so why don't you guys check out some pictures?

Aki en route to Tampere, Nazca/Kätyrit split gig.












Mikko en route to Tampere, Nazca/Kätyrit split gig














Black eye after the Tampere gig













Freddy in Cornmo studio, scene of the crime for Non Grata and a bunch of other music.












Dad












Me n Tanja doing trick photography












Mikael, Nikolai's kid, trying my russian gasmask












Doing trick photo on myself












My brother gave me a nice cowboy shirt.












Tanja plus plastic flower












Freddy's cat Skitso

Moving

Gonna take some days before I'm back online again. If I haven't answered your email, this is why.













This is the gate of the new place.

A late tribute

Roger Keith "Syd" Barrett died on the 7th this month. His music has been a great inspiration to me. Had Piper at the Gates of Dawn permanently in the cd changer since december...
Here's some videos of Floyd at their trippy surreal best.

Enough whinin' bout cigs. Been one month and THREE days now and feeling much much better.
So, on to other things, like:

Gigs.










The Silver Mt. Zion gig was fantastic. It was worth every penny going to Glasgow to see them. We even got to chat a bit with the band earlier in the day.Intense, emotional, melodic, trippy, political and just so human you want every gig to be.

Stage banter:
Efrim: You are a fantastic audience and we would do anything for you.
Scot audience member: Cut your hair!
(laughter)
Scot audience member: Only kidding
Efrim: I've had nightmares where this is happening.

The same thing happened as when i saw Godspeed, I got an immediate crush on the string section. Something about cute girls in great bands. My hormones go wild.

One of those that will ruin future concerts for a while, because it set such a high standard. Up there on the all time top 5

Mogwai
I never really got Mogwai, every record had a mix of utterly fantastic stuff, then followed by muzaqesque plod.
They got a reputation as a great live band,so I went to see them in Tavastia, hoping I would finally see what is so mindboggling about this band. As on record, I got a mix of some really nice stuff and elevatorstuff. Left before the encore. Sorry.

Rubik opened and played a really impressive first song before turning very Radioheadish. No, I don't consider that a compliment. Got very little against Radiohead, but very much against Radiohead-inspired bands.

C'mon guys, sometimes 'strange' is better than 'pretty'.

Murder Mystery
Two guys on guitar/vox and bass, plus a drum machine. Immaculately styled with ironed shirts and hair straight from the hairdresser. Surprise, surprise, shit music.
Postpunk is the new goth. All style, no content. Go back to your PIL and Gang of Four records. Listen to them. Hey, they got lyrics.
Apparently about things. But hey, we all know that you listen to the new postpunk, the ones with the flashy shirts and the lyrics about gurlz n stuff. Don't ruin your mascara singing about stuff that matters.

Vom
Free gig in Oslo. Great stuff, an all-girl band singing about food.

Life without cigs.

It's been two and a half weeks without cigs now and I must say it's been ...interesting.
What I've learned:
1. Things bounce when you throw them at the wall
2. The satisfaction of smashing something lasts about 2 nanoseconds
3. It hurts like a mofo to smack your nuckles towards a concrete wall. Biting into your hand hurts pretty much too.
4. Sudden explosive rages doesn't necessarily improve your life.

Apart from that, colors are a tad more grey, but then again, I feel the worst is past me. If you've seen Trainspotting, you might get a hint of what I'm talking about.

And yes, I am exaggerating for comical effect.

Vice magazine had a comix issue recently.
This interview with Dave Cooper is required reading, so is this autobiographical story, delivered by our best friend, Tony Millionaire.

Or just check out the indexpage. Lotsa must-see stuff.

Quitting smoking
The last week, I've been smoking a lot of cigs. Been finishing off some projects (Bellona is putting together an anthology) and preparing new ones (Nazca DVD, New Fakta compilation, Nazca record, A 110 pages graphic novel).
Anyway, a lot o work and a lot o cigs. The new thing is my lungs have started wheezing. Now that's scary.
So, I'm on my second day without cigs. Just chewing these godawful nicotine gums. Wish me luck, friends.

Nude bikers

These guys deserve all respect coming to them.
World Naked Bike Ride
It's about time someone put attention to this. Biking is fun, healthy and cheap. But the lack of proper bike roads means we sometimes have to share the road with cars. Which usually means if there's an accident, bicyclists are in a pretty vulnerable situation.
To quote their Wiki:
The ride demonstrates the vulnerability of cyclists on the road and is a protest against oil dependency.

Couldn't have said it better myself.

Just a bit sceptic about riding naked. You know. Naked butt. Bikeseat. Yeesh.

Hats off to these guys though.

My theory

This is really simplistic, but anyway.

There's three main institutions of power in society.
Church
State
Commerce

Our main task here is to pit them against each others, so no one of them will gain superiority. If they do, they will eventually turn totalitarian. Every one of these authorities will want you to give up your rights for 'the common good'.

Commerce will use the argument about the mythical free market. If we give them free reign, diversity, free consumer goods and fun all the time will occur.
(If the free market really encourages diversity, how come I can't find anything in my local store not produced by Unilever, Leaf or Nestlé?)

The church will talk about dwindling morals. That if we let them take care of things, our society will be as squeaky-clean as it once was in the shiny shiny past, because people need ethical guidance provided by the authorities. Apparently rape or incest didn't happen then. Mostly because it was indecent to mention these things.
(I usually think that outrage over alternative sexualities display a lack of morals, rather than moral superiority. If grown up people fall in love, no matter what skin color, sex or age, it's their own damn business. No, I'm not talking about paedophilia or bestiality, that's not sexuality, it's rape.)

The state will as always talk about your safety. You are in danger, all the time. And only the state can provide for your security. So please stop worrying about people being apprehended in the streets for no reason. It is for your safety and comfort.
(If gestapo methods really works, how come those methods never worked for the REAL Gestapo? No matter how many people they put away, tortured or ditched in a trench somewhere, they still lost.)

Power politics. Absolute power corrupts absolutely. I don't usually put on my old anarchy t-shirts, but I still find a lot of truth in the old slogan 'All power to no one'. Not that I think a real anarchy would work that well. My guess it would be pretty fractured and the next world war would be over a can of beans.

Anyway, to repeat, pit the three main powers in society against each others. Create a balance. That way, they will be fighting each others over control, while we reap the benefits, like infrastructure from the state, cheap goods from commerce and umm, free bibles from the church.

Work fun

I had a dream about my old boss last night.
He would come over every hour and ask me what i'd be doing.
I would answer either 'drinking coffee' or 'fixing my portfolio'
Not even in my dreams does he have any authority.
My old boss was a 21 year old alpha male straight outta the army.
He thought authority was the ability to speak really really loud.
His interests were business n careers, sports n celebrity gossip.
I think we had an uh, communication problem.

Like this:
'Whaddya think of this draft?'
'I don't like it.'
'Why don't you like it?' (is it the composition? maybe the font?)
'Because it's ugly'
'Why is it ugly?' (Maybe the colors should be taken down a bit, too contrasty, right?)
'It looks bad'
'Why does it look bad?' (Yeah, the typography can be cleaned up a bit, is it that?)
'I don't like it'
etc, etc.

This thing worked itself out when I found out he liked a lot of black and red. I would just use those colors and he would love it)

He was assigned to fill a managerial position that wasn't there before. Us designers n programmers could well organise ourselves. Suddenly, if anyone had an idea they wanted to try, they were to report to him, if he thought it was a good idea, we could proceed. This was a bit of a contrast to the flat structure we were used to. It caused a lot of resentment towards him.

Not that he cared, I heard him being routinely rude, snappy, threatening and condescending. He was a 45 year old trapped in a 21 year old body. Every time I would feel the smallest tinge of sympathy towards him, he would say something racist, misogynic or just plain stupid that would justify my complete antipathy.

His coup the grace was when the company were having an xmas party. We were going out on one of those cruise boats from Helsinki to Tallinn. Excellent. A bunch of people in their mid twenties aboard a boat with unlimited free alcohol. This was on a thursday. Needless to say, events are a little blurry after leaving Helsinki. When the boat returned to Helsinki, there were some shaky feet stumbling off the boat.

That was when he ordered everybody back to work.

Yeah, nobody had been told. Everybody assumed that the next day would be off, for WHO IN THEIR RIGHT MIND WOULD THINK TWENTY HUNGOVER PEOPLE CAN DO ANYTHING PRODUCTIVE?

I guess what I'm trying to say with all this is:
1. You don't get real authority from business school.
2. Shouting at people is not authority.
3. Being a xenophobic scumbag won't give you the respect of your subordinates.

And of course, that my old boss was a bit of a dick.

Glasgow
Stressing a bit here. Me n three friends are off to Glasgow tomorrow to check out A Silver Mt.Zion. If you have the possibility, track down this record. It is the only record this far that has made me shed tears with joy. Considering the masses of records consumed during 32 years, that's no mean feat.

Just thought I would give you the URL to where you can check out almost all videos from Lume. You can either go to Googlevideo or Youtube. Your choice.

Apart from that, we had a splendid rehearsal with Nazca yesterday. We'll be spending the summer recording.

Be back on monday
Cheers

Choir n other stuff
Big thanks to everyone who took the time saturday eve to be in our very improvised choir. It was great to see so many nice people and good singers in the same room. Funniest part was when I asked everyone in the room to scream. The result of that sudden blast of sound was that the Tascam crashed.
Apart from that, beer, cookies n homemade stuff (courtesy of Ninni) was consumed and a great time was had by all.

Anyhow, what's up?
Been putting the last touches on a series of illustrations for a finland-swedish schoolbook coming out this autumn from Söderströms. You can see one of them at the top of this post. Click the pic.

The Norwegian Arts Council has been generous enough to support both the projects we proposed to them. Hats off to them, I am extremely grateful.

What projects? Well, a new compilation of Fakta fra Verden (Facts from the World), plus the project I showed the teaser from. It's still a bit hush-hush, but it just went forward a giant step. And it will be great.

Apart from that, I would like to thank Turkoosi club in Helsinki for shutting their doors without telling anyone about it. They have been just as helpful with information about when or if they will open again. The fantastic results of their splendid efforts are around ten bands losing booked n promoted gigs and promoters losing advertised clubnights without ever being notified. Kudos Turkoosi!

Big shout-out also goes out to DHL which managed to smash the used Powerbook I bought, altho I paid them almost 90 € for insured shipping. Extra kudos goes out to them being impossible to reach, arranging for meetings and never showing up (twice!) plus their hard work at keeping me informed about the ongoing process. Thanks DHL!

Nazca live video
Here's 'Real Love', live at Lume.
Enjoy!

What's Happening?

Been a busy bee lately. Spent the last two weeks editing the Nazca | Lume -performance.

Weird, memories of the gig weren't that good. Our gigs are usually pretty spontaneous affairs, so we felt a bit out of place there. I remember thinking it felt like a theatre performance more than a concert, since we'd spent the preceding two-three months planning the concert. Everything was pretty tightly plotted.

Looking at the footage, I realise how wrong I was. It's great, one of our best at that point. I'm deliriously happy it was documented properly this time.

If everything goes well ( it rarely does, but anyway) we'll have a dvd out shortly.
If you would like to check out parts from it, go here.

Otherwise, we've been recording a bunch of music lately. Just some more glockenspiel to record and we're done with a bunch of songs. And they all sound fantastic.

If I may say so.

I think I may.

Apart from that, comix, book design and illustrations are filling my waking hours. Together with biking of course.