1. The consolation, the relief, the ludicrousness, and the fatalism in everything’s demise
2. Thought
3. Silence
4. Proportions everywhere
5. People who put others ahead of themselves
6. Skill
7. The smell of a newly mown lawn accompanied by the sound of birds, singing
8. Immersive discussions
9. Poetry
10. Sleep
Honorable mentions 1 and 2: Private parties, crisp air.
Fotograf: Sune Hede
“Lømmelpakken, en gave til dig fra folkestyret”
Idag var vi på gaden. Min kammerat Carl Johannes Borris og jeg selv. Vores bristepunkt var nået i skævvridningen af debatten om landets lømler – os alle sammen – der nu skal kunne bures inde for forseelser der måske, og kun måske risikerer at finde sted (som en anden forhutlet, eller skulle jeg sige forlømlet genindspilning af filmen Minority Report). Paradoksalt i en tid hvor København forsøger at brande sig som Hopenhagen og hvor politikerne har forsøgt – uden held dog – men dog forsøgt at rede verden.
“Vi har jo alle fået den én gang før, men her er lømmelpakken der kan tages med hjem, tændes og sættes i vinduet.”
Det skulle altsammen fejres, i overført betydning naturligvis. Med lidt humor, et julemandskostume og nogle (lømmel)pakker drog vi til Clemes bro midt på Strøget i Århus den 23ende december 2009 kl 15.
Vi havde godt 200 lømmelpakker med os, hver især bestående af et lille fyrfadslys og en seddel med teksten “Tænd et lys for din indre lømmel”. Den var selvfølgelig pakket ind efter alle kunstens regler -> i avispapir. Det tog os kun en halv time at fordele dem til de glade og som regel storsmilende modtagere. Vi håber den fes ind, men vi kan i hvert fald konstatere at folk kender den allerede. Lømmelpakken er blevet hvermandseje.
Det er vigtigt for os at sige at vi ikke er imod politiet. De passer jo bare deres arbejde. Men sikke et arbejde. Vores protest går ud til de 60% af befolkningen der støtter den. Vi bebrejder dem ikke som sådan for at bakke om en pakke som denne der kommer to uger før “lømlerne” går på gaden. Den vil naturligvis være velkommen når hysteriet breder sig. På overfladen kan en lømmelpakke være meget fin, men befolkningen, ligesom landets politikere, glemmer hvad den egentlig handler om og at det ikke er nødvendigt med en lømmelpakke for at anholde folk der kaster med sten. Eller sagt på en anden måde; vores grundlovssikrede rettigheder er vigtigere end de berygtede tre ruder i Børsen der satte gang i urolighederne forrige lørdag.
“Så er gaven her som vi alle kan dele. Fra folkestyret direkte til landets glade borgere. Lømmelpakken!”
Vi håber at lidt flere fanger budskabet inden vi har vænnet os alt for godt til den kære lømmelpakke. Det har taget vore forfædre generationer at sikre os den frihed som lømmelpakken helt principielt krænker. Det har ikke altid været muligt at gå på gaden og tale sin sag, og takket være lømmelpakken har min ven Søren Bo Steendahls bedstemor lige fortalt mig at hun ikke agter at gøre det mere. Når man er i 70′erne, som hun siger, kan man jo ikke risikere at blive plantet på jorden med hænderne bundet bag ryggen. Og hvad hvis man skal tisse?
Ja vi ved det ikke. Men jeg ville da synes det havde været både sjovt og sigende at se Sørens bedstemor til demo.
Og hvis I vil læse mere om lømmelpakken, så læs Sørens indlæg om en lignende event i København ugen før. Den er skrevet på engelsk her.
Og så glædelig jul til alle jer lømler derude i det ganske danske.
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I øvrigt, fik jeg skrevet at fotografen bag alle billederne her er min ven Sune Hede?
I’ve been following a particular picture blog for a while, and it has continued to amaze me. Actually it just blows me away. I think the time has come to share it properly, so I’m putting a few of my most recent favorites here. Essentially however, this is a recommendation from me to you, for you to start following it yourselves. Btw. to make it complete, I can recommend listening to the track Julie And Candy by Boards of Canada while you look through the pictures. I just did that myself.
Have a look below or go directly to the source here.
Together with Wemind and Cevea, I’m bringing the director of the acclaimed documentary “Us Now” to Denmark, to show his film and to discuss its implications.
In a time where the president of the United States of America has over 6 million friends on Facebook, and the Danish Prime Minister actively uses the social network Twitter, attention is now being directed towards the power of social media. What are the implications of these new mediums?
What are the opportunities inherent in these new technologies? And how can modern societies adapt to this new reality, which places new demands on democracies, politicians and the inclusiveness of governments?
“Us Now” is about the power of social media and mass collaboration, and will appear in both Aarhus and Copenhagen. The film has sparked debate among thought leaders in its home country, and at screenings in Canada, USA, Norway, Brussels and Germany. It asks fundamental questions about social change in a time where man’s ability to communicate across time and space is growing explosively.
You can read more or see clips from the movie on the website www.usnowfilm.com
Screenings and panel debates:
Aarhus, 6th of May @ 19:00-21:00 in the cinema “Øst for paradis”, Paradisgade 7-9, 8000 Aarhus C.
Panelists:
Copenhagen, 7th of May @ 17:30-19:30 at Empire Bio, Guldbergsgade 29f 2200 Copenhagen N.
Panelists:
The Director of Cevea, Jens Jonatan Steen will moderate a panel debate after each screening.
Due to a large interest in the screening of ‘Us Now”, we kindly ask you to sign up for the event no later than the 4th of May at markhbeanland@gmail.com. Mark the subject line Us Now Aarhus or Us Now Cph. Note that there is a limited number of seats, so if you want to be sure of a place to sit, we encourage you to report back as soon as possible.
Download the official invitation here, and look forward to an exciting debate!
War made me think of something else I just came across. A great animation:
I hope the ones of you who read this blog like the few things I add. As I’m sure you’ve noticed however, I mostly use it for personal comments, and mostly only when I’m traveling. Because of this I’ve added at new blog to my repertoire specifically for the project I’m working on right now. I call the project Grundtvig’s Project 2009, named after a Danish thinker that lived in the 1800’s. His thinking was a tidal wave in the Danish educational philosophy that created ripples that can be felt today, 150 years after the bulk of his work was created. My project asks a simple question; How could a new legacy be created to lift the banner of Grundtvig based on all the knowledge of good learning methods that has been created since his time?
To read more, look at learningful.wordpress.com
(… only the last of the three pictures in this is my own)
Some nights deserve to be lodged comfortably in our memories, ready to be called upon when we need to bring out a smile or get back to that special state of mind. And some deserve to be flushed out with all their residue of fear, doubt, and distrust.
All the more unfortunate that we don’t get to choose which experiences suffer which fate.
To illustrate I want to tell a little story about the night and morning Antonio just went through. Antonio, or Tony, is a small-town-kid from Michigan. He’s 23, and though it’s not for me to say, until tonight probably shy a few learnings about what lurks in the shadows of human misery. Learnings I believe just caught up to him somewhat like the bitter consequences of reality just caught up to Michigan’s big three; in a somewhat sharp tormenting thrust of menace. I can only hope he’s dreaming of better things by now, but more likely I imagine him having Elmstreet-like nightmares brought on by his special VIP tour into the bowels of Detroit.
Some background is needed here:
I first saw Tony walking about the Detroit Greyhound station at roughly 4PM today – which incidentally is the Sunday after Thanksgiving. You can maybe imagine how crowded the station was. I’d just gotten in on a bus from Cleveland, and he was rummaging about looking rather depressed, shabby, and bruised. Honestly I didn’t pay much attention to him at first. I noted his presence with a so-that’s-what-white-trash-looks-like and continued to go on about my business. That line of thought isn’t a source of pride, but between the miserable, deflated, and bent out of shape air to him, and me just having been told that my bus from Detroit to my destination of Grand Rapids had been cancelled, I didn’t get much further at first. A blizzard on the coast of Lake Michigan (the famed lake-effect snow) meant that the next bus wouldn’t be leaving till the following morning which in other words meant that I had just been left to digest the prospect of spending a night at a dreary looking bus station in a less than fortunate part of town.
After I’d feebly tried to convince the manager of the bus station to reimburse me for a room for the night I saw Tony again. With a shaky voice he asked if he could borrow my phone – something that incidentally has proven to be a popular sport near Greyhound busses – and with trembling hands he took it from me, dialed in vain and dialed again until, hardly audibly, he talked to someone for a brief instance. With the same trembling hands he gave me back the phone. His questioning eyes told me he wasn’t ready to be alone.
Here’s Tony’s story as he told it to me. I didn’t get it all in chronological order, but during the hours that followed. Here, from a bed just before midnight, I’ll try to tie it together.
So, Tony spent last night at a rock concert. I can’t recall the name of the band, but he made it sound like it had been a great success. The band was good and he told me how he’d had his picture taken and swapped email and phone numbers with its members before heading off. There was still a glimpse of happiness at the memory even though he regretted to say that both the pictures, email addresses, and phone numbers were on his phone, and that he didn’t have that anymore. After the concert he was meant to go visit some friends to spend the night. From what I understood it was his ex girlfriend’s parents, though this part of the story didn’t fully make sense to me. He didn’t seem too confident that he understood why they’d wanted to see him either, but the point was that whoever THEY were, THEY had stood him up. So, instead of meeting up with familiar faces Tony had found himself in a dodgy Detroit neighborhood late at night with nowhere to go. Here he wandered the streets a bit not knowing what to do when a few people approached him. I don’t know how many or what they said, but they seemed “alright” to him at the time. For lack of a better thing to do he followed them home and stepped inside their seemingly normal looking house. This is where the story starts spiraling downward towards a very unpleasant image of Detroit.
Tony had found himself inside the home of about five young people with an apparently well developed interest in weapons along with a strong distaste for just about everything else. I’m sure they’d have a much more nuanced image of themselves, but I think it’s safe to say that they’d fit fairly well into the category of either skinheads, Neo Nazis, the Ku Klux Klan.
In the house, next to the bullet holes in the walls, Tony was shown a number of weapons. Most interesting perhaps was the gun that one of them held to his head while sharing a passion for killing people; the same gun that the gracious host was kind enough to fire several times inside and out to prove the guns or maybe his own potency. All the while, as Tony told me the grim details of this story, the hustle and bustle of people and buses proceeded around us, and I saw Tony’s eyes flicker without focus.
Not knowing what else to do Tony kept a cool exterior while his insides were churning. He knew that he’d made a bad mistake going inside to begin with but by now his only thought was not to make himself unpopular. As a kid with black friends and even an black ex girlfriend, he didn’t feel that there would be much gained by making his own views known, so he smiled and listened, agreed and silently quivered inside at the scene that was unfolding in front of him.
At some point the night came to an end and Tony fell asleep in the basement of the house. I can’t imagine how he could sleep but perhaps the strain of bottling up his insides had left him without strength to resist. For all I know he could have also been drunk out of his senses after the concert, but he never mentioned anything to me about drinking or taking drugs, and whatever might have been in him the night before would have been ripped out of him through the nights shock treatment by the time I met him. As for the sleeping, he didn’t get very much of it. He woke up early in the morning to find his arms and legs tied, and a rope around his stomach fastened to a nearby pallet to limit his movement. As a bit of extra spice, he even found a worked up female inhabitant of the house waving a blunt sword meant for swallowing about his head, before soon after exchanging it with a real and very sharp one to better impress her guest.
This is where Tony told me that he thought he was going to die.
Again, knowing no other defense but to agree and comply, Tony bottled up his insides and waited for it to take it’s course. After some time the girl deflated, and another half hour or so later the ropes were loosened.
The girl was even kind enough to drive him “a little closer” to the bus station.
It was here, where he was dropped off, that he got mugged just a little while later. Mugged by two guys that hit him, pushed his face to the ground and took away the few valuables he was carrying. Loosing the phone with the pictures of him next to the band was one thing. Loosing his jacket was worse.
So like this; alone in a strange neighborhood with a wife-beater and a bunch of newly acquired bruises, he made his way through the near freezing afternoon rain. I don’t know where or how – some details evaded me – but along the way a woman had been kind enough to give him a coat. Thin and undoubtedly not very warm, it was in this, with his hands swollen from trying to fight back, his face scarred from meeting the ground, and a confused rather unsettling look in his eyes that I first saw him. Just minutes after he’d been told that his bus home was cancelled so he would have to wait till the following morning to see the comfort of a familiar face or a warm bed.
Given all this it’s no surprise that what he wanted with my phone was to give his father a call. And fortunately for Tony his adventures ended when his father picked him up around 7PM.
As you can imagine, after hearing this story I didn’t feel entirely safe walking to the nearby Burger King to eat my only choice of dinner near the bus station, and it was maybe in some feeble attempt to buy good karma for the walk back to the station that I found myself dining with Super Cool Johnson Junior (named after his father), a homeless man that asked me for a Whopper as a charity. After getting his treat he came to sit at my table, and with a sigh and “this is the first I’ve eaten for three days” he chewed through about half of it before carefully wrapping the rest (and my fries) for later.
I think my attempts at buying good karma worked. I made it back in one piece, and finally realizing that no miracles would save me from a night at the station I decided to make an effort to gain access to some internet. I was lucky. With my laptop in my bag and a wireless connection at the station I was capable of trying my last resort: Couch Surfing. I logged on, searched for hosts in Detroit, and within half an hour sent out mails to about 50 people begging for a place to sleep. Pretty much exactly as I sent the final mail my phone rang. I was in luck. Only minutes after I had sent a message to a host family, they had walked in the door of their home after spending Thanksgiving in their summer cottage, turned on their computer and seen my mail. And with the words “it could have been our child” the hostess told me that her daughter and husband would be there to pick me up within twenty minutes. In fact minutes later I got another call with a similar offer, which made me decide to spend those twenty minutes writing a quick mail back to the people I had just asked for help, to say that I would be well taken care of for the night.
And here I am; in a prestigious suburban home visiting Elaine, Mark and their daughter Lauren. I’m comfortably in my bed for the night next to to a little bedside table with a lamp made form old bottle-caps after a tour of a house full of atmosphere and personality. To their visible horror I told them the same story that I’ve written down here, and after much reassurance from them that Detroit was actually a very nice city, we all praised the fantastic nature of couch surfing that restores your confidence in the good of people.
I hope I remember this night and how well it ended for me. I hope I remember it just like I hope Tony is allowed to forget the parts of it that might leave some of that malignant baggage that bad experiences so often leave behind. Forget them so that they don’t leave him without some of the confidence in people that I find reaffirmed around me again and again wherever I go. The confidence that compels me to try to always open my arms to strangers, because so many strangers have done just that for me.
And why make such an effort to document all this? Well, because on this trip America has taught me that a nation feeding on fear on distrust, learns only to obediently answer that call. Detroit is the heartland of the current financial crisis. The unemployment is at a record high, companies some of which are giants in the global economy are threatened along with the jobs they supply, and average Joe’s and Jane’s are caught up in foreclosures, struggling to live on social welfare, or like Super Cool Johnson Junior, doing their best to just stay warm and once in a while get fed. Here there’s no American dream. This is America the land of the oppressed.
Fortunately I’ve seen with my own eyes the open arms of people who dare to believe that fear isn’t the only way of greeting life. So America, please stop preaching a rhetoric of fear. Allow your citizens the peace to lean back and enjoy that life was good long before big houses, fancy cars, fast careers, and brightly colored commercials were necessary to call yourself free.
Chicago is the city of yellow light.
It was used as a backdrop for the most recent Batman movie and after a recent visit I understand why. At a certain time in the evening Chicago temporarily turns into Gotham City. It’s in the gothic architecture of some of the old skyscrapers next to the huge metal constructs that support the age-old subway system when it moves from under ground to a story above the pedestrians. In the hour after the sun sets on a November night, it’s in the yellow light from Chicago’s millions of street lamps that cast their glow on the back alley garbage bins and graffiti sprayed brick walls in the frosty air.
As you distance yourself from the rampant crowds of the shopping streets, alone amongst strangers, you descend into a net of concrete and metal. An animated reality where villains could come running out of any doorway carrying bags of loot with dollar signs ::: $ ::: or where distant screams might call a masked avenger to silently glide over the rooftops above your head or come swerving down fire escapes with sparks igniting around him as he descends.
I like Chicago’s endless ocean of light. I like it for it’s deliberate flight from reality. It’s stubborn resistance to night. I like it for it’s insanity.
Maybe one day as a tribute to the madness of Chicago I’ll become homeless and die in it’s streets. Unseen, unheard, untouched. Scathed, but a part of a mechanical clock churning against time itself. A testimony to human endeavor.
The beginning of the end.
For greed. For egocentrism. For protectionism.
We is the new me
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