Andrew Tonn

Cameras for Peru

2010-11-16T14:17:00.004-05:00

COLUMBUS--I wonder when the sad day will be when I decide not to take a film camera. Happily, that day has not yet come.

While trying to decide what equipment to take I was deeply conflicted. My primary camera is the outstanding Nikon D3 but the D3 has some serious drawbacks for traveling. First and foremost it is large, obtrusive, heavy and expensive. And owning only one it is my primary workhorse for all those portrait and wedding and Stateside news and documentary jobs that pay a lot more of the bills than travel and humanitarian documentary work. I didn't want to carry the big Nikon because if anything happened to it I would be in trouble for upcoming jobs and, well, I didn't want to literally carry it.

I decided initially to make do with my Leica M6ttl and the Canon G9 but it also seemed irresponsible in this day and age to go on a trip almost certain to produce sellable images with no digital camera but a point and shoot (albeit a very good point and shoot). The obvious solution was a new camera! I considered a number of options and those came down to a smaller, less-expensive Nikon D-5000 or one of the new Micro 4/3 systems from Panasonic or Olympus. All the research and my own personal preference led me to believe of those two it would be the Panasonic but I was unable to find one anywhere in Columbus. Finally, I was able to handle one at Dodd Camera in Cleveland and, well, it was pretty amazing to fall deeply in love twice in one year!

The Micro 4/3 system places a sensor about half the size of a 35mm sensor but around nine times the size of a point and shoot sensor, large enough for good detail and to achieve a shallow depth-of-field. The camera has interchangeable lenses and almost no shutter lag, all in a package the size of the G9, a large point and shoot. There are also adaptors enabling one to use nearly any other camera system's lenses.

I bought the Panasonic GF1 with the 20mm f1.7, which on a Micro 4/3 camera is a normal lens. I also got a Leica M mount adaptor and the optional Electronic Viewfinder. I replaced the labeled strap with a black canvas Domke strap. The GF1 and the Leica M6ttl go in a black Domke F3X shoulder bag along with 35mm and 50mm Leica lenses and a 15mm Voigtlander. These all, via the adaptor, can be mounted on the GF1 with an approximately 2x magnification factor. For the GF1 I have four 8GB and four 4GB SDHC cards and for the Leica six rolls of Fuji Neopan 400 ASA, six rolls of Ilford HP5 and two rolls of 400 ASA Fujichrome slide film. I also have an 4GB Flip HD Video Camera and Kristina will carry my Canon G9.

Now all I need is a llama posing in front of some Inca ruins with a cloud-wreathed Andean peak in the background!

Points South, Far South

2010-11-16T13:31:00.005-05:00

COLUMBUS--I think we decided that Peru was our first destination as a couple (other than Chanute, Kansas to visit the Martin and Osa Johnson Safari Museum) even before we got engaged. Kristina had been saving frequent flyer miles since she was in college and figured we had almost enough for South America. We had talked, of course, about Guatemala and Honduras but decided we might as well travel somewhere neither of us had been before. I suggested Ecuador, the South American country I had been longest fascinated by and she tossed back Peru.

We began buying Peru books and I realized I had read more about the country than I had thought. Besides holding the heartland of the Inca empire, Peru contains the remains of other, far more ancient civilizations. The country is twice the size of Texas and contains some of the highest mountains, driest desert and deepest jungle in the world.

The main attractions for tourists are in the southern part of the huge country and nearly everyone asks, when they hear where we are going, "So, off to Machu Picchu? Cuzco is a great city." And one of the places I have wanted to see ever since I was a map-obsessed kid is Lake Titicaca, the largest high-altitude lake in the world. And then, along the southern coast are the Nazca lines, enormous monkeys and jaguars and straight paths, miles long, etched in the desert in a land that receives almost no rainfall, ever.

However, perhaps perversely, we decided to go north, off the main gringo trail, to a series of locations that will include jungle and mountains, Inca and pre-Inca ruins and the northern coastal Sechura desert. I think the main reason we decided to go north is to stay in the city of Paita. Why Paita? Because that, dear reader, is where Bogart and Bacall end up at the end of the rather bizarre classic film, "Dark Passage." Yes, that's why. Of course it is the oldest Spanish port on the Pacific and a few other things but there is no other real reason. It's barely in the movie and I am sure what is shown as Paita at the end of "Dark Passage" is really California. But I suppose it the idea of Paita as a place at the end of the world that is the attraction, the idea of going somewhere simply because it is there, because there is nothing grand there.

Neither of us really know what to expect. We'll have to go to these places--Lima, Terapoto, Chachapoyas, Keulap, Paita and the rest to find out. We finished packing our bags last night, two black packs and two Domke bags now lie in the living room waiting to be picked up. We have new shots and vaccinations and the Larium (Mefloquone) is coursing through our veins to ward off the malaria. I've taken the milder Chloroquine many times before but the strains in Peru are Chloroquine resistant. I have heard many stories about Larium nightmares before. Multiple people told me about them and that they usually involve snakes and fire. Last night, after my third Monday Larium I had a nightmare. Mine involved an enraged moose chasing me through a cabin. Moose. Why'd it have to be moose...? At least it wasn't a fire-breathing moose.

Fall Comes to Ohio

2010-10-04T13:46:00.004-05:00

WOOSTER--The summer seemed to go on and on in a mirror of the seemingly never-to-end winter. The sun beat down day after day, scorching the plants and drying the earth and making any outdoor task harder by each degree of mercury. But just as the freezing days of winter suddenly passed into Spring and sun and heat so one day I woke up to find a chill in the morning air and a peculiar melancholy scent in the air that signified that another year was coming to an end.

Ohio, in certain prime weeks of its seasons, has lovely light and both late summer and early Autumn produce glorious light in their mornings and evenings. Every day I have been carrying at least a Canon G9 and here are a few pictures from Wayne and Holmes Counties. If Ohio is, as the State motto reads, "The Heart of it All," then I believe these two counties are the beating, rural heart in the center of that. They are places where the American dream of the family farm still exists, practically in its Platonic ideal. Now, in Fall, at harvest time, the fruits of all those hard hours can be seen: being harvested from the fields, pulled behind tractors, for sale in roadside farmers markets and on display at the annual Wayne County Fair.

I am not a native of Wayne County, having grown up in the entirely different Southwest and, to be honest, Arizona is still a spiritual home to me. Long ago I resented being uprooted and moved to Ohio. Then I worked at the local newspaper and while driving to Orrville one early Fall morning I came over a rise and a field of drying corn and a red barn rose from a ground mist into bright clean, morning air. I was taken aback and suddenly realized how lovely and special a landscape this is.

Mike DeWine Ice Cream Social

2010-06-29T14:44:00.008-05:00

COLUMBUS--Every year, for over 30 years, former US Senator Mike De Wine (R-OH) has held an ice cream social on his property in Western Ohio. My girlfriend Kristina has been before and had invitations to this year's event.

It was a beautiful day as we set out driving West. Of course, with the weather as it has been this year, there was no guarantee it would stay that way. She was beautiful in a summer dress, blue straw hat and heart-shaped American flag pin. The event gave me an occasion to wear my new Brooks Brother's tie festooned with little elephants and the Pentagon-shaped American flag pin my friend got me, well, at the Pentagon.

We must have exuded more importance than we actually posses since, beginning with the guy at the gate, continuing through the event and ending with one of the candidates, people said things like, "Oh, I know who you are," "I know we've met before but tell me your name again," and "Just tell them who you are and they'll put you up front."

It must have been the tie and being with the prettiest girl there (whose dress was nearly identical to the stylish Mrs. DeWine)!

Bad weather began to form and come our way and we moved, along with much of the crowd, inside the DeWine's well-appointed family room (a building they call "the barn"). Mr. DeWine came in and, as his right as man-of-the-house, took up his remote to find the local weather channel. And then the weather passed without a drop of rain falling. The band (the talented and hilarious Crazy Joe and the Mad River Outlaws, the Kings of Nerd-a-Billy) began playing again, the speakers spoke, CHANGE (which brought some laughs and a lot of applause) in the upcoming elections was promised and the festivities continued.

After mingling some more we left after being photographed with Mr. DeWine, and for the rest of the day no one asked if I was somebody important. I was still with the prettiest girl around, however, so I didn't mind very much at all...

Portfolio: Eight Photo Essays in Six Countries

2010-05-28T17:11:00.002-05:00

COLUMBUS, OHIO--Just out, a new book of Andrew Tonn's photography, a soft-cover portfolio containing the best of eight photo-essays shot in six countries. Available for $37.95 at this link: http://www.blurb.com/books/1382755

Photos from ScanFest

2010-04-29T15:42:00.002-05:00

COLUMBUS--I have set up a quiet office down here in the great Buckeye State's capitol city, far away from the dust and noise of the construction zone atop which I have been living in Wooster. I have been traveling to an working in Central America, doing documentary and media work for several humanitarian relief organizations for nearly a decade. This decade has seen an amazing shift in photographic technology, moving with almost mind-numbing speed from film-based to digital equipment. When I first went to Honduras in 2001 digital cameras, of course, existed, but there was no comparison in their image quality, responsiveness and general abilities to good film cameras. On my first trips almost no one had digital cameras (and more or less the only available professional digital cameras were the Nikon D1 series (1, 1x and 1h) which priced in at about $5,000). Only a couple years later all the travelers were toting decent little digital point and shoots and using them as portable mini-slide shows to augment the, "So, where are you from, where have you been, where are you going, how long are you traveling for?" standard conversation. The con and pro-sumer SLR was still a few years off but no doubt a large number of those travelers are now toting those as well.

Over the years I have toted a wide variety of cameras and have never traveled without some film bodies, even as recently as a couple years ago. I have, pulling quickly from memory, used a Nikon FM, a Nikkormat (briefly as the light meter went bad), a Nikon F3, a Leica M6ttl, a Leica Mda, a Leica Mini and a Leica Digilux 1. I have used an Olympus Stylus Epic, a Nikon D1x, a Canon digital Elph, a Leica C-Lux, a Nikonos V and, oh yeah, a Sony Mavica and probably a few others not to mention a Panasonic VHS Reporter video camera and a Panasonic DVC 60 video camera.

I love film and will continue to use it, at least a little, because I am stubborn and have spent a lot of money on those Leicas (but don't have enough for an M9 right now) and I like the way it looks and I like the idea that every time I expose a frame it is changing just a little part of the universe forever. But I don't love all these hours I am spending at the desk scanning all those negatives to make digital files of them so they can be used in a practical way. Over those trips I shot hundreds of rolls of film and for a variety of reasons many of them have never adequately been used. I would get back and get on with the next assignment or the next assignment would involve heavy usage of a small portion of those negatives or, well, who knows. Suffice it to say that I took a lot of pictures I have never dealt with.

I am dealing with them now, however! And here are a few of them:

Photo of Senator Kay Bailey Hutchison

2010-04-05T12:34:00.002-05:00

I was recently in Washington D.C. covering the Women Airforce Service Pilot (W.A.S.P.) event where female aviators from WWII were finally honored for their service with the Congressional Gold Medal. Senator Hutchison (R) Texas was instrumental in getting the legislation passed in order to honor the women. This photo was published on her website: http://andrewtonnphoto.com/hutchison.htm

Walking Around D.C.

2010-03-29T11:57:00.007-05:00

Photo Published

2010-01-11T10:56:00.001-05:00

This photo of a Mandean Arab baptism I took in Lund, Sweden was recently bought by Minority Rights International.
http://www.minorityrights.org/8132/reports/uncertain-refuge-dangerous-return-iraqs-uprooted-minorities.html

Transcarpathian Regional Mental Hospital

2009-12-01T19:16:00.004-05:00

This short film was shot at a Mental Hospital deep in the Carpathian Mountains of Ukraine. In Soviet times political dissidents were imprisoned here along with the insane. While still on the grim side (but what mental hospital isn't), the institution has come a long way in the last years, largely through the efforts of S.A.R.A.

This and the Roma film were shot entirely by me along with still photos which can be viewed on my website www.andrewtonnphoto.com. For all you photo geeks, the video was shot with a Panasonic DVC60 and the black and white still photos taken with a Leica M6ttl on Kodak 400CN. The color stills were taken with a Leica Digilux 1.

Roma Settlement Film

2009-12-01T19:08:00.002-05:00

This is one of the last two of a series of short films I shot in Transcarpathia, Ukraine in June and July of 2008 for S.A.R.A. This Roma, or Gypsy settlement is on the outskirts of the city of Bergaszas. The music was recorded in a Roma church and the voice over is by S.A.R.A.'s Rev. Stephen Szylagi.

New Slide Scans From Atitlan

2009-11-27T16:12:00.003-05:00

R.I.P. Kodachrome 64

New Hardcover Photo Book

2009-11-06T17:49:00.002-05:00

WOOSTER--I recently finished editing the following book. You can preview it and order it at the following link!

http://www.blurb.com/books/919865

An Expedition to Christmas Run Delta

2009-09-07T21:19:00.003-05:00

WOOSTER--We set out to find the end of Christmas Run Creek on a fine mid-summer day when we both should have been working but the allure of going down a mini-river with a pail to catch minnows surely seemed like a better option.

I live in Wooster, Ohio. It is not my native town--though I am no longer sure where that might be--but this creek has run through my days here for well on nigh twenty years. I have walked it before a little. I still don’t know where its headwaters are but it runs from the private property of Miller Lakes, through the country club golf course and through Christmas Run Park. There the stream splashes past pavilions, a steep bank to one side and a groomed park on the other. Mothers take their children to play in its clear and innocuous waters. It passes under a covered bridge and if you walk a little down the banks are choked with a species of mint that smells of chocolate.

At the end of the park is a viaduct, higher than a tall man’s head and at the other end its deepest pool. You continue downstream past the old Wooster High football stadium and past houses and then through a run-down trailer park and soon you are at the fairgrounds. I had gone almost that far before several times and always I had wondered where it finally ended.

I suggested the venture to my friend Patrick because I knew he would be interested, that he rarely says no to any adventure no matter how small or large. So we set off to find where that piece of water ended. Of course the expedition would be very limited as I am pretty sure the watercourse ends in New Orleans. That Christmas Run would empty perhaps into the Killbuck, which would go somewhere into something and eventually into the Ohio River and finally the mighty Mississippi. But our plans were not so grand that day.

We crossed into the fairgrounds which led us through a long rectangular tunnel filled with spider webs which might have been easier had we still been the nine-year-olds we were feeling like. Past the tunnel the course narrowed between high, grassy banks and just out of the fairgrounds the mud began. At first we sank up to our ankles and then our knees and soon it was often deep enough to swallow a nine-year-old. We trudged and fought on. Pat stayed mostly in front, leaving me the choice of either stepping in the deep holes he had made or making new ones myself. There was little difference. For a moment we considered calling it quits. Where we stepped in the deep mire, bubbles of methane from the rotting foliage that had collected in these lowlands bubbled up like stinking jets from an unholy Jacuzzi.

But the thought of quitting passed quickly. We were on an expedition of exploration and just because we could quit and walk home didn’t mean it was right to. Finally, however, the constant struggle with the mud became too odious so we climbed the bank into tall grass and followed the course from above. We were lucky, it wasn’t saw-grass and later we found no ticks and we made good time. The landscape seemed African and I could imagine the tension of hunting lion in similar country. But there are few roving lions in Ohio and we saw not so much as a groundhog though in the water I did spot a fair-sized snapping turtle and earlier Pat had seen a water snake.

And finally we came to our goal. The end came suddenly, somehow. One minute we were following the creek and then we were at its end, barely a stream trickling into what I think is the Killbuck joined also by a section of old canal. We sat under a bridge, muddy and stinking like a couple of fairy-tale trolls, drinking water and admiring the handsome old iron pilings painted with high-water gauges. The bridge they supported was part of Old Columbus Road and the end of the Christmas Run Creek down by the corner of Wooster’s waste-water treatment plant. We agreed next time to follow it the other way, up to the Mountains of the Moon or wherever Christmas Run Creek begins. And then, in the hot, afternoon sun, we began the walk home and I told Pat of how once, long ago, my friend Robert and I followed the railroad tracks out of Oxford, Ohio only to end up in the exotic town of Hamilton.

Vineyard Job Movies

2009-07-26T03:46:00.007-05:00

WOOSTER--I am ideally qualified for this job. But I didn't get it. Here are the videos I made. I had help from a lot of people and the music in mine is original from Jeremy Hartzler and Matt Yanock. We got our casts and found the locations, shot the cut outs and the second car team stuff. We all learned a lot.

Sick

2009-06-22T23:28:00.002-05:00

WOOSTER--I pulled up at the Woodland house and my mother was running the lawn-mower up the stupid slope on the front that ought to be just plants on a very hot and humid Midwestern day. I parked and took the lawnmower away from her and finished the mowing. I needed a few things at WalMart and she suggested we go together and she drove because she likes to be in control and is scared of my driving on principal even if I've never had so much as a couple parking tickets. It was one of those Wally-world adventures: a soap dish, a memory card, a box of Rice Crispies, some swimming goggles and two avacados that requires an inordinate amount of walking. Near the end we re-met and she began flagging and said she wasn't feeling well and would I mind pushing the cart. We checked out and she said she was feeling sick.I asked if I should drive and she said no but a few minutes later she pulled over and I drove us home asking if maybe we shouldn't go to the Emergency Room.

We got home and she went and took a bath and it got worse from there. She came down and lay in the entry way and began vomiting and, as she said later, "There is nothing worse than throwing up on yourself with no warning and not caring."

My father went and got our next-door neighbor, Barbara, a Nurse Practitioner who had recently lost her husband. That same morning he had asked, "Have you met Barbara?" I shook her hand as she came in to see my mother on the floor.

I have never seen her sick before. Never seen her unable to handle the pain. This being my mother who births easily and refuses Novacaine at the dentist. And although I have come back and seen her older I had never seen her in pain and I let the nurse do her work and put her towels on her head and when it was finally not working I got my car up to the front and we walked her out and got her to the ER.

They got her in fast enough and under Barbara's medical insiderness got the IV in and the morphine onboard and they took blood and took her for a CT scan but then we sat there in the darkened room for four hours until the results came back.

I will always remember my mother's smile when she came back from the scan when the pain had been stopped by the morphine and she could get by the pain and see her worried husband and displaced son and widowed neighbor waiting.

We waited and bandied about diagnosis and I got to know my parent's neighbor the widowed nurse and listened to my mother's breathing. And finally the doctor came back and it was a 2mm kidney stone. They wrote prescriptions and I pulled my car up and put my mother in back and drove carefully home. And I was afraid to go to sleep and not listen to her breathing. But the next day I had to make her stay in bed even though she thought she passed the thing and when I left to take care of some business I came back and her Saab was gone.

Winery Job Application

2009-06-15T17:15:00.002-05:00

WOOSTER--My friend Jake told me about this job as Wine Country Correspondent right when I got back to the US. The major part of the application was to shoot and submit a one-minute video explaining why you should have the job. Here is mine. Please give it a view and send a vote for me and then come visit me in California! Click on this text to see it...

The Civil War

2009-06-11T12:50:00.004-05:00

WOOSTER--Though it is, at times, difficult to lead a peripatetic lifestyle, and I miss a certain Swede, it is also good to move and change and to be back in the United States. I have missed my family and friends and in more intangible ways I have missed America. It isn't the small things, those rarely have mattered to me. I have lived too many places and worked in too many regions and countries to get overly upset about small luxuries. And as for habits and daily routines I have been so long in different places that the only ones possible (for long) are those of work and rest I impose upon myself.

So, Sweden's lack of pepperoni, Saltine crackers, Taco Bell and a few other culinary delights aside, it wasn't those things I missed about the United States but rather the broader concepts of the land itself and the effect those have had upon its citizens. Succinctly put, I have missed my fellow Americans. I have missed their directness and amiability, their willingness to express an opinion and to hear one and to extend a hand and invite men and women of goodwill, wherever they hail from, over for a cookout or out for a beer.

Obviously, America has its share of problems, misfits and misanthropes, but they are not who I am speaking of right now. Sweden has its goodly share as well as does every land. Right now, while missing someone very special to my life, I am also reveling in being back in, well, yes, the land of the free and the home of the brave.

I am certain I will have more to say on the subject of Europe and the US, Europeans and Americans, but right now I will add one simple benefit of being back: my photographic eye has been reset to my own homeland. Above is a series of photos I shot the day before Memorial Day when the Civil War monument in Wooster Cemetery was rededicated. God Bless America.

2009-05-19T23:38:00.001-05:00

This is Station S, going off-line.

Storm at Sunset Over Transcarpathia

2009-05-05T04:01:00.001-05:00

LUND--It is difficult to explain how small one feels in Ukraine. On a sunny day one can see huge storms as they move towards you, huge banks of clouds and lightening flashes darkening a section of the horizon.

We were out, visiting different sites to film and had to drive into this one. I took several shots out the window before the rain hit. The light and feeling in the air was very similar to tornado weather in the American Midwest but the Ukrainians said they didn't have twisters. It seemed to me the perfect place for them. I wonder why.

Leica Photo Contest

2009-04-29T17:06:00.001-05:00

These were the photos I took at the Carpathian Mental Hospital. If you haven't looked at them please take a moment.

FILM: Carpathian Home For Disabled Children

2009-04-29T06:22:00.004-05:00

LUND--Click on this text to see the third short film in the series from SARA's relief programs in Ukraine shot at a home for mentally and physically handicapped kids. The institution, located in the rugged Carpathian mountains of western Ukraine, houses approximately 200 children. SARA and other organizations have been working there for many years to improve conditions.

S.A.R.A. 's Ukrainian Dental Program

2009-04-21T09:33:00.002-05:00

You can also watch this video at YouTube

Once Upon A Time in El Salvador

2009-04-21T07:54:00.002-05:00

EL ESPINO--(L-R) Betty Ann Larson, Joyce Gilberg, Dr. Ephrain Alvarenga, John Gilberg, Sharon Fiely, Kim Hemelgarn

Roma and Horse Carts and the Leica Digilux 1

2009-04-21T06:46:00.004-05:00

LUND--Last summer when I traveled to Transcarpathia, Ukraine to shoot footage for the films I am currently editing and posting I had a bit of a camera dilemma. I was shooting the movie with a shoulder-mount Panasonic DVC60, a terrific camera but a fairly large one. Someday I hope to have the ultimate photographic accessory, an assistant, but as it was I am one guy filming, taking stills and recording the sound and taking notes--which is a lot to manage and perhaps even more to carry.

I decided to compromise on my still cameras (and this was before I got the Nikon D3 and the Canon G9) and to take only my Leica M6 loaded with black and white film and the odd, clunky beast that is the Leica Digilux 1, my very-first-ever digital camera. I had the option of taking, then, my Nikon D1X but both because of its weight and a number of issues with it I decided on the aforementioned rig.

The Digilux 1 is a strange machine that has recently achieved a sort of second life as a cult camera. It is a large point and shoot with retro styling, shaped rather like the classic American rangefinder of yore the Argus C3, or, as it was known, "The Brick". The Digilux 1 is a scant 4 mega pixels--a little anemic even for its time--and certainly for its original price tag of about $800. Still, it often proves the mega-pixel myth and the primacy of a good lens as, in good light, it turns in photos that can send even current point and shoot cameras slinking to the dog house. But good light it must have. In poor light and even at moderate ASAs of 400 its images become almost uselessly noisy. It has a slight shutter lag though it was incredibly fast for its time and still beats all but the better P&S models. The shutter itself is almost completely silent.

In good light it delivers some of the loveliest color I have seen on any digital camera and it has a fairly easily accesed set of manual controls. Oddly, being a Leica (even if it is really a repackaged Panasonic) it lacks a black and white mode. I could go on about it and though I wish I could return to Transcarpathia with my D3 and other new equipment I am glad I dusted the Digilux off and used it seriously, even if for the last time. I still plan to take it out on sunny, summer days when I feel like making pretty pictures. I wish Leica would re-invent it, same weird, cool, retro body, same lens, same lovely color rendition, but with better low light performance, a little higher resolution and perhaps a larger sensor. The body is certainly large enough to contain all that!

Among the Digilux 1's features is a 3-shot burst mode (rather like the M-16 A2!). The horse cart is a common mode of transportation in Transcarpathia, most commonly (though not limited to) utilized by the Roma (Gypsy) people. I had the idea to use the 3 shot burst mode to take sequences like those above as we passed the horse carts on the road. It took me a while to get them done but here are two that came out.

To Take A Photograph

2009-04-20T06:16:00.004-05:00

LUND--I was in the Honduran village of Sensenti. The town lay on the scorching plain of Ocotapeque province in the west of that Central American republic, in sight of the mountains that rose up to the border with El Salvador. It lay near a small, fetid lake and a wide, shallow river spanned by a suspension bridge.

Dentists from Central American Medical Outreach were set up in the new health clinic by the 17th century church treating people from Sensenti and the surrounding areas. After a while I became tired of the sound of drills on teeth and the smell of burning enamel mixed with dust and sweat. I became tired of the pictures I was taking, one open mouthed scared kid began looking no different than the next and, even though this was in the years just prior to mass rise of the digital camera I knew I had enough good shots. As I walked outside one of the dentists handed me a Polaroid camera and several packs of film for it.

"This is the last we brought," he said, "Take pictures of the kids outside and give them their photos. Have fun."

The kids saw me with the camera and charged and I managed to get them a bit separated and began taking their portraits one by one and handing them the magic square that soon materialized an image of themselves upon its blank face. I finished the Polaroid film and the kids began to point at the two Nikons around my neck. It was my first trip to Central America and I spoke next to no Spanish. I tried with gestures and the few words I had to explain that my cameras wouldn't provide any instant gratification. I don't know how successful I was but soon the children stopped waiting for the photos to appear and began insisting I take their photos anyway.

It was about then that I began to think about what it meant to take a picture. There was apart of me that felt selfishly possessive over the Polaroids I had given away. They were, after all, my pictures. It was I that had composed them and picked the moment at which to expose the film and arrest a fraction of a second of light and time. But of course I didn't take them, I left them and took with me my negatives, those latent images that wouldn't be seen yet for several weeks, that, I realized, the children in Sensenti would normally never see.

Later we had lunch at the mayor's house. In the big, airy, green painted living room was a bookshelf filled with various ornaments and oddments: a stuffed bear in Valentines Day garb that had seen better days, one of those gilded Chinese cats with the perpetually knocking arm, a clock in the form of a glowing waterfall and one, small, family photo in a frame. On the wall was a second family photo, taken with a cheap, fixed focus camera but blown up to about 16 x 20. And that was it as far as I could see. One of the wealthiest families in town had two photos on display. I thought of the hundreds, thousands no doubt, of photos of myself. Of me as a newborn, taking my first steps, going to school, prom and so on and so on. I thought about the kids I had given the Polaroids to and realized that perhaps some of their families had no photographs at all and I thought that that was a very strange thing. And I thought it even stranger that large blonde people sometimes arrived in a cloud of dust and pulled their teeth out and handed them images of themselves from strange whirring boxes and then departed in a cloud of dust from whence they had came.

EPILOG:
And so, when I came back to the US, I took those photos I had shot with my Nikons and I printed up 40 or 50 of them in my darkroom. And when the doctors went to Sensenti again I gave them those photos to take with them. I thought that they were, then, a strange sort of Polaroid, a smaller, quieter, box that, took a year or so but delivered much better and larger pictures via a dusty truckload of tooth-pulling gringos.

The photos above were taken only a couple years ago in El Salvador. Sharing America's Resources Abroad's John Gilberg brought a mini-printer with him. He took the photos and docked his digital camera and within a half-hour had printed out these kid's photos. Not as much fun as the Polaroid but a technological evolution of the same idea.

S.A.R.A. 's Ukrainian Orthopedic Surgery Program

2009-04-14T13:03:00.003-05:00

LUND--This is the first of a series of short films documenting SARA's (Sharing America's Resources Abroad) projects and programs in Transcarpathia, a region of western Ukraine.

SARA Film on YouTube

2009-04-14T07:27:00.001-05:00

You can watch the SARA short here at YouTube

An Article

2009-04-13T10:44:00.004-05:00

LUND--A few weeks ago I wrote an article on this blog about Sharon Fiely, one of the SARA team members I met in 2007 while filming "The Children of the Mangroves". It has been recently published again on the "Your Cause" website. Check it out there.

My Friend, the Artist Currently Known as Tim Braucher

2009-04-11T13:41:00.000-05:00

This Explains, Well, Something.

2009-04-05T12:51:00.002-05:00

LUND--Shortly after arriving in Cleveland my friend Jake met me at baggage claim. My one bag didn't make it that evening from Dulles. This was the scene at the lost luggage office. Someone seems to have misplaced something important. And perhaps it has affected this kid...

S.A.R.A. (Sharing America's Resources Abroad)

2009-04-03T05:08:00.002-05:00

This is a short film, a visual introduction or advertisement for S.A.R.A., the organization that commissioned my last two films, "News from El Salvador: The Children of the Mangroves", and "Faces of Transcarpathia" which is currently being edited.

New Gallery

2009-04-01T12:15:00.003-05:00

Fredrik Larson, reporter

LUND--There is a new gallery of portraits, "Portraits and People II" up on my website. Most, though not all, are from Sweden with a heavy emphasis on people in the Swedish media/film community.

Imperial Troops Land in Skåne

2009-03-30T10:43:00.004-05:00

MALMÖ--Sunday I went into Malmö with my friend Ali. It was a bright sunny day and there was a sci-fi convention in its final day. We met some other photographers there and wandered around taking some pics. It was rather staid compared to Marcon in Columbus, Ohio, which I had gone to with my friend Jake a few years back. Of course this was just in the convention center, not a hotel, so there were no drunk Klingons partying with Orcs later on, no love affairs begun between Furries and Stromtroopers. Actually there were very few people dressed up while back in the US I would guess over half the attendees were in costume. Well, there were a lot of people dressed as Swedes...

From the Big Snow

2009-03-26T13:21:00.002-05:00

LUND--Spring keeps trying to arrive but the harsh and wintry Norse gods keep doing their best to strangle it in its flowery cradle. Or some damn thing like that...

When I got back from the second snowiest and coldest winter on record in Ohio the chill came with me and for once the land I expected to be snow-covered was and for a while it was beautiful. These pictures are from that morning as I was walking to language school.

Now I just want the summer to come. There was snow on the ground Monday morning but the afternoon was bright with sun. This morning was bright and clear and the early afternoon warm but now it is bitingly cold and there are flakes of white in the air.

Two Views of Lund

2009-03-24T10:22:00.002-05:00

LUND--There are these trees in public places trimmed in such a way that, especially when winter-bare, remind me very much of ones found in a Dr. Seuss book.

From Late Last Summer in Malmö

2009-03-21T05:50:00.002-05:00

And Another Article On Simon (of which he was not involved)

2009-03-19T13:59:00.002-05:00

LUND--The unfortunate thing about this article, I found out after talking to Simon, is that the writer never spoke to him. It is, in fact, a re-write of the Wired article. Of course I should have known this as Simon would never say, "Please pirate my documentary... I beg you." A line which, if you know Mr. Klose, you would know isn't his style. He isn't much one for begging and he likes to be paid for his hard work as much as anyone.

What I find interesting here is that this article is a pirated version of the Wired article.

http://apcmag.com/simon-klose-please-pirate-my-documentary-i-beg-you.htm

Simon Klose (and my photo of him) in "Wired" magazine

2009-03-18T07:12:00.002-05:00

LUND--Lena's talented cousin Simon Klose is a filmmaker based out of nearby Malmö. He has, for some time, been making a documentary about the Pirate Bay owners (who are Swedes) and was recently in Stockholm to film their trial which may have far-reaching implications for the future of Internet file sharing and the definitions of piracy. While there he met a writer for Wired magazine who was also covering the trial and who decided to do an article on Simon as well.

A few months ago Simon had purchased an adaptor for his Panasonic DVX100 with which he could use Nikon SLR lenses. He borrowed a few from me and I took several photos of him with his new gadget. Wired ran one of my photos with the article (not the one above). So check out the article and the photo.

Spring Wind

2009-03-18T07:00:00.002-05:00

LUND--A strong wind blew yesterday, shaking tree limbs, rattling signs, tearing dead leaves from their hold and sending them swirling along in rattling brown clouds. The sun shown and the wind, though hard, felt friendly, necessary, like it was blowing winter from Norden. In the grass, amongst the still bare trees, nature's first signs had appeared: small white and yellow and now purple flowers, telling the world that warmth would, at least this time, return again to the land.

Leica Photo Contest

2009-03-14T21:04:00.002-05:00

LUND--The Leica photo contest rules are deceptively simple. Eight to 12 photos in a photo essay, on the rather up-to-interpretation theme of "Man in relation to his environment" at least one of which needs to have been taken in the last year. Well, for me, that left out all my Central America stuff so entered 12 shots I had taken at the Transcarpathian Regional Mental Hospital. It was that or the ones from the Roma camp and for better or worse decided on the mental hospital. This was the first year for digital submissions. I see a lot up that are very good and also a lot that are pretty heavily manipulated. All I will say for mine is that they were shot with a Leica M6 ttl on Kodak 400CN and scanned with a Nikon Coolscan V with some help from my friend here in Sweden the photographer Justin Brown. As for PhotoShopping nothing was done other than what can do in a darkroom--contrast adjustment mainly and a modicum of dodging and burning. Regardless, please go look at Leica Photo Contest

Transcarpathian Home for Disabled Children

2009-03-14T19:20:00.001-05:00

LUND--Jennifer Lawrence, a nurse from Ohio whom I met on the SARA trip to Ukraine last summer, just sent me several CDs of her photos from the trip. This is one she took of me at work while visiting a home for mentally disabled children in the Carpathian mountains. The other is, more or less (there are three similar frames) the photo I was taking when she took this.

Two Photos of Lena

2009-03-11T15:22:00.002-05:00

The Children Of The Mangroves Short Film

2009-03-09T14:38:00.003-05:00

Sharon's Art and Purpose

2009-03-09T09:12:00.013-05:00

Sharon Fiely on the Rio del Espino near the Pacific coast of El Salvador.
--Andrew Tonn photo

"God's Love Shines" an original oil painting by Sharon Fiely
--image courtesy of Sharon Fiely

LUND -- I first met Sharon Fiely about 4:30 in the morning at the Columbus, Ohio airport in 2007. I was lugging my normal burden of camera gear, made all the heavier since I was making a film. I mention this because the first thing I noticed about Sharon was her extra luggage – a large, flat crate that, she explained to various flight personnel, contained a painting which must arrive undamaged at a Salvadoran church. I understood transporting things that must arrive undamaged and over the next hours came to admire her singularity of purpose in shepherding that package.

We were all there to catch the 6 a.m. flight to San Salvador on a delegation from SARA (Sharing America’s Resources Abroad) an ecumenical, humanitarian relief organization I had worked with the year before and was now engaged to make a film for.

While on the plane, Sharon and I began to get to know one another and she gave me a card bearing a reproduction of the painting in the crate. The image, of a glowing cross and dove over a tropical coast was titled, “God’s Love Shines.” The coast it depicted was also our familiar destination, El Espino, El Salvador, the location much of my film was to be centered around.

Playa El Espino
--Andrew Tonn photo

Over the next week I would speak at length with Sharon about her art and her motivations for coming to an area of the world I had spent much of the past years of my life. Though at times our perspectives on the world differed, I confess that I needed some of her enthusiasm. This was my seventh trip to Central America, time that would total nearly two years, most of it spent working with medical relief projects. This was Sharon’s second trip and I could see in her much of the enthusiasm and energy that had kept me coming back. I remembered how my own first trip had altered the course of my life, how after it all I could think about was Honduras and how I could get back there and explain it to others

Throughout the coming days we spoke while traveling around El Salvador. The conversations often continued late into the night, sitting in the shaded courtyard of Hotel Villa Real. There, Sharon and the other delegation members and I would try to make sense of the world, of what we could do to improve it and of our own motivations for being there. It was in those moments that I got some sense of who Sharon was and where she had come from.

“My first trip in June 2006 turned out to be one of the most inspiring times of my life,” she said, “I think of it every day, about the people I made bonds with, about a country recovering from a civil war and locked into some of the worst poverty in the world. One of the places we visited on that first trip was a Lutheran church in a very poor community. All it had on its walls was a paper cross, a wooden cross and a picture of Jesus. After the services Bishop Gomez and his wife ran a soup kitchen to make sure the people had something to eat that day. One thing the Bishop said changed my life. He told me they were there to, ‘Build bridges not walls.’”

Sharon Fiely with Salvadoran children in the town of El Espino.
--photo courtesy of Sharon Fiely

I remember Sharon telling me these things there in the hotel courtyard, about her and her friend Kim Hemmelgarn deciding that I was their new younger brother, to be taken under-wing, and feeling my own inevitable, accumulated cynicism dissipate under those wind-blown palm shadows.

Sharon went on to talk about some of her own life, saying, “I studied art back in High School and during my senior year received a gold medal and the chance to go to art school. I now realize I was a fool to turn it down but I continued teaching myself, buying books on different techniques, eventually discovering I was unhappy with the way acrylics blended and dried. I wasn’t getting the results I wanted so decided to teach myself oils with the help of books and a few Saturday classes,

“And so I painted in oils until 1991 when I was hit by a fork-lift which left me almost unable to walk for nearly a year. I found myself giving up on my faith and on the talent God had blessed me with. I quit painting altogether about 1995 due to the pain when I stood and reached towards the canvas. I also developed carpal tunnel syndrome and it became so frustrating, dropping the brushes, that I just quit.

“But then, in 2005, my husband and I were talking about the talent I had been blessed with. About that same time we began attending church again and they asked for volunteers to paint murals on the walls. Shortly after, the minister asked for volunteers for a trip to El Salvador and when I returned all I could think about were the bare walls of that church in San Salvador that gave so much and I painted “God Love Shines.”

The original oil painting "God's Love Shines" is presented to the Lutheran Church of San Salvador and Bishop Gomez by Sharon Fiely.
--Andrew Tonn photo

The painting made it safely to the San Salvadoran church and hangs even now on its wall. A similar original hangs in Sharon’s home church in Ohio. “…it was about time I figured out what path He intended me to take my art,” she said, “I have now asked others to ask themselves what talent, skill or resource they have to help others in need and then to take action.”

Reproductions of “God’s Love Shines” are available in various sizes and all proceeds go to relief projects in El Salvador. Fiely can be contacted at: sharonforapurpose@gmail.com.

All You Need to Know

2009-03-03T14:28:00.005-05:00

LUND--Of my trip to the US there is little to say. Its time had come and so I flew back, not to the Southwest of my childhood but, perhaps, to the place where I became a man, where my parents still live and to where most of those who had become my closest friends live as well.

So I flew to fly-over country and it began to snow. I had thought I missed being known by people but in truth it was only that I missed the people I know well. While in Wooster I only went out on the town one time. Though Seattle's, my favorite coffee shop, had closed there were new places and the usual suspects were perched a their rails engaged in the ritual whirl of practice mating, liver damage and feigned conviviality.

Some asked me how Sweden had been treating me though most confused my country of residence with Switzerland. To them I wove alluring tales of a love affair with a beautiful yodeling champion and my new job in a watch factory. A few figured I had been in Central America (usually confused with South America and occasionally Africa) and some hadn't noticed I'd been gone at all. Not that I blame them, I had changed worlds too often before and was normally only part of theirs' briefly and in passing. To those who are not of your intimate circle you are only a cipher anyway, a collection of half-truths and assumptions based on hearsay, rumor, faulty information and clumsy spying.

So I am what I am and they are what they are and I'm sure all the people I thought I missed are known and loved by someone but that person isn't me. For I am no longer there, no longer part of the local milieu, and the goings on in my life are of no more interest to them than theirs are to me.

I needed to return to see this, to see what I missed in fact and what is more personal myth than reality. I was able to spend time with most of those who are close to me though not all. A month after nearly a year and a half is simply too little time. And now I am back and at first it was a day and then a week and now it has been a month and soon enough another year. I am back into the whirl of my life here, utterly insignificant and of little interest to the denizens of Wooster, Ohio.

The strangest thing, perhaps, is that life overseas is often more or less just like life in the US. Things, as Vincent Vega said so wisely, are just a little bit different. I am looking for work, making time for Lena and my friends, going to school, shopping for groceries, cooking dinner. The world back there is carrying on doing much the same. People I have known will date, break up, marry, move, breed and maybe die and quite possibly I will never know. Someday I may be back there and say to someone,

"Whatever happened to old ---------?"

And there will be an uncomfortable silence before someone says,

"You didn't hear?"

"No."

And there will be some sad story of cancer or a car wreck or maybe something weird involving shaving a goat while whisky drunk by an Interstate Highway but with the same sad end and shaking of heads. Or maybe they'll see my friend Jake and think of me and ask, "Whatever happened to old Tonn?" and he'll look at them, take a moment, and say something like,

"Well, I don't really know. The last I saw him he was riding a camel out of Marakesh with two redheads and a bottle of whisky. Some say he's dead, others that he's King of Waziristan..."

Because that, my friends, is all they need to know.

Moon Over Lund

2009-02-09T06:33:00.002-05:00

LUND--The moon was huge and bright against the black limbs of trees and the fast moving clouds of February.

Snow Imps

2009-02-08T08:18:00.006-05:00

LUND--My friends, convinced I had been possessed by some Nordic snow imp, wanted me back across the Atlantic. Though they professed to missing me a severe blizzard had begun right about the moment I was landing in Cleveland. For the next month of my stay the weather would alternate between more snow and those glittery, bright winter days that belie the deadliness of temperatures that often fell below -10F. All in all it was the second coldest and snowiest Ohio January on record.

When I left, just a few days into February, the snow still hadn't gone away. Still, each day had grown a little warmer and, though winter was far from over, there was the promise that at least for a while the snowpack would melt and the ground and roads return.

When I finally landed in Denmark and traveled onward to Sweden the southern reaches of Norden were dusted with white and gripped in an intensely grey and lightless fog that leached all color and warmth. Lena said that until I arrived it had been a generally bright and sunny winter.

Today is a mix of snow and rain falls from a lightless sky and forms an oddly glue-like mixture underfoot. The trees are black against the featureless sky. The evil snow imp laughs, returned home after spreading its icy fingers in the New World.

Jiggity Jig

2009-01-20T02:18:00.003-05:00

INDIANAPOLIS--The night before I left I had about the closest to a panic attack as I have ever had no matter what that %$#&^^%$%@##@ Kathy says happened before she found out my diaphram was paralyzed by a bad dose of Imodium that one night in Honduras. But this time I was leaving the woman I moved across the ocean (Atlantic) for and I was coming back to a small Ohio town that nothing much had changed in except I was no longer a part of the lives within that town.

We went to bed and the alarm went off a few hours later. I got right up and showered and dressed and Lena walked me to the station. We said goodbye for now and I got on my train to Copenhagen and we took pictures of each other through the window and the train began to move and she ran alongside as long as she could for a hundred feet or so and then she was gone.

And then I was in the airport away from my Scandinavian life until Lena's cousin and Japanese fiancee found me on their way to the Canary Islands and we had a little talk. I bowed to her father in his wheelchair and to his wife who pushed him. And I got on my plane to Frankfurt. And then my plane to Dulles and going through customs was routine and, mainly incedentally, I was glad I was an American because it made everything easier. I love being an American for a lot of other reasons but at that moment it was mostly about getting in the correct line above the smell of tired carpet.

And another plane and I barely made that and it was one of those small and frightening jets that one is always particularly pleased to have survived and I made it, almost running, like OJ Simpson except I only knocked down a nun but cut no white bitches, but my bag didn't make it with me.

Dr. K. was there and picked me up. Cleveland. And it was far colder than Skåne and the snow was deep. I find it difficult to write all the details. There was an obese idiot trying to keep us from getting out of the parking garage. We went to a bar and ate chicken wings and the owner couldn't understand that I wasn't actually Swedish so we got a lot of free drinks. We sleapt in a sort of fantasy single guy high-rise condo because the owner had got himself all entangled with an evil and rather stupid stripper who was raping him of his self-worth and dignity. And the next morning Dr. K drove me to the airport where I collected my bag and we got a McGriddle and a McMuffin at the holy McDonalds and we took the familiar highway back to what was no longer my home.

Clubbin'

2008-12-23T03:15:00.013-05:00

LUND--My life here has become rather like a chronic medical condition: it's not going away, I have to treat it with a mixed therapy of exercise, proper diet and medicine and still I have my good days and my bad days. I'd been having some bad days lately: a mix of the dark winter, missing my friends and the existential angst of passing though an entire year in a foreign land, turning 39 and finding myself in a stable relationship. These all have combined to make me wonder, in my darker moments, if the best is all behind me. Here I am, suddenly, incomprehensibly, almost 40, engaged to a wonderful woman, watching what I eat and drink, having quit smoking, started wearing underwear and often more content sitting at home Friday nights with Chinese take-out and some DVDs of "Friends" than out drinking, arguing and hunting for the next love-of-my-life.

My life is far from boring and even though I am often bored I have always been often bored so that is nothing new. In the past year I have moved to Sweden (after spending a month in El Salvador filming a documentary), learned to speak a new language passably, traveled to Budapest, gone back to Budapest on my way to Transcarpathia, Ukraine where I spent a month filming a second documentary, returned to deal with helping the actual love-of-my-life through the death of her father, traveled with her through Croatia, Italy and back to Budapest, got and finished a freelance job making seven short films and photo-series, hung a exhibit of photographs and taught myself to make a good Perigeaux sauce. And all these leave out all the smaller trips, little jobs, everyday victories and setbacks that add up to one extremely busy year.

So this past Saturday night I found myself listening to a Scanian windstorm, watching the trees bend in the gusts and a cellular tower whip back and forth and thought, "Hmmm, maybe we should stay in tonight, rent a movie. I know we're invited to a party in Malmö and are on the guest list at the hip club Debaser where Lena's friend and co-worker Tara is DJ-ing her monthly event, "Get Laid or Die Tryin'"... but... it's windy out there...." At which point I realized I had better either shut up about having nothing to do or trade my boots in for loafers, buy a big television, start watching sporting events for excitement and develop the sorts of disfunction my e-mail spam already accuses me of.

I never have been a club sort of guy, vastly preferring the pub, the café, the coffee house or my porch to a door charge, overpriced drinks, ear-splitting music I don't like and overdressed wankers and the girls who mate with them making me feel like a big dork. Of course, not having been clubbing for years I've also gained in age and confidence and being off-the-market romantically renders a lot of the angst irrelevant. We showed up a little before 2300 and were on the guest list. We had just been to a glögg party, a little circle of Swedes drinking hot, spiced wine and Lena saw that the bar's special was a glögg cocktail so we began with those. Debaser, where we had been once before after my birthday dinner, is a good space. When I hear "club" I tend to think of cavernous spaces and VIP rooms filled with immortals. The Swedish club was a little different. The crowd, for the most part, was dressed extremely fashionably, the men perhaps more than the women who, being Swedish, needed to do no more than put on a little lipstick and anything from their closets in order to pretty much blow away the rest of the world's females. The men, being as interested as they are in hair care products, here-today-gone tomorrow sweaters and ironic hats simply can't raise the level of aggressive, threatening testosterone I normally associate with the club experience. To the Swedish guy's credit, perhaps being secure (if goofy) enough to wear such sweaters they aren't overly aggressive because, in fact, they're already getting laid by some of those gorgeous women.

My point being that the atmosphere of the club remained fun without any of the meanness or desperation one might expect from an event called, "Get Laid or Die Tryin'." Perhaps such a name could only work in Sweden. Americans or Russians or Mexicans (just to name a few) might take it far too literally--fail to see the humor, as it were. Three bands played: some Emo guy whose music was only slightly less painful than having a roofing nail driven through your foot, a good rock band with a cute female singer and a little 17-year-old rapper, too young to drink beer even in Europe. Then Tara and her friends DJ'd and the floor was packed. I felt, if not on the cutting edge of fashion, obviously cool since I had opted for jeans, Doc Martens, a t-shirt and my old black leather jacket.

And we had a good night, a sufficient number of drinks, some dancing (Lena) and some photo-taking (me). We left before close and caught a bus back to Lund where we got late night McDonald's. And in the morning I felt much better, much more like me, much less like a couch-sitting dork gossiping about the relationships of his friends, Joey and Chandler, Monica and Ross and Rachel and Phoebe rather than having adventures of his own.

Three Moments

2008-12-17T07:01:00.003-05:00

#2: We went to IKEA to buy a new chair. It was named Franklin. When we came out it was dark and ABBA was playing on the radio.

#3: I walked to pick the car up from the shop. Then I drove the Volvo home in the dark Swedish winter afternoon.

The Earth Moved

2008-12-16T09:47:00.003-05:00

LUND--The bed was shaking, the shelves were rattling, somewhere, no doubt, people were screaming. At approximately 6:20 this morning an earthquake of around 4.7 on the Richter scale hit Skåne. We both woke up and lay for a moment feeling the strangeness of the entire world around us move, the sounds of grinding and rattling coming from every direction. We both jumped up and could feel the floor shake under our feet.

I said, "Hmm, It's an earthquake."

Lena said, "Yes it is."

It stopped.

And Now For Something Completely Different!

2008-12-09T16:14:00.007-05:00

How many distinctly Swedish things can you spot in this photo!?

LUND--Now if Sweden is famous--and rightly so--for anything of importance, it must be meatballs. Sure, they have some award thing every year and they stand as a beacon for social justice and an equitable society or something like that and make good, boxy cars and excellent artillery. But what they really do well are meatballs. Meatballs and cleverly designed, reasonably priced furnishings. So its no wonder that these two things go very well together.

Meatballs are available everywhere. Any supermarket has multiple brands in packages ranging from sufficiently sized to tide over a lonely bachelor to enough to feed a boatload of Vikings on their way to Vinland. Any convenience market has them as well and they are a refrigerator staple, always ready to nuke up when nothing else seems appealing.

Now any Swede will tell you, being human more or less, that the best meatballs are, of course, Grandma's (or Mom's, who of course learned from Grandma). The second best meatballs, however, unanimously come from IKEA. IKEA, in order to make shopping palatable for the whole family, has a cafeteria smack in the middle of its showrooms (among other tricks). And while there are various choices of foodstuffs the meatball platter reigns supreme. Dished out by well-designed Swedish girls, the plate brims with meatballs in gravy, boiled potatoes and lingonberry jam.

I had not had the IKEA meatballs since my very first trip to Sweden and a few weeks ago we were nearing IKEA on the way to the summer house and, it being around lunchtime, I suggested we roam IKEAland and eat of its fare. Now no Swedish woman can resist such an offer any more than a Texan would refuse a steak and a trip to the gun store and, well, so we dined. Of this there is little more to say. The furnishings were well-designed, the meatballs were tasty, and if you eat too many of them over too many years the health care is affordable!

Nazis Schmazis

2008-12-07T14:48:00.008-05:00

Lund--Officer Friendly and his Wonder Dog Skip maintain order near the train station.

LUND--The young man got in the big cop's face and yelled, "Why are you protecting them?"
The big cop stood, impassive in his riot gear, and replied calmly, "It's my job. This is democracy."
A hundred meters away 50 or so of the master race stood, chanting, their torches lighting the early Scandinavian night, a phalanx of more than double their number of police standing between them and over a thousand counter protestors, journalists, the curious and people trying to get to and from the train station.
A young woman, veins standing out on her neck, her face twisted in rage, began shrieking over and over, "Democracy allows fascism. Democracy allows fascism." as her face turned purple and spittle hung from her lips. I thought it better not to engage her in a political debate about the rights of free speech, even offensive free speech and instead took the moment to get closer to the Nazis. About that moment torches began to fly back and forth between the groups which were dramatic against the night but more or less harmless. I realized then that I couldn't see any bottles or stones, which are not so harmless, and that it was so dark I wouldn't get any decent photos anyway. I retreated and Lena and I followed from a saner distance until we found ourselves caught between two large groups of police. Suddenly people in front of us began to run from a police charge and we dove over a wall, finding ourselves in the old cemetery. It was cold and late and I was sick and tired of Nazi-types and the early dark I couldn't photograph in and Lena was depressed about Nazi-types in her town so we trudged back home to warmth and light.

I have been trying to figure out this phenomenon of Nazi marches and counter-protest and masked anarchists chucking stuff about even when there are no Nazis in evidence and the odd fact that I've seen more rioting and street violence in Sweden than anywhere else I have been. Strangely, it still seems the safest place I have been as well. Perhaps, in this country of mostly atheistic liberals endowed with equal rights and effective socialized health care and a climate that leaves them in the dark with unaffordable booze for most of the year the need to lash out at anything and provide the soul and body with some sort of excitement is overwhelming. Combine this with the need to believe in something, given that there is no God here, and rage and trouble bubble inevitably to the surface.

The thing that bothers me the most is that all the rioting and property destruction and overheated chanting really has the feeling of playtime. It is a moment when the bored youth can provoke the police into a little tear-gassing and clubbing and then bemoan the existence of police brutality (In the other direction, this is known as entrapment). Where they can don black clothes and masks (either side) and search out some gratuitous violence in a country that otherwise decries such activities as basically un-Swedish--more American really. My big problem with the game, however, is that real stones and bottles and torches fly through the air. These very often fly through the air around civilians and any of these missiles could cause death or serious injury. And no one seems to care about that.

In most of my interactions with Swedes they profess horror for violence, for capital punishment and for gun ownership. They complain about their weather and the lack of general excitement but mostly they seem content with their wonderland of clean water and good hospitals and timely trains. They never condemn stones thrown and dropped on Nazis though they would never say they ought to be killed (unless that slips out when they get drunk enough) and they never seem to question these same missiles thrown at working cops or passers by. Perhaps in their wonderland they don't know that rocks can kill. And what, one might ask, is the fun in having socialism without ever having a taste of the barricades, however pointless, irresponsible and irrelevant they might be.

Istria or: Roman Tito Zebra Porn

2008-11-15T12:42:00.001-05:00

Gondola Pigeon Porn

2008-11-15T12:40:00.002-05:00

Pula to Venice

2008-10-14T16:41:00.001-05:00

LUND--We left Sweden in an interim season that had not quite become fall. The day was sunny and cloudy, alternating between the two every few minutes. In a little more than two weeks we would spend a week in Croatia, journey through Venice and Florence and take a night train back to Budapest which still reigns as our favorite city. The last time we flew home from Budapest it had become Spring in our absence. The weather had gained the warm breath of coming summer, cherry blossoms adorned the trees and the sun had burned away the last of the winter clouds. Now the air is chill and the leaves are turning and falling, you can feel the wind bite your skin through your clothing and the grey, featureless cap of clouds seems to have settled again over Scandinavia.

Together we looked around the apartment that day. We had changed money into three different currencies, I'd made us sandwiches, Lena had bought a new camera and I carried a modest three. Hotels had been booked, arrangements made. Our bags were packed and we hoisted them up, turned off the light and walked down to the street. We waved goodbye to the owner of the little Arab café downstairs and set off for the train station. That first train took us to Copenhagen airport and our first flight to Zagreb, Croatia. It was night in Zagreb and we spent our couple hour layover there writing postcards and drinking beer in the smoky bar. There wasn't much to say on the postcards yet. "We have left but aren't there yet... Zagreb feels like an airport and is dark. It probably isn't always dark but it is now because it is nighttime..." But we wrote some anyway.

Our next plane was a small twin-engine, turbo-prop that hopped us 45 minutes to Pula where a car from our lodgings was waiting for us. Jakob, our driver took us from there to the Pula Youth Hostel and we had our first glimpse of the Adriatic, black water lapping a white beach in the night.

We woke to sun and the incredible sight of Adriatic blue. It is like no other color I have ever seen. It is as clear as the Caribbean but its colors less pastel, more primary and deep. I kept hearing Homer's words, "The wine dark sea," in my head and days later, as we crossed the narrow straits to the isle of Brioni, the waves seemed, on the edges of their deep blue, to have an a deep magenta cast.

We were there just a week or two off high season and that had mostly advantages, prices were considerably less and, speaking a few days later to an expatriate American, we had avoided enormous hordes of tourists (who we were later to encounter in Italy). The downside was we had dreamed of lazy days soaking in the sun and swimming but it was never really hot. The sun could be intense but the air had a chill to it and the sea, once immersed in it, was tolerable but less than balmy. So our beach holiday became more of a walking, sightseeing and café holiday which, in a land of plentiful and cheap truffles is not altogether a bad thing.

The next week found us walking 20 or 30 minutes back and forth from the hostel into downtown Pula and taking day trips to the hilltop town of Labin and Tito's island retreat on Brioni. Breakfasts were at the hostel, bread and cheese and tea watching the day begin on the deep blue Adriatic. We explored Pula, the Roman amphitheater, narrow winding streets, eating pizza and pasta with truffles, sitting outside on the hotter days and inside on cool nights.

All too soon our time there came to an end. Vowing to return, making plans to, next time perhaps, fly into far southern Dubrovnik and make our way back north, we packed our bags again. My alarm woke us at 0430. We had paid our tab at the hostel the night before and reserved tickets on a bus to Venice. We shouldered our packs, locked the door, dropped the key in the box and hiked to the main road. We waited there in the pre-dawn and soon the bus came. It took us away, up into the mountains, out of Croatia, across a tiny corner of Slovenia and then down and into Italy, through the port city of Trieste and, before noon, on the streets of Venice where we fought our way through crowds to a wide canal and caught a water-taxi to our next brief home.

European Social Forum

2008-09-23T02:54:00.006-05:00

Some Faces From Ukraine

2008-09-16T11:22:00.001-05:00

Ukrainian Cherries

2008-09-01T10:17:00.002-05:00

LUND--It is a fertile land, in food if not in money... Cherry rich, cash poor. Cherries, apples, plums, apricots, peaches, wheat, cattle, corn, sunflowers, hogs and much more.

Weather Report III

2008-08-27T19:27:00.004-05:00

LUND--It is 0230. The sky is the color of new jeans in the dark. Clouds are moving fast across it, looking like bleach stains that reveal star points in the night. In a month and a half I will have been here a year. The last days it has rained and rained with only brief moments of clear. I cannot remember a rainy day such as the day of Lena and her friend's birthday party. It began before dawn, steady and hard and continued that way through the afternoon and night without pause until early the next morning. And we were awake then.

I was surprised by the Swedish summer. It is almost pornographic. I mean that, not that men and beasts are copulating for cameras in the streets but in that it is too good, too perfect, too staged and unreal. The summer time has always been problematic for me, at least since coming into adulthood. I always forget there is no summer break, that one still has to work. In the depths of winter I imagine an endless period of canoes and sun, lemonade and beer, smoking grills covered in meat and surrounded by friends -- mornings and evenings that are simultaneously early and late. But of course one still has to work and summer is pretty much humid, sticky, and filled with bugs that don't stop work either.

But in Sweden, the Nordic wonderland, summer is hot and sunny but dry. People are beautiful, half-clad and tanned. The days last until near midnight while men and women and blonde-headed bairns frolic at the beaches of sea and lake and river. There are apple trees everywhere and berries and streams full of fish. Fruit grows fat and red and the kids grow blonder and browner whilst they fish for crabs and engage in healthful outdoor activities. Around the longest day of summer the Swedes gather and dance around a big long pole decorated with the likeness of testicles. They hop around like frogs and sing folk tunes. Then the days begin to get shorter. Near the end of summer the adults gather and eat loads of crayfish boiled in dill with fresh bread and cheese and drink too much schnapps and sing rousing songs about eating crayfish and drinking schnapps and then summer ends.

There are a couple weeks where every day is a rather dramatic battle between the sun and the shades. The summer does not want to die. The clouds roll in and there are tremendous winds and towering black clouds but they never seem to accomplish much. The summer is very strong and will not let them. Not that day. You look out and it is dark and you put on your oil-coat and hat and by the time you walk downstairs it is hot and bright. And you walk to the station and catch a 15 minute train and when you get there it is chill and grey which changes in turn to a bright and clear night.

But I think that today, or maybe it was Saturday, summer died. I felt the change. The season had ended though Fall I have yet to smell. The leaves are still green. None have changed and I wonder what, here, the first scent of Autumn is like.

Storm Over Transcarpathia

2008-08-25T16:40:00.003-05:00

These are two photos taken out the car window as Arpad drove towards home while a big electrical storm rolled towards us. Out there on the plains you can see the storms coming from miles away and they look very small while, at the same time, you know they are enormous. Across the flat Ukrainian landscape you can see the lines of rain and forks of lightning and around you it is sunny and then, with incredible speed, the storm is upon you and you feel very small.

Observations and Notes from Transcarpathia

2008-08-20T04:17:00.003-05:00

The following notes and observations are taken from e-mails sent to a number of friends of mine: the journalist, the historian, the poet and the anthropologist… you know who you are…

I have been stuck in a tiny Hungarian village with no Internet (or indoor toilet) for a couple weeks. The most common house style is a square one-story box with a semi-pyramidal roof, usually constructed of slightly irregular, locally-made bricks but also quite often of mud bricks (made in the yard in wooden forms from mud and straw), plastered over, much the same as is common in Latin America. Of course a lot of the newer houses are made of poured concrete or concrete block. The newer houses often are two to two 1/2 stories but the older ones are almost all single story.

On the side of every house is a grape arbor, both to provide shade and, of course, grapes--some of which are eaten but most of which, I am told, go into making wine. Isabella and Delaware and other Labrusca hybrids are quite common here. I would assume that they and other American-French hybrids were planted after the phyloxera epidemic that decimated the European vineyards in the 1800s and, unlike the rest of Europe, were not replanted with grafted vinifera vines later on. There are no French bureaucrats telling them they have to rip up the vines they've been growing for years. The hybrid varietal Noah is grown here and, as in France, it is said that drinking wine made of it will make a man go insane. In fact, I was told that making wine from it is illegal. A winemaker told me, however, that is doesn’t make you go mad it just gives you a headache.. There are other local varieties I tasted as well. One a sort of muscat and another that the old man who made the wine said was from a Carpathian (vinifera) variety. It was an unusual (good) taste.

While the houses in the villages are quite close together in neighborhoods they are, in many ways, traditional peasant extended-family compounds. Often the square house fronting the street (quite roomy inside) has additions extending back from it and usually a rather sizeable backyard which is, in fact, the family's private mini-farm with a variety of (always grapes) but vegetables (tomatoes, cucumbers, peppers, etc.), fruit trees (apple, cherry, plum, apricot, peach, etc.) as well as often quite a few chickens, ducks, rabbits and perhaps a hog or two all quite efficiently packed in. The enormous flat fields stretching off into the Great Hungarian plain are mostly for normal field crops. There is a lot of wheat, rapeseed, sunflowers, potatoes and maize. Most of the machinery, combines and such, are of Soviet manufacture and at least 25 or more years old. A great amount of labor is still done with hand tools such as wooden rakes and scythes. Up in the Carpathian mountains it is even more old-fashioned with traditional old style hay-stacks with a sharp center pole forming cones all over the landscape. The architecture there uses more wood than that on the plains and you see both wood board houses, often with elaborate, almost Victorian tracery, but also lots cabins, some using large flat-hewn logs and others using round logs.

Here, unlike Hungary where almost everything of the kind was either destroyed or moved to a tourist park, Soviet monuments are quite common. There are, however, monuments now in all the churchyards listing the names of those killed under Stalin. There are also many stories about pre-Soviet monuments (such as WWI memorials) that were buried for 80 years to save them and then put back up rather recently.

The 19th, 20th and 21st centuries, perhaps more than anywhere I have been, seem to exist rather nicely side by side. There isn't much money, quite literally, but there is plenty of food and people grow a lot of what they eat. Arpad, the young minister, is always stopping briefly at some house and coming back with a bag of peppers or potatoes or cucumbers or such. There are a lot of cars, the most common of which is the Lada, many of them 20 years old or more. The Lada which comprises at least 50 percent of the car population, are that most common of Soviet things: a copy of something else. The classic Lada is, in fact, a Fiat copy--a boxy little economy car. There are lots of mopeds and small motorcycles and cycles with sidecars are fairly frequent. And there are new Mercedes and BMWs and such but the saying is, "If he has a good car he must not be a good man." The East German Trabant, common in Budapest, is in little evidence here. Then there are the Volgas. These were the best cars, 4 door sedans that look like about a '67 Plymouth--even those made in the 1990s. And there are other manner of weird Soviet vehicles: Kamaz heavy trucks, Neva jeepythings and others. There are also a large number of horse drawn carts. They are not buckboards in the American style but are narrow, no more than two feet at the bottom of the bed with angled board sides opening up to perhaps four feet max. They can put a shocking amount of hay on one, however. Two people who like each other's company can sit side by side up front and they are pulled by either one or two horses (rather scrawny things). The wheels and axels, however, are scavenged from motor vehicles. You also see many personal-sized tractors. They are an engine mounted on two wheels with a pair of steering handles. They can be attached to a cart in place of a horse or hooked to a plow or, I am certain, used in any number of ingenious ways. Also a lot of bikes, old trusty one-speeds for the most part and modern one-speeds that look like expensive, hi-tech mountain bikes but which sell for a little under $100. The roads, very often asphalt overlaid on old, square-cut, laid stone, are terrible, the worst I have ever seen. As is the case in Wooster and other small old Midwest towns there are perfectly good old brick roads that with only a little maintenance would have lasted forever. At least in the US they tend to resurface them but the Ukraine is a good example of what happens when modern tarmac isn’t kept up. Huge potholes and crumbling edges, probably keeps the mortality rate down, however, because on a good stretch of road the locals tend to put the pedal down.

The sky is huge. But it is somehow different from the West, from Montana. It has something of an element of desolation and dread rather than freedom and awe but perhaps that is my imagination. Cloud formations seem positively Soviet in size. The morning light is usually clear and bright though sometimes the days are simply hot and humid much like Ohio though somewhat more bearable (but it isn't August yet). Sunsets can be pretty spectacular but confined to the lower edge of the huge sky. At night you can tell how little developed it is because the sky is actually dark and black and there are stars. In the main, out in the country, it smells very clean and even the cities aren't really all that bad. Perhaps there isn't much heavy industry left. I don't know, but there are no evident pollution controls on the cars and cycles and the air ought to be worse in town than it is. Perhaps it is blown out and absorbed by the vastness of the surrounding plains. The plains of Pest extend from Buda-Pest, Budapest, two different cities actually, or originally anyway, separated by the Danube, all the way to the foothills of the Carpathians which aren’t too far (20 miles or so) from where I am. This is the Great Hungarian Plain and geologically as well as to a large degree culturally, this really should be part of Hungary. Other than the odd hill popping up every now and then (a geologist could probably tell you why) the land until the mountains is flat flat flat. The Carpathians are old mountains and remind me a lot of parts of West Virginia. Not terribly high, but very rugged and very steep and very heavily wooded though mostly in evergreens (on the plains there are, in spots, a lot of oaks and other deciduous varieties). Many rivers and streams run through the mountains, wild and rocky and shallow and seemingly very clear until a bend eddies with the same vast and indestructible collection of plastic drink bottles that clog the beaches of Utila, Honduras and other spots that ought to be pristine.

Surgery

2008-08-13T06:54:00.006-05:00

TRANSCARPATHIA, UKRAINE--In the morning we drove to Muncachevo with Dr. Yuri Demjan. He drove fast, handling the car well but impatiently as if he might intimidate it into going faster and the cars around it slower. Demjan is a big bear of a man, a Ukrainian orthopedic surgeon that SARA has brought to the US for extra training, particularly in scoliosis correction.

At the Regional Children's Hospital he charged through his morning consultations: a little girl with a burn-scarred scalp, a boy with a badly broken leg he had operated on earlier, another boy with a sunken chest and finally a Svetlana Perminova, a 18-year-old Russian girl with an asymmetrical chest. A year before she had had her scoliosis corrected at Shriner's Hospital in Erie, Pennsylvania with SARA funding. Projects like this, that find and help pay for people like Svetlana to have surgeries that can both save their lives or, especially in a case like her's, completely alter the quality of it, are a large part of what SARA does. Rev. Szylagi and I went back a few weeks later to visit her in the hospital. She was smiling, sitting with her mother, a little shy about her English but happy and eager to talk about how her life would be different now. "Look at her," said Szylagi enthusiastically, "She is a beautiful girl but before, before this surgery and especially before coming to Shriner's, she couldn't stand up straight, she was in pain. Now she has the confidence to go out in the world, find a job, go to school, have a family." And it was true. The difference between the photos of her a year before, her thin body twisted and bent, and the undeniably beautiful and confident girl who sat in front of me and talked in halting English, was incredible. I thought, as well, that her's was only one of hundreds and hundreds of surgeries and other medical procedures around the world that SARA has taken a hand in making possible--that hundreds of Svetlanas now had chances at normal lives because men like Dr. Demjan had trained in the US and brought their knowledge home.

We changed into scrubs and were soon into the first surgery, the boy with the sunken chest. The operation was quick and efficient. The patient was put under, the operating field was sterilized and isolated and two incisions were made on either side of his chest. Curved metal bars were inserted from one incision to the other, flipped with special wrenches and the chest thus expanded.

I had not slept well the night before and towards the end of the first surgery I began to fade. The thing with surgery pictures, unless you are documenting a specific procedure for medical people, is that after a while they pretty much look alike--masked people of various heights arranging themselves in a tableaux around a big green sheet with a small square of bloody flesh at the center.

The operating room itself was separated but its door opened onto a prep room with a door open to the outside. I went out on the balcony there and sat down on a mouldering canvas stretcher and promptly fell asleep with Leica's dangling from my neck. They finished the boy and found me snoring on a Russian military stretcher there on the balcony on a gently raining day.

"We find you a room to sleep," said Yuri, "Next surgery long."
"Thank-you," I replied.
"You want we send you girl?" he said, laughing and grinning.
"Make it two girls and a bottle of vodka," I shot back, not to be intimidated by a little Russian leg-pulling.
"Ha ha! You want big girls?" he said and stretched his burly arms out to a span that even in jest was terrifying.

A silent Russian nurse made up a hospital bed for me with fresh sheets. She left and I lay back on a nicely plumped pillow and I read from a copy of The Lord of the Rings that I had brought with me. I had just finished The Council of Elrond when I fell fast asleep to strange dreams. I was awakened by a different, equally silent nurse who led me to the balcony. Yuri was in the parking lot, "Surgery finished quick. C'mon, c'mon, we go. Time to eat."

And thus began, quite fittingly, my month in Ukraine, always a little tired, always rushing from one place to another and always, just around the corner, another meal.

The Death of the American Dream

2008-08-02T20:27:00.002-05:00

Write an essay on this subject and I will publish it here...

LUND--It is getting onwards towards late up here in Ultima Thule. That's what the Romans called it, this place of ice-gnawing savages far, far out of the reach of the civilized world. Now the local Nazi wannabees like the term. I suppose it does sound cool and Conan. No darkies would dare live in a place called sumpin' like that or whatever their twisted little brains might imagine. But I don't care much about them Nazzees anyhoo. What we're talking about tonight ladies and gentlemen and gentlefolk of all persuasions is THE AMERICAN DREAM. I have been reading the collection of Hunter Thompson's letters and his never finished book of that title. The damn thing is that book is the summation of everything he wrote. It is the question. It is a life work and fitting that it was never summed up in a book simply titled that. The question is too big.

But it is a question worth asking. What is the American dream? As I see it it was the greatest experiment in freedom and democracy ever to take place and, in ways, resulted in the best and most free society ever to exist in the history of humankind. But somewhere along the way we have lost our way. I hesitate to write more as I have been too influenced as of late with Mr. Thompson's inimitable style which is not my own and should never be imitated despite the temptation to do such.

I was debating this tonight with my Swede. Her idea, and I apologize if I misquote her, is that the American dream is the ability to, with ones gun and personal strength and fortitude, defend one's family and personal belongings, to kill whoever it is that might take those away, be it Indians, Cattle Barons, Evil Railroad men or garden variety thugs, perverts and serial killers. And then to be LEFT ALONE. If one wants to also protect and or help one's neighbors then that is fine and good but one is under no such obligation. And that, pretty much is the American dream... According to a Swede. And I can't all in all disagree but I don't think that is all.

So what is the American dream? How was it killed? Was it? Or did it just die of neglect? I want your opinions.

Map of the Area

2008-07-25T10:24:00.003-05:00

LUND--These are two pictures of a map of the general area I was in in Transcarpathia. They were on the wall of a classroom in a school we were touring. The closer up of the two has also been added by Jesse, along with two photos, as another image on my website's homepage. Go there and click refresh until you see it!

The Faces of Transcarpathia: First Slide Show Movie

2008-07-24T16:59:00.005-05:00

LUND--I have been working on the photos. This is the first usage of the photos and sound. All of these photos are (pretty poor) commercial scans of photos taken with a Leica M6ttl and a 50mm Summicron lens. The sound I recorded with my Røde NTG2 shotgun mike on the Panasonic DVC60 at an elder's house outside of Nagydobrovdyn, Ukraine, Transcarpathia of old women singing a traditional folk hymn. The photos were taken at numerous locations

We Arrive At an Orphanage Late at Night

2008-07-18T05:01:00.010-05:00

NAGYDOBRONY--It was late when we arrived at the orphanage run by Kotko where we would live for the next two weeks. The orphanage, which houses some 80 or so girls, is on a self-sustaining compound on the edge of the village of Nagydobrony. There is an extensive system of fields and greenhouses, a bee farm, fruit orchards, cattle and swine and fowl and an artificial lake where fish are raised. Of course none of this was visible in the early morning, only the well lit dining room with guest rooms overhead that Kotko rents out to various tour and relief groups passing through or working in the area.

I suppose I would describe Kotko as a local businessman, entrepreneur and humanitarian with a strong interest in raising the standard of living in Transcarpathia. He is tall, somewhere in his sixties I would guess, never without dark glasses and sporting a white brush cut that blends the personal styles of Leonid Brezhnev and Billy Idol. If viewed without his usual smile he might look, if not sinister, then powerful and not-to-be-crossed in the Russian manner. I would guess that, in fact, he ought not be crossed, but in my observation and from the reports of others who have worked with him for years he is honest and takes the assistance given him and multiplies it manyfold using the widely varied resources he has marshaled together. To quote Dr. Mettens, "Give Kotko $200 and he'll easily turn it into $1,000 or more of practical assistance."

Kotko (left) speaks with the Ukrainian Colonel in charge of the local border gaurds.

Among other methods, he obviously uses the rich farmland itself to multiply the funds. I have heard Transcarpathia (which is now Ukraine but has been four countries within living memory) described as a place that simply, quite literally, has no money. A place where much of the food to be eaten by a family is directly produced by that family. Again, in the words of Dr. Mettens, "imagine having to think about what you are going to eat six months from now." Among other things, it puts into sharp focus the lie that the Ukrainian famine of the early 30s was anything but terror. For the experienced and industrious farmers, living in a land rich in everything from grain to livestock to fruits and vegetables it would take years of terrible harvests to approach the deadly famines of the 30's.

Kotko stands beside a monument in a churchyard to those murdered and disappeared under Stalin. These monuments are common. There is one in nearly every village, usually in the churchyard. They put into perspective the scale of Stalin's destruction, when you count 50, 60, 80 names from a village that might have 500 inhabitants. As well, it is worth considering that Transcarpathia was not as severely hit as the rest of Ukraine.

So there, in a pool of light in the middle of the night darkened farmlands we ate a late supper, unpacked, drank a few good and cold Ukrainian beers and began getting to know one another. Already, and I would not be proved wrong, it seemed like a particularly good group. Dentists and Doctors and Nurses and Ministers and a few with no easy classifications such as Ernie and young musician Chris Lawrence on his first time overseas that often do even more than the specific professionals to provide perspective and balance to such a group.

Chris Lawrence (left) talks to Rev. Steven Szilagyi in the Russian mini-van

I was about to go to bed when I was told to grab my cameras. The baking has begun. I have never been one to turn down baking--or at least its product--so I followed to the back where a modern bakery had been started, providing bread both for the orphanage as well as to sell in the area. There I watched and filmed as the dough was kneaded and formed into loaves and I wished it was a little later, for the warm smells were making my hungry again.

Over the Border

2008-07-16T06:39:00.003-05:00

TRANSCARPATHIA/UKRAINE--We left Budapest and traveled East across the great plain of Hungary towards the Ukrainian border. We sped down the good highways, stopping for dinner in the late afternoon at a shelter for the sick and for the family's of the ill who need a place to stay while their loved ones are being treated. We met a young boy with a bad cancer and he took my photo while I took his and he seemed very happy and very brave and very full of hope that we, that someone, might do something.

It soon was dark as we continued towards the border. Long lines of cars and trucks were stopped, waiting to be searched. I felt an instinctive fear there. Too many years, I suppose, of spy novels and movies with tense scenes at places that looked like this. There were the tall, grim-faced blonde soldiers in strange camouflage, a certain blocky, monumental feeling to the dark buildings with bright-lit spots of cyrillic writing, but we went through quickly because of the connections SARA has worked on for years.

And then it was dark. We crossed the border into deep shadow. Most of what we could see was only that lit by the car's headlamps, a twisted sign here, a darkened lot or field. It was the kind of dark one usually only finds deep in the woods but here we were passing through silent towns. The roads became pitted and crumbled as soon as we entered Ukraine and the drivers began the familiar zig zag navigation of driving in a country without the funds for infrastructure repair. Above us were stars.

Onward to Ukraine

2008-07-16T03:43:00.001-05:00

BUDAPEST— There was a bright yellow half-moon over Budapest when I landed a minute after midnight. I have had a lot of experience closing up my house and getting a ride to the airport and going away, hoping that perhaps I would meet the love of my life or at least a brief approximation of her. I had a lot of experience leaving a failed or failing or otherwise impossible relationship. I had no experience leaving a woman I loved, who I had never left before since finally I found her again and I was scared. I was nervous about a lot of things. I was working on a major project again for the first time since El Salvador, almost exactly a year before. I would be working with the same relief group but almost all new people, in a country I had never been to, in a language I spoke none of. But it was the leaving of Lena that frightened me despite all her reassurances. But the day finally came and I was ready and she was gentle and loving and when she finally drove me to the Malmo airport in the bright Swedish evening I didn’t feel so bad, just restless to go a little bit so I could begin to get it over with and come back. It was a feeling I didn’t like much as it interfered a little with my own self-image of an independent man who has previously put his work and travels and adventures over any woman.

She saw me to the metal detectors and when I was through I waved and waved as I watched her finally walk away, turning back to see me there until finally she turned one more time and waved in return and then was gone through the outer doors and I was alone.

The plane touched down on the moon-bright runway, two minutes into morning. I was meeting a Hungarian man named Csaba who worked with the SARA group. That is all I knew about him other than the picture he had e-mailed me. He had a sign with my name on it and we got in his car and we drove into early-morning Budapest. We stopped and ate some Hungarian pancakes, more of a crepe, filled with ewe-cheese curds and green olives. Csaba (Cha-Bah), a slim, neatly mannered man in his 40s is a plastic surgeon who SARA sent to Cincinnatti for special training in burn and trauma reconstruction. After eating he took me to his friend’s Tomas and Bebe’s (Elizabeth) apartment, where he had arranged for me to stay. All but Bebe were asleep and she again offered me food and drink and I think I hurt her feelings a little when all I wanted was a water but she let it go at that and showed me to my room. I slept hard and long and around noon Csaba came back and he and Bebe and I walked up to the long hill beginning near their apartment to the memorial of freedom, a monumental statue of a woman. It is irreverently called the “big can-opener” because of the scythe-like wreath she holds over her head but is very much a matter of pride to the Hungarians. Bebe left us soon after and we continued our walk through the city, seeing things through his eyes, small details and Hungarian perspectives Lena and I had missed on our visit to that city a month before.

That evening I showed “News From El Salvador: The Children of the Mangroves” to my host family, including their children and it was a good moment to see and show the lives of the Salvadorans so far away and to attempt to answer questions about them and their country.

In the morning Csaba picked me up again and we drove to the airport. Soon the SARA team was coming out of passport control with the usual suitcases filled with donated supplies and medicines. I greeted one old friend, Ernie Hollenbecker from Wappakaneta, Ohio whom I had spent time with twice before in El Salvador. Ernie is always a joy to have on a trip, his joyful irreverence always adding the right degree of humor to what, on these missions, can at times be an overdose of caring and sharing and tragic poverty. The rest were new to me. I had been in e-mail contact with a few, Drs. Mettens and Mikesell and had briefly, I think, met a few at SARA meetings in Columbus, Ohio, but knew none but Ernie. So we loaded up the two vans and headed East and North, across the great plains of Hungary towards the Ukrainian border.

Return From Transcarpathia

2008-07-11T08:43:00.000-05:00

LUND—The last day came as it always does. That night there was an incredible storm over Transcarpathia. The power was knocked out almost immediately. Arpad and I stood on the porch while the rain blew in on us and the lightening came down so fast as the storm’s center approached that it was like some weird and disorienting strobe light. I drank some of the Isabella wine a local vintner had given us and we spoke of life and family. I told him of how I missed my parents and my friends, how strange it was to have moved across the ocean, far away from those people who made me. He talked, and had talked about the closeness of the Hungarian family. How he, as a minister, was, whatever happened, committed to staying in the area where he could trace his family roots back to the 15th century. We said goodnight and I finished the last bit of packing by flashlight and went to bed while the storm crashed on outside.

I woke early. Power was back on but I couldn’t get the Internet to load but Lena knew when my plane was supposed to arrive. A little before 0700 we got in the van and drove to the Hungarian border. We were there an hour or so while the guards went through everything in the cars and trucks in front of us. Smuggling cigarettes and liquor from Ukraine is a big business. A carton of smokes costs around three dollars, a liter of vodka or other spirits often less. The guard had me open my bags and made a cursory search and then we were on the road again. In the city of Nyiregyhaza I bought a ticket to Budapest and found, much to my delight, that it stopped at Ferihegy airport. I had thought I would have to take the train into the city center, far from the airport, and take an expensive cab back. The three or so hour train ride was pleasant enough, my car not even half-full, plenty of leg room and big windows that showed the rich farmland of the Great Hungarian Plain flashing by, mile after mile of flat fields, just harvested wheat fields, golden brown like a summer-tanned girl, vast fields of sunflowers just come into bloom, high green corn and enormous orchards. The stops were brief, just long enough for people to get on and off and by around 1300 I was at Ferihegy 1. The terminal could be reached by a covered walkway over the highway. I envied other travelers and their slim backpacks. I was humping over 100 lbs. of gear but it didn’t matter much, it wasn’t far and I was in no hurry. My plane didn’t leave until 1930. So I got inside, found a nice cart to wheel my bags around on, bought a bottle of blessedly uncarbonated water and an expensive National Geographic special edition on modern China and settled in on an outside bench to wait until check-in. I tried to call Lena but somehow my phone was dead though I thought I had charged it the night before.

I was ¾ of the way through the excellent magazine when a slim, dark-haired girl who had been sitting nearbye came back out with an annoyed expression on her face and a tall glass of beer in her hand. The beer looked good but I didn’t feel much like spending he money and so went back to China for a while. In a bit a tall British man walked out and began chatting her up. Since the Americans had left Transcarpathia a few weeks before I had heard almost no English except Arpad’s and had mostly been in a linguistic isolation chamber so it was pleasant to hear a language I understood. I was a little surprised when the dark-haired girl answered the man in excellent English with a slight but familiar accent. I had simply taken her for Hungarian but I overheard her say her plane to Stockholm had been delayed. I decided to go check mine and then the day really began to grind on. My plane was pushed back until 2130 and a bit later it would get delayed another hour. I came back and decided I didn’t want to spend the next hours in China or Russia (I had recently begun War and Peace) so I joined their conversation. “Where did you get that beer,” I asked, “My plane to Malmo just got put back.” They told me and I went and got one and came back out. “Cheers,” said everyone, “Might as well drown or sorrows.”

The girl actually had been there longer than I had and her flight left after a bit so the Englishman and I continued talking, trading off buying rounds and watching each other’s gear. He was waiting for his friends to arrive in several hours and then they would be taking a hired car to a big music festival in Serbia. The time passed, as it does with a good, casual conversation. I let him copy the small Hungarian lexicon I had acquired and taught him the few basic words I had learned. We spoke of travel and music and then got into politics and global warming and American hegemony for a moment but on mutual agreement decided that was a bit heavy and it would be better to speak of breasts and beer and bands and that was a lot more fun. His friends arrived and began to get organized. I took their picture and gave a couple cards out, wished them luck and gave a little advice to one couple in the group who was meeting the rest later after spending a couple days in Budapest. It was nice to be a good representative of my country, traveled, politically aware, linguistically competent, and they asked me to go on with them. “Hell, mate, make a documentary about us going to the festival!?” And for a brief moment I thought about it, “Nah, I have a woman I need to get back to. If I was still single I’d be putting my bags in with yours.”

But the truth is I did want to get back. And a lot of that was true. I was not single anymore and I missed my girl and I missed our home and that is where I wanted to be, not tramping through the mud at a big rock show in Serbia even if Manu Chao and Juliet and the Licks and a lot of other good bands were playing. So I said good bye to them and went through check in and waited in the airless waiting room pressed in by a bunch of Italians waiting to go to Milan and a bunch of Germans for Frankfurt and a load of Swedes for Malmo and by the time we finally boarded my temper and nerves were beginning to finally wear thin and just a little bit now I didn’t want to go back to Sweden, I wanted to go to where they spoke English, spoke it all the time. I didn’t want to be in a linguistic bubble any more, not even a little bit.

But I found my seat and settled in then was asked to move so a family could sit together. So I did that and we took off and I don’t know if I slept or not but soon we were landing, at a bit of an angle, bumping off the runway and back down and I gritted my teeth a little at the incompetent flying. We deplaned and I got my bag and walked out and Lena wasn’t there. I looked around, circled the crowd and she still wasn’t there. It was after 0100. I walked out and there was a bus, probably specially carried over, going to Malmo and Lund. I bought a ticket and settled in again for the long ride that stopped five places in Malmo before finally at the central station in Lund. It was raining. I shouldered my bags and humped them through the dark and silent early morning city. I was tired, very tired and each step made me increasingly furious. I stopped for a while and tried to cool down debating whether to lett it go or to say some pretty terrible things I imagined to Lena, that I didn’t care how damn late it was, that I would have waited. I finally got to the door and punched the code. A flight above I heard the door open and she was in the door, her eyes flooded with tears. The sight of that cooled my anger a little but I also thought, damnit, I don’t look that bad, just wet and dirty and tired and about crushed by the bags.
I got up and she took first one camera bag then the other. I shrugged out of my pack and she gently helped me out of my weighed-down jacket with its full, heavy pockets and then wrapped her arms around me.

“My father is dead.”

And suddenly I was crying too.

Leaving, Well, Yes, On A Presumably Jet-Powered Plane and All That

2008-06-09T18:30:00.002-05:00

LUND--The sky is now at 0130 as dark as it is going to get. My bags are packed and I am about ready to go. Backpack closed and empty day-pack strapped down over it. All the batteries are charged for the Panasonic and the Sony and the Leica. There is plenty of film for the other one. I have tapes and they are bringing me more. We had dinner out and some funny random conversations. Now Lena is asleep on the couch, keeping me silent company in this ersatz ready-room and I appreciate that very much for she has to work tomorrow morning and I am about done, manana I just get to wrap up inconsequential details and fret.

I went to class today because there was a field trip. On it I met a guy from Costa Rica, married to a Svensk Kvinna, moved here three weeks ago. We spoke of Sweden and Central America and a lot of the rest of the world along with Anders, one of the teachers, a good man and a good friend of Lena's friend.

I will be leaving this place, on my own, for the first time. I have never spent a night away from Lund before, after moving here, without Lena. I am not shutting the door on my house to leave it cool and silent until I return. I am leaving a woman I want to return to. When I come back it will not smell still and dark.

We went out for dinner. I decided I wanted a hamburger and fries for a last meal here. I am an American. We saw funny drunk Swedes and talked to Brits. And we came home and I did the things that I have done so many times, pulling zippers and changing batteries and checking again if all the things I have to have are going with me. Passport and money, can't do anything without them. Then cameras and their accessories. Then minor things like clothing and toothbrush. So it all seems to be there. It was all mostly packed anyway. And then I went to bed.

...

2008-06-05T18:20:00.003-05:00

LUND--This was my last day in class. My teacher sent me home early because, well, I fell asleep in front of my computer and she knew it was my last day. It was done with no malice. In fact she was quite solicitous about the state my my stress level. She sent me home for my own good. I tried to take all my checked-out books and CDs back to the library but it was closed. Then I went to Burger King and bought two 10 crown hamburgers. Then I sat on the Patio of the Olde Bull and drank comparatively cheap Fosters and wrote a very long and complicated essay on my time in Swedish class that I very much would like to write down again on this computer bloggy thing. But not now. And then I called Jake and he was in a meeting and then called Pat and he was about to leave on his motorcycle and then I called Rob and his phone was about to die and he was at work anyway because it is six hours earlier and Lena was at a newspaper work party. But then I called Jake back and we planned a trip to the best restaurants of Paris and talked of every other thing. I called him back at Seattle's, where we met and which, they say, is going to close. He put me on the phone with the people who are always there and were. They said hello. We spoke of Swedish film and of Indiana Jones and of the things we are going to try our damn best to do. And SKYP kept cutting out and we were about done anyway. So I sat and wrote a while and then Lena called and was on the bus home from Malmo and so I stopped writing, picked up my camera and went out the door to the station to meet her.

A Tabletop In A Swedish Grandmother's House

2008-06-05T13:56:00.003-05:00

Imiemigration

2008-05-31T19:25:00.002-05:00

LUND--"How do you feel about going back to the States, Matt?"

"The time for reflection has passed, frankly. Now I am just going."

And that is the truth. Whatever form a trip may have, a return to the familiar or an adventure into the unknown, all the fantasy and anxiety takes place in the weeks and months and days before. But then, at some moment, you are faced with the fact that your bags are packed and the plane leaves in the morning. The events to come, the closer they come, lose significance in the face of the practical details. I don't, in fact, care much what the hell I am going to do this summer or what I am going to say to my Mom or what the first things I will do upon return will be because those will happen. What I need to do right now is make sure I get to the airport and that I have my passport with me. All the rest of it? All of that is going to be and now, since I have entrusted myself to a big aluminum tube with wings, is out of my hands.

And as I write this Matt is probably packing. He had better do it soon anyway because the train for the Copenhagen airport leaves, at the latest for him, in seven hours. One of the first friends I made in this country, and my only fellow countryman, is going back home to New York City. We were printing photos in the community center darkroom the other day and while they were fixing and washing we sat outside and talked of the United States and of Sweden, what they meant in relation to each other, the all-you-can-eat buffets we missed and how good it is to be an American and how good as well it is not to be in the US. But it is easy to love where you are when you know your ticket home is only days away.

It is possible, a joke perhaps, but one I hope he carries through on, that when his family picks him up at Newark the first thing they will do is take him to IKEA and there, after adventuring out in the world, he can take his people on a mini tour of Sweden. "And these, Dad, are kottbullar, we call 'em meatballs, but try a little lingonberry jam on them. No really, it's good..."

Today was a good day. Lena and I hiked around a lake. The trail was well marked at first, Swedishly marked. There were orange paint blazes on every third tree along a well-worn path. There was little danger of wandering off and being eaten by a random grouse or badger. But after a few miles the orange trail (still well marked) began leading off into the countryside, away from the lake. We found a farmhouse. Lena laughed at my hesitance to approach it. "Don't worry, no one will shoot you, this is Sweden," she said. "In America," I replied, "A lot of guns would live there..."

We walked around the barn and an older man was cutting boards on a sawhorse. There was some barking and his medium-sized black poodle rushed us and began savagely licking our hands. "Oh, yes, just walk down my field and you'll get back to the lake and the trail," said the old farmer. That was not the end, the adventure, in fact, was only beginning, but pleasantly trail-worn we returned home. Lena's friend Elin came over, at a loss while fabulously between parties. We had dinner and champagne with her.

Then after a bit Matt came over. We spoke of space and exploration, the future of the human race, spoke of many things, said our farewells, figured train schedules for the morning. New York City, United States of America. When I go to bed tomorrow he will be back in the USA. And I can't even think much of what that will be like. His trip, not mine. Right now, as I write, all he can think about is making sure a bag is packed and that he makes it to the train on time. Me? I don't have a ticket home. I don't know when I will. So, for me, the US is a fantastical land, far away, across the sea. I hear the streets are paved with gold. Someday I will go there.

Night and Day

2008-05-27T17:43:00.004-05:00

LUND--It is 12:44 a.m. and the sky outside is a deep azure blue. It is dark out but there is light in the sky. It is night but that qualification, up here, is no longer, for this time of year, exact. I have, as compared to times past, been mostly to bed rather early--by midnight or before most times. But last Friday I was still awake at half past three and at that hour it was the beginning of the dawn. At after 10 p.m. there is still light in the sky. I can only imagine what it is like farther north. We are entering the hours and days where the distinction between night and day, dark and light ceases to have exact meaning. The light here is strange and, I think, leads to strangeness. Dark, so dark for so long and more than just dark but gray and gray and mist and gray and then light of absolute clarity, hot sun with cool shadows, light through the hours of night and a sky that never goes completely black. It is strange in the northern lands.

New Adventures

2008-05-27T09:23:00.004-05:00

LUND--I will be in Ukraine in a few weeks. My information on the project is still a little hazy but I have the following, sent from the SARA group: "We will be "headquartered" in Nagydobryn (Velekidobryn), will certainly go to Mukachevo (Munkacs) and probably Uzhgorad (Ungvar) plus a miriad of small villages".

It is strange to think of the twists and turns of life. It is true that I had never forgotten Lena after meeting her all those years ago in Honduras. My heart, I suppose, always held out some hope that we might meet again and, in my obsession with packing I had often imagined what I would take were I ever to go see her in Sweden and what I would wear there and when I got off the plane to see her. I once had a pair of pants I thought would be perfect and was inordinately upset when, during the Ohio winter, I slipped on the ice and tore them at the knee. That being said I can't, in all honesty, as much as the die-hard Romantic in me would like to, say that, "Yes, I always knew I would be here. I always knew we would meet again and that our last kiss in Honduras was only the last for a while." But I did hope and was ready to take the chance were it to ever--and when it did--present itself.

But two years ago, more or less, I did not think that in two years I would be living in Sweden, finished with a documentary film on El Salvador, and off soon to places with names like Nagydobryn, Mukachevo and Uzgorad to film another. I did know I needed a break from Central America, that I had been there too much, too often, and that I either needed to spend time elsewhere or I needed to commit to a long term presence there. Ultimately, however, I needed a break from those lands. I was not liking what in fact I loved. I was not seeing there with the clarity I wanted to and that, I felt, was both shortsighted and potentially dangerous.

I hope, very much, to return to Central America. I would like to make another, more intimate portrait of the lives of the curileros of El Espino for one thing. After my second trip I traveled home overland from Honduras to Ohio. I want to go the other way now. I want to photograph the scenes underwater off Utila and to travel through the rarely visited central highlands of Honduras as well into Olancho and the Mosquitia. I want to climb more mountains in Guatemala, visit the islands of Lake Nicaragua and many more things beside.

But now I want to head south from Sweden, not Ohio, head south and east into the old Carpathian mountains and the plains of Ukraine, to use my cameras to tell stories about places new to me. And then, perhaps, when I am ready, I can return to Meso America with a fresh eye and a refreshed spirit and see the beauty there all anew.

May Day

2008-05-27T02:56:00.004-05:00

LUND--Valborg is on the last day of April which, of course, makes it the day before the first day of May. May Day, International Workers Day, the day big tanks and braces of rockets used to thunder in endless hordes through Red Square in Moscow to show the might of the Soviets to the world and make the capitalist running dogs tremble in their imperialist loafers. Well, of course we know now that a lot of those tanks and rockets were sent back a few times for another pass and that the mighty Red Army was underpaid, low on morale and fueled mostly on vodka. But here in Sweden the red star of communism is alive and well and not just recycled for its kitsch appeal.

Valborg was sunny but the next day was full of rain. We stood and watched the leftists speak on one of Lund's squares. The more radical black-flagged anarchists spoke at the train station. We stood in the rain under our umbrellas and I felt like a member of the Central Committee reviewing the troops on May Day... except I was sober and hadn't sent anyone to a Gulag in a very long time.

Valborg

2008-05-22T04:06:00.009-05:00

LUND--As I walked towards the city park I felt as if I had been caught in some human-sucking gravity well that acted with particular force on people carrying ice-chests, cases of drinks and grilling paraphanalia. The park is partially bounded by a high, grassy berm that is the remains of the city's defensive medieval earthworks. I reached its crest and before me was a stunning sight. The grassy, flowered park was gone, invisible beneath a seething, shouting sea of Swedes. Columns of savory smoke rose from scores of points. Hundreds of portable stereos competed with numerous bands and DJs and the voices and shouts of thousands of people celebrating the triumph over the long winter. Beer cans and champagne bottles glinted in the sun that had suddenly, in the last week or so, broken out over this southern outpost in the mysterious northlands the Romans once called Ultima Thule.

I unlimbered my camera and put on the telephoto hoping its compression effect would give a better sense of the throngs than a wide angle and prepared to enter the fray when a middle-aged man walking his dogs stopped me. "Over there is a good picture," he said, grinning. I looked to where he was pointing, to a short line of young men waiting to urinate in the bushes. I raised an eyebrow. The man smiled again and said, "There is a picture of Prime Minster Rhienfeldt there. The sign says, 'You piss on us, we'll piss on you!'" Which, indeed it did. Back in the bushy cove it was stapled to a short stake, the neo-con PM grinning as his face dripped with recycled beer.

Within the field the city had, in the last days, fenced off the flowers and covered the rose beds in sturdy boxes. These now not only saved the roses from certain annihilation but provided some nice, high, seating. Many groups had brought in old couches, coffee tables even, and set up their own outdoor living rooms. Most sat on blankets and on the fringes there were tug-o-war competitions and dance areas. Students splashed in the fountains. This was Valborg day in Lund.

Valborg is the last day of April and is celebrated in different ways throughout Sweden. Usually, after a day of revelry, it climaxes in the old ceremonial fires of pagan times, traditionally made from the winter's deadfall to mark the beginning of the warm months.

I ran into Calixto, a recent immigrant from Cuba and one of my classmates from Swedish for Immigrants school. When I first met him in the winter he told me how much he liked Sweden. I guess that even the dark and cold can't repress the feeling of freedom. "If I didn't get here," he told me, "I was going to swim to Miami!" Like most Cubans I have met, Calixto has an irrepressable sense of humor. He is in constant motion, talking, laughing, sometime singing and half-dancing when he is not actually dancing. "Andrew!" he said, in his island accented English/Spanish/Swedish mix, "This is how life should be, man. Sun! Dancing! Girls not in big jackets, whew!! When he saw I only had a big camera and nothing else he offered me his beer. We stood for a while, sipping it and watching the crowds and the girls not in big jackets doing the same (though mostly not sipping).

We walked over to where a DJ was playing Reggae and Reggaton and he danced, immediately attracting a crowd. I took photos, my own rhythm, and wandered on after a while, back through the crowds, back to the old medieval wall keeping the not-so-savage sons and daughters of the Vikings safely outside the city. I paid a visit to the Prime Minister then walked home past people still flooding towards the party. Back at the apartment I stood on the balcony in the sun, feeling a little lost, feeling old, missing my friends and knowing that if Jake and Patrick and Jesse were here we would be sitting on a blanket. Not long after phone rang and it was Lena.

"Good. You answered your phone and that means you're alive."

"Yes, usually it means that."

"We just heard here at the paper that someone was killed by a bus." She named a street, one I had just been on.

We found out later that it was a girl, 23-years-old. Two young men had been playing around, pushing each other as young men do, and she was accidentally knocked into the street, in front of a passing bus. The day became a little gray.

I have debated whether to write of this, of death on a clear Spring afternoon. The irony is almost too heavy, the lessons too obvious, struck down in the flower of youth whilst all around the rebirth of life is celebrated... And there are all those barroom philosophers who raise their beery glasses and, to justify their alcoholism say, "Live for today for you never know when you might be hit by a passing bus." And it is always, inevitably, the bus they use as the metaphor for sudden death, the guise in which the reaper comes. They never say, "Drink now lads, for you never know when you might get malaria or dengue or a Katyusha rocket or an Israeli bulldozer or a tsunami. Perhaps the bus is the leviathon of the civilized world. Perhaps that is the point. That in the banal, developed world death comes secretly, closed off in a hospital ward or else from the ultimate innocuous, helpful, impersonal banality of public transportation. The bus never sets out on a mission of destruction like a roadside bomb. It is just a thing that follows a pre-planned route; a route that somehow intersects with your misfortune or inattention, someone else's foolish antics that had nothing to do with you.

Spring came to Sweden. The buses ran on time. And the sun was bright and the people happy and there was just one less young woman who would be there to dance and drink, lay on the beach and make love that summer.

Springtime in Skåne

2008-05-17T05:42:00.003-05:00

LUND--I was standing on the back balcony, looking over the apartment's back yard, letting the sun bathe my face. A door opened from the basement door below and a woman walked out pulling a large cat on a leash. The feline didn't seem particularly upset, merely disinterested. It would walk up a couple steps, stop, lay down and lick its fur. The woman finally got it into the backyard where it promptly lay down again and stretched. I was watching this little drama with some amusement when the woman looked up and saw me. Then came the surprise. She smiled, waved, and said, "Hej!"

I had been told of this phenomenon. Now it is a given that people who live in cold climes tend to liven up when the sun and warmth return--it is certainly the case in Ohio--but the Swedes seem an extreme example. They spend all winter behaving as if nothing and no one else is sharing the gray universe. Say hello to a passing stranger and they look up, startled and slightly afraid as if you might be a troll about to drag them off into the mist. I have it on good authority that it is even worse up north where the night is even longer and the temperatures colder. There, I am told, the Swedes spend those dark months staring with Nordic moroseness into their beer and brannvin and occasionally uttering depressive grunts. I also had it on good authority that as soon as the sun returns the Swedes thaw out.

The fields of Skåne are in bloom. Flowers cover cherry trees and fall like soft, pinkish rain. The leaves have unfurled on the trees, cloaking with soft green what had been skeletal forms filled with the croaking balls of raven's nests. The Swedish flag is a gold cross on a blue field and the land here mirrors that symbol in a way that seems almost embarrassingly patriotic to the undemonstrative Swedes and their low-key nationalism. But the rolling rapeseed fields of Skåne blossom in vast swaths of bright yellow making gold lines against the clear blue skies.

The Swedes respond. Not only, at times, do they randomly say cheery hellos, they even smile and laugh while sober and in public. To my surprise, the mid-May days have been more than merely warm and sunny. Some have been downright close to hot. The squares and parks and benches are covered with people eating ice-cream, talking, drinking beer. Every bar, eatery and coffee-shop has put out tables. Practically overnight Sweden transforms itself from a lightless land full of silent and dour herring-eaters moving quickly through scabrous half-light to a café society of exuberant sun-worshipers. From everywhere comes the savory smoke trails of BBQ's. There are ducks out on adventures, waddling around the city squares begging for food. Life moves from inside to out and for me it is more than just the sun; it is an affirmation that this land is more than mist and night and no amount of second-hand reports can make up for seeing a new season in a new country.

Budapest 2 (excerpt from my journal)

2008-05-17T04:38:00.003-05:00

BUDAPEST--As we walked back to the Hotel Victor Hugo the wind began to pick up, blowing over the flat plains of Pest. Dark clouds scudded across the sky, turning the golden light to a shade of oxidized lead. We rested a few hours in room 610 and lightening flashed, illuminating the darkened room in bursts of electric blue. The flashes were accompanied by long, sustained thunder, a sound I had not heard all winter up in the northlands. When we went downstairs, to go out seeking dinner, the rain was falling. The lobby was dark and the old man behind the counter sat in cloud of smoke and a pool of light from an old desk lamp. The streets, slick and dark looked more like I had imagined, a place for grim deals in the back of Ladas and Trabants, where quick bad endings happen in rain pooled alleys, a place for upturned trench-coat collars...

But at the counter Lena asked the old man if there was an umbrella we could borrow. He smiled and rummaged around for a bit and came out with a huge, two-person affair, bright red and emblazoned with the Coca Cola logo. It kept the rain of no doubt but detracted from my espionage fantasies.

We walked down the slick, black streets, through pools of orange lamp-light, to the neighborhood restaurant we had found the night before. Inside it was warm and bright, all wood and stone and brick with heavy plank tables filled with eaters and drinkers and laughter. The night before I had eaten a deep-fried filet stuffed with Camembert and Lena had had goulash. She stuck with her regimen of goulash and I opted for the cutlet, Parisian style. We both had cold Drehers and we laughed and talked and planned.

When we walked back to the Victor Hugo the rain had stopped and the streets were full of smells; plants and the river, the old buildings and their must, flowers in new bloom and the indefinable scent of a new place with its essence released by nighttime rain.

We'll Meet You In Budapest in the Lobby of the Hotel Victor Hugo...

2008-05-12T04:38:00.007-05:00

BUDAPEST—The weather was variable in southern Sweden and Lena began throwing up not long after we awoke. The night before I had gotten information that Hungary would be under a general transit strike the day we arrived. When we bought our tickets we had also paid for a ride into the city but if that would still be in effect we didn’t know. She drank a little more coffee and was sick again but we had a bus to catch so I put on the pack, shouldered my camera bag and we walked across Lund. The bus took us to Malmo Sturup airport past fields with just the first hint of Spring green under a clearing sky. Lena went to the bathroom before check in and then after we were through and she slept while we waited for our flight. At the gate she asked for special boarding, we got it and sat up front near the bathroom and she was ill again once or twice during the flight.

We landed in Budapest at Ferhigy Terminal 1 and walked out into a normal, modern airport. The people looked normal. I am not sure what we had been expecting but there was a distinct lack of chain-smoking nervous types in bad suits and slicked-back hair. Lena took a couple barf bags from the plane. We finally found a car with our airline’s sign taped in the window and the young driver had our names on a list. We were lucky to have booked since the taxis weren’t running. We waited almost an hour for the other names to show up but they never did and so he took us into the city. The cab ride in took us past crumbling Soviet block apartments that morphed into beautiful fin de siecle buildings. We passed a yard filled with Soviet military equipment: a Hind helicopter and braces of rockets and other hardware familiar from May Day parade and Afghanistan newsreels, their shapes oddly familiar and disturbing. Lena slept most of the way and I felt bad for her as she had been working very hard and had wanted this vacation very much. For a little extra the driver took us to our hotel, the Hotel Victor Hugo at 25-27 Victor Hugo Utca (Street) and we walked into the old, dingy lobby that was a strange mix of ill lighting, marble floors, Scandinavian modern furniture, cheap paneling and stale cigarette smoke all opening onto a garden.

We were meeting my High School (and long after) girlfriend Blair and her Austrian husband Chris. They had come to Europe a few weeks earlier for his parents 50th wedding anniversary. Blair had visited Budapest years before, not long after the collapse of the Soviet Union and was in love with the city. I thought that I was leading a strange life, the sound of which I had wanted very much as an adolescent, had reveled in in my extended adolescence, but now found simply strange and frightening in the normalcy it had somehow achieved. In less than a year I had been in five countries, had traveled from the mangrove jungles of El Salvador to film a documentary on child labor, had taken a brief R&R at my favorite hostel on the shores of Lake Atitlan in Guatemala and had packed up my life and moved to Sweden to be with Lena whom I had met over six years before in Honduras working on another documentary project. Since then I had been from Copenhagen, Denmark, up to Stockholm and down to the far Southern tip of Sweden at Smygehuk. Now I was introducing my Swedish fiancée to my high school sweetheart and her man in Budapest.

Blair, through a Hungarian friend, had booked our room. She and Chris had arrived the day before by train and were out when we arrived. We went to room 610 and Lena lay down to sleep, fairly sure by this time that it was a suspicious red pepper she had eaten the night before. I went down to the lobby and soon Blair and Chris walked through the door. I watched them for a while from my chair while they checked for us at the counter. It would be easy to say it was strange to see her there, in Budapest, but it was not. Though even after all these years it was strange to see her easy familiarity with another man. I had only seen her again six months before, at our 20th High School reunion, met her husband for the first time. And this was after I had had become engaged to Lena. I liked Chris and, apparently as a surprise, he seemed to like me. She told me he hadn’t liked any of her other exes. But perhaps that was the thing. I did once love his wife, did know what he had and had no illusions either way. She was a woman worth loving and now, finally, I had found another that I loved free of her so there lay no conflict and the potential for respect.

While Lena slept Chris and Blair and I walked to Café Comedienne that they had found the night before. There we had coffee and shared a crepe filled with chestnut purée and chocolate and when we returned Lena was better having finally purged the bad pepper. We took a short rest then went out and walked to Franz Lizt Utca and just off that to a little Gypsy restaurant in a basement. The place was perfect, if an almost ridiculously romantic Mitteleuropean basement restaurant. There was no menu, just goulash, a fine red house wine and violin music accompanied by a keyless piano played with mallets. If there had been spaghetti with meatballs I would have pushed one to my love with my nose. And it was good but there is a limit to romance, I suppose, when you are the only man there that has dated both women at the table. There is an odd feeling of guilt when you hold your girl’s hand in front of your ex, your married-with-a-child-ex, somewhat akin to being at a romantic dinner with your mother and her lover, not your Dad. Not exactly that, well, suffice to say it is difficult to explain…

We woke early after sleeping to night air that smelled subtly of a place you have never been. In the morning we had breakfast at a nearby café with Blair’s Hungarian friend Carolina, an elegant dancer and spent the day sightseeing, climbing this and that, walking the old streets. We went to the terror house—the former block-long headquarters of both the Nazi Gestapo and the Hungarian KGB and found it hot, the exhibits overly designed and yet still terrifying.

The order of the day was to go to a famous bathhouse. We went to Carolina’s mother’s house, a strange and magical place, fenced in and ivy-drowned in the middle of a wide city park. But Lena and I had had enough of couple’s sightseeing and decided to forgo the baths. We left them to it and walked across the city. We stopped along the way, just as it began to rain, and had a drink under the awnings of one of Franz Liszt Street’s many cafés, relaxing away from anyone else, away from Sweden, the first time and place we had really been alone together in a place neither of us had ever been before. We had been in five countries together before having that.

We had time to talk and laugh and explore a little before arriving early at a moored boat restaurant called “Spoon” and they came not long after with Carolina and her neurosurgeon husband Attila. The meal was fabulous in every way that an expensive meal ought to be, there was duck and venison and piquant sauces and a soupçon of witty conversation. We walked back from dinner and Lena began questioning Attila on the politics and history of Budapest and Hungary. He was glad to have the stage and answered thoroughly and well, giving a fascinating account of recent and near-recent political developments. We ended the night at an Irish pub. There is one everywhere. My younger brother Kendric recently went to one in Ulan Bator, Outer Mongolia and I can only regret that I wasn’t there first and it wasn’t, through some gross oversight, called Ghengis O’Khanners.

We spent a time with Blair and Chris in their room, the two girls eating a bag of foul Swedish liquorice we had brought along. Chris and I speculated that the grimly modern building across the street with one strangely glowing blue window among the dark ones was the new KGB headquarters. Then, for some time, after Lena went back to our room and Chris to bed, Blair and I talked on the balcony, continuing in this place our strange and often melancholy conversation of travel and culture, people and places we have known and those we wish to. Finally it was very late. They were leaving in the morning: a train back to Austria and their son and then a plane back to Arizona. Lena and I still had a lot of Budapest to see but my flight home, now, would be short, north, to Sweden.

II

In the morning we were alone. We rose and ate the breakfast the hotel brought to the door: boiled eggs, sausage, bread. We wandered a while through the streets, had coffee and ice cream, found a camera store with a beautiful old Leica for sale I wanted but couldn’t afford but had a nice conversation on the merits of Russian lenses with the woman proprietor. We came across a Greenpeace rally in a park with a good band playing, got a great lunch, visited the museum of Hungarian Photography and spent some time shopping and writing postcards.

In this, I think, is one of the chief joys of Budapest. You see the term “old-world charm” bandied about but this is a city that truly possesses it. There seems to be always something going on, a concert here, several thousand bicyclists here, riding to remind people to bike instead of drive. The cafés and parks are filled with people and the city with art. There seems, despite its bloody past, to be a curious sense of joy and of both gentleness and gentility.

But here and there one comes across the remnants, the hangover of the Soviets. Between stylish boutiques is the closed and dark Aeroflot office. A street-vendor sells a t-shirt that says, “KGB: Still Watching” and Attila had said that this is not mere hyperbole for the tourists. There is a beautiful and sad memorial to several hundred Jews who were shot into the river by the secret police in the form of old-fashioned, cast iron shoes lining a section of the Danube’s bank and downtown is a white plinth topped with a gleaming gold Soviet star. There are those who don’t want it torn down, not in the interests of history, but because there is a remaining and resurgent old-guard communist party. The plinth and its baleful star are fenced off to keep away vandals and, on the other side of the park, stands the US Embassy. The antique shops have dusty Red Army belts and Kalashnikov bayonets mixed with old Hungarian glass and battered Fed and Zorki and Lubitel cameras amidst Gypsy skirts.

And outside of the city is the statue park. You must take a bus there; we caught on at a central park, paying for both the trip and entrance to the outdoor museum. There, several miles on the outskirts of the city in a wind-swept field are the monumental statues to communism that had been removed from their places in the city (those that were not destroyed). You could say that they kept each other bad company, I suppose, the massive proletarian soldier, the standard-issue huge Lenin with blowing trench-coat and an outstretched hand, beckoning one to universal socialism I suppose but looking more as if demanding a hand-out. There are the somewhat abstracted old fathers, Marx and Engels, looking a bit like stern Santas and marble reliefs of happy workers clasping comradely hands, now lying on the ground, the hands separated by grass growing between the different sections. In the indubitably capitalist gift shop you can buy reproductions of Soviet posters, a mug that reads, “I like my coffee black and my communism red,” a CD of revolutionary music titled, “The Best of Communism” as well as various movies, cigarette lighters, hip flasks and other red kitsch. I liked the whole thing. The monuments to oppression keeping themselves company in a suburban lot, the commercialization of what had once been taken so seriously and that, as you stood in front of Vladimir Ilyich’s bronze bulk in such a banal setting, you could still feel a frisson of his and their lasting evil.

III

The last day we wandered some more and went to Basilica where enshrined in a gold reliquary, is the hand of St. Stephan. Standing next to it was a morose old man, chanting in a heavy accent, “Turn on light, 100 Forint. Turn on light, 100 Forint.” I waited until someone else paid and took what pictures I could of the shriveled thing, reflecting on a grotesquely sweet story told in the brochure. To mark some anniversary or other they hand brought the arm bone of St. Stephen’s wife from where it lies in another church. They let the two rest together, arm in hand for a time, nearly a 1,000 years since they were last together in life. We took the elevator and some stairs to the top of the Basilica then for an open-air, 360-degree view of Budapest. Across the rooftops cranes rise everywhere, speaking to the city’s rebuilding and ongoing, if slow, rebirth.

We dressed for dinner and went out, planning at first to go back to the gypsy restaurant, just the two of us. But we had already been there and picked one of the bistros on Franz Liszt Utca instead, settling in the fabulous repast. Lena had venison tenderloin with gooseberry sauce and a rosemary-apple cake and I the duck steak with grilled fruit – pears, apples, grapes and oranges – with a wild rice risotto. With it we drank a 2006 Takler Cabernet Franc.

We had taken the subway into the center from our hotel, using the little book of punch-cards Blair had left with us. To go back we had one more each. We dutifully punched it, took our first train then began looking for our second. A tall uniformed man asked us for our tickets as we were looking. We pulled them out and showed them.

“You need another ticket. You didn’t punch another one before coming in here,” he said.

“I’m sorry, where were we supposed to punch this one?”

“Now you must pay fine, $6,000 Forint each.”

“We don’t have $12,000 Forint.” I replied.

“We haven’t even changed trains,” said Lena, “We’re not even close to one.”

“It is the system.” He said, sounding like a ghost from the bad old past, “You must get money or I call the police.”

We argued for a while and finally he sent Lena off with vague directions to a ATM. We stood ackwardly for a while and I kept on him, letting him know I though we were being cheated and that this had spoiled our otherwise perfect impression of his city. He, in turn, kept muttering, “It is the system. I give you receipt for fine. Lena was a long while coming back and finally we went up to the top of the stairs. A while later she appeared in a high rage. He took one look at her, realized he had sent a woman off into the night perhaps, realized perhaps that we had not been trying to cheat and he let us go with a classic, “Uh, well, don’t do it again.

We walked back, cooling down, slightly shaky, aware now just a bit of remaining unpleasant undercurrents. Neither of us had ever been in a subway anywhere in the world with such a system. Late, then, we sat at a neighborhood bar, had a last Dreher beer and talked of our time and, definitely, what we would do when, not if, we came back.

Ze Desk, sometimes zay must be cleaned

2008-04-14T04:23:00.002-05:00

I do believe that a constantly cleaned desk is a sign of mental illness. On the other hand there comes a time when work-flow is impeded by, well, having everything you need buried under something else. And my other desk, behind me, had become nothing more than a catchall for papers and books and as I have been using my OL (Original Laptop aka Hermes Baby typewriter) for certain aspects of my projects I needed a place to put it.

Desk Evolution

2008-04-09T03:57:00.001-05:00

The film is getting close to being finished. When it is I will organize all this stuff so I can begin a new collage of black and silver junk...

A Bicycle

2008-04-02T20:04:00.002-05:00

LUND--I bought a bicycle today and in ways it feels for the first time like I have arrived, joined the ranks of peddling Scandinavians, but more than that it feels like freedom. There is a boyish excitement in owning a shiny new bike. I haven't had a new bike in 25 years or a little more. That one was a dark red Nishiki 12 speed racing bike that I got through my Scout Troop. We all worked for and got matching bikes and then went on an incredible, cross-country trip through the California Redwoods to the Oregon border. My first bike was a bright yellow Peugot 10 speed that my father found and fixed for me, taught me to ride and led me on adventures.

This bike, as yet formally named, is a used Crescent 3 Speed thumb-shift. The previous owner repainted the frame a glossy black. The fenders and handlebars are chrome. It has a generator powered head-light and a little bell you operate by deftly spinning. It has a new seat and a new chain, a front-wheel hand brake and a rear-wheel back-peddle brake.

I think of the book 016 gave me to read once, "A Boy's Life," literature I would call American Magic Realism. The character has a bike that, to him, is magic as all bikes should be to all boys. It takes him on all the adventures of boyhood, it is friend and race car, fighter plane and transport to places farther than foot can carry in the time one has free.

I imagine, right now, the same for myself and for the Black Beauty beside me as I sit in the square and write this. On her I can fly through the Swedish countryside, think about the farther fjords of Norway or the nearby plains of Denmark. And if, someday, I become too restless, I can just coast downhill from here to Capetown, end of the line. Unless I take a left in Lichtenstein that is...

Things I Like About Sweden

2008-03-20T15:38:00.013-05:00

Now I know I have written a lot of negative stuff but winter is never my best time and winter is particularly dark up here but Sweden isn't all bad, not even half bad, not by a long shot. So here, written down on a sunny day, drinking a "Three Hearts" beer on a park bench in front of the "Systembolaget" (liquor store) with the rest of the homeless drunks, I came up with a list of some of the things I like about Sweden:

• The women are beautiful. Like, all of them.

• The butter. They make the best butter. It doesn't get too hard, it tastes perfect, it can spread right out of the fridge without being oily, damn it's good butter.

• Everyone speaks English. Everyone. Americans like to flagellate themselves with their linguistic incompetence and say things like, "Well, yeah, Europeans speak a lot of languages." But it isn't that. try speaking English in any other country and see what happens. Here, everyone, and I mean everyone under about 70, speaks more or less fluent English. People over 80 speak some and have an opinion on "Cops." Frankly it's a little creepy since they speak English so well it comes as something of a surprise that they're also fluent in a language you probably don't understand.

• How Swedish is, in fact, so much like English. Many of the words are either the same word spelled slightly differently (and often more logically without the tricky English spelling) or are archaic English/Germanic words that if you are any sort of language and literature buff you'll recognize immediately, ie; skriver=to write.

• In Lund, at least, you can sit on a bench, in the park or walk down the street drinking a beer. Of course a lot of the year it is too cold to do that but...

• The light, at least when there is light, is beautiful, strong yet gentle, clean, long-lasting and pure... sort of like the Swedes...

• The people are generally slim and well-dressed without being overly Euro.

• Despite their pervasive liberalism the Swedes generally have no problems with drinking, smoking or eating large amounts of sausage.

• Good cheese. They have all sorts of cheese. They are proud of their cheese-slicers. There is cheese from everywhere except the United States and I would love to have some good pepper jack, but all in all the cheese is great and diverse and plentiful. Plentiful cheese is a good thing.

• Unlike many "furrin" countries the Swedes make both excellent hamburgers and fries (though their pizza, while relatively tasty, is socialist and weird).

• People walk and ride bikes, the public transportation system (both buses and trains) is excellent, timely, clean and runs late. You can take dogs and babies in strollers almost anywhere and Swedish dogs and babies are, in the overwhelming majority, well behaved. Despite this the Swedes make excellent, fast, solid cars and generally know how to drive them.

• Again, despite their at times aggravating liberality, the Swedes have an anarchic streak that allows for litter, puke and broken beer bottles and smashed bicycles on Saturday morning streets and fairly regular mini-riots involving fascists vs. anarchists. Despite this, in the end, the streets get neatly cleaned without being Swiss.

• There is open land, wilderness, forests, coastline, islands, rural villages and cities that combine Medieval buildings with Scandinavian modernism in a whole that is generally harmonious.

• Swedes aren't any happier about winter or more genetically able to handle cold and grey and dark than anyone else. They just happen to live here.

• Pastries and bread: now Swedish pastries lack some of the elegance of the French but they are incredibly good and, in a Germanic metaphysical Hegelian sense perhaps more honest and always, as they are, perfect.

• The thrift shops are great and not expensive unlike everything else. I hypothesize that the Swedes, with their inherent good taste and tradition of design simply do not posses much bad stuff, even to get rid of. Being neat and tidy (and a bit uptight) by nature many don't even consider using someone else's castoffs though many others (perhaps the notoriously thrifty (some might say cheap) Smålanders, have no problem with this). In addition, they mostly live in apartments and if they upgrade there is simply little room to store an old desk or lamp or trinket. And since they are clean and well-organized then there is a surplus of very good second-hand material that simply must be dealt with. And since, in addition, they're fiends for recycling in all forms, there is a surplus of well designed, un-marred, very good and even interesting used non-crap. If anything could get my mother on a plane to come visit this would be it!

• Reindeer: not only are the Swedes generally not vegetarians, they love to eat Rudolph and I never liked that red-nosed freak anyway. Santa, bastard that he is, didn't care for Rudolph either, letting all the other reindeer oppress him as they would until he happened to come in handy. Yeah, the Swedes chow down on old Rudolph, Donner, Blitzen and the rest as well as good old-fashioned white tailed Bambi but Rudy and clan have a special place in the Swedish culinary soul. You can buy reindeer in numerous forms in almost any grocery store--fresh, frozen, mixed with cream cheese in tubes. In the north you can buy reindeer burritos at fast food stands. If that wasn't good enough they also eat a lot of wild boar and moose.

• Salmon... Now these people are famous for their herring, which ain't too bad (except for the herring and beat salad which ought to be banned by the Geneva Convention) but they also eat vast quantities of salmon in all its known forms. Salmon, yay. yay, salmon. Smoked or fresh or cured how I love and how I will eat thee. They are also mighty eaters of the eel.

• Just when you become overwhelmed by the blonde Nordicness of it all you become friends with an Iraqi or a Cuban, an Azerbaijani or a Uruguayan or talk to a Menadaen Arab or a street musician from New York who has been playing in the train station here for 25 years.

• Coffee. They love coffee. The Italians or French can get all snobby all they want but the Swedes love coffee like coffee ought to be loved. They'll slurp down an espresso, double or triple, a latte or a whateverachino, but more than anything they like putting an obscene amount of fine ground dark roast in the drip machine and drinking pot after pot of strong coffee. They always have coffee and always offer it. They know their own Gevalia is an overrated marketing scam. Strangely, however, the coffee in convenience markets is some sort of weird instant machine awful crap, far worse than regular old American convenience market java. Really, it's foul and neither do Swedes carry their coffee around with them in stylish steel thermos mugs. Then again, there is always coffee waiting upon arrival.

• The beautiful women are friendly. Again, I make a hypothesis, and that is that the women are not only generally well-educated and, in comparison to the United states and much of Europe, in a relatively mature stage of liberalism, but they have too much competition to be particularly stuck-up. Now I am sort of making up these numbers, my study is, shall we say, informal, but when 30-35% OF the female population are stunning blondes, the next 35-40% are stunning other hair colors and most of the rest are damn cute (and the guys they are competing for fall under the same standards) then there is a lot less ability or desire to have an attitude problem.

• They provide free, high-quality (in my experience) language classes to foreign residents and immigrants. If you're going to take in immigrants it is essential that they can assimilate and the most basic way to do that is by providing language skills. Yes, the Swedes all speak English (though not everyone else in the world does) but they also, strangely, have their own language. I guess we can allow them that.

• Though they innately subscribe to the concept of "lagom", roughly, "enough," "sufficient," or "Just right" (there is no exact English equivalent) they do inherently believe they live in the best country in the world. That may sound strange coming from an American but it isn't, I didn't agree, I come from the best country in the world but, as I believe that so do the Swedes. In practice it makes them perhaps the most tolerable of other nationalities. They are entirely lacking in a national inferiority complex that makes so many other countries citizens intolerably contentious. The Swedes know they're the best, thus they are quite lagom.

A New Blog

2008-03-17T16:41:00.002-05:00

LUND-- I started a second blog yesterday, "Angry Monkey Films". I plan to use this forum to write short updates on the editing of films-in-progress as well as anything in production. I also plan to use it to, when I have the urge, muse even geekily upon photography, film, editing and the various equipment that makes it possible.

Skrivbord (Desk)

2008-03-16T04:33:00.002-05:00

A few months ago I bought a desk with all the usual, hollow promises to self to keep it neat and tidy. Back in college I had a roommate who swore I had a rare genetic disorder, Tonn's Syndrome, wherein every time I entered a room papers, photos and other things would shoot from my pores, instantly covering every available surface. The first is a photo of my desk shortly after buying it and first arranging things. The second is as it was two nights ago...

Weather Report II

2008-03-11T03:07:00.002-05:00

LUND--I was going to write that of late every day has been the opposite of the other. There will be blue skies and sun, sometimes cold and clear and other times very nearly warm. The next day, then, will be grey and rainy. But yesterday was sunny, so warm that a vest under my jacket was too much insulation. I woke this morning to grey skies but now, having showered and dressed and stepped out with my coffee, I see that the sky is clearing and the temperature is again mild. Such a simple thing, the sun and light, but even a few days here and there with a break in the overcast make the spirits hopeful.

December it was reported that there were eight hours of sunshine. This in itself is horrible, like the Viking end time of Ragnorak had come. But it does nothing to describe the strange quality of the light at that time. Now, when it is overcast it is merely that, a dull and rainy day. But in that last month of the year the light seemed to touch nothing. It was like some grey fluid through which people moved and in which objects stood, a separate entity that never quite touched anything. Seeing it goes a long way, I think, towards explaining the dour and distant reputation of the Scandinavians and their other reputation for going a bit wild in sunny places. Let a Swede loose in Spain or Fiji and there is no telling what mischief they might get up to when suddenly released from the prison of the lightless winter. I am told it is far worse farther north where there are whole days of darkness. that there, for several months, the natives do nothing but glumly chew their herring and grunt into their brannvin.

But the winter days are ending. There are tiny flowers on the ground, small white ones, tiny yellow ones. Even the many ravens who cluster in some of the tall, old trees seem to croak a little hopefully. The branches are still bare but you can imagine them with leaves. Yesterday, walking to school, I suddenly smelled manure, perhaps blowing in, as such smells do, from some neaby farm. It was a shocking smell, not that it was so horrible, but in that I realized I had smelled little of anything for months.

It has only, down here in Skåne, snowed twice, at least so that anything stuck. Neither of those times lasted more than a day on the ground. So much, then, for the icy realms of the northlands. Suddenly, as I write this even, the last clouds have left the frame of my window and the sky is an achingly perfect blue. I can tell, looking with my camera eyes, that the light here in summer will be as beautiful as any I have seen.

The Children of the Mangroves Slideshow

2008-03-02T17:02:00.004-05:00

I am working on a documentary film for the S.A.R.A. (Sharing America's Resources Abroad) Project. This slideshow, made in IMovie, is both a preliminary exploration of the material and structure of the film as well as a stand-by-itself piece.

Nazis? I hate these guys!

2008-02-09T08:49:00.000-05:00

LUND-It was a sunny winter Saturday and Lena and I were walking around Lund, running a few errands in preparation for a tapas party we were throwing that evening but more than anything enjoying the rare sunlight. People were out, sitting on benches, wandering the market with the same idea and we were on our way home, passing through Stortorget, one of the main squares. There, as they are every Saturday, were some older folks protesting the situation in Palestine. We passed them by and were leaving the square when from behind us we heard chanting. I figured it must be the Palestine protesters but Lena suddenly turned around and cocked her head. "They never say anything she said and walked back into the square. Across its width, coming in from Lilla Fiskaregatan, was a column of marchers waving the blue and gold flag of Sweden.

"Shit," said Lena, "Nazis!"

I was a bit skeptical but followed her, thinking perhaps that her Swedish definition of "Nazi" might differ from my more conservative American view but I should have known her better, Lena doesn't joke about Nazis. As she said later, "I may not like Reinfeldt (the current neo-con Prime Minister of Sweden) but I don't think he's a Nazi. We moved closer to the column of perhaps 30 to 40 marchers and I took out my little Olympus Stylus that I always carry. I snapped a few pics and then noticed that the flags and shields the marchers carried were emblazoned with the letters "NSF" which my mind correctly translated as "National Socialist Front" but half-refused to believe until I saw it spelled out on one of the banners. National Socialists?? These are freakin' Nazis! And then I noticed their outriders sporting shaved heads and dark clothes and boots.

A crowd began to gather and I told Lena to stay put. I think she barely heard me. Her eyes were locked on the offending toadies like a pit-bull eyes up a disrespectful chihuahua. I ran the several blocks back to the apartment, ditched my sunglasses and sweater and slung on my Nikon and Leica. By the time I had returned the Palestine protest had packed up and a crowd was beginning to gather. Now for any of their faults the average Swede is anything but a Nazi and the assembled crowd of all ages and backgrounds were yelling back at the National Socialists and widely gesturing with an internationally recognized hand symbol of dissaproval.

There were a number of other photographers hanging back with their teles but I had a 17-35mm on the Nikon and a 15mm on the Leica. Besides, I like it close. I walked up and filled the frame with them and began shooting. Around, people were on their phones and the Nazis must have known their time was limited. Lund, a university town, is a traditionally liberal and free-thinking place, home as well to many groups of student radicals who like nothing better than to put on their anarchist boots and do a little fascist kicking. Two rather large policemen showed up but the march hadn't been advertised beforehand and they were without any backup in case things got ugly. Soon, shouting their filth, the NSF marched off the square. One man lobbed a full bottle of soda into the crowd, luckily missing anyone. A few steps later he tumbled to the paving stones and looked around for the offending attacker before realizing he had simply fallen on his fat ass while trying to goosestep.

Lena and I followed closely behind them as they made for the train station. On the way one of the shaved headed morons smiled at a rather waifish female photographer as she lowered her Nikon. She spit at his feet and he took a step at her then looked over and I smiled back at him, putting a few teeth into the grin. He kept walking. At the station they re-formed and shouted a bit more Hitlerian nonsense. Swedish citizens yelled back. They looked at me and, well, I had to say something so in my best and most obviously American voice I drawled, "Now there, remember what happened the last time ya'll started marching?!"

They walked through the station to the back lot where they had parked their cars and at this point the police wouldn't let them leave. They began to whine about how Lund was a dangerous town for them and they had to get out before the anarchists showed up. The big cops towered over them and gave them a slow lecture about lack of permits and other technicalities. One little weasel walked over and put a sticker on a signboard. Lena walked right over and pulled it off. He showed himself a true über man and screwed his pimply face up and gave her a nasty look. Me too. The Nazis got in their cars and slunk away. While they could still hear I waved, "Bye Bye Master Race."

Both of us were shaking with adrenalin and Lena was worked up to a fighting pitch I had never seen her in. I had begun the day blue and down but there is nothing like a few Nazis to improve one's mood. The sun was shining. We'd sent the bad guys away and friends were coming over for dinner. And I was in love with a terrific girl. I felt the weight of my cameras on my neck and my boots securely on my feet and her hand in mine. It was very fine and very good and I smiled fully for the first time in a while.

How To Get Your Passport

2008-02-01T20:34:00.000-05:00

I have often been asked, "How do you travel?" and I answer that it is all in the details. It is not some deep mystery with its roots in a troubled childhood, a mother that made me read the classics, or a pact with the devil. Or it might be. But regardless of that, or anything else, it is still the details that will allow you to see the Pyramids, Paris, Gary, Indiana, any of those places you have dreamed about. So, all you Americans out there, I ask you this one simple question, "Do you have your Passport?"

Because if you don't, you aren't going anywhere except maybe Kentucky. And if you aren't from the United States you aren't going there. Not that I would particularly recommend going to Kentucky anyway, the fried chicken is usually better in Tennessee, but it is pretty sad that a passel of furriners has their passports and you, Mr. or Mrs. American can't even leave your own country. Because you can't if you don't have one. Other countries have rules too.

So this is what you do, this is all you need to do: Go to the Post Office or local court house and ask for an application (they will tell you what to do). Ask for another one for your friend. Fill out the application. You will need a pen to do this. Get two pictures, Passport approved, taken. Any AAA office will do this and quite a few places where they develop film and print pictures will as well. In other words, they make Passport pictures all over the place and if you ask around someone will tell you where to do it.

Mail pictures and application with a check or money order to wherever they tell you to send it. In a few weeks you will get your Passport with your ugly damn picture on it. Then you are free to travel. Before that you are not. Don't put it off. Get the damn thing and the world is your clam. Or oyster, or mussel or perhaps badger. Yes, that's it. Get your passport and the world is your badger.

Let There Be Light

2008-01-29T18:34:00.000-05:00

LUND--The day had been warm, or what could reasonably pass for warm in January in Sweden. Skåne (Scania in English) the southern tip of Sweden, is bounded by water on three sides and washed by the Gulf Stream. Consequently the temperatures rarely go far below freezing despite Lund being at a North latitude of 55 degrees and Wooster at not quite 41 degrees. My friend Michelle, who lives in Cincinnatti, a farther south latitude even than Wooster, said in her last e-mail that the cold was so intense that it sucked the air from her lungs. To date it has never been that cold here.

Still, this much farther north the nights come early and most days are grey and cloud-bound. Here in Skåne there is a constant wind, blowing down from the Arctic and across from Russia one way and across the North Atlantic the other. You find yourself walking down the street, constantly blinded by tears. It sounds grim.

It often is grim. In December there were eight hours of sunshine but I may, in my writings, given too dark an impression. I have not, in re-reading them, spoken of the warm light cast inside by candles and orange paper stars or the talk and and generous gatherings that these northlanders use themselves to get through these months.

It is always easier to write of the bad, the annoying, the hardships -- to become lost in the words of winter and dislocation. As well, I tend to write of these things regardless of climate. Perversely, it is easy enough to share pain with the world. Joy is a private thing, fragile and rare--a thing that one does not speak or write of lightly in fear that it may go away when it is so rarely had. It is easy enough to tell you of everyday trouble but harder to speak of simple happiness or of terror.

This move has been difficult. For over ten years amidst all my jobs and wanderings I never accepted my life or home in Wooster. I never unpacked to stay. I was never preparing my house for a life but was always preparing to leave. As such things happen it was only there, at the very end, that the Ohio air became unbearably sweet and clear and I could feel that the friends and community loved me as well or better than I loved them. And I left them in the fullness of that. I left my family and my friends, new friends and friends that in the course of my stay had become old and trusted friends. I left there and I left them with three suitcases and what I could carry on a plane to go to a woman I loved but in many ways barely knew. It was the only thing I could do. I had thought so long about her, and for so long about leaving, that had I not gone I would have damned myself as a coward for the rest of my days though no one else would have. And there, at the end, the incentives to stay were many. Still, I went.

I will write more of the joy because it is there. I see that I have done a similar disservice to Central America, made it a land of little but sickness and poverty and death and Scandinavia little but unfriendly clean darkness. Neither are accurate. The clouds sometimes clear and there is a little more blue and a little less grey. The night now is cold and clear and the light of the moon is brighter than many of the days so far. In the dead of winter the light is something like I have never seen. It seems to touch nothing, to be a fluid through which things move untouched, but the light, when it is strong, seems like it could last forever.

PS-And in the interests of full disclosure my Lena, in a fit of pique at my melancholic writing, began a photo blog proving I am not, in fact, moping around all the time... www.tonninsweden.blogspot.com

Weather Report

2008-01-20T05:19:00.000-05:00

Yesterday the sky was brilliant blue. I would have taken a picture but my camera was loaded with black and white. Today the sky was back to normal.

Positively Negative

2008-01-18T07:28:00.000-05:00

SAN CARLOS, MEXICO--Andrew Tonn stands on a small island just offshore San Carlos, Mexico on the Sea of Cortez toasting the day with a Negro Modelo. Dr. Jake Kuttothara photo

LUND--I recently bought a negative scanner from my friend Jesse Ewing, a Nikon Coolscan V ED. I had wanted one for a long time, having thousands of rolls of processed film waiting for some attention. I had, for the last years, been making do with a good Canon flatbed with film inserts my father had given me a long time ago, but the process was very slow and the results not quite satisfactory as the inserts never held the film quite flat (among other technical issues). Over the past six years or so on my Central American and Mexican expeditions I shot enough film to fill two five-inch binders. Much of it, since I only had the film processed and not printed, has never seen the light of day as finished images, either digital or as prints. Much of it, undoubtedly, never will.

Before I moved to Sweden in October one of the tasks I had to finish was the filing of those negatives, those and many others. I succeeded in collecting together all of the Latin American negatives (most I had already sleeved) and arranged them in binders by trip (Honduras February 2000, Honduras, Guatemala, Mexico September 2001-May 2002, Mexico January-February 2004, Honduras, Guatemala, February-March 2005, Honduras, Guatemala, El Salvador, February-May 2006 and El Salvador, June-July 2007). I thought the negative filing would take perhaps six or seven hours. In fact it took me about 36 hours of work and not long after I was done I remembered an aluminum case under my bed. I pulled it out and it was full of unfiled negatives though, luckily, not from Latin America. Rather than enduring a nervous breakdown I gently closed the case and slid it back under the bed. Due mostly to limited luggage space I brought with me only the Latin American negatives and the ones I shot in New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina. But I also could have mailed the rest or found some way and there is a reason I did not. Those who know me well know how grimly tired I had become of Central America. While on my last trip to El Salvador I think I did some of my best photo work. I still, however, felt I had become dull to it. I was sick of the smells and the language and the everyday trials and my eyes were bored. I needed new lands to photograph, new sights, unfamiliar situations before I could re-approach that area which I do love so much. Within that, however, I needed to, need to, finish so much of the work I have accumulated over these past seven or eight years--to evaluate, catalog, print, publish and finally, at least to some degree, put aside those negatives and files and films and tapes so I can move on to new ones. Even if, or when, I hope, I go back to Central America I need to have a handle on what I have missed, what I have done and where to go with a new and fresh eye.

So, since the scanner arrived I have been sitting for hours listening to its whining grind and then watching as fractions of a second from years gone by appear on the screen. It is strange seeing these images here in wintery Scandinavia. It is strange to actually be "overseas." One often bandies the word "overseas" about whenever one leaves the United States (at least to go anywhere other than Mexico or Canada). In conversation people would often refer to my trips as "overseas" and I admit at times to falling into that trap myself. At the risk of stating the obvious, however, Central, and for that matter South America are not in any way overseas. They are "The Americas," and you can walk there, take the bus, get in your car and drive. So, while it was often strange being in an Ohio winter and looking at my more southern photos it never was as odd as this. There, if I needed another look I could hop on the bus and go look. Catch a plane early in the morning and be there by lunchtime. Once more, being obvious, everywhere is close to somewhere. Central America is relatively close to The United States but far from Sweden. In Sweden you could go to Poland for the weekend on a ferry. Hop on a plane and Afghanistan isn't all that far away.

The photos come up on screen, digitized ghosts of silver halide grains, cold scanner light and 0s and 1s illuminating the little squares that were altered years before by sun and lamplight in countries that are, at present, far overseas. I plan, now, on this blog, to regularly post some of these photos along with short stories of how they were taken. So keep coming back. As well, my readers, let me know what you would like to hear about Sweden, what images you would like to see. All too quickly, the strange and foreign becomes mundane.

Grey Skies and Night

2008-01-12T05:50:00.000-05:00

LUND--The local paper's weather section read that in December there had been EIGHT HOURS of sunshine. This somehow came as no surprise and January has been little different. There probably has been a little more sunlight but it all comes in the morning and can be gone by the time you look out the window, see that there are blue skies, throw on your boots and parka and walk down two flights of stairs.

Yesterday, there was no sunshine at all but we decided on a little adventure anyway. I have always been fascinated by the edges of places, the periphery, borders, farthest points and little visited places on the edges of maps. I am fully aware that there is usually nothing in these places but I find a certain satori in the physical mapping of land beneath my own two feet, to trace the edges of a land by foot.

We set out from Lund in the car bound for the southernmost tip of Sweden in the town of Smygehamn. We drove through small villages on back roads, villages not unlike rural Midwestern communities although possessed of fewer churches. Skåne is much like Ohio, as I have written before, meandering country roads and small towns surrounded by farms. Each small town even seems to have one house on the outskirts whose yard is littered with junked cars, cannibalized farm equipment and other detritus of human living. A slow rain fell from the uniform grey skies and the closer we got to Smygehamn and the actual point at Smygehuk, the stronger was the wind.

The village was a small, seaside town filled with artisan shops and closed restaraunts, shuttered hotels and campgrounds that in summer are undoubtedly full of life but in this season show their age and wear. At the point there is a monument and a small harbor and a snack shop that didn't advertise itself as the last chance for a herring burger before Germany and Poland. It was obviously not run by an American who would have been unable to resist a "Southernmost Snack Shoppe" sign.

We walked to the point and there is the obligatory monument. This one told us in granite that Moscow and Paris are as far away, more or less, as the farthest point North. At the far tip of Sweden in January the waves roll in and it is grey. There is no color. The sea is grey and the land is grey. The grass is grey; the sky and clouds are grey. The docks and boats are grey. Only the caps on the waves are not grey. They are white. Near the point there is a sculpture near an old lime-kiln. It is the masts of a ship coming out of the ground. It is grey as well.

You can feel the weight of the long phallic forested rock of Sweden leaning on top of you. Or maybe you can't. But you can feel that North is only forest and rock and cold, cold lakes and down there, down across that grey, flat water is land worth conquering, invading, pillaging. No reason to come here. We shall go there.

I crawled through the old lime-kiln, into its heart where the fire once was, and thought how cold it had become. We met in the middle and for a moment it was not so cold. We crawled out and walked down the beach and I found that some of the rocks had smooth holes drilled though them by time. I took a lot of photos and then found that the Summicron lens of my Leica had a fine beading of water over it. I haven't seen the film yet but I am expecting an unexpected soft focus.

We left there and drove to Ystad. On the way we stopped at an ancient stone rectangle. Yes, rectangle, not circle. And a very nice rectangle it was. Grey.

Global Cuisine

2008-01-06T11:25:00.000-05:00

LUND--Bored with scanning negatives of sunny Central America on a snowy Swedish night I decided to engage in a spot of culinary self-entertainment. I walked down to the square though the slush and as usual the kebab stand was playing excellent music. I wandered through the aisles of the grocery store and bought some Spanish chorizo with which I was planning a spicy red lentil stew, some crusty bread and some eggs and cream with which to practice my creme brulé. I thought that if there was one great thing about globalization and the shrinking of the world and its borders it was the availability of exotic, multi-national ingredients. I remembered a story I had read about an American airman interned in neutral Sweden during the second world war when his plane couldn't make it back to Britain. He had said something to the order of, "I really liked the Swedish people and nothing bad happened to me while I was there, but I couldn't eat fish for about 15 years afterwards..."

So I counted my blessings of not being on an enforced diet of all the wonderful ways one can prepare herring. I was on my way back to the flat when I saw a new sign in the window of McDonald's. It advertised two burgers, the El Maco Grande and the El Nacho and read, "A Swedish tradition...from Mexico." Of course there are some things in life one cannot resist and I popped in and ordered an El Nacho which turned out to be a more or less regular cheeseburger topped with corn chips. At present I cannot yet report on the nature of the El Maco Grande. But I munched my crunchy traditional Swedish-Mexican McDonald's sandwich and thought that I should have ordered a pie. Sometimes they have cloudberry pies (a very Swedish berry along with the lingonberry) in deference to local tastes just as in Central America McDonald's often has pineapple pies. I was, for a moment, very proud to be an American until I remembered that only on foreign soil can one get the old-fashioned fried McDonald's pies. Apparently it is only Americans who have to eat the insipid baked pies, who cannot be trusted with the hot filling. Swedes seem to be able to handle it. Ditto for Mexicans, Guatemalans and Hondurans. Maybe other countries are as inept as the US at the eating of fast-food pies. I vowed to investigate. And, in general, to eat more pie.

New Year's Eve 2008 (What the hell else are you going to call it?)

2007-12-31T22:32:00.000-05:00

LUND--The day, New Years Eve day in Sweden, broke blue and light. The sun had not been out like that in over 60 days and the grey had become intolerable. We lay in bed on the morning before the new year and saw the strange blue light come past the cloaking blinds. And we went out into it to buy this and that, wine and asparagus and the last few things we needed for our small party to come. And the light was strange and hopeful. For the first time since I had arrived in the country the light seemed to shine on things instead of being separate. We walked and she took her long black leather gloves off and took my hand. We bought Hungarian champagne at the State liquor store and asparagus at the market and a few other things. We cleaned the flat and bought fireworks, packs of huge skyrockets with three-foot poles. I began to prep dinner.

She dressed in a full-length, red-sequined ball gown she had bought at the Goodwill store in Ohio and I in a raw silk, shawl-collared dinner jacket with vest. We met the guests at the door with Jell-O shots (a remarkable American invention) made with Russian vodka and strange Halal raspberry gelatin. Our guests were as follows: There was Fredrik and his girlfriend Catherine, Lena’s old friend Tatjana and her friend Katy from England. Fredrik went to journalism school with Lena and is a News-writer, Catherine is from the French and a counselor for the hearing-impaired and a potter of note, Tatjana, Swedish of Croatian descent with a law degree, works in Chiapas, Mexico as a peace observer and Katy is working on her Doctorate focusing on the way indigenous people view themselves in photographs, view photography (King’s College, Cambridge).

I made salmon en croute with pesto, herb-roasted potatoes, and steamed asparagus served with a garnish of raw, julienned carrots and drizzled with a pesto cream sauce. We began with a dish made by Fredrik and Catherine, shrimp marinated in balsamic vinegar over toast with fresh greens and a nice Rosé brought back from her aunt’s village in the south of France. With the main course we drank a Pouilly Fumé brought by Katy and for desert we had a mix of fruit and meringue and cream that someone said was Russian in origin. With it we drank the Hungarian champagne. The women were all beautiful.
A little before ten minutes to midnight we went down to a piece of public greenery at the local bus station that Lena and I had scouted out earlier that day after buying the ridiculously powerful skyrockets. We took the bombs and three bottles of champagne. Lena wore a mink coat and matching hat. I wore, with my tuxedo, the Finnish army motorcycle goggles I’d bought with agent 016 in Texas a few years before on my way to Mexico. For the minutes before and after midnight we did a lot of kissing and setting off of fairly high explosives. I liked that.

The rockets went up with military whooshes, streaked up and blew up and I was impressed for my second year in a row how the Swedes might be overly safety-conscious about most things but their fireworks were top-rate. The only one that went wrong shot out the side and almost got Anna Palmehag who had come by to wish us a happy midnight.

At the bus stop we spoke with some pretty girls, proud of their African immigrant roots, who were on their way to Malmo. They cheered America when I said where I was from. Then they cheered Zambia, Thailand, Sweden and everything else. We went home and soon everyone left. Lena and I put my Nikon on a tripod and took our New Year’s portraits. We downloaded those. Then I downloaded all the pictures from the little pocket Canon my Father gave me. We looked at the record of the night and looked at a sort of slow motion movie of the time since I have been here in Sweden. I thought that it would make an interesting movie. I thought about the pictures I would take in the next year and what an interesting movie they might make. I thought about what I might write and then wrote. Then I went to bed. Or not. But it was already four hours into the new year.

Dinner at Pelikan

2007-12-18T10:55:00.001-05:00

LUND -- I was lying sick in a hotel room in San Salvador medicating myself with liquids, Cipro and television. I don’t have a television at home and find myself exposed to its weirdness in places that accentuate the strangeness of the medium. I found that the TV often contains odd corollaries to actual life and in between masked Mexicans tossing each other about and the psychopathic progression of one dying, dismembered and disappeared show after another I found Anthony Bourdain’s food and travel show “No Reservations.” Bourdain, in this episode, was visiting Sweden, where I was soon to be.

What I love about Bourdain is the glee with which he has, “sold out.” He has, for better or worse, and that is up to him, “sold out” to the complete dream and in the best possible personal way that I think I have ever seen, parlaying his own intelligence, wit and anarchic personality into a living on TV. And while actually doing the show undoubtedly is often annoying, it still allows the finances and freedom to travel the world and eat and drink for a living instead of toiling forever in the body and soul crushing commercial kitchen. Cheers to that!

What Mr. Bourdain has found is a traditional refuge of the talented rogue: journalism. Of course I use the “j word” loosely, but there is a long and gloriously checkered tradition of the adventurer using both restaurant work and published words or images to further and fund a personal taste for world experience. And no real rogue is worth his salt (or pepper or saffron or garlic) if he doesn’t like his adventure combined with meat and fowl and game and wine and all other gastronomic possibilities for good, ill or dysentery as the road finds them.

So, I was sick in San Salvador, undoubtedly from something I had eaten, and Chef Bourdain was cavorting in Sweden, my soon-to-be-home. Among other televised adventures he ate at a traditional old Stockholm restaurant named Pelikan where he dined upon knuckle of pork. Now I already knew that Lena and I were planning to go to Stockholm in November and she had been asking me what I wanted to do upon arrival in Sweden. The sights of Sweden, unfortunately, are less obvious than, say, Rome or Paris, but now I had a destination in mind.

The Pelikan was only a few blocks from our hostel and we went on a Sunday night. It is a large, open, wood-paneled beer hall with 30 foot ceiling painted with fading murals of gamboling monkeys. It was mostly full that evening but felt convivial not crowded. Our waiter was a short, Germanic man who was curt at first, though not impolite. He seemed to warm to us, however, as it became evident we truly enjoyed the food. We began with drinks, Lena a Martini (red vermouth not the cocktail) and I a Laphroig single malt neat. We decided to make a whole meal of the experience and began with starters. I got a salad of anchovies and egg on dark bread and she the charcuterie plate. They both were good, the cold cuts slightly strange in their spicing and texture to my palette and the salad a hearty mix of flavors, both perfect with the Carlsburg Hof that we washed them down with.

I considered the meatballs, what could be more Swedish than that, and rather wanted the duck in cider sauce, but Lena questioned my manhood if I didn’t get the pork knuckle like some cook with a French name had managed to eat. So I ordered the pork, which came as a huge bone-in joint of boiled swine-flesh with three mustards and a side of mashed root vegetables. Lena got the elk in chanterelle sauce with mashed potatoes with rose hips. We vowed to return for the meatballs and duck.

And the pork was sublime, cut-with-a-fork-falling-off-the-bone, salty and perfect with the mustards and the buttery mash of carrots and parsnips and potatoes. Lena’s elk was excellent as well and we traded back and forth a few times until I declared the pork knuckle mine and fended off her questing fork. We drank more of the Danish Carlsburg (Probably the Best Beer in the World reads the label, I love Scandanavian pseudo-modesty).

Between the meal and desert we had strong coffee and two kinds of Branvin, literally “burnt wine” (schnapps). One, the traditional caraway flavored type and another infused with bog myrtle. We finished with a cloudberry parfait and a blueberry pie with vanilla ice cream.

What else can one say? The interior of Pelikan is warm with light and laughter and talk against the dark Scandanavian winter night. The food is perfect. All in all it was one of the best restaurant experiences I have ever had. I aligned my fork and knife (gaffel och kniv), let the waiter take away the plates, looked deep into the blue eyes of my Swede and let out a long, satisfied, traditional burp.

Off to See the Wizard

2007-12-12T10:57:00.000-05:00

LUND -- We were driving through the Scanian countryside and I saw something odd to my American eyes, it isn’t important what, and I turned to Lena and said, “Dorothy, I don’t think we’re in Kansas anymore.”

“Is this not like Kansas?” she asked matter-of-factly. As a credit to her non-jealous nature she didn’t even ask why I called her Dorothy but, then again, she is used to me blurting out strange statements. In a moment of equal literalness I replied, “Actually I’ve never been to Kansas but this does look a lot like Ohio.”

“Then why did you say Kansas if you’ve never been there?”

“You know, ‘The Wizard of Oz.’”

There was silence for a moment, then, “No.”

I laughed, “C’mon, you’re kidding. You’re trying to tell me you’ve never seen ‘The Wizard of Oz’, never read the book? Dorothy? Toto? Tinman? Winged Monkeys????”

“I have heard of it,” she replied, “but I have no idea what you’re talking about. I mean, I know you’d love to have some winged monkeys…”

“Yes, and they come from Oz.”

“Of course they do, darling,” she replied and, again to her credit, she didn’t pat me on the head or begin dialing the police. In questioning her I discerned that the Swedes know little of Munchkins but, perhaps more interestingly, I realized how deeply the mythos of Frank Baum’s imaginary land has pervaded the American psyche. References to his 1900 book and, more particularly to the 1939 movie based on it, have acquired a level of shared knowledge in the U.S. far beyond the normal usage of movie quotations. I will go out on a limb and say it is the most quoted movie of all time. Let us begin with the quote I began this essay with which is actually, “Toto, I don’t think we’re in Kansas anymore.” (incidentally, is it better to refer to your girlfriend by the name of another woman or of a dog?). This phrase is used in any number of situations to describe the sudden, profound realization that geographically, or situationally, things have taken a turn for the weird: Kansas being the metaphor for home and normalcy and Oz (wherever one has found oneself: Sweden, El Salvador, transvestite-midget-strip-club, etc.) being the other, the direct and obvious counterpoint to everyday existence.

This list and analysis is by no means complete or comprehensive and simple explication of quotations somehow fails to adequately describe how deeply Americans know what these phrases mean, even as they have become separate from their origin. There is, “I’ll get you my pretty….and your little dog too…” exclaimed by the Wicked Witch of the West. Often this is wittily shortened to, “….And your little dog too.” When this is said is difficult to explain. Sometimes when one sees an annoying little dog. Sometimes when one wants something or someone. But, really, you just know when to say it and when it is funny.

“Follow the yellow brick road,” and, “We’re off to see the Wizard,” both of which can be applied at the beginning of any journey, particularly when the end result is unknown.

“Fly my pretties, FLY!” said by the aforementioned witch to her legion of avian simians as she sends them off to interdict Dorothy and her companions. This is often used either when one is out of beer and needs more or when one has a nemesis and wishes, as we all do, for a praetorian guard of flying monkeys to do one’s bidding. There are unconfirmed reports that President George W. Bush said this to Erik Prince, founder of Blackwater Security. It is also unconfirmed though highly suspected that Hillary Clinton not only says this on a regular basis but has access to actual winged monkeys.

There is the metaphor of The Wizard himself, which is often used in serious discourse to illustrate the faceless and feared power behind the scenes which, in fact, is nothing more than smoke, mirrors, light shows and, well, humbug.

And, after some mistake or misstep, depending on the circumstances, one might well say, “If I only had a brain / heart / courage — the character traits wished for by the Scarecrow, Tinman and Cowardly Lion. As well, these traits are often, making use of the Oz movie’s internal metaphor, our inherent qualities, proven under fire, but which we only recognize in ourselves when validated by the authorities — even when said authority is humbug…

A Munchkin, in short, is anything or anyone small, cute and possibly annoying.

Come in contact with unwanted liquid and see if part of you doesn’t shriek, “I’m melting!”

Be sent off on some odious task by a hated boss and see if you don’t sing the Winkie’s marching song, “Oh ee oh, eeoh oh.”

In parting from some beloved, perhaps underappreciated friend say, “I’ll miss you most of all Scarecrow…”

Then slip on your ruby slippers, click your heels together three times and say, come on, you know the words, “There’s no place like home. There’s no place like home. There’s no place like home…”

There are, undoubtedly, more than the above; everyone has their favorites. And we’ll skip the cinematic conclusion when Dorothy wakes up to the possibility that it was all just a dream. We’ll skip that for two reasons, first, and less importantly because it was a cheap, disingenuous Hollywoodization at the end of an otherwise brilliant film and two, because it most certainly was not a dream. Because as Americans know, there is no Santa Claus but there most certainly is an Oz.