Weblog | I don't like the word blog, it's ugly. Anyway, new content happens here. (Swedish dito)

About me and the site | Twenty-something male who likes text. Obsessed with things such as books, reality, communication, and one or two tv-shows.

Archives | Things written here since... well, 2001. Some of it is good, some is utter shait.

Books | Books read, not books written. So far I've struggled to maintain unpublished.

Photo | I like my camera and it likes me.

Links | Outwards, away, flee.

e-mail | J. Nicklas Andersson

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2003 in bullets but not

Nothing new will happen at all from here ‘till the new year, so might as well just get it out of my system. Time to sum up the year, and this time I’m going to do it properly. I’ll count everything, including things that I’ve rewatched, reread and relistened to — because hey! I’ve experienced those this year as well.

Best music: Hard. It’s either Tegan & Sara’ “This Business of Art”, the Kills’ “Get on Our Mean Side” or the Pixies “Doolittle.” Maybe White Stripes’ “Elephant” too, but I’ve not listen to it nearly as much as the other three.

Film: This is tough. Several things to choose from and among them movies such as The Last Wave, Adaptation, Withnail & I. Which to choose? Damnit. And I did re-watch Clerks too. Arrgh.

Tv-show: Fire-fucking-fly. Character-driven western in space masterminded by Joss Whedon. How can you beat it? The only possible way is to actually pick the show up and produce mer episodes, since Fox — stupid Fox — cancelled it. (The Dead Zone is quite brilliant too but pales in the shadow of Firefly.)

Book: “Dance Dance Dance” by Haruki Murakami. “Master & Commander” by Patrick O’Brian, “Quicksilver” by Neal Stephenson and “Miss Wyoming” by Douglas Coupland coming up close second. In the biography department: Toby Young’s “How to Lose Friends and Alienate People” and Hunter S. Thompson’s “Kingdom of Fear” are both excellent.

Comic: The Invisibles. It’s ‘masing. Why haven’t I read it earlier?

Website: Lostbrain, Flakmag, Knotmag, Black Table and as always Whygodwhy.

Top five resons why snow is bad

1. One might trip and fall and hurt the bottom.
2. When it rains — as it must do — everything turns to sleek and horror.
3. It means it’s cold outside and that might mean that soon it’ll be cold inside too.
4. It’s rather useless.
5. If you turn it 180 degrees you get “MONS,” which both sounds and looks like a proper word but it isn’t. Instead, it’s evil.

Even more snow today. Why? No, seriously. Why snow?

Things I need to do

• See if there is money on the right account. If so, can I afford a record or two with Thea Gilmore and/or the Rosencrantz And Guildenstern Are Dead DVD.
• Burn what episodes I have of the Frantics to CD for backup. This should have been done ages ago. Mail cd and see if those I don’t have are available somehow.
• It is said that Lost in La Mancha is coming soon to region 2 DVD. Look it up.
• Listen to The Darkest of the Hillside Thickets. Is is possible to do an acoustic cover of the song “The Innsmouth Look”? Hell, can I even find the lyrics?
• Get a higher bridge to the guitar.
• Try to remember to get a new string to the bas as well.
• Eat something.
• Memorize the lines to the Pitchfork Disney.
• Mail people about fanzine articles could be a good idea.
• Go out. Breathe and take photos.
• Organise the books. They’re on the floor again and I thought I saw some empty shelf-space somewhere.
• Read grammar books. One month left till exam.
• Sleep now?

Books of 2002

I honestly believe M. John Harrison’s Light was one of the best things I read this year. I say believe because it’s compeating with works such as At Swim-Two-Birds by Flann O’Brien. (Read more about Light in the booklog.)

Among the top layer of books I’ve read this year, these are the ones I liked best beside the two mentioned above:

Philip Reeve: Mortal Engines
Michael Marshall Smith: One of Us
Clive Barker: Weaveworld (first time read in English, read in Swedish translation around 1992)
Kazuo Ishiguro: The Remains of the Day
Tim Powers: Dinner at Deviant’s Palace
Tim Powers: On Stranger Tides
Peter Ackroyd: Milton in America
Terry Pratchett: Night Watch
Chris Wooding: The Haunting of Alaizabel Clay
Haruki Murakami: Sputnik Sweetheart
Richard Garfinkle: Celestial Matters

Best foreword and afterword in a book must go to On Pirates by William Ashbless.

Worst thing I read was The Sea, the Sea by Iris Murdoch. It was... almost as bad as last year’s To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee. Not quite, but almost, and that’s bad.

What’s your best/worst read during the year?

Learning curve

Three weeks — take a few hours — until it’s my birthday. This is some of the things I’ve learnt during this year:

a) My fifth grade teachers were wrong about how to behave if an tom bomb falls down by the church (which is right across the street from the school).

b) People who thinks Judge Dredd is a good movie, shouldn’t be allowed to talk about movies in public.

c) I read a book by Emma Bull and the next thing she does is to break her arm. I’m jinxed.

d) Newspapers much compare everything to movies. Stop that.

e) How to study and get the desired results.

f) Computer animated cat food commercials are pretty horrible.

g) People get confused when you try to explain Mornington Crescent in under five minutes.

h) Eating a sausage in a hotel lounge is not considered rude because — well — everything is relative.

i) I have far too few meta-books.

j) A giant Sloth killed the Dinosaurs.

k) Växjö has a mime school.

l) I need more cds with Curve as well as lots more books.

Read these or do whatever you usually do when you're not following orders

I think it’s time for another list. Yeah, high time. This time however, I’ll make it a bit more difficult as I’ll motivate my choices. Sure, sure. You might not like them and some of you might even find them offensive. Five books that you should read (should here being used in a pushy and demanding way but it’s not necessary).

5. Steven Brust & Emma Bull: Freedom & Necessity
Although written by two fantasy authors, this is really historical fiction. A fabulous historical novel presented as an epistolary. This might not sound like the premise of a good book but it is. The basic thing is that James has lost his memory and writes to his friends. They thought he had been dead for some time and together they try to unravel the foul business that’s the cause of this. Of course, since this is during the industrial revolution, things are not as easy as it seems. Lots of accurate history as well as good writing in general.

4. Christopher Priest: The Glamour
I had a hard time to assemble this list, mainly because of Priest. In the end, because I said to myself: “Nicklas, you can’t fill the entire list with Chris Priest-books,” I chose this one. As usual, the reader is treading very murky ground indeed here. Genre-tropes are really nowhere to be found, but there is still a feeling that links it to several often contradictory literary fields. So don’t even bother to try to pinpoint the books genre in any way because you’ll end up mad. The book is about reality and how traits such as charm affect it. But that’s how I see it. The important part is of course the narrative.

3. Iain Banks: Espadair Street
Iain Banks so called “mainstream” is much better than his sf. This is a fact. This is my favourite Banks story. It is not complicated in any way, quite the opposite. The most complicated thing is the two timelines, and those follow the conventional path where one is the present and one of them is about the past. What it does is to give the aging rock star-myth a spin. It is not glorious, and the main character just wants to leave it all behind him, never to be reminded again.

2. Mervyn Peake: Titus Groan

“The morning of the next day opened drearily, the sun appearing only after protracted periods of half-light, and then only as a pale paper disc, more like the moon than itself, as, for a few lack-lustre veils descended with almost imperceptible motion over Gormenghast, blurring its countless windows, as with a dripping smoke. The mountain appeared and disappeared a score of times during the morning as the drifts obscured it or lifted from its sides.”

I don’t think I need to say something more, do I?

1. Wilton Barnhardt: Gospel
This is religious fiction. No, really. But it’s brilliant despite this. It has everything one can wish for: a lost gospel that some would want to remain lost, an alcoholic ex-Jesuit, a 29 year-old theology PhD student, bickering between the different beliefs and a smart-ass Holy Spirit. Oh, and it has these lovely excerpts from this lost gospel as well.

Sell thy soul

There is this thing about soul. Not the music, but the mystic mass of energy that supposedly empowers the human beings and cute animals (but not the ugly ones.) Some religious people say this is what makes humans divine and in His grace a worthwhile diversion from more important matters.

But if the thing exists we can function without them, see all the examples in the glorious animal kingdom where awful beasts behave just as the cute ones. So I recon I could live without the soul. Sell it of to the highest bidder. If it doesn’t exist I have lost absolutely nothing and if it does... Let’s say I have no problem with that since I don’t believe in hell, and if it does exist I’ll probably end up there anyway.

This is what I would like to sell my soul for:

10. A nice bike.
9. To be the best bass player this side of the road.
8. Star Wars original trilogy on DVD without the extra enhancement-crap.
7. The entire collection of Theodore Sturgeon’s work in hardcover. Sturgeon wrote like a God.
6. To have an Irish accent whenever I speak English because that is the way it is supposed to sound.
5. A signed first edition of The Stress of Her Regard by Tim Powers. I haven’t read this one.
4. Proper growth of beard. As it is, I can’t have a beard.
3. To have the cans containing the Wicker Man-footage found and turned into a super restored version.
2. The Flash Girls first album, The Return of Pansy Smith and Violet Jones. (As You Know Bob fact-of the-day: At least some of the liner notes was written by this guy and can be found at their homepage.)
1. To be able to write as a God.

A year in summary

Book: Declare by Tim Powers, all hands down. There is no competition at all really. A shame it wasn’t on the Hugo-ballot.
Movie: Shrek. I haven’t seen The Other One yet and Terry Gilliam didn’t finish one.
Entry: People and how to deal with them.
Comment on an entry: on this entry.
CD-record: The Flash Girls Play Each Morning Wild Queen, in lack of actually hearing Curve’s the Gift even once.
Bizarre idea: My yet to be mobilised plan of doing a Alien on Ice - The Musical for Broadway (featuring William Shatner in a bigger wig than usual as Ripley).
Saddest RIP: Harry Secombe of the Goon Show-fame.
Fun Person IRL: Robert Rankin.
Worst Disaster: The time-outs I get from Bookshop.co.uk which forces me to use Amazon.co.uk instead.

Top Five Possessions

In materialistic times such as these — christmas-time and all — I must write a list. As I don’t really like christmas at all, I won’t make a wishy-washylist nor enything like that. No. Top five possessions I could’t live without:

1. My Terry Carr “Fandom Harvest”-book.
2. My notebook and pen.
3. The red spin-dail phone, yet to be plugged in.
4. Coke. (The soft drink, stupid.)
5. Black socks.

The five doesn’t seem so important, but I can’t figure out what else to put there.

The entertainment equation

Could it be possible to choose movies reliably because of the sum of the actors entertainment-index? I think so, but there are some weak spots. Some actors, or actresses, shift their value at some point of their carer, some dives downwards with such a force and speed that they should get a ticket. And then there are those who always manage to keep a high index no matter what crap they star in.

People that are unknown would then have to have a indexnumber of 50, since they can go both ways. Limitation to the posternames are also recommended for a quick and easy way of deciding to see the movie without access to the entire credits. The huge problem is to get the plot to matter, I have not figured out exactly how to deal with that part yet.

For simplicity the equation would probably look something like this: actor_i1 + actor_i2... + actor_ix / x = entertainment value And just to be perverse I’ve collected a small token list below. Feel free to add new...

Bruce Campbell: 100
Edward Norton: 100
Jackie Chan: 100
Jason Lee: 100
Jennifer Jason Leigh: 100
Johnny Depp (with Burton): 100
The Monty Pythons: 100
Benicio Del Toro: 95
Christopher Walken: 95
Gary Oldman: 95
Ben Stiller: 90
Christopher Guest: 90
Kevin Spacey: 90
Helena Bonham Carter: 90
Michelle Yeoh: 90
Patricia Arquette: 90
Rutger Hauer: 90
Salma Hayek: 90
Tim Roth: 90
Alan Rickman: 85
Al Pacino: 85
Cameron Diaz: 85
Elias Koteas: 85
Guy Pearce: 85
Jack Black: 85
Jeff Bridges: 85
John Malkovich: 85
Johnny Depp (sans-Burton): 85
Cate Blanchett: 80
Jim Carrey (drama): 80
John Lighgow (not thriller): 80
Robin Wright: 80
Willem Defoe: 80
Bard Pitt: 75
Janeane Garofalo: 75
Jeff Goldblum (80ies): 75
John Cusack: 75
Terrence Stamp: 75
William H. Macy: 75
Harvey Keitel: 70
Michael Douglas (clothes): 70
Milla Jovovich: 70
Robert DeNiro: 70
Samuel L. Jackson: 70
Tommy Lee Jones: 70
Winona Ryder: 70
Catherine Keener: 65
Michelle Pheiffer: 65
Angelina Jolie: 60
Ian McKellen: 60
Joe Pantoliano: 60
Johnny Lee Miller: 60
Nicolas Cage (early): 60
Christina Ricci: 50
Jeff Goldblum (90ies): 50
Kevin Bacon: 50
Malcolm McDowell (movie): 50
Bill Pullman: 40
Carrie-Anne Moss: 40
Nicolas Cage (now): 35
Ben Affleck: 30
John Lighgow (thriller): 30
Adam Sandler: 20
Arnold Schwarzenegger: 20
Chaterine Zeta Jones: 20
Michael Douglas (naked): 20
Val Kilmer: 20
Jim Carrey (comedy): 10
Meg Ryan: 10
Will Smith: 10
Lorenzo Lamas: 5
Malcolm McDowell (tv): 5
Freddie Prinze Jr: 0
Jennifer Lopez: -50
William Shatner: -50
Leslie Nielsen: -100