Zombie skiing

Skiing again today. Took the boys to a freestyle competition in a ski centre one and a half hour drive south of our home town. No serious crashes today. That's the most important, more important than the rank.

Nice but cold, too cold with the wind chill in the upper slopes. My nose was freezing.

They had built a new chair lift. It starts right outside the churchyard. It’s the only church I know with ski-in ski-out. Maybe they want to bring salvation to the skiers? And the zombies can ski all night >:)

Index librorum prohibitorum

Index Librorum Prohibitorum was a list of books that good Catholics should not read, to protect their poor fragile souls from bad influence. The list was officially abolished by the Vatican in 1965. I don't know what effect this list had on the Catholics. For me it triggered curiosity. For a while, when I was a teen, it was my book-store shopping list. The Prohibitorum contained books by famous authors, for instance everything written by Jean Paul Sartre (most of his books are boring), Simone de Beauvoir (Sartre’s fiancée) and Emile Zola. Among well-known books on the list we find

o The Red and the Black by Stendhal
o Madame Bovary by Gustave Flaubert
o Les Miserables by Victor Hugo
o Justine (The Misfortunes of Virtue) by Marquis de Sade

Note that Mein Kampf by Adolf Hitler was never on the Prohibitorum! Anyway, it's a crap book. I read it when I was in high school, just by curiosity (I knew the chief librarian in my home town very well, and she ordered anything I asked for).

The Vatican is not alone when it comes to banning books. It’s no surprise that many books were banned by the German’s during the 2nd World War, by the apartheid regime in South Africa, and in the Soviet Union. More remarkable is the list of books that have been banned in the Western world, were the freedom of speech has been a basic principle. Books that have been banned in Western Europe and USA include

o Brave New World by Aldous Huxley (banned in Ireland for sexual content)
o Grapes of Wrath by John Steinbeck (banned in USA as socialist propaganda)
o Lady Chatterley’s Lover by D.H. Lawrence (banned in USA and England for sexual content)
o Lolita by Vladimir Nabokov (banned in France and England for sexual content)
o The Tropic of Cancer by Henry Miller (banned in USA for sexual content)
o Ulysses by James Joyce (banned in USA for sexual content)
o Without a Stitch by Jens Bjørneboe (banned for sexual content)

Many good books worth reading on this list, I think, in particular the books by Steinbeck, Miller and Nabokov.

7am flight

I'm a man of the night; love to stay up late, hate to get up early. Tomorrow morning I have to take the 7am flight to the South of Winterland. Getting up at 5:30, meeting all the miserable faces at the airport, people who wanted to stay in bed a couple of hours more, just like me. Life is hard.

Snowdark

Whiteout is when everything is white, just white. The white cloudy sky and the white snow grow together. The contours of the terrain become invisible. In some Winterlandic dialects, the word for whiteout is "snowdark". This is a very good and descriptive word, like in the dark, you see basically nothing; nothing but white, or sometimes a little grayish or blueish.

Skiing in whiteout is an interesting experience. You need to ski somewhat differently, more precautious. When you can't see the terrain, you need to feel it, with your feet and your body. And you feel the terrain at the moment you're there, no pre-warning, no time to plan ahead, you must react immediately, and correctly. It's exciting and a little scary at the same time.

Black metal

Here is a very short introduction to black metal, my version:

The first wave of black metal is associated with bands like Bathory and Venom. In 1982 Venom released the album Black Metal, which gave the name to the genre.

The second wave of black metal emerged in the early 1990's, with bands like Mayhem, Immortal, Gorgoroth, Burzum and Satyricon. Characterisitic features of black metal are distorted guitars, blast drumming, and a special vocal style (grim vocal). The song structure is often unconventional, sometimes with several musical ideas in one song, different from the usual verse-chorus structure of rock and pop. The lyrical themes are often anti-religious.

Black metal has always been underground culture, not accepeted by mainstream society, often associated with satanism and church burning. However, less than a handful of individuals in the black metal community were directly involved in church burnings in the early 1990's. Well known are the infamous acts of Varg Vikernes (known as Count Grishnackh in the one-man band Burzum), who killed his band-mate Euronymus and set several churches on fire. The Count was released in 2009, after 16 years in jail. A new Burzum album will be released in 2010!

To get a kick start on black metal, run to your local metal store and buy these three albums:
o Pentagram by Gorgoroth
o Nemesis Divina by Satyricon
o Over Bjørgvin gråter himmerik by Taake

Below is a list of my favorite black metal albums. You will find most of these albums (and many more) in the CD collection of a black metal enthusiast.

Arcturus:
Aspera Hiems Symfonia (1996,2002)

Burzum:
Burzum/Aske (1992,1995)
Det som engang var (1993)
Hvis lyset tar oss (1994)
Filosofem (1996)

Carpathian Forest:
Defending the Throne of Evil (2003)

Darkthrone:
A Blaze in the Northern sky (1992)

Dimmu Borgir:
For all tid (1994)
Stormblåst (1996,2005)
Enthrone Darkness Triumphant (1997)
Death Cult Armageddon (2003)

Emperor:
Anthems to the Welkin at Dusk (1997)
Scattered Ashes: A Decade Of Emperial Wrath (Best of album, 2003)

Gorgoroth:
Pentagram (1994)
Antichrist (1996)
Under the Sign of Hell (1997)
Destroyer (1998)
Quantos Possunt ad Satanitatem Trahunt (2009)

Immortal:
At the Heart of Winter (1999)
Sons of Northern Darkness (2002)

Keep of Kalessin:
Armada (2006)
Kolossus (2008)

Mayhem:
De Mysteriis dom Sathanas (1994)
Ordo ad Chao (2007)

Satyricon:
Dark Medieval Times (1994)
Shadowthrone (1994)
Nemesis Divina (1996)
Volcano (2002)
Now Diabolical (2006)

Solefald:
Red for Fire: An Icelandic Odyssey : Part I
Black for Death: An Icelandic Odyssey : Part II

Thorns:
Stigma Diabolicum (Best of album, 2007)

Taake:
Nattestid ser porten vid (1999)
Over Bjørgvin gråter himmerik (2002)
Hordalands dødskvad (2005)

Ulver:
Bergtatt (1995)

1349:
Hellfire (2006)

Aspera Hiems Symfonia

Arcturus was a legendary supergroup, a side project of musicians who had their main work in other bands. Aspera Hiems Symfonia was their avant-garde black-metal masterpiece. This album doesn't need any review; it's a classical album. Anyway, I just wanted to write a few lines about it.

Aspera Hiems Symfonia was released in 1996; great music, but not very good mixing and production. The album was completely re-mastered and re-released in 2002. You can buy a double CD that contains both the re-mastered and original versions (and a couple of good bonus tracks). The re-mastering really brought out the greatness of the music. It is an album where all songs are very good, it's not often you find that. The music is black metal at the core, but has more than you expect from the typical old-school black-metal albums from the 1990's.

The music is symphonic and melodic, carried by distorted lead guitars, with great solo sections. The brilliant (electric) piano played by Sverd adds spice on top of the guitars. The drumming by Hellhammer is brilliant as always, with nicely timed blast beats, and precisely underlining mid-song changes in beat and tempo. The grim-vocals by Garm has just the right desperation to match the mood of the songs.

I have listened through this album about a thousend times, never getting tired of it, one of my all-time favorites. I listen to it now, as I write. It is impossible to pick one single song as the high-light, every track on the album is one. Below, I have included a YouTube link to one of the songs, picked more or less at random: Whence and Wither Goest the Wind

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2zJ0vqJWwAM

And since only one song can't make justice to this album; here is another one:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UXHng1Vz3II

Enjoy !!! >:)

My little list of favorite books

I have a record of all the books I have read in the last 25 years. It's based on old-fashioned technology, which means it's a small note book, made of real paper, where I write, with a pen. Recently, I have started to transfer it to my computer. Some books I read in Winterlandic, some in English. It would be cool to write a review of each book, but that would take forever. Here is a list of my favorite books, that is, books that I really enjoyed, and recommend for book-lovers like myself:

Dostoyevsky, Fyodor:
The Player (Gambler)
Crime and Punishment
The House of the Dead
The Idiot
Brothers Karamazov

Tolstoy, Leo:
War and Peace
The Cossacks
Sevastopol Stories
Anna Karenina

Turgenev, Ivan:
Fathers and Sons
Smoke

Lermontov, Michael:
A Hero of Our Time

Pushkin, Alexander:
The Queen of Spades

Ibsen, Henrik:
Ghosts
A Doll’s House
The Wild Duck
Rosmersholm
An Enemy of the People
Brand

Hamsun, Knut:
Hunger
Mysteries

Bjørneboe, Jens:
Moment of Freedom
Powderhouse
The Silence
Without a Stitch

Kielland, Alexander:
Poison

Falkberget, Johan
Christianus Sextus

Lindgren, Astrid:
Emil of Lønneberga

Lagerløf, Selma:
Marbacka: The Stories of a Manor

Lundell, Ulf:
Jack

Guillou, Jan:
The Road to Jerusalem
The Knight Templar

Brink, Andre:
Rumours of Rain
A Dry White Season

Hemingway, Ernest:
The Old Man and the Sea
The Sun also Rises
Farewell to Arms

Irving, John:
Hotel New Hampshire
A Prayer for Owen Meany
The World According to Garp
The Ciderhouse Rules

Steinbeck, John:
Tortilla Flat
Grapes of Wrath

Jack Kerouac:
On the Road

Ellis, Bret Easton:
American Psycho

Miller Henry:
Tropic of Cancer
Tropic of Capricorn

Nin, Anais:
Henry and June

Greene, Graham:
The Human Factor

Marquis de Sade:
Justine (Misfortunes of Virtue)

Jean Genet:
Thief’s Diary
The Miracle of the Rose

Stendhal (Marie-Henri Beyle)
The Red and the Black

Adams, Douglas:
The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy
The Meaning of Life, the Universe and Everything
The Restaurant at the End of the Universe
So Long and Thank’s for all the Fish

Mann, Thomas:
Buddenbrooks

Hesse, Herman:
Beneath the Wheel

Allende, Isabel
The House of the Spirits
Eva Luna

Marquez, Gabriel Garcia:
Love in the Time of Cholera
Clandestine in Chile

Lenz, Siegfried:
The German Lesson

Bernhard, Thomas:
Wittgenstein’s Nephew
Concrete

Kundera, Milan:
The Joke
Life is Elsewhere
The Book of Laughter and Forgetting

Kafka, Franz:
The Trial
The Castle

Joyce, James:
Dubliners

Wilde, Oscar:
The Picture of Dorian Gray

Brown, Dan:
Angels and Demons
The DaVinvi Code

Puzo, Mario:
The Godfather
The Sicilian

After a nice weekend

With the boys; skiing. Race day, giant slalom. Did my duty as gate judge. With my old lady; taking a shower, eating oyster, juicy hairy oyster. Love the taste and smell of it. Nice weekend.