m o l n /// c o l o u r o ï d

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For these are the recent and randoms: 

In the evening, giving Lisa's Zoe bag a more appropriate message, giggling. 

A dinner party with old friends who couldn't make it to our wedding party. 

Long walks in strong wind and glistening sun, imagining I'm dressed as a flapper, a black sleek shadow. 

Enthralled by the strange soundscape at Stockholm Public Library. If you close your eyes you're immediately outside of time.

Falling in love with a font and the word moln - cloud. Karin Boye is the girl in the white hood and long braids.
And I cried a little as I reread "Dead Amazon" by Hjalmar Gullberg.

Colouroïd Colouroïd Colouroïd Colouroïd Colouroïd Colouroïd Colouroïd Colouroïd Colouroïd Colouroïd Colouroïd Colouroïd -

Friday night the Glenn and I play live at Top Nice at Under Bron. A flexi-pop synth rave dance floor. Come give us a shout, bitte.
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STAR

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Blueprints are so beautiful. Look at the soft, generous lines. I could see this as a big poster.

The facts are:

Slussen - The Lock - is about to get torn down. It's a meeting point of cars, buses, cyclists and pedestrians, connecting the island The Old Town with the island Södermalm in Sthlm, and it was built in the 30's.

A debate is roaring whether it should it be torn down and what should you do instead or could it be repaired? It's built on rotting wood from the 1600's, but to be fair I don't keep facts. I've passed this place for 20 years, and it's part of my personal history.

Reading the local paper, my heart skipped a beat:

"The epitome of elegance. 1958, more than 20 years after the opening of the new Slussen the environment surrounding Blå Bodarna (The Blue Shops, my translation) was much more attractive." - Louise Kristoffersson

Oh my. The dome at Blå Bodarna was once bedazzled - ! I didn't know this. When did they remove the pearls of light? 

A frenzied treasure hunt began. Pearls!

Blå Bodarna then, when the world was still set in black and white...

...and today, in harsh colour.

As you can see the dome is robbed of stars. The few remaining shops aren't that classy, and everything is in a state of decline. Slussen is doomed.

I didn't take any photos of Slussen and Blå Bodarna, because I was certain google would be full of it, but it actually took some hunting.  

More:

The ultimate Slussen project - City Heart from An Urban Anatomy. I've blogged about it before.
I've compared photos of Sthlm in the past and present here - Skanstull and Klara.

The photos - my own exempt - link to their original locations. Just click'em.
List of photos:
1. Blueprint of Slussen, 1930 års trafikkommitté i Teknisk Tidskrift, Wikipedia. 
2 & 3. My own photos of photos of Mitt i Södermalm, Stockholms Stadsmuseum, 120221.
4. Stockholmskällan, Svenska Dagbladet, 1935 - 39, photographer not mentioned, Stockholms Stadsmuseum.

5. Stockholmskällan, Almberg & Preinitz, 1935 - 39, photographer not mentioned, Stockholms Stadsmuseum.

6. Stockholmskällan, Almberg & Preinitz, 1935 - 39, photographer not mentioned, Stockholms Stadsmuseum.

7. Stockholmskällan, Almberg & Preinitz, 1935 - 36, photographer not mentioned, Stockholms Stadsmuseum.

8. Det sanna Sverige - Folkhemmet i förfall, photographer Ulrik Hammarström, no year mentioned. 
9. Dagens Nyheter, 2010, no photographer mentioned so I'll assume it's Lars Epstein.

10, 11 & 12. Slussen och jag, 2011, no photographer mentioned.

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b r i c - à - b r a c o l a g e

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Lately (besides asking myself where I've been or what I've done) I've worked on my portfolio. I'm exhausted. Doing stuff for yourself is tricky - and I think that is so stupid. On another day I'd say that the difficulty is that we've all possibilities before us and how to choose?

But I'm rethinking that. Are we in fact our own worst clients - bitch bosses that never know where to draw the line, who scold us relentlessly: It's not good enough! Creatively, I want to return to childhood and fantasy and play make our future. That's the way.

And in a way, I kinda like this bric-à-bracolage pic more than the real thing. Messy is sometimes good.
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f l y

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At night I go to one of my favourite dream places. It's always at a new location, but each time you must take the train. Then you walk. 

Like the tracks in Spirited Away, it's a long, narrow, silvery strip of land. Here and there are shards of island, and beside that, there is the ocean. I love this place. It's among the most heartbreakingly beautiful I've seen. 

Last night I was accompanied by some large silver blue lumps of monsters, a bit Totorolike - I know, I've given Studio Ghibli full control of my similes.

You see the middle window to the right in the last pic? My neighbour has bright green walls in the living room, and my heart skipped a beat and I thought to myself: Just like Almodóvar! (I've long since passed the "just like in the movies of..." bit.) But I know, you can barely see it here. Also, I'm thinking of leaving Pinterest after having read this article, and others like it - what do you think? Right or wrong?
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e n t e r . t h e . d r a g o n

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Hello blue weekend. 

Beyond the love of friends and pet synthesizers and general goodness of life there is a dragon. Reality has started breaking up, little by little. There are bouts of memory loss, of not knowing where I'm going or even what I'm going to. Then there are the things I'm told I've done and said in unreasonable fits of anger, and that is the worst. 

It seems I've begun entering a mode between dream and being awake - is it nightmare I mean? Unknowingly, I've fed a dragon. What do you do about it? Do you focus on the barrier between worlds or the substance of dream? Reality has always been a vague concept to me, but this is going too far, and in the wrong direction.

I read in an interview with Woody Harrelson: "I was in a taxi the other night, and we started talking about life and the taxi driver goes, 'Chaos and creativity go together. If you lose one per cent of your chaos, you lose your creativity.' I said that's the most brilliant thing I've heard. I needed to hear that years ago."

(Pair that with this worrying quote from The Iron Lady: "Watch your thoughts for they become words. Watch your words for they become actions. Watch your actions for they become... habits. Watch your habits, for they become your character. And watch your character, for it becomes your destiny! What we think we become." I like this quote, and oh how it bothers me with its exclusion of... the messiness of living.)

My instinct is to embrace the Woody snippet. But chaos, once you got it is a messy thing since it can contain anything, destruction included. Neil Gaiman described this condition well with his The Endless, I think. (The page I'm directing you to is so terrible, you'll probably want to chop my head off - which would solve my cunundrum.)

As with all nightmares, there is no clear point to this, so I'll just - stop here.

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n i g h t . a t . t h e . m u e s u m

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A.V. looked me straight in the eye and said that he had once told an artist about an idea that he'd had that he cherished, that he needed to do but hadn't yet got done. One of those ideas that just might be brilliant.

The artist responded: If you haven't realized this idea in five years time, it belongs to me, and I'll do it.

And now, five years later he received the notification by mail. She has claimed it.

This exchange, brilliant as it is, is just a smidge of the museum - sorry, muesum - that this artist has built round the idea of retrieving other people's lost ideas: "From missing masterpieces to the unpublished, unfinished and undone. From the burned down Great Library of Alexandria to your lost socks."

Most of all I'd like to copy paste the whole text from The Muesum page and force feed it to you, because I like it so much and it's such a mind fuck (great combo, no?). But assuming you're not more monkey than me (surely you can't be) you're probably able bodied enough to navigate from here to there on your own. (If not, e-mail me, and I'll fax you an owl and a strawberry.)

"Here you may find the m{ }esum attendant, meticulously cataloging n∅bjects into the muesum archive or lovingly tending to your lost hats and scarves, to your lost trust in political systems, to the memory of a body, to your old ego, to your numerous lost telephones, to your future plans, to your lost cause, to your unfulfilled desires and to the answer that you never received."

This muesum is the best thing ever - unless it's your idea at stake. My friend will try to fight her claim. I so want to know what's next.

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BLUE

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As usual I'm a muddle of reference and inspiration. My brain collects mind maps, like reflections upon reflections, of things once seen or thought. And I would like to tell you all about it, spare no detail of what once for a millisecond happened in the corner of my eye.

If I tell you to look at these pictures of The Little Prince and listen to this recording of Zorrino's and Maita's song* from Tintin and the Temple of the Sun, written by Jaques Brel - Säg är det sant / ska denna natt bli den sista / i Zorrinos unga liv? / Säg är det sant / att Zorrino ska mista / sitt unga liv när dagen åter gryr? - do you get what I'm looking for, or am I only being cheesy?

Then I add some more blue, blue pictures of the Sea of Decay from Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind (1984)**:

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Wednesday I clung to this mix of inspiration like thistles, trying to get my thoughts straight on my little movie script. It helped! Now I have an A4 paper with a story outline, ready to be broken down - built up? - into scenes and images. I'm quite excited - we're quite excited. This project - five women, five movies, five minutes each, one theme - must come to be!

What I was looking for in childhood records of Tintin, The Little Prince and Nausicaä is this feeling of being all alone on the moon, that no one or nothing can touch you even though you'd like to, that it's much too late. I know, I'm gloomy.

Happy weekend! This Friday has started out like shit, but I will it to get better. I will it to.

* I'm more inspired by the Swedish version, but it's not on YouTube - maybe I've found my calling there?

** More pics from Nausicaä here! My manga has finally arrived, but more on that later.

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c a s t l e l e s s

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I took these photos mostly to document the heavy snow falling... You could say I failed right? 

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Looking at these photos makes me irrationally sad, I feel like a kid back from summer camp - and summer is over now that I'm back! They are from day three of script writing, and now we won't huddle up at our glorious dreamy mansion - well, Ida will, because it's her studio space, and Rebeca will too, because they'll share it - until March. That's worlds away.

Well, I'll go there today too, because we have a tiny meeting, but then. Worlds away.
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d a y . t w o ( o f . d r e a m i n g )

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Today I've moved backwards and doubted what I took for certain. No, not in life, but with my little movie project. We carry these images within and make plans for what place they will get, and then, as you dig in, you, well - things get complicated. And you question.

I don't want to sit in the dark with my mother and sister and know that I've caused them pain, even if my movie turns out well. So I move in circles and wrap things in and out to give them a new disguise. Maybe we can get as close to the core if we go sideways?

"Once upon a time there was a boy who was put to sea when his mother died. He sat in a small rowing boat attached to a distant shore, unable to get back to land, for a year. What did he see during those endless starry nights? He never said."

How will it end tomorrow?

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a t . h o r n s g a t a n ( w h e r e . d r e a m s . a r e . m a d e )

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These are the luxurious days, when Ida, Rebeca and I sit together and write write write and dream of making movies. I take tedious tiny notes by hand, black on white, in hopes of getting to the place that existed before we learnt how to write a movie script correctly, and just wrote. I want to touch the commuter child who kept diary on the trains connecting suburb with city. I want to dream make a movie.

We snuggle up with tea and coffee and chocolate in the chill in what must have been the living room of a stately flat. Wedding decorators fill the space with pink magnolias that we secretly return to the hallway. The entire room smells heavy of rich old lady perfume, fur and pearls and cigarettes and eyeshadow, a woman I'm not sure exists. I connect her with round marble tables and black silk wallpapers, like in the bar Potemkin in Halle-am-Saale (where I know she doesn't exist).

The floors are white and wooden, the ceiling high, the sun filters through fume dusty windows. This flat is like a make belief Berlin, and I resort to old dreams in which when you'd open the door to your flat you could be anywhere in the world. The dream didn't include ever actually leaving the flat. Everything is at the expense of something other.

For two more days we'll sit and write. It'll be the best days. Film making can be such lonely business, and I thrive in the company of these women. Discussing dreams is most beneficial, and tomorrow I'll bring felt pens in the colours of the rainbow and white post-its and turn my dream into a jigsaw puzzle. I want this process to be as tactile and childish as possible. Lets be grown up another day.
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s m a l l . f l a t , b i g . i d e a s

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The other evening I asked the Glenn: What do you like in interior design?
 After thinking for a while he said: Well... spaciousness.

That's kinda unfortunate since we live tiny - and had just ordered billions of 7" vinyl mailers (vinyl envelopes) and bought a bookshelf that is much too big for our home. In other words, our living space was smaller than usual. That happens quite often.

Above you can see some bookshelf. We measured our walls and there was absolutely no way to fit it. After a lot of discussions and measuring the Glenn stated: We'll put it in the kitchen. It's the only way.
  Here's an old pic of our kitchen. It's long and narrow and tiny, in this pic it looks bigger than it is. We've had to take down that (tiny tiny) table since there wasn't enough space for two people to cook there, or even open all the cupboards.

We called our resident handyman mr Bobergotti, baked a cake and cleared the kitchen wall off paintings. There were no progress shots taken - no space! - just non stop relentless action.
  When we were done, we had this:

Ta-daa! I wish I had saved the original add so you could see the bookshelf in its entirety. The bookcase is like a big lounge - sauna - gillestuga wall with floating shelves, very sexy and very 60's, a chunk of jacaranda glory. Perfect for mixing your cocktails and chilling your champagne.
  I'd found it by chance, looking for something other on Blocket (Swedish E-bay). A woman outside of Sthlm was selling her house, her husband had died and she was moving to a smaller flat. This bookshelf had been with them since the early 60's and gone with them from place to place.

{ Lets move in for some close ups. }

Later I heard giggles, and discovered that the Glenn and Bobergotti had secretly begun decorating, using a collection of British sauces, Ryan Air cigarettes (Similar), whiskey flavoured condoms (!), vitamin D, a lid, a timer, garlic and, to tie it all together, a bottle of wine.

{ We ended up with jacaranda leftovers - those are good leftovers! }

I put a cupboard on top of a small 60's table that I already had, and it looked nice and strict (much better than in this pic, with plastic bag and nonsense).
  When I sell my grandfather's book cabinet that is much too big for our flat (yes I know, my common sense comes and goes), this cupboard table combo is going to look so nice instead. I can't wait.
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a . f i r e p l a c e . o f . h i s . o w n

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Hello invisible friends,

I've decided I won't blog every day Monday - Friday. It's too much, my posts so long and winding - and I don't seem able to be brief or quick - ! So, from now on, there will be empty gaps at this space... I'm not going anywhere, I'll just sometimes be extra invisible.

This post goes to prove that I take the most photos when I'm alone...

Wednesday I had children's food for brunch*, and admired February's first snow. The whispers were right (or maybe it was my King Bore posts that did the trick?) because winter is here. The grey of winter - or rather the grey of no winter - has made me long for colour and magic and - and - and--- a never ending stream of Studio Ghibli snippets to brighten my day. Pink and turquoise are my BFF's.

Thursday I admired the empty studio space at Transit with the forest wall, and wished, again, that it were mine. I would fill the forest with little paper inhabitants and --- **.

On the train home the night before there was a mentally ill woman that walked up to people and told us she was sick. When no one would play with her, she started crying and sang, clapped her hands, smoked, put up her feet - anything and everything. She wore me out, and I was glad I could disappear into Let England Shake. At Transit a studio neighbour kept snuffling and clearing his throat loudly and played music, drummed on the table and sang along. Another neighbour had brought her little child that was really happy and shouted a lot. I took a freezing walk and bought myself some good coffee - unlike that lipstick smeared cup.

In the evening the Glenn and I went to the opening of Ai Weiwei's exhibition at Magasin 3. I had seen pictures of it at This is Naive and was quite expectant. But as with most things Stockholm, it was the mini version, and somehow it felt more like us, the spectators, were on display.

Friday I dyed my hair and the Glenn made hearts over my legs.

Saturday we went to Pike's gallery opening. There were quite a few things we wanted to bring home, but not enough cash. Mr Bobergotti agreed to share a bottle of Törley with us, and then we met up with friends. (That dog was so sick of people that I wanted to give him a fireplace of his own.)

Sunday was take away in bed and millions of movies.

Monday I waited forever at the police to make a new passport, I haven't changed mine since I became a Moe. Restless, I walked round the police house - and saw the tiny castles above the rain gutters! The Glenn and my mother had lunch, then my mother and I sprinted off to the cinema where we watched The Iron Lady (2011). It was moving, disturbing and uneven. I felt sick afterward, sick of grief, sick of politics, sick of fear of death and forgetfulness.

* Children's food = food that doesn't taste of anything but the flavours of childhood. Like macaroni, for instance, and prinskorv.

** I think that studio is taken now! The walls have been covered up.

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