The big news for me this week was the unveiling of the program for this year's Roskilde Festival. It has not yet been determined if I'll be working at the festival, but there can be no doubt that I'm going. The headliners are amongst others David Bowie, The Pixies, Morrissey, and Korn and while those names are great it's as always the smaller names I'm getting really excited about. So I was thrilled to see names like !!!, Broken Social Scene, The Fiery Furnaces, Franz Ferdinand, The Hells, The Hives, Kings of Leon, Muse, Sahara Hotnights, Scissor Sisters, The Shins, TV on the Radio, and The Von Bondies added to the program. I may not be familiar with the music of all these bands, but the reason I love Roskilde is that it's a way to get to know bands you wouldn't normally get a chance to see. So these are bands I'll try to get to see even if I don't get around to checking out their albums in advance.

The weather here is amazing these days, so today we're going to the annual boatrace in the university park. I wrote an entry about the race last year, so check it out to get an impression of what I'm talking about. This year I might get around to taking a few pictures, so there should be a full report on today's events later on.

I finished the prep work on my DJ gig tomorrow, so now I have about 40 carefully selected CDs packed in my flight case (which has been doubling as my crap CD storage for a while now). This is like Christmas for me, so I'm more excited about playing records and hanging out tomorrow than I've been about anything this year. And I've gotten some feedback from people, who'll be showing up early to hang out, so I think it'll be a lot of fun. So if you know me or perhaps want to get to know me you should show up as well at Sway (under the Clemens Bridge) in Aarhus between 20:00 and 22:00 tomorrow.

Tomorrow is May 1st, so there will be a lot of stuff going on downtown. I'm invited to the opening of a boutique, which should be interesting. And a guy I know has been involved in an art project and I think they'll be showing it somewhere tomorrow. That I have to find out later today, but if it's happening then I'm definitely going.

I finally got around to watching Party Monster recently and while it wasn't fantastic it was still interesting. I can't really decide what I thought of Macauley's performance, but Seth Green was definitely cool. I've seen the documentary Party Monster a bunch of times, so there wasn't really a lot of new stuff to see in the movie. But it was fairly impressive how well they'd managed to recreate all the scenary and the elaborate costumes. And poor Natasha Lyonne looked like she had to gain a hundred pounds for her role as Brooke.

But the reason I'm mentioning this is because I read an article about Benton and Bailey (the people behind both Party Monster movies) and the documentary The Hidden Fuhrer: Debating the Enigma of Hitler’s Sexuality which suggests Adolph Hitler might have been gay. I'm not a big student of queer theory, but projects like this always puzzle me. If in fact they'd managed to find one of Hitler's old boyfriends would that cast any kind of light on why he was such a mass-murdering fuck-head (as many important historians have said)? I'm still puzzled by a comment made by a teacher I had for a media science class, who claimed the Lethal Weapon movies were packed with latent homosexual tension. If that is in fact correct then my question is why. Will it really give higher box office numbers if a selection of the crowd is hoping Murtaugh and Riggs will make out at the end of the movie? And where does that leave Crockett and Tubbs? Any thoughts on this can be left in the comments.

This has been a good weekend for sports. Obviously, the biggest thing was Arsenal winning the championship this afternoon with four games still unplayed and still undefeated. But while Chelsea were losing to Newcastle I was out watching local team AGF win their first game of the year, which had the fans cheering like they'd just won the championship. They've played a series of terrible games, so obviously people are now hoping that this will boost their confidence enough so they'll start getting some more points. I was fortunate enough to get a bunch of free tickets for the next home games recently, so it would be nice if they would continue to win games as that makes going to games a lot more fun.

This is also the weekend of the NFL Draft, which I haven't followed at all. I read up on the Eli Manning trade, but that's pretty much it. I don't know anything about the players drafted by The Ravens, but trading for Kevin Johnson seems like a good idea. And finally we actually went to see the second best local team, FC Aarhus, play AC Horsens, who might get promoted to the best league this year, yesterday. The sun was out and so were quite a few people, so we drank cheap beers and hung out and had a great time although the game wasn't too exciting. And oddly enough they played Bad Reputation by Freedy Johnson on the stadium speakers, which was a bit weird as I've never heard anyone play that song ever. So that made for a relaxing and entertaining afternoon.

I just found out tonight that Guided By Voices have called it quits, which is a bummer. I'm sure Bob Pollard will continue to release albums, but it's still not the same. And unless they stop by Denmark in the Fall I'll never get to see GBV live, which really sucks.

I don't know what TV is like where you live, but around here there are just way too many shows devoted to plastic surgery. There are a couple of Extreme Makeover shows and while I was watching football highlights there was a show on another channel about women, who have plastic surgery done 'down there'. And to top it of the show Nip/Tuck just started running here. It's a show about two guys who run a clinic where they perform plastic surgery and it is easily the grossest show I've ever seen. I'm a big fan of ER, which has its fair share of disgusting surgery scenes, but for some reason Nip/Tuck just seemed ten times worse. The worst was when someone had surgery on their eyelids, which was revolting. But there were several other scenes that were gross as well. So I'm not sure I can watch it again, but I might give it a go.

I haven't been home a lot this weekend, but when I have I've been watching the 80s Weekend on VH-1. There has been a ton of good stuff, but the funniest was when they interviewed Billy Squier about MTV and he said that he doubted that it would make much of an impact and added, "There will always be big records with small holes and small records with big holes". Yeah, guess again Billy-boy.

Once in a while I get those epiphany moments were I realize I need to do something with my life or less everything will fall apart (again). I had one of those recently because of circumstanses which will force me to reevaluate my place in the world. I think my life will change a lot in the next couple of months and I don't know if things will get better or worse. Obviously, getting a job would help me a lot and I still have this loose end in my life which concerns me quite a bit and I need to figure out how to deal with. But those things might not resolve themselves, so I'm not sure which direction my life will take.

Last week when I was talking to Tinka I told her I could stay in Copenhagen as long as I wanted as I had nothing to go home to. I stated it rather matter-of-factly and it wasn't until she pointed out how depressing that was I realized she was right. But as my living situation will change during the summer maybe other things will happen as well. Something definitely needs to happen soon as the epiphany moment I had yesterday while flipping back and forth between Roadhouse and Coyote Ugly proves.

As I mentioned earlier this month I'll be DJing at Sway here in Aarhus on May 1st at the monthly The A-List party. So as a passionate music lover/listmaker I yesterday started going over what I wanted to play and unsurprisingly narrowing down my record collection to a two hour set was absolute hell. I probably listed about a hundred bands I wanted to play, which will leave me with a lot of thinning out to do. The reason I'm playing at Sway is that I want to play primarily American indie bands, who they don't usually play there. So not included in the hundred band names were all the British bands (and some American ones) they already know and play frequently. So now I'm working on a prioritized list which wil turn into a list of actual songs. Then I need to add all the minutes up and see how I'm doing for time. It's going to take a lot of time and heartache eliminating great bands from the list. But the good news is that if they ask me back I'll still have a truckload of stuff to play.

Speaking of music I'm kinda getting into the "Hope and Adams" album by Wheat. It was one of the records I picked up in London, but it hasn't gotten a lot of play because I bought a whole bunch at the same time. But I've been listening to it today and there are some really great songs on it. It's very acoustic and lowkey, but then moody acoustic music has always been my bag. They also run a Wheat Blog, which I might have to check up on once in a while now.

There are a lot of festivals coming up and with a little bit of luck I might be able to work on some of them. There are two festivals here (Recession and Spot10) and then obviously Roskilde and I'd love to be able to review shows and maybe do interviews at all three festivals. I'm currently working on getting press passes for all three events, but so far nothing is definite. But it would be fantastic if it would work out for me somehow.

After four nice days in our beautiful capitol I'm now back in Aarhus. Usually, when I go to Copenhagen I try to cram in as many visits with friends and trips to museums as possible. But this time I took it a lot more easy (also several people weren't around for me to visit), which meant there was time to catch a few movies and sit around and read in the sun.

But the main reason I went in the first place was to see the Beulah/Preston School of Industry at Loppen and I'm really glad I went. It's one thing to go by yourself to concerts in your hometown, where you almost certain to run into people you know. But it's a little weird going by yourself in another town. But when you've sold your sold to rock 'n' roll you do what you have to do. Quite fortunately I ran into two guys I knew from university, which was even more of a coincidence as there were only about 50 people at the show. They didn't know the two bands and were pleasantly surprised by Beulah, who put on a great show. I wasn't surprised, but totally ecstatic during the show and especially when they played songs like Emma Blowgun's Last Stand and Fooled with the Wrong Guy.

The band apologized for being a bit knackered after a rough night in Hamburg, but except for one song where singer Miles Kurosky chose to not hit the high notes they seemed in great shape. During one song Kurosky stepped down from the stage (which is about a foot high) and took some pictures with a girl in the crowd. And before the last encore (A Good Man Is Easy to Kill) Kurosky pointed out three people in the crowd and told them they wouldn't play another note unless they came onstage and played with the band on the last song. It's rare that I go see a show to see the support act instead of the headliner, but this was one of those times and after the show they delivered there was no way Scott Kannberg's Preston School of Industry could live up to that.

Not surprisingly people were there to see PSoI, so people got really excited when they went onstage. Unfortunately, since the stage was only a foot high and people were standing so close to the band they could touch them if they just reach out their hands people felt like they could also just start up conversations with the band. Especially this one drunk, American teenager was a pain and he kept asking Kannberg dumbass questions between the songs. But other than that the show was pretty good and since they played the best songs of "Monsoon" I was pretty happy. I had hoped they would pull out a Pavement cover for the encores, but unfortunately that didn't happen.

So, the other exciting thing to happen on my visit was meeting up with Tinka of Dust From a Distant Sun fame. I think we've read each other's weblogs almost since the beginning, but we've never really emailed back and forth, so all we knew about one another was what we'd read on the weblogs. But after such a long time that is actually quite a bit and seeing as we have seen a lot of the same movies (though we have different opinions on especially the mainstream ones) and like a lot of the same bands we had no problems finding stuff to talk about. We did talk about weblogs for a bit, but I'm a little weblog talked-out, so we quickly went on to more interesting topics like Take That and the most disappointing movies ever.

I took a few pictures in Copenhagen, which are available now in the Fauxhemian Gallery, but they're mainly from the concert. As you may notice in some of the shots from the city the whole place seems to be under construction, which really is a shame. The area called Nyhavn (New Harbour) and the square in front of the Royal Theatre are beautiful in the summer. But now there are metal fences and trucks and bulldozers everywhere, which really is unsightly especially now when there are millions of tourists on their way.

In the links department I found a big ass article on Aaron McGruder and the comic strip Boondocks in The New Yorker. It's a fairly interesting article although I must say for a guy who makes fun of Ja Rule a lot he's quick to fall into the same gangsta-tough-guy routine.

And I found the video for Morrissey's Irish Blood, English Heart, so those two links are pretty good I think.

I sat down to watch Dogville last night although I knew from the get-go I wasn't going to like it. I was right of course, but surprisingly enough I didn't hate it, either. The cast is really amazing and unlike some people I wasn't put off by the chalk outline set design, which I actually thought worked really well. My problem with the movie was that it didn't move me the least bit and through large parts of the movie I just had a feeling of "I don't get it". So after I'd seen the movie I read Roger Ebert's review and I must say I agree with him on almost ever point.

Then I found his review of Elephant and oddly enough all the things I didn't like about the movie are the things, which in Ebert's opinion makes the movie a "brave and radical act". But unfortunately he doesn't deal with the two scenes I found objectional (the guns/video games scene and the bathroom scene), which I would have liked to know what he thought of. In the review Ebert quotes Gus van Sant as saying, "I want the audience to make its own observations and draw its own conclusions" and "Who knows why those boys acted as they did?".

I think people have already made their own observations and drawn their own conclusions and I fail to see how this movie does anything to help us draw any conclusions, which does anything to explain what happened that day. Van Sant doesn't know what went through their heads on that day, so he's made a movie in which two random kids kill a bunch of other random kids without saying anything about anything so we can draw our on conclusions. To me that makes for a pretty pointless movie. Maybe that's a point on some level, but I think we already knew that killing your classmates is a pointless act of violence.

On a lighter note I've decided to go to Copenhagen for a few days, so I'm skipping town tomorrow. The main plan is to see the Preston School of Industry/Beulah show at Loppen, but I've also lined up a few appointments with friends, so it looks like it'll be a nice couple of days in the big city.

I spent about an hour this afternoon at the University being interviewed today for their paper Information & Debat. A couple of new buildings have been opened recently on campus, so we picked up some lunch and made our way to a beautiful terrace, where we could sit in the sun and talk about weblogs. I've given a few speeches and a few interviews on weblogs in the last year, so it would seem like a lot of people are getting more and more interested in this thing we do. So I'm thinking maybe I should start sending my thesis to publishers, so I can get it turned into a book and make some money on this before someone else does. Even the Salam Pax book has been translated into Danish now and is available in bookstores everywhere, so there has to be some kind of marked for this thing. It would definitely need a lot of editing, but it could be an interesting project, if someone wanted to publish it.

There's a scene in an episode of Frasier where a timid manager is trying to explain to his client, Frasier Crane, that he can play hardball with the best of them. This he illustrates by explaining that in a negotiating situation he once said, "You better just clean up your language, Pal. I walked out on that Mamet play, I can walk out on you", which does little to convince Frasier.

I never really understood that joke until today. I think David Mamet is one of the best screenwriters around and if you look through this credits I think you would have to agree with me. When I think of Mamet I think of The Spanish Prisoner, State & Main, The Untouchables, Glengarry Glen Ross, and Wag the Dog, and although I'm sure there's a curse word here and there in those movies we're hardly talking Kevin Smith or Tarantino territory here. But after seeing the movie version of Mamet's play American Buffalo today the other shoe dropped so to speak.

The movie is pretty much about two two-bit hustlers played by Dennis Franz and Dustin Hoffmann, who are working on pulling a job on a coin collector. Franz is remarkable laid back, but Hoffmann plays probably one of the most annoying bastards I've ever seen in a movie. And he curses worse than I've ever heard anywhere before. The first time you see him in the movie he's just standing around bitching and moaning about two lesbians, who he calls every nasty word in the book and that goes on for like ten minutes. For the rest of the movie he never shuts up and keeps talking BS until the end of the movie. He does it very well and there's enough suspence in the air that although the whole thing takes place pretty much in one location it doesn't get boring. And if you like me wondered whatever happened to the kid from Fresh then check out this movie as he's the third character in this cast of three.

I also watched Down with Love, which is a great movie if you're into over-the-top screwball comedies (and honestly who isn't?). It's one of those movies where the Art Direction really stands out and adds a certain larger-than-life aspect to the movie. And it has enough sexual innuendo and double entendres to make your head spin. I can see why the girls fancy Ewan McGregor, but I do miss the days when he made movies with Danny Boyle (but then stories about treachery, heroin, and Iggy Pop always get to me). Renee Zellweger is usually good in movies like this, which is why it baffles me that she of all people has been chosen to play Janis Joplin in Piece of my Heart. But then she's bound to do a better job of it than Pink will.

So the Nightfilm Festival ended last night on a high note. After having seen Elephant Saturday it was great to see The Cooler Sunday. William H. Macy is one of my favourite actors and when Alec Baldwin is good he's really good, so it was a joy watching him as well. There's really not much to the story, but it was well acted and had several funny moments, so as a weird feelgood movie it worked really well.

Elephant was another story, though. Although it had its moments and some scenes were beautifully shot it left me wondering what Gus van Sant was trying to say that we hadn't already heard a hundred times before. A couple of scenes were either clichéed (like filming a shooting sequence in the same style as a computer game the boys play) or puzzling (the shower scene) and the ending did little to tell you anything about the characters, their situation, or their actions. Personally, I think that if you're dealing with as serious a topic as high school shootings in a movie you should be able to make more of a point than just showing that shooting your schoolmates is an act of meaningless violence. You should at least have some kind of opinion and you should try to make that opinion known in your movie. Or less what's the point really? So even though the movie had a couple of interesting elements I found it extremely frustrating and left knowing nothing more about the characters or anything else than I had when the movie started.

That's also how I felt after having watched Wonderland, which I went and saw even though I had a feeling it would suck. I'm not even going to try to recap the story, but just point out that casting Dylan McDermott as a tough guy biker type in the worst beard since the stoning scene from Life of Brian was a huge blunder. The whole movie is a mess and based on speculation anyway, so the only good thing about it was the music, which was especially cool in the scene on the yacht, where Val Kilmer hangs out with Paris Hilton and listens to Girls on Film.

Speaking of music I saw a documentary about Kiss the other day called Kiss Loves You. The documentary follows a lot of Kiss fans from the early 90s until about a year after the big Kiss reunion tour. It looks at the Kiss conventions, the cover bands, the fans, and the relationship between a fan and Ace Frehley. I don't know a lot about Kiss and I'm hardly a fan, but it was still pretty fascinating. Especially since the documentary made the four original members out to be a bunch of money grubbing jerks and it showed how a lot of fans gave up on the band after the reunion (several suddenly became diehard Elvis fans). The documentary was produced for Swedish television, so I don't know if it'll be shown around the world. But if it is you should check it out.

I also finally got around to watching Velvet Goldmine, which features some of the same music as Wonderland does. This reminded me of just how cool the first three Roxy Music records are. A friend of mine when I was 16 loved Roxy, so even though I never got around to buying those records I've listened to them a lot. Anyway, Velvet Goldmine was okay, but I sort of lost interest towards the end and thought the musical acts were way too long. But it definitely had its moments and the music was fabulous.

The Weeping Willows show I was supposed to have gone to tonight got cancelled, so that was a bummer. But I've decided I want to go see Preston School of Industry and Beulah in Copenhagen next weekend, so if that works out I'll still get to see a cool show this month. It looks like PSoI are headlining, which is a little weird, but hopefully both bands will play full sets. I'd sure hate to go all the way over there just to see Beulah play 35 minutes.

I do less and less linking to things, but this is the best thing I read in ages.

The Nightfilm Festival is still going and last night I decided on checking out The Company, which is directed by Robert Altman and stars Neve Campbell. This was what I knew about the movie and had I known more I probably wouldn't have bothered. Turns out the movie was co-written by Neve (strike one), stars Malcolm McDowell (strike two), and deals with life in a ballet troupe (three and you're out!).

The opening sequence last almost ten minutes and features a long ballet sequence set to weird, electronic music. Turns out the music wasn't supposed to be quite that weird, because apparently something was wrong with the sound and the weird buzzing sound in the background continued into the scenes with dialogue. This didn't stop even after the movie had been stopped and started again, so for the first time ever I walked out on a movie. It didn't really feel like my kind of movie anyway, so it doesn't really matter. But it means I now have too many coupons for movies (if you buy six tickets you get a discount), so I might have to go see Wonderland tonight just to use the coupon I got refunded. I honestly have very little interest in the life and times of John Holmes, but the cast is pretty cool, so I'm considering seeing it.

I saw the movie 11:14 this afternoon (after having seen the Arsenal - Liverpool game) and it was quite good. It's similar to the movie Go, but is a lot more compact with four stories crossing over in 85 minutes. There's not a lot going on storywise, but it's entertaining and fun to try and guess what connects the four storylines, which all connect at 11:14 one night. However, I would've called the movie 10:15, but then that's just me.

I'm planning on seeing Elephant tomorrow and The Cooler Sunday and then that's it for this festival for me. I guess I should be more adventurous, when it comes to movies in other languages than English. But more often than not I feel like I'm missing something when I'm watching Asian movies, so unless they come highly recommended from several people I usually ignore them (and even then I'm usually fairly sceptic).

In unrelated news The Guardian has a huge interview with Morrissey.

So, how many people would you have guessed would gather at midnight on a Wednesday to watch a movie by the Polish brothers? As it turned out quite a few. Enough to actually fill the theater, which really surprised me. As I was walking down to the theater I had this image in my head that it would be me and one more person sitting there all by ourselves watching the movie.

The movie in question was called Northfork and is a bizarre tale of a town, which has to be evacuated, because the area in which it is located is about to be flooded. So the movie follows a group of men whose job it is to make sure the last people have left the area. It also follows a priest and a small boy, who has been returned to an orphanage, because he is very ill. This boy meets four very odd people, who are out looking for The Unknown, who apparently is some sort of angel.

The movie is filled with surreal scenes and imagery and while it's bleak and sad at times it also has a lot of humour (at one point James Woods' character says to his partner Willis "Whatcha talkin' about Willis" even though the movie is set in 50s). I'm not sure I got all the symbolism and subtler points (it was in the middle of the night after all), but the movie was beautifully shot and odd enough to keep me entertained.

However, I think Northfork will be the only movie I'll see at this year's Nightfilm Festival, which won't later be in regular distribution. I haven't been able to find anything else, which interested me (I passed on Japanese Story yesterday). So I'll probably have to catch a couple of advance screenings of interesting movies this weekend.

I'm sure everybody has linked to the free preview of the forthcoming Wilco album. But just in case you haven't checked it out yet here you go (I've had problems getting the first track to work, but the rest work fine).

This is the weirdest website to pop up in my referral log in a while.

A whole bunch of us went and saw Grant-Lee Phillips and The Dudes at Voxhall last week and everyone had a really good time. I reviewed the show for Frekvens where you can also find pictures from the concert. I haven't really heard the "Virginia Creeper" album, and I wasn't too impressed by the songs he played from that album. Some of them were good, but he just played way too many tracks off that album and some weren't that great. But whenever he played tracks off his other two solo records I really enjoyed myself and when he played Grant Lee Buffalo songs everyone got really excited.

So the show had a few peaks and valleys until towards the end when he played Truly, Truly, Drunken Angel (by Lucinda Williams), and Hickory Wind (by Gram Parsons), which was the beginning of an amazing stretch of songs. He came out solo for the first two encores (Rock of Ages and Mockingbirds) and when the band came out they continued playing Buffalo songs. So the show ended one a really high high note and was followed by a fun Tuesday night on the town.

And speaking of nights out I landed a DJ gig on May 1st at The A-List, which is the monthly indie club thing we go to. I told them they should let me come down and play some of the records they never play and they said okay. So I'm pretty excited about that and will pass on details as we get closer.

The following day I met up with a bunch of friends for a four hour flag football session, which was played mainly in rain and mud. But it was a lot of fun and it looks like we're enough people who are up for playing that we can continue to set up games through the summer.

This week marks the beginning of the Aarhus leg of the annual Nightfilm Festival. I usually watch a lot of movies, but the last couple of years the program has gone from bad to worse and this year it's absolutely disgraceful. There are two movies I'm considering seeing, because they aren't in regualr distribution and a handful of previews of movies, which will open later this year. But there isn't really anything I'm overly excited about (forgive me for not jumping the Bollywood bandwagon, which is so last century anyway).

I've been listening to the latest Ted Leo and The Decemberists albums today and I'm not exactly sold on them. Soldiering Life is a good song, but other than that they haven't made a real impression yet. But knowing me they'll get a few more chances. A thousand bloggers can't be wrong, right?

I just found out the other day that Beulah is playing a gig with Preston School of Industry later this month in Copenhagen. It's pretty much a no-brainer that I'll have to drag the old carcass over there to see them all the while cursing that Weeping Willows is the only halfway decent band to play my town this month.

Oh, have you heard? Lloyd Cole is getting The Commotions back together!