Nothing to worry about

Saturday, reporter Camilla Stockmann wrote (and documented with her own photographic snapshots) quite a dramatic story in Politiken concerned with a couple of activists, two foreigners, a man and a woman, who have been making a scene in Copenhagen art galleries lately, masturbating in front of art works, shouting insults, peeing, bringing along excrements and the like. Stockmann sets out in the first person singular to find out who they are and what they are up to.

It is a remarkable adventure which still strikes me as an epideictic piece of reporting --- epideictic as in confirmative epideictic oratory made on special occasions like national holidays, birthdays or funerals. Traditionally, the epideictic speaker is seen to represent the community. The epideictic rhetor knows what values and ideals the auditors basically agree on, and in and by the speech these values must be enacted and consolidated. By the rhetor for the audience and on behalf of the audience which means that the epideictic speaker is constituted as some sort of cultural hero (Dale Sullivan’s term). So back to Camilla Stockmann as an investigator on the art scene – what is she then?

Well, she is a determined reporter who actually finds out who the two unwelcome guests are: Alexander Brener and Barbara Schurz who have a history of making aggressive opposition to commercial and institutional art and who published Anti-Technologies of Resistance back in 1999. And Stockmann puts herself on the line in her story insofar as she tries to confront the two in order to be allowed to ask some questions and has a glass of water thrown in her face. Later on, by means of a determined look and a well-chosen line, she successfully wards off a glass of urine.

Camilla Stockmann never gets a chance to speak to the couple though. And after having identified them she doesn't fill the readers in about their artistic ambitions, at least not in any detail. And she never attempts her own answer to the question which is posed on the front page of Politiken on this occasion: "Is it art to piss on art?" - or actually: She does imply a reassuring no. Stockmann keeps herself detached along with the people she is talking to along the way. People who feel at home on the art scene and whom the readers of Politiken can happily identify with:

The people who are bothered by the activists include "the actor Ulrich Thomsen".

It is an artist (who "is originally Swedish-French") who eventually recalls having seen the two before: "Slowly he recalls their names: 'I believe the woman's name is Barbara ... Barbara Schultz... no Shurz.' ...

A gallery owner characterizes Shurz as "berliner-cafe latte-punk" which Stockmann confirms.

And a German visiting professor at the Royal Danish Academy of Art who is witnessing Shurz peeing in a plastic cup still keeps his conversation with Stockmann going and remarks with cool detachment that

"this reminds me a bit of fluxus artist Carolee Schneeman back in the 1970'es who read aloud from a strip of paper which she pulled from her vagina. Something was at stake then. But the woman there is not good - you can tell how she doesn't feel good about herself after doing this."

Journalistic handbooks speak of the reporter's role as that of acting as a substitute for the reader and my point is: this is exactly what Stockmann is doing all too carefully. She seems to presume timidity in the readers so she offers us comfort. She keeps us classy company all along and assures us through arguments of authority not to worry: These people are harmless. They pose no threat to our community.

The Fall of M(&M's)

May the reign of Michael, Mads and Morten soon come to an end, was Leonora Christina Skov's wish as she was pointing out how guys like (Michael) Jeppesen, (Mads) Brügger and (Morten) Sabroe are dominating the discussion of personal reporting in Denmark these days.

The latest issue of Danish KOM Magazine (published by communications trade union Kommunikation og Sprog) is a theme issue on rhetoric, and I have contributed an article about the reasons that journalists would want to play with the old topos of modesty "I'm not a public speaker, and yet I will now have a go..." Through a few examples I am trying to show how the explicit hesitation and explicit search for words in a piece of journalism may raise readers' awareness of various rhetorical mechanisms at play in the text and, by implication, in journalism in general.

Writing this piece and looking for illustrative textual material I turned to my stock of examples which, of course, is currently dominated by the M's already dominating my dissertation, and sure enough:

An M was flashing. Mads' this time.

So yes, well, I picked out two texts by Mads, both of them from Euroman in which Mads on one occasion is reporting from a weapon's fair and on another occasion from the festival Burning Man...

They are both good examples, and/but as sure as eggs is eggs: the sound of M&M's falling to the floor won't be provoked by me. Not this fall.

Back where it belongs

About the dog and its origins, well, people close to me suggested simply looking it up in Dictionary of the Danish Language. And I simply did... which makes me able to announce that the dog phrase can be located in the literary work of Jens Baggesen and Sophus Schandorf and makes a first media appearance in Politiken in 1906.

Details in Danish:

// sagde hunden, (dagl., l. br.) anv. som en slags undskyldning for, at man nævner sig selv (jf. sagde drengen u. Dreng 4.1). *den Fjerde er jeg selv, sa'e Hunden. Bagges. III.355. smst.204. Hakon Jarl siger til Ejnar Tambeskælver: Jeg elsker dig fast som du var en Kvinde: jeg (sa' Hunden) vilde sige til Amalie Skram: Jeg elsker dig, som om du var en Mand. Schand.O. II.134. (vi) kommer trækkende med vognen – La's og mig, sa' Hunden. Pol. 19/2 1906.6.sp.1. FlensbA. 10/4 1910.1.sp.3. //

And about the boy who is mentioned alongside the dog:

Krist.Ordsprog og mundheld.(1890).423. (jf.636ff.). jf.: “Vi” var Operasanger N. N. . . den unge Forfatter P. W. og jeg selv, sagde Drengen. Pol. 18/6 1913.8.

And I guess this is it then...

Journalist meets novelist

Journalist and novelist Morten Sabroe was interviewing himself in Weekendavisen last week on the subject of writing his latest novel Evig troskab (Eternal Fidelity), and at one point the self-conversation turns on his ambiguous or ambivalent role as a writer. It goes something like this (in my English):

"To begin with I had to get away from the language I use as a journalist. Which takes its time. And I didn't have the patience to distance myself from it, so I started writing the story in a very literary language. And precisely because I did that, I was still bound by journalism."
- Not understood.
"I fought hard not to sound like a journalist, and that was because I was still bound by journalism. It was a counterreaction. And you don't counterreact t if you're free from the one you're counterreacting to."
- Is this some sort of wisdom you're expressing?
"You're not done with you're wife as long as you're standing in front of her screaming: 'I'm done with you.'"

What Women

Mmhh, I'm actually on my way on holiday, but before I go... in today's issue of Weekendavisen Leonora Christina Skov is praising a collection of 100 Years of the Best Journalism by Women and calls it "a flying brick which must hit any lame excuse for ignoring women's journalism at two hundred kilometers an hour". And it does sound like a really good book --- flying my way at two hundred kilometers an hour. Thus Leonora Christina Skov opens her review by discussing my dissertation and approvingly so, but still pointing out, as she did on radio too, the absence of women reporters in my study.

What I'm still wondering is: Who would they be? To me it seems that spectacular, personal reporting by women is missing in contemporary Danish journalism - and therefore in my dissertation too. Female reporters that work undercover, for instance, usually just do their thing without creating a striking persona for themselves in their texts; they tend not to pose in any elaborate literary fashion. Women may do so as columnists, essayists or critics, but not often as reporters.

I'm grateful for any suggestions and willing to loosen up on the genre categories a bit. Suzanne Brøgger has been brought up before as she's definitely a self-fashioning writer and a daring one. And, well, I remember Lea Korsgaard on one occasion during her trainee period at Politiken was infiltrating some exclusive night club in Copenhagen and reporting from this adventure in the first person singular... but there must be others? Perhaps other examples from Weekendavisen? Or from magazines that I've overlooked?

Kill your dogs

Yes, it's about that dog again. In the foreword to my phd dissertation I use that same Danish formula of modesty myself - "...me, said the dog" - mainly because I found it, well, ironically topical and illuminating in a dissertation concerned with the use of the first person singular. The phrase is a good example in a nutshell of the necessity (or annoying habit) to excuse yourself for attracting attention to your own person when you speak.

Anyway, I had (have) grown still more fond of the dog-phrase, because a reader of a draft of my text was totally confused by it. She'd never encountered the phrase before and left a big question mark in the margin. What dog?? And that incident made the somewhat stale phrase even more appealing to me. It was potentially strange and funny, even exclusive.

Which, however, it really isn't. And tonight a reader of the actual dissertation confessed that he found it totally uncool of me to use it. Not that he wasn't familiar with it, he just found it really trite and out of place. And I have to agree. That dog is a darling of the kind that I teach other people to kill. And now tonight my dog was killed - but it's still there, and I guess it won't go away until I get down to rewriting the dissertation and make my attempt to have it turned into a book.

How can that dog be barkin' in the backyard? We ran over him years ago How can that dog be runnin' by the backfence? We ran over him years ago Ghost of a dog Barkin' in the backyard How can that dog be scratchin' at the back door? We ran over him years ago How can that dog be lying under the shady tree Where we buried him years ago? Ghost of a dog Flyin' through the backyard.

So Gonzo equals Provo?

"The Gonzo journalist is out to expose things, and no politician ought to feel safe," writes Martin Eide in a discussion of Norwegian writer Herman Willis' election campaign diary Kvalmende og hjerterått from 1997, but adds that Willis was never really a menace, if surely sometimes he was annoying:

His provocations became harmless, had to become harmless. For it is by no means easy to live out the part of the jester these days. The potential to expose by construing politics as a drama seems exhausted too. In a time when the mediafication and aesthetization of what journalists must cover is in your face and obvious, there is little exposé potential in construing something as stage managed and media adapted. [transl. from the essay "Den journalistiske hoffnarr"/The Journalistic Jester]

So how to be genuinely provocative in your gonzo writings these days?

Well, it seems that a journalist may earn the gonzo label through provocation - and that provocation tends to become the one single criterion for possessing that gonzo quality.

And provocation becomes a sad end in itself.

But who's being sad about it? Well, the other night I watched Mads Brügger on web tv discussing Hunter S. Thompson as a journalistic icon with host Sune Aagaard (which I paid for a one-year membership of Club dk4 to be able to). Aagaard was asking Brügger about the conditions for writing gonzo journalism in Denmark nowadays, and at one point Brügger was pinning down "the essence of gonzo" by introducing the story of journalist and former chief editor Claes Kastholm Hansen who is said to have defecated on the desk of a colleague at Ekstra-Bladet, used the curtains to wipe his bum and left the building. And thereby lost/quit his job. As far as I know, Kastholm didn't even write about the event, and I can't believe that Mads Brügger (who has written some of my favourite examples of contemporary Danish gonzo journalism) presents gonzo as just a matter of causing outrage and not giving a damn. 'The Gonzo journalist is out to defecate on your desk, and noone ought to feel safe' - ?

No Not the One You Heard About

I saw Simone Kærn's exhibition Open Sky in Malmö, Sweden, in July when actually I had crossed Öresund courtesy of my brother to attend a music festival, Accelerator - the Big One. Kærn took me by surprise as I arrived at the exhibition hall not only unintendedly, but holding her project in low esteem. I'd just read about it in a newspaper, and Kærn's whole idea of flying to Kabul to make (or not to make) a dream of flying come true on behalf of a young Afghan girl in a story by Carsten Jensen seemed sort of old and sentimental hat.

In stead, the music festival was a disappointment (to me) and for all the opposite reasons. I had expected to be listening to fresh, cutting edge versions of all the bands I used to like... and I do see the attitude problem now, but I felt up to it all.

All ears, yet earplugs ready at hand.

And Regina Spektor was fantastic to begin with, singing and being a band on her own, playing the piano and drumming away with her drum sticks on a wooden chair, but her show and her lyrics became more and more curious and yes, well, self-indulgent by the song, and I felt as if I were visiting the weblog of a perfect stranger and grew tired of it. Silver Jews seemed hostile, and I felt only momentarily heartened when they reached the legendary line (of a song-in-character) that up until then I'd only heard my brother recite:

There is a house in New Orleans, no not the one you heard about, I'm talking about another house...

Anyway, we decided to leave the site for a few hours to go for a walk around Malmö. And happened to pass by Kunsthallen where Simone Aaberg Kærn's actual (and actually very little) airplane and her portraits of female pilots in World War II, paintings, videos and more, were on display.

When the exhibition hall was closing for the day, a guy had to pull my sleeve to make me put down the ear phones at a video of Kærn's visit to the States in the homes of some of the pilots who are still alive today. Basically I was caught up in a film of how Simone Kærn was drinking tea with an elderly lady and then getting up to go fly a plane with her. What old interesting and very absorbing hat. And nevermind the music festival and The Raconteurs who closed it for the day.

Simone in a War Zone

Performance artist Simone Aaberg Kærn has told a spectacular personal docutale (in everything but print) of how she flew from Denmark to Afghanistan in an old and very small airplane. Kærn and her partner Magnus Bejmar's way of describing the project reminds me of various opening statements in texts by wallraffers and other concept-conscious reporters: "You can be upset about the war in Afghanistan", thus Magnus Bejmar, "or women's rights and write a letter to the editor and sit in a café and mope for three months, but come on, do something..." Like Günter Wallraff, Jakob Boeskov, Norah Vincent and others, Kærn had nothing but a basically useless indignation and a very abstract idea of things which nonetheless - like Wallraff, Boeskov, Vincent - she decides to act upon by assigning herself a very concrete task. Magnus Bejmar again:

We coined the term docutale. Reality told as a fairytale. Which fits the performance concept well, too: if you prod reality a bit by adding a new element to it, it shifts, which forces you to look at it differently. So it is with Simone, the flyer. She is the object we add to the world, that people have to relate to as we go along.

I'll get back to Simone Aaberg Kærn's story when I've had a chance to see the movie. I'm looking forward to it, even if I was never very fond of The Little Prince.