Black Metal Images by Peter Beste and a Blast from the Past [video interview NSFW]

(Peter Beste
Maniac of Mayhem, Røros, Norway, 2004
Gelatin Silver, printed 2008; edition of 10
20 x 16 inches [image taken from stevenkashergallery])

You know, sometimes I come across a picture or a music video on the YouTube that just brings back memories. Yesterday I was searching for the Chuck Norris Action Jeans and ended up spending quite some time at PCL Link Dump, which could also be called ‘Time Dump’ (which is a good thing in internet world), by the way, which has a huge collection of artifacts of popular culture, like vintage movie posters, vintage photographs, etc. On it, there is a post on the work by Peter Beste (official website), who spend some time in Norway to photograph members of the Black Metal scene. Here’s a snip from the press release:

In the last two decades a bizarre and violent musical subculture called Black Metal has emerged in Norway. It has its roots in a heady blend of splatter movies, heavy metal music, Satanism, Pagan mythology and adolescent angst. In the early-mid 1990’s, members of this extremist underground committed murder, burned down medieval wooden churches, and desecrated graveyards. What started as juvenile frenzy came to symbolize the start of a war against Christianity, a return to the worship of the ancient Norse gods, and the complete rejection of mainstream society.

Apart from the fact that the pictures a great on a technical and content level, I couldn’t help but smile. Why? Because I remembered my own past black metal self (minus the racism and satanism and killing each other) and because some pictures show a self-irony on the part of the musicians - however, I could also just read this into it. Beste seems to be interested in these specific musical subcultures. According to his website, another photo project of his involved Houston Rap Culture which is also definitely worth checking out. Below you’ll find a video interview with Beste on his work in Norway. If that got you interested, consider grabbing a copy of the highly acclaimed Lords of Chaos book on Black Metal in Norway by Peter Moynihan. It’s on my To-Read list for quite a while now and is one of those books I definitely want to read at some point. (image to the left is Nattefrost of Carpathian Forest, Sandness, 2002, taken from stevenkashergallery)

 

 

But enough talk, here’s the video after the jump (it’s in half Norwegian and English, w/ subtitles in Norwegian, but Beste’s statements are in English), which includes live material that is definitely NSFW.

A short note on images being messed up, categories, and tags

I’m finally getting around to sorting out the “categories” and “tags” issue, which is a drag, really, but in the end you’ll find it will be easier to navigate around on this blog. While going through some very old posts I noticed that some images and pictures have changed for some reason, i.e. images turning up in posts where they don’t belong, etc. I’m sorry about this, I will try to sort this out. I guess this has to do with the re-design and re-launch of WordPress.com. I just started doing this, so I will be moving things around a bit. Everything should remain functional, though. Stay tuned!

Cheers!

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Where do all these people come from?!

So it’s sunny, alright, and I wanted to go out and sit in the sun and do some work. This is one of the things I hate about this city: it’s too crowded. All the green spaces are just PACKED with people and this is, frankly, annoying the shit out of me. It’s like Grand Central Station. Seriously. 

And the other thing is, that it seems like they’ve imported and opened a box of entirely new people during the dark and cold and lonely winter months. The boxes were opened one week ago. You know the type: skinny jeans, ill-fitting and/or tasteless wardrobe, big sunglasses, etc. What’s really freaking me out is how old these people are! I mean, three years, give or take two more, ago this was non-existent. Nada. Call me conservative, but I believe there is one period in your life when you search around, pick out a subculture, and more or less stick with it on some level. It’s called puberty. You don’t turn into a Ramones look-alike when you are thirty, if you get my drift. Especially not if suddenly the your entire age bracket decides to do so and WASN’T EVEN AROUND WHEN THE RAMONES OR STUDIO 54 WAS HIP!!! Of course I’m not saying that you can’t discover and listen to the Ramones whenever you stumble upon them, but who in his right mind decides when he is thirty to suddenly imitate them?! This is the stuff teenagers do, not adults. And what if they actually had been Ramones fans since pre-school?; well, THEN THEY WOULDN’T LOOK AS HEALTHY WHEN THEY TURNED THIRTY, WOULD THEY!?

Pfff, sorry about the somewhat incoherent ranting and shouting, but I really had to get this off my chest. I guess I’m just annoyed at not getting a place in the sun today.

I guess what I’m saying is: we need more TECHNOVIKINGS!

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HeartBeans - I want one

(picture taken from Yanko Design)

Made from a single piece of carved wood, this coffee grinder has a built-in heart beat monitor and will grind your beans to the rhythm of your heart.

Whoa. This sounds like an interesting idea, but it sure looks freakish. 

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Two Star Wars clips

So okay, I grew up on Star Wars. Who hasn’t in my generation? Star Wars, Indiana Jones, and the A-Team. Oh, and MacGyver, of course. So these two clips just touch a spot. You’ll know what I mean. The first one is from the great Eddie Izzard, the second one is a German dubbed version that is just hilarious. Enjoy!

PS: While checking for “MacGyver” I came across a wikipedia page that lists all the problems solved in all, repeat ALL, episodes. So how is this for a starter:

With an old, bullet-ridden Jeep his only means of escape, MacGyver must patch up the Jeep’s radiator to get it working again. Remarkably, he does the job with nothing but water and egg whites. First he dumps some water in the radiator and jump-starts the Jeep, causing the water to heat up. A few minutes later, he dumps in the egg whites, which the water cooks. Once cooked, the egg whites naturally plug the holes in the radiator, making the Jeep temporarily usable.

Genius.

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If the Germans had won the War

…I’m not sure whether they would’ve painstakingly re-named all of Manhattan, but the idea is certainly interesting. Strange Maps dug up this artist, Melissa Gould, who tried to imagine what would’ve happened. Here is a snip from the project’s statement:

NEU-YORK is a cautionary meditation, suggesting what the local geographical reality might have been like had victorious Nazis succeeded in bringing the Third Reich across the Atlantic Ocean in 1945. At the same time it is an exploration of psychological transport, place, displacement and memory. This re-imagining of the city plays with comparison and misrecognition, exploring the coexistence of past and present, fiction and reality.

Isn’t that something? The project’s website has a ton of info on this and if you are interested in alternative history scenarios, take a look at Robert Harris’ Fatherland or Philip K. Dick’s The Man in the High Castle. Both are good, but if i remember it correctly, I liked Fatherland more. And now I’m off to watch Iron Man.

UPDATE: Well, Iron Man was good, but it didn’t really keep me on the edge of my seat. The effects are neat, but the story doesn’t seem to hold somehow and the evil guy is E V I L  and you know from the first moment on what’s going to happen. But Robert Downey jr. really elevates the movie, I loved his acting and character in the movie. It’s a nice popcorn movie and those are rare enough to come by these days, so… it’s one thumb up for Iron Man.

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I want to learn short hand…

inside pages

Originally uploaded by squareintheteeth

…without having to become part of a secret group and without having to work as a secretary. Or are they called PA’s now? I don’t know and care, but the writing in this book looks pretty neat. It comes from a Flickr set of scans from a Masonic handbook, The Book of Solomon,  ca 1920, and there are some transcriptions of the text in the comments. I went through a phase when I was really interested in code, sparked by reading Neal Stephenson’s Cryptonomicon and parts of David Kahn’s The Codebreakers. However, because I just S U C K at math and all related disciplines I soon gave up. But I remember really liking Stephenson’s book back in the days. That was years ago, though, so don’t crucify me when you read it and it turns out to be lame. I was in my early twenties when I read it, I think.

Speaking of books, I started reading Michael Pollan’s Omnivore’s Dilemma and it is about to change my life! You’ve probably already heard of the book or the writer, because he seems to be all over the place lately. That’s not necessarily a bad thing. Omnivore’s Dilemma is about food, or better, the food industry and you’d be surprised by a number of things. As always, dealing with the industrial-food complex has gigantic grossness potential (see the Rolling Stone article on hogfarms), but he manages to spare you the worst bits, although corn is not doing much better. And you’d be surprised that corn is everywhere. If you can’t be bothered to read the entire book, Pollan published a number of articles that sketch out his views and opinions, so go forth and read here, here, or here. Here’s a snip from the last one:

some of the cultures that set their culinary course by the lights of pleasure and habit rather than nutritional science are actually healthier than we are—that is, suffer a lower incidence of diet-related health troubles. The ”French paradox” is the most famous such case, though it’s worth keeping in mind the French don’t regard the matter as a paradox at all; we Americans resort to that word simply because the French experience—a population of wine-swilling cheese eaters with lower rates of heart disease and obesity?!—confounds our orthodoxy about food. Maybe what we should be talking about is an American paradox: that is, a notably unhealthy people obsessed by the idea of eating healthily. 

Other news from the healthward front are that I’m still keeping my pledge of riding my bike everywhere I can, following the strike of the public transportation employees a few weeks ago. Now I just have to eat more veggies than pasta and couscous and I’ll be fine. ;)

 

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Re-Organization of the Bearded Blogging Empire

So, as you might have noticed, posts here have gotten very irregular at best. So I sat down to figure out how to go on with this blogging thing. So, here’s the deal; as some might know, I keep another blog at Tumblr, called Bearded Dave @ Tumblr, which gets updated on a regular basis. Why? Well, it is just much much faster and easier to post something you find on the web on Tumblr via a little bookmarklet. I know that WordPress has the same thing, but it is just not as streamlined as Tumblr’s. The drawback, though, is that the posts there are much more boring than they are here, because I rarely comment the T-posts and use it more like an inbox for the stuff I run into and that I think is neat or interesting or what have you.

So this is what I came up with: I will keep this blog and post more personal things here, in addition to longer posts on topics that I come across and where I feel like writing a longer post on (like Humboldt Squids! They are awesome.) I’m planning to get back into more personal blogging on a regular basis, but the past few months have been extremely stressful and I was spending so much time working in front of the computer and writing than I just couldn’t be bothered with writing in my free time in front of the computer. Lame? Maybe, but hey, I also got a life to live! ;)  

However, I like blogging and frankly I’m not too happy with the more or less uncommented posting that I do on Tumblr. I will keep the Tumblr Blog and keep it updated, though, simply because it is so nifty and streamlined, but I’m going to post here at WordPress more again in the weeks to come.

Pfadfinderehrenwort. 

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GTD - implementing ‘The System’

Usually a book where the only blurb consists of ‘the personal productivity guru’ makes me throw a book away quicker than you could say QUACK, but I have to admit that I got hooked on David Allen’s Getting Things Done method. I won’t get into the how-to here, because there are plenty of places online where you can look that up, like the fantastic 43folders website. Look around online a little, maybe get the book, and try it out. I started to use it about two weeks ago and I have to say it works fine for me so far. Nerd that I am, I looked around on the internet for some geeky application that would ‘help’ me organized my lists and contexts, but it turns out the way that works best for me is the index card method (much like the hipsterPDA by Merlin Mann). I attached them to my calendar a clip and do a review every other day and this, combined with a physical inbox on my desk, works just fine.

Some of the programs (all Mac, sorry) I’ve tested look great at a first glance, but none of them really delivered, at least in my experience. The prettiest and the one that implements the inbox-process-organize-work-review process best is definitely Midnight Inbox, but this rigidity is also it’s biggest drawback. You can download the trial version and test it, after 14 days you’d have to dish out around $35 and the 2.0 version will be Leopard only. It certainly looks gorgeous, but next to the lack of customization the definite backbreaker for the app is that it sometimes just crashes and you have to restart it, hoping that your data is still there, which also leads to obsessive saving. This is NOT something you want to happen if you want to stop worrying about ‘open loops’!

iGTD (the public alpha iGDT2 release is out, so you might want to give it a shot if you are feeling adventurous. Leopard only, though.) is a freeware application that works stable and fine and is fully customizable in terms of contexts, projects, etc., but is somewhat unintuitive to use. If you want to record your tasks in your inbox you want to do it fast and don’t go through a number of clicks first. This is actually one of the main reasons I ended up using a paper-based system - with every program it turned out that it was quicker to jot down a note on a piece of paper and throw it into my physical inbox than to enter it into one of the programs. Of course, if you are a Quicksilver wiz this might be different.

The third one I tried was Easy Task Manager. Like iGDT you can set up almost everything yourself and it has the added bonus that you can upload your tasks to an Easy Task Manager online account that you can access from every computer, which makes sense when you have a second computer at work and want to keep in sync. Still, the interface is somehow clumsy and I never really warmed up to it.

The main drawback of all these applications, though, is psychological, at least for me. I work on the computer a lot, but I don’t carry it around with me everywhere and I don’t have a PDA that I can sync with my calendar, so that’s taking the benefits out of managing this on the computer. That is one point, but the more important one is that I just don’t trust my computer. And in order for GTD to work its magic you have to TRUST your system and KNOW that the stuff you put in there will stay there and pop up when needed and scheduled. As I said, this is psychological, but there is a larger chance of my computer dying than my index card(s). So for me it’s index cards, plus Stikkit, which I came to love. It’s basically an online post-it box that understands natural language and can mail you reminders. I’m still somewhat undecided between Remember the Milk and Stikkit, but both work fine as reminders, back-up base, and interface between work computer and home computer. Plus, you can share notes on Stikkit with others, which is a great feature. If you use Firefox and Gmail, you can add Remember the Milk to your Gmail Account and access it via Firefox, btw.

Actually, the beauty of GTD is that it is so open that you can (and have) to experiment around and see which method and which tools work best for you. There is a ton of info on the web on how to implement it, which tools to use, etc., so here’s just a little link bundle of things I think are neat:

• D*I*Y Planner pre-printed index cards that you can download as a .pdf and use as your hipsterPDA. If you want to, that is.
• Pocket Mod online template that lets you print out little folded calendars, tasklists, etc. that fit in your pocket.
• Using Stikkit with GTD (via the cranking widgets blog)
• Using RTM with GTD (via Republic of Geektronica)
• PigPogPDA one of a gazillion Moleskine hacks
• Hacking a GTD Moleskine

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Spy Guns

(image taken from Club Littlegun)

Again, my blogging frequency has dropped substantially again and, again, it is due, at least partly, to spotty internet access. This is so annoying that sometimes I feel like beating up the internet. Literally. Anyway, I always had a knack for tiny itty bitty thingies, like miniature cars, miniature dioramas, etc. But the masters of small and hidden yet neat things are the spies. So here is a website of a gun collector who has a whole bunch of hidden and miniature guns displayed online and, God, they are awesome. They are all here, the Cannon Hand, the Belt Gun, the Whip Pistol (pun probably intended), an, of course, the Knife Gun.

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