ROME

 Yes it's been a long time since my last post. 

I would say that, up until about a month ago, my reason for not writing was that I was so busy with the house renovation. And my reason for not writing in the last month is really just that I have slipped into what you might call a 'hard time'. I won't spend a lot of time talking about having a hard time because no one wants to read about that, but I think the following should suffice: During our first 14 months or so here we were in non-stop trouble-shooting mode, whether it was paperwork or getting Kodiak settled in to his new school or learning Swedish or finding a house to buy or renovating that house. During all that time I was so focused on the task at hand, whatever it was, that I had very little time to really feel what it was like to leave my 'home culture' and jump headlong into this new one. My alienation from my feelings during that time was only exacerbated by a lifelong difficulty I have in identifying and experiencing emotions, even in the best of times. So, when the house renovation finally slowed down and Kodiak showed himself to be adjusting much better in his second year to being here, it was finally time for me to feel just how big a thing we've done, and just how hard it's been. If you liken a person who is able to healthily vent emotion consistently to a pressure vessel which maintains its equilibrium by venting pressure from time to time, I might be similarly likened to a pressure vessel with a faulty pressure relief valve, so that when the pressure is finally released, it's a bit more sudden and intense. Anyway, learning to recognize, experience, and regulate my emotions is an important piece of my lifelong psychological journey, and even though it's not always a fun journey, it's my journey! So there!

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OK, now that that's out of the way, I think my next challenge will be to streamline and focus what might otherwise be a freewheeling and sprawlingly wide-ranging post. After all, a lot happens when the signposts in life are spaced far apart.

I can see that it's been so long since my last post that we were not even finished renovating the house yet. Here's a great picture from back in the beginning of the renovation, taken by our good friend Krister:

While a renovation like this is never really done, we did get the house finished enough to live in, and we moved in at the end of August, meaning we've been here for a little over three months now. The house is sweet and cozy and is supporting our family well. 

Now that the house is basically finished, we are shifting our attention to the main workshop. 

This is how the workshop looked a few weeks ago... 

...and here's how it looked last week...

... and here's how it looks now. The first big job we are taking on is opening up the space by removing the low ceiling, much like what we did in the house. As of right now, I have stripped about 1/3 of the ceiling down to the rafter beams. 

When the rest of the ceiling is stripped, we will cut out the rafters and insulate the interior of the roof, thereby gaining a much taller space. 

You might remember from the last post that we have three buildings; the house, the main workshop, and the other building. The other building is the one in the middle, and will end up serving various purposes, such as guest apartment, wood shop, Christina's and my 'fine arts' studios (like painting and sculpture), and maybe even one day a gallery or café. The following photo shows one of the upstairs spaces that I cleared out and will one day soon serve as my painting and sculpture studio. 

I'm really quite excited about that, as it will be the first proper (meaning: large enough) studio I've ever had. 

And here's one last shot of our sweet courtyard, between the three buildings, back when it wasn't covered in snow!

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OK, on to other news (and here's where it could get a little sprawling, but I'll try to keep it tight!)

A few months ago I retrofitted three bicycles - one for each of us - with electric bike kits. Here is Kodiak letting us know how he feels about his new e-bike!

E-bikes are really pretty amazing; they've revolutionized our transport around here, and are especially helpful now that we live a little further out in the country. We can get to Lund in about 25 minutes. Although, to be honest, we haven't been using them much lately because it's too cold and icy now.

A few days before Halloween, Lund hosted the annual "Run For Your Lives", which is a zombie-themed mini-marathon through the city. Basically, runners have to get from start to finish without getting tagged by a zombie. Three tags and you're out. I played a zombie. I think I was born to play a zombie. It was really fun. 

Kodiak and I visited Stockholm a few weeks ago, where we visited with friends, went to a museum which featured some funhouse mirrors...

... and saw this fantastic sculpture, the Orpheus Group, by Carl Milles.

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I'm having a bit of a love affair. 

With Rome.

I just got back a few days ago from 4 days there with my fellow expat friend Scott. We decided to go... just because we could. For me it was mostly about the sculpture. Scott is a talented photographer and for him I think it was mostly about the opportunities for photography... and the beer!

Rome is sort of the anti-Sweden. Rome (and maybe the rest of Italy too??) has visual density, public art around every corner (most of it from antiquity), and tons of style. It's also well appointed with museums, antique stores, used book stores, and sprawling outdoor markets. Sweden has none of that. At one point during our trip, while strolling through Piazza Navona, I thought to myself "Sweden has no style."* My internal reaction to that simple statement was one of surprisingly strong emotion, which signalled to me that my observations about the differences between Rome and Sweden tap into larger questions about how well I 'jive' with Sweden. I know from chatting with Scott that he feels at home in the order and simplicity of Scandinavia, but I'm not feeling that right now. It occurs to me that it might not be a coincidence that Italy is a place which you might characterize as 'demonstrative' or 'emotional', and in the same loose way Sweden could roughly be referred to as 'withdrawn' and 'intellectual.' I am bored of withdrawn and intellectual, and I'm fucking bored of jantelagen, the informal Swedish rule which discourages standing out from the crowd or touting your own uniqueness. But, whatever. For now we are here... and as I've said before it is our job and our duty to give this experience our very best shot; to try as hard as we can to make it as good as it can possibly be. 

And... Rome (and Florence and Barcelona) is just a short plane ride away.

* This statement is obviously not true. Swedes do have a style, even if it's a bit homogeneous and unadventurous. IKEA is a good example. The more important part here is my reaction.

OK, get ready for a bunch of pictures...

My current favorite sculptor is Gian Lorenzo Bernini, the undisputed superstar of the Italian Baroque. Our four days in Rome were loosely structured as a tour of Bernini highlights.

This is probably my favorite Bernini sculpture, called The Ecstasy of Saint Teresa. It depicts the moment Saint Teresa receives the awesomeness of Jesus, as symbolized by the little angel about to stab her with an arrow. The sculpture is considered scandalous by some because Santa Teresa's religious ecstasy looks just a little bit too much like sexual ecstasy. That's probably why I like it so much. Bernini apparently had a 'healthy' sexual appetite, so it's not a stretch, in my mind anyway, to imagine that he might have been intentionally riding that fine line between different 'types' of ecstasy. The sculpture is tucked into the side of a smallish church which was right in our neighborhood of our hotel. I went there at least three times. (Picture by Scott. In fact, so many of the following pictures were taken by Scott that I'm just going to use a red asterisk, like this * , to denote them in the future)

This photo is a little out of order in my narrative, but... later in the trip I spent an afternoon perusing some spectacular antique shops, where I saw this marble replica of Santa Teresa's face. Of course I had to ask the price, but... at 6500 Euros, I had to pass!

The church in our neighborhood also had this 'replica' of a saint, lying... apparently dead... underneath one of the sculptures. Not a common sight in Sweden. Actually, not a common sight anywhere I've travelled!

Later on day one we found these open-air used book sellers. I appreciated that you could buy all kinds of books here, from art history to pornography to philosophy. *

We had our first dinner on this square, or piazza. Rome is full of piazzas, and the piazzas are full of life. This one had a good bookstore called Fahrenheit 451 books. *

On the second day we went to the Galleria Borghese, an art gallery in the former private home of a rich Catholic cardinal. The place is full of amazing art, such as 'Apollo and Daphne,' by Bernini, above. In this sculpture, Daphne is escaping Apollo's amorous advances by turning herself into a laurel tree. *

Detail of 'The Rape of Proserpina,' also by Bernini, also at the Galleria Borghese, photo also by Scott *.

Cardinal Borghese was also a collector of Caravaggio paintings, and there were four in this room (three in this picture). If you've been reading this blog for a while you might remember that I'm a Caravaggio fan, and it was amazing to see them in person. Sometimes I can't believe that these treasures of art history, these one-of-a-kind objects, which are pictured in so many books and are so historically important, are just there... sitting there... in a room. If you were sneaky you could probably just touch one of them. *

Last pic from the Galleria Borghese. An amazing little drawing by... I can't remember. But it was great. Most of the time when Scott was taking a picture of me, I wasn't aware of it. I guess there might be more pictures of me in this post than usual, because he took some good ones. Like this one. *

We wandered into another church and saw these sculptures of women, kind of in a side room. As if they weren't that important. But the women were so beautiful. At least I thought so. Sad... and beautiful. *

In the same church there was this quite strange modern bronze sculpture of an angel. *

The river Tiber, looking back at the Vatican.

That evening we just wandered around some more, ending up at Piazza Navona, a huge piazza with quite a few sculptures by... you guessed it. Bernini.

The next day we went to the Vatican, which is....

Flippin' enormous. Over the top. Gigantic. Pictures can't do it justice. *

The first thing I wanted to see in St Peter's Basilica, the main church of the Vatican, was this funerary sculpture by Bernini... *

Check out the bronze skeleton with wings, holding an hourglass, trying to emerge from the red marble drapery. Amazing. *

St. Peter's Basilica is topped by a huge dome, which you can ascend by a series of internal stairways...

As you near the top of the dome's curvature, the walls of the stairways mimic the dome's shape...*

This is the view from the top, looking down on the Piazza di San Pietro, which was also designed by Bernini. Yes, he was also an architect. And a painter. And a theatrical production designer. Jeez! *

Scott and me, up on top of Rome.

On the third evening, Scott went to take some pictures, such as...

... this one of the Tiber, looking back at the Vatican. That's the dome we climbed. That's a damn good picture, right? *

Meanwhile I perused some world-class art and antique shops...

I was hoping to find something I would fall in love with, and that I could afford, and I hit the jackpot when I found this print. It's an engraving from 1895 of a painting by Emile Levy called The Death of Orpheus. In 'the old days,' before photography, sometimes prints would be made of famous paintings so that ordinary (not rich) people could have the artwork in their homes, or a facsimile thereof, anyway. The action in this image is incredible... a sleeping Orpheus is about to be murdered and dismembered by a bacchanalian gang of eleven dressed and undressed women. Now I need to find a beautiful frame for it.

Later that night we wandered through quaint neighborhoods...

... popped in and out of more churches...

and had dinner at a lively little beer place in an area called Trastevere.

On our last day, we wandered more...

... past more sculpture (there really is sculpture everywhere)...

... and ended up at the church where Bernini is buried. As I walked towards the tomb, a church worker pulled a red velvet rope right across my path, blocking me from getting any closer than this!

Had I been 2 minutes earlier I could've walked right up to it. Oh well. A fitting end to an amazing trip.

In this last picture I'm showing off the Italian ibuprofen that kept me going day after day. Old injuries flare up when you walk an average of 25 km per day! Yes, we walked 100 km in four days, an average of about 6 hours a day. *

OK, done with Rome.

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Our days and weeks here are still pretty well taken up by working on our homestead, but I have managed to do a little art here and there. 

I find the part of a tree where the trunk splits into two to be a very inspiring shape, for its similarity to the human body...

... so I've been doing some wood carving along those lines.

I took the idea a little farther in an application I made to an artist residency in February. This is the concept image. I'll update as to whether I'm accepted. The residency is in another part of Sweden, and I fear my proposal might be a little too... 'corporeal,' shall we say, and not theoretical and conceptual enough. But I think it's great, and I hope to make it happen! I've also been sculpting in clay with an eye towards casting another bronze, but the clay sculpture is not finished enough to show here. 

If you made it this far, congratulations! It's the end!

I have in mind another post, about a super mundane and pedestrian topic which is nevertheless quite close to my heart. We shall see if I can post that one sometime soon.

I hope this finds you all well,

Hugs,

Christian

And... Thank you Scott for letting me use your great pictures!

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.

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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