Viva la resistance! But why's the resistance in my head?

Yesterday was a blast. Or rather, let's start with the day before yesterday. Rade came by to spend this easter weekend in Stockholm. We played video-games, ate and went into town, bought a bag full of ice for 50SKR (~7USD) and went to his sister's place, where she was shacked up with Peter, her boyfriend, watching some Swedish detective-story. Rade and I sat in the kitchen talking, and as Tamara and Peter emerged, she started mixing caipirinhas based on muddled, slices of lime (of course), loads of mashed ice and Pitàº. Very nice! We sat and talked the night away, but went to Allmänna Galleriet where crappish music was played but we still had fun - Peter and I poked Tamara in the face appx. five hundred times and I took this film of the scene. On the way home I missed the subway with two minutes and had to wait for a remaining 28. While hovering about the train-station in central Stockholm city at appx. 01:30 is somewhat boring, there were a few wonderful moments, mostly due to people with a few loose screws; a man dancing to tunes known only to him lounged into a vending-machine, a woman went around screaming insanely for five seconds and then stopped, only to repeat this gala performance every ten minutes. What happened? Did The Catholic League unleash their minions upon us?

So, what happened yesterday? I went into town to meet Rade and Tamara at Medborgarplatsen, where they sat near to Christer, a very exibitionistic man who often roams the south of Stockholm city. Ardent readers may know him from this picture I snapped of him last summer.

Rade and I went walking. He had his mind set on purchasing a nice watch for Selda, a girl he's more or less pursuing; it turned out to be the perfect present, just the watch she desired. Sweet! We went to Amida Kolgrill where we had massive portions of cous-cous, grilled lamb, veggie stuff and lounged. We then went to an Italian ice-cream shop where I had a cone with coconut ripple. Now, I don't mean the regular, industrial shite ice-cream that most people think of when you say "coconut ice-cream", but this was the real McCoy: naturally sweet, the ice-cream had loads of grated coconut in it. That's just what I desired on what was the first really sunny Stockholm spring-day of the year.

I bought the latest single by Swedish band The Radio Dept., who have just churned out their latest album, "Pet Grief". That's one to remember. Quite short, but well worth the money, the album evokes memories of Pet Shop Boys de era "This Couldn't Happen Here", oldish New Order-tracks crossed with Electronic and The Smiths, even. A low-fi filter bringing a lonely echo-effect build most of the ambience of the album while pianos, an old drum-machine and semi-acoustic guitars twist great sound-scapes over melodic synths and a droning voice, making this one of the best albums so far, this year. I didn't believe it either, but check it out.

Anyway, Rade and I went back to Tamara's place, right outside of which I managed to photograph this woman hiding behind a plastic bag, drinking milk from a carton. Anyway, we went to my place, played a little NBA Live 2006 and Rade then went to see Selda while Mikaela and I took it easy.

I've been enjoying" The New Annotated Sherlock Holmes" more and more, and received "The New Annotated Sherlock Holmes: The Novels" last week, which means I now have all three volumes of the New Annotated canon, as edited by Leslie S. Klinger. Very nice indeed, the volumes use impeccable typography, extensive annotations (although I think some of them, e.g. gossip on what some women might really have meant, as with Violet Hunter in "The Adventure of The Copper Beeches") ((Most interesting were the notes 10, 14, 21, 29, 30 and quite so, even 39.)) - and utterly brilliant research and mind-work has been done, e.g. a monograph titled "The guns of Sherlock Holmes and John H. Watson, M.D.", a list of the most venomous serpents in India, and very importantly, critisisms at Holmes' (at a few times) flawed thinking, e.g. the notes named "...And the Calculation Is A Simple One", where Klinger details Holmes calculating the speed of the train in which he and Watson went "flying along" to Exeter, in the story "Silver Blaze". Mostly, the annotations are very valid, in-depth and not at all disturbing while reading the stories; if one desires to skip them, this is very easily done as the annotations are printed in the outer regions of the pages instead of at the bottom or as an appendix to each short-story or novel. Also very mentionable, there are loads of illustrations by Sidney Paget from the original published editions in The Strand during the 1800's.

I read Holmes for a while, and then Mikaela had made a pasta dinner (using great pasta), cocktail-tomatoes and olives, which turned out very well; Björg then popped over, we all chatted along, drank champagne and went to a party.

Our hair-dresser held her annual party together with her partner-in-hair, Simon. As expected, Marco was bartending and very nice; his restaurant, Locanda, is apparently faring well and I'll be sure to visit it soon - check out this Swedish review to get the feeling why people love the place, and don't forget to check out Marco's cook-book. People were nice, the music was upheld by Simon and his friend Anders. Too bad Joel Mull was ill and couldn't make it, but this didn't stop us from chatting with people, dancing and it was nice to see Björg getting attention! We arrived home at appx 04:30 and almost passed out immediately. Speaking of food a few sentences ago, I just saw a list of the 50 best restaurants of 2006 and they hail El Bulli, which seems like a dream come true, not least judging from this semi-old review from The Guardian. Good restaurant-reviews is a bit like reading good prose.

Speaking of art, I'm looking forward to A Death In Belmont, a coming book on the murder of Bessie Goldberg by Sebastian Junger. This is a quite interesting article on him and the book courtesy of The Guardian. Speaking of books, I'm very much looking forward to Will Self's coming work, "The Book of Dave". Here's the synopsis:

"The Book of Dave" is based around the rants of Dave Roth, a disgruntled East End taxi driver, who writes his woes down and buries them only to have them discovered 500 years later and used as the sacred text for a religion that has taken hold in the flooded remnants of London. Will Self's big bold book dares to take on the grand themes in the grand manner. It is at once a profound meditation upon the nature of received religion; a love story; a caustic satire of contemporary urban life and a historical detective story set in the far future.

Very interesting indeed, especially since Self has written one of the best books I've read in ten years, "Great Apes". More on Self, here.