svanurp

I just took part in a survey on who are the best and worst best actor winners at the Oscars. The film blog I read the most, Edward Copeland on Film, was compiling the survey and today they released the results of the worst best actor winners. Four of my five choices were in the top ten, so either I was not very original or these performances just really weren't that great. Here are my votes for each category with the comments I sent in.

Worst Actor
1. Roberto Benigni (La Vita e Bella)
-I thought the nomination was a joke and was simply infuriated when he won.
2. Dustin Hoffman (Rain Man)
-One of those annoyingly mannered performances. Hoffman has done a lot of great acting but he is much better playing normal people.
3. Lee Marvin (Cat Ballou)
-A comedy performance but still overacted and in the long run, not that funny.
4. Russell Crowe (Gladiator)
-The oscar success of this film was weird and I don't remember walking out of the theater thinking anything positive about it, even Crowe's acting, which normally is high caliber.
5. Charlton Heston (Ben-Hur)
-Heston has done some good work but he is mannered in this film and simply gets annoying after a while, which is not a good thing in a film of this length.

Best Actor
1. Daniel Day-Lewis (My Left Foot)
-A role like this would so often be overdone and overacted, but Lewis makes you forget the actor as a presence (which he has not managed to do in Gnags of New York and There Will Be Blood). Simply an astounding performance.
2. Marlon Brando (On the Waterfront)
-It's a classic, solidified the legend after his oscar was robbed by Bogart a couple of years earlier.
3. Peter Finch (Network)
-In a sea of great acting, Finch's performance stands out and his chant throughout the film sticks in your mind for year afterwards.
4. Paul Scofield (A Man For All Seasons)
-The performance is very theatrical, granted, but Scofield's poise and dignity shine through in a subtle way that perfectly fits the character of Thomas More.
5. Dustin Hoffman (Kramer vs. Kramer)
-Here is a great performance by Hoffman. He does everything right in this role of the single father trying to get to know his son.

So Ingmar passed away at the age of 89 last Monday. He was and really still is my all time favorite movie director. Below is a clip from one of his films, actually the opening of my personal favorite Bergman film, Cries and Whispers, or Viskningar och rop.



Note the slow pace and extreme closeups to make you feel as if there is no escape from the images he wants to show you.
This film also shows the impeccable framing of shots I so admired in his films as well the beautiful cinematography by Sven Nykvist (he won an Oscar for this film)l.

If only somebody came along to make as powerful films today as Bergman did in the 1960s and 1970s. Any suggestions as to who might take over from Bergman as being "the world's greatest living director," as Roger Ebert called him a couple of years ago?

So tonight I am going to see Sonic Youth perform Daydream Nation in Brooklyn. I have never seen them before and it will be nice to see them perform old stuff. Sometimes that will just mean that they are playing golden oldies but this album is a classic and they are doing an entire tour were they are playing it. So it should be really good.

I'll practically be going with the Vandelles since it is I, Lish, Dave, Jason and Sue. I'm not sure whether Sue's boyfriend Ollie will be going too, but then it would simply be the Vandelles and the two guys who are always at their shows. In short, it should be a good night in Brooklyn.

I know I haven't posted here for almost a year, but I still like this better than myspace since only my friends really know about this place. I'll try writing a bit more often around here in the future, but for now, a bit of news for those who don't know.

I will be moving out of the wonderful house I have been living in at the end of this month. My professor will be returning from her year leave so I needed a new place for August. I am moving in with the wonderful Lisha as well as her two kitties, SheRa and Puck. Lish and I already have a new place around two or three minutes away from where I live now so the move will be easy for sure. I just have to find a way to store all the books I have, mostly because Lish is also a book fetishist and we will have a ridiculous amounts of books for the cats to knock around and off the shelves.

The apartment is a two bedroom apartment so we plan to have one room just for our desks and books. The first office I will have in my life, but alas a shared one. That is something to be expected for a first office. What scholar hasn't had to share in their first one?

I have a bunch of pictures I should post and I'll definitely put up new pictures when Lisha and I have managed to settle in a bit.

P.S. I am staying in the US this summer. I probably won't be back in Iceland until Christmas.

So I am in Berlin!

I have been here for almost two weeks now after a short stint in Iceland with the lovely Lisha. In Iceland I had better things to do than update this journal and my computer wasn't to happy in its first trip to Germany. The first day in the archives it was implying homesickness and on the second day it just died. The problem? The hard drive was done for (or kaputt as they say in German). So it took a week to get the thing fixed and I of course needed an entire evening to download all kinds of programs and windows updates. Not the most fun I have had in my life I must say.

But now everything is better. I am sitting in a Biergarten (if somebody has trouble understanding this word, it is your own fault) about two minutes from where I am staying. I am staying with an Icelandic woman in Charlottenburg, close to Kurfürstendamm, a room that Solla rented when she was working for the Icelandic embassy here in Berlin earlier this year.

Research didn't get to a good start. I actually dropped my project on Benjamin britten's War Requiem two days into the research because there was almost nothing to be found and what I found made me realize that it would never amount to a decent paper. Since then i have been working in a lesbian archive called Spinnboden and I believe I only have one binder of sources to go through for this research. I am working on a paper for my European Seminar. I will be looking at the connection between socialism and the gay rights movement in West Berlin in the early 1970s. If you want to laugh, just go ahead but this is really interesting stuff which I will prove in my paper.

On Thursday I am going back to my German roots, a place also known as Tübingen. there I plan to meet with Solla, my old roommate Frank and also my old mentor at the university there, Jan Plamper. I really look forward to going back there, go to Neckarmüllr for their wonderful Biergarten, their own brew of Hefeweizen and the amazing Flammkuchen (a kind of a pizza with sour cream, smoked ham and green onion). I also plan to buy two sixes of Rothaus Tannenzäpfle to bring back with me to the US. I hope it still tastes as good as my memory has made me believe the last three years.

It has been hot as hell here in berlin since I got here. Finally it is cooling off a bit. Again I am followed by a heatwave during my European excursions. Earlier this spring I was making a joke about going back to Europe and that there would definitely be a heatwave. Well, maybe I should have kept my mouth shut because it was rather unbearable here the first week and a half. I was almost wishing for New Jersey temperatures and humidity again, simply because of the air conditioner in my room. I do admit that a certain person was also pulling my thoughts in that direction constantly.

I wasn't smart enough to get Lisha's digital pictures onto my computer before he left for the US but all I can say is that it was as perfect a last week with her I can imagine. We saw some sights, had some fun and she managed to meet most of my friends and some of the family, and they all liked each other. One of the high points I thought was when Lisha decided to spend her last 500 krónur on buying Helgi Hrafn a beer at Ölstofan, because she thought he was a blast and it is also in her feminist nature too buy guys beer instead of the other way around.

I also got other good new yesterday. Vanessa and I have probably found the third roommate for Suzanne Lebsock's place. Another graduate student from Rutgers who is studying Women's Studies. I think she will be the perfect addition to our little gathering and I can't describe how much I look forward to the coming school year.

That is it for now. The computer is back and I hope I manage to write a few lines again before I leave Germany.

So my first 4th of July in the United States. So far I haven't noticed anything drastically different than normal (since I haven't left the house yet, or my room to be exact), I just guess that everything is closed like on June 17th in Iceland. Never really enjoyed that day, just remember that my mom and me used to just hang out and see a movie or something. In later years we've had a beer together or something.

But what am I up to today? I am going to Brooklyn to see Lisha's band play a show. It will be a barbecue and music and fireworks so I am looking forward to a pretty decent 4th of July. Maybe I should get ready since I have a train to catch in less than an hour and a half.

But, yes. Updates on the traveling schedule. Lisha and I will be arriving in Iceland on Saturday morning, really early at 6.20. She will stay just over a week, leaving the next Saturday while I will leave the next day to go to Berlin. I was planning to get together with some friends on Saturday evening when we arrive but petrakhov has been implying that people might go to Siglufjörður instead to listen to some old folk songs. Then other people have implied that they might go out camping in Reykholt that weekend. So I have discovered a well organized plot against me.

So, whoever is in town, want to hang out and have some beer on Saturday evening with me and Lisha?

Nú er spurning, hverjir verða á landinu dagana 8. júlí til 16. júlí? Þá mun ég heiðra landann með nærveru minni. Aldrei að vita nema að leynigestur muni fljóta með í för.

In around nine hours I am off to San Francisco with a very pretty girl. I'll be there for six days and I can't wait because I have never been to the West Coast, or the Pacific or to California. I might even take a short ride to Berkeley while I'm at it just to check out the campus of that famous university. Too bad that Viðar has moved from SF because he would have been a perfect tour guide.

Instead I got Andrew Daily to give me pointers on what to do and what to see (as well as what touristy things to avoid). He grew up in San Francisco so he knows it pretty well.

I hope to upload some pictures from the trip onto this site and I will let people know when that happens. I will have free WiFi at the hotel we are staying at.

Better finish packing a find myself a flower to put in my hair tomorrow.

A fellow graduate student pointed out to me a website yesterday. It's dedicated to a magazine that was published between 1965 and 1971. The website has everything that was in every issue published and after spending two hours browsing the material I came to the conclusion that this was without a doubt the greatest magazine ever published!!!

I'm just ashamed of myself that I had never heard of it before. The good thing was that Lisha had never heard of it either. It's called Aspen.

Yesterday I went to Rite Aid with Matt to invest in some fine whiskey. I had decided not only to buy 18 year old Highland Park for $69.99 but also some 12 year old Redbreast for $44.99. The Highland Park was a recommendation from Viðar and I remember the Redbreast since I bought that for my mom when I was in Dublin a couple of years back.

So. Whiskey for $115 dollars. I actually didn't pay that much because when I got out an checked my receipt I saw that the cashier had made a mistake and had only charged me $0.69 for the Highland Park. I do admit that I became ethically challenged and Aristotle would not have been proud of me. But Matt and I both agreed that it really is a great whiskey.

I must admit that I find it harder this semester than last to sit down and write an essay. I've been struggling to sit down and write a 7-8 page essay for one of my courses now for a week. I finally started a couple of minutes ago and I'm expecting a long night to get as much done as I can. I know that I can easily finish it tomorrow as soon as I get started. For the same course I have been writing 2-3 page reaction papers about each week's reading but I don't know what my problem is.

It might be that I'm kind of partying more this semester than last. The history grads don't go out anymore so Thursday drinking has been minimized but now that I'm friends with more people outside the history department I seem to be able to find a party every weekend to go to. Last Friday I got home at five in the morning after a party at Adam's place.

I finally finished Italo Calvino's If on a Winter's Night a Traveller last week, highly recommended, and started reading Kazuo Ishiguro's Never Let Me Go the same night. Ishiguro's book is quite the page turner since I read over 50 pages after I started it and therefore didn't go to bed until 4.30 in the morning. Thank god I don't have morning classes anymore. I'd be a walking stiff.

Tomorrow is my reading group. I finished the Foucault on Friday and tomorrow morning I plan to read the Derrida chapter. Lisha i supposedly joining the group and last week I was looking for a copy of the Foucault for her since she was planning on reading it on her business trip to Boston. First I went to the Rutgers University bookstore where a woman in the textbook section tried to convince me that they had never had a book by Foucault in their section. My guess is that she never managed to spell Foucault correctly even though I spelled it for her five times. I also think she originally typed in Matness instead of Madness, don't ask me why. When I went to the regular bookstore section the woman there managed to spell his last name correctly but then asked me whether SHE had written anything else than Madness and Civilization. She had typed in Michelle Foucault instead of Michel. After experiencing such idiocy I went to the Olive Branch with Matt for Happy Hour. I sure was in need of a beer then.

Apart from that, life is treating me well. One last thing. The world is small as most people have realized. Brian Jonestown Massacre is a semi-famous band here in the US. Einar Sonic's (12 tónar employee) band Singapore Sling have toured with Brian Jonestown Massacre and is good friends with the band leader Anton. Lisha's band, The Vandelles, are touring with Brian Jonestown next month in Texas. I always find these coincidences a bit weird. Better get to work.

I guess a lot of you people have seen these but if not... Here is an article about the current trend of making spoof trailers. It also has links to a couple.

http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=5200607

I still think the one on The Shining is by far the best. The Brokeback ones are pretty predictable.

I rediscovered one of the greatest bands of recent years a couple of days ago. Realizing that I was alone in the house with my Bose stereo, I deided to play a bit of loud music. There is hardly anything better than Godspeed You Black Emperor! on a Sunday afternoon, especially Motherfucker Redeemer (Part I) off Yanqui U.X.O.

I think I'm finally getting the hang of planning my reading for this semester. I even think I can finish the reading for Thursday tonight, which would be great. Maybe I could then watch Saraband, Bergman's latest film, later this week.

Cachè was really good. I highly recommend it. To be honest I wasn't that crazy about the film after I walked out but it makes you think and the next day the clues you should have seen come pouring in and it makes much more sense. It's very slow, there is no soundtrack but still manages to be quite shocking. I went to a bar in Princeton after the film with Lisha and there is an obvious difference between the college kids in Princeton and those in New Brunswick. That difference is money. I'm not saying that the Princeton people were directly arrogant or anything like that, you just felt the difference.

Went to New York on Saturday to a birthday party. Haven't been as drunk since I got back to the US. Good thing this does not happen every weekend. It's also really different being drunk in another city and having to get yourself home instead of being in walking distance from your place, even though it's a thirty minute walk. That I have done on numerous occasions. In New York you have to remember the last train back and when drunk that could become a problem.

Better get ready, meeting Bonnie Smith in an hour and then going to the third and final job talk at the department. We have an opening for a modern British historian and since I went to the first two talks, there is no reason for me to skip the third and final one. I also have to read a book for next week by the person giving the talk today, Slumming by Seth Koven.

On Tuesday I sat down for a chat with Bonnie Smith to talk about classes and future projects. Bonnie has the amazing ability to come up with amazing ideas of what I can do but hen I leave her office I am both thrilled but at the same time scared to death of taking on the project. If a project for a simple seminar scares me, how the hell am I going to come up with an idea for a dissertation topic which won't leave me paralyzed?

Semester looks good, the teachers are all great and later this month a couple of grad students are planning on meeting for our reading group. The first reading is Foucault's Madness and Civilization as well of Derrida's critique of it in Writing and Difference.

Tomorrow I plan to go to Princeton to see Michael Haneke's new film Cachè and then wander around Princeton and grab perhaps a beer or two. The only time I've been to Princeton was simply to walk to the Princeton Record Exchange from the bus stop and then directly back to the bus stop. Looking forward to it.

Over the past few years I have always had one film that has had the status of: The film that I most want to see in this world. The list was originally started I think in 1997 when Lacombe, Lucien took the spot. I bought the film in Paris in 1998 but without subtitles and on Secam, that ridiculous idea of the French as a alternative to PAL. Since the film was impossible to find I just thought that I would probably learn French one day and then I could watch it. The next year Lacombe, Lucien was superseded by Cries and Whispers. That didn't last long since Þórarinn Eldjárn bought me a copy from Sweden. Still one of the best films I have ever seen. Mid-through my Bergman mania another film took the top seat and has been there now for about six years. That is Face to Face. It has been completely impossible to find that film. I remember when I was in Tübingen I was even getting help from a Swedish teacher film buff who sent an email to Svensk filmindustri requesting a copy saying that he intended to teach it in class. I never heard from the teacher with any updates. So the list has been unchanged for the last six years, Face to Face at the top and Lacombe, Lucien in second.

What happens now? Lacombe, Lucien will be released on DVD in the States on March 14. I found a recent online store which sells DVD-R copies of hard to find films (I guess there must be something illegal about this) and one of the films they're selling is Face to Face. It's probably a transfer of a VHS but what the hell do I care as long as I get to se the film. I ordered it instantly, along with Utvandrarna, so now it is all in the mail.

My problem is, what the hell do I put on my list now? I have always had some film that I have simply been dying to see and if I can easily find everything, then there is no suspense, no excitement, no meaning.

This second week of school was not of my highest standards. My first week was mostly spent with friends, hanging out, having a couple of beers and so on, so I hardly got any work done. This is in close connection to having a different schedule of classes. I must now plan when I will be doing a reading for each course. As well as me just wanting to have fun with friends.

Apart from that, I am happy to be back. I mentioned in an earlier entry that I thought that this year would be great, better than the last two at least. Not that those years were bad or that I was unhappy. Those that know me should have realized by now that I almost tend to be overpositive about things. But I do admit that this year has started in the best way I could have wished for. So yours truly is genuinely happy.

Finally got the first DVD of season 4 of the best TV show on television, The Shield. Now I know how I am spending 12 hours of this first week of mine in the US. Everyone must watch The Shield. You're not going to regret it.

Haven't posted a thing on here for a while. Reason? I'm back in Iceland and my internet access here is awful to say the least. Now sitting at my normal cafe/bar in Reykjavík, Prikið which can also be seen as an American diner in the film A Little Trip to Heaven.

The holiday season was filled with constant dinner parties, eight in nine days, so I haven't been able to relax much. After the dinner craze I finally finished my Women and Gender final essay and now I'm working on my little quiz show. I will have no time off on this so-called vacation.

It's been fun being back; great seeing a lot of my friends again. After I flew in on the 23rd, jet lagged of course, I decided to try and stay awake the entire day. I could hardly walk most of the day because I was so tired but managed to wake up again around midnight when I went out for a beer with a couple of friends. What happened was that more and more friends stopped by and decided to buy me beer. So my christmas eve was characterized by me being still rather tired and a bit hung over as well. No reason to waste time in getting back into the Icelandic mode.

Coming back here has of course been a bit weird. I try to compare this to when I got back from Germany for christmas. That wasn't as weird though since I always knew I was only living there temporarily. Now I have moved to the US for many years and I feel like I don't live here anymore. I have also made closer friends in the US than I did in Germany and I miss many of them, some more than others of course. So I kind of can't wait to get back to New Brunswick.

I have also had trouble concentrating here, took me more than a week to remember what I normally did here to get myself to do some work. Things are getting better now though, which is good because I really need to get a lot of work done.

And what about the new year? I think 2006 is going to be great. 2004 was characterized by a break-up and finishing my BA. 2005 was better with me working for the first half of the year and then going to Rutgers in the fall. One of the best decisions I have ever made. Now I will be a student for the entire year, doing something that I'm really interested in, and can hang out with the wonderful friends I have made. Things are looking good.

Var narrraður síðasta sumar til að lofa því að skrifa grein á Hugsandi.is og samþykkti ég þar sem ég þekki vel til beggja ritstjóra. Ég hafði upphaflega lofað því að senda pistil inn í byrjun október eða nóvember en sökum leti gerði ég það aldrei. Til að losna við ýtnina í Kela settist ég því niður í dag og rumpaði þessu af. Ég var settur undir flokkinn: Póstur að utan.