> sorry you missed your dance group's first show
It was a hard decision, but I think it was the right one after all. It was
really important and good for me to get to come to Holland for the first
time after July .. and it might well be that I wasn't ready to perform
anyway, yet.
> I didnt know it was that kind of group
> maybe I got the martial arts idea confused with the dance
> so whey do you get to perform?
This time was in a theater like setting, but for kids (6-10yrs) mostly,
and their parents of course. It was on Sunday, a christmas calendar kind
of things, and the figting elves (the santa's helpers guys) was the
adaptation our contact improvising movement material had found during
their practising. The reviews viewed them as .. some-positive-word and
scary, I didn't find the newspaper yet, though.
The actual thing should be ready in march. I don't know too much where
it's heading, but the name is Erä anyway, like in "eräretki" which means a
trekking kind of walking trip out to the wilderness, or another meaning
would be "erä" like in sports (icehockey, football) where it means one
round, part of the game. The dictionary seems to give all the following:
Database: enfin Key: erä
amount (noun)
batch (noun)
consignment (noun)
entry (noun)
game (noun)
heat (noun)
instalment (noun)
item (noun)
lot (noun)
parcel (noun)
part-payment (noun)
period (noun)
quantity (noun)
round (noun)
set (noun)
share (noun)
We have used both the trekking and teamsports metaphors to approach the
groupness this man-gang should have, in the most man-energy-like way.
Besides that we do all the movements sort of anti/kontra-music, not at all
to the rhythm the way I'm used to, so it's quite anti-me on the whole. At
the same time it is very me, though, I did do teamsports actively for
years and feel like having this boy power (!= spice girls).
Just read your frankfurt-ballet.de homepage .. was pretty much the same
text as in the Touch-program?
I'm visiting my "urhem" (swedish), or "alkukoti" (finnish), meaning the
home of origin aka. parents home ie. mother, her new husband and my
brother for the first time in a couple of weeks, after living here all the
time from August all long autumn months till the beginning of December
when we finally got our new apartment in the center with a friend.
Yesterday we had sauna there for the first time, invited some friends over
(about 10 or so), as it is on the top 11th floor (the sauna, not the flat)
in the talles building of this small city, a great view to the sea. I
enjoyed being a host after a long break, really.
Now I'm working on more hosting .. tomorrow on Friday night there's the
traditional drumn'bass/techno/house party in town that ends at 4am so I'm
inviting people to continue a little at our place afterwards, as it is my
birthday then when it starts turning to the Saturday 26th. The theme is -
surprisingly enough - Teletubbies (of course). As you may know it's a cult
in the Brittish (gay (and)) club culture and here in Finland they show it
8am on Sat. morning too, which is just perfect for the recovering
freed-my-mind-in-a-night-through-dance people, whose cognitive skills are
about the level of those 0-4yrs old babies/kids who also follow the
ever-happy and colourful show.
I just wrote an exclusive introduction to the show to the mailing list of
the local party dancers who are coming tomorrow, explaining most of the
clever structures built in the program. Not having the energy to repeat it
here I have to mention one interesting detail that came up:
All the teletubbies have same kind of TV-screens in their belly, but the
antennas on top of their heads are all different. They seem to be sexual
symbols .. it appears quite clear even for me, who tries to avaid sexual
interpretations of things. I haven't read about it anywhere, although
there probably are a lot of texts around, but we have tried it with the
dolls ;)
Hipsu/Daisy (fin/eng), the green one, has a straight stiff antenna, a
clear fallos-symbol. Laa-laa, the feminine red one (is wearing a skirt in
one picture on the CD album covers I bought) has an antenna that is a
circle, just like the female symbol in biology. Interestingly enough, the
small yellow one called Pai/Po has an antenna that is sort of twisted to
be a circle, but not really, could yet develop the be either one (or
both?) of the two mentioned. Oh yes the dolls, we tried and the green
fallos fit great through the red circle, but the yellow didn't really work
with either one.
The only problem with the theory was the oldest Teletubbie, namely
Tiivi-Taavi / Thinky-Winky. The purple one serving as my cellphone
comfortablizer, remember? It's antenna is a triangle pointing downwards. I
mentioned this in my post to the list, which I also forwarded to a friend
who's not a techno/dance fan at all but with whom we'd been talking about
the show and the party earlier. He happened the be on-line (well, most of
the time he is, actually) and mentioned remembering that a pink (some see
the purple as pink, I don't get it) triangle had been a symbol that
homosexual men had to wear during the World War II in the Nazi
concentration camps or something. He wasn't quite sure, but could confirm
it quickly from the net .. using the search phrase "homo nazi triangle"
(mentioned being a great potential band name for the future ;) he found
out that different coloured triangles were actually signs for different
criminals in prisons back then, this is from what he posted:
---cut---
Those who wore the pink triangle were brutally treated by camp guards and
other categories of inmates, particularly those who wore the green
(criminals), red (political criminals) and black (asocials) triangles. The
following testimony by survivor, Heinz Heger, provides a dramatic
illustration:
Extracted from: Heger, Heinz. The men with the Pink Triangles. Alyson
Publications 1980:34-37.
"... Our block was only occupied by homosexuals, with about 250
men in each wing. We could only sleep in our
night-shirts, and had to keep our hands outside the blankets,
for: 'You queer arse-holes aren't going to start
wanking here!'
---cut---
So it seems my new Nokia edit is gay! Gee.
Hmm. Christmas. Traditionally IRC-time, but all the interesting people
seem to be asleep already. Had a good talk with my brother, live even,
after playing chess with a real wooden board and everything. Before that
we were trying to build a nice medieval/middle-european church from one of
those 3d-puzzles. I gave him the Sony casette recorder, the one I bought
about a year ago in A'dam and was so happy about. as a present. I broke
mine in May or so and just got it back from the store last week. Sony had
sent them a brand new one, a new microphone and a set of earplugs included
(I'd kept mine to myself). He and his friends are, in a weird way, anti
hitech and like to use c-cassettes so he seemed to be quite happy about
the gift. He's had trouble with having cassettes with different speeds,
recorder with different decks, and this on has a nice pitch control wheel
even.
Wonder if you ever have time to read this long e-mails? Well you do read
loads of books and newspapers, so perhaps. I seem to have continuosly time
to write these. The thing I wrote about Teletubbies in Finnish was 9k.
This one's only 8 so far. I didn't tell you what the sun with a baby face,
the videos with real kids and the sound coming from a periscope like
megaphone could be interpreted as. Or how it has been with the music
videos.
Oh the music videos. I've been trying to make even two of them. One with
the music from Studio1, the German / Mike Ink project I played you once ..
the monoc strict clean (well in a way groovy too) detroit style techno
thing. For that I already selected the material from the tapes I had after
the trip there and drove it in the Avid we get to use for editing. The
system seems to be ok so far, nonlinear enough for me. The piece
(hellblau, skyblue) would be just clouds, sky and sun in different
positions, changing according to how the monoc music develops.
>From the airplane I have the clouds from above, from the ground from
below. Up in the plane the sun was shining above the clouds, when videoing
on Monday from a bridge down here in Oulu the sun was just above the
horizon, below the clouds. From the plane the clouds sometimes filled only
1/3 of the sky, sometimes 2/3, sometimes half, sometimes everything. From
the ground I got a shot of clear clue sky. Those different compositions I
will try to attach to the music but have no clue if I can make it work.
The other would be more narrative, probably much more work too. It would
be about the dynamic-duo of two powerful companies in charge here: Nokia,
Sonera and of course highly critical (but in a *not* obvious way at all, I
guess). The tall building where we live now has huge (in Oulu-scale) signs
of both on the wall. I think the Nokia sign can be seen from kilometers
away when driving to the city from the airport. And all the newspapers are
full of those two coupling, in both advertising and editorial material,
all the time. And I have good shots of my own Tiivi-Taavi Teletappi (fin),
my fingers gently lifting it's poor face off from covering the screen,
revealing the same text: Nokia - Sonera.
Sonera is the ex-PTT Finland, perhaps the only good ex-national PTT in the
world, or perhaps there aren't any. It was privatized this autumn anyway
and it's globalizing fast. Netherlands is essential for them, they got a
lot of people working there etc. .. good for both South-East Asian,
African and also American (well and EU too) contacts I guess. It is still
relatively small, but it's one of the few telcos in the world that makes
almost all of it's money with mobile networks and the Internet, which are
now merging. Our department does a lot of research for them and they also
come to teach, mostly quality management and information security, for us.
I wonder what the video should show and how.
One thing that christmas (and all those party organizing and video
creating dreams!) has helped me to take distance from is the yearly
(second) international Politics&Internet'99 congress that is organized in
Finland in the beginning of January .. in a couple of weeks that is.
I'm in the organizing comittee for the Oulu part myself and should give a
speech about Internet governance, meaning governing the Internet, not
governing the rest of world with the help of it (like a lot of the
conference is about i think/hope) in Helsinki. I think I still keep that
distance for now .. my main responsibility for the time being was to help
to organize a competition for the schools in Oulu area.
They were supposed to build net services that would bring the home
(parents) and the school (kids activities, teachers) closer somehow in the
primary schools (kids from 6-15) and for older kids/students in
high-schools etc. the task was to make systems/services that would connect
the schools better with the further education institutions and
work/business life in the area. Most of the participants are actually from
the primary schools, with kids about 10 yrs old (4th grade). I guess they
are the most enthuastic ones about the Internet. I haven't taken a look at
the stuff they've done yet, but I'm in the jury so next week we will.
There'll be also a public vote on the net but I'm afraid it'll all be in
Finnish.
Gee now it's 12k already, so many different things. An overload I'm
afraid. Off to sleep, finally.
Thanks for writing, reading too I guess, and good times.