PRIDE

Traditionally, we see a movie in Lund or Malmö or Ystad with a friend between Christmas and New Year's. We've seen the Lord of the Rings trilogy together, and the first two Hobbit films. So with the release of the last Hobbit film, we should have been seeing that. But the reviews were so clear that this was a CWOT (complete waste of time), that we chose a film based on when we could all be in Lund. The children's films, dubbed in Swedish, were out. The local independent theater, Kino, was showing the film PRIDE, so we went there. And I'm very glad we did.

It's 1984 and the coal miners are on strike in the UK. A group of lesbian and gay activists decide to support the coal miners against the common enemies of the thugs, the police and Maggy Thatcher. They choose a place in South Wales, Onllwyn, and start collecting money. There are many problems to be dealt with on both sides, but eventually because of some very resolute people, they become friends. I can't tell more, or I will spoil the story, but fascinatingly enough, this is based on a true story.

The story is about solidarity - one group helping another, and them returning the favor. It is movingly told, and as one reviewer has said, it is not just a good indie LGBT film: It is a good film full stop. I was moved to tears as the wife of a miner began singing "Bread and Roses" (one of my favorite union songs) and is soon joined not only by the rest of the women in the room, but also by some of the men. There are many small, intertwined stories told in the movie, and there are many moments when you just have to laugh. It is fascinating to see how characters such as Siân James develops, who in real life went on to be the member of Parliament for Swansea East.

Interestingly, the film is free for children from the age of 7 in Sweden, but is rated R (under 17 only accompanied by an adult) in the US. Are they afraid of the representation of homosexuals as normal people, or of the political activism? There are no sex scenes, just a dildo, a gay magazine, and some topless guys. And a cuss word or three, I suppose.

As we spoke about after the movie - the solidarity that was in the air from the late 60s to the early 80s has somehow disappeared. When we went to university, there were many activist groups and much solidarity between the various groups. Now, it's more or less the me-generation looking after its own best interests, and the right-wingers doing some rabble-rousing, violence, and arson. How can the solidarity be regained? We have no answers, but an imperative: Go see this film. It is worth it.

Det som ingen ved

Sick of the TV-tinsel-Christmas and with WiseKid and WiseGrandkid not coming until tomorrow, we opted for a film before the midnight service on Christmas Eve. We settled on the Danish filmmaker Søren Kragh-Jacobsen's Det som ingen ved (German: Was niemand weiß, English: What no one knows). The subtitle is "Vem kan du egentligen lita på?" (Whom can you trust?) It doesn't appear to have been shown in the States, probably put on a blacklist by the NSA.

I remember seeing it about 5 years ago (make that 2008) at the Nordic Film Festival, but I didn't remember the plot. Scenes began reappearing in my mind, and I remember some of the things I thought while watching the movie. "There's no one watching all those surveillance videos, they are just there to scare off thieves." "There can't be such a secret organization that knows how to kill people and is willing and able to do so just to keep their group secret." "The Danish government would never work hand in hand with the CIA like that."

Post-Snowden: It's worse than this. This film is sugar-coated, rose-colored glasses, just hinting at what we now know to be true. Truly amazing that the Danish Department of Defense (Forsvarskommandoen) let them film on location.

Yes, there are loose ends here and there: Thomas keeps coming up with cars that shouldn't be there, maps to hidden cabins appear by magic, Stockholm is just a short drive from Malmö. But still, the film should be revived, if only to make you ask some questions: What are all these cameras for? Why are they watching us? What is it, that they don't want us to know?

Summer readings

It seems that my usual blogging time has been taken up with WiseGrandkid, which is fine by me. She's 15 months old now, and I've been able to babysit a few times. She misses her mother then terribly, but when we girls go shopping together, she quiets down. So shopping we go, I've managed to finally get myself some new shoes and stocked up on drug store items. It's amazing how young they are able to identify brands. There is this sugary yoghurt called Fruchtzwerge that comes in colorful little pots. While grocery shopping this week she pointed to them in the dairy section, then looked at me with those eyes I know only too well from WiseKid, and so Grandma puts a six-pack in the grocery cart. And WiseGrandkid actually ate one when we got home.

Over the summer I did get some reading done, so instead of long reviews, here's the list with a brief description:

• Kazuo Ishiguro: The Remains of the Day
  This book won the Booker Prize in 1989 (which only shows how long it takes me to get around to reading things). It is a description of the life of an English butler, Stevens, who spends his life serving others. In 1956 he finally takes a holiday, and we are treated to descriptions of the English countryside as well as peeping into his past and all that he has seen, but never spoken of. He has never had time for himself, being in service 24/7 at Darlington Hall. I suppose I should take heed of this and spend more time doing things for myself and not end up like Stevens, only working for others.
• Jörg Maurer: Felsenfest: AlpenkrimiI usually prefer Scandinavian Krimis, crime thrillers. But Jörg Maurer is really good, he has such whimsical characters and such fast-paced, crazy stories that take place in the Alps that just might be true. A great summer read.
• Robert M. Sonntag: Die Scanner
  This is a story for young people, although I'm afraid teenagers today don't read, so we'll have to wait for it to be available on YouTube. It's about a society not too far in the future in which there are no books any longer. They have all been scanned and the paper burned. There are people who comb the city, looking for books that have been left over, in order to scan them in. And of course there are the hold-outs who hoards books and hide them and refuse to turn them over to the scanners. Then one day, there is a "computer problem", and all the books of the past are gone. No matter, who reads books anymore, anyway? It is a plausible dystopia, but I'm afraid that teenagers don't understand the value of keeping "old stuff" around.

That's it for now, at least I can now put these books into my bookshelves. And no, I'm not scanning them in. I like to have words printed on paper, they don't change or disappear.

A Most Wanted Man

Philip Seymour Hoffman's last film, A Most Wanted Man, was showing in the original language at the local artsy theater, so we found an evening to go watch it.

How bizarre to be watching a movie clearly playing in Germany, with American actors speaking American English and German actors speaking English with a German accent and a Canadian actress (Rachel McAdams) speaking English with a German accent. And the film had German subtitles, that you actually needed when the characters were speaking Arabic.

What a chilling story (by John le Carré), most especially after I heard a lecture today on the German data privacy laws as they affect personal privacy rights and how the NSA and the German authorities are actually breaking German constitutional law. This film pitted at least three spy organizations against each other (Verfassungsschutz, CIA, and some third, unnamed entity), and they all are breaking personal privacy rights right and left. But of course, the long-term goal is to make the world a "safer" place, right? Take care of those pesky terrorists.... And as we now know, this is actually not fiction, but happening, all around us. We are paying for their fun & games, and strangely, with a sense of Stockholm Syndrome (as Jochen Koubeck put it in the talk this morning) are even sympathizing with the NSA & Co. listening in on all we are doing.

As WiseMan remarked after the film, if Philip Seymour Hoffman's character would have seen Robin Wright in House of Cards, he would have known that he can't trust her. Spy movies are not normally my cup of tea, but this was great, Hoffman was just such a great actor. The only boring part was the full half an hour of silly advertising and trailers for films I most certainly will not see, and that with the film not starting until 8.30 pm. Oh well, lucky me, I don't have to get up too early tomorrow.

Riverbed

We went to the Louisiana Museum of Modern Art, north of Copenhagen, today, as it was opening day for Ólafur Elíasson's Riverbed exhibition. The papers had said that this exhibition literally turned Louisiana inside out, which of course is one of his major themes.

Inside-out indeed.

We were given a map at the model room, and after lunch in the cafeteria with the breathtaking view we tried to get to the Riverbed. We first thought it was outside, but there was just a tent there for the literature days. The doors we normally use to get into that wing of the museum were strangely locked. So we went back to the gift shop to enter what is normally the wrong way.

You walk down a wooden pathway, the walls painted a spotless white (okay, it's opening day), with people coming towards you. Then you step out into a large room, painted white, with a lot of rocks in it. And - natch - a river running through it.

 A river running through the sacred, polished wood halls of Louisiana! And the river bed is not just any bunch of stones scraped together. These are lava stones, carted over from Iceland.

Tons and tons of stones!  The guard said the workers had been carting the stones in for six weeks, wheelbarrow by wheelbarrow. And that they put down some heavy-duty plastic before the stones started being brought in. The rooms that normally partition off portions of an artists life or themes the artist dealt with have doors, some low, some wide, that drive upwards, ever upwards towards this waterfall:

There are steps up over the waterfall, and then more lava in more rooms, until you finally get to the source (there are two): 

Another few steps up and you are in the library, a breathtakingly beautiful room overlooking the Öresund. I normally like to go sit in the library when I am at Louisiana, as it is usually deserted and I can enjoy the quiet and the view. The library is now a dead-end, so it is filled with people flipping through books about the artist and his works. A man, end of 40, comes in at one point, looks around, smiles, leaves.

I always assumed that Ólafur was an oldish guy, because he has done so many (crazy) things. Looking at his picture online I wonder if the man I saw was the artist on opening day, seeing how people react to his monumental work.

The exhibition is on until January 2015: If you are near Copenhagen, this is a must-see!

Bletchley Park

We spent Saturday at Bletchley Park. That is a little town north of London where Alan Turing worked trying to crack the code that the Germans were using in World War II. At the peak there were apparently 10.000 people working there, also building a magnificent single-purpose computer, the Colossus, to crack open the one-time pad generated by the Lorenz Machine for use be the German High Command.

Saturdays are wonderful days, as there are volunteers out there enthusiastically explaining how the machines work. The only down side is that the National Computer Science Museum and Bletchley Park are on the same grounds, but they don't cooperate, so you have to pay two entrance fees if you want to see both machines running. But it is worth it! And if you are heading up by train, there's a 2-for-1 coupon that you can print out in advance, that saves 15 pounds.

It was nice to see a lot of material in person and to be able to photograph it. There were live demonstrations of a rebuilt Bombe and the rebuilt Colossus. All machines and material were to have been destroyed after the war, as this was a top-secret operation, but luckily there were a few photos and diagrams, and there were still some of the engineers alive as groups started re-producing the parts.

The Colossus was primarily built out of standard telephone exchange parts, as the telephone engineers built it. When British Telecom was upgrading their analog parts to digital, one of the members of the rebuild team drove around with a truck, picking up all the analogue parts (especially valves) he could. The presenter requested that everyone have a look in their garage and attic to see if they happened to have a few lying around, as they are too expensive to produce any more. They consist of hand-blown glass with metal and plastic parts. I wonder if there will ever be a 3D printer for retro parts.

I must have taken 100 pictures, far too many to post here. I guess I'll have to teach cryptography again only in order to use them - and in order to explain how the codes were cracked. The "unbreakable" Lorenz cipher was broken when a soldier re-used the same one-time pad to resend a message that was slightly different - with abbreviations. And the Enigma was brute-forced after some lateral thinking showed that there was a flaw - a character could never be mapped to itself. And since the Germans love wordy, standard terminology, and had a tendency to send messages at the exact same time every day (like the Wettervorhersage, the weather report, or regular reports that nothing had happened worth reporting - Keine besondere Vorkommnisse) so the engineers could compare the intercepted code with typical words that they expected to be in the text, and were thus able to rule out quite a number of cases. With the Bombe they then brute-forced the rest of the possibilities, using a machine called the Type-X that you could set a possible key and type in the message and see if it fell out in plain text. What a disappointment that must have been to spend all day decoding and then to learn that the Kleiderpauschale had been raised by one Reichsmark or something equally boring.

It was a fascinating day, I could have spent lots more time AND bought one of everything in the gift shop. But I'm flying and already close to the weight limit, so I just purchased some postcards and a DVD.

London Calling

It's been about 30 years since I last visited London. I've been to Newcastle a few times, but avoided being in London. But this year my family (including princesses who are rapidly turning into teenagers) decided to "do" England and Ireland, so we are meeting in London. I'm here a few days earlier with WiseMan in order to do some vacationing ourselves.

The first thing you notice about London is that everyone seems to have earphones on, and half of the people are talking loudly into their shoulders. And I mean LOUDLY. I'd be rich if I wrote a novel about every drama I've half heard just the past few days. And they are addicted to their phones! Even a proper English professor I was meeting for dinner took a "Selfie" with me and sent it on to a friend, sharing the immediate response with me, as we discovered that I had just recently been in correspondence with just this friend.

From the ads I gather that mobile phones are incredibly cheap to use, 10 pounds buys 700 minutes a month and 5000 (!) SMS and 500 MB of data. In Germany you would pay three times that.

I observed one woman at a bus stop, hair set in stone with hairspray, dressed in a very close-fitting black leather top and mini-skirt, with a shopping bag in one hand and a small box with a slice of pizza in the other, yakking away on her phone. She had the phone, a non-smartphone, held tight with her bra strap pulled out a bit from her shoulder. As she boarded the bus, it turned out that she even had two kids in tow. The bus driver called her back to user her bus card to pay for the trip - she had to give the pizza box to her little boy while she got out the card, while continuing to talk on the phone.

Shaking hands

I chaired a Bachelor defense this afternoon for a student from Saudi Arabia that has been in a number of my classes. As he was called back in for me to officially grant him the degree, I put out my hand to give him a congratulatory handshake that for me is always part of the ceremony.

He pulled his hands back, put them over his heart and smiled, saying "Oh no, I can't because of my religion."

I was irritated, but kept on with the formalities and left with the other woman on the committee, his advisor. We spoke about the incident afterwards. Here we have been teaching him all these years in Germany, where hand-shaking is a daily ritual (and you need to make sure that you don't forget and shake the same person's hand twice in one day or you will get told "Wir haben uns schon", we already shook hands). But he is unwilling to touch us because we are unclean women? Or because we are the "property" of our fathers or husbands and he does not have our permission?

If he had said: Oh no, I have a cold! We would have gladly not given our hands. And my colleague notes that she really hates the huggy-kissy stuff that is popular in Berlin as a greeting. But to refuse to shake our hands because we are women is mighty strange indeed. I suppose I should just let it go, but it somehow has nagged on me all evening.

Meeting a moose

Even though we have been traveling to Sweden for over 30 years, we have seldom seen a moose at close quarters. Twenty years ago we saw two at a distance in Färjelända, and once somewhere while we were walking in the woods one crashed through a clearing before us. We've seen moose droppings in the woods around our summer home, but mostly we have seen them in the nearby zoo (and petted noses, they have soft fur on their noses).

On the way to the airport this morning a young moose suddenly sprang out of the woods. WiseMan was driving (luckily, I had a terrible headache) and there was no car coming the opposite direction. We were able to swerve. We did hear a thump and thought that we had still hit the moose broadside, but the car behind us said that the moose had just gotten one leg underneath the car. Either the knee hit the car, or we ran over the hoof.

The moose limped off into the woods, and we pulled over. There was no damage to the car, luckily, and we were okay except for the scare. We called a friend who contacted a hunter and the police. The police called while we were at the airport to take down all the details. They send a hunter out to look for the moose and see if it is okay or needs to be put out of its misery. After everything was over a bit of shock set in. We were very lucky -- suddenly meeting a large moose can total a car.

I think I'll be happy to just visit the zoo in the future.

Happy Birthday, BASIC

Well, since lots of other nerds are wishing BASIC a happy 50th birthday, let me chime in as well.

It was the summer of 1973. My mother, a high-school math teacher, had signed up for summer school as part of her work on obtaining a Master's degree. She was taking "Boolean Algebra" and "Introduction to Programming with BASIC" at Emory University, in Atlanta, Georgia. But she ended up in the hospital with kidney stones and was unable to attend the classes she had already paid for.

I was the proud owner of a driver's license. Yes, you got your license at 16 in Georgia, learner's permit at 15 at that time and I remember to this day my first drive alone, the day after my birthday, in our red Duster with the windows rolled down and Rod Stewart's  "Maggie May" blasting out the radio.

Since I had no plans other than reading a large pile of Gothic novels over the summer, I offered to take the courses as a proxy, and my mother readily agreed. I drove to the university in the mornings and took notes on the lectures, copying down the hieroglyphics on the board. I then drove to the hospital (luckily, she was at the Emory University Hospital) and brought her the notes and the exercises. She solved the programming ones first, writing out what I was to program for her.

I drove back to campus and went down to the computer cellar. We were able to use the keypunch machines there all afternoon. My math teacher, Mr. Barber, was also taking the course. He showed me how to use the punch, and how to (literally!) bootstrap the machine with the BASIC interpreter before feeding my own little punch tape into the machine. A teletype would then rattle away and print out something. I would tear it off, and then drive back to the hospital to show my mom the results, picking up the Boolean Algebra exercises to hand in at the end of the day.

WOW! I could make the machine go! My mom didn't want me playing around (I might break something), I was only allowed to type in her programs for her. So when we moved to California shortly after the school year started and Crawford High School had a course in computing, I signed right up! Mr. Juell, our teacher, would take punched cards with FORTRAN programs to a computer center twice a week and pick up the results of the last batch. Boy, you sure learned to check your syntax that way!

We also had a teletype, hooked up via modem to some computer. I can still whistle the connection melody. Here we programmed in BASIC, and oh my, you got immediate response from the computer! What fun we had, a small group of nerds, playing with these toys that also included a programmable calculator that had to have commands punched in octal on cards. I wish I still had copies of the programs we wrote that would be so funny to see how badly we programmed back then.

I went on to study computing, learning all sorts of other programming languages and hearing about the GOTO being considered harmful. I never had a home computer until I bought a Computer Schneider system for writing my dissertation. It had BASIC on it, but I didn't have time for games.

As a proper theoretical computer scientist I, of course, should not admit to ever having used the language. But the immediacy of the results we got as teenagers fueled my enthusiasm for learning more about computers. So many thanks to BASIC for getting me started on my career -- and happy birthday!

Grandkid Stuff

WiseGrandKid is coming over this evening with her parents. She is now very mobile and adept at crawling, she even scootched up two of the stairs the last time she was here. Our place hasn't been child-proof for years, so I hit the Mega-Baby-Stuff-Store this morning, along with approx. 37 expecting couples and 42 with offspring in tow.

Although the kid's high chair that we got for WiseKid is still going strong, we didn't get the baby set then. I tried to get one today, but the production has changed and so they are not available for older models.

I did get this too-cute-for words place mat from Stokke:

It sticks to the table with giant suction cups and has high rims to contain spilled milk. I had been a bit worried about how the polished stone surface would react to a child banging on it, as I remember the deep cuts WiseKid made in our wooden table when he was a kid. This will do the trick!

I cleaned out the lower shelf that used to contain lots of things not suitable for children (and found the lovely Swedish tea-light holder sheared off, that probably happened during a past visit and I didn't get told). I put up a sign and some stickers and put some toys on the shelf:

Oh, that Monchhichi, WiseKid didn't like it so it is still in pristine condition, it is just too cute for words:

Schweineöde

My university moved some departments (mine included) to a former industrial area in Berlin, Schöneweide (English: beautiful field), five years ago. This part of town is often called "Schweineöde" (English: pig's wasteland) by the locals. Located on the Spree, it was an area with heavy industrialization that broke down during the German Democratic Republic times and for decades was known for unemployment, abandoned buildings, and Neonazis. The latter had their headquarters here, a clothing store and some pubs, but that is now changing. One of the pubs has finally lost the last court suit brought by the owner and is being forced to move.

In 2004 Carsten Otte published a book called "Schweineöde" with Eichborn (reviews in German at Cicero and Perlentaucher). The book is about Raimund Kuballa, bored millionaire from the West who rents a room in Schöneweide and experiences, as Otte writes, "Einsamkeit, Haß, Zuneigung, Liebe, Ablehnung, Gewalt, Erniedrigung, Ohnmacht und Macht" (loneliness, hate, affection, love, rejection, violence, humilation, impotence and power) during his years of living in a small apartment in the Rathenaustraße. Most particularly, he becomes so fascinated with the history of the former Eastern German secret police Stasi, that he himself turns to information gathering, denunciation, even framing his neighbor and rival for the love of Jana in order to get him jailed.

Oberschöneweide
CC-BY-NC-SA, WiseWoman

I was at the beginning fascinated to read about this part of town, and it was interesting to see how Kuballa was drawn into his obsession with the Stasi. But the book soon got bogged down and Otte didn't really have any idea how to end the book. But for a first novel I suppose that is often the case. I often wondered while reading the book if Otte himself had lived in this apartment and was describing his neighbors.

In any case, this part of town is slowly pulling itself out of the muck. Since 7000 students and teachers trek out to the university every weekday, espresso bars and cafes have sprung up, and the art scene is rapidly developing. The rents are still cheap here and a walk along the Spree is a great way to spend a sunny afternoon.

Simon and the Oaks

Swedish TV broadcast the 2011 film "Simon and the Oaks" (Simon och ekarna) this evening with one of my favorite German actors, Jan-Josef Liefers, playing a supporting role.

The story, after a book by Marianne Fredriksson, is complicated. Simon is growing up in the late 1930s in a working class family near the water outside of Gothenburg. He is more interested in reading, his best friends are the oak trees high above the water. He insists on going to school in town, and there meets Isak, the son of a German Jewish bookseller who fled Berlin with his wife and son. Isak and Simon become friends, and slowly exchange families. Isak learns the trade of a carpenter, Simon embraces the music and literature he is exposed to in Isak's father's house.

Eventually, Simon learns that he is adopted and that his father was also a German Jew. He searches for his roots, eventually finding an uncle and learning that his birthfather died just a few years ago.

It is a sweet family story, a little heavy on the classical music, but it tells the story of how people came to terms with World War II living far away but still so near to the horrors that were happening.

Liefers is superb – he seems to have learned Swedish for the role. It is his voice, speaking excellent Swedish with a German accent, intermingled with German. The other characters are also very well done, complicated people with secrets and longings and desires. They are not plastic perfect happy people, but they are very real. The cinematography, cutting between seasons, inside and outside, light and dark, is very well done, capturing the spectacular light of Sweden on a sunny summer day and the gloom of deepest winter night. 

You feel that you have really gotten to know these people and want the story to continue as the credits begin to roll.