eyeballing life through the dirty windowshields of a 1998 mercedes sprinter.

spending half of your precious day in a crammy van, there´s nothing much to do but to sleep or look out the window.

we(ungdomskulen) doesnt travel in a nightliner so we travel during the day, and since we dont have an x-box,psp´s or wii´s in the van, the window is the source to our entertainment.

you are going so fast though, you only get to witness excerpts of little stories swooshing by, likekids chasing a school-bus or two horses feasting on the jingly hay-stuffed body of a scarecrow.

it happends too fast to capture on camera, so you just have to memorize it the best way you can.

one time we saw a guy threatening to jump from a bridge arching over the freeway we where on.

he was hanging outside the bridge-fence,grabbing onto the cold metal-grid like spiderman, with cops trying to convince him to climb back over and get into their custody.

it was nerve-wrecking.

another time we saw barebreasted bloody kids knucklefighting eachother in broad daylight.

we were sitting safe and sound with our wintercoats on just moping to the intensity of it all.

the thing is though, there is no end to the stories we get served, just the middle, see otherwise it would go unnoticed.

we dont see the suicide-jumper considering climbing the fence, or the kids making up after the rumbling.

no, we just get the juicy middle, the climax, the bone of the dog, the blizzard or nothing at all.

still, most of the time its just landscapes or neonlight-inthusing diners that are flickering by.

trafficjams and sweaty construction workers, cows taking dozy naps under the shade of a tree, or greenfingered taxpayers attending their private petite gardens.

no matter what you see though, it makes you feel really small, and vunerable in a way.

it´s you against the world, the speeding car against gravity, the sun and the moon, your future and past all battling for your attention.

and so it makes you think about alot of weird things.you get inspired, bored and emotional within the same minute.

your mind wanders free and hairy and you end up getting knots on your thread of thought, not getting any conclusions whatsoever.

no, there´s no peace of mind or fullfillments of your mental cascades.

and so after a while it just becomes a big grey gush of wheat-porridge, and you need a break.

so you sleep alittle, talk alittle, put on some new music on the carstereo or textmessage a loved one, and then... you simply just start from scratch.

eyeballing life through the dirty windowshields of a 1998 mercedes sprinter.

...so about texas...don´t mess with it/her...

--------------------------BEWARE OF THE BLOGG!

this is what happened: we flew out from bergen to london, stayed a night in a aspestos-infested uncle-fester sorta motel, with a hot water-roomheater from the bawels of dust-hell, not to mention the pink toilet where you had to go number 2 with the door open because of lack of space for the old knees-and-legs.

so, after that we flew 9 hours or so to minneapolis where we spent 3 hours halfasleep waiting for our next flight to austin which was delayed.all good.

we finally got there at midnight, and it was beautiful, warm weather,nice rental-car and open roads.
soar troats,shaking flight-knees and severe backpain aside, we were there.

so we woke up the next day to nice weather and blue skies.

indie-kids and biz-people walking hand in hands down the sun-kissed sidewalk, wading in flyers,posters and free beer-tickets.

we got our badges and goody-bag(very-well logistics sxsw) and sat in the sun and smiled for a little while, the earth stopped spinning and it was just great being alive doing nothing.

after the leisure that is life, we did biz-lunch with nikki and will, god bless them!,and we did an interview with a berlin-based radio-station and a programme called fritz.

we decided to return our rental-car, seemed that it was no use for it since we could take shuttles and stuff everywhere for 0.50 $ a head. we also stumbled into a party where "yacht" and "does it offend you,yeah?" was playing.in my humble opinion yacht should´ve stuck with the blow.

the hightlight of the day would come around 11aclock, when the slits were playing at the elysium. it was awesome!

the band was really loose and tight at the same time, vocalist "ari up" who was really tanned, mooned us to our amusement, at the end of the show. it was some moon i´ll tell ya!

she is fit like a panther.
i also have to mention the guitarist, who played so good it gave me goosebumps on my soul!
she was stabbing the guitar with the precision of a serial-killer, and she was funky as they come!

here´s a cute picture of her.

----------------------------------GUITAR-GODDESS
after that we went for some drinks with nikki, we ended up at a bar where this dude was singing about dollars and dollars and he really meant it.

20 dollars,40 dollars,30 dollars and so forth...
he must´ve been hallocinating or something, poor guy.
we called it a day and went back and slept like newly washed babies in diaper-commersials,
happy and pampered with the great day.

day two was hectic like a motherfucker!

we went for breakfast with chris at this family-restaurant way-off broadway,
and ate some big-ass omelettes and our waiter looked like the guy from "perfect strangers" or "balki and larry" as it was called when it aired in the 90´s in norway.
our guy looked like the one who was russian, i think that was balki, he also looked alittle bit like dweezil zappa, but this blog isnt really about people looking like famous people so lets drop that.

after the breakfast we went and had a really good interview with a guy from the wall street journal, he was really smart and warm and we took an imidiate liking to the guy.
he had alot of things figured out about us already, and i wish we could spend some more time with him.

he could totally crash our tour-bus at any time!

here´s his stuff:
http://blogs.wsj.com/sxsw/2008/03/14/26-years-old-and-5000-miles-from-home/

and the day was just getting better by the minute.
so..., after that we went and did an interview with mtv, with charlotte thorstvedt with her
haunting beautiful looks and camera-karisma.

--------------------------------------------COZY!

it was very cozy and pollite unlike the interview we would do later...
so then we went out to rural austin, saw a good show with sissywish, hijacked an ice-cream truck and got a bit of a sun tan.

-----------------------------------WHO´S FOR ICECREAM?

after that we did an interview with channel 4 in the middle of the street, there was a preaching farm-boy right next to us with a sign with a bible-quote on, and he really got on our nerves.

-----------------------------------------SAY CHEESE!

so we moved a little to the left.

the interview was as wacky as they come.

i cant wait to see it,it was fake-penises,spinning,attacking of the journalist and alot of nice verbal

tricketering.

they were really sweet guys, and their boss an australian curvy beauty was obviously drunk on tequila.

it was magic!

after that we went to do our show.

we played a really good set at maggie mays rooftop, it was a really lit up stage on a rooftop ofcourse.

it was calm wind swooshing in through the open ceiling blowing life into the puppets that are ungdomskulen, and oh! did it help.

we played as if it was no tomorrow, and no yesterday.

alotta love and dancing was a-going down!

after the show we all rushed off to the orchid where viper room had there party.

within 15 minutes we were playing our second show.

it went well, and we got to meet our favorite promoter melissa.

she is a sweet-heart, if there ever was one.

she took really good care of us, and pulled off some classic dancemoves during our set.

after that it was pretty much straight to bed, we were knockered, and a 26 hour flight the next day was waiting.

im not going into that flight cause it was so depressing long and boring, but we ended up in scotland eventually which is a good thing.

so that is where we are now reminiscing and stuff.

smell you soon!
U.S

scotland, dear scotland!

for you who pay close attention to the unfolding of the ungdomskulen flower,you know that we are on a two-week uk rampage-tour with the young knives.

it is going really well, apart from some cruel laryngitis popping out of our party-cake.

its cold though and windy, and not sweet like austin,texas where we were last week.

(we´ll get back to that).

so today we did some die-hard touristing, visiting the edinburgh castle, we didnt actually go into it cause we mendoksei to pay the entrance-fee.

visiting castles should be gratis!

this castle was´nt all that either, i prefer tyresö slott,in sweden myself,that castle has it all(the best snails there is).

so the gigs have been going really well, it seems like people are into our scandinavian trash-pop surprisingly,

and we´ve been gloriously blessed with the warm embrace of the young knives and their crew as well, they are really sweet people.god bless!

so...

here we are now at the AMAZING CASTLE!

niagara falls

this is becoming somewhat of a travel-guide, without the interactions with the locals and the useless bar-guides(who in their right mind wants to read about a bar?).

anyways, so we played lee´s palace(really awesome venue) in toronto on our 2008 us/canada tour , and so we swung by the niagara falls on the way there, we hear that the canadian side has the best view, so that was where we went.

it was freezing cold and the particles of water in the air stuck to our faces like bees to the honey.
the sight was intense and utterly beautiful and also breathtaking and it looked like the ice-world in lemmings.

we took our bandphoto there ofcourse,and some really nice italian tourist snapped the picture and we are adding it to the pictorial list of places where we have been as a band.
more globetrotter-bragging to come!
here we are now:

cry-baby LP

everyone loves the freedom to choose, and sometimes the choice is pretty easy.
just look at the beautiful lp and his plastic baby-sister.
who do you wanna rescue in case of a fire?
it took some time to get it pressed, the cd got released in october, and now the lp is finally done.

we used our advance from the record-label to press it ourselves,
they didnt want to release it on this format,

so now we have a 1000 copies lurking in our basement.
there is no distro for this the lp so i guess the only way to get it is to buy it at our shows or something.
if you live in bergen you can either buy it at apollon or robot, two very fine stores.
i guess we will have to spread it one way or the other, but at the moment we really don´t know
how,when and where.
we´ll let you know when we sorted that out, in the meantime:stay positive!

hotel califreezia

ungdomskulen recently played the wonderful northernlight-city of alta (pop:18.272 in 2008),
which is located way up north in norway.
on the day of our return we had some time to kill so we went to the igloo-hotel.
it is basically a hotel made of snow and ice, you can order drinks which comes
in glasses made of ice, and they only consists of spirits cause everything else would freeze.
it was really interesting and worth a visit,but dont go in may cause then the hotel is all melted to its ground.
they rebuild it every year with a new theme, this years theme was norwegian polar-explorers and such.here´s u.s in the hotel, contemporary norwegian explorers!