EDITORIAL
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t is the dark and rainy month of November. At least this is how this month has been in Copenhagen where this editorial is written. Along with this November issue comes the transition to December, which brings with it the promise of Christmas, a time for relaxation, at the end of the month.Since we can wait for Christmas by drinking seasonal beer and eating seasonal foods, the dark times aren’t necessary all that bad. If only that bothersome work didn’t get in the way to pay our bills, life would be so much easier.
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o give you something to pass the time, we have made you this November issue to browse and read at your leisure. The beers etc you will have to get yourself, which I recommend you do. Some alcohol should make this magazine even better. Our brave reporter’s journey to the Sodankylä film festival is still on and we also have the usual segments with our own ponderings and wonderings. As usual, do contact us if you want to have your work presented on our pages.
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e here at Godartet wish you a pleasant read and an enjoyable December.
NOVEMBER
EDITORIAL 2 COLUMN 4 5 NIGHTS UNDER THE MIDNIGHT SUN 5 COLUMN 6 ESSAY 7 COMIC 9 BATHROOM STALL WALL 10 LAST PAGE 11
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COLUMN
JUHA HEIKKINEN BEING AN OUTSIDER, THE EASY EDITION JUHA HEIKKINEN
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aving moved to my second country within one year, I once again find myself in a position where I come from the outside into a group of people who, even though most helpful and accomodating, have a life of their own and therefore don’t understandably think first about how to make my transition easier. It is sort of fitting that I am in this position while all of Europe is it the middle of a refugee crisis, with people with no possibility of staying in their home country coming also to Denmark in hopes of finding work and a new place to call home. Let’s admit firsthand that my transition is labeled by a middle class-ish comfort and, most importantly, a willingness to leave my home and experience new things. Whatever stress and discomfort I experience when moving here, I was asking for it and therefore enduring it is much easier. Also coming from stable conditions, being already employed and at least having English as a means to communicate with the locals who almost always speak very good English are all factors that make life so much easier in comparison. Speaking of language, yours truly does have every intention of learning the local language and it helps having to use Swedish in my work quite a bit. The biggest issue is what they do to the words when they spew them out of their mouths. Quite horrendous, really.
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enmark seems on the first glance to be very similar to Finland in a sense that the rules are stricter than in Poland (someone might smile at this but let me tell you, the relaxed rules were quite nice) and the price range is also considerably higher than in Poland. To our surprise, food and alcohol seem to be a bit cheaper than in Finland, which to us is once again sign that Finland is in need of some healthy competition when it comes to things you consume orally.
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ut what about what we at Godartet are about, culture, art and all that? Well, I have managed to watch a couple of Youtube videos about Soren Kierkegård, the existential philosopher. On first glance, meaning after being encouraged by a for dummies type of explanation that I could actually understand his work, I feel I have to find a library close by so that I can dive into his work and thoughts. I am also reading the second novel from Godartet’s most beloved Norwegian, Karl Ove Knausgård (a moment of day dreaming), in English. Having gotten used to reading his work in Finnish, it feels sort of weird to change the language. However, his writing is as strong as ever and I must say that I cannot detect any trace of the fact that he was more inexperienced as a writer when writing A Time for Everything (En Tid for Allt). I have to apologize for my laziness towards finding you events and artists that are typically Danish. If you want to see a nice concert, I do recommend Amager Bio, where I went to see Deathcab for Cutie with my girlfriend. The venue was perfectly built for concerts with a more intimate feel to them and it resembled the iconic bar/concert venue Tavastia in the heart of Helsinki.
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n short, Copenhagen seems like a very nice place to be, at least when it’s not raining. Which is almost every day this time of the year. I will do my best to find interesting people and places for you to wonder and am more than happy to take suggestions. Come down and visit Copenhagen, we might bump into each other.
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The writer enjoys not having proper internet, a debilitating problem in the first world.
5 NIGHTS UNDER THE MIDNIGHT SUN DAY IV
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s the morning of the fourth day of this journey came, not brought by the Sun because it was always up, but by the clock, I actually managed to get my ass up to the morning discussions. I got the motivation for this victory from a theory I had: If I got up and going faster, I would have less time in the freezing tent and therefore I’d be less cold. It kind of made sense. Anyway, these were the first morning discussions I got to see this year, and the first without the late great Peter von Bagh as the interviewer. His absence was clear. Olof Möller wasn’t at all bad when talking with Miguel Gomez, but Gomez himself was surprisingly dull and generic. The other discussion was some PR dude talking with Whit Stillmann. Stillmann was cool and funny as hell, but the PR dude was a stuttering mess. All in all, what used to be the highlight of the festival, had now turned into nothing special and something forgettable.
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n true Godartet fashion, I then made my way to the ticket booth with a clear idea: To see all the Polish films for the day as we back then also covered the Polish cultural life. Nothing could say more “Godartet” than the moment they told me all the tickets had already been sold and I quickly had to come up with another plan. So I headed back to the beer tent. I quickly revised my plan and did manage to get a nice selection of films for the day from Peter Von Bagh’s documentary to Truffaut’s brilliant Wild Child. The gem of the day -and the festival- however, was Martin Hanacek’s Pictures of the Gone World. A Slovakian film about the truly old-school peasants living in the rural parts of Czechoslovakia. A beautiful and brilliant piece of humanity on the silver screen. My last film of the day was Gazier’s Under the Skin, which truly
made me feel old and dusty: As the movie’s whole point was essentially having a naked Scarlett Johansson hang around and have sensual close-up’s of her… parts… I couldn’t help but to yawn at the dullness of the film and its plot. I have truly grown up. All the other films I saw were brilliant, though.
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owever, even if everything was fine on the screen, not much was good in front of it. The audiences in all the screenings I saw acted like bags of monkeys. When you barely got used to seeing someone’s Facebook feed in the clear light of the cell phone, you then had to try and ignore the drunken discussion people had about how boring the film was right behind you. And snippity-snips of the opening beer cans. It felt weird, but it was at Truffaut’s Wild Child when all this was combined into a middle-aged asshole, 100 kilos worth of it, and I had to think how an average teenager behaves better in a commercial multiplex-cinema than an average adult in a art-film festival. Completely befuddled, I went to sleep, happily unaware of the peaking nightmare I was about to experience in the last day of the festival.
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We at Godartet are slowly but surely losing the battle of sanity with this dude. Someone, please, make him stop!
COLUMN
FANNY GRAZZO
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Howdiho and laadidaa! was thinking once again that I should really be writing a trailer for a cinematic film that would be made into an aria which could then be played by Brad Pitt in his upcoming series House of the Walking Nightmare Dead Infected by Desperate Hostel Wiwes part 2 – This Shit Just Never Stops. I really enjoyed the first one, even though it was a bit generic but hey then again who isn’t sometimes apart from me hoho not me! What was I supposed to say again before I lost myself in this space of time and started walking on the sunshine’s edge before finding the mystery behind misery? I am the answer, I realized and stopped asking questions. I suggest you do the same and stop boring me with whatever it is you are doing with your life.
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et’s play a game shall we? I am God and I will tell you what you name is under the colors of your youth. Your task is to bring me the correct fruit to which I will answer the question you asked the previous day from my father who is now dead. Oh how I love this game! We play it all the time at parties with friends like Kierkegård and the like. It can get a bit dull at times, you know how it is with these sulking types... But I will not be deterred from my mission and I will find my mission and let you know why I have turned left from here and turned my attention to the wonderful life of Brian. His was a funny story I have to say. He died, hehe...
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don’t more,
have talking
time to
to be staying you! Bye and
here see
anyyou!
ESSAY
VILLE KOSKI WAY BACK TO EXTREME BASICS VILLE KOSKI
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xford Dictionaries has a tradition of annually selecting a “word of the year”, a single word that captures the ethos and vibes of the year. This year, the good academics at Oxford chose this word to be not so much a traditional word, but an emoji. Precisely it is the “crying from laughing” -emoji that is the word of the year. Personally, I would disagree with this choice just for the news these days; the attacks in Paris, massive paranoia and scares in Brussels, Copenhagen and Stockholm, bombings in Beirut, financial crisis… If it happened this year, it’s probably depressing. So a laughing emoji isn’t exactly the best choice for 2015. However, as I have the soul of a pissed off old man, I cannot accept an emoji as a word of the year in any possible way.
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or the past 5000 years, humankind has passed knowledge on to following generations, recorded stories and marked their names on bathroom walls in written language. We do not know how the very first creatures considered to be humans talked or communicated, but it soon developed from something that probably was some kind of elaborate grunting (which is the way we at Godartet still communicate) to speech that had words and sentences in it. And as people need to both remember stuff, pass it on to further generations and let others know Steve was here, they soon developed a way to write it down. Among the first written languages was the Egyptian hieroglyphs, the language that combined logography and literature. Logography of course means the pictorial version of written language, the images we usually think when talking
about hieroglyphs. Naturally, as time went on people realised that it wasn’t exactly the most efficient way of memorizing things into stone and writing evolved to some kind of a version of what it is today at about 2300-2400 BC with the Akkadian language. Naturally, this as well as all other languages evolved through time and disappeared at some point, but some words still exist in modern Assyrian.
A
s we look at languages today, the results of the evolution can only be considered amazing. Nowadays we (probably) have more languages alive than ever before (and I can’t properly speak any of them!) and the rules of each of these have been elaborated to the maximum. So, where does one go from the absolute peak of progress? Sadly, down. Just like the “word of the year” award shows us, our ability to read, write and speak is going downward in a spiral. A few years back a magazine in England had an article on how cellphones were destroying young people’s writing habits as school essays started to have words like “LOL”, “ROFL” and “STFU”. For those unaware of internet-language, they mean “laughing out loud”, “rolling on floor laughing” and “shut the fuck up”. Essentially, when our means of communicating became much faster that the usual letters, postcards and telephone-calls with chat rooms, e-mails and text messages, we also had to make our language faster. And now Oxford dictionaries tells us even those shortcuts are not enough, but we have to go back to the hieroglyphic times. Many studies also show that modern school kids have far worse reading comprehension skills than before and that even in Finland many kids can 7
actually go through the whole school system without learning to read or write (http://goo.gl/cXg6Hs). I am not a doctor or a specialist, but extended use of logography probably won’t help their difficulties in understanding literal writing.
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ut essentially, does it really even matter? Am I just being an old prude with this, a grumpy old bastard who doesn’t want things to change, yelling at clouds? Well, it depends, but probably I’m the one whose train has left. I love books and essays and poetry and you can’t do any of these with emojis. One could argue that all languages must develop and that emojis are just a part of this natural development, but my counter-argument is that emojis aren’t developement but regression to logography. Even though that one little picture can give us the impression of crying out laughing or the joyfulness or pooping, they take it all away from our communal vocabulary without giving anything in return and therefore dulls our minds. In the future history isn’t told in books, letters and speeches, but as a picture of a toilet and with “LOL”.
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owever, to end this little rant on a lighter note, we should take a look at previous year’s “Word of the year” winners to see just how prestigious this Oxford Dictionaries is. In 2014 it was “Vape”, as in those stupid-looking vaporising e-cigarette things. In 2013 the prize went to “Selfie” and 2012 to “omnishambles” because it was mentioned in a TVshow. So, perhaps our worry for the future of language isn’t that realistic, as the people selecting the word of the year are exactly as up to date as one would guess; like that weird uncle who always bums money from your dad while having a mullet and trying to be hip.
The writer uses way too much emojis because he’s incapable of expressing himself with those thing that make up sentences and stuff.
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Due to technical issues, Rufus the Existential Elephant is on a brake.
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ONE MORE THING, JUST FOR YOU, OUR DEAR
NORWEGIAN/SWEDISH/FINNISH/ESTONIAN/DANISH READER!
ARE YOU AN ARTIST, OR DO YOU KNOW ANY ARTISTS OR THOUGHTFUL PEOPLE IN SOME OTHER FIELDS? YES? WOW, THAT IS SO COOL! IF YOU OR YOUR FRIENDS WISH TO SEE THEIR NAMES IN THIS MAGAZINE, THAT CAN EASILY BE ARRANGED! HERE’S WHAT WE’RE LOOKING FOR: WRITERS!
ARTISTS!
Essays, short stories, poems. You name it, we’ll take it! If you have anything in your drawer just waiting to see the light of day, send it to us and we might just publish it. We’re not telling you how to write your stuff, but in essays we’re looking for something that’s related to Nordic arts or culture. Poems and short stories are of course a free-roam, but local point of view is preferred. We don’t have any word or character limitations like those silly professionals, but we hope that you remain in a maximum of 15 A4 pages with some basic size 12 font. Also, no politics, religion, sports or other unrelated boredom!
This is why we do this, to give visibility to amazing artists. Whatever is your medium, from painting to sculpture and photography to textile design, we’re willing to let you promote yourself. In each number we have room for 5 artists and each artist gets a total of 6 spreads to promote themselves (1 spread is a mandatory cover, so 5 is just for art) that you can use any way you wish. Not all of them have to be used, of course. We’ll take care of the lay-out and the end result will always be approved by you before publishing and all the copyrights remain with you.
TIPS!
READERS!
Do you have local knowledge of the best culture events in your town that nobody else knows? Or maybe you have a great idea for a feature story, Gonzo-concept or otherwise great ideas on how to make Godartet a better magazine? If so, do contact us! We’re eager to know what’s happening out there.
If you don’t have anything to contribute, but just like to read our nifty little paper, do share us with the world! We’re on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram and Issuu, we have our own webpage and a YouTube channel so there are many ways for spreading the word about Godartet. And for this, we salute you! Sharing is daring... Or something like that.
And just for all to know, we can’t compensate for your writings, as Godartet works purely on voluntary work (this includes Ville and Juha). However, we also won’t be charging you for anything, and we hope to help you in any way we can. Also, don’t worry about your English, because Godartet has a professional proofreader, who makes sure your words are solid. Hope to hear from you soon!
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LEGAL INFORMATION GODARTET IS A NON-COMMERCIAL, NON-PROFIT MAGAZINE AIMING TO SUPPORT, SPREAD AND ANALYSE ART AND CULTURE FROM NORWAY, SWEDEN, FINLAND AND ESTONIA. THE MAGAZINE IS BASED IN HELSINKI, FINLAND. EDITOR-IN-CHIEF: VILLE KOSKI. SENIOR EDITOR: JUHA HEIKKINEN. EVERYTHING PUBLISHED IN GODARTET IS PROTECTED BY COPYRIGHT AND ALL OF THE COPYRIGHTS BELONG TO THEIR RESPECTIVE MAKERS UNLESS SPECIFICALLY MARKED OTHERWISE. DO NOT COPY, ALTER, SHARE OR IN OTHER WAYS USE THE MATERIAL IN GODARTET WITHOUT THE PERMISSION OF THE SPECIFIC COPYRIGHT OWNER, WHOM YOU MAY CONTACT DIRECTLY OR THROUGH GODARTET MAGAZINE. ANYONE BREAKING THESE RULES WILL BE CAUGHT, FOUND AND - FOR YOUR INFORMATION - WE THINK LANNISTER IS THE COOLEST HOUSE IN GAME OF THRONES. ANY QUESTIONS OR COMMENTS CAN BE SENT TO GODARTETMAGAZINE@GMAIL.COM. HAPPY READINGS!