The morning started out normal enough. I woke up at 7:00, which is a little later than usual, turned on a Swedish children’s story called “Loranga, Masarin och Dartanjang” that I have on my Itunes, and went to the kitchen to make coffee. I like listening to that story in the morning. There’s a part in that story where the characters buy a thousand hotdogs on credit to feed a pack of tigers, which they keep in a barn. Later they go to buy a thousand more. When the hotdog dealer refuses on account of the previous debt not being paid, they give him one of the tigers in trade. I love that. I think it’s nice for my kid too, he likes to hear voices in the morning as he wakes up. I let him sleep until about twenty after, then I shook him awake. ”Yeah, yeah” he said, his hair a big blonde mop.
We went to the kitchen and ate cornflakes with lingonberry jam. Among other things, today is bring-a-toy-to-school day, which they have once at month at my boy’s elementary school. So after breakfast he packed up his turquoise Nintendo DS. It always makes me feel a little powerless, to witness the surge of products and ideas that just barge right on through my house, winking at me as I stand by, but I try to remember the joy I had in games. Our striving as parents needs to be factual when it is so often passionate, and this can lead to illogical rules and consequences, which frustrates the family’s sense of order and safety. Shit my son plays too many video games. But limiting the amount of time he spends with his DS is not a contest of wills, but rather a search for a defined world. Children need to know where they stand, and they’ll never let you forget it. All this passes through my mind every time I see the lavish care my son spends in packing up his little games and styluses in the little purse he has for his game paraphernalia. I think he’s just waiting for me to say something. Like he can sense the world-view, the sermon, on the tip of my tongue. But he knows he’s safe because this time his actions are school-sanctioned. It is as if a whole non-verbal conversation passes between as we pull on our clothes.
As is often the case, I forget that we need to brush our teeth until the minute we are about to walk out the door. We often stand in the bathroom in scarfs and hats, brushing and spitting. Earlier in the week we’d been to the dentist and I’d been scolded for not actually manually helping my 6.5 yr old brush his teeth. To me that seemed totally insane. The nurse explained that parents should help their children brush teeth up to the age of ten. Ten! Apparently that’s when their motor-skills reach the level of virtuosity that clean teeth demand. Sitting in the dentist office I sheepishly agreed, but oooohhh I hate being told how to do my job. I do help him now though, and I probably will far into the future. In the end, his cavities speak for themselves. That’s just plain physics.
We charged out into the snow. A little snow anyway. It was cold. Cloudy. My jeans felt thin despite my capilene long-johns. I love walking with my kid to school because it gives me the opportunity to walk beside my son. I don’t know if you others have noticed but parents seem to always walk like five steps ahead of their children. Kids have shorter legs so their natural pace is slower. Plus they have no reason to hurry and rush since they’re not responsible for getting themselves to school or their parents to work on time. My kid doesn’t need to worry about what time my bus leaves. Making the conscious choice to walk slow and hold hands with my son is like extending a big “fuck you” to my boss and the whole system that upholds his hierarchy. That booming voice which echoes through all our clocks and telephones constantly asking “why aren’t you in production yet?” Still, during the walk to school, my mind starts to make a transition. It’s Friday, after all, which is the day I tag out as Dad and let Mom take over. We are switch-hit parents, which is common here in Sweden. On this walk I begin to think less about my son and more about myself. Today is a big day for me, I know that already.
After waving goodbye to the kid, I made my way back towards the subway. Normally I would take a bus to meet up with a commuter-train and ride out to the job site in a southern suburb, but today is different. First I call a co-worker to see where he is. I’ll have to call him “S” since this is the internet and all. S is and interesting character, I wish I could write more about him here. A recovering heroin addict on methadone, S one of the most interestingly methodic carpenters I’ve ever worked with. Sometimes I go back and look at things he’s built and marvel. Not long on physics but with an overdose of enthusiasm, his damaged brain and neurotic personality often produce constructions more akin to art than house-building. Most carpenters I know build like machines. We are children of Adam Smith’s Invisible Hand, fostered to build clinical and efficient. But S’s insane life as an addict and drug-runner has wrenched him free. His style is honest, transparent. You see how he thinks by looking at the stuff he builds. I wish these characteristics would be valued but I fear they are mostly to his detriment.
S told me on the phone that he’d gone straight to the Company Office as soon as his shift was supposed to start, and waited there until somebody official showed up. He said I should come there too, so we could get our paperwork in order. That seemed like a good idea. I was also encouraged buy the fact that the office was still in existence. We had heard that an eviction was pending due to unpaid back rent, which sent shivers down my spine because all the company phones had been turned off for the same reason and it was starting to seem that the actual physical office was the last link between us, the workers, and them, the owners and administrators. The company seemed to be running out of tigers to trade. And paperwork is very important here in Sweden, especially when it comes to Unemployment.
When I arrived at the Office I was handed a fresh cup of coffee by S, who seemed to have already had several. He was harassing a secretary, trying to get all our sacred documents together, printed and signed. Pay stubs on deposit, formal documentation of our total hours at the company, etc. We need these to get our social unemployment insurance. There was some protocol confusion around what to do with the company’s tools we’d taken out. Particularly concerning the really expensive dual-tank air compressor and pneumatic screw and nail guns I’d been using for the past half-year. When you borrow a tool, the company makes you sign a waiver giving you formal responsibility for whatever happens to said tool. Theoretically the company can try to make you pay damages if something happens to the machine. I wouldn’t put it passed my swine boss to send me a bill for 50K Swedish so I wanted to have some kind of official document transferring responsibility over to another employee. This took some time.
Eventually, S and I managed to get all our papers in order and we headed out. He decided go home but I needed to go back out to the job site to get my tools and clothes. We sat at the bus stop together and had what will probably be our last conversation. We talked a lot about the Company and the jobs we’d worked on together. Last year we framed and sheathed a roof during the winter months. We had a lot to say about the foreman on that job. Our most recent project had gone much smoother: partition walls in a new apartment complex. I think we’d both grown during our time together, but that’s not what we talked about. We shit-talked the bosses and foremen who’d supervised us and discussed new tools and materials. I, for one, had never worked with a pneumatic nail-gun that could shoot into concrete.
I arrived out at the job site by around 11:30. There was nobody there from our company. Either they’d gone home early or they’d never shown up in the first place, I couldn’t tell which. It wasn’t exactly the grand send-off one might hope for, but in a way, quietly excusing myself out through the back door while nobody was looking seemed a fitting way to exit this world. I felt more like an escape artist than a laid-off construction worker.
First thing I did I cleaned out my locker. I threw all my work-clothes in a plastic sack except the pants with holes in the knees which I threw in the container for burnables. I went down to the foreman and said adios and that I would keep his number for future reference. He asked if I had anything new and I said I did but not right away, which is partly true. He said I should call him if I needed work in the spring. I might. Then I went down to the container where we keep our tools. I took all the hand-tools out of the masonry bucket I use to carry my stuff out onto the site and put them into the box I use to transport tools from site to site. I dragged the box out to the street and left it there and went up to get my sack of clothes. I threw the sack over my shoulder like Santa Claus and went back down and sat on the box to wait for my ride.
My ride showed up after about fifteen minutes. I was thinking he had a Land Rover but he didn’t, he had an old beat-up white station wagon with a cracked windshield. I have to say that explained a little discrepancy in his personality I’d been wondering about these passed few days. Anyway this guy had agreed to help me drive my stuff, which was really nice. When I tried to give him gas money he replied that it was his sacred duty as a car-owner to help the carless, referring to the inherent immorality in owning a car. This is a refreshing perspective for a Swede, though this dude isn’t technically Swedish, and it reminded me of home. Here, in contrast to the States, the mainstream idea is that cars actually damage the planet. Not that there isn’t a significant car-culture here as well, but at times the rebel in me doesn’t quite know where to turn, and I catch him sometimes wanting to buy a pickup.
We took a quick walk through the site. Two large buildings that will house 81 1-4 bedroom apartments, built with prefabricated concrete modules, not unlike a house of cards. In fact this past summer, a couple of the modules actually fell apart and one of the assembly dudes was almost killed. Until they are welded together and new concrete is poured across the knotted rebar, the modules are held together by their own dead load. Unfortunately I was wearing my Peltor FM Stereo Receive Headset, probably listening to Britney Spears at the time, so I didn’t hear the crash. Too bad cause I heard it was enormous. It is rare that a friend of mine comes to see where I work so I had no shortage of anecdotes to tell. I filled him in on everything as we walked and he commented on the undesirability of living in such lifeless boxes as well as the undesirability of concrete as a building material. He himself lives in some kind of geodesic dome made of birch twigs. Do I need to say he has a beard? After a quick walk-through we drove to my place in Skarpnäck and he helped me to unload my toolbox. He stuck around a while and we drank coffee and talked about our fucked up love lives.
At 14:00 I had an appointment to be at band practice in Bagarmossen, so between stories of broken promises and frustrated hopes I had to start getting ready. I’d been working all week on a demo version of a song about having oral sex at the top of a tree, so I wanted to burn my band mate a copy and transcribe the lyrics. Walk into the forest, lay down in the bark/ see the life of birds, of wings and cries/ creature of two legs you can be home among the flies/ seek the balanced weight, the branch and the spine. Not that I admit to having engaged in this type of activity (not that I deny it either), but I hope this metaphor will serve to illustrate the difficult nature of Swedish (and perhaps all Scandinavian) culture. Seen in the context of this country’s Lutheran moral environment, what could be a more free act than to not only have oral sex, but to actually do it at the top of a tree? Then again, who could possibly bear to be even partially naked at the top of a tree in Sweden in February? You see the quandary here. Feel along your throat, the long wind of blood/ rhythm of the flex, pulse of the run/ catch the evening starlight on your tongue/ follow the mother’s voice when the last song is sung. Bury me, suffocate me, in the wide-open air. I realize this must say more about myself than about any culture, but I’m down with that (no pun intended). Poetic pretensions aside, I feel that even if we’re not breaking it, we should at least be looking for new ground, but as Steve Buscemi’s character in “Big Fish,” the stagnated poet Norther Winslow, admonishes us apropos the creative process: “never discuss a work in progress!”
The practice space we use in Bagis belongs to Musikföreningen 128, a loosely-knit group of musicians I joined in the fall, who have remodeled a derelict garage into rehearsal rooms. The place has a clandestine feel to it, owing to it’s DIY nature. Like most volunteer-driven groups, Musikföreningen 128 has it’s core group and it’s periphery, and is always hungry for more hours. For the past few months I’ve been working there nights and weekends, trying to fit it in between all my other on-going projects and relationships. Part of my secret plan is that I can dedicate a lot more work time to projects like this now that I am unemployed. It’s sort of against the rules to think like this, but I have high hopes for the coming months. Employment is rolling back like a curtain, revealing a whole world of places to be and things to become. I don’t have to stop being a carpenter, there is plenty of stuff to build. But I can become a musician. A poet. A painter. An activist. A writer. Showing up for band practice, in the middle of the afternoon on a Friday, I began to realize what unemployment could mean for me.
Our band doesn’t have a name yet, but our form is beginning to take shape. It appears we will remain a two-piece, drums and guitar, a setup identical to my favorite band: The Usa Is a Monster. Noise rock ala Providence, RI is an undiscovered genre here in Sweden, I’m not sure why, but it is a good starting place for us. Sweden may still be living under the misconception that a two-piece can’t effectively cover the spectrum, even just purely sound-wise, and if it is my destiny then I will be glad to liberate them with my amazing rig. But playing the only melodic instrument in the band has some advantages for me personally. When it comes to key changes during improvisation, for example, I can be totally self-absorbed. This is of course a disadvantage as well. Part of the most interesting thing about seeing a band is watching the communication between musicians. The two-man setup suits my chromatic style, at least initially, and I’m satisfied with its simplicity.
I’ll be using a Boss OC-3 Super Octave pedal to cover the low frequencies and plan to stay for the most part in drop-D tuning. Our songs so far seem to be either riff-based or atmospheric, which provides a satisfying contrast. I love contrast in music. Juxtaposition. I look forward to being able to engage in a deeper creative process musically than what I’ve had… fuck that. You don’t go out there thinking it might take you somewhere, you think about where you can go within yourself. Go in uninhibited and if some product flops out, withhold judgement, and think of the next path. Look always to the path. This is the opposite of manufacturing. I want to stand like a tree with waving limbs, with melodies and energy flowing from my leaves like hale from a tropical storm and I am inside the eye, staring at some shape or design. Sometimes I feel like a tree. I like that.
After band practice I went home to drop of my guitar and take a shower. Then I took the subway into town to Kafé 44. On the way I listened to (the French) MAGMA. When I arrived the meeting was already under way and the group was in deep discussion. One of the problems we had with the old Cyclops group (see “a world of wings and cries”) was that nobody took time out to document what was happening. We have relatively few photos, interviews, etc. and now that the new Cyclops seems to mean something to this town, there is a new interest in an ongoing documentation of events. We talked a while about what type of documentation we wanted to get into and how we might store all this information in a central location, so that other groups within Kulturkampanjen might be able to access material they could use in their individual projects. I was more into the idea that we would actually make small documentaries, zines or films or posters or something. We could have our own youtube channel for example. Or we could make posters, not in the sense of an advertisement for an event, but more like a band might make for a record or something, like something for the kids to put up on their walls. Consensus within the group tended more towards the collection of material, focusing on input rather than output. I guess technically this is yet another sign of the deep difference between me and everybody else, at least in relation to how I perceive this project and how I relate to projects in my life in general, but I figured whatever, it could still be fun to do some interviews and of course I can make my own youtube videos whenever…
After the meeting some friends and I went to System Bolaget, Sweden’s answer to Aunt Bettie’s Cupboard. I bought three Urquell beers because it’s on my list of beers with a gluten count of less that 20 parts per million, which is under the threshold for food products to call themselves “naturally” gluten free. Check it out:
http://www.slv.se/upload/dokument/risker/allergi/0510_WEBsorttillverkare.pdf
I can imagine that other celiacs out there might get pissed to know that in Europe we allow ourselves to drink Czech pilsner, but the jury is fucking out scientifically, you have to admit it. The bottom line is that only chemists can actually debate this stuff and nobody normal knows anything for sure. The best advice a doctor can give you is to experiment, and be prepared, with religious trepidation, to take drastic measures. Pizza? No. Bread? Nope. Pasta? Nejdå. Urquell? Ok. Corona is also on that list…
Anyway, we had some time to kill before the Crow Bar party, which was supposed to start at 11, so we decided to go to a friends house and sit around drinking and listening to music. On the way we stopped at Amida’s and ate, which was dope as always. They cook all the food there over a huge charcoal grill and it’s about the only place in town where you can get a vegetarian plate that will stick to your ribs. By the time we made it back to the apartment we were a gang of three. We sat around and talked shit. I read some song lyrics aloud. They told me they thought it was muddled and spacey. I think I’ve read it too much not to like it. By now it answers to it’s own expected rhythms, but I don’t have any high ambitions for it, I just like it.
Child of the night your eyes are singing
cornea lenses shine like a jungle cats
everything you know, chaos of motion
school of run, your heart is born
in the first rays of the new rising sun
cup your young soul in your hands
can stare out across the valley
in’s innocence may pass into you
sleep in the grace of the valley
and pray you may wake to run again
a wild galloping horse, free on the plain
shot by a tank, exploded
the guts of the free horse hang from sunflowers
bent and puking their seed on the barren ground
step in the mud of the blood-soaked desert
like drunk cattle, innocent and holy, wondering
is this where I belong
searching for the ones who name the sky
lords who wait in robes of polished skin
eyes awash in their alters holy light
in the alters holy light
fingers on the buttons, masters
rulers of cold power
in throes of self-defense
unleash their wills upon the land
believed in the ghosts of plows
who bow to no one
who forget the lover’s tongue
like waves upon your eyelids
the unknowable suns of foreign worlds
setting in the middle of the day
seek the rings of the cave
remember the cold of the floor
feel the press of the wide ocean
and the shells under your feet
sea-drenched monster of the sea
water eyes like a fish scales gleam
clones upon clones upon clones
a vibrating pulse of creature
contained in a drop from the pupils lens
a drooling hole of vision
pour your tears across the hearts of hunters
who long for the keys to the casket
who camp at the center of our village
and dream of flames
and dream of flames
At around 22:30, we started to talk about how we were going to get out to Finntorp, where the pontoon housing the Crowbar Club was supposedly docked. C and I wanted to walk but the third musketeer said it was way too far. He went off to meet up with some others who were going to take a bus. C and I bought a hog leg for the road and set out. It was cold and clear. A long night walk can be the perfect caesura from the hectic socialization of a friday night. And, knowing the party would go on all night, we didn’t have to hurry. We walked along the water across from Hammarby Sjöstad and smoked and talked and walked. I don’t remember everything we discussed but I believe it was some serious fucking shit! This walk was straight out of a Richard Linklater movie. We didn’t actually have directions to the pontoon but C felt she knew the way intuitively. I was totally convinced we were lost and made no secret of it. We seemed to be wandering among apartment buildings belonging to the elderly. That’s just a feeling I got. One time we saw the silhouette of a strange animal under a bridge. C claimed it was a fox or a baby reindeer. I maintained it was a feral hare; they are fucking enormous around here. We followed it under the bridge but came out on the other side at the gate of a cemetery. It was a little too Sleepy Hollow for us so we turned back. To my amazement, we eventually stumbled upon a giant crow doll made of wire, electrical tape, and scraps of cloth and we knew we were on the right path! From there we followed the signs and eventually we arrived.
The party was a benefit event for an artists collective known as Kråkan, the crow. Some of the people from Kulturkampanjen are involved there so it was kind of an act of solidarity to show up. Lasers and smoke and lemon shots, we were doing our duty. The pontoon consisted of a single cuboid hall, where the group had set up a few bars and some DJ room effects. Unfortunately, and to my chagrin, you could not feel the boat sway while standing still on the dance floor, which I had automatically assumed was the whole point of having a clandestine disco rave on a boat. Weird people were captured by the strobe in strange stop-motion poses. They were using powered speakers, 12′s or 15′s maybe, with horns and portholes. Whatever it was it sounded pretty damn good. Loud as shit.
After warming up the dance floor and having a few drinks, C and I got into some serious shit: dance charades. The idea is not complicated. It’s the same as normal charades, but you can’t just do the obvious thing, you have to dance at the same time! That means moving to the beat, waving around, whatever, expressing yourself! And the others hang around dancing and watching and trying to guess what the hells it is you’re doing! This is more interesting than normal charades because the resulting interpretive dance provides an interesting look into the mind of the dancer. You see how this person thinks about objects. When you’re guessing you have to think about what type of object this person would choose to dance about. I recommend everybody try this. In the beginning we were totally on the same wave-length. The first like five or six guesses we got right away. Then we kind of lost it after C couldn’t get my “satellite.” We danced until there was nobody left and the Crow people started sweeping up beer cans. By the time we got on the subway it was the morning of the 14th. We decided C should stay over at my place in Skarpnäck because in just a few hours we were both due at another Kulturkampanjen meeting in a nearby suburb. A meeting about consensus techniques, that is to say, a meeting about meetings.
So that’s it, that was my day.
