Where did the beauty go?

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WARNING: This started as a set of reflections from the last few days, but somewhere along the line it turned into an essay and exit’ed as reflections again. I have been thinking about opening a blog for essays, as not to kill my readers (if I have any, Haha! :) with information and to keep it a bit more tidy. So if you want a lighter side of me (and less words) I suggest you click at some of the other posts. Though there is plenty of lightness in here if you look! I am now hungry, and after writing for 3 hours on this document I won’t bother correcting anything cause I need to sleep tonight. I might do adjustments later. My apologies for any written mistakes, I’m just interested in finding out where the beauty went… I’ve missed it.

***

Before I moved from Norway I used to spend quite some time up in the mountains and roaming the woods at night. I’ve always been pulled towards the views and sceneries. I was checking some e-mails this morning and wondered again. I have a friend who had a pager back in the early 90s. If we went to someone’s house we wouldn’t have the chance to text someone to say we were outside the door so they could open. We had to ring the door-bell ourselves, and when we had gotten the address wrong it was always fun to see the reactions and conversations that would unfold. And if we weren’t sure about the address we’d have to try any house and see if someone knew our friend. But people were cool about it, everyone knew this was how it had to be. My friend’s pager was indeed a pinnacle of technological achievement. It meant he could call you back from a phone-box, paying with a “tele-card.” I didn’t utilize the opportunity much; I think his parents were more active users of their son’s availability. I just used to walk down the hill and pop by when ever I wanted to see him.

When I’m in remote places in the mountains all alone it always does something to me. I know we all are wired differently (thank God!), but I feel I get closer to God where there are no man-made disturbances to his creation. Though others I speak with gets this sensation when they spend time with people in cafés and man-made places for socializing. The other thing is that I treat time differently when I return to the city. I don’t stress out as easily and stressful events don’t affect me as much anymore. I mean, if you walked 20 km yesterday, had to cross two rivers and saw mountain eagles soaring in circles over their nest there are limits to how much the rush-hour or your assignments in College will affect you. Closer to God, more calm.

No it’s not always a rose-garden, I’ve had my toes and fingers so frozen that I didn’t feel they were there, at one occasion I am thankful to God he answered my prayers and let me come home alive, once I checked out a wind-lip in the off-pieste and it broke under my feet and sent a hard packed piece of snow the size and weight of a little car sliding down the hill while I had to grab hold of the snow above with all I had to avoid going the same way. The latter example was hilarious though, but the first ones you try to avoid. Once I was walking through a half-dried-out river in the bottom of a canyon in the marshes under some pretty desert mountains. My shoes slipped on a wet rock and everything went so fast that I didn’t get my hands forth fast enough and I ran my head into another rock. Stuff like that doesn’t often happen to me and if it does I forget it as fast as it happened, but this time I was quite tired and it gave me the creeps for a few seconds. These are the stories that self-professed “city-people” remember, and those any journalist wants to have on print if they are covering mountaineering of various kinds. If there is trouble or a conflict it will stick longer in people’s memory when it is retold. They’ll loose out on the good bit. Like the time me and my pal stayed and slept 16 hours in a dry-toilet-shed in the middle of nowhere in December to seek shelter from the storm after sun-down when we should have been back in town. The wind calmed when it went towards morning and I went outside for a couple of walks, and the stars! Massive clouds braking up, and above them the most amazing scenery you can imagine. Or the time we lost the ski-track in snowdrift and fog way after sundown. Between us my friend and me ate 950 grams of meat, plus accessories like bread and cheese, plus cake after we found the cabin. We had to heat up the cabin and melt snow for water as normal, but the reward for the detour was on the mountain. The snowdrift was clearing up, the fog was retracting and we started to see more of where we were going, instead of just seeing it on a map with a compass to guide us. As we were walking I was aware that the light was intensifying around the mountain massive to my left. The moon went up over the ridge and we could see far and wide as the snowdrift and fog calmed. I could see some strange colours in the snow-crystals hanging in the air. I didn’t think much about it till I looked up again, and this is what I got to see: High up on the sky massive cumulus-clouds were breaking up looking like floating castles with gigantic towers lid up by the moon. Under them the lower clouds that surrounded the mountains were on their way back and framed the peaks in a white fog. But the best was the snow-crystals still hanging in the air. The moon shone through them and millions of little lights were all around. But that wasn’t even the good part, for from the ridge of the nearest mountain the moon painted a rainbow in the snow-crystals. A complete rainbow starting at the mountain’s ridge, sharply drawn towards the night sky all the way around till it landed firmly on the same mountain-ridge on the other side of the moon. I couldn’t care less that we lost the track!

What keeps you coming back for more? Beauty.

I have a friend who calls herself a “city girl.” We used to tell her to come to the mountains with us. I said she’d love it, she said she wouldn’t. An artist, she admitted that it would be a good thing to do for the sake of doing some photography. I had the privilege of ascending one of the highest peaks in Norway with her once, and she loved it. You don’t have to love spending hours digging snow-caves, sleeping under trees, getting your sleeping-bag soaked with wet snow or falling nose first over the handle-bar of your mountain-bike to like beauty. But it is probably the main force that drives us.

I did a couple of searches on Google and Yahoo for “beauty.” Mostly I got the web-pages of beauty therapists and saloons. On picture-searches, apart from a couple of dogs and cats greatly adored by their owners, it is-not surprisingly-a whole army of lingerie-dressed women out there ready to attack your world with “beauty.” And of course, it made a trekking guide happy to see some sceneries as well. Someone were out there and thought it was beautiful. And beautiful it will stay long after the current lingerie-army is resting safely in their graves. When God made the woman, He planned each individual one to be adored with lingerie (or without) by one man respectively. The lingerie-army is adding nothing to beauty, but breaking it down. It goes from being heaps of individually beautiful women with their life-stories to a uniform army of generic concepts of beauty in a world with instant access to everything. My friend’s pager less than 15 years ago granted him immediate access to nothing but the phone-number of who wanted to speak with him on the phone at any given time. Today our phones can receive highly compressed generic sounding mp3-files alongside the lingerie-army. Music has no sensation left where this is the listening pattern and the lingerie-army as they pose in their pictures, trades their individual beauty for a generic one.

This is not meant to be a social critique, I am not trying to sound like Theodor Adorno or Walter Benjamin. Nor am I trying to pick up “the gospel of Marx” and criticize the capitalist system. If the young Marx came into my living room I would throw him head-first over my balcony so he couldn’t go back in time and create the havoc that claimed literally millions of innocent human lives. But Marx utilizes what he criticizes when he claims authority over every invention created by private money. The access to such inventions will decrease with time in a Marxist system simply because no one-not even the government-earns anything on their new invention because there is no competition. It becomes like a pool of stagnant water, of a stagnant production-machinery in this case. The only alternative is a “Gothic Revival,” but one should think that we had put those days behind by now. The only option for current direction is forward.

Since we are in the Marxist corner already I will do my private little sidekick to the philosopher Max Horkheimer when he talks about the “unreconciled juxtaposition of faith and contradictory knowledge” (“On the Problem of Truth,” 1935). Much unreconcileable theoretical goods have been accepted as knowledge for the sake of political argument and it seems like Horkheimer’s camp inherits as much faith as any. And if it is not faith then it is a con. –Or at the very best, a misunderstanding or incomplete research. To explain myself I’ll use the equation: “If God exists.” I firmly believe He does partly because I see His works active in my own life. I will not treat this in any detail here to not get completely off the topic, but I’d love to write more in an essay or something in the future. If God exists He does not fear science nor philosophy –they simply seek to outline what He has created. Hence, He does not take any offence by the above equation. If God exists and He is who I believe He is, He made the world and all in it and every piece of life is upheld in Him at any given time. If God exists He reveals Himself. If God exists He reveals Himself in what He created, anything else would be a contradiction in terms if His creativity made the foundation of creation. If beauty is inherit in something created, Beauty is provided by God. It is a product of His creative mind.

Friedrich Neitzsche claims that the world and existence can only be eternally justified through its aesthetic value. One could ask what a man like Neitzsche would need to justify anything in eternity for. For if man himself cannot be believed to be an eternal being by the upholding provided by a greater power then Neitzsche seems to be dreaming and hoping that he is wrong. It actually gives me some sympathy for him. I would love to visit him with a cake or something and just sit at the stairs and look at the world. I’m sure he was suppressing something by the juxtaposition of his own faith in the eternal elements of justification and his almost complete rejection of meaning. Grrr… if I could only find out… But it’s too late, the train has left and he died 109 years ago. No cake if you’re dead!

In Isaiah 46 God says through the prophet (If you don’t believe, remember the equation “if God excists,” don’t quit reading for forgetting the philosophical frame):

5"To whom would you liken Me
And make Me equal and compare Me,
That we would be alike?
6"Those who lavish gold from the purse
And weigh silver on the scale
Hire a goldsmith, and he makes it into a god;
They bow down, indeed they worship it.
7"They lift it upon the shoulder and carry it;
They set it in its place and it stands there
It does not move from its place
Though one may cry to it, it cannot answer;
It cannot deliver him from his distress.
(NASB)

The gold and the silver both inherits the beauty for which it is utilized for the manufacture of an idol. There are millions of beautiful and interesting women, but love and friendship is new each time, whether now or in a hundred years. We can picture the mountains in our mind, but nothing is like living it. No artist can shape a rock as wonderfully as a river can, given the years, no matter if you hit your head against it.

I extended my search in best BBC “Click” style and typed in “Where did the beauty go?” A person was commenting on where the beauty went in art. –Cause previously it was about beauty and now much of what was coming out was just meant to be shocking and ugly the author meant. Yesterday I was at one of my occasional walks through Leeds Art Gallery. I have a big affection for National Romanticism and there’s a huge 19th century painting in there from one of the Western fjords in my own nation Norway. It is so beautiful that it almost is a bit larger than life, it is so beautiful that it is almost better than the real. I guess you see it even clearer if you have done any painting and realize the massive undertaking of filling a whole wall worth of painting in a 19th century building with high ceilings. The techniques are diverse and the dark rock bathed in shadow from the high sun seems almost “carved” with the pallet-knife. Not a paintbrush stroke can be seen on the rock-wall. I’m spellbound. In the next room there were 100 years of social critique basically hammering loose at anyone with money, power or influence. Nothing was meant to look nice, just to have meaning. I wonder what Neitzsche would have said. Poor man, I wouldn’t have the heart to tell him. He could easily have swallowed the cake wrong and died once again. Was this meant to eternally justify us? he might have asked.

Don’t get me wrong, I am not attacking modern arts, then I’d be attacking much of my own output too I guess. Modern painting techniques, darkroom and digital processing of photography, modern film music, funny concepts, sound-installations, performance that carries personal messages... Bring it on! But what do we view as beautiful. And Hahaha!, do we need the beautiful? For if we don’t seek it where God put it, distort it in private persons that should be a part of our lives that now appear as a generic product on a computer-screen for the sake of anything but beauty, and if arts itself turns it back to beauty for social argument; are we slowly being malnutritioned or can we perfectly well live without it? Adorno writes about music that “The new phase of the musical consciousness of the masses is defined by displeasure in pleasure.” (Fetish Character in Music and Regression of Listening, 1938). Is it up to us to define beauty or is it at least partly a given? Do we need to take control over our lives in a Heidegger-ian sense also in the realm of beauty? Surely, who of us have not seen thrilled children at their first meeting with something new and exciting and beautiful. You might argue that beauty is not the active component, but substitute the beauty with something ugly and shocking and we'll see the difference in effect. After years of leading teenagers in the mountains I have also found this true here, that on their first meetings with the grand nature they react with amazement and keep coming back for more. Hey! I’m not that old, but I’ll never stop getting thrilled by the beautiful!

Maybe I’ve been living in cities too much over the last years. Maybe there are some key relations not present. Maybe I’m just happy that I’m going home for my father’s 60th birthday in two days and will get to see Norwegian mountains… I don’t know, but all of the above probably did their bit to provoke the question. “Where did the beauty go?”

There is an elderly lady living just up the hill from me in Norway. She is well over 90 and have been there all my life as a part of the world since she was a close friend of my grandparents. Last summer mom, dad and me brought some cake and went to see her. I showed her pictures from my days in Singapore and my current place in the UK. She didn’t get the slightest tired and just wanted to see more of what was inside my laptop, so I dug up pictures from the coast of Malaysia, Paris, Vienna, Prague, big snow-covered mountains and the fjords of Northern Norway. In many ways her persona is a good tale of beauty. –the way she reacts to it when it is visual, the way she has always been happy and positive and always gone the extra mile to look good when in those parties of my childhood and even today, without ever becoming pretentious about it. But also relationally, by her persona and communication and just as important: as a woman. Whenever I get married I believe my wife has a lot to be grateful for to her. She has exemplified so much through how she is without trying, especially in the way she treated little me from my first recollection of her. She has clearly stated what women are but never attempted to do so. I hope she is still around whenever I get married somewhere down the road. In that case she’ll have to be well over 100 :) She’ll beat the whole lingerie-army any day!

Forth Forth!

Time's Beautliful Veil

Twisting reality and I can't see why.
I turn my nose around and the tree becomes the sky.
Fading present gives beauty's present,
veiled grey turns crystal again.

Deep dark dungeons philosophy hails,
when memory comes, it to the wall is nailed.
Time's idealization, is there a reason?
If it reflects what is, then there is more than this!

Grey hart gone for a red in exchange.
Blue eyes back for what the green eyes conveyed.
But still the puzzle remains as it were,
why is it that sunlight is time's way to blur?

The places we were, were two places apart.
One here on earth, the other my heart.
In thoughts reduce or in thoughts enchant.
Apparent transparent, or deprived of its charm?

If again, then I will the veil away!
Changing no colors in long past ways.
For the sake of love and all that is good,
if we give more enchantment than we should
-what is the source?
and if we leave the thrill or dust it with the will
-what is it we cover?

If reality lost was a treasure in time,
the hangover stays for life in our mind.
But treasure's pull comes from beauty's own source.
God put in all a piece of gold, what we see is what we choose.
But blinding one's eyes for the rest is a rush!

Gold will remain, the sun have her say,
and all of the present come tumbling our way.
Human appearing like angel in the world...
When the ways cross, high life no more lost.
Heaven only the jewel can out-cost.

Ingjerd!

Time: November/ December 2008

Ingjerd! For en merkelig nyhet! Jeg leste det på natten og våknet neste dag, lettere rotete i hodet! I mine tanker klarer du ikke å dø! Du er for happy, for smilende, for positiv til at noe vondt synes å noen sinne kunne ta deg vekk!

Når jeg var liten hadde jeg en drøm om natten om at en god venn døde. Neste dag var fæl inntill jeg forstod at det bare var en drøm og vennen i virkeligheten var vel i livet. Denne gangen er det omvendt. Det triste er virkelig, men drømmen er at du lever!

Når noen så positiv og fantastisk forsvinner får det meg til å tenke igjen på meg selv. Om det er min tur i morgen eller om 100 år vil jeg forlate med den livsgleden du hadde –for da vet jeg at jeg fikk utrettet noe! Og det er her det ser ut for meg som om du lurer selve døden. At gleden ved, og i livet ditt aldri kan vaskes vekk og aldri kan overgås av sorgen ved at du er borte.

For de som har kjent deg har du vert en solstråle! I minnet om deg til den siste av oss er borte vil du leve videre på jordensom en inspirasjon og glede. Tro er sterkere enn tvil, håp større enn tomhet, og kjærlighet større enn alt annet. Hvem kjenner menneskets hjerte og evigheten? Håpet svinner aldri! –at om vi møtes igjen kommer det til å bli like artig og givende som det var her i tiden. –og en ”siste hilsen” blir i håpet aldri ”en siste!” Amen!

Når jeg drar tilbake til Alpene på vinteren en gang skal jeg virvle opp noe snø i noen krappe svinger for deg også! Og selv når du er borte virker du så levende at jeg tror jeg kan høre latteren din bak trærne! :)

Du kommer til å savnes av mange, men om jeg noen gang skal felle tårer for deg skal de være gledestårer! (De renner nå...) Gledestårer over privilegiet å ha fatt møte deg, og at livet fikk ennå mer innhold og ennå mer glede ved at du fantes iblant oss! Om mennesker fikk være noe annet enn mennesker hadde du vert nettopp en solstråle!

Min dypeste kondolanse går til familie og venner! Familien har brakt til jorden ett fantastisk menneske! Vi har alle fått være velsignet av hennes glede, entusiasme og vennskap! Sørge gjør vi, men gledes ikke mindre av at nettopp du var her på vegen igjennom livet sammen med oss!

Heller enn ett tårevått ”adjø!” får du fra meg heller ett leende ”vi snakkes,” eller ”me sjåast” (eller hva du ville sagt :) –jeg tror det treffer hvem du er bedre! For i hjertene er du fortsatt og alltid med oss, men i håpet drister vi at du er ennå nærmere!

Ingjerd! Hvil i Fred og Takk for alt du var her iblant oss!
Amen!
Harald Haltvik

What is the point of a wife?

Time: “Timeless” and way-too-late-at-night.

The latter year’s events have given us a beautiful arsenal of newlyweds. And it is in this context I ask, not on their behalf but on my own: “what the heck is the point of a wife?” I have never had a girlfriend, and I’m not stressing, though I know that others are. I know what loneliness is, but I like my own company way better than a thousand frenzic girls! I have time and I don’t think that if I don’t get married in a freaking rush, the train leaves the station and I’ll never have a family, kids or happiness and that I’ll die old and with grey hair, bitter and sentimental in a rocking chair!

My sister recently got married. And I guess I’ll have to leave the initial question behind for this sake since she surely was the most amazing wife material alive before getting married, and surely must be one of the most fabulous wives alive after getting married. Her Character, General Amazingness and Beauty will testify for them selves! But I don’t think I ever completely understood that we’d grow up, and the question arises again!

I understand the thing with attraction-that it is attractive-but I’ll say as Dennis Finch Hutton: “You confuse needing with wanting! If I die will you die?” Although I totally disagree with the long late Mr. Finch Hutton on marriage-for I think that: #1, We have a mandate from God to get married, and as Martin Luther noted in his big catechism-staring out a monk himself-marriage is not optional. #2, If you love her, you marry her. And Mr. Finch Hutton was much wrong when he said to Karen Blixen: “I won’t love you more because of a piece of paper!” It was never about his feelings, it was about putting the spike in the coffin, the final seal; putting on its legs the final bravery to honour the woman he loved above all! Here-here! If you now are tempted to tell me you have my answer, that you red the “attraction” part and have a half-perverted answer that does not contain the state “love” in more than a physical sense I loose you from the duty to read on and you can keep your distorted opinion to yourself, for Dennis was right about this: “if I die, she won’t die,” but he was only wrong not to marry her. Marriage is not a necessity seen from a human point of view. Desire to get married is there, but so it is to ski big mountains and buy expensive cars. The absence of one or the other does not claim a day of your life. But psychology tells us that the death of a spouse is the single most stressful event in the life of a human being, and popular scientific research that people’s lives equal out in happiness only past 50 years of age for singles and those who are not. So the feelings are there, though we might question the practicality.

I’ll be brief on this next one, but more than anything I understand the friendship part. Obvious opposites and more similarities than Hollywood would ever want us to believe. I understand better than most the parable of two people fighting an enemy back to back, for a good sword-fighter should reach 180 degrees without too much hassle, but no one has eyes in his neck. Friendship-definite and by no possibility fleeting-I understand that. Though I still think that you won’t die without it. Maybe I shouldn’t ask if we need it, cause maybe we don’t, and in other ways we do. And maybe this most obvious point is what I wonder the most about after all. -Why should I trust other people? And in case my question is at least slightly justified objectively, why should I (not) bring this paradox as close as marriage, both for her and for my sake? I never had many friends growing up and I know well that it doesn’t at all kill you! Though there is a complex as big as my reflection here, and you’re right to point out that I can’t get past it: that human’s purpose is un-loosingly bound to other people!

This last matter I accept blindly with no questions asked: God’s commission over the human life: -if he made us all, and none got married, “subdued the earth” and “multiplied,” I understand if God looked down at the subsequently empty earth, pulling his hair out, asking: “WHAT!?” -I’d have a cigar and take a very long holiday if I was Him. -Luther was right where Finch Hutton was wrong.

When I find her I’ll marry her; as long as I have been reasonably well past Elementary School there has been no question! I know that some of you have an incline towards asking about “the one” at this point. Am I talking about “the big love?” -In my teens I used to believe in “the only one and only”, mostly in the absence of other and more useful theory. But my tendency to ask for reasons aside, I don’t think I could ever care less. When you choose her she becomes “the one and only” anyway, and at the furthest the two notions need not even contradict. Whether it’s one or a million or a few, does it matter? If “the one” dies you’ll be left alone with a bleeding heart, not knowing the foundation of your never-ending sorrow. Much like a Germanic Knights novel of the 18th century. Burn “Romeo and Juliet,” dying for love-not to say of love-contains nothing romantic. It is as romantic as “Jack the Ripper,” not to mention equally tragic! Go for the happy love stories! Those are the ones you want. Those are the ones you would want to be in! Those are the ones you’d like to believe and to achieve -if you are single, to work for hard as rock if your marriage are near failing, to make you both happy, but not you alone for also those whom you support. A king has no option but to fight when war is upon him! I say no option indeed! For it is only by Marx that man can afford to be a pacifist! If Marx was right we only know capital as a driving force in our souls and Neitzche tells us that whatever it is that drives us is utterly complex and we might never come to the bottom of the riddle non the less. If being set free from the capital or embracing the complex and mad interests that governs the nihilistic man (über-mensch), “freedom” can be loosened from duty and you can choose not to fight. See you friend? -that they just killed love? For if man disposes and applies his thoughts only by money or a maniac’s spider-web of never known reasons I will never know why I love her; or at the simplest: I’ll have capital interests that I am sure Mr. Darwin can outline in context for you. -And he too helped to kill love! If I won’t defend her, it is only me here! Back to the line: “a king has no option…” -and nor do you, but to defend, support and build up those who have come to trust you both. Aging parents, children, various, or society at large. Just as in war you shall stand your ground. Love is a choice, not merely a feeling. A feeling much less in fact, cause if I was wrong then: if you didn’t feel it you could make no promises that you could in the end even trust yourself. If that was so we’d give fuel to Neitzche and I won’t join! Am I exempted from gravity just because I feel like it, from tax paying, from showing up at work, for taking care of the kids I will have, for being responsible in the traffic? No indeed, and nor are you! And suddenly the ever so brave Dennis Finch Hutton that would let the lion get just a little bit closer, seems insecure about himself more than about marriage, or even more than he is about her.

I believe in Marriage! I wouldn’t even be here without it! But I have no idea what I need a wife for! If I can’t see a reason in a Newton-ian way, cause the absence of one won’t kill me, if I’d have to be convinced to trust that it would make life better (though it might be easier than it sounds…?), and I believe we have a commission merely by being born, I am honestly not left with much mental gunpowder to exercise choices in reality upon! Much I have to obey you might say, but man was given choice by the same One as he obeys, and it is in man’s given and created nature to ask before acting, and contrary pattern to this often do spell crazy outcomes. But still I ask, and it is not a rhetorical question, for I intend to gain an answer. Preferably from a happily married male-or several-cause hopefully (for her) he would have an answer!

*

It is now late at night and I intend not to correct my quickly authored script in any way. So I apologize (or not) if you find unexplainable outlines (though I doubt it), or misspellings of the difficult names of German philosophers or non-correct transcription of names of friends of the last King Edward.

Glenn Miller

Friday 1st of November 2007

"Timetravel and timewindows"

I came across a Glen Miller recording in the library yesterday. It was a box set with two discs. It was called “The Lost Recordings.”

I thought that if I were to put together all the Glenn Miller recordings I’ve held in my hands through my life it would cover most of what is out there. Thus I found the title a bit pretentious. I picked it up and started reading the list of content. It was mostly stuff I had seen before and assumed that it wasn’t a lot of alternate takes available neither. But I borrowed it with me home to check it out.

I was running errands around the city today and had not eaten enough. Something that had given me a slight headache and I needed some nice soft music with the food.

Dude, sorry the interruption, but someone is sending up fireworks again! It seems to be fireworks in the sky here every day now. I wonder were they bought it! I’d love to get some! Maybe I could hold a party at the rooftop gardens and make a memorable ending…

Anyway. I read in the cover that the executive producer had come across some never before released recordings and that they were of high quality. I put in the first disc and started to flip through the booklet.

The first couple of songs were just old classics and well known recordings, I got restless and took the disk out. Then I flipped the page in the booklet and my heart almost stopped. I had never seen the orchestra and their bandleader like this before! So close up, in action, so real! Not the usual arranged pictures but huge bandscores on his note stand, Miller conducting, and a young Dinah Shore singing by his side. This was with the military band so Major Miller and the band were all in full uniform. The room was packed!

I put disc two in the player and flipped another page. One more time I held my breath. A huge string section at the Major’s right side! Strings! Maybe there’s more to this disc than I assumed. And yes, it was.

The lost recordings indeed. Silkysmooth sound. High quality recordings like the producer wrote. I have often thought of how wonderful it would be if we had him around longer and could get better recordings, after the tape recorder really started shaping up the sound after the war. But this is good! Clear and crisp! Better than any recording I have heard before. And two more things:

#1 I have never heard strings used this extensively in any Miller recordings before.
#2 I have never heard any Miller arrangements that to this extent uses orchestral dynamics. Orchestral is really the word! This is more orchestral than Big Band at times.

It is suddenly so near!
And here’s a thing to all of you youngsters that have said that I’ve been listening to “grandparent-music” for the last 15 years:
Most of those grandparents are gone now, though more of them were around 15 years ago. What am I listening to then? –Dead men’s music? –Corpse-Swing? There is a page in the booklet with a young horn section. Some of them may be the age I’m now. One of the front guys could well have been Justin Timberlake’s buddy. –If he had come out of the picture and been the same age today as he was then.
This is music produced by young people, for young people! If we loose that perspective we loose what binds us to history and the sounds in my living room becomes antiquated curios to relate to either in a dry intellectual manner or by laughing of it as irrelevant and maybe funny. Do you think it is?
Then try this test:
Would you discard Wolfgang Mozart for being out of date, irrelevant, non-influential and maybe something to laugh of in the present age?

If yes, read no further!

I sat on the kitchen bench reading a book but this wonderful music caught my full attention from time to time. It was like someone had opened a window. I remember how it was like walking around in the huge hall under the music school I went to in my early teens. If someone had opened a window in their practice room you could hear a nice blend of jazz saxophone solos, classical sopranos and piano sonatas down in the hall. It would put a smile on my face. It would reveal music, activity, passion, dreams and beauty. And I was lucky to get a short glimpse into it, and even be a part of it. So I was sitting in the kitchen and someone opened a window in Autumn 1944 and I was lucky that it flowed into my apartment. The book I was reading encouraged to seek the sages, the wise old men. –In old writings or in person, and humorously, but seriously it was written: “Hang out with the wise, living or dead!” I thought “Haha,” I’m doing it right now! The dead and wise in music are here already.

I think the recordings were meant for radio broadcasting and Miller and a lady is narrating it for us. For some reason it is partly in German so it seems a bit like an attempt of breaking through the propaganda-barrier and radio control of Vermacht.
Then it came. I know his straight forwardness in his opposing Hitler in Music, and I love this comment that came:
“Love of freedom and love of care free life are two vital American characteristics. And I hope the time will soon be here when we’ll completely wipe out all nazi gangsters, so that not only the people of Europe, but also the Germans may enjoy home, life and happiness. The allies will see to that.”
I was sitting on the kitchen bench and had to put down my book. I clapped my hands and shouted “Yeah!” “Preach it brother!” He didn’t address me in 2007, he did in ’44, and where his voice came from the war was still not over. You simply can’t respond today. It was really exciting! The voice of a man long gone, suddenly highly alive, with a voice revealing a steadfast hope in a free Europe. –Soon!

He never got to see it him self. We lost him and his plane over the British Canal before the war was over. It was such an unnecessary death. It has grieved me many a time. But then again he stays forever young in our memories. Kinda’ like the James Dean of Big Band Jazz. And though he sadly never got to see the end of the madness he was fighting, he never got to see the decline of Swing Jazz neither. It keeps him even younger in our minds.

I held my hand over his picture and prayed thanks for all that he has meant to music and to us who has been blessed by the sound of his thoughts that came to action. –Came to sound through his orchestras.

The record came to and end and after a few words in German he concludes with an “Auf vider sehn!” I was waiting for the last tune but it never came and I understood that his words were the final track. I laughed! “Haha, you bastard!” Slipping through my fingers once again! We never found your plane or learned how it disappeared. You just vanished! I can see the blink in your eye as you tell me “till next time!” before you’re gone yet one more time. Someone closed the window in 1944 and my living room turned silent. I’m back, and Major Miller is gone once more.

Auf vider sehn indeed! At our first encounter mom was wheeling me around in a pram in a Norwegian shopping centre. It was about the same time as I ran into a guy called Sinatra. I’m looking forward to our next meeting, but where you’ll show up then I have no idea!

In fond memory and deep appreciation of
Glenn Miller 1904-1944

Ray Mears

Monday 29th of October 2007

Today I met one of my heroes.
Ray Mears was in town holding a lecture. The gorgeous old and venerable Leeds Grand Theatre was packed till the last seat.

Today we travel out into the “wild” with tools of the city. Titanium stoves, nylon tents and Gore-Tex. It’s adding an extra layer on top of the user interface between us and the nature we travel in. Ray Mears is one of, if not the most outstanding expert in the world on removing that layer and bringing us close to the nature around us, on nature’s own premises. May I add, on God’s premises, who made the laws of physics onto where we apply our knowledge. Ray Mears know how to live with nature, not just in nature to a level few ever reaches.

I know and have known several outstanding mountaineers through my life. Some can take your breath away with how fast they can walk on skis (literally if you try to follow them), how fast and under how appalling circumstances they can get a fire going and how well they can judge snow conditions for camp spotting and for foreseeing potential avalanches. But what is probably most notable with Mr. Mears is his humbleness. Not only for nature, but for the people living in it. And that he sees his work as important preservation of skills and culture. With our high tech world we have gained a lot, but how many can make a fire without matches or melt ice to drinkable water without a cooking pot in the arctic ice today? As we eat our way through rainforests, cattle gets gene manipulated and all food comes from the shop there are many essential skills, but more so also detailed knowledge about God’s creation that goes lost. And as much as our grandchildren may enjoy sitting under a tree as I have done, or Newton, or someone further back, they may know less about it. Not in terms of chemistry, botanics or Newton’s physics but in knowledge about the simple use and benefit of it, right where it is found. I know at least two different methods of finding South by looking at trees I can find in the woods. They are pretty inaccurate though, but your GPS may not be there when you need it one day.

I was probably 13 or 14 and I saw “The escape through Kalahari.” (Sorry, I’m not sure if it’s the English original title.) It made a huge impact on me. It was one of those moments when I knew that trips and exploration in the future would be more and more my own. Up until then it had mainly been hikes in the woods with my parents. I wrote a whole lot of stuff in my “diary” (or what ever you might call it) afterwards. Without going into detail it was about my determination to explore in the future. But just as much about my commitment to it. It was my first encounter with the African X/N language and I walked around making clicking sounds with my tongue for months afterwards. I remember a guy called Xabo.

Ray Mears showed pictures from some of his trips to Africa tonight and mentioned one of his friends name. It is not common to hear people in the West pronounce that click with the tongue, but guess what his friends name started with?

A circle was drawn, old tracks were crossed. Although I haven’t been much in the outdoors the last two years, it has brought me to new places and into new things that will bring me even further. The writing in that old diary must have been glowing tonight. I’ll find it again some day.

Maybe it’s time to renew those words… (Big smile! -can you hear the sound of my laughter disappearing between the trees at night? :)

New Hotel Rooms

Leeds 11th of October 2007

I find that new hotel rooms contain new music. I woke up in Korea half past three at night a couple of months ago with a song in my head. Out with the hotel’s letter paper and after it was written down, record it on the phone. And then another one. One hour's work and then I fell asleep again.

It was a bit too much carrying the guitar at times. I had enough things with me moving from Singapore. Although I shouldn’t complain since it was checked in. But the real advantage didn’t come late. I bumped into the hotel room in Leeds (my home for ten days), and within a day new tunes started popping up. Thank God for versatile laptops. I could record all I needed sitting in my bed, and with the guitar case as a drum almost make a full production after effects and mixing.

God, send me around the world to pick up all the new music!

Actually it boils down to new places. And more than that it’s about the place you left. It’s like an elastic band. You travel away from your destination and some things keeps pulling on your feelings and memory. People, places and events.