I’ve updated the <a href="http://www.stefangeens.com/links.html"links page, adding many new links and taking out the ones I never visited (and hence you probably never did either). I also did a redesign, which you will like better once you are used to it. For those who absolutely hate it, the old links page is still here.
Also, if you’ve been using this page as your start page and there are sites you visit regularly but can’t find here, please signal them and I will consider adding them.
There is something Platonic about summer in Sweden. On one level, it is an abstraction, a collection of ideal things about summer, much as I remember summers from childhood, even though they could never have been like this. But it’s a fact that the light here is yellower, the sky brighter blue; it’s like looking at an old color photograph of summer, lens flare and all. And just as with a photograph, there are no flies (yet), and no humidity, and the sun in the late afternoon seems fixed in the sky — it will hover there for as long as you care to look.
Summer in Sweden is also a summer of the mind. It’s brilliant daylight outside at 5 am, and by then you feel as guilty as sleeping till noon in New York. People go to work early, but then spend most of the day rooted in parks and on terrace cafés — human sunflowers. After work, behind the Kungliga Biblioteket in Södermalm, they’ll play a mysterious game that involves setting up a miniature wooden set from The Lord of the Rings, then taking turns destroying it by throwing wooden sticks at is, playing Sauron. It goes on for hours. I sometimes go to watch, pretending to read my first Swedish-language novel, a Henning Mankell detective thriller. My main fear: At the end of the novel the detective will tell me whodunnit, and I just won’t get it. Is there a word for butler in Swedish?
In London yesterday morning, BBC television news carried a quitessential New York story: a bouncer had been stabbed and killed by a patron after the patron had been asked to stop smoking inside a nightclub, as required by a new law. In the 15 seconds it aired, a camera panned across a purple awning that looked, well, familiar.
It was. It was Guernica, I later found out. Guernica sits atop the legendary Save the Robots, which sits atop the mythicalA seriously outdated web review still includes Save the Robots. Robots, an original East Village punk establishment. I caught the tail end of Save the Robots when I settled on Saint Marks in 1996. Save the Robots sat across empty lots on Avenue B, between 2nd and 3rd, and was the default destination whenever a 4am closing time at 7B We always suspected 7B was actually called The Horseshoe Bar, or maybe Vazac’s but it often proved easier to conflate name and location, especially as their Jack and cokes barely ever had any coke in them. Many of the beat poets drank their livers away at the corner of 7th and B—Allen Ginsberg lived around the corner. was not reason enough to call it a night.
Save the Robots had a smoky cellar for a dance floor where seriously loud techno-cum-punk was played without apologies out of a cage where the DJ protected his records. The place was open all night, so club kids developed the strategy of sleeping in Tompkins Square Park during the days and frequenting Save the Robots at night. Spending the night in Tompkins Square Park was no longer possible after 1989, when the park acquired closing hours in order to remove the tent city that had sprung up there. The result was some pretty darn serious riots.In those days, the aide mémoire for navigating Alphabet City still rang true: A is for Adventurous, B is for Brave, C is for Crazy, D is for Dead.
By around 1997 or 1998, the place was closed on account of one too many drug busts. It was ridiculously easy to score drugs there, Not that I ever tried. or rather, it had been. Giuliani’s Quality of Life Campaign was extending into the foxholes of the alternatively lifestyled, and popping pills on the raised sofas of the main room was just not on anymore, especially now that those empty lots were being filled with “medium income” housing and their attendant families.
In its place came Guernica. It remains one of the better places to dance in the East Village, but youThe best is Sapphire Lounge. Still, although New York is many things, dance capital is not one of them. have to make a beeline past yuppie scum to a fresh downstairs dance space. How strange that after all those years as a druggie landmark of sorts, somebody would end up being killed at the place over a cigarette.
The acute reader may have wondered, as I did upon rereading my own recent posts, how I could have known that the La Bohème I saw was set in Stockholm, and not, say Oslo. Two details: The presence of dörrvakter in front of Café Momus, and the need to use a kod to get into a building.
dörrvakt: Bouncers wear distinctive medallions in Stockholm. They’re certified, like cabbies in New York. Stockholm nightclubs have a nasty case of the velvet rope, to which Swedes, rational in every other respect (well, save a further respect or two) flock like looters to regional Ba’ath party headquarters. Bouncers do seem to play fair, though: subscribe to the dress code and you’ll get in on a first come, first served basis, without regard for genetic defects or a total lack of self-esteem.
I suspect that all this standing in line is yet another altruistic gesture. It frees up places like Mosebacke and Elverket for the rest of us. New York’s equivalent is the standing in line for Saturday brunch—an opportunity to pay $14 for 2 eggs and a slab of béarnaise on English muffins, made by the Ecuadorian busboy, instead of quaffing quiche at Le Gamin.
kod: Apartment buildings here do not have doormen. Instead they have a keypad onto to which tenants type a communal 4-digit code to gain entrance to the lobby. These codes rarely change in theory, and never change in practice. When a Stockholmer gives a party, it is considered good manners to send the code along in the email invitation. These emails get forwarded with abandon. By now, I can gain access to a decent number of choice building lobbies, should I be so inclinedAnna’s code is 1812. Joachim’s code is 6889..
Not to worry, though, I’ve been assured this is completely safe. My landlady told me she left her (now my) door unlocked all the time, as the other tenants are so “nice”. No doubt, the friends of their friends are nice too. And their friends. So perhaps this is worth trying if you live in an East Village tenement: Make 30 or so copies of the key to your lobby and send them to your guests next time you have a party. Encourage your neighbors to do the same. That’s not really their code, above.
Really.Let me know how it goes.
Fergus McCormick has his music website up, timed to correspond with the release of his eponymously named debut album. 
I’m mentioning it because there are some pictures of mine on there for which I have a particular affinity. They were taken one late summer, I think it was 1999, on a pier off the lower west side of Manhattan. Fergus had discovered a blue Volkswagen Karmann Ghia parked on a rooftop there, just like the one in his song, so we headed over on a lazy Sunday afternoon for some photos. Franzi came along, and inevitably she ended up being in all the shots.
Afterwards we crossed the West Side Highway to do some daytime drinking at Ear Inn. It was hot and humid outside, so we drank our gin and tonics inside and drew patterns with crayons on the paper tabletops. By the time we exited into the sweltering darkness, buzzed, New York was humming, and I remember feeling like a character from The Great Gatsby, preternaturally aware of the special moment I inhabited, and all its possibilities…
Fergus’s songs are beautiful, by the way. You can listen to some of my favorites on his website, including Extremadura Love.
Three days in a row it’s been 10ºC and sunny in Stockholm. Three days in a row all the Swedes I know have tittered in unison about the coming of daylight savings time. March 30 this year.But they reserve their widest smiles for when they tap me on the elbow and tell me, again, how wonderful those outdoor cafés will be… in May.
To better understand such ebullience at a mere turn in the weather, it helps to read a Swedish grammar exercise book. Exercise books in other languages deal with such innocuous topics as the color of one’s pencil. My exercise book has taken it upon itself Första övningsboken i svensk grammatik, by Gunnar Hellström © 1994. I heartily recommend it. By far the best of its kind.to prepare us immigrants for the Lutheran take on life:
Jag får inte börja jobba. Jag har inget arbetstillstånd.
~ I am not allowed to work. I don’t have a work permit.
Ta det lugnt, mormor! Doktorn kommer snart här.
~ Shut up, grandma! The doctor will soon be here.
När tänker du betala tillbaka pengarna som du lånat?
~ When are you thinking of paying me back the money you borrowed?
Min mamma har cancer och tror att hon kommer att dö.
~ My mother has cancer and she thinks she’s about to die.
Those last two sentences are meant to illustrate that Swedes have 3 lexemes for the verb to think,
Not to be confused with morphemes.much like eskimos have 15 lexemes to describe their wealth of experience with snow. If you think you might die (belief), you tror. If you’re thinking of suicide (intent), you tänker, and if you think dying would be nice (opinion), you tycker. Choose the wrong verb, and your fear of death turns into a deathwish. Who said Swedish was easy?
No posts for over a month because in my mind, BLOG@STEFANGEENS.COM had aquired lame-duck status qua design. This involves a non-trivial amount of manual labor porting over comments, as well as media, and it is not yet done, so no complaining if your acid-lined gems of old have temporarily disappeared.
Also check out Text Pattern, another promising content management system for blogs.Ever since I had decided I was going to change my content management engine from Blogger to Movable Type I saw little use for adding new writing to a soon-to-be obsolete system. Also, I needed a break. Not from blogging, but from the constraints that the blogging format was beginning to impose on me — or so I felt.
So I redesigned the site. Site design is to me what I imagine gardening is to some people. It just pleases me to do it.
For this latest iteration of BLOG@STEFANGEENS.COM, I decided to focus on readability. Specifically, I hankered after the simplicity of the page in a book: black, serifed text on white space. My inspiration came from Robert Bringhurst’s excellent The Elements of Typographic Style, which has become the typographer’s bible since it was first published 10 years ago. Question: What is the ideal amount of characters on a line of text? Answer: 66It is an immense pleasure to read, because it constantly practices what it preaches.
But Elements gave me another idea. It uses marginalia copiously, to great effect. For the web, marginalia seems a natural addition: It breaks off from the narrative’s one-dimensional thread, but does not quite amount to the radical break of a link. It’s an extra half dimension of freedom, allowing short diversions that would otherwise be heaved into brackets, distracting from the flow of the text.
1.618034… or 1 plus the square root of 5, divided by 2.How wide to make the marginalia? I went with the Golden Mean, that naturally pleasing ratio. We’ll see if it works. This site will need a few weeks to mature yet. But welcome back in the meantime. I have plenty to write about.
The old site look is gone. I’ve preserved a sample page here. It keeps the random image delivery method that I used. To see all 13 images, keep on hitting the refresh buttons.
On the heels of MemeFirst.com comes the revamped Sighs.com, the site which started it all for me way back in 1995, when 5-letter domain names were easy pickings. It has served since then as a repository for news for SAIS alumni from around 1993-1995. It’s had many incarnations, from an early crude hand-coded html version, to a sounding board for my web design theories, to straightforward blog, to — now — a real community site that virtually runs itself.
If you went to SAIS around then, I encourage you to register and update your classmates, and then to forward news of Sighs’ reappearance to the alumni you stay in touch with. It’s been around eight years since we graduated (nine since Bologna), and as those days slip further away, staying in touch can become more difficult, but not less important.
You may have wondered what I’ve been up to this past week. I’ve had the flu, but there has been one productive outcropping from this mildly hallucinatory daze punctured by coughing fits: MemeFirst.com, a new collaborative project with Matthew Rose and Felix Salmon, and hopefully you.
StefanGeens.com has played host to colorful debates among friends. But there is no way for you to post your own stories here, and the commenting system is very basic. So while this blog is fine for my own musings, it comes up short for the kinds of debates we could be having.
But I also confess that MemeFirst exists in part to turn the tables on the likes of Eurof and Charles — now they too can subject themselves to peer review and be found horribly wanting. I look forward to the opportunity.
This blog continues unabated, but with a slightly modified purpose; overtly political posts and links with wide appeal will now show up on MemeFirst. The more personal stuff stays here.
So make MemeFirst.com a stop on your daily web rounds — in addition to this blog of course.