A star is born

This was born early today, at 6 a.m. this morning. It's a girl. Mom and baby are doing fine.

The third generation of the Nummelin family on a Tolkien binge

We watched Peter Jackson's The Hobbit when my daughter was last on vacation in Finland with us (she lives with her mother out of Finland most of the time), and my son was so excited about the film, he wanted to watch Jackson's The Lord of the Rings as well. And so we did, just the two of us. (My daughter had already left Finland at that time.)

Boy, was he excited! I'm very happy my son has an eye for grand adventure and thrilling moments of battle. Afterwards he wanted to know everything about elves, old kings, the lineage of everyone mentioned in the film. I told quite many details of the film beforehand so as not to make them too suspenseful. And then he said he wants to hear The Hobbit as a bedtime story, so we started it. Then he said that when the book is done, he wants to move over to The Lord of the Rings. So be it, we said. (And just yesterday when we stopped by a thrift store, I picked up a battered copy of the novel for him to take away when he moves out. If the book holds up to that day.)

I read the European graphic novel version of Tolkien's novel (or rather, Ralph Bakshi's animated film) already when I was 10 or so. My daughter saw Jackson's films when she was 11 or 12 - afterwards she read the book in two or three days. Now my son is on a Tolkien binge when he's soon 9.

I'm just pondering here whether we should watch Bakshi's animated film and its appalling sequels and read the afore-mentioned graphic novel... I'm also thinking whether I should revisit Silmarillion myself - it's been almost 30 years since I last read it!

Snow sledding

Here's a Christmas present of sorts to all the readers of this blog: the father of my son's friend shot a video about us sledding some weeks back. The song in the soundtrack is, I believe, also by my son's friend's dad. Merry Christmas to you all! (And oh, by the way, you can take a peek at the Xmas glamour at our house: here's my wife in her Christmas dress in her vintage blog.)

The Demars redux

The Demars, the band my kid brother Matias and our cousin Juho had some dozen years ago, seems to have some renewed interest in them and there's been some traffic at Pulpetti, mainly on this link in which I tell the story of the band.

Anders Engwall was complaining - and rightly so - about the absence of downloadable material by The Demars. There's none that I can think of, but someone has downloaded one of the songs on the Veriläiskiä EP, their only record that's been available. The title translates as something like "Round-Shaped Pussy" (no, don't ask).

Merry Christmas to everyone!

I was going to post a nice Xmas picture my daughter did, but I just made it vanish! We are away on a Christmas trip and I can't get to the picture at the moment, so you'll just have to wait until tomorrow. Merry Christmas until then!

Kauto soon seven and..

..going to school! Tomorrow actually. I'm soon beginning to put him into sleep. Wish me luck! He's not very easy in these matters, let me tell you. But how time flies by! I'm just proud to have kept him alive. He's a very smart kid, reads, calculates with big numbers, runs like a lightning, but these seven years haven't been very easy. The old cliché says "I wouldn't change a day", but I'd really like to change one or two. Yet, I love the kid very, very dearly.

The picture is from 2009, I think. The hipster clothes were picked by him.

We just moved

We carried almost all of our possessions to our new apartment - our new home! - today and we are all pretty tired. Kauto threw up after eating almost only candy and snacks all day and this new place is a mess, with all the 6,000 books lying around, in boxes, on tables, on shelves, everywhere. Plus all the clothes, Elina's vintage dresses, 120 shoes... and I'm not someone to blame her, since I've got at least 100 T-shirts and what not. We've talked about opening a bottle of Moët & Chandon when the move is over, but it's not over yet. Wish us luck!

Wishes for Merry Christmas...

...with this nice pulp-styled boxer shorts package I discovered while I was shopping for Christmas gifts. I thought for a minute I'd buy them for Kauto, my son, but I wasn't sure whether he likes boxer shorts, as he doesn't wear them, so instead I just took a photo. I think this is very well done.

So: Merry Christmas and all that!

Elina's blog

My wife Elina has just started her own blog. Take a look here. The blog, called Hopeapeili (Silver Mirror; an old Finnish fashion mag), will be largely about vintage fashion and it's in Finnish.

Some great films seen lately and other ephemera

I've been really busy during the last two weeks, hence no posts. I'll try to get some done in the near future.

But, em, you know, I get a feeling that everyone thinks I see only bad movies, like the recent Silent Trigger. I've seen quite a many great films lately, but for some reason or another I haven't written about them here. They include John Huston's James Joyce film The Dead, which is simply marvellous, Georges Franju's great, but slightly obscure Les yeux sans visage (AKA The Horror Chamber of Doctor Faustus), and, just late last night, Terrence Malick's war epic The Thin Red Line.

There was also the Festival of Finnish Cinema, during which I managed to see only some movies, but they included Seppo Huunonen's Karvat, about which I've written before (see here; I'll add the link later, there's some trouble with this computer), and Visa Mäkinen's exploitation flick Yön saalistajat/Hunters of the Night from 1984. Visa Mäkinen is an independent movie maker from Pori, where I used to live, and this is his only action film, from a script by Kari Levola, a writer who's now living in Raisio near Turku, where I now live. I know him, and he's a very nice guy, and I can see what he tried to do with the script for this film, but for some reason the delivery fails at all accounts: the direction, the actors, the editing. But the film is more fun for it. I'd like to see this remade. Maybe I'll have to start producing films on my own...

Have I been reading anything? Yeah, I've read two novels by Tracy Chevalier, The Girl with a Pearl Earring and Falling Angels, which I recommend heartily; I read them, because we are doing a sequel to the reference book on historical novelists with Jukka Halme and Sari Polvinen. I'll start one of Robert Harris's novels on Rome any day now.

I've also been reading Spade & Archer by Joe Gores (the Finnish translation just came out as Sam Spaden etsivätoimisto), but I'm not really getting into it. Spade seems a bit too stale. Was he this boring in Hammett's books? I don't think so. But I'll write more about the book once I finish it.

As for the family matters... Sigh. I just heard my daughter and her mother will be spending three more years in the Central Europe. These will be hard years. And I don't know what Kauto will think of this - he hasn't been told yet.

Kauto can read

My son Kauto has just learnt to read! He read at least two quotes from a cartoon all by himself - and he'd never seen the cartoons before. We are totally amazed with Elina - we knew this was coming, but still it strikes us by surprise.

And before you ask: Kauto is five. Okay, five and a half.

My daughter

I haven't been blogging much - that's mainly because my daughter (now 10 years old, 11 later this year) is spending her Winter holiday in Finland and has been mainly staying with us for this week. She's going to her mother in a couple of hours and they are leaving back abroad early tomorrow morning. These are always difficult moments. My daughter is shy and doesn't really seem interested in getting melodramatic, so it's just normal life before we part again - she's playing with Kauto, I'm sitting at the computer, Elina is tidying up places, we're talking casually about lunch. And then it's all over again for five weeks.

Hurrah for the Fleischers!

We've been watching quite a lot of old Superman cartoons by Max and Dave Fleischer with Kauto. I bought an old VHS cassette some time ago and Kauto was enthusiastic from the word go. He said to me today he's gonna be a film maker when he grows up, and later he said he'll make a movie in which he shows how Superman is born and how the planet Krypton blows up. Didn't know we have Richard Donner living with us.

(Kauto also said that he'll make the world's longest movie that shows someone sleeping for 24 hours... We've been talking about the longest movies and I told him there's a film called Sleep. Kauto also said that it may be even 100 hours long. "No one sleeps that long", I said. "He's not a real man, he's fabricated!")

Those Fleischer Supermans (Supermen?) are fascinating. They are pretty well-made in their own right, but it's interesting to note how noirish they are in their design, with steep camera angles and very shadowy lighting, the use of silhouettes and such. It's at times like watching Citizen Kane.

Here's one that's not on the VHS I bought. I seem to remember my kid brother used to watch these, too, and this was one of his favourites.

Crying my eyes out: Chaplin's The Kid

You know the scene in The Kid where they come to take Jackie Coogan away from Chaplin? With Coogan throwing his arms out and yelling: "Papa! Papa!" (I'm not sure, but that's what I read from his lips.)

It's a scene that makes me cry every time I even think about it. And now I just saw the film again, for the first time in years (in its entirety, I've seen bits of it every now and then and I've showed it to students when I've done some lecturing on the history of cinema). I was crying almost all the time, especially since I knew what was coming. And thinking that Jackie Coogan is just as old in the pic as our son, Kauto, is now made me weep even more.

But when I got back from the film archive screening, Elina showed me this photo she'd taken of Kauto earlier tonight, I couldn't but laugh.

Vacation; a notice on a post elsewhere

Starting my vacation tomorrow and heading off to a trip longer than a week, so won't be posting. Ottilia's with us for three weeks.

Here's a link to a longer post on an old Finnish sex paperback I just posted on one of my other blogs. In Finnish, that is.

Back from the vacation, catching up on Facebook, Twitter, e-mail and what not

We just returned from our three-day trip to a summer cabin. Everything was fine, even though Kauto threw a big rock at the back of my head. It was an accident and he said immediately he was sorry, but still... Elina was later pretty amazed I didn't get angry. The weather treated us two ways: first it was warm and sunshine, then it wasn't that anymore, almost the exact opposite. However, Kauto and Ottilia got to fish for the first time in their lives (and me for the second time in my life!). Kauto even got two! Ottilia caught one, but it fell from the hook. We killed the two fish, but we couldn't eat them, which is kind of stupid.

Okay, here's an interesting article on how Facebook will - probably - change literature. Thanks for the link to Sarah Weinman on Twitter!

PS. And, oh, I decided I'll grow me a mustache. Photos later.

Couple swimming trunks, eh?

We were going to go swimming last Sunday, but the swimming hall was closed - it's closed on weekends for the whole summer! (Typical of Turku, the city where we live in. They never do anything right.)

But this gave me a reason to gather up my collection of vintage swimming trunks. Are you ready? I counted I have at least 25 pairs of old swimming trunks, from the sixties to the late eighties. I took a snapshot of all of them - and here it is.

Finally it's Yuri time!

Some of you may remember that I was having a birthday party on May. As a commemmoration, I played live some songs I recorded on a C-cassette player in the late eighties. During those years I pretended to be an artist called Yuri, but I never performed live and I never distributed any of these (except to some friends and my then-girlfriend). My kid brother Matias shot some of the performances with his digital camera in May, and now I finally got to upload them in YouTube (or is it "on YouTube"). (Too bad no one captured me and Matias playing live at the same party. We were a band called National Panasonic Boys. Maybe one of these days...)

I called my music "acoustic speed metal", but it's more akin to hardcore punk in that the songs were very short, from two seconds up to 20 seconds. There are two videos now, the shorter one being "Kill Me" and the longer one being "I Am a Dead Milkman" (which, as I write in YouTube, is a tribute to The Dead Milkmen, a band which many may not remember). I introduce the songs in Finnish. I play a plastic toy guitar, in the eighties Yuri had a real guitar - but it had gone bonkers and you couldn't really tune it (not that I would've known how to do it).

Okay, here you go...


"I Am a Dead Milkman". (I talk about the psychobilly fashion a bit. I was never a billy man, but I've been somewhat fascinated by the style. The song is in Finnish. It goes something like this:

I'm a dead milkman
I'm a dead milkman
I'm a dead milkman

I used to deliver milk to people's doors
now I don't do that anymore
'cause I'm a dead milkman

etc.)

"Kill Me". (I compare this to Kurt Cobain's ("that loser", I say) "Rape Me".)

PS. There's actually a third song by me on YouTube, but you'll have to find it that yourself.

Sangster's Private I

I finished this last night. Well, I can't actually say I finished it, because I had to stop reading some 40 pages before the actual end. I just couldn't concentrate on it in any way. I've been quarreling with my ex about many things (you may remember that they moved to Luxembourg and I haven't seen Ottilia for almost two months now and it seems that they won't be able to travel to Finland as often as I was originally told), and last night I realized that I hadn't understood anything that had been going on in the book for the last 50 pages. I didn't know what Sangster's hero, private eye John Smith, was talking about and who some of the characters were, so I thought it would be better just to drop it and read it some other time. (If you're new to this blog, scroll down a bit - there's a longer post about Sangster.)

But then I picked up the new Poe biography by Peter Ackroyd. I was tired as hell, but the book grabbed me and I read till midnight. It's a very good biography - and it's short, so it's highly recommended. (The Finnish translation just came out. I understood the book was published in UK only this year.)

Hectic, stressful, take your pick

Sorry, haven't really been able to post anything here - I've been busy, which is always a perfect excuse, but I'm also having other stressful things in my life. Today my daughter Ottilia is moving away from Finland with her mother - they are going to Luxemburg! Ottilia's mother got a two-year teaching gig there.

Ottilia has visited us almost weekly for the past seven years and now we'll see each other again only in the end of October! No wonder this morning looks so gloom. Ottilia came to us yesterday for a few hours in the afternoon and I feel like I should've said something important to her or at least spent more time with her. I know that whatever I would've done, I'd still feel the same, so there's nothing doing.

It's a good thing we have Kauto here, he keeps us away from too much grief and sorrow.