“Ofelía has infected me with this postmodern sickness”, says Siggi in Byggingin (The Structure). He doesn’t know any manners any more, and all over the place there are robots in glass cages who try to control his behaviour; they order him to flush the toilet, for instance. The Structure is a novel by Jóhamar that Bad Taste published in 1988 - a year later they followed it up with Jón Gnarr’s Midnætursólborg (Midnight Sun City). Those were good days. One alternative work after another, and when I look back, that for me is the most memorable period of Bad Taste’s output. I acquired a whole new faith in Icelandic literature; as a university student I was of course totally preoccupied with everthing that wasn’t middle of the road. Actually at the time I was obsessed with the Medúsa group, and stated straight out that Bad Taste was some sort of heir of Medúsa. And then wrote a learned piece in Ársrit Torfhildar (the literature students’ magazine) where I compared the poems of the Medúsa poets to the Sugarcubes’ texts and claimed to find some similarities.Can’t forget Kráarljó›in (The Tavern Poems) either; that’s where the connection between Medúsa and Bad Taste became beautifully clear, as lots of the poets were former Medúsa members. I pull all this out to emphasize how much Bad Taste is a multimedia enterprise.

1991. I’m writing a BA thesis. Which of course was supposed to be the BA thesis to end all BA thesis (and was, too). The main focus of the thesis is the writings of Sjón; then I brought in the two Bad Taste novels and Kristín Ómarsdóttir’s short story collection Í ferdalagi hjá flér (On a Trip with You). The theme is eroticism, and I thought I was really avant-garde and fearless - I read Story of the Eye to pieces, The Story of O, the Marquis and more along that line, became exceedingly educated in pornographic literature, and felt in my essence as spokesperson for these marginal works. (And got what I paid for; to this day I still get email and phone calls requesting me to express my views on pornography - me, who completely fell off the bandwagon after The Correct Sadist, and hasn’t read anything cruder than a Britney Spears lyric for a long time.)

2003. Twelve years later I sit down at the computer to write about these Bad Taste novels, which have aged
well, both in my memory and in re-reading. Both stories take place in the future, and show the influence of Burroughs, cyberpunk and other dystopic science fiction; in both instances an interesting attempt is made at imagining Reykjavík as a rough-edged international city, in a wreck after unnamed horrors, pollution, war. The Structure tells the story of Siggi and Ófelia. Siggi is unlucky enough to have recently discovered “that he was a mortal man, one of a few. Earthlings had basically stopped dying because of unexpected progess in the chemical industry.”

And then the story tells (maybe) of his attempts to come to grips with his mortality. Space travel is a given, a universal treaty is in effect, and Iceland and Reykjavík have been in a state of war for a long time, with complicated international intervention.
“Icelanders’ weapon ownership was a lot greater than anyone had imagined. I guessed that every seventh person in the country had a shotgun or a rifle, and one of fifty had a handgun. And the strange thing with the handguns was that they seemed to reproduce as fast as the rats did, once the hostilities broke out.”
The novel is so alternative that it doesn’t even bother with page numbers, which caused some problems for this university student, concentrating on her newly learned literary precision. And to cap that, The Structure is a metastructure, with really cool textual refernces like “Ófelia [...] isn’t on this page, at any rate,” says Siggi when he’s asked where his woman has ended up, and then starts talking about her anyway (so now she is on the page).
A state of decay similar to that of The Structure permeates Midnight Sun City by Jón Gnarr; there the view of the future is an urban nightmare, while the countryside is the ideal world, although neither really exists: “This is our dream, our private nightmare, and we can do whatever we want,” says one figure in the book at a dramatic moment. This idea that the story takes place at the border between dream and reality is actually to be found in The Structure as well, yet there the reader could suspect every now and then that the whole thing is just a dream, fantasy or even nightmare of Siggi’s. Midnight Sun City begins with Runólfur, leader of the pirate boys, being released from prison; he heads straight for the city, which is a closed sector of decay and destruction. Night has disappeared, and in its place has come a midnight sun that never sets and is yet a hallucination. Runólfur plans on revenge - Jói, who represents the good children, had informed about his drug dealing and landed him in prison.
Both books are stuffed with postmodern references to the widest variety of cultural works; Jóhamar continues along the Medúsa line and sprinkles his text with surrealism, as well as references to pop culture. He plays with language and in the end breaks it up into a long string of sounds and fake words. Jón Gnarr makes many references to children’s literature; the characters in the book have a shared adventure/dream world. The parts of the book that describe this adventure world are a straight-out parody of super-positive Polyanna books of the fifties and sixties, where everyone is winking, wearing sarcastic expressions and talking in a sarcastic tone, and the young bodies vibrate with their youthful attractiveness and the energy of free teenagers.
Sex is of course a key feature in both books (otherwise they wouldn’t be decent alternative literature). Siggi and Ófelía practice a lively sexuality, together and with others, and talk about sex in between. Ófelía tells of how Siggi sometimes doesn’t want to do any more than look at her, “you know”:
“I spread my legs as wide as I can and he just sits in the chair across from me and looks at my pussy. He looks at me for so long that he goes into some kind of trance. He loves looking at me.”
There’s no shortage of erotic descriptions in Midnight Sun City either, but there there’s much more gay sex. Jói is a dreamer who lives much more in the dream world of children’s books than the other characters in the novel. In addition he dreams very graphic dreams:
“He sees a big bed and himself fucking somebody he doesn’t recognize. He feels bad and feels a terrible threat in the air. He goes closer to the bed and looks at his own ass rise and fall. No sound. He gasps! He’s pounding on a huge doll! She’s bald and the eyes are sunken.

He wakes as the doll smiles, unless he’s waking into another dream...” When talking about sex, people think about Freud (at least I do). The Freudian ‘uncanny’ has its roots in women’s sexual organs, which Freud says that all men fear and desire at the same time; they desire them becuase they think they belong there (the womb is after all their first home), and fear them because they’re afraid of being swallowed back again for once and for all. The feeling of uncanniness appears because when a phenomenon from the past appears to us again, after being forgotten, it takes an uncanny form after its travel in time. In the same article in which Freud delivers this entertaining vagina story, he talks about uncanniness in connection with mechanical dolls “which suggest too strongly toys which have come to life in children’s imagination” and

whores; he claims to be really baffled how his random walks through the city led him again and again to the red-light district. Gee. He should have read some Freud, Freud. But for certain he would have added both Bad Taste books to his collection of examples, as he was very fond of using literature to shed light on the psychological tangles of the individual.
Here you shouldn’t get the wrong idea that I’m dissing these books, just the opposite. (But when I read them again and see my scribbling in them, and recall how serious and extremely focussed I was, I’m filled with a peculiar feeling...) It’s quite clear that the novels were particularly interesting publications at the time, and actually there has been nothing that’s come out since then that comes near the raw, basic energy that flared up there. Both stories are full of the sexual anger of the young man (oh, those angry young men) and young poet, and remind you in a way of the contemporary attempts of Mikael Torfason to provoke, with violence and exaggerated sexual descriptions. His first novel, Falskur Fugl (Fake Bird) from 1997, actually bears a lot of resemblance to Midnight Sun City; conflict between youth gangs is a subject of discussion there as well. On the other hand, Torfason’s approach is too restrained for his books to be truly described as avant-garde or provocative. Bourgeois values are still the basic reference point, which is seen in the endlessly repeated emphasis on the traditional family structure. It’s also interesting to compare these books with the future fantasy LoveStar by Andri Snær Magnason, which is also an attempt to place Reykjavík in a fantasy sci-fi future world, but that book, like Torfason’s, is too restrained and flat, and the same bourgeois values are in the place of honour, in addition to which it doesn’t come out of the same familiarity with marginal literature that The Structure and Midnight Sun City attest to. You could perhaps best compare the Bad Taste stories to Steinar Bragi’s novel Áhyggjudúkkur (Worry Dolls), where the same chaos and uncertainty of ideas and world views can be found.
From a literary point of view this strange pair of novels is thus a remarkable phenomenon, and if I didn’t take myself so seriously as a critic I’d say that Bad Taste deserved praise for their initiative. In the year 2000 I took part in a festival Bad Taste organized with the name Ordid tónlist (The Word Music).

In connection with it there was a round-table discussion, and a book was published about the connections between the word and music, looking among other things at the ties between poetry and pop music lyrics. The lyrics of the Sugarcubes are a particularly good example of such a tie, since they’re the direct offspring of the Medúsa poetry that I’ve mentioned above.
What characterises these texts is play with words and images, which then connects with the music and the interplay of the two voices of Björk and Einar Örn. The influence of the surreal play of the Medúsa poets, with associated experiments in the use of imagery and fantasy subject matter, are clear; in the lyrics there is little emphasis on staying within the limits of traditional pop subject matter - if those subjects are used, they’re playfully subverted. (And what are these traditional subjects, someone might ask? The answer would be something along this line: love, separation, loneliness, love, relations between the sexes, it’s fun, have I mentioned love?)
The lyrics on the Life’s Too Good text sheet are set up like prose and work that way, too, they remind you a bit of very short stories. “Traitor” tells of a man who’s almost always late and knows that when the revolution comes he’ll be shot for being too late, but that’s all right because he thinks it’s been worth it, living life without a clock: “I regret nothing.” “Motorcrash” seems inspired by J.G. Ballard’s novel Crash; the song tells of a terrible car crash which a girl on a bicycle seems connected to in a mysterious way: “she looked quite innocent.” The narrator claims to have saved the mother from the accident and taken care of her, and adds that the mother is pleased with the attention, but perhaps the narrator is the girl on the bicycle after all? In “Sick for Toys” is the story of another girl who is crazy about toys and finds a little boy whom she uses as a toy, except that at the end he combs all her hair off. “Deus” tells about a meeting with God that ends with a bath, as did the birthday games in “Birthday”; that lyric is a little story of a girl who is celebrating her birthday with a man with a beard, she collects insects which she threads onto a string like flowers.
Other lyrics such as “Delicious Demon”, “Cold Sweat” and “Blue Eyed Pop” are more like attempts to describe feelings or situations. The delicious demon takes on various roles; cold sweat suggests a picture

of a body about to burst - or already burst “I tear your lungs out”; and blue-eyed pop is a song of happiness where everyone melts together like tigers in a wild dance.
Although the lyrics of Here Today, Tomorrow, Next Week also have the character of tiny stories, there are fewer stories there and more strange juxtapositions. In these lyrics the interplay of the two voices takes on a stronger role. An example of this is “Water”, where you hear: “wait for me underneath the water/wait for me and count to ten/you’ll look up and I will be there/wait for me.” Then comes another voice: “The lake was frozen, you took me for a walk over the ice, cracked the ice cracked I fell into the lake, I watched you through the eyes.” The first voice is poetic, the second tells some kind of story, and from this you could read that the “poetic voice” managed to get the “story voice” under the ice, and sings so beautifully to it to wait there.
A similar connection is found in “Eat the Menu”, where the “story voice” has trouble making a decision while the “poetic voice” is offering up all sorts of delicacies: “your appetite is appalling.” Plastic is an ode to plastic; there plastic seems to be describing its own origins, or what? “I was born eons ago before anything human was known.” In Planet and “Speed is the Key” there is created a feeling for speed and wide expanses, alongside which the body is reflected in the universe: “When I’m excited and have to wait my organs start to move,” we hear in Planet, while in “Speed is the key” the “poetic voice” claims to be a “future woman” and a “space girl” as she zooms around. The same feeling of personified nature and wide spaces can be found in “Regina”: “came from the east/like the sun.”

„Ófel ía er búin að smita mig af þess um póst móderníska krank leika“ seg ir Siggi í Bygg ing unni. Hann kann enga mannasiði leng ur og út um allt eru vél menni í gler búr um sem reyna að stjórna hegð un hans - skipa hon um að sturta nið ur til dæm is. Bygg ing in er skáld saga eft ir Jó ham ar og var gef in út af Smekk leysu árið 1988, ári síð ar birt ist Mið næt ur sól borg Jóns Gnarr hjá sama for lagi. Þetta voru gleði dag ar. Hvert jað ar rit ið á fæt ur öðru og þeg ar ég lít til baka eru þetta mér minni stæð ustu út gáfu stund ir Smekk leysunn ar. Ég öðl að ist al veg nýja trú á ís lensk ar bók mennt ir, en sem há skóla stúd ína var ég að sjálf sögðu ákaf lega upp tek in af öllu því sem ekki fylgdi mið lín unni. Á þess um tíma var ég reynd ar með Medúsu hóp inn á heil an um og hélt því blákalt fram að Smekk leys an væri eins kon ar erf ingi Medúsu. Og
skrif aði svo lærða grein í Árs rit Torf hild ar (tíma rit bók mennta fræði nema) þarsem ég bar sam an ljóð Medúsu skálda og texta Syk ur mol anna og þótt ist finna þar ýmis lík indi. Ekki má held ur gleyma Krá ar ljóð un um góðu, en þar kom einmitt teng ing Medús unn ar og Smekk leysunn ar svo fal lega í ljós, því ljóð skáld in voru mörg hver fyrr um Medús ulið ar. Allt þetta dreg ég fram til að minna á að Smekk leys an er al vöru marg miðla út gáfa. 1991. Ég er að skrifa ba-rit gerð. Sem átti að sjálf sögðu að vera ba-rit gerð allra ba-rit gerða (og var það líka). Að al við fangs efni rit gerð ar inn ar er höf und ar verk Sjóns, en svo tók ég inn Smekk leysu skáld sög urn ar tvær og smá sagna safn Krist ín ar Ómars dótt ur, Í ferða lagi hjá þér. Tem að er eró tík og ég þótt ist aga lega fram sæk in og hug uð, las Sögu aug ans í tætl ur, Sög una af O, mark greifann og fleira álíka og varð af skap lega mennt uð í klám bók mennt um og upp lifði sterkt mína stöðu sem tals kona þess ara jað ar rita. (Og sat svo í súp unni, ég fæ enn tölvu pósta og upp hring ing ar þarsem ég er beð in að tjá mig um klám, og ég sem tap aði ger sam lega af lest inni eft ir The Cor rect Sad ist og hef ekki les ið neitt meira ögrandi en texta Brit n ey Spe ars lengi.) 2003. Tólf árum síð ar sest ég við tölv una mína til að segja frá þess um Smekk leysu út gáf um, sem hafa elst vel, bæði í minn ingu og yf ir lestri. Báð ar sög urn ar ger ast í fram tíð inni, og bera merki áhrifa frá Burroughs, sæ berpönki, og öðr um dystópísk um vís inda skáld skap, í báð um til fell um er áhuga verð til raun gerð til að sjá Reykja vík fyr ir sér sem harð neskju lega al þjóða borg í rúst um eft ir ótil greind ar skelf ing ar, meng un, stríð. Bygg ing in seg ir frá Sigga og Ófel íu.
Siggi er svo óhepp inn að hafa ný lega upp götv að „að hann var dauð leg ur mað ur, einn af fáum. Jarð ar bú ar voru hrein lega hætt ir að deyja vegna óvæntra fram fara í efna iðn aði.“ Og svo seg ir sag an (kannski) af til raun um hans til að takast á við dauð leika sinn. Geim ferð ir eru sjálf sagð ar og al heims samn ing ur í gildi og á Ís landi og í Reykja vík hef ur ríkt stríðs á stand lengi, með flók inni al þjóð legri íhlut un.