The Bad, the Good, and the Un-Sexy

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.

A view of the courtyard as you enter through the driveway. House on the right, workshops in front and to the left.

After entering the driveway, turn to the right and this is the outside of the house.

What follows now is a few pairs of photos; in each pair the first photo shows the house as it was when we first saw it, and the second photo is taken from the same spot and shows the house as it is today. Mind you, it's still under construction.

View from the living room. The two doors on the far wall are the bathroom (at left) and the old kitchen (at right). At the far right you see a window and doorway... these used to lead to a sunroom (which was sort of stuck onto the side of the house).

Same view, more or less. The door at left still goes to the bathroom, but the bathroom has been totally re-done. The door on the right used to lead to the old kitchen but now leads to Christina's studio. And we totally blew out the wall which used to lead to the sunroom and that is now the new kitchen.

Looking through the door into what used to be the sunroom.

Same view. The wall which contained those two windows and doorway is now gone, and that room will now be the kitchen. In the kitchen and bathroom, we removed the old floors down to the dirt to facilitate installing new plumbing and floor heating, then poured new concrete. You can see we also used a steel I-beam to support the two wooden ceiling beams, as the wall which used to support them is no longer there.

View from the living room looking back towards the master bedroom (which is the doorway at the far wall, below the staircase)

Same view. This picture shows a lot of what we've done... the wall which divided the living room (with the oversized square opening) is now gone. Much of the first-floor ceiling is also now gone, changing the living room from a cramped low-ceilinged room into a large double-height space. We also pulled the 1980's cladding off the main beams, exposing the original 1850's wood, and stained them dark. The new floor will be going in soon.

There used to be a full and proper upstairs...

... but as I mentioned we removed much of the floor to make a full-height living room. Note the same two windows in the photos. The bottom photo is somewhat dominated by a wood bridge I just built today to allow traversing over the open space, but this bridge is temporary, and will be replaced by a more elegant steel version at some point in the future.

Last photo from the interior. This one has no counterpart from before. Here you can get a sense of the living room and the height we gained by removing the ceiling. The red line shows where we cut the floor.

As I mentioned earlier, we will be living in this house by the end of August, and it promises to look quite different (better) by then. I will post more pictures soon, as we get closer to finishing it.

________________________

When you write a blog but you go this long without posting, unfortunately not every amazing thing you do is going to get the full reportage it deserves. In the last few months...

• Christina and Kodiak and I went back to Portugal to finish the installation of The Flybrary, joined by friends Cedar Goebel and Brian Malley. The trip was a success.

• Several of Christina's oldest and best friends from the States visited us here in Lund for about 3 weeks. We did a lot of group bicycling - cycling as a gang around Copenhagen was a real highlight!

• I went to Denmark with Scott, my friend and fellow American expatriate living in Lund, to see Rammstein in concert (just before their singer hit the international front pages for all the wrong reasons!) The show was great.

• I finally cast my first bronze sculpture, which I found highly enjoyable and inspiring. Thanks to Clara and Ricky down at KKV for helping make that happen! Here she is:

Note that I had only one week to prepare the wax positive, which means that in that week I had to sculpt the clay original, make a two part silicone mold with plaster mother-mold, cast the wax positive, and do extensive cleanup on the wax. All of which is to say that I anticipate my next bronze effort to come out better, as I'll have more time. You can click HERE for more photos and info about it (that's an Instagram link so it might not work if you don't have an account...)

I intend to do more bronze work in the future.

OK, that's it for now.

Wish us luck retrieving our sculptures from Las Vegas! Not sure how that's going to happen, exactly... but hopefully I'll tell you in the next blog post!

Cheers from Sweden