the gaudiest, most valuable, and most improbable water wheel

Friday 24 December 1999, 11.25

I'm boycotting Christmas this year. This is, of course, impossible (at least as long as I'm not celebrating Ramadan instead, which I'm not), but reducing the amount of unnecessary Christianity seems like a good idea. Anyway I have a cold, so I'm not up to any strenuous activity. If I sleep through the whole thing it'll only do me good. I've had breakfast and I'm listening to Petter's 'Bananrepubliken' on the stereo. I've been thinking about what I dislike about Christmas. Why do parents lie to their children about Santa Claus? It seems a really odd thing to do in a culture that values rationality and truth and stuff like that. The weather is overcast but blowy. Slushy but there's some snow left under the trees. My thermometer says it's 3.8 degrees C outside. An inauspicious start to this blog. Things can only get better.

Friday 24 December 1999, 15.45

It's pretty much entirely dark outside. Out there in the Rest of Sweden, christmas foodstuffs are being consumed and people are watching Donald Duck on TV. I'm listening to Stereolab's 'Peng' and eating small flavoured fromage frais things. I've talked to two people today: my mum, and L, who rang up about an hour ago. Oddly enough the difference between this December 24th and the last one seems small. Everything is strangely understated. Somebody at my ISP has filled the disk that my web stuff is on. So we'll see whether you, dear audience, get anything much to read before Monday.

Friday 24 December 1999, 21.30

I found a copy of Cliff Richard's 'Millennium prayer' among my Christmas presents. Tomorrow I'll ask the misguided relative in question just why she thought I should have it (it's as bad as you'd expect - Cliff combines the lord's prayer with Auld Lang Syne and manages to drag them both down to the level of 'Mistletoe and wine'). My current plan is to ceremonially destroy the thing. I went for a walk. I could have done with my skates, actually: the air may be warm but the ground's icy. Lots of attractive ice-covered cliffs by the roadside, and not very many people around. In here again it's quiet except for the wind buffetting the windows. The plan for tomorrow is to go and see 'Fight Club', but as usual I expect that if it wasn't for Brad Pitt I wouldn't be interested. Especially as it sounds like it'll be an uncomfortable experience.

Saturday 25 December 1999, 10.30

So, it turns out that the misguided relative in question was anything but misguided in sending me the Cliff Richard CD. It was indeed in a spirit of fin-de-siècle irony that motivated the present, and the whole point of the thing was that I should have fun getting rid of it in spectacular fashion. Phew. I knew I could trust her better judgement. I'm half-listening to P3's Spanarna on the radio right now and in a post-breakfast sort of way it's quite pleasant here, despite the unremittingly grey weather outside. I made it through yesterday without getting either too nostalgic about last year or too lonely. My cold is getting better. I can write small pathetic details like this here without anyone complaining. It's kinda cool. The plan is still to go and see 'Fight Club'. Maybe I can use that as an excuse to subject you to some feminism.

Saturday 25 December 1999, 19.30

I figured that (however much one might like Brad Pitt) 'Fight Club' was just going to be another Intelligent Violent Film For Guys so I went to see Jane Campion's 'Holy Smoke' instead. Dirty old man (Harvey Keitel) versus cute (but strong!) young thing (Kate Winslet), this time played out in the outback somewhere near Wee Waa, with a colourful supporting cast. I like a complicated film, and this one certainly had a fair few layers of stuff to think about. Winslet's character is not the deluded and drugged-up cult member her family wants to believe she is, but nor is she the forthright and clued-up Alanis Morissette fan either (as I want to believe she is), it seems. It's a fun film - plenty of laughs at the expense of the usual targets - but it cops out and we get an unsatisfactory happy end of a sort we didn't need. Skipping the last ten minutes would have put us in 'Thelma and Louise' territory, but that might have been preferable. Today's Aftonbladet has a feature on guys who wear skirts. One of whom I've actually met. I use my sarong almost exclusively as a computer-cover for three reasons: (1) it actually makes quite an attractive computer cover, (2) if I wear it, people ask me whether it's a kilt (cue The Kilt Conversation, yawn), and (3) I'm way too scared of really challenging gender roles.

Sunday 26 December 1999, 18.30

Today's plan (inasmuch as today had a plan) was to go ice-skating, and to do some planning. I decided to skip the skating, partly because of the remains of this cold, partly because it's a pain humping the skates all the way into town for a quarter of an hour one the ice, and today I wanted to take my camera (okay, it's A's camera, 'bout time I got mine repaired and returned it to her) and take some pictures. Which I did. right now I'm interested in taking pictures of different sorts of greyness, and this time of year there's plenty to go around. It all started with a series of poster ads for one of the Swedish cable channels back in October - they featured pictures of just how dark and miserable the Swedish winter was going to be, and of course the pictures were absolutely beautiful, capturing just what's so fantastic about the winter and darkness and greyness in the city. I had a late lunch at Chokladkoppen, which was nice and cosy (with the dress rehearsal for the big millennium-night historical extravaganza going on outside - the whole of Gamla Stan is getting quite bizarre, gantries and floodlights and fake medieval huts all over the place) with waiters that are trained to look sultrily at you and make anyone over, oh, I dunno, 25? feel like a gay version of Harvey Keitel. Rounded the afternoon of with a (return) visit to the record shop to buy Gloria's eponymous LP. Met N and F there and noticed that three days of living on my own really does take its toll on my ability to converse. Ho hum. The Gloria CD is just the right sort of countrypop Swedish melancholy to play while getting slightly miserable about such and other things. Maybe I'll skip the planning too - I need to be in a better mood before I can think much about flat-hunting and my career and what late Christmas presents to buy people and so on.

Sunday 26 December 1999, 21.30

So, my favourite music from this year (singles and album tracks department). Fifteen years ago I got credit for my Sixth Year Studies maths for doing a chart sorting program in BASIC for a Sinclair Spectrum. This lot comes courtesy of a little thing I did in Perl with the assistance of FreeBSD and, well a lot of my own head's CPU time.

Antique 'Opa opa' Probably the best pop song of the 1990s. It's in Greek. They come from Gothenburg. Nikos is cute (but I didn't find that out until long after I fell in headoverheelsinlove with the single).
Christian Falk featuring Robyn 'Remember' Christian Falk is an old rocker turned soul and hiphop producer. This one is a complex, beautiful love song.
Christian Falk featuring Demetreus 'Make it right' Another one from Falk's 'Quel bordel' LP. An uncomplex, straight-to-the-hips danceable love song.
Tarkan 'Simarik' Actually I'd been dancing to this one (at Häcktet, of course) since the summer of 1998. Turkey's king of pop.
Blues 'Andra sidan (bortom dimmhöljet)' The new wave of Swedish hiphop, and the voice of its conscience, Blues. Sends shivers down your spine.
Robyn 'Main thing' The best and most insistent track from her album 'My truth'. Robyn is both soul diva and girl next door.
Tom Jones and the Cardigans 'Burning down the house' One of those covers that are better than the original.
Antique 'Dinata dinata' Amazingly the follow-up to Opa opa was almost as catchy and wonderful.
Petter featuring Eye-n-I 'Saker & ting' Vad händer mannen? Saker och ting börjar röra sig! (What's happening man? Objects and things are starting to move!)
DJ Mendez 'Estocolmo' In the future, all the best Swedish party music will be in Spanish, like this one.

Monday 27 December 1999, 06.45

Back to work, back to the Project. Not before time, really - the last three days feels like quite enough holiday for the moment. Besides, I used up all this year's holiday days quite a while ago. Last night I was thinking yet again about volunteering for some Y2K job, but it's not clear what useful I could do. Oh, I read a chunk of 'Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone'. Geek hero, huh. Right now I'm not sure I see what the fuss about these books is about. Talk to yous later.

Monday 27 December 1999, 21.40

Well if the millennium frenzy has hit the big telco I work for, it's keeping it from me. Indeed, it's rumoured that there'll be less New Years Night-support than planned, because they just don't think anything particular is going to happen. Unless the virus-writes and the crackers and the terrorists get going (they may also, you know, be too plastered on champagne and beer to care), it'll be the large companies in the developing countries and the small companies in the industrialised world that find they can't pay people. Then maybe there'll be trouble. But it looks as though people like me doing Terribly Significant Things (like writing shortlived weblogs [the link-starved among you might like to check out the millennial festivities in Stockholm's home page, which is otherwise hard to locate]) might be wasting our time. Well, FSVO 'wasting'. :-) After next week, it's going to be hard to remember what it was like to only have lived in the 1900s. Like listening to Gloria's wonderful 'Don't ask' and trying to remember what it was like the first dozen times I heard it on the radio and didn't much like it. Or how it felt those first days at work when I couldn't find my way around. Or the first time I set eyes on L, or A, and didn't really know who they were. Or how Swedish sounds when you can't understand any of it. Or what I thought Andrew meant by what you could do with xmosaic before I knew what the web was. Today's Metro reported that there's a syphilis 'epidemic' going on in Oslo at the moment. Almost all cases are connected to 'homosex circles' in the city, and of course sauna clubs (banned in Sweden in 1987 in a fit of moral panic) are blamed. Nice angle, news agency TT! In other news, this year's biggest-selling Christmas present was the new translation of the Bible. Just in case you thought this fin-de-siecle (last time I use that phrase, promise) business was all fun and games.

Tuesday 28 December 1999, 06.55

Aftonbladet this morning has some nice examples of which sort of feminist you might like to become. For me, Nina Björk is god, of course.

Tuesday 28 December 1999, 19.40

The temperature's dropped to zero and it's SNOWING! One happy Robert. Suitably inspired, I've been doing some flat-hunting. The market in Stockholm seems to be insane - the only reliable way of getting hold of something is to buy, and that's out of reach for me at the moment. Renting is tough too, there are so few places advertised, they are taken as soon as they make the web. (Over there at Bostad Direkt, you can see which ones I'm missing.) So I relented and designed my self a really nice Wanted Ad and have just been out posting it in various places. A vain gesture, maybe, but better than nothing. And here's another:

ÖNSKAS HYRA Skötsam, rökfri kille
(som skriver en webbdagbok
men är annars helt okej) vill hyra
en 1:a eller en 2:a
i Stockholm eller närförort
omgående!
Mejla Robert.

Wednesday 29 December 1999, 19.40

So it'll be A's place on Friday night then. A very small party it'll be, but a party nonetheless. What's more, it turns out I'll be bringing along the bottle that's currently languishing in my cleaning cupboard. It's a Moet and Chandon which I got given in celebration of 4 years in Sweden, and, well, it's been languishing, gathering dust and not getting drunk for about a year and a half. Bit like me, really. It must be about time to get in those emergency rations now - food and water for a few days, I read in the Washington Post today. Water for a few days. Maybe I should just run the bath and let it stand... Nobody in Sweden seems terribly worried - my suspicion is that, as long as the storms don't jigger the electricity networks, most of the trouble here will start on Monday or so. This blog will continue, even if the entire internet goes down (or even just my modem). Just mail me your postal address and I'll copy out the handwritten version and send it to you in a Y2K-safe envelope. You've seen paper media migrate onto the web, now see the whole thing in reverse.

Thursday 30 December 1999, 21.55

Stockholm is icy cold. I was back in the Old Town, now even more cram-full of people in medieval costume and ordinary Stockholmers in warm coats and woolly hats there to watch whatever's going on. Pop historian Herman Lindqvist seems to be the star of the show, telling about the city's history every night at half past six. I missed him, though: A and I were at Mandus having some food and drink and watching our friends the bar staff getting even more stressed at all the Herman fans who come in and order Irish Coffee and Glühwein. I don't think I said that I have to be out of this flat on January 16th. I thought finding another place would be easy - I was way wrong. Especially considering how stupid I've been doing things like writing a weblog when I should be making sure I have a roof over my head. Talking to A about it all I realise that 17 days is really, really tight and I had better get my, um, skates on. The thing that gets me most is that I didn't want to tell all my friends and enlist their help, I wanted to do it all myself. But it's like looking for a job, the whole point is to trust my friends enough to help me. Otherwise they get the worst of it when I'm homeless and unhappy and all what. I was taught to be antisocial - what do you think I'm doing on the net? :-o. Talked to my mum for the last time this year. Mentioned about there maybe being problems with electricity and water. Which she hadn't been worrying about - oops. Well at least I said nothing about nuclear power stations and missiles and terrorist attacks and computer viruses. Not that I'm worried about those. Oh no. I'm quite calm. Quite, quite calm. And really relieved that I'm not going to be on my own when it all happens tomorrow night.

Friday 31 December 1999, 11.45

So Boris Yeltsin is retiring, they say on the radio. One of the things they said about Y2K problems was that, come New Year's Night, everything unusual that happens will be interpreted as a Y2K problem. No without a two-figure date variable in sight, Boris soes his bit to make the whole thing more exciting. Wonder of anyone else has anything up their sleeves. I went out shopping, and saw no signs whatsoever of panic-buying. The usual New Year soft drinks and crisps and so on. Nothing odd at all. Talking of nothing odd at all, I find it kind of comforting to realise just how unremarkable today 'really' is. The calendar I (and all those computers) go by is pretty arbitrary, and there are masses of other ways of reckoning years out there. People celebrate New Years (the Chinese and Jewish ones, for example, or the Kurdish, or the Cambodian) at other, umm, times of the year. And they're not always much of an occasion to celebrate. I think I've grown up assuming that the whole world celebrates New Year (and Christmas, for that matter) at the same time, and in the same way. Take that away, look at the pseudo-christian New Year as just another stupid-but-fun little festival, and I think we'll be onto something. Talked to L last night. Last year it was Finland, it was me and him and A and our Finnish friends at the start of 1999. In a minute New Zealand goes all 2000.

Friday 31 December 1999, 13.40

So in a while I'm going to look at a flat. I found it on the map, and it's a long way away, but the owner sounded quite pleasant on the phone. She wants it taken tomorrow - I would really like to get something sorted out fast. It's still -7 degrees C outside, cold and clear and snowy and really very beautiful in that wintry way I like best. Travelling to a suburb I've never heard of before seems to be a good thing to do today. I washed some clothes in case the laundry isn't Y2K-safe. I filled a couple of bottles with tap water, put them in the fridge. So far there's been nothing on the radio about problems in New Zealand. The war in Chechnya continues. Most of the voices I hear on the radio are men.

Friday 31 December 1999, 16.30

Copied out from my blue notebook: I'm on the train back from the flat I was looking at. It's even colder now, and almost completely dark. The flat was really nice, too small for all my furniture, but with a gorgeous view and plenty quiet. I think I gave the right sort of impression of being reliable, interesting, pleasant and relaxed. In other words I didn't shout 'I am an immigrant and I am gay and so politically correct you ought to be afraid of me!' Hm, which is me, I wonder... Anyway I hope I get chosen to rent the flat. Just to be able to stop worrying.

Friday 31 December 1999, 17.55

Soon I'll be out of here and on the way to the small party at A's place. I'll take my blue notebook with me and write stuff. Maybe tomorrow it'll be possible to connect up to the net and write things. Certainly I've been listening to the radio all day and the only news has been about Boris Yeltsin and Vladimir Putin. There have been two power cuts in the Stockholm area, but the electricity company claims they're routine. Ha. We'll see about that.

Saturday 1 January 2000, 19.15

So nothing very much happened. I slept on a mattress at A's place after the little party, and couldn't get over the way the bathroom light worked, and the water came out of the tap, and when I got home again there was a message on my answering machine from two o'clock this morning. Amazing. Anyway, I met A's friend (also called A, since I'm restricting myself to initials to protect the innocent) and the three of us got on just fine together. The food was good, the champagne got consumed at midnight, the fireworks were loud and spectacular, and it was bloody cold on the balcony watching them. We watched some tv coverage from various places in the world. Some of it was even reasonably good - clearly the best bit was Björk singing 'The Anchor Song' from the Icelandic celebration, in icelandic. Shivers down the spine. The Stockholm celebration looks like it was a lot of fun, more than half the city's population out in the ten degrees below having a good time. The tv seemed to like pictures of the sun coming up on the first morning. Especially with dancers in silhouette representing humanity. The BBC finished off their otherwise rather nice montage of New Year footage with just such a scene: Sun Rises. Man Appears, Stretches, Muscles Flexing. Reaches Over to Right, Pulls up Woman with Long Hair. They Embrace. Just in case anyone was under the illusion that the old millennium's standard gender roles are going to disappear any time soon. Bleaugh. I came through the Old Town on my way home this afternoon. It didn't seem to have sunk into the sea after 700 000 people jumping up and down to keep warm on it. The odd leftover pile of champagne bottles and the smell of stale alcohol, curious natives and tourists wandering around getting a feel for the new year with all those zeroes at the end of it. Back to what passes for normality for me, though: another flat to look at. Closer to here, but dearer and not so nice. No kitchen, just a microwave and a fridge.

Sunday 2 January 2000, 18.50

Sent a couple of carefully-worded (and, I hope, mildly entertaining) mails to two of the mailing lists I'm on, asking for flathunting leads. Gotta use what means I have, you know - this means using my friends and acquaintances. Wish I didn't have to, but in some weird way we're all in this messy life together, and if I'm ready to help other folks out when they have (say) flat trouble, I suppose it's reasonable to give them a shout when things get hairy for me. Down to the city for some ice-skating at Kungsträdgården. I left my hat at home, and it poured wet snow on my anything-but-winter-proof head. So I didn't skate for very long - apart from anything else I could barely see for the sleet on my glasses, and half the fun of skating at Kungsan is checking out other people. Over coffee at Svart Kaffe I read a lot of millennial crap in DN. Elderly blokes (doubtless the same age as me) observing that young people have no hope for the future, or that we in the West have lost our sense of Beauty. Sad sad sad. Not that I can offer much unbridled optimism myself - what do you expect from a flathunting rebound case like me? - but I'm definitely ready for what the new century has to offer. Today's phrase has to be '20th century rubbish - give me something new!'.

Sunday 2 January 2000, 20.40

I've been offered the flat I was looking at yesterday. In fact I've said yes to it - my new landlord, R, rang my up about an hour ago. Like I said, it's not a great place but it'll have to do for the moment. Beggars and choosers being the mutually exclusive categories that they are. So now I have to set the wheels in motion to get all my stuff out of here and over there. I guess I should be celebrating. Instead I just feel kind of empty and apprehensive. I've been in this place for three and a half years. Now it's time to move on. Whether I want to or not.

Monday 3 January 2000, 06.30

My head's full of the new flat and how I'm going to move everything over there. And all the decisions and non-decisions that have brought me here, to the first few days of this year, to this messy situation. Behind it all there's this constant amazement that it was only Gambia that had serious Y2K trouble, the electricity and the water (scuse me if I go on about this, I wasn't expecting it)... Meant to tell you about yesterday's musical highlight - Grand Tone Music on P3's New Year programme 'Y2K', playing a fantastic live version of Whitney Houston's 'My love is your love'. Ostensibly because the CD player had been the victim of the millennium bug. A little gem.

Monday 3 January 2000, 20.30

I signed the contract, and paid the first rent for the new place. I'm not really happy with the place - would you live somewhere that didn't have a kitchen? - and on balance, this is one of my worse decisions. But it's this time of my life and I hope things will get better. Not so much 'beggars can't be choosers', more 'some people are so bad at choosing that they might as well be beggars'. Anyway, that's enough self-flagellation for now, and I have just drunk a celebratory bottle of Klass II Carnegie Porter, so to all intents and purposes, all's right with the world. The Millennium Bug - My Part in Its Downfall. Yup, a genuine Y2K problem turned up on our web-based fault reporting system today at work. Most exciting. Dates were being published as 100-01-03, which was way too long ago to be real. So I (being the only person much interested in Perl at our place) hacked in and fixed the thing. Well I'm no hacker and in general can't claim anything more than latent programming talent, but it was quite a marvellous feeling seeing the fixed dates, shining there in glorious HTML with the '2' and the zeroes all in the right places.

Tuesday 4 January 2000, 21.55

Not up to writing anything today. See you tomorrow.

Wednesday 5 January 2000, 19.35

Yesterday the whole moving thing really got to me, and I didn't feel anything like happy enough to write anything here. Now, armed with advice from my friends over at soc.motss, I've booked the removal people for next Wednesday, and I've got ten big fold-up cardboard boxes transported here for packing things in. I'm still the only person in our department who's solved a millennium bug this week. I heard the first good new music of the year - DJ Mendez again (see Dec 26 above), this time with 'Razor tongue'. More hard-hitting good-time Swedish pop in Spanish and English. Last time I looked, DJ Mendez had no web page. Why? (Note added 2000-04-04: Actually he does - here.) Looks like I'll be going out tonight to Stargayte, first time I've been to a gay club in months and months. My friend M will be there with a bunch of other people I know, and doubtless they'll all remark on how long it's been since they saw me. And how late I'm up.

Thursday 6 January 2000, 16.55

Stargayte was fun but very odd. Quite a small club, with a pleasant enough bar, and a clientele that was on average quite a bit older than me, and about 40% dykes. Which is always a good thing. It was very quiet at 10pm, then livened up a bit after twelve or so. M and I were joined by a bunch of our friends, H and D and P, and we exchanged millennial wisecracks and did the usual catching-up thing. Took a turn on the dance-floor, but only when the music got really good. Funny how La Belle Epoque's version of 'Black is black' sounds just as good now as it did in 1977 when I was ten. It'll be interesting to see whether the Antique songs sound as good in 23 years' time as they do now. I expect by that time I'll have learned enough Greek to understand them, which could make all the difference. I've started the packing process here, dividing things up into classes: Throw Out, Recycle, Box For Moving, Leave Here. The biggest job may be going through the plastic bags full of mostly-useless bits of paper and deciding what of it should be saved and what should go. I've taken down pictures from the wall and rolled up my mats; it's the stage where the symbolic gestures almost seem the most important.

Saturday 8 January 2000, 00.20

Friday, which finished just twenty minutes ago, was the last holiday day of the season. I used it to pack. I've now got three big boxes full of books and CDs (seven more to go) and I've been to the recycling station and the bottle bank with some of my accumulated detritus. J phoned me again and ended up being the recipient of my metre-high pile of Nöjesguiden, QX, Darling and Kom Ut! from the last five years or so. I flicked through some of them - these were papers and magazines I spent lots of time reading during the 1990s - but there were no pangs of nostalgia. I realised it would be fine to get rid of them. In the morning I informed the Address Change Service about my move. The guy on the other end of the phone was friendly and efficient - a big contrast to their website at www.adressandring.se. Another one of those sites that looks great but spews out JavaScript errors at you, erases your form entries when you press the Back button, and finishes with not accepting your entry because the program doesn't work. I suppose it makes a change from those sites I've been at that have really wonderful user-friendly searchable indexes of flats for rent - but completely empty databases. Either way, the user loses out. Anyway, I ended up going out for the third night in a row - something of a local record - this time to SideTrack bar with J. Drank orange juice. Got mildly alarmed by the number of gay men there. They looked like they were having more fun than the guys at Stargayte on Wednesday, anyway. For myself I feel kind of immune to the whole scene. I'm doubtless in denial of some sort, but what the hell.

Saturday 8 January 2000, 18.45

So I finally did go and see 'Fight Club', which you might remember me talking about on December 25th. And it was worth seeing, in a sort of a way. As in 'The Matrix', the violence is all dressed up in a sort of post-modern way, and the 1990s irony of it all allows them to make a film with only one woman in it and still come out of it not appearing grossly chauvinistic. It's quite a funny film - Edward Norton's character narrates in a Friday-supplement columnist sort of way, and he's an engaging travelling-companion. But I got the feeling I was watching a strip cartoon, or a Dilbert management book, or a newspaper article by some famous journalist, a parade of ideas rather than a film. In other ways it seemed like a re-run of 'Surrender Dorothy' - a terribly queer film dressed up as a straight one. 'Fight Club' is the ultimate straight-boy love story, and the ultimate (or maybe just the first) straight boy porn film. Maybe I've read too much about S&M (or not done enough of it), but the Fight Club in question looked to me as much like S&M sex, with safewords and all, as it did like bar-room brawls and boxing clubs and so on. That's what I mean by porn. The love story? Well, Edward Norton and Brad Pitt don't so much fall in love as coalesce. For me, right now, coalescence looks a lot more realistic to me than standard Romantic Love. But I wanted the credit card institutes to collapse on New Year's Eve too, so don't listen to me. And now it's back to the packing.

Sunday 9 January 2000, 22.25

Lots of things happened today, over and above the continuing packing activities. A friend of mine rang just before lunchtime to say that he's moving back to Stockholm soon. Not just a career move, this: he's no longer together with his boyfriend. Same boat as me, kind of, then. There wasn't much I could say - he sounded distant, not just because it was a bad line out there into the country. It's complicated, this business of living with and being together with other people. The more I do it, the more I'm surprised it works at all, ever. Specially such indefinite things as what goes under the name 'relationships'. I guess this blog (the last edition of which you are now reading) is a try at a short, well-defined, communication of some sort. Life isn't really like that, out there. Some things, however, just roll along, like me and A finding neat things to do in Stockholm. This time we were at the Nordic Museum to see the exhibition 'Tre sätt att se' (or 'Three ways of seeing'). Three women photographers, one Norwegian, one Swedish, one Latvian. An interesting thing happened with the first, Marie Høeg - I got the impression that she was a contemporary artist who'd put masses of effort into recreating turn-of-the-(last-)century photographs of herself and others, except in a bunch of playful, cheerful, gender-crossing roles. Marie as Drag King, if you like: Marie as a boy, Marie as a girl, Marie in undefinable roles. Plenty queer, and very refreshing, especially with all that period detail - she'd clearly gone to great effort to invent the story of herself the probably-lesbian photographer from Norway and the photographs turning up only a few years back, in a bag marked 'Private'... Then it suddenly dawned on me that while the other two artists were alive and well and using modern material and techniques, Marie Høeg really had lived at the end of last century. She died in 1949. She really was a lesbian. She really did dress up as a man for those pictures, and her 'unidentified' male friends who turned up in drag in some of the pictures, they really did exist in Norway one hundred years ago. And she really had had to keep those pictures secret. Wow! A truly fantastic bit of Nordic queer culture, years and years before Stockholm Pride and queer theory and gender-bending 1990s-style. Brilliant stuff. The exhibition is on until January 16th, 2000. Go see it, or at least check it out on the web. As if that wasn't enough, we took in the ABBA exhibition, also at the Nordic Museum. Marvellously done, a triumph of the Swedish sense of design, humour, honesty and pathos. Trinkets and costumes from the history of Agnetha, Frida, Benny and Björn, beautifully lit, the music providing the sound background, and selected apposite quotes printed on the walls, presented like so many small understated poems. OK, I may be part of the original ABBA generation, and maybe I grew up liking them, and maybe I turned out to be queer on top of that, but I was almost moved to tears. It just all felt right, somehow. I didn't get a lot of packing done this evening. J was up visiting the city from Gothenburg, and I grabbed half an hour with him and his friend J at Central Station before he left. We had coffee and, well, touched base or whatever 'touched base' is in British English. We didn't even talk hip hop. I haven't talked hip hop much in this blog either. Must remedy that somehow. Anyway, I'll see him again, there'll be other times. And finally, L phoned me up again. I told him all of the above, and he told me some of his stuff. So I feel happy. Now I'm going to bed, tomorrow it's work, on Wednesday I'm moving, then it's a few days cleaning and both me and my computer will be outta here (or whatever 'outta here', etc) by next Sunday. Thanks for reading. I have no idea who you are. Write and tell me.