I'm obviously long overdue writing this blog post.
I've thought quite a lot about how to structure the post, and I've decided to give you, my faithful readers, the bad news first... followed by the good news.
THE BAD NEWS
Section 1. The Soft Bad News
I am in a stage where I am finding many things about Sweden annoying.
I read an article not so long ago which claimed that the lives of Swedish people are highly compartmentalized, which is to say: Work is for working, the grocery store is for shopping, the bar is for drinking (and maybe being friendly), and Tinder is for flirting, and when in Sweden you should not try to mix any of those. Really, the article said all this! I think it offers a pretty good explanation for why no one looks at anyone else in Sweden; you wouldn't look at someone on the street, because being friendly happens in bars, or worse yet, you wouldn't want a friendly smile to be confused for flirting, because that happens on Tinder. (Note: I seem to remember that friendly smiles between strangers are pretty common in many other cultures, but they are basically non-existent here. I'm currently in danger of forgetting what friendly smiles between strangers feel like, and probably also forgetting how to perform them.)
Some people thrive on the written word, others thrive on listening to music. I thrive on visual culture, and Sweden is pretty lacking in that department, at least out in public. It's visually dull here. The buildings are generally pretty boring, there is very little public sculpture, there is no graffiti and almost no advertising, and the advertising is bland and thoroughly impersonal and de-sexualized. Think "stark Nordic", and then mentally compare that to "lush and baroque Italian", or "seedy and gritty New York" to get an idea what I'm talking about. It's also annoyingly clean and tidy here. I found amazing free stuff on the streets while living in Los Angeles and Barcelona, but there's nothing out of place in Sweden.
Speaking of the de-sexualization of the public sphere, a friend recently told me a little story about a local blacksmith we know, an older guy called Torbjörn. He recounted: "I went into Torbjörn's lunchroom, and... he's got a topless calendar on the wall! You don't have that kind of thing in Sweden anymore, for years now, but he doesn't give a fuck! He's old school!" The way he told the story, it sounded like the old blacksmith had a Nazi flag on the wall. I imagine that this de-sexualizing of the public sphere comes out of the progressive impulse to make sure no one feels objectified, and that seems very reasonable. But does it make me an old-fashioned asshole to say that the result feels sterile and boring? Compared to Los Angeles or Barcelona or Rome, Sweden is a very un-sexy place. It also makes me suspect that paintings of nude angry women might not be such hot sellers here. I guess I'll have to show them in Germany or Denmark!
No place is perfect, and I know from previous experience with the well-established stages of expat adaptation that I will eventually arrive at a place of perspective and acceptance regarding these annoyances. I also know that in the bigger picture these are minor complaints.
Section 2. The Hard Bad News
You might recall from my last post, several months ago, that I spent a few weeks in Las Vegas delivering two sculptures for a festival called Transfix. Transfix was supposed to run for 14 months (sending us handsome paychecks each month), but six weeks after opening its doors the festival ceased operations. Apparently large Burning Man art wasn't the huge draw that the organizers were hoping it would be; the public just wasn't walking through the doors. There was allegedly also some financial mismanagement of the startup funds.
And then, instead of honoring their basic responsibility (and contractual obligation) to cover the costs of returning the art to the artists, the festival simply declared bankruptcy. Christina and I, like 30 or 40 other participating artists, were left high and dry and were never paid a cent. Our sculptures are currently stuck in Vegas and we're not sure how to get them home, but it'll likely cost us thousands of dollars. So our most significant projected source of income has quickly become a huge liability, throwing us into some real financial instability.
This "big art" thing isn't working as well as it used to.
THE GOOD NEWS
There is, thank god, also some good news.
Again, no place is perfect, and Sweden, for all its shortcomings, is a fundamentally sane and solid place. Especially for raising a kid... and especially compared to the US. I can recognize that. And, as I write this in late July, much of the Northern hemisphere is baking in temperatures around 30 - 40 C (95 - 105 F), but here in Sweden it's cool and rainy pretty much every day. I think there will be worse places than Sweden for getting through the coming climate apocalypse!
Kodiak stabilized considerably over the second semester of sixth grade and is now doing normal things like hanging out with other kids after school and staying home alone. In fact there's been a huge and sudden increase in independence, which has been great and feels very healthy. He even took his first flights alone recently, visiting his grandmother and his uncle Cles (my mother and brother) in Greece for two weeks. It seems he had a great time, and it's nice that we are so close to them.
And we are slowly starting to make a few friends.
But the biggest news of all, really, is that we bought a house in Sweden!
Considering how much we like our home right next to a workshop, situated rurally about 15 minutes from a small, politically liberal city with a four-letter name in the Southwest of the country (I'm describing our home in Taos), we decided to buy another one of those! Yes, it's true... our new home has a workshop and is in the fields just outside liberal, little Lund, in the southwest of Sweden. We are calling it The Farm.
The property consists of a home, built around 1850, and two additional workshop buildings, arranged in a "U" shape around a central courtyard, all sitting on about 1 acre of land. We have a really big yard full of trees, including quite a few productive fruit trees. It is surrounded by farmland, and... since there are almost no property-line fences in Sweden, it feels very expansive and open. The fundamentals of the property (good-sized home and workshops, nice piece of land, close to Lund) were all just right. However, the home itself felt old-fashioned and cramped, so we have embarked on an ambitious remodel. (Christina and I can't seem to stop building homes!) We are under a deadline of August 31 to get out of our rental in Lund, so we have been working furiously on the house to get it ready.
A few photos:
This aerial view is pretty self-explanatory, and shows how close we are to an active train track. I thought that the trains would bother me but I've quickly come to actually like the sound of them passing by. They make me feel like we are "connected" to the bigger world out there.
