Kung Fury is king!

 -       It’s absolutely insane!

In only 24 hours he had reached his goal of 200 000 $, and yesterday when the one month campaign closed the amount was more than 600 000 $!

It was on Christmas Day 28-year old Umeå animator and filmmaker David Sandberg launched his trailer on Youtube simultaneously with the Kickstarter crowd funding campaign. The goal was set on 200 000 $ to make a 30 minute film; a free release for the web. Today David is signed by the biggest talent agency in the world, William Morris Endeavor, WME, in Hollywood. American distributors and investors have made contact with him and the trailer has more than 6,4 million hits on Youtube!

-       I am on the same agency as Quentin Tarantino, Martin Scorsese, Steven Spielberg and Matt Damon, it’s nothing but unreal!

So, this is the story:

David had an idea about a playful martial arts police action comedy breathing the eighties. The plot is the Kung Fu cop Kung Fury who’s friend is killed by the most dangerous Kung Fu crook ever; Adolf Hitler aka Kung Fürher. To take revenge Kung Fury is traveling back in time, but those time machines aren’t perfectly reliable and he ends up among dinosaurs, Vikings, Nazis and mutants. Yeah, the plot is as crazy as the month that’s just passed!

David, who looks a lot like a young Johnny Depp, is starring as Kung Fury, and friends from the young film scene in Umeå (mostly) fills in as the characters Kung Fury meets on his voyage. The plot is set in Miami, but the whole trailer is shot in front of a green screen and most of the locations and environments created in computerized post production, an incredibly time consuming work, made by David.

-       That’s where the Kickstarter money is going, says David.

The Kickstarter campaign has been the most successful in Sweden so far, and David’s goal for a 30-minute film is more than fulfilled. If investors start kicking in, a full-length movie might even be possible; the executive producer Mathias Fjellström at locally based Salmonfox has been on the Sundance Festival with interesting meetings this week.

- Special effects people from Harry Potter and Lord of the Ring have been in touch with me. Elijah Wood, the actor doing Frodo in The Ring has tweeted on the project, it’s all incredible, David continues.

I am thinking, watching all this, about boys. I don’t know David Sandberg myself, but he moves in the same creative crowd as my sons. I have been watching them growing up playing their way towards an adult life. They do what’s fun and are not compromising on that. They have picked their joy, cultivated it, worked hard (absolutely!) and are going towards 30 carrying professional titles on what once was their after school fun.

I don’t see girls doing that. Girls stop playing in their pre teens and become serious good girls. Doing the right thing. They study hard and get better grades than the boys. They are suffering from anxiety from being competitive, they don’t sleep, they have headaches and stomach pain and it seems to me they are not having fun. They are turning way too serious way to early in life (still just kids!) meanwhile the boys are running around laughing their heads off in something that might very well be there future occupation.

I find this very unfair. And disturbing, Umeå is a young, creative and fairly gender equal city. As boys and young men have surrounded me, I have to think hard to find examples of girls to compare with. We have young women who fill up their space and make headlines doing what’s closest to their hearts. Many musicians.

But the ones coming to my mind are girls working for gender and race equality, for getting men to understand their role in sexual abuse and rape, for having people make the right choices when it comes to organic food and fair trade clothes. Serious, good, young women. Doing the right thing. But are they having fun? The way young men are having fun? There are the fashion bloggers of course, their subject seems from a distant to be more superficial, more of being in the entertainment business. Are they having fun? Are they playful? I don’t know.

God forbid I am putting a damper on David Sandberg and Kung Fury here, that’s not my intention at all. We are so incredibly proud of this young man from nowhere (Umeå) who is making headlines all over the world! And what an inspiration he is to men and women all ages! I am just turning a little bit philosophical on the subject.

The Kickstarter final status landed on 630 019 $. From 17, 713 backers. The backers will be given something in return; a brief product placement, a logo swirling like a ninja roll star through a frame. The biggest contributor did put 93 000 $ in. He wants to do a character in the film.

-       I just have to bring all my directing skills to the set and I think we will be fine, David says.

28-year old David Sandberg didn’t sleep the first crazy weeks of the campaign, not from anxiety, he was just too wired up from the excitement. I hope he will get a little bit of rest now, before his playfulness will be cashed in to fulfilling his dream. It will be very exciting seeing what will come out of it. And hey, if this viral phenomenon still hasn’t reach you: watch and enjoy!

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=72RqpItxd8M 

Holding my life in my hands

This year it’s made out of purplish leather. It’s a very solid hard cover and there is a hand written poem by Edgar Allen Poe on the front. My pen runs smooth on the paper and it’s a joy picking it up every night before I go to bed. It’s nothing but beautiful and I love the feel of it in my hands.

I have kept a journal since I was thirteen years old. I have been ending my day by writing it down every day in my life but the twelve first years.

My first journal was purchased at the bookstore in the small town south of Umeå where I grew up. The dates were printed on the pages, so whatever was on my mind it had to fit on one page. I can still recall standing at the back wall in the little store around Christmas picking the journal, as I did for many years. When I started high school and moved to Umeå, the range of books working as a journal grew bigger, and I moved over to hard cover note books, allowing me to adjust my writing after my needs.

My journal was and is my best friend. I probably wasn’t perceived as a lonely girl, but within me I was. I had friends, but I always felt different and estranged. I think I took life very seriously even at a young age. And I didn’t have parents to turn to when I was troubled.

My father was a warm and loving man but not really equipped for listening to and advising a teenage daughter. My mother was a complex woman who was the root to my alienation and therefore impossible to turn to. She was anxiety-ridden and punishing so whatever my problems were I needed to keep them from her. As she was so different from other moms, I couldn’t share that matter with my friends. I was ashamed and sometimes I even defended her, coming up with good arguments for her behavior. I guess I was a codependent family member. My journal was the only one I could talk to, and I don’t think I would have lived today without my journal, always there. My rescue. My best friend.

At times, going back in my journals, I wish I had been writing more. There are allusions, half images and glances, making me curious about details, about the whole picture. My memory is very good and I remember more from my life than most people do, still, there are of course lost pieces. And sometimes I wonder how my ability of remembering is connected to the fact that I have been writing most of my life down.

The older I have gotten the more I have been writing. The more challenging life has been, the more I have been writing. And the lonelier my life has turned, the more I have been writing.

I need to like the things around me. I need to love the esthetics of the couch I am spending most of my hours in. My cereal bowl needs to make me happy, so does my teacup. The music I am playing needs to fit my emotional mood. The light from the lamp needs to be right. The wall paint needs to be the one I had pictured. And I am designing my dinner table so that I get what I am imagining.

My hands are holding the journal every evening. I am closing my day 365 times a year with reaching for that book. I need to touch something that is inspiring.

Some years have been entered in complete darkness. New Years 2009 when I had a malignant cancer tumor in my breast I picked a dark brown leather journal. There wasn’t room for being inspired. My body and soul were scared and lonely. The year after, being a survivor, the journal was high pink linen (not breast cancer pink but high pink) as in I am living, I am actually living and I am ready for life!!

For years I have wanted to design my own journal. As I have a lot of photos in my archives I’ve been thinking it would be cool to create my own cover. This fall I finally got to it and put a lot of time into it. I was so excited when the books arrived and terribly disappointed watching my pictures look like a storm cloud had parked over them. Contrast, dynamics, colors, none of all that was there! I made a complain, reassured that they would fix it. The second arrival didn’t happen until ten days in to January, and my heart just sank when the outcome was exactly the same as the first one.

At this time I was trying to talk some sense into myself: Maria, this isn’t so bad. The journal still has a nice feel to it. You can get used to this! You don’t actually have to LOVE everything around you to get through the day…

Well, I made a deal with myself; if I couldn’t find anything in the local book store that would make me a little bit more happy than this big disappointment, I would adjust and check in to this reality of mine.

So, I couldn’t have been more surprised to find the most beautiful collection of Canadian handicraft leather note books in amazing designs if I had bumped into them at Barnes and Nobles or some well equipped art supply in Seattle! Expensive of course, but there it was, the book that will harbor the next year of my life and be the last thing on my mind and in my hands every day 2014!

Now, I could make this a cute learning story about fighting hard for something, having to let go, and something else will come your way. That’s actually what if felt like when I breath taken laid my hands on that gem. But I know that life isn’t that simple. Sometimes you have to let go, and nothing else comes your way. The only thing there is, is a deep dark whole. A vast cold tundra. And it’s cold and dark forever.

Life isn’t always a success story. In this time and age we are run over by the message that we are in control of our lives, the only thing we need to do is set a goal, think positive and work hard. I find that approach extremely cynical. Life, as we know it, can change in a split of a second no matter what are goals are, however positive we think and how hard we work.

I am sometimes wondering about the meaning of my life. I don’t know. I don’t know what the meaning of my life is. But there is my bookshelf. Filled with my journals. I am looking at it. I can follow my preferences and taste when it comes to the design of them through the years. I can spot the years I was indifferent, just grabbed something to write in. The years I had purpose and goals. The dark ones. The life changing ones. The happy ones. I am watching my life neatly sorted in colors and shapes. And I am thinking: this is the meaning of my life. The documentation is the meaning of my life.

I am holding my purplish stunning journal in my hand. Of course I did the right thing not adjusting myself to a storm cloudy cover picture that would make my heart sink every night at lights out. This is my life! I am holding my life in my hands. And this year I feel obligated doing everything I can to fill the blank pages between that gorgeous cover with days resembling the sense of the book. Right now – and now is all we know - my life isn’t gorgeous, but it isn’t dark brown either. And I feel my journal will inspire and help me making the best out of it.

Gay/Socialist: the people's choice!

It’s been called a watershed moment in the US history. And it happened this Monday. Seattle’s first out gay Mayor and it’s first socialist were sworn in to office. To me, I must say the latter is more surprising.

In my photo show Away is Home Home is Away, which I produced on commission for The Nordic Heritage Museum in Seattle 2002, there is a pair of pictures called Love.

One of them is from my Swedish village, picturing the hands of my beloved neighbors Alida and Värner at that time 85 and 92 years old. The other one two tall and fit macho men in tanks, one of them black the other white, holding hands, looking at each other. I caught them from behind at a red light on Broadway. It’s a street shot and they are not aware of me. To me the Seattle gay community is a signum for the city.

Mayor Ed Murray took the oath from former governor Gary Locke (the first Asian governor on the US mainland) on a Gaelic bible held by his husband. Socialist City Council member Kshama Sawant’s oath was administered by Washington State Labor Council Vice President Nicole Grant, after which both women turned to the audience raising clenched fists.

I must say, I have never seen a raised clenched fist in Seattle. Perhaps I need a new set of photos juxtaposed, one fist in Umeå and the other one in Seattle.

The event was moved from more or less closed chambers to the City Hall, which was packed with about 1000 people. Reporting happened in national and international news outlets including CNN, Fox News, The Guardian of London, The New York Times, The Times of India and Al-Jazeera International.

Seattle is a liberal American city, no doubt about it. Certainly all my friends are. A couple of years ago I had a meeting with a friend of an acquaintance who was a Republican. I had never even met a Republican before. Driving there I felt like I was meeting with someone from a different planet. It turned out he was a nice person, and we didn’t discuss politics.

I would say my friends are not only liberal, but very liberal indeed. They are opinionated and on top of the political debate not only in Seattle, but national and international. We have never discussed the subject but I doubt that anyone of them would call themselves a socialist though. That’s why I am amazed I have to say, to find a raised clenched fist in the City Council.

Kshama Sawant is known for her uncompromising stands and idealism. She is a former Seattle community college economics instructor, and in her remarks at the ceremony she denounced the “glittering fortunes of the super wealthy” in the city, saying they came at the expense of working people, the poor and unemployed whose lives, she said, “grow more difficult by the day.”

Ed Murray is the architect of the state’s marriage-equality law, which made same-sex marriages legal in December 2012, and one of the country’s longest-serving gay politicians. Murray and Sawant come from different places, but I am thinking those places might be befriending. And this far they agree on a very specific subject: the raise of the minimum wages.

The minimum wage in US is 7.25 dollars per hour. State of Washington has the highest minimum wage in the country, 9.19 dollar by 2013. Now, Kshama Sawant is set on making 2014 the year of the minimum wage 15 dollars in Seattle. Ed Murray chose to make a $15 minimum wage for city employees the topic of his first official press conference. And the pledge by both Murray and Sawant to propose a $15 minimum-wage ordinance to the City Council by April has fueled national interest.

The buzz around the Monday inauguration seems to be an extension of Seattle’s progressive reputation around the country. Washington State already was in the national spotlight for its recent legalization of gay marriage and marijuana. Seattle also was the third city in the country to adopt a paid-sick-leave ordinance that primarily benefits low-wage workers. Since then, three more cities including Portland and New York City have followed suit, putting Seattle at the forefront of liberal initiatives.

Growing up in the Umeå area in the sixties and seventies a raised clenched fist has been more natural to me than same sex marriages. Although Sweden was the seventh country in the world making same sex marriage legal, it didn’t happen until 2009. Umeå has been voted Gay City of the Year twice, but I wouldn’t say gay is a major signum for the city as I feel it is for Seattle; hey, Seattle recently sailed past San Francisco as the most gay city in the US! I would say though that Red Umeå, an epithet from the sixties, still has an accurate ring to it.

Anyhow. Anyway. I am wishing Ed Murray and Kashma Sawant good luck serving the people and City of Seattle, and I am looking forward to what will come out of it! 

The entertainer

-       Will you be going to the family fika tomorrow?

-       If I can get a ride I absolutely will.

-       Would you consider riding with me?

-       I most certainly would!

It is Bertil, calling me the other day. Bertil will be 93 in March and he is my mother’s cousin. He lives on the original family homestead down across the field from me, in a yellow house with a well-kept baker’s cottage and barn.

Every year during the Holidays the family on my mother’s side gets together for a major fika. It is saffron bread and Christmas cookies of many different kinds, and of course coffee, tea, Christmas candy and fruit. This year it was at my sister’s place, and that’s where I needed a ride.

The rain changed to snow just as Bertil was picking me up. I should of course have given him a ride, not the other way around, but things are what they are. The road is slushy, Bertil is an excellent driver though and his eyesight is still unrestricted.

Bertil is a widower since six years back. He was married to the beautiful Kristel who escaped the Nazis through the Berlin sewer system, fleeing her country with her two young daughters. One of the little girls didn’t make it, and Kristel arrived in Sweden with the great loss of a husband, a child and a country. That’s when she met Bertil.

Loosing Kristel has been very hard on Bertil. Yet, it is like he has entered a new phase in life.

I love Bertil, he is very dear to me. He is an intellectual, intelligent, sharp, witty, warm, caring, elegant and an extraordinary storyteller. Being with Bertil is a lot like meeting my father again. They are very similar although not related. I know my mother was very fond of and close to her cousin Bertil, and maybe she saw something in my dad reminding her about her dear cousin. And the funny thing is; my mother and Kristel had similarities too. They were both independent strong women with a lot of character.

In his old age Bertil has become an entertainer. His qualities as a storyteller is widely known, and quite often he is combining that talent with playing the piano, sometimes even singing. In his profession Bertil was an elementary school teacher and church organist, he is still practicing the piano every day. At passed 90 he has refined his teaching skills into his stories, and his fingers are flying the piano keyboard in the most elegant way still.

You could put Bertil into any radio or television broadcast. On stage he is taking everybody in the room in, seeing everyone, giving each and everyone a special word, a nod, a message. His stories are timed on the second and he never runs too long. He knows exactly what he is doing.

One day Bertil told me: ”Maria, I don’t know if I will ever get over the fact that Kristel is gone and won’t be coming back.” I said: “of course you won’t, how could you? She is the one you chose, and she chose you, you had a long and good life together which of course you miss incredibly. Why are you asking from yourself to get over her? That’s just too much to require from yourself, don’t do it!

Bertil is often sad, wondering by himself in his childhood home, most everyone from his early years and adult life gone. He keeps is brain and mind alert with following the news and debates in the world, he watches concerts and theater from Germany on his satellite TV and finds different versions of his favorite music on Youtube. I am sending him a rose by email on his birthday when I can’t walk across the snowy field to give him tulips in March.

And most every week he takes the seat in his white Mercedes which has 187 000 miles, running like it’s still new, and enters a stage where an attentive audience is all eyes and ears for him. He switches his charm on, his gaze young as a boy, his voice expressive and humorous. The entertainer.

Yesterday we were 19 people around the Christmas fika table at my sisters. Three generations, Bertil the oldest, my sons’ cousin Kasper the youngest, just over 20. Bertil isn’t aware of that he is the center for all of us; we are all in love with this wonderful man who can tell the stories of where we all come from.

There is a family tree, and at Christmas Eve the young cousins were gathered around it. Now Kasper started asking Bertil about how it all was connected, who was his father Oscar and how was he related to the young cousins great grandfather Carl? And how come the homestead was divided into two? And tell us the story about their sister Lina who immigrated to America?

The normal duration for a Christmas fika was well passed when we finally rose up from the table. Something very special happened around that table. Three generations together around the family story. No one playing with their phones for other reason than recording Bertil and what he had to tell us. Everyone focused on the same thing. On ourselves in a perspective that we all were very aware of will be gone when Bertil no longer can tell the stories.

To end the day we were all summoned for a summer event we cherish: Bertil’s waffle party in his barn, which he has made into an inn! I know his garden will be at it’s best, him driving the riding mower the day before, making the lawn look like a golf course. And he will play the organ he built in the barn and of course he will tell the stories we ask for. The entertainer.