Turning heads (and torsos) in Malmo

[imomus]

Newspaper Sydsvenskan has today published a little video report about Krets, the gallery in Malmo where I'll be performing a little action called Down With Fun! tonight. Click the picture to see the report, and if you're in Malmo come to the gallery to see the performance -- it's at Kristianstadsgatan 16 and starts at 7pm.



In the background of the report (which starts at 1min 30 and ends at 4mins 30) you can see drawings by Matt Furie, and tonight is really a finissage party for the end of his show at Krets. You can also hear the Swedish language (naturally) in the clip. It's currently spoken by nine million people worldwide, which makes it too small, apparently, to warrant a place in Google Translate.

You can tell Swedish is a minor language because absolutely everybody here speaks excellent English. Unlike in Germany, where English-language TV programmes are all dubbed into German, in Sweden they're subtitled, which allows Swedes to learn the kind of English spoken in bad comedy shows. (By the way, did you know that up to 90% of the 6000 languages that exist today will have died out by the end of this century?)

I must say this Swedish daily paper shows better taste in its choice of music than a British paper would -- the soundtrack to their report on Krets seems to be Maher Shalal Hash Baz covering "Georgie Girl". Okay, I'm off to see Calatrava's Turning Torso, out in the Malmo harbour.

Comments

Sweden and Cool?

[(Anonymous)]

It is cute to compartmentalize and blog about a topic such as a nation of people having a grasp on the entirety of what we here think is a shared cool. Comparing it to other nations in the east we long to greater understand as "cool" people from the west. Sweden is far from a bastion of coolness, it is a sub-arctic place of arrested development for its youth if that is cool then I am missing the point of life. It is failing, it is a place where its citizens gather and study for their coolness by having a lot of time in darkness to read on what is going on in the "cool" worlds in London and New York and elsewhere in magazines and sad forums deep within the crypts of the web. Sweden much like Japan is a nation where the standard of living as far as youth having funding to share outwardly their social/cultural place in the world of trends is easy because money is not hard to come by. It is a beautiful place, but it is a place that allows for an easy path to fall directly into this line of thinking about life. That something like knowing what to wear and who is drawing the best pen and pencil art on myspace. It is a bummer. It is a far cry from the generation of Swedish parents that came out of the 60s and thought that their social democracy would affect a greater change on the world. Hooray for cool pants and cool music especially when you can go anywhere in the world and say, "are those cool pants swedish?".

Re: Sweden and Cool?

[(Anonymous)]

There is and old colloquialism that it would be nice to see change at some point during this generation of cool.

Instead of,

"Great minds think alike."

Let us be the generation of,

"Great minds think."