kaerlig hilsen: sisseltp

Tjeck out our website/blog!

2011-02-09T13:50:00.000-08:00

Mike has been working on remaking our website for some time now, so here's a launch of

www.thismonthonly.ca

take a peak!

Some pictures and a pause from the blog till I find out what I wanna do...

2011-02-06T03:15:00.000-08:00

Land of Bruno S, August Sander, Sebald and Me

2011-01-18T03:05:00.000-08:00

I have moved away from home once again. Now I am living with Mike in Berlin in my parents lovely 2 floor apartment with a bright and spacious attic, in the quite peculiar neighbourhood Wedding. It is sort of run-down industrial-immigrant-working class-but potentially growing hip area, where the Döner Kebab is 2 € and the big-size beer is 1 €. Strange transitions the new year starts out offering me, and I have a feeling that this forecasts all of 2011 which is exciting and scary. Most of the time I am quite exhilarated, although it is sometimes a challenge to keep the head cool with all the moving around and making plans. Luckily I have grandmothers to call and keep me focused, and still brighter spring-like days and bikerides to clear my head. In spring I will be going to Toronto again to work with PDA and I am looking forward to having concrete, hands-on, creative projects at hand, hopefully remove some of the heavy- thought activity clouding my vision and inject the new year with same ecstatic excitement and productivity that Toronto induced me with last year.

Oh, I met a friend at the ferry to Berlin:

Mike is photographing in Wedding and Christiania

We went to a very random and strange museum about the Stasi-methods in DDR:

Berlin is strange, wonderful and so full of stories, and it is weird for me to be so alone in a city, since in Copenhagen as well as Toronto I always have lots of people around me that I know. It is definitely a city you never grow tired of visiting, just by the fact of looking at the Berliners' faces and the buildings and stores and little cobbled stones turned into memorials. Curry wurst and Sauerkraut!

I finished editing some videos. I really like the Soffie Viemose one, cause her voice in it gives me the same kind of chills down the neck as it does in real life (when she sings that is, not all the time, like..)

Soffie Viemose feat. Victor Dybbroe at Art Space, Brussels from This Month Only on Vimeo.

Did I show this one about the Drive-In car?

Drive-In By Wunderkammer: The Travelling Van from This Month Only on Vimeo.

Germany countdown

2010-12-04T08:45:00.000-08:00

Amazing fall of industrial age-melancholy by Berndt und Hilla Becher

Workers by August Sander (Germany round 1939):

Incredible contemporaries: Robert and Shana ParkeHarrison

Sooooo goooooood!!!

2010-12-04T08:31:00.000-08:00

via Coilhouse

Great North Korean irony

2010-12-03T06:53:00.000-08:00

Planes and ferries, gum factories, photographs, meatballs in curry...

2010-11-30T13:54:00.000-08:00

It's difficult to start posting again after having neglected it for a while, like calling up someone you once knew and haven't talked to for a while. Here we go:
Planes and Ferries: I have been to Brussels with Soffie Viemose and Victor to play at a swanky gallery for the Danish Institute. Everything went wrong the first day. Metro gulped us up in the middle of nowhere, refusing to take us to the airport in the snowstorm at 4.30 saturday morning. Got taxi after 20 minutes. Almost died of stress trying to catch the plane in time, was stuck onboard of plane for 5 (!!!) hours while someone (???) was determining whether we could fly or not cause to snow. We flew. Brussels greeted us with slightly more friendly weather but unfriendly taxi drivers who didn't wanted to bother taking us 15 minutes up the street with all our gear. The gig went well, I had made video of little blimps flying past foam clouds, all my porcelain figures out into the snow, and found that old piece of footage from the bar This Month Only in the Junction. Afterward we were euphoric and went hiking the streets, but ended up getting falafel and going back to sleep.

After having read Austerlitz by W.G. Sebald (Highly recommendable) i dwell into the structural trauma/melancholy of Europa and this book has definitely given rise to even more romantic ideas of the phenomenology of travel - especially the slow kind. This guy, Austerlitz, travels round Europa by train in search of his lost identity, while displacement and no sense of belonging slowly breaks him down - I will tell no more. Read It! I am trying to copy his style, writing about restless souls in love, on ferries stuck on the ocean, Oh well: David Lynch proclaimed he didn't have his first real original idea till he was 21! I guess I'm still kind of waiting.

Although (photographs)
I have just finished my very first interview of an exile/photography project, which is somewhat approaching the core of my curiosity for understanding memory. Patricia from Chile showed me her family photographs and we talked about landscapes, kids and new lives. She said many clever things and I got a glimpse into her existence and past, although I've only met her once before 5 years ago. I am thrilled about photography's ability to generate stories, to evoke emotions of belonging - even though it's the life of someone else. Verstehen: That is the empathetic insight into the Other, according to Max Weber. I am finally compelled and intrigued by this project, seing the threads of all my previous work on memory and identity gathering into a new direction - one of interacting with the memories of others.
Laptops and meatballs: My dad made amazing meatballs in curry tonight, and we had dinner in the kitchen. My dad travels to Shanghai tomorrow to tell the world's biggest chewing gum factory, Wrigley's, to save some more energy. I made him a red leather-bound travel book with my stories, my blimps, and a totally random photo I found from my grandma's boxes showing my grandpa in front of a giant Wrigley's commercial (probably from a business trip to London in the 50's). Such are the weird little coincidences... This is my dad's night table:

Here we go!
Kaerlig hilsen.

Audios and visuals

2010-11-16T10:11:00.001-08:00

Soffie Viemose Concert at Wunderkammer's Drive-In from This Month Only on Vimeo.

A wild sheep hunt with Adam

2010-11-09T08:47:00.000-08:00

I miss Adam! He was a good Copenhagen Companion.

Drive In

2010-10-23T03:25:00.000-07:00

Noélle Burgi Golub on emotions as a dimension of ethical and moral motivation

2010-10-22T03:54:00.000-07:00

Reading about identity and exile. waiting for mysterious seminar on the imaginary.

"How can one take imagination and reality simultaniously into account without mistaking DREAMS for LIFE, and DREAMING one's LIFE rather than LIVING out one's DREAM? (Therein lies the question of the *crisis of identity*."

Respond if you feel like it!

In Space

2010-10-18T05:21:00.000-07:00

A lot of spacial reshufflings has been happening the last couple of weeks. Wunderkammer has moved into the enormous space in Ny Tap, an old brewery which used to be Carlsberg, now just a big 7 storey empty building, with amazing secrets, such as 7 kilometres of underground galleries. The old van has moved from its hiding place through 6 years in my grandma’s garage, onto fake grass and a spooky fake camping setting next to the Hope Van that took Julian to India, and the Jungle Hearse to the other side. This upheaval, I imagine, must be quite drastic for this old guy, especially with audience going in and out all the time. The project seems to work really well though, so come visit us! Not only for the car installations but also to admire the space, and reflect upon how to transform buildings intended for something else into interfaces for people interacting with each other and with art! Pics to come. Here's one of the brewery room:

My grandma has also moved, to a retirement home which definitely also took some readjustments. It has been strange but curious to write stories about displacement and family ties, working on the themes of exile, diaspora and home, and seeing her adjusting to a new place after living in the same self-built house for 50 years (or was it more?). We all try to adjust, acknowledging the loss of a family framework, an epoch ending, and a place decaying - where 2 generations basically grew up. But also the fact that we all inevitably have to adjust to change, and to circumstances with an open mind, as well as accommodating new situations. She has done well so far, in spite of this big upheaval. Here are some pictures of the house left behind:

Cyberspace is no place for lovin’ and the pixellated screen on Skype just underlines the absence of the materiality of a real human being. So while we wait for December to come we dream of A-frame cottages in the Canadian forests and the audiovisual spaces of ThisMonthOnly (shameless advertising of our new website!)

PS: LONG LIVE INTERNET! I was F#### when my cracked vj-program stopped working just before my first gig as a vj for Soffie Viemose (yes I crack. If I had money I would feed all starving artists and software developers). I couldn’t get anything to work, until Saturday morning (we had our concert the same night!!) when I discovered CoGe – an OPEN SOURCE program that is absolutely awesome and free! Thank you, Hungarian computergeek.

PPS: Max Richter’s The Blue Notebooks is bliss!

"""

2010-10-17T05:24:00.000-07:00

This American Life

2010-09-29T14:07:00.000-07:00

Man.. that continent is just so full of crazy people and amazing stories. I gotta go back!

American dreams

2010-09-27T11:16:00.000-07:00

More

I am working on the Van-project and listening to This American Life

Family tree on repeat, of course

2010-09-24T15:48:00.001-07:00

Reading about memory and Barthes (again again)

2010-09-24T06:26:00.000-07:00

Stumbled upon this quote about families and photographs: Family is structured by desire and disappointment, love and loss. Photographs, as the only material traces of an irrecoverable past, derive their power and their important cultural role from their embeddedness in the fundamental rites of family life..." (Marianne Hirsh, Family Frames, p. 5)

I have about 5000 photo slides from my grandparents' vacations that need to be scanned... ugh.. and a volkswagon van that can't drive that needs to be transported to Carlsberg! very exciting

Edmond Place

2010-09-24T06:16:00.000-07:00

Edmond Place from This Month Only on Vimeo.

Video piece made for our friends at Public Displays of Affection's fundraiser at The Gladstone Hotel. They have raised money and arranged an interior design show where all the furniture will be donated to the new affordable housing project Edmond Place in Parkdale. The piece is reflecting upon the Parkdale community and Edmond Place, where the PARC folks were kind enough to give us a peak!

//This Month Only

Field of Bees

2010-09-13T08:02:00.001-07:00

Field of Bees from This Month Only on Vimeo.

from my hidingplace thinking about emigrating

2010-09-12T15:21:00.000-07:00

I am back on the eastside of the ocean. Although this return is quite ambivalent for me I must admit that Denmark has shown itself from its prettier side: Shiny blue September sky and crisp sunny days. I am back in the pocket, and have been hiding in my birth home for over a week now trying to readjust to this new situation.
I put a great effort into exercising my feeling of “the return of the self-exile”, even though I know that the legitimacy of putting myself in this position is highly overrated. I'm no refugee, nor a diasporic Jew, nor am I particularly concerned with my homeland - at all. However, after having read the German author G.W. Sebald's The Emigrants I continue to eagerly put myself in a state of nostalgic displacement. This is okay I think - it's like a country singer that had an okay childhood, and has to associate strongly with troubled people to get the right feeling in his music (I watched a film about Towns Van Zandt - I won't end up drinking to die though) This might sound slightly pathetic, but has resulted in quite a lot of productive thinking about future projects. So, more about memory, photography and exile (voluntary, that hopefully lead to thoughts of involuntary, and personal that reflects a more general concept of exile) in my grandpa's old van and my grandma's old slides projected on the inside. Once again I end up in memory and visual narration as a catalyst for identity creation, probably because this is how I use images myself (always remembering Suzanne Brøgger stating that one must start with what one knows the best: Me). What Sebald does is creating a close connection to the nature of memory and the conditions of exile. In both cases one needs to step back and reconsider the relations both to the place of origin and the destination. When I look at a family photo I relate the motive to myself. If the person in the picture is dead, I keep it as a precious reminiscence of the person, as if the picture had captured a piece of this particular being when it was still flesh and blood. In that way the content of the image is neither dead nor alive – it is a liminal state between being there, captured into the emulsion (of the analogue photo, some might say) and not being there in reality. This is what Derrida refers to when he says that photographs are always a state of mourning what is no more. I actually get the same feeling when I look at others’ old photographs, which is interesting: Sebalds book is an almost ethnographic investigation of 4 Germans in exile, in which he uses photographs as a sort of evidence of his fictional portraiture of these persons’ identity and relationship to their homeland. As with photographs of memory, the exilic relationship to the fled land is loaded with melancholy and nostalgia, as is memory, in general, and in particular in relation to exile itself. It is a process of continually searching for a stable identity between adjusting to the new and holding on to the old – neither must take over. This of course is easier if the exilic condition is voluntary – but imagine being in a situation of involuntary having to leave your root of identity, history and kin, in order to settle in an alien environment, balancing between poles. Memory as well as old habit keeps you in a transitional state between two places, and it is easy to imagine that a traumatic condition of exile will put you in an everlasting state of “jetlag”. Here, as when you hold a photograph embedded with memory, you will have to rethink your relations to then and now, and your connections to both. This is why the combination of memory and exile is such a wonderful machinery for creating stories, as biographies, or works like those of Sebald, are proofs of. I hope to keep that in mind in my future projects to come.

Below some pictures of the last days in Toronto and things to miss

Sorry guys, but I had to post it. its too funny.

Fred yawning

2010-08-25T06:23:00.000-07:00

You want more

2010-08-24T19:59:00.001-07:00

Soffie Viemose: You Want More from sissel marie tonn-petersen on Vimeo.

A certain little strip on Dundas Street West that I’m gonna miss

2010-08-24T11:33:00.001-07:00

I’ve taken the role as part time little housewife these last couple of weeks, which leaves me plenty of time to make video and take photographs of the city I am about to leave. These are of Dundas West from the bridge over the train tracks after Landsdowne, to where Mike lives, on the intersection with Roncesvalles:

To me they represent the atmosphere of Toronto that I like so much. Its quirkiness, the peculiar and ever surprising little nooks of unimportant but curios places that, coming together, gives the city its diverse appearance (along with the multitude of all sorts of people, who I, unfortunately, do not have the guts to photograph). The city definitely has its share problems of poverty, homelessness and other social issues. It’s polluted, too crowded with crazy cab drivers and douchebags (I try my best with slang - and still always fail!) in big SUV’s at the size of a trailer truck, and a depressingly big amount of lost, wandering souls asking for quarters and sleeping in alleys. Unfortunately the City is not to generous with donating money for community projects, like this one in Parkdale, Public Displays of Affection, which consist of my good friends Adam, Katherine, Parimal and Jeremy. Luckily everyone here are creative in raising money for what they are passionate about. That is why Mike and I went to their PDA fundraiser yesterday night and performed for the very first time with This Month Only (It went awful! The sound was bad, we both fucked up and people were talking – not the kind of project you set up in a bar! But the PDA folks were happy and they raised a lot of money, which was the most important thing). What I get from the philosophy behind PDA is that they want change, but within a framework that is already there - not for something completely new. They think design for people that are not usually designed for, in this case the users of the community centre for mental illness and drug abuse in Parkdale. They focus on using salvaged and recycled material and consider the inclusion of the people who will use it in the process of designing.

I think they’re on to something really important. When it comes to transforming urban communities you have to start with what’s there, which is the people and their environment. I hate new architectural projects (like the ones usually seen in Copenhagen) that tries to create a community by building and then placing people in those buildings, with a metro, a mall and a concrete driveway. Usually they are cold and motionless, completely disconnected from nature and I’ve never understood how they have actually been considered for human living. As the Detroit artist from the documentary below correctly states, people are so afraid of trash and decay that they tear it down, clean up and build something new, shiny and seemingly everlasting – like they hope to be themselves. But what they have been forced to implement in the salvation of the decaying city of Detroit is rethinking nature into what was destroyed by industrial exploitation and capitalism. In a city where nature has literally taken over the abandoned buildings, with trees growing on top of the ghostly but great central train station they might lead the way of a new way of thinking about urban planning and developing.

Whether the case is using recycled material to rebuild lives as well as community, or considering farming in an urban environment shows sign of the same necessary thought. These are groundbreaking visions for meeting the necessity of rethinking our way of living, which is increasingly becoming more urbanized, but in a reality where confronting issues of climate and natural resources should be on everybody’s mind.

We talked about utopian ideas on our way home from Montreal this winter, while driving on the snowy highway. How important it is to have them and even more important to carry out. While writing this I am sad that I will not have the chance to see Adam’s amazing cottage that he built out of salvaged and recycled material in his mom’s back yard (He built a fucking cottage! That is the coolest thing I can think of!)

Horrifically close to my departure to Denmark, but that will be a whole post worth of melancholic scribblings.

Kaerlighilsen

2010-08-21T18:16:00.001-07:00

Get In My Car & Drive: Nowhere in Detroit (Episode 1) from Kristen Gallerneaux on Vimeo.

VIDEO//BLOG

2010-08-09T09:36:00.000-07:00

Burnt rubber in Michigan

2010-08-06T15:24:00.000-07:00

We went on a spontaneous road trip to Winsor/Detroit last weekend. With great ideas of displaying the community struggle for making Detroit the new "Urban Green" city, with farming and art projects which we had heard about, we set out with the best of intentions. However, when we arrived late afternoon Saturday night we found ourselves in some sort of urban desert, where we felt like we were the only pedestrians, except from a few sorrylooking souls, in fact we felt like we were the only people in the city. We decided pretty fast that we should have done our homework and contacted someone who knows about the city, who could show us around. It was definitely interesting, but of all the sad and troubled places I have been to this was the saddest. You could feel some sort of prior glory, from the 60's motown, the rise (and fall) of the automotive industry. Apparantly it was even called "Paris of the West" in the beginning of 1900's. Drugs, crime and race issues has now made everyone leave the center, and before dark falls everyone reccomend you to be "on the other side of 19 mile highway" - the suburbs. I have never seen so many abandoned houses, churches and lost people at one place. I hope to go back there some time and do some more serious research on the place, cause to me what has happened to Detroit is a metonymy for what is wrong with the American dream, as cheesy as it may sound. Oh well! We flipped the coin and kept driving to the Obama City of Chicago that had everything Detroit wanted. The city is NICE and CLEAN. Almost too pretty, with amazing waterfront, wonderful neighborhoods and beautiful sculptures. Rich and sane looking people and lots of tourists. I was only there for 24 hours, but this little condensed rush through Michigan and Illinois made me certain that I would never be able to live in the States. It is amazing to visit, but the problems, the opinions and the craziness is just too much for me to deal with. Once you've been to Canada and seen those cute little billboards of bears and moose you can never drive on a Michigan highway again. If you've tried you know what I mean.

Detroit:

Chicago (the two above)

Oh yeah and This Month Only has officially been performing (for one guest and a cat):

Stone foundation and fluffy prospects

2010-07-22T13:35:00.000-07:00

My brother is 20 and people say we look alike. I don’t really think so, but he is definitely still very much my little brother. As in he sleeps a lot which annoys me and I can’t help but putting on my big sister attitude every once in a while, which annoys him quite a bit. But it is also nice to see how one year has changed my perception of him into more of a grown-up-person-friend than just little brother. He has been visiting me here in Toronto for the last 12 days and it was nice to rediscover Toronto, as it was nice to reestablish our communication and talk about all sorts of stuff. We went to the Island and talked about communities. And to Leslies spit, and I became nostalgic. We also went to Niagara Falls and agreed on that it was too much of a circus, but we enjoyed the jelly beans, and white trash neighborhoods around the hunted houses, casinoes and amusement parks.

He met my friends and said that meeting them and being amazed with their incredibly welcoming and relaxed attitude made him realize the immaturity of some of his acquaintances back home. I guess I am just extremely lucky having met these people. Adams cottage and family are still amazing and it broke my heart a little bit when he said he is gonna have thanksgiving there. I looked at tickets online. Doesn’t look good… The guys put put up roof and Katherine, Anna and I smeared cement into the cracks of the stone foundation which, oddly enough, was an extremely satisfying job. I really wish to come back there in the wintertime. Anyway.... On a lighter note, I am trying to get my shit together and figure out my future. So far it has to include: Video, writing, (making money and starting master’s – lower priority), Cinema in Palestine, getting Mike to come with me, Copenhagen (with all that comes with it), New York, Toronto. Also I need to start being more out of the city. I guess the mentality of Canadian youth and their awareness of the world outside the cobbled streets have really gotten under my skin! But just take a look at this:

The Banality of Evil

2010-07-22T12:48:00.000-07:00

I wrote an article for my friend Jordan's zine, and I am taking the liberty to post it, cause he said it was good and only had one grammatical error. I didn't even bother looking for it:

In 1961 the philosopher Hannah Arendt was sent to Jerusalem by The New Yorker to report on the trial of Otto Adolf Eichmann, a prominent figure in the structure of the Third Reich. Her report reflected upon a subject that later would become the core in her philosophical work: The stunning banality and thoughtlessness that she encountered in the man responsible for so much death and atrocity. She stated that: “The deeds were monstrous, but the doer… was quite ordinary, commonplace, and neither demonic or monstrous.” It was not so much evil or stupidity that had led Eichmann to organize the deportation of millions of Jews to the concentration camps. It was the mere thoughtlessness, or rather, petty alignment to abiding the overall rules that produced a blind obedience and a complete inability to think independently of right and wrong. This thoughtlessness led Arendt to the question:” Could the activity of thinking as such, the habit of examining and reflecting upon whatever happens to come to pass, regardless of specific content and quite independent of results, could this activity be of such a nature that it ‘conditions’ men against evildoing?”

What is interesting about Arendt’s thoughts on Eichmann and the pathology of evil is that she is looking for a way of preventing future evil deeds – through the activity of thinking. Obviously she doesn’t mean the common activity of thinking about today or tomorrow or what’s for supper, but the deep philosophical thinking which according to Arendt, referring to her philosophical icon Socrates (and specifically the Socratic dialogue), is an ability lying within the mind of every human being, and which can be triggered. In this way she gives hope to human kind, but it is a hope that is constantly challenged by the commonplace banality of the human Eichmann: “You say that there is an Eichmann in each one of us. Oh no, there is none in you and none in me! But this doesn’t mean that there are not quite a number of Eichmanns. But they look really quite different”.

Who would the modern Eichmann be? I don’t think it would be in the spirit of Arendt to poke our fingers, but as a case example one could look at the military psychologists that are presently facing complaints with their state license of psychology in New York. This complaint is a reaction to their responsibility of implementing their professional psychological expertise in the execution of torture at Guantanamo Bay (‘The Times’ magazine leaked a rapport that spoke of a 49 days straight interrogation of a detainee, including several of the so called ‘enhanced’ techniques such as hypothermia, stress positions, sleep deprivation and so on). One of the accused, a Colonel Larry James, who was highly ranked and used within the military, first in Guantanamo and later in Abu Grahib, spoke at the American Psychological Association’s annual convention in 2007, speaking against an APA resolution that would have prohibited psychologist from participating in interrogations in American prisons, He stated that: “If we remove psychologists from these facilities, people are going to die, people are going to get hurt”. The same man used his professional expertise and knowledge in how to implement psychology in the interrogation techniques, violating his professional oath of protecting people, participate in violating international human rights and performing institutionalized abuse and torture.

You would think that these psychologists (as you would in the case of Eichmann) would have had plenty of occasions to question their own ethics. Sit down and think deeply about the rights and wrongs of the actions of what you’d like to call a democratic society. But the problem with these kinds of actions is that they are not rooted in any kind of “pure evil” (shockingly curious association to the terminology of the Bush Administration), but to the banal, shortsighted and superficial motives of a human being – and how do you guard yourself against that?

Let’s return to Arendt’s logic:” I mean that evil is not radical, going to the roots, that it has no depth, and that for this very reason it is so terribly difficult to think about it, since thinking, by definition, wants to reach the roots”. So doing good, and thereby resisting a system that has accepted morals that would, in essence, be evil, but who has been legitimized by a decade of scare tactics and a web of political and corporate interests in a “war” against “terror”, is simply a question of reflection.

Moral collapse happens because of a commonplace discourse of abiding institutionalized laws and regulations, which prohibit and blur common sense of justice and ethics. Moral collapse also happens, not because of pure evil intentions of taking over the world, but because man is incapable of realizing mistakes. Arendt’s concept of deep thought could be implemented in an everyday effort of making social change and opposing injustice and flaws in society: Reflect and react against what you think is morally wrong and demand accountability and justice by raising your voice. Resist banality and stupidity by reaching the roots of your own ethics, weather it is within the private or the public sphere of your life.

http://www.democracynow.org/2010/7/8/military_psychologists_face_complaints_with_licensing

Berkovitz, Keenan, Katz (ed.): Thinking In Dark Times: Hannah Arendt on ethics and politics.

Against Life//Against Love

2010-07-06T06:47:00.000-07:00

Slowly trying to mobilize collaboration of video and sound that can work across oceans. The project is called This Month Only which is a sketchy bar close to where Mike used to live in the Junction. It was also the place we sneaked in with an edirol recorder to capture good sounds for our first project together. We got to show a video installation that we've been working hard on this Saturday at an event under a highway bridge called Against Love. Luckily everything went well:

Against Life//Against Love from This Month Only on Vimeo.

After tremendous amount of bad PR during the G20 summit the police chose to keep a low profile, so the party could go on all night. Taking a unused public space and filling it with music, art and people is a nice way to think out of the white box I think. Many fine moments:

Last one is from CANADA DAY taken through James' fireworks magic glasses.

aching back of excitement

2010-07-02T09:19:00.000-07:00

Canada day yesterday where all people cheered the True North, pulled on their best Canada tee and smoked weed on the waterfront watching fireworks. I am working working working with meatfields on This Month Only. So far it looks like this:

2010-06-24T20:14:00.000-07:00

Toronto's full of cops and walls for the G20 and they just made a law that permits cops to arrest you if you get within 5 meters of their 1 billion security defense mechanism. So in these dark times of desperate attempts to solve capitalism I will quote David Lynch:

David Lynch about darkness and confusion:
Q: Does the darkness and confusion ever abate or does it get worse?
A: It does go away. And it will always go away for everyone. I really believe that this isn't the way it's going to be for ever. I don't know why it's necessary that we get lost in this darkness and confusion, but part of it is really enjoyable. But then, if you get sick or you get tortured, or shot, it's not enjoyable. Or your heart gets broken, or your house catches on fire. (Lynch on Lynch by Chris Rodley)

From New York to North Bay

2010-06-23T08:17:00.000-07:00

Out of school brings new exciting adventures.

There is definitely something about the fuzz about New York. Driving into the city for the first time Sunday morning, in a burning sunrise, with Time Square buzzing with the night people and garbage pigeons not yet on retreat and the old and the pregnant on their way to Central Park, was worth the 10 hour drive from Toronto. Both Mike and I are broke. So here's a poor man's guide to the big apple. We stayed at Sarah's apartment, in an awesome Polish neighborhood that reminded us of Ronscesvalles area where we came from. We were met by Sarah's, her roomie Suzy's and her boyfriend John's hospitality and generous help sending us to strange places all around Brooklyn. John plays in this band called MAN FOREVER, which is a burst of adrenaline with 5 (or 6?) guys going nuts on drum kits interfering with your eardrums and heartbeat. So anyway, they sent us out on walks to Coney Island that was a corny reminiscence of 50's candy-colored clown land (with a spooky David Lynch undertone), The Trash-park, a "nature sight" with one of the worst pollution concentrations in NY, "The Worlds Best Pizza Place", somewhere 4 metro shifts away (Mike tested- documentary is coming up), The neat DUMBO which led us to an area we were completely unaware of: The Jewish orthodox neighborhood, where we felt like we had fallen into a pocket of mysterious traditions that we as gentiles were completely alienated from. We've been talking to dogs in Central Park (even though I don't think much of Manhattan - well, not if you're broke anyway!), dreaming of studio lofts in Clinton Hill and relentlessly criticizing modern art at PS1. We ate omelet at diners that look like the ones that Edward Hopper would paint and held hand in Greenwich village. Oh, I wanna live there and you should come too.

Kind of tough to get back to Toronto - patience was tested and after a couple of sorting out shit days we headed up north to wild life. Killbear was the first stop: As a city person that very adventurous name kind of gave me creeps and when the rustling and squeaking got too insisting around our little bonfire on the beach, we were both on our way back in the car - it turned out to be two little foxes though, but they sure sounded like hungry bears wanting our bones to chew on. We escaped the park in soaring rain before the park office opened (and in the future a song should be made called "Escaping Killbear"!). We camped on an island in North Bay where uncle Gary and aunt Andrea are building a cabin. There are all sorts of unfamiliar activities and types of people that would expand my interpretations of what Canada also can be. White man's Fires and potato guns, cheese wieners and military pants - I felt a bit displaced at times! But the nature is still breathtaking and Gary and Andrea are lovely people! We built a Mudda Kua, which is basically a monster you place strategically to fright people - my dad and I made them when I was a kid.

If I were to make a commercial with the most Canadian things it would include:

- Flannelshirts (obviously)

- Canada Day

- Ice hockey

- Pot

- Maple syrup

- Hard ware stores

- Bear

- Moose

- BBQ

- Cottage

- Bonfire

- Big fat SUV's

- Boots

- Dad's

It's Rugged!

Soon: New York!

2010-06-03T15:54:00.000-07:00

Island trip

2010-06-03T15:38:00.000-07:00

Last one from James

I have to repost this!

2010-05-28T18:05:00.000-07:00

From Adam

2010-05-27T17:00:00.000-07:00

Perfect weekend in the wilderness with hammering and bonfire. too busy and warm to make a real post or be picky about pics:

Jordan snapped this awesome one..

The Sandwich Project (teaser)

2010-05-26T07:41:00.001-07:00

Toronto smells like barbeque all the time and my patio has turned green!

2010-05-20T16:51:00.000-07:00

So the volcano didn't disturb my happiness. Parents came and went back without ashes in the motors. Past three weeks have been symbiotic reunion of family-glee, riding my new/old road bike, and sitting in the backseat looking at trees passing by.

We went out east: France was nice but not as quirky and awesome as Toronto - parents agreed. The trip beautiful and peaceful EXCEPT!!!! Infants playing at the roadside while we drove past them with a long tail of big American trucks behind us! This was extremely scary - fogtoddlers, you say? It was definitely white trash and scary as hell. They stayed unharmed though and we got away with the fright.

Moose, beaver/odder, chipmonk, woodpecker, checked off my Canada-list in Algonquin (they also had a bear but it was stuffed). We rented a palace of a cottage, Mike came and my dad thinks he's a real lumberjack and admired his boots and the Pontiac with the broken windshield.

Now they're sent off again and that went well too. As long as the inner of the earth behaves I can make this trans-Atlantic future plan of mine work pretty well. Quality time that is condensed is better than sporadic quantity time where you forget to enjoy. I don't care that I'm being sentimental - giggling over bad but comforting familiar jokes and getting emotional in airports is what I'm all about.

I am in a transitional state between old empty and sad 50 Borden st. and still unknown new destination. I am also almost done school, which means that the last bit that needs to be done seems impossible, and suddenly a half page resume seems way harder to write than the 30 page paper. So I read Henry Miller who gets more and more greasy and shabby (I don't know if I can stand reading about his escapades when I dislike his protagonist so much!) and try not to watch Mad Men all the time. Toronto gives away everything these days, and I'm getting the greatest walk-by comments from auto-mechanics and homeless dudes all the time (I forget them again unfortunately!). I feel like doing nothing and eat all the time and sleep and make out. But I also feel like getting dirt under my nails, then it's good that I'm gonna build a cabin this weekend!

Lauren Bride's Heaven in Double Double Land

Talking to the Tennizketsjer, my shallow scribbles suddenly seems a little trivial. I don't care though, cause I think I know who is writing this, who is mostly my dad and Ola. But I encourage all to go to his blog that he just started even though he was against self-exposing sluttiness on the net in the first place. THIS will take you to where we (Denniz and I) will emigrate to when Denmark gets too tight next winter!

I heard a joke that I can't tell properly so I'll write it:

Why do elephants wear green pajamas?

To camouflage themselves on pool tables.

Did you ever see an elephant on a pool table?

No.

See, it works

...
And I am looking forward to being able to dance like THIS:

on the way to Quebec with my new Canon!

2010-05-05T11:20:00.000-07:00

guilty pleasure but good

2010-05-05T10:46:00.000-07:00

kool kat

2010-04-29T11:38:00.000-07:00

Arbitrariness of genoside? Not for the weak!

2010-04-27T10:02:00.000-07:00

M.I.A, Born Free from ROMAIN-GAVRAS on Vimeo.

ps til dansktalende. Man kan læse om verdens tilstand online i lettre internationale og det er ret godt!

2010-04-21T16:46:00.001-07:00

http://issuu.com/lettre/docs/lettre09

Thinking in darkclouded times

2010-04-21T16:04:00.000-07:00

Being an over-privileged university student has certain advantages. It is relatively easy to justify retiring to your ivory tower with heavy books and academic self pity over essays and presentations for class, not bothering keeping an eye on what happens in the world outside your petite study chamber under the roof (and making long sentences! That's a privilege!). However, the last couple of days I have been checking the newspapers several times a day, biting my nails over the angry volcano in Iceland. Until my dad brought to my attention that him and my mom might not be able to come over and visit me on Saturday, I had not really paid the great attention to what's going on in the air above Europe. But faced with the fact that for once the global issues actually have a direct impact in my life, and that my parents possibly will not be able to visit me, I got extremely overwhelmed with the staggering incomprehensibility of the world. I have felt so self-pitiful and angry with - who? The earth? Iceland? Mostly myself because I'm such a spoiled little kid that deliberately chose to leave home and cross the Atlantic, and be so lucky to have people with means and will to come visit me all the time - and having taken the accessibility of flying back and forth between continents for granted. What a stupid idiot I am (however a really sad and homesick one for the time being!). No one has died, or has their homes destroyed or anything, as happened the last couple of times the earth chose to spurt up lava. I guess I just have to take a cargo ship back to Europe in August if that other even more angry volcano starts to erupt. When they teach you about the modern individual in the late modern society of interconnected networks and whatever in school, they don't really tell you that you yourself most possibly will get that feeling of incomprehensibility and apathy towards, well everything. Damn you Zygmunt Baumann. I am so tired of reading about clever old men (and women - Damn you Hannah Arendt!) that takes away any spark of reckless youth in me! From now on (or very soon, that is) I will only read dirty literature from the 20s under the cherryblossoms in high park, listening to really cheesy indiepop.

Toronto looks pretty great in sunlight, I am basically done with my gloomy paper on wartrauma and I helped a friend build a giant wooden pyramid for his thesis-project all day, after eating breakfast at a patio. So life is still awesome. Fingers crossed for me being able to show my world to the folks on Saturday (but also that they won't be the test-ones to try out the ash-infected air over Denmark!)

According to christian fundamentalists in the States, Iceland is the country closest to hell- therefore all our troubles - but worst were Björk! Read this scary guy

D.H. Lawrence! For summer reading...

Dawson City - I want to go there this summer:

Mike made a picture! And moved into a triangle where the streetcars outside shake the walls:

I have found a little procrastinating treatment from my trauma studies:

2010-04-17T07:48:00.000-07:00

I know I said I didn't like tv-series, but this is really sophisticated and awesome. I admit. And the sounndscore is great!

If you are in Toronto tomorrow night then go to this:

2010-04-14T09:37:00.000-07:00

I've been putting together this event with Adi and Katie since January. We've screened a LOT of video and have finally come up with this program that we are really excited about. The name, Petite Pomme refers to what the portrait-photographer used to tell women to say when he photographed them. Because that push up you cheekbones and sucks in your chins while you get this nice kissable little round mouth. Most of the stuff we collected for the screening dismantles the view of portraying woman. which I also think my poster kind of does. It's Freud sticking his bald head up in the background by the way!
Kærlig hilsen

2010-04-14T09:32:00.000-07:00

2010-04-14T06:06:00.000-07:00

Cassander Eeftinck Schattenkerk via Synaptic stimuli

Waltz with Bashir and Jacques Derrida

2010-04-06T15:56:00.000-07:00

"I would be reconciled with everything I live, even the worst things, if I were assured that the memory of it would stay with me, or stay as well as the testimony that gives meaning or that brings to light, that permits the thing to reappear"

Procrastinating paper by procrastinating flight ticket

2010-04-06T15:25:00.000-07:00

The queen let me stay for a couple of months to enjoy an all american summertime, to which I am thankful for.

overtly sentimental

2010-04-06T15:23:00.000-07:00

Summertime

2010-04-04T10:30:00.001-07:00

Via Pitchfork

---

2010-04-02T08:43:00.000-07:00

This is definitely somethingA film about a woman who...
hit this:

http://www.ubu.com/film/rainer_woman.html

She is giving a talk for FREE at OCAD wednesday. I'm going. Its all beautiful and important. I think.

Dark matter doesn't matter

2010-04-01T11:54:00.000-07:00

Oh my...

2. semester is over and a schoolyear has passed in the speed of light! I don't know about York... I liked it a lot, but I think that I have been highly coloured in my opinion by the overall awesomeness of Canada and not so much the school. I will definitely not miss the UGG-boots-sweatpants-army of loudspeaking, press-on-nail gesticulating, hairextention-swinging people that only talk because 20 % of the mark is class-participation. I will not miss the piercing eyes of the countless numbers of facers in Vari Hall that wants your participation in some association, or the coffee that makes your stomach squeal. But I've also had fun and learned a lot in some strangely associative, alternative and creative way. I've done so much (of course I haven't had the necessity to work for money which helps hell of a lot on the creativity and time to dwell into stuff I must say!).

Now I'm left with my animationproject on trauma, my granny documentary on memory and my Bachelor on trauma and war memory! All this reading on gloomy guys like Derrida and Freud has given me the most horrible nightmares which has obstructed my sleep (along with drunk roommates at 5 am) for several days...

My very last course project turned into this film, which I made with Mike while playing around with his dad's giant black light, some flourscent tube, sour cream and balloons.. fun. Soffies beautiful voice has been dissected into bits and pieces - luckily she likes it - cause she wasn't really asked for permission to be used for this. Its supposed to correspond to the idea of "Haptic visuality" which more or less is the conception of a visual sensory experience using methods of evoking a sense of touch while looking by using very little field of depth, a high degree of textuality and tropes evolving around the body and to some extend the erotic. The idea of the haptic really speaks to me. I guess it kind of captures what I think is so awesome about movies. I don't need 3D so much - I already feel like I can enter the screen, touch the characters, smell the coffee, fear what is behind me. Illustration is great but animation is better! The viewing world has come so far since the Modernist indifference and autonomy. Maybe a little too far in some cases? Lady Gaga can give herself a mental orgasm she says. Good for her. I just like giving myself the opportunity to rely on my own imagination, cut away the 3D glasses and overwhelming multi-sensory experiences. I still think that Jeanne D'arc was beautiful without sound..

Dark Matter Doesn't Matter from sissel marie tonn-petersen on Vimeo.

Flies in my brain go away

2010-03-15T20:08:00.000-07:00

I am frustrated with my braincells. they are getting fried!

-----
Internet doesn't make the situation easier...

Hi dad, remember we saw this film at the surrealist museum in Berlin? (And do you remember who had made the film with the strange water-pouring machine?)

Uh yeah taking high brow to the max- but look at those eyelashes!

I'm anxious and excited!

I keep cutting my hair. soon I'll be bald

2010-03-13T16:52:00.000-08:00

its a wonderful life

2010-03-08T18:39:00.000-08:00

It's a wonderful life

THE EDITOR | MySpace Video

Mark Linkous from Sparklehorse just died and that is really really sad. Especially when viewing this beautiful video for "Its a wonderful life". sigh.

New Project/New blog : Check it out!

2010-03-04T11:48:00.000-08:00

http://feministslovechocolate.blogspot.com/

2010-03-03T08:01:00.001-08:00

friday

2010-02-26T17:02:00.000-08:00

Cold Feet

2010-02-26T15:36:00.000-08:00

Chrysalis from fragrances&opposites on Vimeo.

This movie is Chrysalis, a project Mike and I have made for an ECO-ART festival (Don't ask me why anyone would name an event that..) at York. It feels really good to actually have finished something on our own. Apparently our project requires some sort of explanation because they have asked us to attend a Q and A which will be me nervously ssstuttering something in danglish. After Adam defined AVATAR as an Eco-thriller I was intrigued by the idea of making something dark and post-apocalyptic with radioactive sand, mutated mushrooms and glow-in-the-dark excrescences. So many visions so little time. I had to reinvent my vague intensions several times, due to cold feet both literally and metaphorically. Anyway after a bland attempt of editing our footage and a taunting laugh from Mike, we decided to cut in this old, never-finished, polish sci-fi movie called "On The Silver Globe". The polish government banned it because they saw underlying critique of the totalitarian governmental restriction of art. That Was It!!! Everything started looking better, our David Lynch rip-off/references suddenly didn't seem so obvious anymore, and the dripping and slushing fruit color experiments executed in the woods didn't seem all that ridiculous anymore. And we actually came up with a name after several days of banging our heads together in attempt to find the slightest bit of originality.... Next project coming up is building an impossible machine in the desert called BADLANDS (an amazing name) outside Toronto. But that probably requires some spring time feeling first.
KH

ladies, dasies, sixties, seventies

2010-02-26T10:35:00.000-08:00

last minute

2010-02-11T09:47:00.000-08:00

This is very indie-cute but it reminds me of new friends and old friends and makes me happy

Yours Truly Presents: The Morning Benders "Excuses" from Yours Truly on Vimeo.

PIERROT LE FOU, kysseri og andet godt fra de virtuelle gemmer

2010-02-08T11:31:00.000-08:00

BLOW UP

Jeff Wall

TEAM ORLA - JEG SAVNER JER!

Nature Morte on the Web

2010-02-08T07:28:00.000-08:00

Carlier Max: Still life with a lobster and assorted fruit and flowers

Adriaen van Utrecht: Stilleben mit hase und vögelen

Chardin: Nature morte au lievre

Jean-Baptiste Oudry: Nature morte avec oiseux morts et cerises

The world according to Mrs. Mildred Gibbons OR another curse on language

2010-02-05T09:03:00.000-08:00

I bought a sweater with the name Mrs. Mildred Gibbons glued to the inside. So I feel very special when putting it on (it's very gnome-ish green with red pattern) almost like stealing some (dead?) woman's personality, putting all sorts of exciting stories into this old garment. I found it in a hidden-behind-ugly-surface store in the market where I also bought a fluffy marshmallow-sweater, a hipster cowboy-shirt, a silver dolphin and a Stetson hat. I'm such a girl I've been told. Surely I really like buying all sorts of shit, which is lucky since I'm on the continent for doing that.

I'm spending sunny times in the Narnia-library at UofT behind the stained glass windows reading about memory. Apparently memory can be categorized into 3 categories: Personal memory, cognitive memory and habit memory. In different ways these categories tries to map the processes of memorizing - and especially heal psychological malfunctions and behavior patterns caused by loss or repression of memory. In all 3 categories memorizing rely on semantic and verbal codes of interaction with the surrounding world. This has to do with language in other words. In order to gain personal memory the individual mirrors it self in the society in which it is situated where shared language is like a mental map, a shared collectivity.. It is evident that language is the key term in all sort of interaction between humans, in the formation of a self, a memory and a feeling of belonging. This of course you become aware of when you're confronted with expressing yourself in another language (one can ever only take a point of origin in oneself because this is what is immediate - As Suzanne Brøgger cleverly has stated when asked why she was always writing about herself). But it is so universal: When it comes to integration and the question of mother-tongue education in Danish schools, to the studies of local dialects, and Diaspora... Understanding the importance of language and signs is also an understanding of when language is unnecessary - when signs of communication transcends language barriers and rely on sensory experiences such as touch, sound and colors.

My new roommate thought I was a native Canadian, which made me kind of flattered. But since she's from Korea she has a hard time mastering the language, and this is perhaps why she came to this conclusion. In some situations though I don't feel fluent at all, and when trying to express my most complex and confusing thoughts and feelings I sometimes feel like brushing my teeth with the toilet brush - mouth shit. I know this is a diasporic feeling in the light version and I am aware of the fact that I have to leave the English-speaking northern part of the globe to actually have the challenge of language, norm and value accommodation and transference of identity into another cultural context close up. For now I will stop whining and go get coffee. I'll throw in some pictures of Mildred and my patio.

WHO WAS MILDRED????

Also, I don't really understand what Georges is singing about but I think it has something to do with his friends abroad.. so here it comes:

Asta in Afgrunden (1910 - and very erotic at the time!!)

2010-02-03T19:42:00.000-08:00

School: Another little project describing a walk from A to B

2010-02-02T09:30:00.000-08:00

Factory Walk from sissel marie tonn-petersen on Vimeo.

What goes through my mind

2010-01-31T07:22:00.001-08:00

Häxan by Benjamin Christensen:

Balkan Erotic Epic by Marina Abramovic:

Céline et Julie vont en bateau:

I'll go hunting for some more of his film, like this one:

skypecat

2010-01-30T14:40:00.000-08:00

I am still puzzled with Skype: Within a couple of clicks and tabs I find out that my brother is a grown-up. I guess as a big sister you will never stop looking at your younger sibling as a kid, a bit like parents will always try to talk to their children from time to time as if they were 12. But I will always be stunned with little glimpses of fact that a grown up, well reflected and extremely mature person is the little shit that once walked behind me for an entire day, playing body guard or Lucky Luke (yeah well, time went by, he became a guitar-hero-teenager, a high-school graduate, a night-owl, and THEN all of the suddenly he has caught up on you in matureness, working in this really cool and demanding job and having friends send off to war..! What happened to the little kids playing warhammer in the woods?) . I guess from a distance you see the structures of your family more clearly. Oh no, now I get to feel old again. I better go dancing frantically tonight in my most silly-looking outfit (I'm 24 in... 15 days).
Seasalt/Seeshell/SISEL

last: called Womens Christmas (for some reason)

2010-01-28T18:59:00.000-08:00

Do Not Disturb (I'm blogging for a month in advance - or in retrospect)

2010-01-28T18:47:00.000-08:00

I hate Skype sometimes. You are supposed to feel more connected over distances, and there are always a couple of contacts that are available, free of effort and charge. But it is never the exact ones you want to talk to, or maybe they are online, but then its kind of awkward to call out of the blue so you just end up staring at the annoying little v-sign. Oh well.. It's definitely better than Facebook-chat which is really a pain. Maybe I should cut down on the Internet-whore attitude and attend that symposium Saturday on the "anti-social-networking movement"!

Reptile brains on return

2010-01-28T18:35:00.000-08:00

I finally feel I have let go of Denmark for the next long period of time, when sending the most magnificent girls of all time to the airport yesterday. It's been intense (to display my world to some of the people that mean the most to me), but learning that they loved the city and it's people almost as much as me was glorious. January has gone by unimaginably fast, and all greyness has been covered with matching knitted sweaters, voodoo videos (soon to come!), Avatar-flourecent references and ethnic inspirations (such as Phó and Chinese paper-money!). I wish I could condense my Denmark-world in a little snowy ball (the ones with The Eiffel tower or Santa Claus, not the ones made out of snow that you throw) and have it right here on my table. Perfect world. Maybe Naja wants to come next year, that is how much she loved it. However, I'm still not convinced that going home would be a constructive thing for me to do.

Kærlig hilsen

MindFucking FACS and Balkan Devil-May-Care

2010-01-28T18:20:00.000-08:00

York is doing me good this semester, giving me the opportunity to take only 3 courses where one of them is an independent study. This basically means that I get to talk to a really great professor every once in a while about Bachelor paper and an animation film I am going to make as an extension for project granny (which is also, slowly, moving along).

The two courses I am taking is 1) a typical FineArtsCulturalStudies course about the senses. Typical because it doesn't really teach me anything concrete, but always blows my mind and sends me into existential spacejourneys in both very productive and a bit destructive ways. Mostly productive - and creative. I've started to scribble which is both embarrassing (as in reading old diaries and shrink from your own pathetic emotionality) and really great in the cliché kinda way... But as Adam says (or was it Mike? Someone with a beard anyway) - Clichés are only bad because they are true (otherwise they would be called lies?)- I really wanna make that movie about middle class housewives talking about Carpe Diem.

2) I am also attending a grad-course about conceptual art, and apart from feeling stupid and checking my Facebook all the time, in grumpy teen resistance to all the clever grad-students, I actually get hell of a lot out of it. It seems like art theory and criticism is not as similar to film theory as I thought, it is less instrumental and, I guess, obsessed with finding conclusions (Actually I found myself hating most of the film theory I read). It is more like the Cultural studies stuff I've been reading over here.. This school, with all its crappy food, overcrowded hallways, UGG boots and High-school-musical spirit, does give me some kind of un-institutional schooling that could not be found any other place (in university, anyway). (Yeah - I just read about Un-art...) Maybe it even kills a bit of the famous Scandinavian need for control!!

I am researching on this crazy performance artist, Marina Abramovic. She is so 70s radical femi-guerrilla and so Eastern European that she has survived any bad connotations to the word Feminism that the pussy-paintings (kussetryk? hvad hedder det på engelsk??) of the 70s may have cast upon the term. This is a lesson in rat-killing:

Kaerlig hilsen

<3

2010-01-18T19:24:00.001-08:00

Yuko Shimizu

2010-01-18T19:11:00.000-08:00

Found on all time favorite BibliOdyssey

My future camera can do this

2010-01-18T18:40:00.001-08:00

Going interactive

2010-01-11T18:22:00.000-08:00

Children's tv is always so inspiring!

av mit hjerte

2010-01-10T15:12:00.001-08:00

winter

2010-01-10T13:03:00.000-08:00

ick.. my planet is still inhabited by the cast of The Imaginarium--

2010-01-08T08:49:00.001-08:00

Imagination!

2010-01-07T19:18:00.000-08:00

valse statique-la théorie du combo from maxime bruneel on Vimeo.

Maxime Bruneel is amazing at this stuff; http://vimeo.com/maximebruneel

I saw The Imaginarium of Doctor Parnassus.

Tom Waits is awesome as the devil, reminding me of his role as Your Last Hope (i think) in Big Time! Happy New Year:

Going home and back home

2010-01-07T16:33:00.000-08:00

One thing is certain: You need an icy stomach to be a globetrotter and you need a certain romantic feeling about airports. I have neither and this caused me some troubles these past weeks. Christmas came up and landing in Denmark the same day as Obama and end of pathetic COP15 was pretty disastrous. HOPEnhagen can kiss my a.. - and the queens new years speech giving thanks to the well-doing police was way too hilarious. I've had a hard time justifying a return to Denmark, recognizing how bad our reputation continues to be. Luckily I found plenty of reasons coming back to good times and people like this:

armpit-hair measurement!

2010 happiness

Leaving home for the second time has been weirder than the first, possibly because the holiday has brought up big emotions, hello's and goodbyes and a recognition of the fact that Toronto feels more like home right now, with everyday-life trips to the market, back-to-school-excitement and friendly faces. This is nice but strange. Already after 7 days in the new year I've broken my New Years promise of not planning ahead. School ends in April and my brain automatically starts working on possible opportunities for the future, hopefully involving a dusty trip across the country with a camera, Justins red pickup truck (OH this would be so nice! I would never stop photographing him in such a car!) and all the friendly faces gathered in one big bunch of happiness!

Regardless of other people's plans, I am definitely going to make a lot of cool stuff of my own, since I have time, video material and the whole great country of CANADA for my feetThis is grandma who have been generously sharing her memories and family pictures with me over Christmas. I wanna make a fluffy version of Lynch's The Grandmother. Is this possible? I don't know, It seems there's a universe between this:

This man really really creeps me out in the best way possible.

oh...and this:

bedstepreview from sissel marie tonn-petersen on Vimeo.

I also wanna make a music documentary on this awesome band that plays bluegrass at the Silver Dollar each Wednesday. Think it was Mike that got the idea, since he keeps coming up with stories for each player in the band. He seems to be not the only one doing that, they just generates ideas of their personal lives in everybody's head which is interesting and could turn out to be a fun starting point for a film.

haha.. theyre awesome..

more of the mont-real

2009-12-15T13:17:00.000-08:00

i just bummed these from Awollas balls

2009-12-14T13:21:00.000-08:00

Group trip to Montreal. Ola, Justin, Adam, Mike and I went to little Europe in North America on minimal budget in celebration of ended semester, the upcoming holiday and the bliss of life, smoked meat, poutine (??) and little French cafés. Severin was there, so was Emilia, Maria and Stine, there was snow, high sun, cold feet and visions for the future! Sound ex, snow pile jumping, bruises, yelling into silo#7 on the harborfront, Canadian beer and drinking in the Cabin of cute Sous-bois in Old Montreal, and sillywalk at night + dancing behind the Silver Door. I wanna go back. I have big plans in this country.

Visual

Yeah, so Montreal was nice, but I still agree with Liv that Toronto has more of its own ugly, pretty North American charm which was what we came for. I love Toronto because it's so diverse, local but global, full of life and quirky funny people that are driving like crazy. Of course its also because i feel at home, there's people i love and my home is totally rad and awesome and cheap!!! And also in Toronto you can find wicked places like demolition in The Junction:

This summer we're all going out west to Dawson City to live life, I'll make friends with Nature, and change the world.

stupid videos from Toronto involving Scandinavian people

2009-12-10T07:38:00.000-08:00

Your loveliness goes on and on from sissel marie tonn-petersen on Vimeo.

This is silliness involving wine, a black telephone, kleenex and Emilia Rüf from Finland and her camera...

jump the junction from sissel marie tonn-petersen on Vimeo.

This is silliness involving Liv's schoolproject, no concrete idea and a poor effort of editing. but it's so funny..

om 9 dage. samtidig med Obama!

2009-12-08T16:01:00.000-08:00

Henry Miller you could not shock Anaïs Nin and you can not shock me! Deep down under that surface of raw bohemian masculinity you're just a sweet little man that wants a hug!

Naoto Fukasawa. Cosmos

I wanna go to Mexico and I am jealous of Matt and Nika who just returned from there:

The Aztec Cosmos! pretty...

Dancing dwarf!

jeg skal snart hjem.

2009-12-08T16:00:00.001-08:00

A trailer

2009-12-02T05:25:00.000-08:00

Oh, and this. This is for my grandma -film-documentary-investigation that I am going to make when I come home, and I can't wait. It's old footage from the summer and Mike helped me out with the little sound score (yes - more skills in turning my poor music abilities into something quite sweet! I am the one humming, whistling and playing the same 3 chords over and over again)

scissor sister

2009-11-25T13:36:00.000-08:00

I've been doing paper cut silhouettes recently for animation, but unfortunately they are not nearly as pretty as these Mexican ones:

Also, listen to this piece by Terry Fox: A virtual labyrinth of cat purrs! (hit the cat skeleton with your little mouse)

It's only 9.10 am and the day is looking good

2009-11-25T06:10:00.000-08:00

I'm so glad I found this!

I love that man

And I almost got a ticket yesterday for riding on the pavement (Liv talked us out of it, playing stupid tourist in a most convincing way!) and I went to see New Moon with Aurora and 1000 other squealing women and a couple of gay guys, and feeling so teen and awesome, in a cinema that looked like a ferry with free butter popcorn and PoP. Now it is hard to write a paper about French newwave film when all I can think of is vampires and werewolfs!

KH

Objects trouve (in a boring class at York)

2009-11-23T15:05:00.000-08:00

November is like spring in Canada

2009-11-22T08:00:00.000-08:00

Even though everybody keep telling me that soon I'll probably die from frostbite, the weather seems to kling steadily on to the sunny side, which I enjoy.
Last night we rode all the way east to a circus training spot turned into a concert location. Great fun times with Ola, Val and James and a bunch of really mindblowing musician guys (and one herbal looking tribal dancing girl I could have been without..). What a mixed bag of sweets, with surprises such as this guy:

Oh yeah, and his name was CORPUSSE and he would Fight For Rock (he spat himself all the time and at one point pulled out a whithe feather boa which killed me). He for some reason made me think of this horrible story I read about, where a 450 kg heavy American guy had to be cut free from his chair, which he had been sitting in for 8 months (!!WTF!!!), then dying from heart attack. This made James and I talk about the state of the world, malnurishment in North America, the evil of capitalism and so on.

Next performance was less gloomy: I've seen Lucky Dragons before in CPH, but it was great pleasure to see them again. People were thrilled, banging like crazy on drums, eachother, rocks and wierd seed capsules:

Ola was happy!

Oh, and look who just came to town! Soon there will be awesome loop music and crispy video coming up in here!! Yay. She is so gooood! listen: http://www.myspace.com/soffieviemose

This is completely stolen from a great blog called synaptic stimuli:

More greatness:

Kærlig hilsen, KH, hej hej

Off the wall...

2009-11-13T08:42:00.000-08:00

This is the brave and wonderful sheik of the Middle East, Tenniz Habibi Göl Hummusmaster Bertelsen after his transgression from innocent (almost) culturejammer of Copenhagen to full-blood activist saving the world and messin' with secret police! I'm sitting at the other side of the globe and sending protective thoughts..

PPPS. I love the Internet. I want to be just as cool as this guy

2009-11-11T19:11:00.000-08:00

Enough with the overspringshandlinger and back to work

PPS. Kissing is great!

2009-11-11T19:08:00.000-08:00

PS. Check these out they are so great!

2009-11-11T19:03:00.000-08:00

this is only the trailer - check them out at http://www.sundancechannel.com/greenporno/

The memory hole: Between Proust and Americas next top model

2009-11-11T18:21:00.000-08:00

Life in 50 Borden is good. We've discovered several more mice, a couple of cases of swine flu (mildly exaggerated - I've catched a cold and passed it along to Sarah and Nika), and I tell you, it's hard to study while tv-dinner-parties always going on beneath you. Jen cut my hair last week, so now I look a bit like a boy. As for school, I'm buried in studies of horror, trauma, war and death in my classes Artist as Witness and Culture and Memory and I love it! I've found the niche that most of my previous work has more or less unconsciously been evolving around and it never seems to bore me. (Footnote: Sociology teacher with passion for marxist readings of all the problems in the world can go screw herself) Think I got a crush on my Woody Allen looking weird nervous-giggeling little professor, and am a pain in the ass for my co-students sucking ass in his classes with my hand raised all the time. I don't care: I want more witnessing testimonial imagery to puzzle my mind with. I made a book about trauma - this is one of the pages:

Next I am going to dissect this fabulous movie if Woody allows me to:

Also I can't wait to be done with examine period! hopefully I will go to Montreal do some tourist acts before going home to tinyland. I can't wait to do my projects either, cause they are all going to be extremely cool and interviewing grandma about her mind and memory work is going to be the all time most exciting! Had a long chat with auntie Anette about personal vs. communal memory, family photos, great-grandma (in her kitchen) and the process of writing about it.
School has never been a boring trip to the dusty libraries for me, but it seems to have been escalating in weird projects since coming to bear-wrestler-land. After making cat-kitchen on Mike's floor, getting drunk Saturday night a couple of weeks ago, look here what came out of our efforts!:

Semiotics of the Katchen from sissel marie tonn-petersen on Vimeo.

Last week a couple of good and patient friends helped me out making my sound project #2. Here's the result:

Bellwood Pipes from sissel marie tonn-petersen on Vimeo.

Saturday the magnificent ms. Viemose comes to visit my humble crib, and I better be fresh and de-stressed by that time, so I can show her my world. Det bliver helt vildt fedt at snakke dansk med en der kender mig som Danmark-Sissel, som jeg kan snakke om alt det pre 26. August (= Danmark - liv, Danmark - venner, osv. ) og bare lege lidt turist i Toronto, noget der ikke har været meget tid til siden jeg startede på uni! Det er også gået op for mig hvor helt utrolig dum jeg var at tro at jeg ikke skulle hjem til jul - den idé fik Bedste heldigvis elimineret og nu kommer jeg hjem den 18. til glögg gilde - GLÆDER MIG HELT VILDT ABSURD MEGET!!!!!

Næste år er min plan kun at tage 3 kurser for at få mere tid til at dykke ned i Toronto-kultur (der bare ligger og venter på at blive udforsket og som ikke bliver det, desværre), hvad jeg skal være når jeg bliver stor, livets mening, Internettets glæder, flere film, mere Bachelor skrivning (eller, jeg skal starte på det), lære at lave mad osv. Alle ideer og input er velkomne.

Kærlige hilsner fra studinen på kvisten

This is me with new hairstyles

2009-11-10T13:15:00.001-08:00