What the hell are they doing over there?

"So what the hell are they doing over there?" I can hear you asking, my faithful reader.
"What is it like to land in a different country? How are they spending their days? In what ways is Sweden different from the US? Or from Taos?" Even though I'm on the other side of the world, I can clearly hear you wondering. 

Or maybe that's just me, trying to make sense of all this change.

Well, I have answers.

I can start by saying that IT'S A LOT. As in: THERE'S A LOT TO DO.

In no particular order, our days are consumed by:

• Getting Kodiak to school, and back (although he's just on the cusp of riding his bike there and back by himself.. which is a big step!!)
• Walking Griselda, or doing whatever it takes to exhaust her inexhaustible energy
• Finding bicycles (we got through that already)
• Managing the arrival of the container (still not here, arriving Friday, lots of paperwork)
• Trying to learn the road signs here so we can drive legally
• Dealing with the paperwork associated with moving here, which differs for me than for Christina, but involves:
-Getting the residency permit card (me)
-Trying to get a personal number, which you need for pretty much everything (me)
-Getting Kodiak registered so he can get health insurance, etc.
-Trying to register our business here
-Insuring our house, and car (car: see below)
And while doing all of the above, we are also of course trying to...
• Explore this place we now live in
• Do fun things with Kodiak in the afternoons and on weekends
• Make art (or at least make plans for making art)
• And learn Swedish. It is perhaps not too surprising that I am not yet finding a ton of time to practice my Swedish.

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We bought a car last week... a VW Up! (The exclamation point is not my editorializing, it's part of the vehicle name)

One interesting thing is that buying and registering a car is quite a bit easier here than in the states. Here in Sweden (and this was true in Spain as well) you do NOT have to visit a government office of any kind to buy a car, and you do not have to show anyone your driver's license. Everything is done by mail. We do not yet have our Swedish driver's licenses, but this was no impediment to buying the car. With the exception of a VW diesel bug that we had a few years ago, this is certainly the smallest car we've ever owned. But... it does get between 42 and 60 mpg.

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Way back in 2016, when we moved to Barcelona, I wrote that visiting a town's thrift stores and book stores (especially used book stores) was one of the ways that I got to know the place. Well, Lund and Malmö have some pretty good thrift stores. The best thing I've yet to find, by far, is this taxidermy Peregrine Falcon... (at least I think it's a Peregrine Falcon...)

I haven't really found any amazing used book stores here yet, which is slightly surprising considering it's a university town. But I have not, by any means, exhausted the search.

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I think it's a natural human instinct to want to compare things... or compare places, in this case... and I find myself often comparing life here in Lund to life back in Taos. But I think it's important that I be careful in the way that I construct my comparisons so that they are meaningful. What I mean to say is this: when one considers, for instance, the fact that Lund has quite a few public-access, outdoor workout facilities...

... it is tempting to jump to the conclusion that "Sweden just takes better care of its citizens than America." But is this really a comparison between Sweden and America? Or between rural and urban? Taos is a tiny town which I would call more rural than urban (and a poor little town, at that) and Lund is a city (albeit a small one.) By population Lund is 15 times larger than Taos, and considerably wealthier. So a more fair question would be: How well does a wealthy little American town of ~90,000 take care of its populace? Does that town have public access workout facilities? I don't have the data to answer this specific question, but the point is that one must be careful to construct comparisons fairly... to compare apples to apples... if one wants meaningful results.

So I'm still working on making those meaningful observations. A few things I can say with a reasonable degree of certainty are: 

• Services seem to work better here. Civil servants are very efficient and relatively nice. Mail from government agencies comes really fast. People working in stores are nice and helpful, and attend to you fairly quickly.

• People seem less angry and fearful here. People of all different races are jumbled together in work spaces and in public spaces, and it's not uncommon to see people of different races walking and talking together. I'm sure that also happens in some parts of America, but there are a lot of places where it doesn't. Anyway it's refreshing to see. 

• The roads are WAY better. Traffic in the cities is significantly more complicated to navigate because of the large number of bicyclists everywhere, and you must therefore drive more slowly, but things seem to run smoothly nonetheless. There are roundabouts (traffic circles) everywhere and they work well to keep traffic moving. 

• People don't make eye contact on the streets here very much. I have some theories about why this might be, ranging from "it's just cultural" to "people are more self-absorbed here" (and smart phones certainly contribute to that) to "perhaps eye contact is really just about sex and people have now outsourced hooking up to apps, so no one needs to look at anyone else anymore".

A last observation I'll make about our arrival in Sweden is that, for whatever set of reasons, it has felt suspiciously smooth. What I mean, specifically, is that it feels to me almost like we've moved to some more northerly, better-functioning part of the US. I've joked with Christina that I think we may have actually moved to Minnesota. I have felt very little "culture shock", certainly MUCH less than when we moved to Barcelona. I attribute this to several factors: 

• Everyone here speaks English.

• Sweden is, in general, not VERY different looking than America. It is useful here to think of Barcelona, with its narrow streets, gothic architecture, and generalized 'visual density', as a contrast.

• We've lived in Europe before, and so it's not so new to me anymore. 

It's exciting to feel you're in a brand-new place that feels really different from home, and so in a way I miss the culture shock. 

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I joined the public library (which is quite good) here in Lund in my first week. It's one of the few things you can actually do here without a personal number. I immediately checked out a few books... one on learning Swedish, another on understanding contemporary art, and another on J. C. Leyendecker. I was already vaguely aware of Leyendecker, but the book was a revelation. I have now added him to my list of favorite artists, and... more importantly... he shot to the top spot in my list of painters I would like to emulate (at least in terms of his style).

These are good examples of why I love his style- it is crisp, bold, and high-contrast... a very "illustration"-style. 

Amusingly, as a gay man he fits right in with all my other favorites... Bacon, Caravaggio, Cadmus, and McQueen. One thing I find quite entertaining is that he managed to surreptitiously insert homoerotic imagery into his work in a time when it was not at all acceptable...

Observe the barely concealed erection... in a national advertisement!

... and he did this while working at the very highest levels of the American advertising industry! That takes some daring!

He was a direct predecessor to, and inspiration for Norman Rockwell, who borrowed his style and became even more famous, despite being less talented (I'm sure some will disagree but to me it's obvious!)

Am I guilty of talking about painting, and how I'd like to paint, more than I actually paint? If you read this blog, you know that I am, and it's a fact about which I am embarrassed and which I intend to rectify. I now have my own painting studio in this home we've newly rented in Lund, and our container is finally arriving on Friday(!!!) so I will have no more excuses to get back to it. My first few dips back into painting will simply be copies of some of Leyendecker's faces and hands.

Until next time... Hejdå

Getting Out

I suppose that, by necessity, this post will largely take the form of reportage. So much has happened that, in order to maintain some sense of continuity, I'd better just tell you the story. If I'm able to sneak in some opinions, anecdotes, or asides, well then so much the better.

I last left you, my reader, with the news that we were moving to Sweden. So much has transpired since then that, as I write to you now, I am writing from our newly rented home in the small town of Lund, in Southern Sweden. 

The last few months in Taos were a whirlwind. So much work. Too much work.

Christina and I, despite having gotten married in Sweden in 2017, had always wanted to have another ceremony... in Taos. So on the blustery and rainy day of June 25th, in front of about 12 good friends, we tied the knot... again!

We then followed that with a going-away party at our pal Steve McFarland's Revolt Gallery, where we took this lovely group shot...

The subsequent week was consumed by the job of preparing for our container shipment. Knowing that we would be given only 3 hours free-of-charge to load the container, I spent several weeks mocking up the load in our workshop.

You can see the 'island' of stuff in the middle of the floor... which is the load waiting to go into the container.

This turned out to be time well-spent, as the load went flawlessly. We stuffed that container full, to the ceiling and to the doors. I like to say that we put the best 25% of our stuff in there. The load included a small mill, a small lathe, quite a bit of Christina's blacksmithing equipment, hundreds of pounds of books, 2 motorcycles and a moped, a piano, 30 or so pieces of artwork, all my painting equipment, 3 mannequins, 2 sewing machines, furniture, beds, bicycles, clothing and kitchen equipment. Et cetera. 

The original estimate for the arrival of the container at our home in Lund was the 8th of August, and to a large degree we built our travel plans around that date. As it happens, that date has been pushed back by at least 3 weeks, which has precipitated a few difficulties. More on that later.

After we sent the container off, we entered into a somewhat strange 3-4 week period. It felt strange because, even though we'd made this big ceremonial 'GoodBye' to Taos, we were actually still there, engaged every day in the hard labor of cleaning and organizing our land, preparing our home for rental, and selling off big items like tools and vehicles. It was during this time that I also installed Fledgling (with help from friends Cedar Goebel, Josh Cunningham, and Shiloh Gossner) in its 'forever home' at Revolt Gallery.

Then, finally, it was time to leave. Christina and Kodiak departed on July 22nd, landing first at a hotel in Lund and then taking occupancy of the house around the beginning of August. The house was literally empty upon their arrival (save for the fridge, stove, and laundry machines) so their first few days were occupied with the task of finding some basic furniture and light fixtures. 

Meanwhile I stayed in Taos an additional week, wrapping up the last things, and then set out for the East Coast in a rental car with our dog Griselda. Most US-based airlines no longer fly dogs in cargo (allegedly because of... the pandemic!) and Griselda is too big to fly in the cabin, and I had been wanting to visit my brother Trevor and his family at their new digs in New Hampshire. So off we went on a 4 day drive across the country. After spending 4 lovely days with Trevor in the rather idyllic little town of Portsmouth...

we were finally off on our big adventure. Luckily SAS (Scandinavian Airlines) still flies dogs in cargo, so on the grey and rainy morning of August 5th Griselda and I landed in Copenhagen, where we were met by Christina and Kodiak. Griselda went wild when she saw them!

I mentioned a few minutes ago that the delay of our shipping container has caused some problems, and what I mean is this: Christina and I put quite a lot of thought into exactly what to pack, and one of the guiding principles in that process was that we did not want to have to buy - in Sweden - a bunch of stuff that we already owned. Why buy mattresses (which are expensive), or kitchen stuff, or a dining room table, or bicycles, when we already own it all? So we were quite careful to time the arrival of the container with our arrival. But the fact that it's quite late (apparently caused by congestion at US ports, a result of... the pandemic!) has meant that we have needed to buy exactly those things, again. After all, we need to sleep and eat and get around.

The other problem it has caused is a little less concrete. The last few months in Taos were marked by a non-stop sense of purpose and focus. There was never a lack of tasks to accomplish, all in service of the larger goal. Now, having arrived in Sweden with nothing to unpack, no art supplies, no tools or motorcycles to keep us busy, we are in somewhat of a 'holding pattern.' This dramatic change of pace felt quite strange to me for a day or two. But then again, if I'm totally honest about it, it has been nice to have nothing particularly pressing to do most of the time, other than explore and discover this new place we are in. Things have been so busy, so intense, for so long that I never felt I had the breathing room to write a blog post... until now. I'm even going to get back to studying the Swedish language pretty soon. This week or two actually feels a bit like a real summer vacation and it's nice to enjoy the downtime with Kodiak before he starts at his new school next week.

I suppose I'll wrap things up with a few early observations about this place, and how it compares to America. My overarching theory of America is that it is fundamentally broken because it was built on the wrong principles of capitalism, racism (and sexism and homophobia), and guns. Having spent the overwhelming majority of my first 52 years in that place, I think the filter through which I'll be looking at Sweden is something like: "In what ways does this place, which purports to prioritize people over profits and the collective over the individual, and which furthermore has no history of slavery, differ from America? And is life actually better here?"

To be honest, I can't give a real answer yet. I've only been here 6 days, and I still feel like a tourist. In fact I imagine I will continue to feel like a tourist for the next year or more. That being said, there are a few things that are already apparent. Wealth seems to be more evenly spread around; I have seen almost no signs of either very rich people or very poor people. And people of different races seem to get along more smoothly. I've noticed this especially in Malmö, the larger city to the southwest of Lund. Pedestrians have an inviolable right-of-way, followed closely in the hierarchy by bicyclists. Cars will stop for you, without fail. Also, the police are more integrated here and their role appears to be closer to the old-fashioned idea of "serve and protect," as opposed to whatever it is they're doing in America now. (For the record, I don't believe the police are completely to blame for their current role in American society; I think economic inequality [poverty] mixed with racism and guns makes their job quite difficult, and dangerous.) 

Malmö, despite having a bad reputation, seems like a very cool city. Christina and I both envision ourselves spending a lot of time there. KKV, the collective artist's workshop where Christina and I will likely be working quite a lot in the next few years, is located in Malmö. The city also has an off-leash dog park which borders the North Sea... and therefor has a 'dog beach'... and which measures approximately 60 acres (!). This feels like something one would be hard-pressed to find in the US, and needless to say, Griselda loves it.

Griselda and one of her many new friends running on the Dog Beach!

Our home in Lund is lovely, although rather large for our purposes (not complaining!) and also still quite empty. It has a luxuriously large yard complete with apple trees and a tree house. Our goal, if we can manage it, is to stay here in this house no more than 2 years (or maybe less) and purchase a home or rural property in that time. It's ambitious, but property is more affordable here than in most parts of the US, so we shall see.

Our yard, just now!

I feel that this post was necessarily superficial, as there was a lot to cover. I imagine that in the coming posts I'll go into more detail and offer deeper observation about what life is like here, and how it differs from the good old US of A. I hope to also talk more about the bicycle culture here, and maybe even get back to talking about art-making!

Cheers