Defining movies of the 00s

I rarely watch movies these days, sadly, nor do I know much about cinema in general. I’m really the wrong person for this. But I would just like to list a few movies that I think are significant for the decade that will end soon. Perhaps not the best ones, but defining in the same way that Modern Times defined the 30s (capitalist crisis), Casablanca defined the 40s (antifascist struggle), Dr. Strangelove defined the 60s (the Cold War), A Clockwork Orange defined the 70s (institutionalism), Videodrome defined the 80s (screen consciousness), and The Matrix defined the 90s (network consciousness). Here they are:

The Matrix Reloaded & The Matrix Revolutions

In the sequals to The Matrix the influence of computer games becomes more obvious, both in camera angles and animation effects, and in the story telling. In his book Convergence Culture Henry Jenkins points out that the story of The Matrix takes place on many different platforms: in the three blockbusters, in the animated short films, in the games, in web-forums, in the comic books, etc. That’s why some parts of the trilogy can be difficult for people unfamiliar with the plot elements from the other platforms. Many movies have given birth to successful spinoff-products (the Star Wars-books, etc.), but with The Matrix-trilogy it was the first time that the creators planned from the beginning for their story to take place in many different media contexts. Using several platforms for enhancing the experience and the interpretations of a cultural product – that’s what Jenkins calls convergence culture. Apart from this interesting aspect – it’s difficult to find action films that are more entertaining.

A Scanner Darkly

It’s made with new, victorious animation technology that give the anime-dominance some competition and it’s about control society and the War on Drugs and its casualties. And it’s a faithful PKD-adaptation! Even more shockingly: Keanu Reeves acts well in it!

The Elite Squad

Like no other film, this was a cultural and social phenomena, surrounded by an enormous hype in Brazil. Before it premiered, pirate screenings took place everywhere in favelas and other poorer areas, only adding to the success of the movie – a very interesting happening indeed, with all these discussions regarding copyright and intellectual property that we’re having these days.

With an aesthetics inspired by american reality shows like Cops and with a message wide-open for interpretations, this was a problematic movie for many people. Some critics saw it as fascist, others discovered its shades of grey. Those who saw Captain Nascimento as a modern Chuck Norris missed the sweaty, pill-popping, delicately nuanced, and very powerful performance by actor Wagner Moura. And excellence was found all over the team; actors, music, editing, script, directing, light, etc.

A problematic film is also productive. Tropa De Elite managed to put the civil war-like situation in Rio De Janeiro on the agenda. Formerly unthinkable remedies could be put forth, like the decriminalization of ganja. That’s the central theme of the movie: the trafficking of green leaves, not white powder – poor kids being killed in the drug wars so middle class hipsters can smoke that weed. Legalization could do a lot (together with a project aiming at social equality, that is) – it would take away much power from the gangster guerrillas of Brazil.

Gomorra

Roberto Saviano’s book is one of the greatest reading experiences of recent times and one of the most important documents regarding our society, a Heart Of Darkness of present day captialism. But isn’t it about organized crime? Exactly. Gangster shit is all about a profit. It follows the same rules as all other business, although it generally has a different relation to the state and its laws. Saviano constantly clarifying for us and showing us the enormous reach of these modern, horizontally organized business empires (who makes up about half of the economy in the area around Naples, Italy) is the the book’s real strenght (also: his HST-like willingness to mix the personal and the political and put his body right in the center of what’s happening).

The adaptation to the screen is brilliant, taking only a couple different pages from the book and weaving it to an engaging story. Technically it reminds me of Tropa De Elite, but closer to a documentary style. Just like the book, the movie is a clarifying, demystifying piece of work. It shows us that it’s not about codes of honor and high class. It’s kids running drugs and fucked up mullets and crappy eurotechno and ugly track suits and doing everything to make a profit, even burying toxic waste in your own land so the vegetables will give your people cancer.

Fight Club

The lecagy of this movie is summed up quite nicely in an interview with Wu-Ming – it’s a movie from a time when people thought poetical terrorism could change the world. Still it’s a potent cinematic experience. (And yeah, technically it’s from a couple months into the 90s, but whatever.)

Do you, by any means, relate to Chuck Palahniuk’s book Fight Club?

Well, I liked both the book and the movie they made out of it. I was in Houston, Texas, when the movie was released (in the Fall of 1999) and I went to see it on the very first evening. After the ending (which, by the way, anticipated the events of September 11th), I got out and heard a guy murmuring: “Fuckin’ weird…”. The night after, I went back to see it again. Not that I ideologically stick with the Mayhem Project (a “collectivist” project like those I mentioned above), but I found many similarities with the state of mind we were in during the Luther Blissett days. “Luther Blissett” was our collective Tyler Durden, sometimes one of us went someplace, someone approached him or her and whispered: “Hey, Luther, I side with you!” or “You’re great”, or something along those lines. There was always this guy walking ahead of us, we were walking in his footsteps Recently, I downloaded an avi file of the movie, very good quality, ripped from the DVD. I saw it again and I noticed that it is a very 1990’s movie, some parts are a little outdated, but it’s still powerful.

City Of God

Brazil showed that they could make those sentimental gangster flicks as good as anybody. Sort of epic, actually.

Foucault on criminals

The break between public opion and criminals has the same origin as the prison system itself. Or, rather, it is one of the great benefits that the power structure has reaped from that system. In fact, the hotsile relationship that we see today between criminals and the lower strata of society did not exist until the eighteenth century – and in some parts of Europe not until the ninteenth or even early twentieth century. (…) At that point , a new form of economic discipline calling for honesty, accuracy, punctuality, thrift, and an absolute respect for property was imposed on all levels of society. It became necessary on the one hand to create in the popular mind an openly hostile attitude towards illegality. Thus with the aid of prisons, those in power created a hard core of criminals who had no real communication with the masses and were no longer tolerated by them.

(p. 126, Foucault Live)

George Clinton never died

Back in the Motown days, we used to wear tailored suits. That was the thing to do in Philly. Even in the Ghetto, you’d buy the best suits or have them tailor-made. We was broke as hell, but that was the thing. It was like the clean, pimp style. But seeing how fictitious that was, we welcomed a change. So when kids started wearing hole-y jeans and T-shirts, we’d grab a towel and wear it like a diaper. When it changed again and it had to be clean again, we bought $10,000 leather-winged outfits, spacemen costumes and a half a million dollar Mothership. If it had glitter, we had to make it glitter to the point that nobody had ever done it before.

Then that was getting old after we’d been on tour for ever, so we got the camouflage stuff. We pretty much started that on the One Nation Under a Groove album. We went into the army/navy surplus stores and stuff was like three dollars for a pair of pants. $3.50, $2.50 for shirts. We loaded everything outta there. In a good six months, that shit was up to $30 or $40. Now it’s a couple of hundred dollars to get a good army suit.

The history of Funkadelic begins where Hendrix left of: distorted guitars, orange-purple soundscapes, black cosmology, LSD-weltschmertz, burning american flags, bombed out city centers – but with one forward-looking, crucial difference; they added the Funk, the continuous groove, the steady heartbeat of the Mothership.

The easiest way to break down P-funk? Psychedelic Rock crossed with Funk. This gives Funkadelic their unique flavour, that is why they appeal to both dirtbag rockers and californian gangbangers, that is why their music has met success both amongst American college-nerds and party-goers in the Brazilian favelas. While the original funk was developed under the disciplinary regime of James Brown, the Detroit bastard child was generally to fucked on acid when they were in the studio to accomplish something substantial. Skippable experiments drenched in bad acid and bad hippie wisdom is one of the weaknesses of the p-funk-catalouge. They also had the bad habit of including ballads on their releases, an area which they unlike James Brown did not master. Clinton’s half-baked Frank Zappa-imitations (Jimmy’s Got A Little Bit Of Bitch In Him) are also misplaced, since Clinton’s own sense of humour transcends Zappa by lightyears. To bow down to an inferior is not a good look.

The bitches’ brew that Funkadelic initially served their followers had ingredients echoing both the immanent theology of the likes of Meister Eckhart and Thomas Müntzer and the darker side of that took over after The Summe Of Love. “The Kingdom Of Heaven Is Within” is howled repeatedly on the intro to their first LP. On America Eats It’s Young they even include a text from The Church Of The Process, a congregation founded by ex-Scientologists that worshipped both God and Satan and believed the world would end any minute now. A.S. Van Dorston writes in his brilliant The Afro-Alien Diaspora, that it “seems unlikely that George Clinton took the Process Church seriously for long. Everything he did showed that his songs were meant to benefit everyone in a positive way.” The iconoclastic imagery of Clinton was larger than one church, it was an all rebellious, playful mythology that was riding on the bad acid-vibes of Hendrix and fellow noise-bringers. Dorston continues that

there’s no mistake that the early music was hard. In stark contrast to their later cartoonish space-freak image, the band looked and sounded as earthy as the dirt on the cover art for Maggot Brain. Funkadelic were bad motherfuckers. They shared management and stages with the other ‘bad boys of Detroit’ – Ted Nugent & the Amboy Dukes, MC5, and The Stooges. Their management even cooked up a marriage between George and Iggy Pop as a publicity stunt. Iggy was probably relieved that it was never followed through. ‘He could have been my wife’, tittered Clinton. (…) Funkadelic’s unique relationship with white rock ‘n’ roll started when they had borrowed amps from Vanilla Fudge. They were so pleased with the high volume that they immediately got their own. Like Jimi Hendrix and Sly and the Family Stone, they reclaimed rock music as their own. (…) By 1970’s Free Your Mind And Your Ass Will Follow, Funkadelic sounded as if they had absorbed some of MC5’s aggression and The Stooges’ decadent nihilism. They continued their critiques of capitalism and booty-liberation theology, but instead of the blues, Free Your Mind’s title track showcased lysergic-drenched noise, with Bernie Worrell’s slavering, distorted three-note organ riff similar to Velvet Underground’s Sister Ray.

With time, the hard-work funk ethics of James Brown came more and more into play, and the psychedelic distortion and acid noise of the first albums took the back seat as the line between Funkadelic’s and Parliament’s identities blurred. The albums got more concentrated and funkier, and funkier, reaching a pinnacle with One Nation Under A Groove in 1978. As the album name suggests, the lyrics and concepts had moved closer to black nationalism (a course that took a later generation of black musicians a lot further. It is also interesting to note that the evangelic SF imagery is a central element not just in the Parliament’s completely masterful Mothership Connection, but also in the mythology of Nation Of Islam – and The Church Of Scientology).

As the eghties drew nearer, the P-Funk-army got more involved in the war against disco, which shows up in both confrontative song titles and in the music itself (it was getting polished). Funk was becoming more and more difficult to play. The times were changing. Cocaine replaced acid, and the quality of music declined. In the disco-era, what else could you do but sell your soul to the placebo syndrome and start smoking death instead of sweating away death under the powerful groove from A Fully Operational Mothership.

The pioneering work of the funk-tribes had however been accomplished. With Uncle Jam Wants You they passed the legacy onto the next generation. Not long after, Uncle Jam’s Army of pioneering hip hop-DJs was formed in Los Angeles, with Egyptian Lover sent out on a mission to once again reclaim the pyramids. On his solo release Computer Games from 1982 Clinton passes the torch to Afrika Bambaataa with the chant “like Planet Rock, we just don’t stop“: Planet Rock was released the same year, and a new world of music was born. Another generation took over. Once again black music was taken out of the clubs, into the urban landscape. Once again the sound in the parks was rough and raw, not smooth and polished. A rich foundation had been layed for the future of funk, and hiphop-producers gathered the ammunition needed for the oncoming battle. The apocalyptic Bring-The-Noise-eclecticism of Funkadelic was essential in The Bomb Squad’s revolutionary Wall Of Sound-technique, while the beautifully bouncing booty-bass and slick arrangemnets of Parliament lives on in the productions of Dr. Dre, DJ Quik, Organized Noize, and many others.

Ever since the mothership of Parliament-Funkadelic went under the radar in the disguise of The P-Funk All-Stars, Clinton hasn’t been the same, and releases bearing his name have mostly been thrown together without class. Atomic Dog was, of course, the shit, but besides that he has rarely shined like in the seventies. Two moments are worth the mention, though.

Just out of jail, and with both Dr. Dre and George Clinton on his side, U Cant C Me is as relentless and triumphant as we ever saw Tupac Shakur. This is one of his hottest tracks, much owing to Clinton’s idiosyncratic adlibs and Dre’s gloriously perfected p-funk (the beat is so large that it doesn’t matter that its skeleton is identical to Snoop Doggy Dogg’s Who Am I). When the Clinton spaces the funk out on Synthesizer from Outkast’s critically-hugged-to-death Stankonia it’s another beautiful moment. But in recent years, solid contributions have been missing, and you would suspect that Mr. Clinton have been paying more attention to the crack-pipe than to the microphone. A friend even had the nerve to inform me of his demise some years ago, a piece of bad news that a quick googling could refute; in fact, he had a new album out. And he put in his input on that Wu-Tang Clan-album.

How does he do it? Perhaps George Clinton is a perpeteum mobile, an alien, cyborg machine that “just don’t stop“, defying physics and AA meetings. In a way the essence of Funk: bodies defying the laws of gravity, shaking, getting it on, grooving for hours and hours and years and years. It’s mind-blowing to see sixty-year-olds like James Brown blasting the same shit on stage as forty years ago. Funk aint slack. You gotta sweat if you wanna have fun. If you want your spot in the sun, you gotta be on some hot shit. On the other hand, if you got funk, you got style.

“Allt är matematik”

Allt är matematik. Allt är nummer, och nummer är inte något abstrakt. Enligt Pythagoras är tingen en manifestation av den numeriska strukturen inneboende i dem. Han talar om ett “levande universums andning”. Det finns en systematisk ordning som våra två ögon inte kan se, men som vi möjligen kan känna. Enligt honom och hans efterföljare är universums ordning matematisk och musikalisk, avståndet i naturen mellan de jordiska och himmelska sfärerna är ordnade likt perfekta ackordföljder. När skapelsens kroppar rör sig i samklang hörs en musik i naturen som vi uppfattar som tystnad.

(Harmoni är dock inte enbart tystnad, men även balanserat ljud, på så sätt som minimal techno väger upp oväsen från gatan, och lämnar sinnet klarare och mer rörligt.)

Nietzsche hade svårt för matematiken, och odugligförklarade den då naturen uppenbarligen inte följer någon slags decimal exakthet. För övrigt älskar naturen att gömma sig för oss, som Herakleitos sade (?) i ett av sina fragment.

Pythagoras hämtade mycket inspiration från sina resor i Indien, Persien, Babylonien, osv, vilket får en att revidera bilden av Grekland som den västerländska civilisationens vagga. Visserligen sammanställde de gamla grekerna grunden för vår vetenskap, men mycket hämtades uppenbarligen från andra högstående kulturer.

RAP MUSIC’S THREE STAGES OF PARANOIA

In the chapter Sampladelia of the Breakbeat from Kodwo Eshun’s interesting book More Brilliant Than The Sun the author highlights a development from Public Enemy’s militant paranoia to the slowed-down, full-blown street life hallucinations of Cypress Hill’s Illusions and Sunz of Man’s Soldiers Of Darkness. These are the two first stages of paranoia in rap music.

Eshun’s prose is more than ten years old by now. Today a third paradigm is visible; from the political, to the mystical, to another set of politics. The enemies have remained the same – the government, the police, the record industry, traitors. Chuck D, Ice-T and Ice Cube feared for the loss of their freedom, artists in the next decade fought a battle for their soul – the biblical 2pac, Biggies bleak visions of Life After Death, a praying DMX, the existensial angst of Big Pun, the battle-ready mysticism-futurism and sad soulfulness of Wu-Tang, the post-Native Tounges spiritualism of Mos Def, Talib Kweli, Common, Black Thought. Most popular rappers these days seem to be more concerned with their money being taken away from them.

The struggle for economic independence and creative control (Company Flow, The Arsonists, Non Phixion) that closed of the last millenium was quite effectively recoded into a quest for dollars (50 Cent, Jay-Z, Lil Wayne and the underground rappers following them). Both the political and the spiritual-cultural has been pushed to the side. (Of course, we’re not talking definite categories here, but paradigms.)

In the bigger picture we can see that the initial call for social change (MLK, Malcolm X, The Black Panther Party, etc.) was persecuted and beat down and transformed into religious, criminal and antisocial activities. This immense energy invested in bettering ones life and reaching for freedom and independence was rehabilitated into the capitalsit system through self-employment, the hustler gestalt, the propaganda for private profits and a preferance for surface, not substace… swagger, not skills, storytelling, ultramagnetism.

Foucault on Literature

On page 114 of Foucault Live the French philosopher gives an example of the so-called schizophrenia of capitalism, its ability to integrate conflicting tendencies at its core, a process similar to what the situationists termed recuperation.

In the 19th century the university was the medium at the center of which  a literature said to be classic was constituted. This literature was by definition not a contemporary literature, and was valorized simultaneously as both the only base for contemporary literature and as its critique. Hence a very curious play in the 19th century between literature and the university, between the writer and the academic.

And then, little by little, the two institutions, which underneath their petty squabbles were in fact profoundly akin, tended to become completely undistinguishable. We know perfectly well that today the literature said to be avant-garde is only ever read by academics; that a writer over thirty has students around him who are doing their theses on his work; and that writers live for the most part by giving courses and being academics.

More than anything, this comment is valuable for our understanding of what literature is today.

De Sade verkar ha varit värsta sadisten

Nån kritiker på Aftonbladet gör bort sig.

En sak har dock Kajsa Ekis Ekman (LOL @ mellannamnet) rätt i: Markis De Sade verkar inte ha varit en särskilt sympatisk person (enligt kommentarerna verkar dock Ekis bre på lite extra).

No shit. Han gav upphov till termen sadism. Vad förväntar man sig?

Att blanda ihop intentioner med innehåll med verkliga övergrepp med dikt med verkliga övergrepp med politisk agenda med litterära kvalitéer med personlig livshisoria är så jävla Burroughs- och Henry Miller-rättegångarna och fucking jävla videovåldsdebatten. Lägg ner.

Jag har inte läst mycket av De Sade, men vill minnas att de fyra herrarna i Sodoms 120 dagar som låter sina allra lägsta lustar löpa ut över de stackars slavpojkarna och slavflickorna faktiskt är en präst, en politiker, en general och en mäktig kapitalägare. Enbart en sådan sak försvårar läsandet av De Sade som något annat än en maktkritiker.

Nåväl, markisen kan svårligen försvara sig, men Vertigo Förlags Carl-Michael Edenborg ska lägga replik i onsdagens Aftonbladet.

 

Uppdatering 26/11: Här är Edenborgs artikel. Med några intressanta kommentarer, bl a:

Om De Sade har uppbackning av alla dessa monumentala auktoriteter, varför blir Edenborg så ursinnig av en enda avvikande kvinnlig röst?

Vad är auktoriteten hos en rad akademiker som få faktiskt känner till och läser jämfört med en självrättfärdig slaskartikel i Sveriges största dagstidning? Vilket har stört spridning i vår vardag?

Intervju med Fredrik Edin, del ett

Fredrik Edin håller en låg profil. Trots att han har haft med fingret i en rad halvlegendariska projekt här i landet så är han långt ifrån något välbekant namn. Jag har alltid velat veta mer vad som ligger bakom hans skrivande, och eftersom vi råkar bo i samma stad passade det bra att mötas över en kebab så jag kunde pumpa honom på rykande het info, gamla goda skrönor och det senaste skvallret.

I den första delen av intervjun berättar Fredrik om filmen Metropia som han har skrivit manus till och som snart har Sverigepremiär. De kommande delarna handlar om vägen dit. Från uppväxten i Stockholmsförorterna Jordbro och Högdalen till journalistlinjen i Göteborg och utflykter till Ibiza och Berlin. Från artiklar i Darling och DN till att vara med och skapa ATLAS, Piratbyrån, Asocialstyrelsen och Högdalen Business School. Från punk till techno. Från knegarjobb till nuvarande skumraskaffärer.

Vad handlar Metropia om?

Den handlar om en neurotisk person som åker fel i tunnelbanan på morgonen. Han plågas av att han hör… kanske inte att han hör röster, men han har ett väldigt aktiv själsliv med en stark inre röst som talar om för honom vad han ska göra hela tiden och som ifrågasätter och är jäkligt jobig. Någonstans när han åker vilse så får han syn på en tjej som han avgudar och som har varit med i shampooreklam. Sen börjar han förfölja henne och hamna helt fel, och den där rösten försöker övertala honom att åka tillbaka till jobbet. Men så börjar han ifrågasätta den här rösten, och sen… Jag ska nog inte säga något mer för då avslöjar jag hela…

Det tycker jag inte du ska göra. Fanns det ett tema som du tänkte på när du skrev det här, eller något du kommit på i efterhand, något som filmen handlar om?

Ja. Egentligen handlar det om vad som händer efter övervakningssamhället… när inte övervakningssamhället behövs längre, när människor övervakar sig själva, det klassiska “snuten i skallen”-konceptet. När alla har en inre röst som förespråkar en moral som råkar sammanfalla med liberala värderingar. Det handlar om en hel värld som egentligen styrs av företag och där alla har en stark inre röst som talar om för dom vad dom ska göra. Ungefär som här och nu.

Det låter fint i alla fall, “en stark inre röst”. Som en självförverklingsgrej.

Det låter som något positivt. Vi har använt många New Age-liknande teman. Mycket slogans med New Age-touch som inte är helt ovanligt i företags- och managementvärlden; föreläsningar med kvasibuddhistiska filosofer som har någon managementteori.

Det är intressant att ni inte gör en 1984, att det inte är statsmakten, utan…

Det är lite mer oklart vem det egentligen är som bestämmer. Man ska inte underskatta att stater fortfarande har väldigt mycket att säga till om, men det finns fler som har väldigt mycket att säga till om. Det känns som det inte alltid är helt tydligt vem det är som bestämmer och sätter gränser för vad man tänker och gör.

Det känns vettigt att prata om kontrollsamhället, kontroll från staten eller företag.

Deleuze av alla människor skrev i sin kommentar Postskriptum om kontrollsamhällena att panopticon-tanken som Foucault bl a förde fram, att man hela tiden kan vara övervakad och därför sköter sig… att vi har passerat det stadiet. Nu behövs inte det längre, folk övervakar sig själva helt automatiskt. Man behöver inte panopticon längre, det är helt internaliserat. Många moderna teoretiker kallar det biopolitik, att maktutövningen sker genom folks egna bios, sina egna kroppar och egna medvetanden, och inte sällan just kroppsligt. Shampoo spelar en väldigt tydlig roll i filmen. Den typen av disciplinering väckte faktiskt hela idén till filmen: “Vet du med dig att du luktar starkt kanske du ska välja en annan vagn”. (Fredrik pratar om de skyltar på Stockholms tunnelbanevagnar som påtalar förbudet mot hundar och även på senare år “stark lukt”). Det är biopolitik nummer ett. Då behövs det inget panopticon. Det räcker med att så det fröet hos dom som åker tunnelbana: “Undrar hur jag luktar idag. Jag kanske inte ska stå så nära andra människor. Dom kanske tycker att jag luktar obehagligt.” Det är beyond panopticon. Du kanske har mjäll. Och det kommer alla andra på tunnelbanan tycka är skitäckligt. Bara det är sjukt kontrollerande. Då behöver man ingen TV-kamera för om någon oroar sig för att han har mjäll kanske han inte ställer till så mycket andra problem. Annat än för sig själv genom att köpa ett shampoo som både är dyrt och dåligt och farligt och tillverkat av något företag som stödjer krig i tredje världen.

Den här självövervakningen är verkligen tydlig. Alla som har Facebook berättar vem dom umgås med, vad dom har för sexuell läggning, politiska preferenser, vad dom jobbar med, vad dom gjort idag. Det är självövervakning på högsta nivå. Jag känner att det var oerhört ironiskt att ha Facebook-grupper mot FRA. Det spelar ingen roll om FRA läser alla människors mail. De kommer inte i närheten av den kartläggning som folk helt frivilligt gör av sig själva på Facebook.

Det var väl Amazon som registrerade vad folk klickade på för böcker på deras sida? Där kan du få jäkla massa information. Jaha, den här personen har läst den här bisarra boken och sen den här politiska litteraturen: “Det här är nog en suspekt individ”.

Det är den gamla grejen med lånelistor på bibliotek. Om har tillgång till det kan man veta allas politiska åsikter.

Med Internet finns oanade möjligheter för vad man kan ta reda på om människor. Man skulle kunna samköra Amazon, Facebook, Hotmail, man skulla få reda på allting. Det finns massor av register, kundundersökningar. Vet Telia vad jag kollar på på TV? Det är inte omöjligt att dom vet vad jag kollar på och hur länge och när jag byter kanal.

Men även om det finns massor av sofistikerade sätt att kontrollera vad människor tänker och gör så jag tror jag alltid på något sätt det är en växelverkan, att människor ibland är långt före. Internet har varit hyfsat “Vilda Västern”, ett territorium utan lagar där folk har skapat sina egna regler och levt efter en ordning som ibland har varit motsatt resten av samhället både vad det gäller moral och privat ägande och massor av andra saker. Samtidigt med Facebook finns fildelning.

Och framförallt finns verktygen för att vara helt anonym.

Absolut. Så är det verkligen. I filmen finns det en lösning för dom människorna, men det ska jag inte avslöja!

När är premiären?

Den 27:e november har jag för mig. Jag hoppas det blir årets familjefilm i jul, så att alla tar med sina vänner och släktingar och ser den. Jag tror att om 246.000 människor ser den så får jag någon typ av royalties. Den ska spela in sina intäkter först och det är inte så många svenska filmer som gör det. Det är ganska osannolikt men man vet aldrig. Det kanske tar några år. Den är ju engelskspråkig…

Du kanske får en utökad pension i alla fall?

Det kanske blir sådär 300 kr om året? Riktigt så bra tror jag inte min royalty är, men jag kanske får råd med en falafeltallrik någon gång då och då. Eller kebab, beroende på.

(i del två avhandlas bl a Hunter S. Thompson och Jim Goad)

Marko Fürstenberg – Cocktail Royale (EP)

They say dub is about making space.

That is why it is music for the city, where space has always been missing.

It’s getting more difficult to find somewhere to live. Rents are going up. New spaces are needed.

Dub music, in one form or other, is necessary. This was the conclusion that came to me some years ago, riding the train through the center of Amsterdam with Lee Perry in the headphones. With time it has become clearer and clearer. The effects, echoes and repetitions fit this landscape perfectly. Here is also the need to meditate on the emptiness and the nothingness, which connects to our strong feelings for open spaces; rooftops, parking places, abandoned lots and closed down industrial areas.

Dub music is tradition. The visionary tradition. The tradition of community making, of a social movement. But a tradition needs growth to stay strong. It needs innovators.

Dub Music as expressed by artists such as Maurizio, Safety Scissors, Luke Hess, Christian Bloch, Vladislav Delay and Markus Fürstenberg seems to be designed specifically for the present urban situation to a high degree. Unlike the melancholic expressiveness of alternative rock, rap music’s dreams of private profits, and reggae music’s longing for a rural situation, it can bring a whole new light to a day of grey asphalt and grey buildings.

This music shows the world beyond the despair and dread of our times. It opens up space. For escape and resistance. For possiblities of community. For a coming generation. For the birth of new life.

“Star Trek was transformed”

“Star Trek was transformed by these young women’s interaction with it. Perhaps, the newness of the individual stories were worn away, the aura of the unique text was eroded, yet, the program gained resonance, accrued significance, through their social interactions and their creative reworkings.”

(Henry Jenkins, Textual Poachers, s. 52)