9/11

Twenty years ago today I lived in Malmö sharing a house with some friends. A house where I had lived since I got back to Sweden from my dwelling in London the year prior. During the past weeks I had stayed in the living room though, sleeping on the sofa, as someone else had taken my old room. The reason was that I was moving out, having bought tickets to Montreal in Canada where I was going to stay with a friend for a few weeks. Then I would go WWOOFing outside Lachute. I did not have much money saved but had planned a trip during autumn and winter, and had gotten cheap tickets for the Greyhound bus across the continent to British Columbia. From there I would be heading south to San Francisco some weeks later, and then back through the United States to Quebec from December 5 to 8. My lighthearted and vague intention was to stay with friends and friends of friends as I traveled around. Spirit of youth. 

As I was packing and preparing I had the radio on and I heard about the first plane flying into the North Tower of the World Trade Center in New York. I turned on the shared television and watched from the sofa/my bed as the second plane hit the South Tower. The rest of the afternoon and evening cohabitants and friends came in to the living room and watched the scenes unfold. Thousands of immediate deaths and many more to follow, and – for better or worse – another nail in the coffin for a western world that naively believed in some sort of hastened expansion of advancement for mankind. It also made obvious a very violent threat to the open society that we had become accustomed to and had taken for granted.

 

It was first the next day or the day after that I again started thinking about my impending travels and how close Montreal and New York are to each other. Would I be able to use my plane tickets, would it be safe to journey throughout North America and would I make it back? It was not only the Twin Towers that had collapsed on 9/11, the entire commercial air industry seemed stalled. As Swissair was not yet grounded my youthful enthusiasm and confidence triumphed and off I went.

In 2021 we have discarded the lofty idea of a liberal empire. Instead we live in an almost dialectical opposite (as per Engels) agenda of low self-esteem and irrational psyches in the academic and public debate: Claiming that the studies of our own western history is racist (our cultural history has not achieved anything worthy), that genderfluidity should be the norm (fabulous for building the strong inner structure of a child). Emotional and incoherent response from a privileged upper middle class is the top dog and defines political correctness (who needs science and contemplation when we have disruption), escapism is a human right (a stable foundation and taking responsibility is unfashionable). Und so weiter. Identity politics runs amok and seemingly outlying deconstructive theories win entry. Ideology which actually generates the intolerance and division of humans it declares it is opposing. Grownups have escaped.

Although in the immediate aftermath of the attack, it ended up being an awesome trip with several lifetime experiences. Pretty much as I imagined and hoped for. Initially in Montreal and then making CSA-baskets for La Ferme Biologique de Bullion, followed by couchsurfing across the continent and back again. I made great friends whom I still have in my life and my innocent conception of how most people are nice and helpful if you meet them in person was confirmed.

The global balance of power will not accept a vacuum. Another superpower already bids for the role as world hegemon by looking at the expansion over all continents. It is unlikely that this alternative will hold similar values to us when it comes to the groundwork of society building that we have achieved: Division of power, human rights and so forth. Consequently it is obvious who must be our strongest ally in this game. I believe that the bubble of an open society with free speech and rule of law will prevail in our part of the world. We are resting on the shoulders of giants and with this foundation, reason will eventually win. Even so we have now learned the hard way that it is not something we have achieved and thus manage for free. Peace comes with a cost. We not only need to protect our outer borders with force but also continually fight for common sense against deranged ideologies within. We need to constantly defend ourselves against the people who hate us, our way of living and the cultural history that makes the open society possible, and that is precisely what we will.

Digi Demo (2007)

From the old chest of drawers.


Released at the JazzMacx Tasmania Takeover in November 2007. Text by Vengeance, Jazzcat, Macx. In order to begin comprehending the context, read this.

The art of cheap travelling

I grew up wanting to travel, though my family hardly ever did. I remember the excitement I felt as a young teenager on my first trip abroad, i.e. outside Sweden and Denmark, when the coastline of Rügen appeared on the ferry trip from Trelleborg to Sassnitz in Mecklenburg-Vorpommern. I often read a about other countries and landscapes within Sweden, but nothing of it seemed to satisfy my need for adventures. A need which I nurtured good.


When I was around fifteen-sixteen I stumbled across an obscure advert in a fanzine of sorts for the "Interrailer/Hitchhikers/Bum/Tramp Guide to the Galaxy". As I have lost track of it at the moment I cannot record its correct title. In any way did it consist of xeroxed pages of addresses all over, where one could sleep for free or almost for free: the well known book store in the 5th Arrondissement of Paris, ultra cheap hostels, private homes or artist collectives where the sofa was offered as a crashpad for travellers, squats, advices on which parts of beaches that are safe. You name it. I guess it was the fanzine version of how the Coachsurfing forum works these days, as this was the time of phone numbers and snail-mail addresses.

I always had that guide in my backpack when bumming around. Even if I did not use it all that much it always came with a "backup plan", or at least I hoped so. That is the way when travelling on an extremely low budget, you are thrown out there and in the end you will have to find a way to spend the night. As much of my bumming around came with an interrail ticket in my pocket, I often ended up getting on the night train to wake up to a new city the next morning. Needless to say, I often made new friends and have slept on many a living room sofa for a day or two. Some of these people are friends to this day.

When I flew into Canada for my first time in North America I had only 4000 SEK (circa 600 USD) on my pocket, but an address where I could sleep a few weeks and a vague idea of how to get around, partly using the dead cheap pre-ordered Greyhound bus tickets I had purchased. On that trip, in Canada and the US, I ended up WWOOFing (willing workers on organic farms) a month, hitch-hike Vancouver Island, see six Canadian Provinces and a whole lot of American States. I crossed the continent twice, and I did not take off until I flew back to Sweden.


A close friend of mine whom today has a company selling used machine tools started out hitch-hiking his way through South America. With him he carried a prospectus of a machine he had purchased from a discontinued factory in Sweden. When he sold it he had made a profit and had funds to buy more machines. Today his company has a number of employees and does not only engender tax revenues to the welfare state.

Neither such entrepreneurship nor cheap travelling is possible if the expectations and demands of a person are set too high. It is about daring and learning to rely on yourself, about initiative and enterprise. Nothing ventured, nothing gained. These days however, I am a family father and with it comes a completely different type of responsibility. When I travel today my requirements are obviously higher, but the sense of security I carry with me in my two shoes follows me all over the planet.


Tomorrow I will fly into Portugal for a week of road-tripping. For the first night I have a room waiting for me in the Pensão Londres.

Escape to Scorraig

by Alan G Bush

Some days ago I returned to the very picturesque small fishing town of Ullapool in western Ross-shire in the Scottish Highlands. As I did the last time, I stayed at the Arch Inn with view over Loch Broom in front of the impressive summit of An Teallach. The Inn is next to the harbour where the Caledonian MacBrayne ferry departs for the three hour sailing to Stornoway on the outer Hebrides every day of the week.

In between Loch Broom and Little Loch Broom is a long peninsula stretching far out. At the furthest point, far from where any roads go and facing a much animated Atlantic is the small crofting community of Scorraig. Crofters were people whom by force were removed from their homes in the fertile inland when the clansmen owning the land wanted ground for their sheep to graze. These people instead had to go living in the coastal, much less fertile, areas. This came to be known as the Highland clearings.

A man who a good deal later made his move to Scorraig is the witty storyteller Alan G Bush. Albeit somewhat crazy at bits he has the skills of keeping the reader caught in the antics and happenings of the gathering of folk and beasts out there. Since he moved there from England, via Wales, in 1963 the community has triumphantly grown. Against all odds must be added as, after all, a more remote place on mainland Britain is harder to imagine. The young lady working at the Inn told me that approximately a hundred people live there these days. But then they do not have to solely rely on the red telephone box courtesy of the British Empire for non-physical communications any more, as they have their own production of electricity and all IT one can hope for. Which, apparently, quite a few of the crofters out there make a living from.

Fact is that my younger brother Anders had his own period of crofting dreams. One time when we drove up from Isle of Skye to Ullapool we went on a detour via a place not far from the anthrax-infected Gruinard Island called Slaggan Bay. It is the most beautiful sandy beach on an isolated bay, and it comes with a few ruins of houses. If I remember correctly is was all left some one hundred years ago. Anders looked into the laws of property and crofting, but as his current project of success lies in Scanian Österlen, it seems likely the Scottish Highlands will have to wait.

The keeper of the Ullapool bookshop whom has supplied me with Alan's earlier writings, Escape to Scorraig, It All My Fault - some happenings before Escape to Scorraig and Escape from Scorraig told me on my recent visit that there was a new piece out. A spot of Scorraig History tells the stories and tales of what and whom was in the dwellings prior to the people currently living in them. As always with Alan, it lacks nostalgia. He gives a portrayal of people in the past, of toil and of hard life. And because of this, of optimism and hope for the future.

Here I had the idea of posting the most fantastic photograph of my good friend Per and Alan's son Ewan, who in the late 80s transported a tractor over the bay. Ewan had purchased it, much needed for the growing crofting-activities out on Scorraig, in Dingwall or some way equally far away anyway. Upon reaching home ground they decided that the best way to get it out to Scorraig, where no such things as roads needed to drive a tractor safely through hills and cliffs go, would be to get it over the bay by boat. However, as the only boats they had accessible were very small, they tied two together and placed planks on top, and then boarded the tractor. The snapshot is that one of the big machine on those tiny two boats on Little Loch Broom, which in no way is that little a loch by the way. The photograph is for the current moment lost though, stuck somewhere in a deep drawer in one of Per's many antique escritoires.

Update 260509. The photo below is a Massey Ferguson MF65 being ferried some when in the 80s. I received it from Alan G Bush today and it is published here with his permission. It remains unclear if it is from the episode I mention above, but it is highly probable. As Alan was in Tasmania back then he does not know. Per just recalled that it was not Ewan, but another guy living out there whom he transported the tractor together with.

The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes

British Granada Television's adaptations of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle works

When I was eleven-twelve years old I went through a Sherlock Holmes craze. For a period I was obsessed with the persona of the well known detective and I read all of the original stories and also a few of the non-canonical writings. I also remember that Swedish television aired the Sherlock Holmes played by Jeremy Brett, and I of course watched as many of them as I had the chance to.

During the past years I have meditated the thoughts of a renaissance with the master. The purchase of a cheap Signet Classics softcover in a book shop at the top of Victoria Peak, with an impressive view over Kowloon and Hong Kong, marked the starting point of just that revitalisation in my literary world. The bridges from Colonial Hong Kong to the eccentric bohemian cleverness in London's Baker Street are plentiful. Even more so, perhaps, in my psyche.

The entire series produced by Granada Television in between 1984 and 1994 consists of The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes, The Return of Sherlock Holmes, The Case-book of Sherlock Holmes and The Memoirs of Sherlock Holmes. In the first two seasons David Burke plays Mr Holmes' sidekick Dr Watson, and in the remaining seasons the role is instead equally well manoeuvred by Edward Hardwicke. Altogether forty-one out of the sixty stories were adapted and from what I have gathered more seasons were planned. This was however put to halt when Jeremy Brett died from acute myocardial infarction at the age of 61 in 1995. One's eyes does not have to be thoroughly trained to witness Mr Brett's deteriorating health during the episodes in the final season. The portrait of Sherlock Holmes as it appears in The Memoirs is that one of a much older man.

The adaptation is, in one word, excellent. Jeremy Brett grows into the role better as the seasons pass. One can sense an increasing actor's pride in understanding that he is putting a face on what many has come to consider the definitive screen version of the Detective of all detectives. Such self-confidence is needed when being Sherlock. Much care is put into details, not only in how the superior ego and slightly neurotic protagonist is played, but in all characters and scenery.

Sherlock Holmes has wit and humour, and childlike curiosity. He understands the value of imagination and uses it together with his extremely capable powers of reasoning to solve the darkest of mysteries. It works as good now as when I was a boy.

The Elegant Universe

by Brian Greene

This book is one of those that has been lying unread in my bookshelves for a considerable amount of years. I remember I purchased it not too long after I read Tor Nørretranders The User Illusion, which I did on the Greyhound bus trip from Montréal to British Columbia back in 2001. The User Illusion gave me that intellectual brain itch one comes across every now and then, and as the junkie I am I obviously wanted the effect imitated somehow. My constant search for euphoria lead to eager consumption of titles on popularized science such as Stephen Hawking's A Brief History of Time. At that period in my life, actually on that very North America trip, I was at a crossroad of crucial decisions. If I really wanted to make an attempt of getting into medical school I first needed to achieve much more comprehensive core studies of natural science, which meant heaps of supplementary evening studies at the municipal adult education concurrent with my beloved studies in philosophy at Lund University. These books I somehow decided to use as my own cognitive behavioural therapy to build up motivation for getting seriously into science. But for some reason, of which I am glad now, Brian Greene's book was saved for later.

In The Elegant Universe - Superstrings, Hidden Dimensions and the Quest for The Ultimate Theory the Columbia University mathematics and physics professor elaborates string theory and contemporary theoretical physics in a non-technical and pretty laid-back way. I often wish my skills in maths were much more thorough as I then could venture into these studies, which in many way touches some of those fields of philosophy that keeps me awake. However, accepting my limitations can also be a healthy insight I suppose, and thanks to the civilization of human collaboration I have the opportunity to enjoy it popularized, but nonetheless as thoroughgoing in its explanations as I could ask for. Again I am left immensely grateful for the shoulders of the giants upon which I am, and indeed we all are, standing on.

The grand Theory of Everything is an attempt of uniting the essentially different physics of macro cosmos, as in Einstein's theory of general relativity, and the quantum physics of micro cosmos. Both those theories are fundamentally coherent in themselves, but have seemed equally fundamentally inconsistent with one another. Greene's book tells us it seems string theory, or rather the six string theories comprised in an M-theory and its many dimensions beyond the three spatial and one time dimension we all are used to, is well on the way to bridge this unexplained chasm. It may be that a lot has happened since it came in 1999, even so the text is interesting as it gives a good introduction to the background of the problem and as it is filled with simple explanatory illustrations and analogies on events that suddenly becomes within a layman's grasp to ponder on. Beautiful! However, despite his high hopes of deducing the laws of physics, Brian Greene is still humble on the fact that such an attempt may not be the end to it. He writes about an idea of several universes, with their own intrinsic set of physics, the multiverse hypothesis.

The Elegant Universe again and again plays with epistemology and the fabric of reality, time and space and other branches of philosophy. Like when Greene is discussing what mysteries remains in our understanding of black holes, and its consequences for the debate concerning determinism. It may be that Laplace's demon with knowledge of position and velocity of all particles in the universe, which because of this knowledge would also be able to determine their historical and future positions and velocities, is undermined by the uncertainty principle of Heisenberg, one of the pillars of quantum mechanics. Probability and exactly is not the same. The then suggested case for quantum determinism within a framework of exact mathematical rule for all events/wave functions, which would enable an intelligence to determine future and history is, according to Hawking, derailed by the existence of black holes. When something falls into a black hole the calculations for all future wave functions will be incorrect, as such information is lost. It is no longer possible to disregard this conclusion as Hawking (again) has shown that black holes are not completely black, and that they are emitting energy, slowly evaporating. Black holes are thus not possible to isolate from the rest of cosmos as the distance between the centre of the black hole and event horizon shrinks, and no longer is keeping the rest of us cut off. But what if the black hole then again emits the information it has devoured, is not that what is necessary for quantum determinism? Well, Hawking and Thorne have bet against, claiming that the information is forever lost, and Preskill has bet on that the information returns as the black hole evaporates. Apparently the winner of the gamble will receive an encyclopaedia.

I have obviously enjoyed reading the book quite a lot, which explains why I opened this review with how I am glad it was left unread on my bookshelf. In fact his second book on theoretical physics, The Fabric of the Cosmos, is on order for me. I have also understood that Nova made a documentary with Brian Greene on The Elegant Universe which, despite the medium's shortcomings on these matters, I must get my hands on. Until then I am left waiting and contemplating, hoping they will get the Large Hadron Collider fired up again next year, finding the Higgs boson.

Goodbye to Berlin

by Christopher Isherwood

While I was reading the second of The Berlin Novels it several times crossed my mind how contemporary to the present day Isherwood is in his writing. The depiction of human interaction, also with references to roles of for instance gender, seems to be universal. At least for an enlightened clique of people during the past hundred years. Either that, or perhaps more likely, Christopher Isherwood was quite an avant-gardist and also was staying in such circles in the Weimar Republic Berliner underground scene. It is very clear that what Isherwood in this book, and as William Bradshaw in Mr Norris Changes Trains, experiences and is part of has had a continuity to today's liberal and leftist progressive political thought. Rejecting his well off background, he is an anthropologist rather than a novelist, spending time at the very bottom and making "Brilliant sketches of a society in decay" as George Orwell described it.

When I visited David's in Tasmania last year we released a c64 production entitled Digi Demo in which he called me the traveling man. I remember his data garage in the Launceston suburb, an Iraqi cigar, some local beers and a conversation partly reflected in the scroll text of the demo. The talk was on the subject of inexpensive trips on trains, coaches or as a hitchhiker, seeing places, having the journey itself as a goal, surviving on a few dollars and only having responsibility for yourself. Obviously we came to discuss not being able to procrastinate as adults, with careers, family responsibilities and such. However, both having a history of bumming around quite a while it became a session of adventure nostalgia. When in the early parts of Goodbye to Berlin Isherwood describes how Frl Schroeder tells him stories of earlier tenants and "I have been listening to her for some time, I find myself relapsing into a curious trance-like state of depression. I begin to feel profoundly unhappy. Where are all those lodgers now? Where, in another ten years, shall I be, myself? Certainly not here. How many seas and frontiers shall I have to cross to reach that distant day; how far shall I have to travel", I could not help thinking of the escapism of our youth.

At the same time as Christopher Isherwood may have spent time with people of political will with relation and also some coherence to today's counterparts, his journeys took place in a world where the dogmas were different. The taboos on what issues to debate and which truths to follow are what socially creates much of a political movement striving for consensus, at least in some European traditions. In a sad way such unwillingness to differ rationale from mere taste often creates a hinder for the genuine topics that truly ought to be politically debated.

Mr Norris Changes Trains

by Christopher Isherwood

I first encountered Christopher Isherwood's writings in the second half of the 1990s through a couple of female acquaintances. I remember how my interpretation of their way of discussing him and his writings was as if they were part of some sort of fan cult. It was however, with all certainty, my naivety rather than factual circumstances that caused such a deriving from my part. I recall a coach trip to Prague with those ladies around that time, and I believe, though I could be mistaken as my memory of it is vague, that I already on that trip had read a library copy of Down There on a Visit, the book they so much talked about. Later I bought a paperback of Goodbye to Berlin. Since then it has several timed crossed my mind that I wanted to read those two novels again, but it was not until I stumbled upon the first of The Berlin Novels, this one, in Winchester that things really seemed to happen.

Mr Norris Changes Trains is narrated by William Bradshaw, whom encounters Arthur Norris in the opening chapter, taking place on a train trip to Berlin. It is plausible that it starts out when the train travels through either Belgium or Holland. William, lacking something to read, foresees a seven or eight hour tedious journey, and rather than remaining in utter silence he demands attention from the stranger with the unusually light blue eyes. This happens to be the start of a friendship running through the two years that follows. The book was published in 1935 and the background storyline follows that one of the early 30s in Germany which means Nazi national socialism in confrontation with Leninist-Stalinist Communism, public antisemitism growing strong and similar forms of sinister political manoeuvres. Mr Norris, whom really is an exciting character growing increasingly odd as the chapters passes not only seems to be a masochist but also joins a Red Front sect, claiming to be part of the Third International.

The reader is given clues to the Berlin society around Mr Bradshaw: Proletarian Lokale where people go for beer are some being communist and others being governed by the Hitler-Jugend; prostitutes with elaborate sexual services; Baron von Pregnitz dreaming of a Pacific island for him and seven boys, ages ranging from sixteen to nineteen. In the midst of this is the polite gentleman adventurer telling us the story. The well meaning and naive William Bradshaw is lured into one of Norris' schemes for funds and is used as a decoy in order to get the Baron on a holiday to Switzerland. In the Alps Norris' plan is they will meet up with the apparent French spy Margot, disguised as a Dutch gentleman calling himself van Hoorn. Bradshaw returns to Berlin and finds out the plot through one of the Communist leaders. Subsequently Arthur Norris escapes in a hurry to south America and not long after the Reichstag is on fire. A lot of his Communist friends are being eliminated by the Nazis and William returns to England. The final pages of the book are excerpts from letters Mr Bradshaw receives from Mr Norris, whom does not seem to have the best of his times.

The Road

by Cormac McCarthy

The rugged hardback I have of this book was a gift from a good friend when he was over from San Francisco not long ago. It is a first edition brown and black Alfred A. Knopf publishing, with the Borzoi colophon, and it looks as well used as it is. The pages are unevenly cut and it had been in someone else’s possession before my friend decided to have it as a travel book when touring Europe. On the inside of the front cover my friend has written a message to me with a black pen, a note from one explorer to the other. All this has made my reading experience more thorough, as a clean and glossy multicolour soft cover would never have done the story justice. A man and a boy hiking through a desolate, uninhabited and dead landscape in a very dystopic post-apocalypse, searching for food in the form of tinned foods, hiding from the ones that want them dead. The dialogue is short, male. Towards the end of the book they reach the ocean, it is birdless give but the bones of seabirds and “At the tide line a woven mat of weeds and the ribs of fishes in their millions stretching along the shore as far as the eye could see like an isocline of death.” The man coughs blood and the boy almost passes away in fever, but it is despair that kills. The writing is as abrasive for something that could be regarded your soul, as the first drink of cask strength single malt from southeastern Isle of Islay is for your throat when it has been withheld from such for a while.