Author Archives: Stefan Geens

Weekend report

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I have seen the future, and it is taller than me. On the occasion, it was also drunker — the occasion being Walpurgis, the location being Karolinska Institute, the medical university where students traditionally ring in spring with a concert fueled by cheap beerEverywhere else in Sweden, this is the night to build a big bonfire with last year’s IKEA furniture, in order to make room for this year’s models. Not so with Stockholm students, who are far too jaded for such blatantly participatory pursuits..

I got in under cover of accompanying Jenny and Maria, who technically aren’t students either, but who at least can plausibly pretend to be. Once in, they were pretty quickly the center of attention of a pack of male students from Idrottshögskolan, Sweden’s sports universityWhat could they possibly be teaching there? Steroid research? Post-graduate swimming? The physics of the hockey puck?.

This group made Eurotrash look like Lady Liberty. They wore soccer jerseys, no doubt an homage to Beckham, but a majority of them also wore one or more gloves in an unabashedly retro-80’s way. And they danced extremely well while simultaneously not being gay. In sweden, it turns out even the jocks are metrosexualApologies for the slight delay in blogging this, but I have added a third cardinal rule to dictate my blogging behaviour: 1: Absolutely no blogging while drunk. 2: Absolutely no blogging while hung over. 3: Absolutely no blogging while it is glorious outside. All three rules were invoked this weekend..

Further burnishing the eurotrash credentials of the night was the band, Lambretta, a semi-famous (so I am told) Swedish thrash-pop act that sounds exactly like Transvision Vamp back in 1989.

Watching them, however, was more of a challenge than concerts used to be. Over the years, my 6 foot 2 frame had afforded me some prime views — in 1992, for example, attending a Guns and Roses concert in Sevilla was like standing in a crowd of smoky midgets. But tonight, perhaps half the room was taller than me. (The New Yorker recently explained why.) If it is important in Sweden that you not stand out, I think I am going to do extremely well here.

Top ten things I hate about Stockholm, V

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The fifth in an occasional series.
 
Ten: Predatory seating
Nine: Culinary relativism
Eight: Preëmptive planning
Seven: Premature masticationSix: Irrational discalceation.

This one really baffles me. If you’ve never been here you might think I’m exaggerating, but trust me, it’s a law of Swedish nature: Swedes will not enter anyone’s home until they’ve taken off their shoes.

I cannot figure out why. During my first few months here, in the autumn of 2002, I wandered about many a friend’s apartment, shod and oblivious to the silent anguish I was causing them as they followed me around in their socks, too polite to enforce the terms of use of their hardwood floors.

Then, in the winter, I too started taking off my heavy boots, caked in snow, as I got home. But this made sense — my boots were dirty. Come spring, however, there was no sign of this habit letting up among locals. Shoes came off indoors, even when it was sunny and dry outside and not a speck of dirt sullied new sneakersNow that I’ve experimented with unshod home life, I can tell you I don’t like it. Cooking without shoes makes me feel vulnerable. Likewise when I wash up the dishes. I feel like I use up socks too rapidly. I stub my toes. I can’t just go outside on a whim..

I’ve considered and subsequently discarded various theories as to what might explain this behavior. It cannot be that Swedes do not want to cause a ruckus with downstairs neighbors: Joachim and Elise have no-one living below them; and people who live in detached houses discalceate too. Is it a bizarre sock fetish? No, because many actually switch to slippers when they get home. Are Stockholm streets particularly prone to wayward dogpoop? On the contrary, they are completely devoid of gunk, slime, and the garbage juice that often finds its way onto New York pavements. Could it be that they are so enamored of their hardwood floors that they don’t wan’t to “use them up?” That would be a very curious departure from an otherwise vigorous culture of consumption: Swedes don’t encase the cushions of their IKEA furniture in plastic, for example, and they do actually use their espresso machines. Like I said, I’m baffled.

I now suspect it is a deep psychosis. Last weekend, when Christine, my Swedish teacher, came by for lessons on a dry and sunny day, I told her there was really no need to take off her shoes. She look so unhappy. “But it feels so wrong!” she said finally, staring at the floor she’d have to violate. She took her shoes off.

Behövs civil olydnad?

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Is there a role for civil disobedience in a democracy? Tough question, especially when you have to answer in Swedish. In short, I think there is. Most improvements to functioning democracies have come to us via civil disobedience campaigns: universal suffrage, civil rights, the end of apartheid…
 
That said, the difference between civil disobedience and criminality is that the former has to have a moral aim and use non-violent means. And that’s hard to pull off, actually.Så många fel förra gången! Jag är förvånad att ni förstådd vad jag ville säger. Men den här veckan kan jag mycket bättre svenska så det kommer at bli mycket lättare för oss alla.

Vad viktiga frågor vi har denna gång på fredagsfyran… Det är inte så lätt vara ironisk omkring sån filosofisk debatt.

Behövs civil olydnad/utomparlamentariska aktioner som ett komplement till demokratin? Vet du några exempel på “bra” aktioner?

Egentligen, ja. De flesta förbättringar i våra demokratier kom efter en fas av civil olydnad: rösträtt för kvinnor, rösträtt för svarta (i USA), oberoende för Indien, motstånd till apartheid i Sydafrika…

Problemet är hur vi ska skilja mellan civil olydnad och ren kriminalitet. Civil olydnad bör ha en moralisk bas, och bör vara ovåldsam (? Non-violent). Det är fortfarande möjligt att jag inte kommer överens med idéer, till exempel de av anti-globalister (som inte förstår att de kämpar för fattighet i tredje världen) men om de protesterar fredligt — avspärrar en G7 möte genom att sitta på vägen, till exempel — är det helt okej med mig. Vad jag håller inte med, självklart, är “reclaim the streets”-stil vandalismen som vi hade på Stureplan förre år.

Är vandalism mot privat egendom våld? Javisst, det är ekonomisk våld mot människor. Även om du anser att egendom är orättvis, kan du inte förneka att förstöra saker skadar människor. Personligen anser jag att egendom är en social tankeskapelse, men vilket är ett nödvändigt begrepp till en stabil modern civilisation.

Är vandalismen mot reklamer civil olydnad? Nej, det är bara intolerant. Reklam är också en form av yttrandefrihet. Om du håller inte med, får du protestera, eller köpa ditt eget reklam.

Vid vilket (om något) tillfälle skulle du själv kunna tänkas delta i en dylik aktion?

Mot officiella diskriminering mot invandrare, mot länkar mellan staten och kyrka, mot protektionism.

Har du själv varit civilt olydig?

Nej, bara kriminell. Det är svårt att vara civilt olydig.

Top ten things I hate about Stockholm, IV

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The fourth in an occasional series.
 
Ten: Predatory seating
Nine: Culinary relativism
Eight: Preëmptive planningSeven: Premature mastication.

For some time, it has been apparent to me that the media here are pushing brunch as the new cool thing for Stockholmers to do on weekends. Newspapers, city guides, television and radio have all decided that if it’s good enough for the Sex and the City cast, this should be the next big cultural import from New York. But there is an element of willful obliviousness involved: Swedes invented brunch generations ago, and in fact brunch every weekday, when they take an hour off from work for food. At 11.30 am.

Stockholmers might think they are eating lunch then, but they’d be wrong. Food consumed at 11.30 am can be wonderful, but it is not lunch. Lunch is what the Italians have at 1.30 pm. It’s what the Spanish have between 2 and 5 pm. That said, the Swedish weekday brunch is a lovely ritual — all the restaurants cater to it, friends meet in the old town to catch up and swap gossip, mamma-ledig (“mommy-free”) mothers on their year-long leave from work cart their offspring in SUV-sized buggies to meet admiring pals, and officemates can flirt without really calling it a date. In fact, Swedish brunch fulfills all the same social functions as the New York version, with the added benefit that you get to do it during office hours.

So, to clarify, I don’t hate the brunching tradition as such, but I do bemoan its misclassification as lunch, and one additional opportunity cost: The resultant temporal shift of all mealtimes. Swedes are constantly hungry ahead of the rest of Europe — their eating habits are, in fact, synchronized with those of Iraqis. Walk home from work shortly after 5 pm and you will see Stockholmers sitting at restaurant tables, ordering. The tail end of a three-martini lunch, perhaps? No, the start of middag, which they believe is dinner.

Clearly, dinner is not served at 5 pm. This is obvious to all foreigners. For example, Ayse and Cemo, who are visiting from Istanbul on a baby-goods shopping spree this weekend, were asked by Joachim, a Swede, what time they’d like to meet for dinner tonight. They said 8:30 pm. Joachim nearly gargled his café latte. He had 6 pm in mind. Because it was Saturday.

Stockholmers, stop being so defensive about your bizarre eating habits; stop trying to shoehorn your meals into accepted global norms, and celebrate your otherness! I suggest trying to export the 5 pm meal to New York as something sophisticated and maybe even a touch decadent, as in “look how early I can get off work.” New York restaurants would take to it in an instant: they could always use an extra sitting. If Carrie and the girls had another season on HBO, they’d definitely be meeting for lunner, or maybe they’d call it dinch.

Public service announcement

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This week it was the annual joke show on NPR’s A Prairie Home Companion, that liberal gem of a radio show hosted by Garrison Keillor. Bush got plenty of come-uppance (What were the best three years of George Bush’s life? Grade 5), but Keillor is generous with his humor, and flawless in his delivery, so you should really listen to the whole show rather than just read the list of the best jokes he collected for the year.

Practically nobody emerged unscathed: not Kerry (John Kerry walks into a bar. The bartender says, “Why the long face?”), not Martha Stewart, not Episcopalians (Why can’t Episcopalians play chess? They can’t tell the difference between a bishop and a queen), not Unitarians (How do you get a Unitarian family to leave town? You burn a question mark on their front lawn) not Michael Jackson, not Janet Jackson, not even Ronald Reagan (President Reagan didn’t vote in the California election because recall’s not his thing any more), not Helen Keller, not the Amish and not the blind (How does the blind parachutist know when he’s getting close to the ground? The leash goes slack).

And certainly not the Swedes, for which Keillor has a soft spot:

PP: A Swedish guy likes to go to bed with two women, so when he falls asleep they can talk to each other. He is so repressed, he blushes if someone says “Intersection”. Sometimes he’ll get drunk and go downtown and spend the night in a warehouse.
 
GK: A warehouse?
 
PP: They’re bad spellers, too. [Script]

Well, okay, it was funny when he said it. You can complain here.

Försenad fyran

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The Swedish alcohol monopoly system is once again the topic of debate, this time precipitated by the news that hard liquor is being sold in Germany in bag-in-a-boxes (like they do with cheap wine). Should these be allowed to be sold in Sweden, as they would defeat the policy of making alcohol too expensive to get drunk on? Of course, EU trade rules should make that question moot.
 
Frågor kommer från här.1. Bör Systembolaget finnas kvar?

Javisst bör det. Att dricka för mycket alkohol inte är hälsosamt. Röker för mycket inte ännu är hälsosamt, så därför tycker jag att vi bör också har ett systembolag för tobak och snuss, som är öppet bara måndags tills fredags, 9-17. Inga cigaretter bör säljas på helger! Att äta för mycket också är jätte daligt för hälsan, men mat är nu så billig och det köps så mycket, och vi har så många feta människor på gator, att jag skulle gärna se ett systembolag för mataffärer och naturligtviss högre skatt på mat. Vi bör fasta på helgen.

Vad jag tycker helt inte om är att det fortfarande finns platsar var man kan äta, röka och dricka samtidigt på helger: Restauranger! Vi bör stänga dem i helger, annars skulle rika människor fortsätta att göra saker som fattige människor har inte råd med.

CBR988.gif2. Leder vin- och spritboxar till ökat supande?

Ja. Liten, men det leder framförallt till sämre bakrus. Bättre att ha mindre skatt på sprit så att vi kan ha råd med bättre alkohol och alltså inte är tvungen att vara sjukskriven nästa dag.

3. Vilka konsekvenser (om några) tror du det skulle bli om Systembolaget avskaffades?

Jag tror inte att Svenskar skulle dricka mycket mer, utan bättre alkohol. Men dem bör dricka mer. Just nu dricker dem mycket mindre än EUs genomsnitt.

4. Nämn en riktigt schysst drink?

Hembryggt palinka av Adriana’s bror.

When gridlock is good

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It now seems likely that Sweden will be the only EU member not to have immigration controls [Swedish] in place when 10 new members join the union May 1Yes, May 1, day of international labor solidarity, when workers of the world, er, unite.. This excellent outcome is not due to enlightened government action, however: the Social Democrats and Folkpartiet did not want to budge on their respective versions of restrictions, while the remaining parties were against either proposal. No proposal has a parliamentary majority, so nothing happens.

Prime Minister Persson says he will consider tabling other measures later this summer or fall. Of course, by then, we will see two things happening: 1) There will be no “social tourists” (though the few that do make it will be amply covered by the press); 2) Those immigrants that do come will be a wave of the most-motivated and hardest-working Eastern Europeans there are, and Sweden will have them all to itself. It is a brilliant policy, and nobody can even take credit for it.

Stockholm: Random observations

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Today was the first perfect spring day, as bright as a day can get, and Stockholmers walked about their city as if they had just been released from a dark room, squinting, and a little dazed. Tourists were easy to spot — they were the ones dressed rationally, whereas the locals were shedding layers like eskimos in a sauna. And not a leaf on the trees yet, though that should change within hours.

make23.gifWaiting for a train at Stockholm Södra Friday night, I started staring at the platform pavement. Penrose tiles! These were invented (or discovered, depending on your take on mathematics) by Roger Penrose: He figured out how to cover a surface with only two different kinds of tiles in a way that never repeats. It sounds impossible, but it’s not. Penrose used two kinds of rhombi, and then added some specific instructions as to how they are supposed to be placed next to each other. The result is a complex mathematical structure made from simple rules, putting it in the same seductive league as the Mandelbrot set and Wolfram’s Rule 30.

In Södra, the rhombi are disguised, but cleverly so: By curving the edges in specific ways, Penrose’s rules are embodied in the shapes: It was impossible for the workmen building the platform to accidentally create a repeating pattern (unless they were to use only one shape exclusively, I think, but I am not sure about that, and need to go have another look).

I started to wonder whether for each separate segment of pavement covered in tiles, the ratio of the frequency of the two shapes was similar. Luckily, the train arrived. Just now, I found out that for large enough areas, this ratio converges on the golden mean. That is deep in ways I have not yet begun to fathom.

I love public architecture that strives for obscure details that hide underfoot, literally. Next time, I will take my camera, take a picture, and post it here.

A tale of two passions: The unbeliever's guide

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Just when you have overdosed on Jesus, just when all possible excuses to blog him would seem to have passed safely, at least until Christmas, behold my belated Easter essay, arisen anew after being forsaken for rugged walks through Irish hills ending in Guinness and song at Ireland’s highest pub.

In Sweden last week, I saw two passions. The first was Bach’s The Passion According to St. John, performed in the Gustaf Vasa Church on Odenplan by the house choir and the royal chamber orchestra. It is a glorious piece, and it was deftly executed in a space that did it justice. Fellow SAIS grad Helena G sang in the choir, an impressive feat that is nevertheless more common than you might expect — Sweden is a nation of choirs, secular echoes of what constituted entertainment in religious rural Sweden until recently (is my wild guess). This love of performing is in the blood, and goes some way to explaining the ability of most Swedes to treat the Eurovision song contest as something other than an exercise in high irony.

The other passion was, of course, Mel Gibson’s The Passion of the Christ — about which I had been compelled to form opinions in advance of its showing here, so I thought I should at least do it the honor of a retroactive viewing.

Is it really fair to compare these two passions? Both pieces run around 2 hours, cover the same story, and hence tell it at about the same pace. Both have been accused of espousing antisemitismHere is a convincing case why Bach’s piece is not antisemitic, even by contemporary standards.. But whereas Bach’s work has maintained a relevance in the 280 years since it was composed, it remains to be seen if Gibson’s efforts have the same lasting power.

Although watching a film in Aramaic and Latin with Swedish subtitles is only marginally less taxing than the Finnish movie I accidentally saw last year, the story is so well known, even by those who temporarily were Christians by accident of birth like myself, that I found the language not really to be an impediment to my understanding of Gibson’s efforts. I only have two problems with his oeuvre: the means, and the ends. Let’s tackle each in turn.

I’ve read many reviewers who tussle with the message, but concede that the film is quite well made. I’d rather not grant it that distinction.

Here’s why: The film promises authenticity. It’s the big selling point, it’s what’s been drawing in the bible belts of the world, heightening the emotional effect for religious audiences when they finally come face to face with their personal Jesus. The movie is interesting to the extent that it is a documentary, or at least a plausible rendition of what transpired. The most touted example of this devotion to realism is that the actors speak Aramaic and Latin — it’s meant to be a constant reminder that what we are seeing is the real thing.

Except that it isn’t, to start the nitpicking. Having made the promise of authenticity, Gibson delivers clichés instead. The Roman vernacular was Greek in Judea at the timeGibson should have read a little more I, Claudius.. In the movie, Jesus has a manicured beard, long hair, western features, and looks rather glam, not unlike Jesuses from the illustrated bibles the Mormons hand out; in real life, Jesus probably looked more like Arafat than Beckham, and he was probably closer to 5 ft rather than 6, and long hair most definitely was not in with Jews thenIf you want to know what I really think of Jesus, read last year’s Easter post..

Crosses were not carried ready-made up the hill, as in the movie; instead, just the crossbar was. The trunks were fixed in the ground, as crucifixions were something of an assembly line process. The spike should have gone through his wrist, not the palm, because — as the Romans knew — the bones and muscles in the hand are not strong enough to sustain the weight of a body.

Evil is depicted as being literally ugly — witness the appearance of Satan as an invalid midget. The bad Jews are caricatured, with the priests sporting noses that are far more hooked and beards that are far more nefarious than the Jews on “our” side, such as the apostles, and Jesus himself.

At the very end, as Jesus rises from the dead, his flesh wounds healed, his beard and hair once again immaculate, we get a special effect right out of Terminator 2: A prefectly circular coin-sized hole through his palm is ready for the dazzling of the apostles, but not until we’re given a good look through it. It’s so cheesy — why couldn’t He fix that too? Either God works in mysterious ways, or Gibson does.

Over and over, Gibson is unwilling, despite the advertising, to deliver a work that departs from convential renditions of Jesus as perceived by orthodox traditions even when these renditions have long been known to be historically false.

My biggest problem with Gibson’s method, however, is in his use of music. He drowns the film in a shmaltzy, muzakked version of world music from the Middle East that has become easy shorthand for eliciting emotional responses in period pieces set in the region. You know it when you hear it — it’s that soulful, nasal wailing.

The pioneer of this soundtrack genre was actually Peter Gabriel, for The Last Temptation of Christ, still one of my all-time favorite movies. Gabriel went out and recorded contemporary Arab folk music, which he then turned it into a great soundtrack. I still get shivers down my spine when, at the end of that movie, we hear “It is accomplished,” and the ululating begins, which then segues into church bells. It is a brilliant compression of the next 2000 years of the story into a single musical momentWe also heard this genre in Gladiator, but there at least I was willing to suspend disbelief, because it was billed as fiction; and the main theme was memorable. Oh for a dogme version of the Passion. . Nothing remotely as memorable happens in The Passion.

So much for means. What about the message?

The torture of Jesus, based on a throwaway line in one of the gospels written a generation after the fact, is portrayed by Gibson as attaining epic proportions. Apparently, it’s not enough that Jesus suffered for our sins, but that he suffered for them beyond the limits of human endurance. The problem with this, theologically, is that if we buy into the realism of the film, Jesus’s torture was nothing special by the brutal standards of the day, nor by the standards of the inquisition, and probably not by the standards of some KGB outpost in Chechnya today.

Odds are that somebody is being tortured to death somewhere on the planet right now. This is of course awful, but is not the main difference between that victim’s story and that of Jesus the fact that Jesus ostensibly died for our sins, rather than that he did so painfully?

I think this is the main flaw in Gibson’s message. In focusing on the extent of the suffering Jesus underwent, Gibson is really undermining his own case for Jesus’s relevance. Is the suffering the main reason why we are supposed to recognize Jesus as the Messiah — for his superhuman feats of enduranceI identified most with Pontius Pilate, the world-weary Roman sent to control a bunch of restless natives and their silly pursuits. I am tempted to see Paul Bremer as a latter-day Pilate, sent out to bring all manner of civilizing influences in return for commodities and hegemony, a bargain the natives seems incapable of appreciating.?

Gibson’s literal interpretation of the gospels also allows very little leeway for alternate takes. At the start of the film, there is a brief moment when we think Jesus could plausibly be projecting inner demons — after all, even the Vatican acknowledges that mental illness is the most likely secular explanation for the experiences of assorted prophets and saints. Instead, by the time Jesus dies, the event is made to coincide with wrathful acts of God more at home in the denouement of Raiders of the Lost Ark.

This, then, is the main difference between the two passions: If you do not believe in the literal truth of the story behind them, only one of them remains transcendent.

Oog goes Live

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Oog is Dutch for eye, but now it is also the Geens family photoblog, and it has just gone live properly, with an installment of dad’s Ireland photos. As soon as we get them, you’ll find sis’s Galapagos pics there, and I plan to add the occasional scanned image from my negative colllection.

Feedback and suggestions are much appreciated.