This weaks blog:


Project Übernörd

1. a tale of three cities. Oslo taught me to yearn for Istanbul. Istanbul taught me that beauty comes with a price. Kolding taught me that the price isn't too high. Oppegård has taught me that Oslo is 'home'.

2. arriving late. I managed to miss the high points of both Gothenburg and Oslo. I arrived in GBG after seeing the riots on TV, hearing of Hvitfeldska on IMC internet radio. Nothing had prepared by for the war zone Gbg had become. I left Kolding right before the big anti-World Bank demo had began and arrived in Oslo right after the last revellers left RtS, not knowing if I would enter another Gbg or not. I didn't. But this, coming late for the action, is a talent of mine. Back in '98, I arrived in Istanbul the day after a particularly brutal police crackdown on a demo. They hadn't yet washed the blood off the streets.

3. generation LARP. Ultra-reactionary family-tractor-gunism meets ultraliberal hacker ethic. Why us? Why now? And how is it even possible?

Today read through the entire "Club 7" book. That's "Club 7" as in the Oslo culture club, not the pop band. And my first thought is: why the fuck haven't I heard of this place before? Been aware of it, sure, but not known of it's significance.

A small gang of enthusiasts in the 60s build a bohemian free zone in technocratic Oslo, set to last for 25 magnificent years. From early smelly basements to the final three floors by the city hall - Club 7 is huge. It's where Jens Bjørneboe, the Norwegian anarchist par excellence, drinks in his inspiration; where Norwegian jazz develops the strength to produce world-class talents like Jan Garbarek, where poets like Stein Mehren and Jan Erik Vold become the leaders of the final generation of decent Norwegian-language poetry (see entry below for my thoughts on the current generation). It's a place where you can have a drink, listen to some of the best jazz ever made, participate in a poetry reading, watch honest non-institutional theatre, get laid, meet creative professionals and teenagers both, defy every social convention of your era AND park your kids in the kindergarten. Frank Zappa and Sean Connery like to hang out there when in Oslo; a membership card gets you treated as a guest of honour in some of the finest NYC jazz clubs. Sossen Krogh introduces absurdism to Oslo, Eugenio Barba probably pops by to find the actors who will become the Odin Theatre. And it's informal, run on enthusiasm, without restriction.

Having read through the book; I realize that every good thing that has happened to Norwegian-language culture the last 40 years somehow begins with "Club 7". And when my circle of friends in Oslo dreams of having a space to work, or a space to drink, of inciting cultural revolution or just being left the hell alone - we're unknowingly walking the same steps as those 60s pioneers. Their story is instructive; as soon as club7 becomes big, it gets swallowed by beureaucracy; state beureaucracy, censorship issues, taxation, management and so on. I will not lament the death of Club 7; it died at the right time, had it continued it would have been an institution as bloated, toothless and boring as the Oslo opera. But I will lament the death of the spirit that built Club 7; and the erasure of the club from history. There is no alternative today; Jazid was a place for branded trend youth, now closed. Blå promotes the cult of toothless beer rock and gathers folks who like to call themselves artists to get laid, but are never heard being enthusiastic about a single idea. Hausmania has allready become too tainted by politics and secterianism - a playground for a 40+ generation of wannabe alcoholics & unrepentant hippies.

We live on the Internet these days. We send our art and our writing and our ideas on LARP back and forth across the globe in seconds, happily building virtual ghettoes where art is only seen by artists, theatre only exists for the actors, and every decent poem is drowned in the flood of amateurs in need of expression. AmerikA had as one of its proverbs "Nothing is true until it's on TV". But a more correct expression of the sentiments of this generation is "Nothing is true until it's on the Internet". And on the Internet, everything becomes sectarian - all phenomena are sorted by the search engines into information ghettoes; we are never surprised, the Internet gives us supreme power and thus we are never challenged.

I search the Web for the name "Attila Horvath" - the legendary founder and primus motor of Club 7. I find a single hit, a mention in an interview with a jazz musician. There are more hits on google, to other Attila Horvaths, but not the Hungarian refugee whose ideas brought an entire generation of cultural celebrities to life, and made Oslo a slightly better place for two generations of bohemians.