Urban Exploration: Downtown Railroad
Yesterday the weather was perfect. It was sunny but not too warm, a great day of zooming around the city with a bicycle. After I left work I cycled to Ruoholahti to the Oxygene diving store to get the diving light I had decided to buy on impulse, while cursing my current flashlight on the diving boat last Wednesday. It’s high time Susi and I will have some proper underwater lighting.
When I got out of the shop and stopped to admire the weather, just the idea of going home and indoors felt positively unpleasant. Luckily I remembered a small scale urban exploration project that I had been thinking about for quite a while.
In the western part of Helsinki downtown there is a deep trench, which used to have a railroad on the bottom of it only a few weeks back. It started on the seashore and connected to the main railway system literally across the street from the House of Parliament. A couple of weeks back they ripped up the railroad tracks, but the trench with the bridges is still there.
The railroad trench is hardly a unique find, since tens of thousands of people cross it daily. For most of the people it’s kind of unspace: something you see, wonder about for a moment and then forget. For three months or so I crossed the tracks twice per day when on my way to work or home, but now I finally got around to checking it out.
Not every UE trip has to be about a massive ruin far away, quite often just seeing your everyday urban surroundings from another point of view is at least as enlightening and interesting as a ruined factory or an abandoned house – often even more so.
(Check out more photos in the Flickr photoset!)
Girls in Corsets, Guys in Gas Masks
Our band Älymystö has been rather quiet in the live gig front for over a year now. We’ve been doing the new album, having a major case of the second album block. Additionally everybody has had plenty of weird and new shit to deal outside of the band life, but what’s new.
We put an end to our gig hiatus on 28th of May, when we went to play in a club called Kuudes Linja, which many people consider to be the best gig club in Helsinki nowadays. This time we weren’t accompanied by the usual complement of other underground bands and DJs, but instead we shared the stage with a burlesque group called Burlesque Polaire. We also played with our full line-up, which meant that in addition to the old crew we had Lin with her cello and Mr. Eskola on the bass.
I personally had been in mid-to-high nasty flu with high fever for most of the week, but having pumped myself full of medication I didn’t have any trouble enjoying myself on the stage. Doing the gig was a real blast, especially so when the staff in the club was very friendly, the gig went well and there were plenty of people in the audience. The gig made me remember how much I had missed playing on the stage and how much I enjoy it.
Mr. Kerhohuone of Tytär was stalking the front of the stage with his video camera, which he had hidden all over the stage. So maybe – just maybe – in the future we’ll see another live video from us.
In any case, here be photos. Enjoy.
First, some photos of our practice session a week before the gig (see the full Flickr gallery)
…and here’s the gig (see the full Flickr gallery). Unfortunately we don’t yet have a permission to publish the Burlesque Polaire photos.
Judging a Book by Its Cover: “Aaltojen alla”
When I go diving, I’m equally interested in the marine life and the wrecks – quite often my wreck exploration goes on a hold for a moment, because I’ll just have to see some little underwater critter up close. The Baltic Sea isn’t an overflowing cornucopia of diverse marine life, but there’s a lot to see under the surface: fish, crustaceans, shellfish, medusae – even things you really wouldn’t expect to see here in the north, like varieties of sea anemones, sea horses and biofluorescent comb jellies.
I finally got around to buying a book called Aaltojen alla (Underneath the Waves), which was recommended to us by a couple of divers we know as being the best practical guide of Baltic marine life available. I’ve been leafing through it for a couple of days, reading about and trying to recognize things I’ve photographed and seen. All in all, the recommendations were spot on. There’s just enough information for Sunday biologists such as I, plus the illustrations and the photographs both look good and make it easy to recognize the species in question. All in all, I can heartily recommend the book for every diver who is interested in the marine life of Baltic sea. The web page is also pretty nice, but unfortunately the English version is still under construction.
There is only one thing I did not like about the book: the cover. I mean, what the hell, look at that photo and the layout and imagine it in full size, so that 90% of the contrast just vanishes. Ok, it’s pretty descriptive of what you can see underwater in the Baltic Sea when you look up or forward: just a few meters mushy greenness with some distant blobs and shapes, but shit – as a book cover it utterly sucks. If I saw a book cover like that on a bookstore shelf, instead of checking it out I might just fall asleep on my feet, fall down and hurt my head. There were a lot of brilliant photos in the book, so why choose this?
In any case, to reiterate – cover aside, if you want to know more about the wriggly things you see underwater around here, go and buy the book. Well worth the money.
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