little flovver

Look what bloomed in our bathroom the very day Little Jacket came to visit!

It had been coming for ages but in the morning while cleaning my teeth I saw that it had absolutely burst open. I’m thrilled as it seems Mr. Snow and I are now not only capable of keeping our orchid plants alive but even getting them to blossom. There seem to be four more flowers on the way. Maybe the plant is pacing itself for our future summer guests?

The weather here has been fabulous and it looks like it’s just going to stay that way, if not get warmer. Little Jacket and I set up camp on the river bank yesterday evening with white wine, a blanket to sit on and our books, though the latter went unread as we had too much news (gossip?) to exchange. Island hopping in the Oslo Fjord looks like it’s on the schedule for this weekend. Will be sure to report back!

the greatest silence: rape in the congo

On a mission… Lisa F Jackson. Photograph: Bryan Bedder/Getty

Not at all an easy read but a worthwhile one. Taken from the Guardian, Friday May 9, 2008.

Filmmaker Lisa F Jackson survived a terrifying sexual assault in Washington. But she was still shocked by the tales women told her when she made a documentary about rape in the Congo. She talks to Kira Cochrane.

In a long conversation, the only time that Lisa F Jackson falls quiet is when I ask which moment most affected her in the making of her film The Greatest Silence: Rape in the Congo. Was it meeting a teenager, Immakilee, raped by soldiers and left pregnant at 15, who, as Jackson says, “has eyes that look like the world has abandoned her”? Or hearing the story of 42-year-old Marie Jeanne, whose husband was beaten and killed and, as she explains in the film, cut “into three parts, the head, the chest, and the bottom part … then they raped me and abandoned me there. I passed out next to my husband’s legs”?

dave eggers websclusive

Yesterday evening’s sun went slightly to waste as about a hundred of us descended into the dark bowels of Litteraturhuset to listen to Dave Eggers being interviewed. As consolation, it was an entertaining, relaxed hour and a half. He talked a lot about his book What is the What, Valentino Achak Deng, McSweeney’s, the publishing house he helped set up, some about his writing lab and tutoring centre 826 Valencia, a little less about his other books and very little indeed about himself. Luckily as Norwegians seem to shy away from encounters with authors (either face to face or from the audience) I got both to ask a question and get my book autographed without having to elbow a single soul out of the way.

As such myyearonline has the pleasure of bringing you an international web exclusive of Things You Might Not Have Known About Dave Eggers and Might Otherwise Never Find Out:

- Spending a year with his wife writing, writing and pretty much almost only writing gave him cabin fever

- The title of his book ‘A Staggering Work of Heartbreaking Genius’ was a joke working title, until it turned out it was too late to change it and he was stuck with it

- He wore braces as a child, which the wrap-around microphone last night reminded him scarily of

- He set up the first independent pirate supply shop in the Mission, San Francisco (Humungous and Jeans, now you know where to go for your party eye patches!)

- The What in Dave Eggers’ world, as learnt from Valentino Achak Deng, is being brave enough to choose the unknown What although the known alternative may be more comfy and safer

- He’s been in Bangkok but didn’t like it, and really wants to go to KL because he has friends living there and they say it’s cool. Our kind of guy!!

the darjeeling limited

This seems to be the week of dissatisfied postings! It’s good practice for me anyway. I both have to think harder about why I don’t like something, and it’s harder to write down why as well.

My most disappointing film of the year so far was Wes Anderson’s The Darjeeling Limited. He is the genius who made The Royal Tenenbaums and the absolutely genius, off-the-wall The Life Aquatic. I had been anticipating his latest film for ages and couldn’t wait to see it. Unfortunately, I was sorely disappointed.

The film follows three brothers on a spiritual journey to find themselves and each other again, aboard the too-fantastical-to-be-true Darjeeling Express Train in India. The film looks gorgeous (if a little Disneyesque) and the cast great but sadly that is about where it ends. I don’t think all the characters were meant as such caricatures of themselves (or perhaps they were), but I found it hard to take them seriously, much less care about their wallowing in self-pity and mid-life crises. Even their ‘encounters’ with the locals appeared stagy and ironic. I imagined everyone breaking into giggles as soon as each deep and meaningful scene was done with being filmed.

Perhaps I’m just too cynical – both to the idea of the film, and to the idea of India as being a place for emotional and spiritual reawakening. Or maybe you need to have experienced a reunion with a long-lost brother yourself to fully appreciate it, like Philip French did. Either way I just didn’t get it, and it certainly wasn’t my film of the year. There were some of the great comic sequences that Anderson is so good at, but they seemed to be random interludes in a self-indulgent story.

All in all, a case of parts adding up to substantially less than a whole. Unless there is someone out there who would care to enlighten me?

tulips

I know it’s a bit shockingly late for tulips, but we do our best here up North. Gone are my Dutch days of 150 tulips for 5 euros (though even I admit that was a bit much, after filling up all possible tulip receptacles at home and STILL ending up with about 50 that I gave to Inspector Gadget as a present).

Still, I have been admiring these beauties at my work every lunchtime on my way to the canteen. I love the combination of colours and the green grass makes it all look even prettier. Of course the sun that has moved in permanently with us (even at night, it seems) does help. Little Jacket is coming to visit tonight, so it’s all good!

calatrava strikes again

A friend’s visit to Valencia made me look up one of its sonss, and one of my very favourite architects, Santiago Calatrava, to see what he is up to these days. Mr. Snow and I had discovered him by accident when we chanced upon his soaring bridge in Bilbao. I’d never seen nor walked on anything quite like it before and became a fan immediately. After that, his work seemed to pop up all over places I happened to be, like Seville, Lisbon and even in cosmopolitan and trendy Haarlemmermeer!

I’d heard he was designing the new World Trade Centre Tansportation Hub, but an astonishing structure caught my eye: the new high-speed train station for Liege in Belgium. The critics are already up in arms about how the station doesn’t fit into its surroundings, but I can’t wait to see it for myself once it’s open at the end of this year. What do you think?

what is the what reviewed

Several other books got in the way, but finally I got to read Dave Eggers’ ‘What is the What‘, his version of Valentino Achak Deng’s story of how war transported him from his village in Southern Sudan through a several refugee camps finally to his struggle to build a new life in America, with several thousand other young men collectively known as The Lost Boys of Sudan.

The book is written in the first person and jumps back and forth between America and Deng’s life story in more or less chronological order. The style was simple and concise, but variously also funny and disturbing. Most importantly for me, it gave a voice and a history to one of the many faces that stare out of photos of war zones and refugee camps. I don’t know if you’ve ever wondered how refugees get to where they are and what life there means to them. This book told me how for one person.

cannes 2008

A quite different competition was going on last weekend. It wasn’t broadcast live to Europe and beyond, but film lovers are surely keen to see the winner of this year’s Cannes Film Festival. An unruly Parisian classroom film called Entre Les Murs (or The Class in English) won the Palme d’Or this year but promises to be a completely different kettle of fish than another recent feel-good French classroom film, Être et avoir. The Guardian today meets the director to find out the story behind the film, check it out if you are curious.

Top of the class

Tuesday May 27th, 2008

Lanie Goodman, The Guardian

When the French director Laurent Cantet put up posters in Dolto College, a secondary school in a rough, working-class neighbourhood of Paris, to advertise castings for his film Entre les Murs (The Class), little did he imagine that the 25 adolescents who made the cut would later be standing beside him, grinning dazedly under the glaring stage lights as he accepted the 2008 Palme d’Or award. Sunday night’s ceremony marked the first time in 21 years that a French film has won the Cannes festival’s most coveted prize. In the spirit of jury president Sean Penn’s professed desire to make Cannes “the opposite of the Oscars”, Cantet’s film is the perfect win. It’s two hours of docu-fiction packed with rapid-fire, slangy dialogue, chronicling life in a Paris classroom where silence is anything but golden. How could Penn – who made his name as a class troublemaker in 1982’s Fast Times at Ridgemont High – possibly resist?

ghost world

Ghost World by Daniel Clowes has been the only comic book so far from the library that I haven’t enjoyed completely. It was a pretty strong reaction as well, as while reading the book I felt an almost physical urge to put it down. I had to think about why this was so for quite a while before realizing that far from the book being bad, it was instead too good.

I’ll explain. The book follows the lives of two teenaged girls in smalltown America somewhere. Its anonymity is key to the atmosphere as the girls don’t feel they are anywhere nor are they going anywhere quickly. They spend their summer holidays mocking the people around them as freaks, while trying to figure out their own place in the world, sex, college and all.

The book conveys their despondent, cynical take on life all too well, and I think that it just didn’t gel with my mood right now. Perhaps if I’d read it in the depths of a grey wet autumn day I might have identified better with it and consequently ‘enjoyed’ it more. And despite my misgivings about the storyline, I really thought the line drawings were excellent and beautiful in their own way.

I do have to say towards the end of the book the girls did start to show more of their true selves, and after all the smart talkback and wisecracks it was all the more touching. Maybe I did enjoy it after all. Let me know if you find and read it?

send us a snap

Those of you who fancy yourselves as photographers can send your shots in to a weekly competition that the Guardian holds called ‘Send us a snap‘. The rest of us can enjoy a fun, often out of the ordinary picture once a week. The photos are accompanied by a good critique by the judges, very enlightening as to what makes a good shot and why. Inspiration for my own holiday snaps!

This was the winning entry a few weeks back, of jellybean children chasing jellybean butterflies in a sculpure by Sandy Skogland at the National Liberty Museum in Philadelphia. I was slightly disturbed to read the artist’s intention, namely that the piece should ‘remind us that we’re all the same inside regardless of the color of our skin.’ I don’t think I’m made of a sugary mass but oh, wait, I’m not a jellybean person! Phew.