Sick as Balls.

 This being sick thing blows. I'm convinced the way to overcome this sickness (which isn't pneumonia anymore, by the way. The doctor has now re-diagnosed it as being sinusitis and strep throat with a side of pink eye. WTF, right!?) is to make myself feel better in any way possible. So for the last couple of days, i've woken up, transferred myself from bed to couch (blanket in tow) and indulged in movies (some really crap ones), tea (seven different kinds in the last three days) and ice cream (hell yeah) for breakfast.

 Things are looking good on the ice cream front: i found this new Ben & Jerry's flavor. On the side of the pint it says: sweet cream ice cream with chocolate cookie pieces, chocolatey peace signs and chocolate fudge swirls. Uh huh. They say 0.15 euros of the price of the ice cream goes towards saving the Nordic Sea. I doubt whether ice cream will save the Nordic Sea, but i'll admit it is damn yummy.

As for the movie front; in the last couple of days i've watched Inception (yeah, not as good as i thought), Letters to Juliet (painful. i thought with Vanessa Redgrave and Gael Garcia Bernal it might be worth it. It's not.), The Kids Are All Right (loved it. Julianne Moore and Annette Benning are awesome), Into The Wild (wow, beautiful), Shrek Forever After (yeah they should stop making these) and Shortbus (which is awesome). If anyone's got more good recommendations as for what to watch, do drop me a line.

And last but not least, here's a selection of the meds i'm currently on. Antibiotics, flu meds, cough syrup, lemsip, ketamin, finrexin, codeine, strepsils, keep-out-kids'-reach-meds, don't-operate-heavy-machinery-meds, cold meds, knock-you-out-cold-meds...i've got the whole cornucopia here. So if you're looking for a buzz (or alternatively to contract one of my contagious diseases), you know where to find me.

Autumn: Mushrooms and Movies

It's September. Today i saw determined looking bar staff packing away terrace tables and chairs, probably to be seen next some time in May. On my walk home from a bar on the weekend i didn't see a single person sprawled out in the park, leisurely whiling away the hours between last calls and brunch next morning; a sight that has been a decadent affirmation of summer, and the happily ambivalent attitude to real life that goes with it. I refused to agree when someone stated it with conviction on the last night of Flow Festival, but now i can't deny it any longer. Summer's finally over.

Although this realization is often coupled with a sense of nostalgia and romanticized reminiscing of that far too short season, i don't mind autumn - in fact, it's quite welcome. I'm not gonna launch into that whole spiel about this being the time for some post-summer introspection, regular exercise, new projects and lighting candles when the rain pelts on your windows on a dark and dreary night. Nope. I'll leave that to womens' magazines (seriously, they tell you the same thing every year, WTF?). Instead, i'll tell you what i think is awesome about this season. In two words: mushrooms & movies.
 

The former were found in copious quantities in a rainy forest in Nuuksio over the weekend. First time in my life that i found torvisienet, which is why i was particularly excited upon spotting the curious looking fungi hiding under a fallen tree trunk (my mushroom book warned me one may easily mistake a torvisieni for a fallen leaf or other decaying plant material on the forest floor. You don't say? Luckily, that's not the case with any other mushroom). In any case, i reckon heading into the bush for some dinner ingredients is something everyone should have a go at. And there's still time, too, as the mushroom season extends until the end of October, at least (according to the aforementioned mushroom book, anyhow).

On the movie front, there's Helsinki International Film Festival, Rakkautta & Anarkiaa. Choosing which ones to see is the hardest part; there are so many movies it's confusing. I reckon your best bet (if you haven't got your tickets yet, that is) is to get a festival pass (11 films/70 euros), leaf through the catalogue, and pick your favorites. Unless you're on the ball with this and getting around to it early, you'll probably not get tickets to all the ones you wanna see. But i reckon this is a good thing, cause this way you can spend your remaining tickets on movies you wouldn't normally choose to see. It's nice to be taken out of your comfort zone and field of interest every once in a while - even if it is only cinematically. Personally, i'm quite looking forward to seeing Heartbeats, All That I Love, Dharma Guns and L.A. Zombie, among others. As well as spending most of my evenings this week in the comforting darkness of a movie theatre. 

Back at the ranch, the fungi was about to meet its end. The 'shrooms were thrown in a pan along with some onions, soy cream and a good handful of spices and herbs, and ended up on a plate with some wholewheat spaghetti, topped off with some parmesan. There's something awesome about eating food you've foraged yourself. Even if it is from a stretch of forest crowded on all sides by houses and infested with other urban foragers, and even if that thing moving on the sizzling frying pan happens to be a slug that's crawled out of one of the mushrooms, seriously wishing it wasn't gonna end up as the protein constituent of your next meal. When this amounts to too much excitement for autumn, i recommend you light those candles and invest in some knitting needles.

Sleep overs. Because you're never too old for one.

So it's probably been almost a decade since i've last attended a real sleep over. Drunkenly passing out on a friend's couch with a bunch of equally hammered partygoers in the wee hours of the morning does not count. A real sleep over is about pajamas, sleeping bags, late night gossip, good friends and crap movies. 
Yuck. If this sounds like something vomit-inducing out of a Sweet Valley High novel, i'll tell you it don't have to be that way. The list of sleep over activities is not restricted to playing with ponies and brushing each other's hair. Four girls had a sleep over last Friday, featuring gluttony, excrement and intoxicants. Here's how it came to happen:

• We made some seriously good food. Couldn't decide between sushi and tapas, so we had both. Works out nicely when everyone brings something, and we ended up having way more than we could manage to eat. Finger food, aside from being seriously moreish, is also ideal for snacking on through the night. All night. And in the morning. Nothing like garlic chili mushrooms and a stiff hit of wasabi for breakfast.
• We watched a crap scary movie. Yeah...getting freaked out by a cam corder view of things that go bump in the night in a suburban bedroom only works for the first fifteen minutes. Yours truly fell asleep halfway through Paranormal Activity. Not so good.
• Had mint chocolate chip brownies, Ben&Jerry's cookie dough ice cream, and marshmallow-topped hot chocolate (with a generous splash of minttuviina) for dessert. I feel like the sugar high was always the highlight of parties when you were a kid. And hey, it's good to know it still does the trick a decade later.
• Brought along a boston terrier puppy with an acute case of flatulence. At first it was inappropriately entertaining, then it got practically unbearable (what the hell do these puppies eat - that smell is lethal!), after which the desperate nocturnal swoops to rescue the white carpet from being soiled by liquid feces became just a little too funny and surreal to deal with. 

After all aforementioned pastimes, we were happy to call it a night at around five in the morning, when half of us were snoring and the other two were half-heartedly watching the SATC movie with little success.

When we finally woke up in the afternoon, bleary-eyed after varying amounts of sleep and dog turds, we were all in agreement that we should make a habit of this. There's something special about over indulgence, sleeping on an air mattress and sharing a sleeping bag with a friend and their dog (who, i was told, attempted to attack me while i was sleeping). Something that makes you wonder why people don't do this more often.

It was a dark and stormy night...

The storm of death hit Helsinki last night. In addition to rattling my apartment’s rickety windows, howling in the building’s airing ducts and forcing in an entirely unwelcome chill, it persuaded me to stay the hell inside and out of its way. Pulling on socks and fumbling with my ancient heater (to no avail) i instead contemplated ice cream and a scary movie.

Despite it really being way too cold, dark and stormy for either ice cream or a scary movie, i dug out the B&J’s (cookie dough flavour), got comfy on the couch and scrolled through my Itunes library for The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari…

Dating back to 1920, the silent film in question is considered one of the first in the genre of horror movies and is an example of post WW1 German Expressionist cinema. Film studies facts aside (cause that’s about all i have, folks); I was interested in seeing this particular film because of its alleged influence on Tim Burton. 

Now i won’t give you a blow-by-blow account of the plot (but those of you who want one can find one here, cause the film really is worth seeing. I will, however, tell you what I thought. Watching black and white silent films often calls for patience on my part, cause being a kid raised on happy-coloured, sing-along, mainstream movies (i.e. the stuff of Disney), having the voice and colour sucked out of what I was watching seemed kinda like cheating when I was a kid. And kinda still does (hey I told you I ain’t no film student). Nonetheless, one must understand the grander cinematic milieu and era in which the film was produced and appreciate it in that context (black and white, yes. Silent, that too).

So I’ll give in, the mute and monochrome work. Further emphasising the mood, the painted backdrop’s jagged angles and the lengthy, flickering shots of ghoulishly masked actors enforce the sinister goings-on, contributing to the whole in a convincingly creepy way. I’ve always been one for stories, and this one was much to my liking. What I found most impressive was the way in which horror cinematised almost a century ago remains a compelling representative of the horror film genre and still manages to evoke chills in the contemporary viewer.

My eagerness to find Burton hiding in The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari perhaps allowed me to find more parallels than really exist: Cesare the Somnambulist is easily identifiable as the doppelganger of Edward Scissorhands, while the town of Holstenwall looks a lot like the Victorian town in Corpse Bride, and the protagonist’s fiancée bears a striking resemblance to the Corpse Bride herself… The vision-impairing, mind-fuddling effects of a pint of B&J? I think not. See for yourself and we’ll talk.