whatever i or my mother might think, i appear to have heaps of housewifely instincts hidden in me. anyone who has looked in my room and been struck by the state of colossal upheaval knows i'm my father's daughter, but when i decide to clean, people better darned well believe i'm my mother's. the bathroom gleams, and i nearly killed a few mops and sponges with the vehemence of my scrubbing, but it gleams, and i'm glad it's fallbreak so people aren't going to be trekking across my newly scrubbed floor. i can't do it as well as she does, and of course i don't have her jie2 pi4 to begin with, but suddenly i'm taking the out damned spot business very seriously. my suitemates say the bathroom only takes 15 or 20 mins to clean, but i spent 35mins in there. this could be because i am turning out to be the sort who scrubs the underside of ledges and into little hard to reach corners. i might think my mother a huge pain when she makes me wiped under instead of around things, etc, but when i'm cleaning i feel like i would do it the way she does. this has nothing to do with hygiene, only aesthetics and perfectionism. it better damned well sparkle or i'm not my mother's daughter! and that sort of thing. people like me probably don't do the water shortage any good.

and now the reverse of droughts: was just telling yen about this music video, a loose allusion to the ark story, only it's set in cuba, and the ark's a giant military ship. the animals are led on, singly, some on leashes (like the great cats), others carried by sailors. and people are getting on it with chairs and tables, and someone's carrying the mona lisa under his arm, the whole thing is hilarious and a little eerie, and then the celebrities arrive in limousines and are inspected by sailors and permitted to board if deemed sufficiently important. the lead singer is driving through crowded streets trying to get to the ship, the rain doesn't start in the beginning of the video, but it starts to come down in the middle, getting heavier, and darker, and you think this is about missing the boat, he's not going to get there in time, and then he *does* get there, but here comes the rub, he's denied entry. which then makes you think, heh, these people have a sense of humour, this is his video and he's a huge celebrity but of course he's not important enough to get on. (i am, of course, talking about an a-ha video.) and then the final twist: he gets onto the ship at the last minute, and you see the crowd in the pouring rain outside the shipfighting to get on and kept back by the sailors, despairing because they know they are lost. and then you see the inside of the ship, and you realise that those who had got on have all walked into a kind of horrible dystopic story. there's no vip lounge within, it's men being put to hard labour.

if you have windows media player you can watch the video which is here. while the lyrics have nothing to do with the video, because of this the line that keeps being repeated "i'll soon be gone now/it won't be long now" and the ark story in the background, you somehow do make a kind of connection afterall.

and here's another one, lifelines, which i got from a-ha's german site. it's created from a 1991 norwegian short film called ‘a year along the abandoned road’, directed by morten skallerud. here's the description from the promoters:

the film was shot in børfjord, a semi-deserted fisherman's village in northern norway, using a specially developed nature animation technique. the result is a magic flight in one single shot where a whole year passes by at 50 000 times normal speed! it took 105 days to shoot the 12-minute film, which has won several prizes both in norway and internationally.

in may of this year, the director got a phone call from magne furuholmen, who wanted to buy the rights to use footage for the new music video. skallerud, who has been approached several times by people who wanted to use footage from the film, had always declined. until now. “this time I felt that my intentions were looked after,” he said to aftenposten recently. “it also enabled me to get rid of the debt i still had on the film.” one of the producers of the original film, svein andersen, said to the newspaper nordlys that he likes the way a-ha produces their videos and that it’s exciting to see how film and music videos can merge and break some borders.

for the music video, the film has been edited down from 12 to 4 and a half minutes to fit the track. morten, paul and magne have seamlessly been edited into the film.

check it out. this one plays on realplayer.