The Spot 09 Festival begins today, so today and tomorrow I'll be hanging out downtown trying to spot the next The Raveonettes alongside hundreds of other kids in search of a new bandwagon to jump on. Last year's festival was incredible, and although I doubt this year will be quite as good it'll be fun just hanging out and meeting people. And since the thing is sold out, I'm expecting to see pretty much everyone and his brother down there.

There aren't a lot of bands I'm dying to see, but I'll probably check out Tiger Tunes, Kitty Wu, and Moi Caprice, and then just see however plays whenever. And tonight when the festival part is over the party should continue at Play, where Electro Clash heroes Separations will perform.
My only gripe about the festival is that they've signed too many established (and sucky) bands to pull in the bridge-and-tunnel crowd (we don't actually have bridges and tunnels here, but you catch my drift). It's called Spot, because you're supposed to be out there spotting new talent and not because the bands have liver spots (yes, Sort Sol, I'm looking in your direction).

But even with the influx of geezers it should be fun. Last year I really looked forward to hearing David Fricke from Rolling Stone talk about Scandinavian music and this year I'm looking forward to hearing him pretend like it's not his fault The Raveonettes got a huge record deal. I'll probably also go to the interview with Richard "I produced Blondie's best records" Gottehrer just because he's bound to have some cool stories.
I'll let you know later how the whole thing went.

I went out shopping for the first time in ages today. In case you don't live here you might want to consider at least stopping by for a visit, because it's amazing here right now. The sun was out all day yesterday and today and people have gone into summer mode overnight. There are people sun bathing in the parks and sitting outside in cafés drinking and chatting (in the old fashion way). I picked up a couple of things, but the real coup was a t-shirt with three pictures (in three different colours) of a Rumble-in-the-Jungle era Don King. Is it hot? Hell yeah!

Y'all are smart people, so maybe you can explain something to me that I've been thinking about today: Why is it Southpaw and not Westpaw? Surely, it would make more sense seeing as we usually consider North to be up and South to be down. There's a story about the Cubs' home plate facing east, meaning that if the pitcher was left-handed, his throwing arm would be to the south, but that doesn't sound plausible.

I like silly things and nothing is more silly than spending time making buttons with rude words on them. Here are a couple that won't make you blush or call an exorcist [via Davezilla].

Heard any good terror jokes lately? Apparently, American comedians of Middle Eastern decent are beginning to deal with issues of racial profiling and patriotism in their materiale. And the good news is that they're pretty funny:

He's like, 'Yeah, what Arab country's your family from?' So I choose the most peaceful popular one that he'd like. I'm like, 'We're from the same Arab country that Aladdin is from.'

You know how Francis tries to teach people Swedish one word at a time? Well, I thought about doing something like that since Danish is an even more obscure language than Swedish, but I never got around to it. But since you'd only want to learn the swear words anyway you might as well go here. They get pretty advanced towards the end.

Not a lot going on here right now, so it's just links today.

The caption for this picture reads: The alleged murderer is here seen taken away by the police after the bloody murder of a man in Valby late Monday night. I'm going to go out on a limb and say they got the right guy.

Apparently, the new Eels album sucks. Or maybe it doesn't. Either way I'll probably check it out eventually.

There's another article about how great Denmark is in the New York Times. This time it's about the northern part of Denmark. Nothing in there about Aarhus, but maybe they'll stop by here later.

Here's an art quiz, which was actually a lot harder than I'd expected [via Gawker].

Check out the redesigned Dandy Warhols site.

Google ranks third on Google [via Fark]. Well, isn't that Alanis? Don't you think?

Fake DIY chats with TCTC's Dan Fisher, but for some reason they don't get him started on Busted. Like myself he has the Sars now (and when the weather changes like this my Sars acts up real bad).

I wasn't sure whether I was going to get the new Local H EP or not, but apparently it's really good, so since I represent 50% of the H's fan base in this country I'm almost obliged to get a copy for me and the other 50%.

Saturday night I went to the last Club Drive party ever. Actually, they'll stage one more event in September, but officially Drive has closed down and is no more. I've been a regular there since they first opened five years ago and it's pretty much the only club in town, where they play decent music, so I have no idea where we'll go to get our indie fix from now on. Saturday night was pretty much the same as always, but the goth kids we met last time had brought their friends and they did all kinds of weird shit. The weirdest was this guy, who walked around with his girlfriend on a leash. She was wearing a dogcollar and the guy had her on a chain like a dog. And her hands were tied up with another chain, so it was pretty weird seeing them walking around like that. And the fact that they both made out with a lot of different people just made the whole thing weirder. Whatever floats your boat, I guess.

The Danish football season is almost finished, but with the win today for local team AGF we've moved from being second-to-last to a middle of the table in three weeks. I went out with a group of guys to see the game at a completely packed pub, which was cool. But before the game time was spent discussing the Eurovision Song Contest (which I didn't see) and songs with illogical lyrics. I quoted Anders' brilliant insights about Busted's Year 3000 and added Christina Milian's AM to PM to the list. Who rocks it from AM to PM? Does she go out in the morning and then slips back for an afternoon nap or does she go out in the middle of the night and comes back for high tea?
A friend of mine added Nik & Jay's Tag Mig Tilbage (Take Me Back), where they're reminiscing about being kids and how everything was easy back then. But for some reason they drop references to everything from East Pack bags over leg warmers to flannel shirts, which is fashion gear from a span of fifteen years. I guess they were kids for a really long time.

Speaking of music I was helping a friend out with a paper he was writing, where he listed a lot of stuff about lines of communication. He would describe the flow of communication in a company and then he would add if it was one-way or two-way. So he would write: "Blah, blah, blah. Open circuit. Blah, blah, blah. Open circuit. Blah, blah, blah. Closed circuit.", which got me thinking of the weirdest country song ever. I only know the Danish version, which was done by Peter Belli and was called Ingen Regning. But the original I guess was done by JJ Barrie and called No Charge. I'm sure whoever wrote the song meant to write a positive song about the love between a mother and child (the song ends with the lines "Lord knows when you add it all up/The cost of real love is - No charge"), but what I got from it was that the kid had done his chores and been a good boy and wanted a reward. Instead he got a guilt trip layed on his shoulders, which will result in years of Woody Allen-style therapy and mother issues just because the Mom wouldn't pony up a couple of bucks. Poor kid.

There's a cool article about how bitchin' Copenhagen is in the NY Times [via Interesting Stuff]. I don't know the restaurants and cafés mentioned in the article, but I'm sure they're every bit as great as the writer claims. But I was surprised to see the quote "Prediction is very difficult, especially about the future" attributed to Niels Bohr and although a Google search confirms it I'm pretty sure it was actually Storm P. who said it.

Dotmusic reviews The Dandys and my copy should arrive tomorrow. And I'll probably go see them in Copenhagen next month, because they're too cool to miss money or no money [via Hard Glitter].

I ordered a bunch of CDs yesterday from CD Wow, which is the cheapest online shop I've seen in a long time. One of them was So Much for the City by The Thrills, but I didn't notice that it doesn't come out until June 30th, so I guess I won't get to hear it before their show at Roskilde. It's just that I was so impressed by the singles Big Sur and One Horse Town that I had to have it, so I didn't exactly read the fine print. If you haven't checked them out yet I think you should. I guess they're inspired by The Byrds, but they remind me of The Bluetones a bit, so if I had to describe their style I'd call it glorious pop music.

Hell gets a tad chilly as NME announces that David Bowie will work with The Matrix on his next album. If you don't hate them already check out the article.
"She (Avril) came over and we played her some stuff in the Faith Hill vein and she said, 'I don't wanna do that, I wanna rock!' She played us a CD of this screaming punk rock, 'I hate you'-type stuff. We said, 'Come back tomorrow and we'll go over some stuff.' She left and the three of us knew exactly what she wanted, a pop song with a rock edge. We wrote 'Complicated' that day".
How you go from screaming punk rock, 'I hate you'-type stuff (as they so eloquently put it) to Complicated is beyond me, but this statement reeks of pr-people trying to build some kind of cred for the tie-wearing one.
And the article continues: "In 'Rolling Stone’ we wrote a dream list of people we'd like to work with. On it was David Bowie and Gwen Stefani. Consequently, we're working with David, but Gwen is still on our dream list."
Yeah, because they're sooo in the same league. "Hi, my name is John and my dream is to work with either Bob Dylan or Vanessa Carlton. Either one will do nicely".

And speaking of The Matrix Ernie tells you what you need to know about The Matrix: Reloaded.

When I met Matt from Nada Surf he praised The Long Winters quite a bit. It seems the album is out now and others agree that it's cool.
And speaking of Nada this is kinda weird [via Hard Glitter].

David Beckham - Original Gangsta. Once again Becks gets headlines because of his hair. I wonder what would happen if Scholesy got a mohawk?

And finally Junior Senior and Mew make DiS' Guide to Records of 2003.

I've actually been a little busy lately, so I haven't had much time to sit down and write about what I've been doing. But I have to mention that the Yo La Tengo show last week was amazing. They played for two hours and ended with two sets of encores. They began the last set of encores by explaining to people that they had to leave town right after the show, but they'd be willing to play more songs if people were cool with roadies packing down the gear, while they were playing. They then started taking requests from the crowd and played even more songs from the glorious I Can Hear the Heart Beating As One. Yo La will be playing at this year's Roskilde Festival, so if you missed them last week you should definitely seek them out at Roskilde.

And speaking of festivals the program for this year's Midtfyns Festival keeps getting better and better. They've added Badly Drawn Boy, The Flaming Lips, and Kathleen Edwards and I think there is room for a couple more big names. I wasn't planning on going this year, but I talked to someone yesterday, who might have some work for me on both Roskilde and Midtfyns and if that works out I'll be going to both festivals again this year.

I've actually been getting some work done on my paper this week and one of the things I've been trying to write about is how important honesty and openess is in the weblog community. This was going to be part of a chapter about bloggers, who get approached by public relations companies and how some people have been able to make money through their weblogs. The idea being that as soon as people are given products or money they might appear tainted to other webloggers, which is something people talked about after the whole Raging Cow/Project Blogger thing came out. This was going to segway into something about how you can make money blogging and how companies can use blogs for different things, but I never got that far, because I started reading about the Kaycee Nicole Swenson scandal.

I had seen this story mentioned a couple of places and knew the gist of it, but it wasn't until yesterday I realized how extensive this hoax had been. What happened was, just in case you don't know what I'm talking about here, a woman posed on the internet as both herself and her sick daughter, Kaycee, and created weblogs for both of them writing about how they dealt with the daughter's disease. She also posed as Kaycee during AIM sessions and during phone conversations with people she had met in chat rooms. All this ended with the daughter dying and people starting a Metafilter thread discussing whether Kaycee was real or not. A couple of days later the mother admitted to having made the whole thing up, which left a lot of people hurt and angry. The story is summarized in this article, but the article by Randall van der Woning, who set up the two weblogs for the mother, is a lot more comprehensive and touching.

I've been thinking about how we relate to the people whose lives we read about in weblogs and how much of ourselves we sometimes reveal while writing. To someone who visits your page for the first time it might seem odd that someone would expose themselves like this for no good reason. And the Kaycee-thing is an example of how involved you can get in someone else's online life and what can happen when you find out you've been lied to. I'm not sure where I'm going with this, but I think it's a fascinating part of the weblogging and I think I want to examine the line between revealing things and revealing too much further.

And speaking of weblogging there's another meeting at our local blogging society tonight. Last time we actually mapped out a couple of topics of conversation before the meeting, which was such a success that we've done it this time as well. So hopefully we'll get around to talking about an introductory weblog pamphelete that a couple of guys are working on and also hear from some people, who are helping a woman in Copenhagen with her paper on weblogging.

I've barely been outside this last week and the one time I did go out I forgot my keys, so I had to go out to my parents' house and sleep there. Usually, I would've been able to get a spare key from the super, but he wasn't home and after a half hour of standing around outside waiting for him I just left.

But this week I'm doing all sorts of stuff. Tonight I'll go see Yo La Tengo, which ought to be good. It's alway so much better seeing bands in a club than at a festival, so I decided to go see them tonight even though I'll probably see them again next month, when they play Roskilde. And tonight I should be getting a copy of the ltd. version of Think Tank, so that should be cool. I haven't heard anything from it yet, so I'm actually quite curious to see how they've changed their sound.

Thursday night there's a show case for four up-and-coming bands, which I'll be going to. I know some of the people in the bands, so there should be a good turnout of familiar faces that the venue. And since Friday is a holiday here there will probably be a lot of people out in the city, so I think we'll get our party on that night.

Saturday, I'm planning on going to see local (American) football team Aarhus Tigers play against Roskilde Kings. I've never seen football here, so it'll be interesting to see how good these guys are.
And Sunday I'll go see local team AGF fight against relegation. They've been playing well lately getting points in the last three games, so hopefully they can continue this streak. And if the weather is nice it's always fun to spend a Sunday afternoon at the stadium.

I'm getting a little addicted to eBay these days. I've never bought anything on eBay, but the last week I've been checking items and following auctions and there are a couple of things I'm considering bidding on. The item that got me hooked is this Chris McAlister jersey, which is sooo dope. Right now it's really cheap, but if it goes as high as the Ray Lewis one I won't try to get it. I'd gladly just buy a regular jersey, but with the outrageous shipping prices to Europe you might as well spring for something really cool.
There's also an eBay in the UK, where the shipping prices are a lot more reasonable, but they don't have NFL gear. However, they have Arsenal gear and cheap PS2 games and all kinds of stuff that I've been surfing through for hours.

This is pretty much just part two of Monday's posting in which it is proven that when it rains, it pours. I handed in my student loan application last week, so I could get the some cash for the last few months I'm working on my final paper. So I freaked out a little, when it was rejected and sent back to me two days ago. So yesterday I go talk to someone at my institute and the secretary informs me that according to the computer I'm one credit short of being ready for my final paper and seeing as it's not plausable that I'd be able to get that credit and finish my final paper before October I'm not eligable for student loans.

Here's a guide to my life: If you want to break me down and give me a heart attack tell me I need to take more classes! Tell me that my chances of leaving student life this year are zip and then take away my money. Having completed the necessary classes are the one thing I've got going for me right now, so the thought of having to go back and take another class was enough to make my heart race and I seriously started contemplating just getting a job and worry about studying later.

Thankfully, after I got home and found all my papers I was able to send her the title of all the classes I have attended and when I passed them, and I became a bit more sure that I had passed everything I needed. I went by the office today and she could inform me that I was correct and that the problem was that I had changed my major (strictly for technical purposes) and then changed it back and in the process a class had gotten lost.
So presumably everything is cool now and the student loan people got my application back, so hopefully some cheddar will flow into the account soon (I'm low on Cristal and I need new rims for the Hummer).

Sometimes reality hits you in the face like a bucket of cold water. Just like the time when you realized that after breezing through school all your life and never doing any work play time was suddenly over and you had now entered the big leagues. And they didn't screw around in the big leagues and they were not impressed by your charms and your ability to bullshit your way through everything, so they failed your ass. You were still in shock on the bus back home, because you had never failed anything in your life. And although you knew you hadn't studied enough and, quite frankly, didn't understand half the stuff you had studied you had hustled your way through exams like this a ton of times, so you just knew it wouldn't be a problem to do it again. But it was and you couldn't.

Well, I had the same experience a couple of days ago, when I realized that September is the last month I'm eligible for student loans. That means if I don't hand in my thesis (or the bane of my existence as it's also known) in September there won't be any money flowing into the account in October, which means I'll have to get a full-time job to make rent. And working the counter at the local marked won't exactly make me resent that damn paper any less. So once again play time is over and it's time to step up to the plate and get the job done.

I'm the king of procrastination. I postpone anything that I find slightly annoying or boring, which is probably the reason I'm writing this instead of working on the problem. But it's not like I'm scared of working. I can spend hours researching an interview or editing an article, but as soon as it's something I'm not interested in I turn cold real fast.
But I need to get busy now, because my current situation has been getting me down for ages and is standing in the way of me getting on with my life and working on projects that I'm actually interested in. I enjoy life as a student, but I'm getting too old to just sit around with no money eating pasta and ketchup and sleep till noon every day. I need to get on with my life and get some structure and some green and quit being a loser. So today is the first day in the rest of my life a four or five month period, where I actually try to get some work done. I'll still make time to write here, but if the number of stories about concerts, girlies, and being faced seem to dwindle now you know why.

As mentioned a month ago something is going on with Jewel. Laura calls this new look ElectroJewel which is fitting and for some reason the look she has chosen for her cover art. She's currently promoting the single Intuition, which is quite a departure from her usual style (check out the lyrics here) and the video here. The video is pretty tongue-in-cheek with parodies of ads and music videos (I liked the part, where she's standing in front of the Big Pimpin sign), but the song is just bad and the lyrics are horrible. I understand a need to try something different, but hooking up with Lester Mendez (who has worked with Enrique Iglesias and Shakira) is hardly a good idea unless she wants to turn into the things she's mocking in her video. She's still looking fine, though.

Funny article about being cool, trendy, or over in New York [via Catherine].

The term Bling Bling will be added to the Oxford English Dictionary. I hope they'll be sure to make the pronounciation Blang Blang, though [via Metafilter].

Sorkin and Schlamme leave The West Wing. In my opinion The West Wing is the best show on television, so this is really bad news. Hopefully, John Wells, who already has his hands full with ER and Third Watch, will be able to get some people in, who won't mess up the show.

You might have seen this already, but if you haven't you should check it out. It's Gov. Bush debating Pres. Bush about foreign policy on The Daily Show in a segment called Bush vs Bush.

If you're looking for music online may I suggest either downloading live tracks by The Shins [via Slatch] or all the Brian Jonestown Massacre tracks you could ever need [via Catchdubs]. And if you haven't heard The Dandy Warhols' cover of BJM's Stars you can get it here. The best bit is Courtney going on and on about how BJM is the best band ever. Just the best one.

I just came back from the annual campus boat race. Now I know what you're thinking. You're thinking this is some kind of Harvard vs. Yale regatta type event. Hardly! Do you know what a beer relay race is? Well, it's like a regular relay race, but instead of passing a depeche between you the goal is to run to a pole, drink a beer, and run in a circle holding on to the pole, and then run back and send the next player along. Imagine that with boats and silly costumes and you have the campus boat race.

This year crews from twelve faculties participated and it was obvious a lot more effort had been made into their entrances than into actually competing. The crew from my faculty had rented a truck and blocked the back with bright coloured foam bricks. They then burst through the bricks dressed as demented cheerleaders and chanted and spelt out the name of their crew (it's PANIK, but they spelt out KINAP like the morons they were supposed to be). Other crews had rented fire trucks, army vehicles, or a gang of bikers and the crew from the English department came as Vikings/Metal Heads. The crew consisted of the members of Insidiöus Törment, who all have poodle perms and names like Ronnie Gamboa (geddit?) and Dave "Steel" Steel. The architects had made a model of the Sydney Opera House, which was designed by Danish architect Jřrn Utzon, but unfortunately from a distance people thought it looked like an iceberg.
Unfortunately, it started raining and people started leaving, but it was a lot of fun and the crew of medical school students, who were dressed as characters from Batman, were deserving winners.
Oh, a fun moment was when a friend of my brothers said: "What's that theme they're playing?...... Oh, it's the Batman theme". How the hell is it possible to not instantaneously recognize the Batman theme? It goes dada dada dada dada dada dada dada dada Batman!!!! from crying out loud.

I mentioned the Coupland book tour yesterday and Nick mentions it here today. Turns out he was at the opening for the Spike show in NYC, which I was also at with Anne and Chris. I think Huey Lewis said it best, when he said: "It's a small world, but it's the only one we've got".

Ernie is redesigning Little.Yellow.Different, but go over there anyway just to check out his D'oh! picture from The Weakest Link.

Denmark is playing in the world hockey championship for the first time, so hockey has been getting a lot of air time on television here. I always thought of hockey as the ultimate white-guy sport, but check out this guy. It's like Cool Runnings all over again.
And speaking of hockey check out the Warren Zevon website to see why his health is so bad (he might as well be under the care of Dr. Nick).

I don't usually take quizzes, but this one just describes me so perfectly:

You are the Consummate Hipster. Newbies bow to you, everyone else just stares, as you swagger down the street with "Little Green Bag" stuck in your head.

What Kind of Hipster Are You?
brought to you by Quizilla

Oh yes, how often I hum Little Green Bag as I walk swaggering among the bowing newbies [via Peter].
The quiz uses the word deck several times, which I was sure was a word no one in their right mind actually used. It appears in the Hipster Handbook's guide to Hipster lingo, which reminds me of The Lexicon of Grunge that The New York Times printed ten years ago. But I've seen it used several places now, so I'm going to try and sneak it in on occasion (that and crunk).

The Midtfyns Festival just upped the ante by added Badly Drawn Boy to their roster. Damn, I wish I could afford going to both MF and Roskilde again this year.

The Blogshares game went from the beta to the proper version today, which means you can sign up now and buy shares at new, adjusted prices.

It would seem that Lloyd Cole still doesn't have an international record deal, but according to this article he'll be releasing his next album, Music In A Foreign Language, through his website, so American fans can get a hold of it. And according to this press release the record will also be released through Sanctuary Records, so it'll probably get officially released in Europe soon. And he'll perform live in Stockholm on May 26th, so hopefully he'll swing by Denmark as well.
Just noticed that the Lloyd Cole site has just been updated with tour dates and info about the new record, but nothing about shows here.

Kalashnikov With MP3 [via Monoki]. Defies description, and the babes add a whole new level of ridiculousness.

The Ravens sign Marcus Robinson, which means they now have two experienced wide receivers as targets for Boller and Redman. This is very promising indeed.

I've been trying to find out who'll be attending Reboot 6.0 in Copenhagen in June, but without much luck. But the conference is listed in the Upcoming section at Megnut, so I guess she'll be there. I've been thinking about applying for some money, so I can go to a conference, but haven't gotten around to it yet. But if there will be people talking about blogging and/or online communities at Reboot I might just try to make it over there somehow.

In music news Danish duo Junior Senior have signed a deal with Atlantic Records, which is rumoured to be bigger than the deal The Raveonettes signed with Columbia. Also, if you live the UK you can check out the lads on Later with Jools Holland on Saturday.

There's a review of the new Bluetones album at DiS and it gets murdered. I wonder if the appearence of Slight Return in a commercial here was approved, because it would coincide with the release of a new record? That would be a fairly shrewd move.

There are some very hot QOFTSA posters here [via Silent Uproar].

Baby Got Back. Why is the sight of white folk singing Baby Got Back so funny? I was watching the episode of Friends, where Rachel has to sing Baby Got Back to get her kid to smile the other day and today (thanks to Sarah Hatter) I caught the Apple ad, where this dorky looking white-boy sings Baby Got Back with his walkman on. I suggest they use Straight Outta Compton for the next ad.

All final line-up for this years Roskilde Festival has been released, and among the late surprises were Brendan Benson, Bonnie Prince Billy, Electric Six, Yo La Tengo, and my buddies Magnified Eye.

I've been listening to Notorious on repeat the last two days and I had kinda forgotten how smooth that record is. Steve Ferrone is a great drummer, the horns on this record are awesome (check out the trumpet solo on Skin Trade), and it's one of the few Duran albums that doesn't have a dud on it. And it has Christy Turlington on the back cover. Gotta love that!

I visited the Boohbah website yesterday [via Swish Cottage]. It's one of the oddest and most captivating sites I've seen in a long time. Apparently, it's the brainchild of Anne Wood, the evil genius who brought you the Teletubbies, which means the kids will love it. And the use of fractal-like imagery and goa beats should attract an older (read: stoned) audience as well.

Last night I watched Zero Effect for the third time and I still think it's a pretty funny movie. In short it's an updated Sherlock Holmes story where the fabulous Bill Pullman plays the world's greatest (and most disturbed) private investigator, and his sidekick, Ben Stiller, has to run errands and take care of meeting clients and such, which drives him nuts. They're hired to investigate a blackmail case, where the blackmailee clearly is hiding something, and along the way Pullman meets the glorious Kim Dickens, who has some issues of her own.
It's a very funny and well-made movie and if you haven't seen it you should check it out. Also, you should check out Things Behind the Sun, which also stars Kim Dickens, which I saw last year. It's a pretty gritty story about a singer, who went through a horrible experience, which has left her emotionally crippled alcoholic.

And finally Douglas Coupland's website has been updated with a release date for Hey Nostradamus! (US/July, UK/August, Canada/September) and dates for the next book tour. I doubt I'll go see him in Scotland in August, so hopefully he'll either come here or to Hamburg or London, where I've seen him before.