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Archive for June, 2007

Moving out

June 29th, 2007, Discussion, 2 Comments

A change of your homeland Prime Minister while living abroad is, I think, a bit like your parents moving house after you’ve left home. Who is this Gordon Ramsey guy anyway?

Progression

June 27th, 2007, Discussion, 1 Comment

Being weary of change seems to be basic human nature. No matter how influential or forward thinking an individual is, dragging the rest of the population along with them is a big task.

Television, motorways, abolishment of slavery, mobile phones, theory of evolution, toothbrushes, medicine, air conditioning, elevators and other widely accepted concepts were all (probably) treated with mistrust and disdain upon their conception.

People hark back to their romanticised yesteryears, or even imagined yesteryears from before their time. Stability, calm and “the ways things were” are what keeps a population generally happy. Sure, there’s a lust for what might be in the future, but try and push people into it too quickly and there will be widespread panic.

So how does the human race advance and adopt technologies and ideologies so readily? I think the answer lies with a small tolerance of progression, along with the regular resetting of familiarity.

A generation will accept a certain amount of change and development before it becomes bogged down in closed minds and stubborn refusals. It is only when the next generation arrives, and is environmentally programmed with a new definition of normality, that we see huge leaps in acceptance.

This is probably obvious logic, but after thinking about it for a while, the realisation that rapid human progression only really happens in between generations and not during, was something that thrilled me. Can it be possible that this ‘invisible’ incubation period is the continual kick-start for everything, and that all us stick-in-the-muds can do is try and develop catalysts for it?

If generational cycles ever got into sync (through some mass disaster maybe), would society be propelled into a hyper state?

In contrast, would immortality leave us with a world of people reminiscing about past millennia, whilst refusing to have anything to do with those “hokey-pokey matter-warp-generators, thank you very much”.

XFUNS magazine feature

June 25th, 2007, Press, Leave a comment

I had an interview in a Taiwanese design magazine this month. You can read more about it on the Spoiled Milk blog.

New friend required

June 18th, 2007, General, Leave a comment

Casper is moving out of Haraldsgade 54, 1. 2100 København in a couple of weeks.

If anyone would like to move in please let me know. It costs 3.300 DKK a month for a bedroom and separate study/work/hobby space. The apartment is very large with a kitchen, dining room, living room, two bathrooms (one small and cute, the other large and luxurious), laundry room in the basement. It also comes with me, Stine and Henriette.

YCN interview

June 16th, 2007, Press, Leave a comment

I was recently interviewed by YCN regarding beginning, running and evolving a creative enterprise. You can read the entire transcript here.

Shampoo

June 16th, 2007, General, Leave a comment

I got out of bed at 8:30am last Thursday and wandered bleary-eyed into the shower. I bathed in the jet a little, before commencing the shampooing cycle. I was enjoying my usual invigorating lather when the water suddenly cut off. After wiping the soap from my eyes using a dry towel, I tried other appliances in the apartment only to be greeted with the same hollow, metallic moaning.

I stood bewildered for a while, trying to wake up properly so I could evaluate the situation, when I heard a tremendous sawing coming from the basement of the building. I remembered something about plumbers coming to fit a water meter, but I was sure that was meant to happen at midday on Friday.

When it was meant to happen was of no importance any more. They had audibly started the job and so I was stuck with a scalp full of foam for the foreseeable future. The only solutions to the problem I could think of were: rinsing my hair in the several pints of milk we had in the fridge, or walking to the local kiosk to buy some bottled water. I couldn’t be sure that the first wouldn’t exacerbate the problem further and I wasn’t prepared to try and explain to a shopkeeper, in poor Danish, why I was wrapped in a towel and dripping soap suds into his drinks cooler. I accepted my fate and skulked back to my bedroom.

There are many benefits to running your own company; one of these is not having to make embarrassing phone calls to a superior when such calamities strike. I simply e-mailed Casper and Lenni to say I would be working from home for a while and spent the next 90 minutes sat on my bed, with the layer of shampoo slowly forming a polystyrene-like helmet.

The shower eventually came back to life and I rinsed, scraped and carved the flakes from my head before conditioning as usual. For all the early morning drama, I have to say that my hair felt wonderfully soft all day and I received more than a few compliments about its shine and vitality.

Jeffrey Lewis

June 12th, 2007, Good things, 2 Comments

I really like Jeffrey Lewis. I also really like how this song crams at least 40,000 words into six minutes. I also like how literal the music video is. You can like it too maybe:

The Danish summer

June 4th, 2007, Discussion, 1 Comment

Copenhagen was apparently built in an era besieged by heat waves and tropical weather. Everything about the city seems geared towards lazy summer afternoons: the large open areas, cafés with a majority of seating space outdoors, the building colours that complement deep blue skies, harbour swimming places, abundant public barbeque areas and a penchant for cycling and ice cream.

The forefathers must have been truly disappointed when, after their grand architecture and social engineering was complete, the meteorology switched and Denmark assumed its now all too familiar role as bearer of snow, ice, cold and five-hours-of-daylight for ten months of the year.

Curiously, the Danes seem unphased by their small window of opportunity and slip into floaty dresses and pavement culture in a matter of hours. The British embrace their brief days in the sun with an outfit hastily assembled from a teenage Spanish holiday topped off with a Kangol hat, before turning lobster red in a Weatherspoon’s beer garden. The danskere start holding street flea markets, throwing Mediterranean 40-person garden meals and hanging out on their ’stoops’ in white vests like it’s a Los Angeles heatwave, in an eerily natural manner. Inevitably the following day is overcast, rainy, tens of degrees lower and everyone is back wearing scarves and lighting candles, apparently without any embarrassment hangover. Mystifying.