Winter fades

I was trying to get a picture of rhe new hipster condos next to the old, iconic apartment building where Somali refugees live. But the train moved.

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MSPIFF, belated follow-up

Also old, because Google is stupid and useless.

MSPIFF was very good this year.  Plus I chose well.  But that's about good movies being at more accessible times.  I planned to take some time off from work to see films, but then AWP took that leave up.

The Black Panther doc had amazing amounts of killer footage gleaned from people all over the world, particularly of the many women who made up a lot of the Panthers rank and file.  I thought it managed a good discussion of the wide range of issues from the time that it's hard to cover in two hours.  Their Kickstarter funded, so the doc will get a theatrical release: First Friday, folks.  That's the way to support the movies you want to see more like.

The Russian Woodpecker was a spellbinding whirlwind of conspiracy theories and solid interviews with ex-Soviet officials who spoke off the cuff and confirmed a lot of what the Chernobyl-survivor narrator suspected in his wildest flights of imagination.  Terrifying stuff.

Bands de Filles/ Girlhood is a well-put-together look at the lives of Black girls in a banlieue outside Paris, and what stands between them and living out their dreams.  Great music, visuals, and acting.  Really nice to see girls get center stage,  warts and all, without saccharin b.s.

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The Blue Fox (old)

The Blue Black Wolf, c. S 2015

This is old, cos Google sucks. 11\15, probably.

I'm on to Icelandic fiction, having scoured the library for Finnish, Estonian, and some post-Soviet E. European lit.  The two non-mysteries that seemed most promising both turned out to be fantastical and straight out science fiction, respectively.

The Blue Fox (Skugga-Baldur), by Sjón.  In his headshots he looks like a hipster.  He wrote lyrics for Bjork.  He writes a lot of different stuff, but the interwebs give his title as Poet. 

Consistent with that, The Blue Fox is short but manages to compress a coherent and satisfying narrative into tiny little snippets.  Man immersed in Nature is no match for her.  Of course there would be no story if he respected her properly.  Don't mess with the Lady or her own, especially in deep winter. 

Virginia Cribb appears to be the go-to translator for Icelandic au courant literature, as well as at least some of the Arnaldur Indridason mysteries.  She translated the Sjon books I saw and Love Star by Andri Snær Magnason, the SF novel.  Her blurb: "works as a freelance translator from Icelandic to English. She has an MA in Icelandic and Scandinavian Studies from UCL, a BPhil in Icelandic from the University of Iceland, and lived and worked in Iceland for a number of years as a publisher, journalist and translator." Otherwise, not much on the interwebs but some poetry translation snippets.  Based on these and the books, she's damn good.

Magnason has an interesting blog, with content in several languages. 
Here's a recent Grist article about reinvention of an old coal plant that he was involved in.

His Swedish blurb sounds better, but the info impresses in English too:
Andri Snær Magnason är den ende författaren som fått Isländska litteraturpriset i alla tre kategorier: skönlitteratur, facklitteratur och barnlitteratur.

(He is the only author who received the Icelandic Literature Prize in all three categories: fiction , non-fiction and children's literature.)

I've only just begun Love Star, and so far it's a lot like Malindo Lo's Adaptation. I'm thinking there's no space aliens tho I could be wrong.

I'm hooked on Danish, Welsh, and French cop shows thanks to Netflix, one feminist and urbane despite the protag having moved back to her hometown of Aarhus, one brooding and very rural, and the last terribly lurid and morbid, so French, from the northern region: Dicte, Hinterlands, and Witnesses (Les Temoins).  Antigone 34 is good too, set in Montpelier.

According to Wikipedia, "Some critics complained that most of the actors' Copenhagen accents were not authentic for a show set in Aarhus, while other actors' accents were so overblown they seemed caricatures."

Everyone's a critic.  I know three words in Danish, all thanks to the show, so I can still enjoy it.  Tak.

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God, I'm a lazy blogger

Busy busy busy. Work is rough. These are all just excuses.

The birds and trees think it's spring.
The air thinks it's April.
The ground thinks it's been raining for two months
None of these things are true.

Reading:
Fiction - Wylding Hall by Elizabeth Hand
Non-fiction- Cool: How the Brain's Hidden Drive for Cool Drives Our Economy and Shapes Our Work, Steven Quartz and Anette Asp

Translating (for the heck of it):
Elena Poniatowska - Tlapalería

Last Watched: Carol
Again. F'in brilliant. Highsmith + Haynes = non-Oscar gold

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