"And use your voice every single time you open up your mouth"

Apparently watching the Blur documentary No Distance Left To Run, has side effects.

Me: "OH MY GOD LET’S NEVER FIGHT LIKE GRAHAM & DAMON! You know you're my BEST FRIENDS, RIGHT? Right?"
A & J: *blinks*


So My Chemical Romance's new album was released the same week that I finally got over myself and watched the Blur documentary No Distance Left To Run, and now the two might be forever intermingled in my mind. Not much else connects the two except MCR's obvious admiration of early to mid-90s British music, and, well, the comparison I'm about to make.

Watching No Distance, it's noticable how much trouble Blur really had with suddenly having 15-year old girls in the audience. It's kind of like the opposite from MCR who, when experiencing that same audience-switch, welcomed it whole-heartedly and happily. And while Blur seemed to sport the view of “Why the fuck are they even here?” MCR’s was more like “OK, being a teenager SUCKS, we know this, and if we can reach even one of them and save their lives than we will!” This has given MCR a certain flair of pretentiousness and overdramatic over-the-top-ness about them and their live shows. In contrast to Blur, who just seemed pretentious.

But I can forgive Blur now. They were middleclass boys straight out of Goldsmith’s college and had probably spent years only listening to the views of their peers. I mean. What did they know?

And Blur is still very much My Band. I loved Oasis and Suede was who I aspired to be and Pulp was like the hot alternative guys in school that I never dared to talk to, but Blur. Blur made me the person I am today.

And yes, I realise there were other bands than the six-seven obvious once, bands you probably needed to know if you were gonna go around and feel a part of something back then. But I never did. And never cared. All I cared about was distractions from real life. And good music.

Watching No Distance now it hits me how little I actually know the members of the band. Today clips and interviews of your pop stars are just one click away, but back then there was no youtube and our London flat didn't have a VCR and very crappy television reception and apart from going to live shows I really didn't see much of them outside pictures in magazines. So when I watched No Distance I was actually a little taken aback by the way they all sounded when they talked. Not Damon. He sounds like he does on the albums. But the rest.

Other things I noticed while watching:

• Graham's dislike of fame and the fans is painful to listen to and must have been even more painful to feel. No wonder he drank.

• In hindsight, the epic Oasis/Blur fight seem more like a silly pub-brawl between two men who were really full of themselves and had nothing better to do, than what it did back then. No wonder Graham drank.

• The question about who moved the single's release date so that Blur and Oasis ended up in competition for the no 1 spot, well, it's not really a question anymore, is it? It's pretty obvious that idea was hatched in Damon's brain and nowhere else.

• I've always been sort of hesitant about Alex but I do think he has a way with words and the comment about how Blur's demos sounded too much like drama school when it should sound like art school is just made of all kinds of awesome.

• All four of them at one point sporting black eyes. From each other.

• The comment that they wished they'd spent a little more time on the record contract they signed back then - because it's the contract they're still under. Well. Yeah.

• Dave's astute observation about how they all had sisters and no brothers and sort of became each others surrogate brothers. No wonder they split up and didn't talk for seven years.

We all grew up, me and A and J and E and the twin, all of us who went to London together back then. We're now in our thirties. We grew up and we no longer share flats and we have full-time jobs we actually have to be good at and careers to plan and partners to find and relationships to make work and children to raise into good people. It's all pretty...yeah.

"Whatever I choose and I'll sing the blues if I want"

Jag måste säga att det är riktigt rörande att se Genusnytts kommentarsfält komma samman och försvara Pär Ström och den kanske inte förbjudna men definitivt diskutabla rätten att kalla sig "genusforskare" i samband med att man marknadsför sina föreläsningar om jämställdhet, utan att ha några akademiska meriter inom ämnet.

Genusnytts kommentarsfält fram till idag: "Genusvetenskap...bla bla bla...OVETENSKAPLIG...yada yada yada...superviktigt att forskning är VETENSKAPLIG....osv osv."
Pär Ström: *låtsas vara genusforskare*
Genusnytts kommentasfält: *artiga applåder*

Och för att vara så varmt engagerade i frågan om vetenskaplig nivå så är det konstigt att ingen av dem nämner att Pär Ström, trots all den tid han lägger på att "forska" i ämnet, aldrig verkar ha hört talas om  maskulinitetsstudier.

Själv är jag deltidsforskare på youtube-clip som folk laddat upp på sina labradorvalpar. Jag tycker det är ett viktigt ämne och jag lägger en hel del tid på det varje dag.

####

Sims update: Adam is doing okay at his part-time receptionist job. (I am under no illusion that he doesn’t hate it, mostly because it takes time away from his “Art”, but it’s not as bad as he thought and he gets to organize leaving dos and birthdays which means he can choose places he knows have vegan food and every Friday after the phones close the admin team go out together and more often than not have a couple of bottles of wine between them and all the admin girls are in love with Adam and gladly cover the phone for him while he takes more cigarette breaks than is strictly allowed as long as he lets them spend their breaks perched on his receptionist desk asking him personal questions about his and Justin’s relationship.)

Justin is still just an entry-level coffee courier at his company and neither of them really make any money at the moment but Adam really, really wished to attend that writing class and Justin desperately wanted a small garden with some pots and plants and the regular bills still have to be paid, so I had to sell their TV.

"Where were you while we were getting high?"

TS Eliot once said that no art has its meaning alone; that the past will always cloud the present (and the future) when it comes to analysis and interpretation, and that any artist "will be aware also that he must inevitably be judged by the standards of the past". Of course, his words were penned with the conflict between the canon of English literature and its current Modernist practitioners in mind, but it's applicable to My Chemical Romance too.

When a review includes a line like that, you know it's gonna rock.

"It's 2019. The city you're living in is completely homogenized. It's a plain of utopian uniformity, a metropolis of very few risks but even fewer rewards. Fear has been eradicated, but so has freedom. And at the head of this tedious existence is Better Living Industries, an oxymoron if there ever was one: a promise of a better life, yet only within strictly-defined parameters. Outside of the city, though, there's something different. It's wild and untamed. A resistance, led by a gang of feckless outlaws known as the 'Fabulous Killjoys'."

I'm not sure I could be more excited for My Chemical Romance's new album than I am. They just released the next video in the whole Killjoys vs Better Living-concept - "Sing" (which will make no sense unless you've seen the video for "Na Na Na") and it's completely awesome and after having watched Gerard die all prettily I'm now a bit...you know. (No, not sad. Horny.)

I didn't love the last album The Black Parade the way I love Bullets or the obsession with revenge in Three Cheers, but when a band has meant as much for your mental health as MCR has for mine, something like that doesn't really matter. And from what I've heard of the new album and seen of the concept, this album seems to have been pretty much made for me.

Firstly, geeky superhero comic book concept, yay! Secondly, I'm their age, which is just over thirty, which is such a weird age because you finally realise you've actually grown up, no doubt about it anymore, which is, well, weird. And means that now, more than ever, you need the Jedi Knights your inner superhero geek. Gerard: "It was our take on it: us directly being slowly and gradually assimilated into that 30-something safe-rock culture."

"A lot of the elements of the setting are completely metaphorical for the real stuff that's going on in this album," explains Gerard, "which is a struggle of art vs. commerce and filth vs. corporate clean up, and freedom being a dangerous chaotic thing that's very hard to achieve, versus a kind of utopian situation where you're very safe and everything's very easy, but it's also very boring."

Made. For. Me.

Thirdly, there's a red line of admiration looping from MCR, right back to the early and middle 90s Britpop era. And I was right there. Back then.

Blur's The Great Escape might have been the last album I completely and utterly disappeared into. But Modern Life Is Rubbish is probably the album that most shaped me as a person.

There are some things about the Britpop era that makes it fascinating thinking about now, today. There was no Internet Culture. I didn't have a blog. Or livejournal. Or an e-mail account. This means I have no lj entries to remind me of what it was like back then, and of all the great bands I saw, all I have are some vague personal memories in my head. I do remember being in the one-bedroom London flat - my very first! - that I shared with these girls who are still my closest girlfriends today (How? How did we not end up killing each other in that flat?), and being very insecure about myself and very skinny and freezing a lot in that flat and sometimes wearing gloves to bed and listening to a lot of Chris Evans on Virgin and one day hearing about some film project Ewan Mcgregor was doing with Christian Bale called Velvet Goldmine and thinking "Oooh, can't wait to see that!"

And I remember even back then I was bored out of my mind with the whole "new lad" part of the culture of Britpop, even back then it just didn't appeal to me and seemed uninspiring and...and nofun! (Of course, that didn't seem very important compared to the feeling when listening to Oasis' "The Masterplan" the first time, so.) And we smoked a lot of Silk Cuts and drank a lot of snakebites and were in love with the keyboardist from Suede and we had only a vague idea who Ian Brown was but we knew Liam liked him and we fell asleep to the violins in Bittersweet Symphony and had no idea Blur was going over to American bands instead and we we were all into The Young Ones, maybe becuse we were such anglophiles. Or maybe because it was fucking funny.

But the strangest thing of all is that still, to this day, the song that most reminds me of this time, of all of this, when I hear it is Robbie William's "Angels".

*

(*This blog post sponsored by "Why wasn't The Libertines around back then 'cause I'd been fucking all over that!")

"You should've raised a baby girl, I should've been a better son"

Hanne Kjöller has penned a very speshual "feminist" vision in her column today, where one important step towards Equality Between The Sexes is to start more girls-only schools "av en modern, feministisk variant" where girls wouldn't have to be held back by "mindre begåvade pojkar."

Lovely.

All feminists have from time to time heard dumbass statements made in the name of feminism that make our toes curl in disgust. We've heard it at coffee breaks. We've heard it on telly. And, of course, we've read it on the dear old Interwebs. (Though thankfully I never hear it from any of my close girlfriends. They're all excellent, excellent feminists and also not afraid to tell me when I'm...not.)

The statements can be about men, or women, or women's clothing, or sex, or underage sex, or religion, or religious clothing, or any fucking thing. All some people have to do is open their mouths and viola! Toes! Curling! Not unusually said dumbass statements will be followed by an equally dumbass proposal to make some kind of stupid law against some kind of stupid (but not yet illegal) phenomenon. This is normal. All movements suffer from this. Tell me one where you haven't heard batshit crazy theories being announced, sometimes even published? And I do understand that mostly it isn't about people being actually dumb, but just about them having a supremely different outlook on life than I do. Sometimes. Other times I'm just feeling melodramatic and like my precious feminism is being torn apart instead of moving forward and then I just wanna go Leo McGarry on their asses.

Because yes, my friend. You can conquer the world, like Charlemagne. But you'd better be prepared to kill everyone. And you had better start with me because I will raise up an army against you and I will BEAT YOU.

####

I'll admit, I was a bit sadface that Pär Ströms blog entry on female objectification didn't recieve more comments. I was looking forward to reading that (sadface). In the post itself Ström does his normal analysis of the problem with the femal body being more objectified and sexualized than the male body, where first he declares there is no problem since both sexes "want to make themselves beautiful for each other", then throws in some standard "J'accuse!" arguments on how women choose to be constantly sexualized (patriarchal traditions=so very completely blameless) only to finally reach the same conclusion that he always does - that the real problem isn't that we live in a Male Gaze society where women's bodies are "objectively" seen as more sexual than men's, but that men don't have the same a-d-v-a-n-t-a-g-e that women do to use their bodies to attain fame and fortune. =(

What I don't get is why these men, if they're serious in their complaints, don't try harder to work on this blantant discrimination against the male sex. Why not take action against a society where women have been stereotyped as being "naturally" sexier and men can't "use their bodies" to get favours? I mean, for that to change you basically need two things: The male body to be "objectively" seen as sexual the same way the female body is. And the Female Gaze to be more of standard than it is right now. So why don't these men celebrate each and every activity that try to sexualize men and turn the female gaze into the norm, even for just one advertisement or one show or one evening? Like, say, Ladie's Night?

Or why not start a petition to get Ryanair to start using men's bodies in their ads instead of women's - "Dear Mr Ryanair Boss Man, where are all the male pilots in nothing but their underwear seductively bending over some luggage? Why are you enforcing the stereotype that only women's bodies are sexy enough to be in a calendar? Why do you want to discriminate against us men this way? Sincerely, A Group of Concerned Swedish Men."

Or, hey, why not attack the heterosexual mainstream porn industry? Get them to stop focusing on the female body and start acknowledging the fact that men can be sexy while being fucked too. In fact, why not boycott the heterosexual mainstream porn industry until they start giving the physical attractiveness of the male body the admiration it deserves? Call for heterosexual porn where all the focus is on young, hairless abs, flat stomachs, smooth muscular backs, youthfully perky asses and acres and acres of soft boyskin. Let the male actors arche their backs in extacy and/or pain while panting and moaning and begging for more into the camera like the sluts they are, for a change.

Or why not initiate a campaign to make sure that for each and every lesbian sex scene there is in heterosexual porn there's an exact equal amount of scenes with men kissing and licking and going down on each other for the benefit of the female audience? (And yes, I know there's all kinds of porn out there but I use the word mainstream here because what I mean is making sure that the first random hetero-porno that a teenager and his group of friends dl involves these things.)

So. I don't understand. What's the problem, men?

####

My Sims family is moving along quite nicely, yay! Although I finally had to give in and give Adam a part-time job because it was just too painful to watch him walk around the house all day without lifting a finger to clean up the puddle from the broken toilet in the bathroom, while Justin was slaving away at work all day but still made breakfast for Adam every morning which meant he never had time to shower before work and thus had some, well, difficulties fulfilling his wish of making friends at work.

Sorry, Adam. Selling a painting for 3 simoleons is just not enough helping out. Hope you enjoy being a part-time receptionist. Do try not to get fired. And for the love of all things holy, will you please just clean the toilet.

"It's a struggle, livin' like a good boy oughta"

So I was doing pretty good energy-wise for a long time and then winter daylights saving happened and suddenly it's pitch black when I get off work and I don't have the energy for anything besides snuggling into the couch and yawning a lot and playing a lot of Sims 3.

My current Sims family consist of Justin, a friendly vegetarian who's also a hopeless romantic and who lives with his boyfriend Adam, a neurotic, over-emotional, artistic writer. Justin's life ambition is to have a big family and to successfully raise 4 babies into teenagers. Adam's life ambition is to become a professional writer. Yeah, I see where there might be a problem.

They are high school sweethearts.

(Well, technically Adam was in college when they met but Justin was a high school senior and he'd never had a boyfriend or girlfriend before so it totally counts. Actually, Justin had, with the wise wisdom of a teenager, already resigned himself to the fact that he would be the loser geek with asthma that no girls ever looked twice at for the rest of his life when he met Adam. Adam happen to be the older brother of Aaron. Justin and Aaron had became BFF during junior year when they first ended up in the same P.E class together and spent it sitting on the grass by the track field remeniscing about the early 90s British independence scene while the coach kept yelling more and more irritated orders at them.

Between junior and senior year Justin finally met Aaron's older brother, when Adam came home from college for the summer. Justin quickly managed to develop a crush on Adam so huge it could be seen from space and Aaron spent the next few months rolling his eyes and sighing a lot until Adam and Justin finally managed to get over themselves and hook up which traumatized Aaron's poor eyes forever but at least he didn't have to watch all the stupid mooning and sad, pining looks anymore.

After Adam finished art college and started trying to Make It As A Writer and Justin finished high school and then college and got a low-level job at some company, they move into a small flat in a crappy neighborhood with barely enough space for a bed, a table and all Adam's books.)

While Justin is away at work during the day Adam mostly sits at home and watches TV. Maybe I shouldn't have made him a loner as well as a writer. And I do kinda wish I hadn't made him both neurotic and over-emotional, because there's isn't a lot of things he can handle without breaking down and it must grate on Justin's nerves. Though, I have to say, Justin seems perfectly happy with his boyfriend and in between tantrums they hug a lot and I notice there's a lot of semi-naked cuddling. So maybe it's just my nerves.

(Though in the worst fight they ever had Justin coldly asked when "trying to make it as a professional writer" became "sitting on the sofa in the same sweatpants every day watching The Real Housewives of New Jersey with an empty bottle of wine on the floor" but he apologized after and he thinks Adam forgave him. Justin's not even sure why he said it because he is not a book critic or an editor but he can see that Adam has real talent and Justin would probably kill him if he stopped writing and got a regular job - one of them working a soul-crushing corporate job is enough - and it's not like Adam wasn't drinking a lot and watching a lot of reality soaps between bouts of inspiration when Justin fell in love with him too. Basically, Adam's the same person as he was when he was Justin's best friend's intriguing brother who came home from college in the summertime and who wrote dark, violent poems about death and dying and depression that he showed to Justin if he had had enough to drink and who had made Justin go "oh" the first time he saw him.)

Otherwise, Justin is currently nurturing a wish to learn more about gardening. Adam really wants to buy an easel, for some reason. Neither of them has any cooking skills yet so a big part of Justin's paychecks is going towards pizzas. Also, neither of them is into cleaning. As soon as Justin's career takes off I'm so getting them a maid because, damn.