Tuesday, December 14, 2010

'Trollbyen'

That's the title of a play which is on right now at one of the most important theaters here in Oslo, Oslo Nye Teater. It's based on the eponymous novel by Karsten Alnæs, and stars, among others, Agnes Kittelsen and Adil Khan. It takes place right here in Oslo, but about 100 years in the past. I went to see it tonight with Anne Ida and my mother. It was a very good production ... a good story, good performances, of course a fascinating setting, and not least, extremely impressive scenography. I recommend it. :-)

It was also extra interesting to Anne Ida and me, because a few months ago we visited this theater as part of the annual Culture Night series of events. Trollbyen was in rehearsals then and we got to go backstage and see lots of the different preparations that were going on all over this fascinating building. (Which is in the city center, so you can get there on any subway line. Get off at Parliament and walk downhill in the direction of the Palace. :-) We even got to see some of the actors rehearsing, and - this was maybe my favorite part - the workshop where they make wigs and masks. Now that was impressive. Unbelievable detail.

I of course made a video, which you can see below. All the talking is in Norwegian, alas for those of you who don't understand that, but there's a lot of stuff to see as well. Behind the scenes at an Oslo theater, rich in traditions and history. Enjoy. :-)



Widescreen here.

Monday, December 13, 2010

A movie star on the subway

I talked to a movie star today. Or at least as close as we can get to a movie star in Norway ... there aren't really enough jobs available for someone to become a big star in movies alone, they rather make their names as actors, and work in theater, TV, movies, all kinds of things. But again, as close as we can get to a movie star, that's what this guy is.

I was waiting for the subway at Risløkka station this afternoon when he came up to me and asked me what I have to say was a really stupid public transport-related question. He wanted to know, when the board said the next train would be line 5 to Storo, did that mean you couldn't get to the city center on that train? Yes, that was his question. He wanted to know ... did it circle around downtown, or something. What? I said no, when it says Storo it means that it goes through the city center to Storo, when it says Parliament it only goes to Parliament station. So, still to the center of the city, just not through it and further westwards on the other side. Oh, thank you so much.

OK, here's the thing: Every subway train in Oslo goes through the city center. Depending on direction, of course, but if you've got the wrong direction then it will usually just turn around at the final station and go back. And if the realtime board says that in eight minutes there will be a train at your platform for Parliament station, then you can be pretty sure that you've got the right direction. So ... every subway train goes through the city center. Who doesn't know that?? Where did he think he was, London, New York? Seriously, this is Oslo. There really aren't a lot of places for those trains to go. If you're in the Grorud valley, and the train goes to Storo ... where the hell do you think it's going to go? o_O

The annoying thing about this - yes, I'm getting to the annoying thing now! ;-) - is that I don't remember the guy's name. It's been eluding me all day since I talked to him. I know that face so well - every Norwegian reading this knows that face - but I can't bring the name to mind. Someone tell me ... he's a hugely famous actor, he's that guy who is in every Norwegian movie ever made whose name is Bjørn, but is not Bjørn Sundquist and not Bjørn Skagestad.* Someone help, who is he?

While you're thinking, here's another movie star on the subway whose name I have no difficulty bringing to mind.

* I don't mean by this that Bjørn Skagestad is in every Norwegian movie ever made. That's Sundquist and the other guy. :-) But he's also really famous and his name is Bjørn, so I wanted to narrow it down for you. :-)

Sunday, December 12, 2010

Terror in Sweden

So, the Scandinavian peninsula has seen its first act of terrorism. A young Iraqi - second generation immigrant, the kind of person the Swedish media mendaciously would refer to as a Swede, but who clearly was not Swedish and could never have hoped to be - tried to blow up ... what? A shopping mall? A subway station? We'll never know, because like so many of his brethren in Jihad, he was a stupid incompetent klutz and only blew himself up in the car. Pathetic idiot.

Anyway, this is of course scary and confusing and so on, and people ask themselves why did this happen, how could it have happened? It is perhaps especially confusing that the terrorist was such a person - as I said, a second generation immigrant, and a stellar example of how a number of Muslims can never become 'one of us', no matter how long they live among us. This is the truly frightening thing about this - that although many Muslims are relatively normal people, we can never tell which are the demented nutcases. So, any Muslims reading this: If we - the natives - are skeptical of you as a group, you have to look among yourselves to find the cause.

I personally am pretty sure I know why these things happen - why acts of terrorism, incompetent or not, in the western world are so often carried out by those who do not come from crazy theocracies with no education and abject poverty for the majority, but rather by supposedly normal people who have been born and raised among us and, many theorize, must surely have accepted our values and mores. Those who believe this - the multiculturalists, as they are often referred to - are wrong, as we see. Their beliefs do not match up with observed reality - just look at the background of the London bombers. Muslim terrorists in western Europe do emphatically not come swooping in from strange countries. They are already here. And they do not accept our values and they do not understand and appreciate our cultures ... instead they want to strike out at us and wound us. Why?

In my perspective, the answer to that question can be easily summed up into two words: Cognitive dissonance. Homegrown Muslim terrorism is a coping mechanism for cognitive dissonance. (A fact which only makes these people even more pathetic.) I'll explain.

I don't really accept the term or the concept of 'brainwashing', which is a shame, because if I did, it would be really useful here. A lot of young, supposedly European Muslims - if such a creature can be said to exist - are raised to believe, and come to believe, that Islam is an infinitely superior system. Not only religion, because that, of course, is the most dangerous thing about Islam - that it is not just a religion, but an entire system that determines everything in a society. And Muslim children and youth in Europe are taught that Islam is superior to everything else, that Islam is the best system and the best religion, that Islam makes everything better, that Islamic countries are the best in every way, and so on. This, however, is wrong. Islam isn't best, it isn't superior. In fact, Islam is an inferior system in every possible way. Islam produces nothing of value. Islamic societies are retarded on every level - economically, socially, technologically, culturally, educationally, politically, you name it. Some Islamic countries are rich, yes ... because they randomly happen to have rich natural resources. First among these is of course Saudi Arabia - one of the most worthless shitholes on the entire planet, which has enormous wealth, but wouldn't even have been able to get their oil out of the ground if it hadn't been for western technology and expertise. And has not been able, I might add, to use their wealth to create better living conditions for the Saudi nation as a whole, or to create anything of value to the world whatsoever. This is because Saudi Arabia, the homeland of Islam, has an inferior culture that has produced an inferior society.

This is true all over the Muslim world. Islam is no good. It creates no progress, it generates no knowledge, it builds no valuable societies. It generates only backwardness and strife. All Islamic societies are inferior to any society you'd care to name in western Europe. The proof is in the pudding, as the British say - Muslims flock here to build new lives, to get educations and jobs. You don't see us going there, do you? Nope. We Europeans almost only move to Muslim countries when our expertise is needed there badly enough for it to be paid for through the nose. My country, Norway, is a much better country and society than, to name but two, Pakistan and Somalia. That's a fact. How do I know this for a fact? Because there are lots of Pakistanis and Somalians here, and more keep coming, while migration in the opposite directions is as good as non-existent. So Pakistanis and Somalians agree with me - my country is better than theirs.

Disclaimer: I cannot, of course, actually prove that Islam really is the reason why Muslim societies are so retarded. But since Islam is pretty much the only thing all these countries have in common, and since Islam so obviously acts as a retardant of any kind of progress, I am convinced that it is in fact Islam that is the culprit.

But back to the point. Islam is touted as the best thing since sliced bread, and this is obviously false. Painfully obviously to these selfsame young European Muslims - they see it with their own eyes every day. Western civilization is the pinnacle of human achievement. Jews win Nobel Prizes, not Muslims. Europeans and Americans write great literature, invent technological breakthroughs, make important scientific discoveries, drive the world forward. Muslims don't do any of these things. The Islamic world is the millstone around humanity's proverbial neck. Living in an Islamic country, this may be difficult to realize, or at least very easy to close one's eyes to. But living in Europe or in the US, it is a fact impossible to avoid. It's reality.

This reality - and the clash between that reality and the ridiculous assumption of Islam's natural superiority that many young Muslims are raised with - create a cognitive dissonance that for some is impossible to live with. They cope with it by taking their own lives and taking with them - or at least attempting to take with them - innocent Europeans whose only fault is being true citizens of a great civilization ... and innocent Muslims too, who in any large European city are likely to be present at a terrorist action. Acceptable collateral damage?

I really wish there was some way to detect this cognitive dissonance in people before it becomes too much for them and they snap. I wish there was some way to root out the virus of religion that so blinds people to reality that they can't live with the world the way it actually is. I wish I could express just how loathsome and despicable that god virus really is. And I wish there was an easy fix to these problems.

Saturday, December 11, 2010

It's a small world

Yes, it is indeed a very small world. Certainly Norway is a very small country, metaphorically speaking.

The following is a true story.

My mother, the retired librarian, is a homework helper - ie she goes someplace, I think it's at the school, one afternoon every week and helps children who need extra academic assistance with their homework assignments and other schoolwork they need help with. This is something people do as volunteers, and the program is available to all school children from first through fourth grade. So, she works there Wednesday afternoons with some other retirees. This happened on Wednesday this week.

Or at least I think it was this week - come to think of it, it may have been last week, and then they talked again this week. But that's totally beside the point anyway. :-)

She overheard a couple of the other helpers talking about a book that one of them had been reading, but was having a hard time getting into ... she was saying that she would probably give up on it, she had started reading another book and couldn't really see herself returning to this first one. It just wasn't worth her time. My mother got involved in the conversation, because by some strange coincidence, my father is apparently now reading this very same book, and like this woman he is not enjoying it and has been talking about giving up on it and starting something else. Or at least he had been - this was four days ago, or maybe eleven days, so he's probably thrown in the towel by now. :-) Anyway.

The woman with the book said that she would probably give up on it, but it wouldn't be a total loss, because she could give it to her daughter so it could be used for BookCrossing. My mother was a little surprised to hear this, and she said Oh, is your daughter a BookCrosser too? So's mine! So they started talking about that, and how it was such a coincidence. The other woman said that she would have to tell S. - ie her daughter - about this. My mother said Your daughter's name is S. - that's an incredible coincidence - my daughter Leisha has a friend who's a BookCrosser, and her name is S.!* Of course the other woman says that at her daughter's birthday party just a few weeks ago, she talked to a young woman called Leisha who was a BookCrosser - and my mother says that this really is pretty incredible, but her daughter did go to her friend's birthday party a few weeks ago. Was it at restaurant such and such in Vika?

Of course it was - so my mother has been a homework helper for months and months now alongside this woman who now turns out to be my friend Travelina's mother! And I spent like half an hour talking to someone who volunteers with my mother, but neither one of us had any idea about the connection. I love it when stuff like this happens. :-D

It's a very small world. :-)

*Obviously I have a number of friends who are BookCrossers, but only one with this particular rather old-fashioned and unusual name. :-)

Friday, December 10, 2010

'I'm so happy to be here'

So sayeth the great Denzel Washington. He's happy to be here in Oslo. So's Anne Hathaway, presumably. They told some Norwegian reporters they were, at least. Incredibly irrelevant information, since they would say they were happy about it no matter what they were feeling. It's like asking an athlete who just won an Olympic medal Are you happy about winning? Who the fuck cares what the guy says, we already know the answer! On a day like today, this is what our media is reduced to. Argh.

Anyway ... that's a minor annoyance, my major beef here is that I don't understand what these people are even doing here. Don't get me wrong, I have nothing against Denzel Washington or Anne Hathaway as such. (I especially have nothing against Denzel Washington. Mmm ... Denzel Washington ...) I just don't understand what they're doing here, now? They are going to be the hosts of the Nobel Concert tomorrow. Why? WTF do they have to do with anything? With Alfred Nobel, with the Peace Prize, with Norway, with Oslo, with the laureate, with ANYTHING related to any of this? The answer is nothing. So what are they doing here? It's so weird. It's just a practice that I don't understand on almost any level. They are celebrities. That's why they're here. They have no other qualification or relevance whatsoever. If I was one of them I would be embarrassed to be here. Almost as much as their president was last year. >:-)

But of course they are major Hollywood celebrities and as such can be expected to live in a bubble of adulation and undeserved respect through which reality can penetrate only with difficulty.

I just think it's completely stupid and rather disgusting to bring in these totally irrelevant celebrities to present this thing, as if they have something to do with it. Same thing with the performers at the concert. Barry Manilow? Herbie Hancock? Robyn? I'm sure it ups ratings. But it's still stupid and pathetic, it makes the concert irrelevant to the Prize, and it means a series of wasted opportunities. The Prize is Norwegian, awarded by Norwegians. Why isn't it presented by Norwegians, just because they wouldn't be as famous as Tom Cruise or Oprah Winfrey? This year the winner is Chinese - so why not have the concert be a presentation of Chinese music and dance? Last year the winner was American, they could have had Manilow and Hancock then. Why create this mishmash of performers from various irrelevant places and ignore the potential connection they could have created to the winner's home and history?

Sorry, I just had to say it. This has been annoying me for years, it had to come out sometime. :-) Of course this post ought to be about this year's winner, Liu Xiaobo ... who cannot say that he is happy to be here, since he is not here, but in a prison in China that at least Norwegian reporters are forbidden from even photographing. Of course this isn't the first time the winner has been prevented from coming to Oslo to accept the Prize. Perhaps most memorably, Aung San Suu Kyi was not able to leave Burma 19 years ago ... but her two teenage sons came to Oslo and accepted the Prize on their mother's behalf. It was actually quite moving. However, this year there is no one here who can represent the winner. No one has been allowed to come. I find this very interesting.

Liu Xiaobo's problems stem from his speaking out against the Chinese regime, which in his opinion is oppressive and dictatorial. His government call him a liar for it and imprison him. Now we award him the Peace Prize, and they are enraged ... again saying that he is a liar and a criminal. So of course he is not permitted to travel here for the ceremony, and neither is anyone else whom we could have accepted as his representative ... his wife, a relative, a close colleague, someone. In doing so they are following - let's call it an interesting tradition. This is only the second time this has happened in the Prize's more than century-long history. The only other Nobel laureate who has ever been denied the right to send a representative to Oslo is Carl von Ossietzky, who was likewise imprisoned by the regime under which he lived, the Third Reich.

Way to associate yourselves with all the right people, Beijing.

Congratulations to Liu Xiaobo, and fingers crossed for his future and for the future of the Chinese people.

I was going to write about the Data Retention Directive today too, but now I'm just too sleepy and the little guys need to eat. It'll have to keep till tomorrow.

Wednesday, December 8, 2010

Imagine no religion

30 years ago today.



I wonder what kind of clothes he would have worn if he had been alive now? :-)