Sunday 27 March 2005 at 2:59 pm
went for a walk in the chill spring sunshine this morning, round the southern end of the island [yeah I know I'm going hypertext ballistic lately. I blame unmetered internet access.] discovered that the new owners of one of the cabins south of my parents' house had decided to block off a very old path down to the beach past their cabin. not only had they built a rather solid-locking 3'-deep, 2'-tall wall made from rounded rocks across the path, they had also excavated a deep trench on the other side, a reverse moat, and filled it to the brim with thorned branches and unpleasantness. typical territorial militancy on the part of nouveau rich in-movers, who feel bitterly exposed and vulnerable without their protective urban armature of building walls and fences. people who move down here and paint PRIVATE in screaming red capital letters on a 6 000 000 000-year-old cliff-face. like, fuck you.
then, having rounded the curve and headed back south through a stretch of forest, I was startled by an extremely loud neighing sound. the stretch of cordoned, grazed-down forest just past the mailboxes that normally houses two small fat ponies was suddenly the stomping grounds of a- comparatively- enormous and very intense-looking stallion-creature. looked like it might accidentally have grazed the head off either of the old occupants while rummaging for feed. this abrupt interruption came just as I was pondering a strangely erotic dream I'd had last night, featuring a very naked sadako- sublimely malignant, long-haired and facially obscured brainchild of hideo nakata, of Ringu fame- being sexually proactive with yours truly. given the heavy-on-the-dying-horses freudian subtext of the american remake, I thought it rather appropriate that even the thought of her having sex- with a squidheaded monkey, no less- would spook the poor horse.
later, in the recent acquisitions section of the local graveyard, about 15' apart, I found two brittle but still-intact spines, each about 7'' long. zooanatomically inept that I am, I wasn't able to tell whether they were from fish or a medium-sized bird.
Sunday 27 March 2005 at 11:49 am
trundling my way through a piece on cows and biopolitics in an online journal, I come across this quote from giorgio agamben's "homo sacer":
...the terrible poena cullei, in which the condemned man, with his head covered in wolf-skin, was put in a sack with serpents, a dog and a rooster, and then thrown into water...
clearly, this makes me want to read agamben's book in much the same way as Foucault's treatment of damiens the regicide made me want to read "discipline and punish". lucky thing I already ordered it.
bottom line: bizarre violence sells.
Saturday 26 March 2005 at 5:44 pm
working my way through EU regulations: elaborate semantic wastelands of puzzling verbal turns and phraseologies that evoke not so much rococco spires and masonic cathedrals- I wish- as gigantic british-style new brutalist parking-lots erected in mind-numbingly repetitive concrete. one would think, an analogy perfectly in line with the animating intention of the regulations, that is to "make the whole conception of the building plain and comprehensible. No mystery, no romanticism, no obscurities about function and circulation." except of course that erasing the mysteries, romanticisms and obscurities of language with the giant eraser of linguistic intentionality seems to produce anything but their opposite. rather, the screw turns full circle in a spiral and you get to a new plateau inhabited by zombie sentences that only the state-sector living dead would be capable of uttering. zombies, as is known, do not eat other zombies.
off-topic, looking for medical information on hernias today, I came across Opitz G/BBB syndrome, one of hundreds of variations on the human genome that I'd never heard of before. for some reason I was intensely struck by the image of an 11-year old boy diagnosed with the condition- I sat looking at it for several minutes, uncertain why or what it was about the image. something about the distinctness and proportion of the features, and their expression- though I hesitate to call it beautiful, for the all-too easily brought accusations of genetic voyeurism, it did make me vividly curious as to what this child-person was like in real life. strange.
also decided to eliminate last referrals and my statcounter from the page layout, despite the loss of panoptic virtual biopower particularly the latter grants me. mostly, this is because the infinite page-up, page-down of meaningless spam referrals and the same old moronic "horny older women monkey fuck" requests eventually depressed the hell out of me and threatened to destroy every littlest iota of pleasure inherent in my online people-watching practices. I don't really need statistical confirmation that most people on the internet aren't sentient. the corollary of this is that I shan't be aware of you regular lurkers out there anymore- hence, please do feel encouraged and unshy if the urge to comment comes over you.
Thursday 24 March 2005 at 11:56 am
went out last night in tønsberg for a latte- lord knows it's the only thing in town that doesn't rip the bleeding heart-chunk out of your wallet, in this country- and a film with a couple of old friends, an american au pair and a friend's girlfriend's irish sister. some deliberation in the light of framing language limitations resulted in blade trinity as eye-candy of choice for the evening- supremely enjoyable filmic experience. razorsharp timing, bass-thumping hyperreal style and precise, inventive, self-mocking comic deliveries- plus sheer moments of glorious screenwriting inspiration, lines such as "you cockjuggling thundercunt" and "you made a fucking vampire POMERANIAN?!".
given my rather simple visceral enjoyment of the film, I was initially a bit surprised at the vehement dislike articulated by the internet-posting massenmensch typewriter-chimps over at IMDB. in retrospect the hows and whyfores are rather predictable though: the movie has a perverse sense of humour, goes for what I'd read as a complex ambivalent angle on blade (eg. gentle mockery, self-irony, exageration, reduced omnipotence, sheer funk, more humanization and more visible limitations); and, quite often, sacrifices yet-another-mindless-action-choreography for sequences that articulate characters and character relations (eg. the bungee-jumping scene). most of the elements I found explicitly enjoyable, it seems, annoyed hardline purists of the series, from editing style to "wasted screen-time". the interpretive leap to diagnosing most of them as 16-year old simpletons with gangster omnipotence fetishes who look to blade to instantiate their inadequacy-numbing opiate wetdreams of infallibility and earnest carnage action would be an easy one, but I wouldn't dream of making it. of course not.
today: look up contact details for national-level animal rights movements, then get in touch with the state-run meat information agency. yiha.
Tuesday 22 March 2005 at 6:28 pm
yours truly pigeon-feeding in st mark's square.
any residual doubts concerning the noxious and spiritually unwholesome long-term effects of contact with the juju doombeast should, with this, be dispelled.
ia ia cthulhu.
Monday 21 March 2005 at 8:42 pm
just discovered that greenpeace have a weblogged project running in northern finland, cross the border from my field area, to subvert finnish government forest-logging plans. their website even has a little flash subgame, featuring a small redcapped computergnome activist that runs around a forest pacman grid, herding reindeer and delineating grazing areas while being chased by evil corporate loggers. america's army it ain't, but I do get to play it and pretend it's fieldwork.
(I also found this, randomly, while looking for information on PETAs anti-herder campaign of a year back. amused me considerably.)
Sunday 20 March 2005 at 3:14 pm
I never realized the joys of internet radio until now. as of four days ago, mine has been set on slay radio [24/7 stream of remixed c64 .sid soundtracks]. lying on the sofa reading an article on consumer meat ethics in norway just now, this came on over my headphones [machinae supremacy, "Sidology 1"]. a spandex scando-cheesemetal rendition of the theme from cybernoid! I thought I was going to die, mentally choking on the sound.
Thursday 17 March 2005 at 6:59 pm
just lapping ashore from an incredibly exhausting bout of influenza, hit me like a giant waterballoon of delirium the evening I got back from Oslo. three days of total liquefaction and literally teethchattering fevers. yech. an affliction that binds me, statistically, to 400 000 norwegian bedfellow-sufferers. thankfully, I am not in the small minority of predicted deaths (1000).
broadbandwired to my brittle skull-sockets, with a 30' RJ-45 cable, I'm finally poised to track down and devour some of those annoying background missing-facts I had trouble locating while in the field. eg., just where does Hazard Analysis and Critical Control Point theory come from; what does the UN Codex Alimentarius commission actually do; and who pulls the secret invisible strings that make the norwegian prime minister's mouth open and shut while the tape plays...
meanwhile: anyone able to tell me just who on earth
<---- this sinister-looking character
is, and why he is relevant to my reindeer death-project, wins a free astral pokemon.
plus my stunned admiration.
reality-superceding yarns may also just get their free pokemon anyway. it's that unexciting.
Sunday 13 March 2005 at 5:30 pm
having survived recent travails and adventures, I'm about to settle back on the island at my parents' place for a phase of sedentarity that involves regular internet linkageness. hence I've reinstalled MSN messenger, a piece of software so long neglected that my account has been cancelled and all my contacts have gone the way of the early jesus.com site, the one featuring with the strange geeky bearded guy who took baths with naked ladies. that is, down the erasuring drainvortex of internet oblivion.
so, tabula rasa it is. if anyone out there thinks they want to communicate me in IM format, I am mailable with contact details primarily via hreinert at gmail.com , or you can just add me as a contact using that address. this goes out particularly to people I used to have as contacts, but I am certainly open to new suggestions (for you singular person out there reading this on a mac, this is probably the link you want).
Monday 07 March 2005 at 1:56 pm
mad erratic trajectories for the last three or four weeks. currently nearing the end of a two-week sojourn in venice, to recuperate my faculties and get my selfhood back in order. heading back to norway tomorrow, aiming to conduct some interviews in the south. return to the northern slaying fields lies in the indeterminate future, probably near the summer- pending among other things on the satisfactory and financially viable resolution of certain logistical hurdles involving cars. slaughtering is pretty much over for this season anyway. more extensive updating when I reach unmetered internet access.
if that were england, you'd get militant OAPs ripping the wall down in the name of freedom to roam and rights of way and all that - 70-year-olds in shorts and woolly hats! ah, i do love my country...
flats - 28 03 05 - 10:53
I think I can score some dynamite in Oslo, man. I'll be down again soon, and we can blow that miniature wall to smithereens! TLA!!!
Helmet - 28 03 05 - 23:37
as temporary spokesperson for the hvasser secessionist movement, I accept help and explosives from our comrades in the tjøme liberation army- though I feel it is appropriate to point out that in no way is this to be taken as an indication that we have submitted to the hegemony of tjøme imperialism. hvasser: monarchy or death!
che monkey - 29 03 05 - 10:35
Eh..... Monarchy? Who do you claim to be of royal blood? The farmer?
I'm sure you mean Anarchy.
Helmet - 31 03 05 - 06:34
anarchy's been done to death. and it's bad for tourism. we may have to import a king, in the grand national tradition. my vote is for viggo mortensen.
the once and future monkey - 01 04 05 - 13:20
viggo mortensen? with long hair and all dirty-but-righteous in Lord of the Rings? oh yes, he's got my vote too. [yes, yes, maybe i don't live on the right backwater island, but monarchy's never cared for such democratic nuances...]
flats - 01 04 05 - 21:32
Hmmmmm..... that's a damn good idea..... I'm sure the Danes won't make too much of a fuss.
Helmet - 02 04 05 - 10:33
then we can raise the armies of the dead, get some elves together, crusade north towards the capitol and wipe out the three times damned kjell magne bondevik in his castle of evil blandness. yarr!
war-monkey with issues - 02 04 05 - 14:15
(flats: every vote counts.) clearly, someone should write to his agent and ask if he's available for kingship.
war-monkey with a mission - 02 04 05 - 14:17
great idea.
web designer () (URL) - 25 08 05 - 14:51
An erotic Sadako dream? Do go on, PLEASE...
anonymous () - 28 08 07 - 01:19