Benedicte Braenden

have you ever wondered how annett louisan crossed with The BossHoss would sound? probably not. i never did.
and now i stumbled over this (what would i do without myspace and youtube??) norwegian girl: benedicte braenden. check her out, she's gorgeous! (that is, you'll think that if you have a thing for light girls-voices and country-rock..)

anna's café

today i tried out a new café in lüneburg, and it has good chances to become my favourite. it is called "Anna's Café" and located at the Stint, which is one of two café-bar-pub-streets here.
anyway, the atmosphere there was such as i like it to be at a café, snug and comfortable, with a lot of room, lovely furniture and tableware (seemed like they went and searched all antique-stores around) and homemade cakes and breakfast. i had some tea there while correcting the last swedish-papers for my course, and i have to say, i don't know a single other café in lüneburg where that would be possible. it's cosy there, and nice people are working there as well.
as for the whole thing together, i'm not sure if it is supposed to feel like a typically swedish café, but it definitely does. i guess that's why i felt at home there...

Get Fuzzy

i love "get fuzzy". bucky and rob and satchel are so much fun, i find something to laugh every time i read it. and about the grammar: well, right now i'm working on those tests my swedish-course wrote last week...

sorting out

in about two months time i will move to a new apartment in this lovely little town, and as i plan on spending most of my time during february and even march in oslo with a., it's definitely time to start packing - and throwing away. i have to admit, i am not good at throwing things away, i never was. but i am learning, or at least trying to.
today, i got started with my clothes, and sorted out three plastic bags (two middle-sized and one large) with jeans, trousers, t-shirts and pullovers that i don't want to keep. and of course, with every second or third item i start thinking "you might want to keep this, maybe you'll really lose some weight during spring and summer so you can wear it again" or "just think how glad you were about all the old stuff you got from your mother, when you have a daughter she might love this!". well. i got over it and put the stuff away to the red-cross-container.
feels good.

poetry in moving pictures

today i went to the cinema, for the first time again after about three weeks of abstinence. i couldn't really decide what to see, the choices were between "once", "the darjeeling limited" och "my blueberry nights". i ended up with "my blueberry nights", basically because it was the saloon with the most free seats (the less people in the room, the less they disturb, or so i thought..) and because i wanted to see it at some time anyway. it is wong kar-wai's first american movie, and it is also nora jones' debut on the screen, which, as numerous critics already have mentioned, is obvious. still i wouldn't take either of those facts as something negative, as the location gives a new touch to wong kar-wai's fascinating pictures, and as nora jones plays her role as naive as i think it was meant to be played.

the story that is told is rather simple, a girl with a broken heart and a lonely guy who owns a café in new york meet. he steals a kiss from her while she is sleeping on the counter, and the next day she is gone, on a trip through the states, sending postcards to him. on her way "over the street" (as she puts it), she meets different people, we see beautiful landscapes, and in the end we end up where we left: the café in new york. a road movie, as poetic as for examples the ones by wim wenders ("paris, texas",...) but poetic in a different way, maybe in a hong-kong-sort of way.

apart from the landscapes and city-subway-scapes (that are so typical for wong kar-wai) there were two scenes, or pictures, that impressed me a lot. they belong, in a way, together. the first one is a close-up on nora jones' face just before the first kiss (after which she leaves town). the second one takes up this picture again in the end and fulfills it.

then, there was this stunningly beautiful soundtrack as well. of course it was partly nora jones, but the song that stayed with me now for the evening was cat powers "the greatest". poetic, interesting, melodic, the perfect soundtrack for a dream.

uneasy listening

i just recieved one of those very unfrequent newsletters of a band which i at some point in my life some years ago found interesting, called t i m e s b o l d. they kind of almost got forgotten by me, apart from one song, which i love tremendously, "bone song". i kind of never took the time to learn liking their other stuff as well, and i still cannot decide whether to buy one of their cds or not. i guess that was becouse they didn't seem to have some kind of a red line in their music, it's not easy to open up to it, and it's definitely what they themselves call uneasy listening. it makes you uneasy in your skin, in your room, it's mysterious in a western-desert kind of style, which is probably why i like it anyway.
a broken voice, a dark bass, a swelling melody,...

The Puppini Sisters

do you like the 40s and 50s?
well, i do (and the 60s and 70s..), and i also like feel-good music.
thanks to my friend rana, i found out about this absolutely ravishing girl-band called The Puppini Sisters, who combine this cool 40s-50s-diva-feeling with superb music and style. Three girls singing and fingersnipping, performing old and well-known songs (such as Dusty Springfields "Spooky" or the all-time-classic "Bei mir bist du schön"), giving them a new, jazzy, feel-good sound. And as if this wasn't enough, their homepage even features beauty-tips (for that 40s-style), recipes and other nice stuff.. To complete the whole thing, they got to wear Vivienne Westwood in their video "Jilted"!! Take a look, it's fun and gorgeous!!

Bertine

the soundtrack to my first visit to Oslo in 2003 featured, above all, a norwegian singer who is just beautiful. her name is bertine zetlitz and her voice is light and airy, like a young girl's voice, and so stunningly melodic. her then new album "sweet injections" went into my possession after i had heard only one or two of its songs, and i never regretted buying it. it's fantastic.

now i finally managed to obtain her next two cds, "rollerskating" and "my italian greyhound", and i am not at all disappointed. the lyrics are mystical, playfull, perfectly fitting her personality and her voice. the music is just as playfull, it is danceable, electronic, fun, intense - well, just perfect.
go listen to her on myspace, my recommendation is "abigail" and "girl like you".

Solche Geschenke

after a long day of studying and searching for a new room, i usually read a little bit in some book or novel, to relax before sleeping. in december, i met this nice young german writer, franziska gerstenberg, at a reading. she was then just about to end a scholarship she had in lüneburg. we had a really interesting conversation and even went to the cinema together, with the result that i bought her first book, "Wie viel Vögel", and read it within a week or two. for christmas, i got her other book "Solche Geschenke", out of which i am reading some pages every evening now.

those books are short stories, erzählungen (in german). franziska writes about normal people and their lives. sometimes we follow them for a few hours through their lives, sometimes a few days or months, never more. it's never dramatic in a sense of big things happening, but the small things that happen sometimes have a huge impact. for example, there is this girl who doesn't really have anything to do, she just wants to get out of her apartment, take the tram to the station, buy a magazine and maybe a t-shirt and get back home. instead, she finds herself helping an elderly and confused lady with her hamsters that went lose in the tram. or there is this middle-aged man who has been travelling around for two years in his camping bus, all on his own. just one day, he has a teenage girl next to him, asking "we are going to spain, aren't we?", and so they go, even though he never really wanted to take her along, as she obviously is running away from home. and suddenly, there is something like friendship.

i like those stories. they are warm and sometimes a bit funny, but never ever is anyone made ridiculous. never. which is what i like even more. and they are easy to read. calming, in a sense.
and they make me want to translate them to swedish. i really want to try.

the bear

for a long time, i wasn't into videogames (or computergames) at all. now, with my boyfriend a. working in the computergames industry, things started to change, but even though i play guild wars online with him, and sometimes civilization or pirates, i still haven't made my way into videogames - i'm still watching a. play. it's almost like watching a movie, the difference being that the main character actually hears what you are saying and responds on it - or not.

the last game a. played and i watched was a pretty weird one, it is called "psychonauts" and takes place in a kids-summer-camp, where they learn how to fight their way into and through other people's brains. of course the main character (called raz) finds out about some kind of conspiracy when he realizes that one of his camp-mates doesn't have a brain and he encounters some nightmare about that when visiting his own mind. we didn't get any further than that until now, but it's a lot of fun and i guess the people who made the game had a lot of fun when they made it.

in the game, there is also one russian kid, mikhail, standing close to the woods. the dialogue with him is the one that stuck with me until now: "Have you seen bear lurking in woods, with skin where hair should be? In Russia bears are smaller, and more fur, less lurking... always eager to wrestle." a bit later, he adds: "Cannot lurk forever, bear." i read in some other blog about this little scene, a journalist-student stating that writing was her own private bear that she had and was eager to wrestle, and got to think that this bear is a good picture for different challenges in life. my own private bear right now is rather like the russian bears the kid is missing. it's not lurking at all but coming with bigger and bigger steps towards me, and i have to admit, i start to get frightened. in exactly two weeks i'll have the first of three final oral exams, and even though this is the smallest one and even though i usually don't have a problem with oral exams, i feel out of practice and would prefer to be able to push it back. it's just that i can't. i have to get through with the wrestling, and all i can do is prepare myself.

back to studying. hard.

happy new year

it's a new year and time to start blogging again.
last time, i wrote about christmas and what we usually do then - well, this year everything was different, not only because my brother florian and his girlfriend linda would be there (though only later in the evening), but also because a. came down to germany to be with me for christmas. the reason is a longer story which i won't tell here, but it was a great time, and my family was really happy to have him with us.

some days later we went off to oslo, and stayed here for new years eve, which we celebrated quietly with some nice nice food, videogame-playing, some reading and alcohol-free cider. at around half past eleven, we met with my colleague dagmar and her partner thorsten at the vigeland park (a huge park with a lot of weird sculptures) where we watched the fireworks. norwegian people are really strange, they start fireworking at around half past eleven and don't stop until one in the morning. anyway, it was not too cold and not too warm, the only thing missing was some snow, and we had a good time there.

as for food, my friend vroni introduced me to "dates with bacon", which tastes delicious. and it's so simple: you just take as many dates as you would like to eat, wrap them in pieces of bacon, and put them in an heated oven (180 degrees) for about ten minutes until the bacon is nice and crispy. the sweet dates with salt bacon are really gorgeous. *recommendation!!*