November 2004

A comment in the editorial of Saturday’s Fréttablaðið caught my eye. It concerned the abduction of the little nine-year old girl last week, the perpetrator of which has not yet been found.

“In a large part of the world, including the one which we inhabit, a large portion of the population watches the same TV programs, listens to the same music, plays the same games, follows the same fashions and last but not least follows the same social trends. This means that location matters much less than before when it comes to what influences people. At the same time it is a fact that nearly everything that can happen out in the larger world, can also happen here in Iceland.”

In other words: Iceland has lost its innocence.

PURE GENIUS!

… Was the fashion show put on this past weekend by Amnesty International, to raise awareness of domestic violence. Rather than the models being glam-ed out with the latest trendy cosmetics, they were made up with cuts and bruises to replicate descriptions found in police records concerning domestic violence cases. Definitely the most cool and effective way of raising awareness that YT has ever heard of!

MEANWHILE, ON THE HOME FRONT

Yesterday was the first Sunday in advent and what an exhausting day it was! The morning was especially strenuous, as mornings spent sleeping usually are. A brunch consisting of French toast followed, after which EPI and I headed outside to allow some daylight to hit our eyeballs, walking a full circle around a nearby golf course that is situated on a spit that juts out into the sea. Although ‘daylight’ was subjective yesterday – as it was overcast and rainy and the whole day was much like twilight.

Headed home after that to undertake some serious Christmas card making, drinking of hot chocolate (real chocolate, yo!) and eating of cookies (bought, not home-made, YT being somewhat challenged in the cookie-baking department). Dinner was consumed a short while later – hangikjöt and laufabrauð (paper thin, deep-fried, pancake-type things), potatoes in white sauce, green peas and pickled red cabbage – all very traditional Icelandic and Christmas-y. After which one found oneself in a reclining position, feet up and belly protruding skyward, eyelids drooping, virtually comatose with Things Ingested.

WEATHER

Perfectly genial at the moment, no wind, mild. Partly cloudy skies with patches of blue and pink in between. Set to get colder today, though, with wet or not-so-wet snow here in the west. Temps around 2 degrees.

Unfortunately they’ve stopped sending our free trial copy of Morgunblaðið, so sunrise/sunset times are currently unavailable! So sorry.

Well, Windows XP has come sashaying into my life with all its snazz, flash and (misspent) pizzazz. YT is not impressed. In fact my acquaintance with XP has so far been a brutal disappointment.

Whereas me and ME didn’t get along famously, particularly not in the last while, we’d formed an uneasy alliance based on mutual tolerance, sort of like an old married couple that doesn’t really like each other but can’t be bothered to divorce. Whereas XP just plain pisses me off. I mean, how come all letters that are more than size 10 font, especially anything in bold, always look blurry?? Mine eyes are sore; my stomach seizes up; the whole exercise of writing requires so much exertion that I’ve got a blinding headache by the time I’ve written a single paragraph. It’s like growing old and blind in fast-forward. But I’m not going blind; it’s damn hotshot XP that can’t display the words properly!! So I peer and focus and try to ignore the fact that the whole experience is like being immersed in a magnetic field or a seriously toxic cloud. It’s making me positively ill!

If anybody out there knows of any cure for this condition, please inform YT! Because I swear I’ve tried everything – short of hurling my cherished computer out of the window.

And then there’s this annoying pop-up that appears every few seconds at the bottom. “Wireless connection unavailable”. Two seconds later: “Wireless connection available.” Two seconds later: “Wireless connection unavailable.” Two seconds later: “Wireless connection available. Signal good.” Two seconds later: “Signal very good.” Two seconds later: “Signal excellent”. ENOUGH ALREADY! I don’t give a Flying Fuck if my signal is good, bad, non-existent… just get out of my sight and let me see the words I am writing!!

This, too, I have spent hours trying to fix, initially convinced that there was Some Simple Solution – now convinced that the whole thing is built to Destroy Whatever Joy I have in life.

Sniff.

WEATHER

‘Twas an unseasonably mild and wonderful day. No wind, overcast, perfect for a run. Temps hovering between 0 and 5 Celsius. EPI and I spent the afternoon shopping for fun stuff for making our own Christmas cards, which along with our combined brood of four we will duly execute tomorrow. After which we’ll be eating hangikjöt (traditional smoked lamb … yum yum) for dinner.

Sunrise was at 10.35: sunset at 15.55.

“Your wireless connection is unavailable…” Aaarrgghh!!

Was at a gathering last night where somebody described a recent illustration in The Economist (UK), which showed the diagonal lines of the Union Jack being painted over with blue, thereby creating the Icelandic flag – all because Icelanders are systematically invading the British market. YT was immediately drenched in nationalistic pride! I mean, who would have believed that a company hailing from an island with a population the size of a peanut could gobble up such a large chunk of the UK?

World-domination-or-death company Baugur is the star of the show. As I write, they own a majority in some 1,000 UK shops, including Karen Millen, Oasis, Coast, Whistles, Hamleys, MK One, Julian Graves and Goldsmiths. Their turnover in the UK alone is supposedly higher than the GNP of Iceland! (This factoid unconfirmed by YT.) Not content to invade Britain, they have now reached their tentacles over to Denmark, acquiring a large share in age-old Danish department store Magasin.

What makes the Baugur success story so sweet to the ears of the common proletariat is that its founder, Jóhannes Jónsson, started the company just over a decade ago, at the age of fifty-plus. And did it in response to being booted from the payroll of the butcher’s shop to which he had devoted the best years of his life.

Now, many lesser mortals would have sunk into the toxic mire of defeat and self-pity at such news – but not our man Jóhannes! Seeing that Iceland’s food market was sorely in need of a discount retailer, he scraped together a menial sum and opened the first Bonus store.

Nothing like a good story of the underdog having the last laugh!

MEANWHILE, ON THE SERIOUSLY GRAVE FRONT

There was a child abduction case in the capital yesterday and the whole nation is horrified. A nine-year old girl was lured into a car by someone impersonating a police officer and driven out of the city, onto a country road on the route to Þingvellir national park. There, the abductor got his car stuck in snow and for some reason ordered the little girl out of the car and drove away. It was extremely cold and windy, there was sleet coming down and the weather was set to get even worse. She was out there for about an hour before a jeep driving by happened to see her.

One cannot bear to think of the outcome had she been forced to spend the night out there. Yet the silver lining is that there was no molestation involved, thank God thank God. Until now, Icelanders have been mercifully spared the horrific cases of abduction and worse that happen in other countries. It has always been considered perfectly safe here to let your children out of your sight. Let’s hope there will be no further causes for change on that front.

WEATHER

Remaining mild; temps currently 4 degrees Celsius. Sight winds from the east, with showers. Set to get colder. Sunrise was at 10.32: sunset is at 15.57.

EPI told me a funny story the other day. There was a guy he knew up in Akureyri (in the north)who immersed himself in the writings of Friedrich Engels. One suspects Marxist theory. Anyway, this guy sat and sat, studied and studied, working his damndest to get a grasp.

One day, he was sitting in the library and studying as usual when suddenly he got it! Everything fell into place, clouds parted, epiphany descended, he understood. At that moment, he rose from the table and headed towards the library entrance. As he walked, he removed his shirt. He then proceeded to remove every bit of clothing on his body until he was stark naked. Once outside, he started running. He ran and ran and ran, down to the sea and along the shore, until the police finally apprehended and restrained him. He’s been a mental case ever since.

Conclusive evidence that too much studying is a bad thing and can drive you insane. Or that one should stay away from Marx and Engels.

CORRECTION

The book reviewer man who never sleeps was on Icelandic telly again last night. Mistakenly I indicated in a previous post that he ended his yadayada with a star rating, which in fact is not true. I just thought he did. I also alluded to the fact that he was funny looking – which was a little nasty, really. He’s not that funny looking. Just kind of funny acting.

YT regrets these inaccuracies and will try to stick to facts in the future.

AND WHILE ON THE SUBJECT OF BOOKS

In the same post I alluded to the fact that I take a looonngg time to read a novel, even if I really really like it. Which is true, because I have a busy life. But I may be about to break my two-month habit because I am currently reading a tome that is superb and impossible to put down (Dússa – takk! x).

Title: As the Crow Flies. Author: Ann-Marie MacDonald.

I am hard-pressed to understand why this book has not won every single literary award going. Was it short-listed for the Booker Prize? If not, I cannot understand why. It is brilliant – huge in scope, intricate in detail, tremendously written, delicately interweaving social commentary, deep emotion, true morality and a thousand other nuances. Exceptional!

WEATHER

Rain rain rain and more rain. Although that said, I can now glimpse a powder-blue sky with pink clouds though the window. The snow we got the other day has all but disappeared. Temps 1-7 degrees here in the south; currently 4 degrees in the capital. Slight wind. Sunrise was at 10.29; sunset set for 16.00 sharp.

Harry Belafonte was in Iceland last week to promote UNICEF. I confess I knew very little about him before he came (except that he sang songs and has a daughter named Shari who is an actress). Last night, however, I got around to watching an interview with him on Icelandic TV* and am completely smitten.

What a gracious, intelligent, generous and kind man! One of those people who by their very presence inspires admiration and respect, to say nothing of when he began to speak. It was like he was plugged directly into some Universal wisdom – every word was absolutely true and real and appropriate, no matter how idiotic and ridiculous the questions that came his way (and there were plenty of those – one cringed repeatedly). Even when watching the interview on Windows Media Player, the impact was profound. Excerpts:

ON UNICEF IN ICELAND

With the dawning of so much economic interest in Iceland… we wonder, will Iceland just become fat and rich, or will Iceland also continue to have a soul and a moral sense of the world around it?….

ON POVERTY

Poverty is very critical to choices I’ve made in life. With all the degradation one finds in poverty, [it] is also where one finds the centre of one’s own humanity. A lot of people in poverty care about one another… when I became an artist and got this great global popularity, beyond personal wealth, my biggest question was, ‘what do you do with your platform?’ [He went on to instigate the We Are the World movement].

SUCCESS

Interviewer: Did you ever feel bad about your success?

HB: No I never felt badly. There was no reason to. The way in which one can begin to feel badly is when you look at the world and see so much to do, and then ignore it.

ON AFRICA

What really struck me [having been in Africa in 1985 in the midst of a famine] was the global indifference. Nobody cared. Nobody said anything; nobody responded… day after day it was all this humanity being wasted. […] When I went back to America… I said ‘our indifference is really a definition of our moral collapse. How can we be so affluent, how can we have so much, and be so distant from people who are in need?’

ON THE ENTERTAINMENT INDUSTRY

“There is something terribly wrong with the world of culture… there was a time when… the men and women who ran it came out of culture. […] Now we have manufacturers, we have business and they make decisions each day that seriously narrows the world of culture.[…] But I think that artists have got to understand that they are the masters of their own destiny. My voice is my voice; what I do with it as an artist is in the final analysis my choice. And I let the banks and the lawyers and the agents and the heads of studios … and just say ‘look, you cannot manage my destiny. I cannot give you that right’. I think we have to reclaim our rights to our destiny and let them know that without us there is no art. And let’s reshape our own values.”

WEATHER

Breezes from the northeast and east; snow or sleet in the north, showers or rain in the south. Temps currently 5 degrees. Sunrise was at 10.26; sunset is scheduled for 16.02.

* For the complete interview, go here, click on ‘television’, then choose Saturday the 20th and ‘Laugardagskvöld með Gísla Marteini’. The amazing HB is the last of three guests (you can skip the first two if you want. They pale in comparison.).

Cripes! Big, bad blaze last night. Down at Sundahöfn harbour, in a recycling lot. Immense piles of rubber tires, rubber tire bits, scrap metal and other mish-mash. All set to be transported out of the country (not to some obscure garbage dump at sea, one hopes), but unfortunately it caught on fire before that happened.

EPI and I had just finished watching our eagerly-awaited weekly episode of The Sopranos when a white line of lettering moved slowly across the screen – the kind of slow-moving text that lets you know that SOMETHING IS SERIOUSLY WRONG. So we went into a mfuddle trying to figure out where to turn for news (radio? online? tele-text?) and finally were able to piece together what had happened… raging fire, humongous cloud of black toxic smoke covering the immediate area, people being evicted from their homes. Evidently, this is the greatest number of people (around 600) ever evicted in Iceland, save for the volcanic eruption on the Westman Islands in 1973, when an entire island was evacuated.

EPI’s sister lives in the building that got the worst of it. She was evacuated, obviously, and had to spend the night elsewhere. She hasn’t returned home yet – but just now on the news they showed footage of others going home and the damage appears to be less than anticipated. The worst thing appears to be the smell – something YT can believe, because EPI and I had to close all our windows last night as a result of the smell – and we live 10 km away.

INFURIATING

Is that the recycling company didn’t even have a permit for their operations, the piles of junk were so massive that one of them spilled onto the roof of one of the buildings, fire authorities had sent them a warning earlier this year to which they had not adequately responded and there is PCB in the ground underneath, which it is now feared will be dissolved and leak into the sea. Very scary!

THE SILVER LINING

Is that the wind was in the ‘right’ direction (even if it did stink up our place). Had the all-too-common northerly winds prevailed, nearly 2000 people would have had to be evacuated, including a veritable village of the ill and elderly.

WARNING

Expect fall-out to continue here over the coming days.

WEATHER

Well, we got everything they promised: mild temps (currently 7 degrees), lots of rain (handy for putting out fires) and slush galore. Sunrise was at 10.23; sunset at 16.05.

Today YT got the deja vu taste of what it’s like to be a nine-to-fiver in an Icelandic winter. Spent the day reading proofs and editing copy for my friends up at Iceland Review, which meant that I left the house in the dark and arrived home – you guessed it – in the dark!

THE SANE NEED NOT APPLY

Still had to have my run, though, having suffered from endorphine withdrawal all day long. ‘Tis not for the faint of heart, yet YT was not daunted by the prospect of running along the seashore in pitch blackness, struggling against freezing winds that plummeted temps to –15 or close, next to boulders covered in a layer of ice, the ground like a thin sheet of glass. Although the thought did occasionally occur as to whether I should have myself committed. To an endorphine-junkie recovery program.

THE QUESTION THAT BEGS TO BE ANSWERED IS

Do Christmas-book-flood reviewers ever sleep? I ask you. There’s a funny-looking short guy, f’rinstance, who these days turns up every three days or so after the 7 o’clock news on Icelandic telly, with three-to-four massive tomes that he proceeds to yadayadayada about in a monotone voice, clicking out with a star rating. How is this humanly possible? I don’t know ‘bout you, but YT has trouble getting through a single novel every couple of months – even if I really really like it (and if I don’t really really like it, well, best not ask.) But then YT is not a book reviewer. Which is an excellent thing, because I do like sleep. Especially in Icelandic winter darkness.

WEATHER

No point reporting today’s weather (it’s evening already), so here is tomorrow’s: set to get warmer, with rain and temps around 5 degrees Celsius. Time to get the Wellies out as slush will be knee-high. Sunrise (today) was at 10.20; sunset at 16.07.

Interesting experience last night. Went to dance mentioned in previous blog. It was held at a community centre out on Seltjarnarnes, which is a tiny municipality adjacent to Reykjavík (which makes up for in affluence what it lacks in size).

Now, here in Iceland one gets the cultural phenomenon known as the ‘country dance’. Basically, (from what I gather) a country dance entails people in rural areas (isolated, starved for entertainment) congregating at a community dance hall and getting pissed out of their (small Icelandic) tree through spiking their (permitted) coca-cola with their (illicit) Black Death*. After which they would stumble out of the place, drunk and disorderly, fighting and/or puking and/or fornicating – sometimes all three at once.

Strange as it may seem, the Icelandic populace generally speaks of this phenomenon with a great deal of nostalgia and affection. And so it was last night. Although the community centre we were in was very much in the midst of the Greater Reykjavík Metropolis (please humour me…) people kept saying with dazed, happy looks in their eyes that this was just like a country dance.

Indeed. There was a lot of drunken Icelandicness, to be sure. Lots of maudlin weeping and inebriated rambling, people falling down, people falling on you, people falling on you and kissing you, boorish men who stepped on your toes and almost knocked you over without so much as uttering an apology. A study in the non-social graces, really.

YT was bemused and more than a little glad to have been spared this phenomenon in her upbringing. Phew.

FLOP OF THE DAY

The Beach Boys. They’re giving a concert in Reykjavík this evening and the promoters have been desperately trying to flog the tickets, selling them off 2 for 1.

Hard luck, but there’s something they should have thought about before they came: Icelanders are like overfed beasts when it comes to international pop stars. After all, there are only so many Big Stars that a population of 290,000 punters can take. Just this year we’ve been subjected to Lou Reed, 50 Cent, Pink, Korn, Marianne Faithfull, Metallica, James Brown, Sugababes, Van Morrison, Deep Purple, and a handful of others that I’m most certainly missing. And now they’re set to stage the MTV Europe Music Awards here next year. Help!

WEATHER

Clear skies, slight wind, temps around 1 degrees Celsius. Very nice, in fact. Sunrise 10.17; sunset 16.10.

*Icelandic liquor, aptly-named.

Today it’s a balmy –1 degrees Centigrade, a veritable heatwave compared to temps in the –20s that we’ve had lately. The wind has picked up, making it safe to go outside again, and the weatherman promises that we’re in for a warm spell, with rain and the accompanying slush and grind.

AAH went off this afternoon to see her friend performing in a musical version of H.C. Andersen’s Little Girl with the Matches at the Icelandic Opera. Which sent me into a reverie about how much I love living in Reykjavík. There’s so much going on here! In a city of merely 110,000 people you’ve got more theatrical performances, concerts, book readings and what have than you can reasonably keep track of. People doing their thing – anything you want to do, you can do in Reykjavík. Whatever’s your passion. It makes for an incredibly energetic vibe.

Off to a concert meself this evening – a pal of EPI’s is playing in a band and we’re planning to cut a rug. It’s been a busy day – spent a very busy morning sleeping, then running, then having tea with EPI, AAH and my father, and now about to paint my face and put on my party dress. Rock on!

Sunrise at 10.14; sunset 16.12 (ages ago!).