Read Some Stewf

Fighter

My winter months in Stockholm were filled with bitterness and gloom, fueled by self-imposed isolation and 4 hours of sunlight per day. The only cure was a mix CD full of cathartic music.

Here is the cover, sized for Jewelboxing's King Size cases. The art is a page ripped from a book I found at a Stockholm bar called The Library. Just discovered tonight that the dude is a Swedish boxer named Ingemar Johansson who won the World Heavyweight Championship in 1955. Fitting that the guy shares my middle name. He looks like I felt at the time.

Typeface: Refrigerator by Mark Simonson

Smörgåsbord

Thanks to Mama’s steadfast keeping of her Swedish traditions, this is almost exactly what our table looks like every year, all the way down to the candlestick holders.

From a little piece in Volvo Magazine.

The Paron Band

Another video for your entertainment: The Paron Band (Stockholm, 2003).

Waking Up In Stockholm

Jen and Erin woke me at noon on a Saturday. Much of the Sweden experience is represented here: up late and cold with a misshapen beard, lacking adequate bedding — luckily I had my PowerBook and McCobbian side table.

Photo by Jen.

Four Hours in Hell, Eight Hours in Heaven

A message to Charles de Gaulle officials: your airport is in disrepair.

One of every two elevators is out of order. It’s a similar story for the escalators, moving walkways, cash machines, and phones. Those phones that do work are of such poor quality that everyone on the other end sounds like vintage Buzz Aldrin, regardless of distance.

The only positive side affect from the lack of maintenance is the sparrow nest inside Terminal 2, which provided some entertainment while I waited for you to locate the bags you lost and damaged.

The rest of the day, however, was ripe with delight and wonder. I met some of my best friends, previously only known to me through the interweb, embarked on a leisurely teaser tour of Paris (which took us under the Eiffel, over the Seine, and in the tres cool Pompidou), and engorged on fine cuisine.

The night ends with this report from my own private apartment on a narrow street made for postcards and movies. I’ll be back home in Salt Lake tomorrow. What a long week this has been.

Marathon Music

The week after I arrived in Sweden I witnessed the Lidingö Loppet — a running race over the most hilly and lightly populated of Stockholm’s main islands. It isn’t very long, but the inclines make for a grueling run. So what music do the organizers blare over loudspeakers to rally the contestants as they push on over hills and muddy terrain? ABBA, of course. Watching hundreds of trained runners do their thing to the sounds of “Dancing Queen” is an amusing sight indeed [see movie]. While I struggled to contain laughter my Swedish companions didn’t see the humor. After all, regardless of its age, this is their most patriotic music, akin to a national anthem. What could be more invigorating? I understood.

Today is the Stockholm Marathon, a longer race through the middle of the city. The course includes Odengatan, the major street just a few hundred feet from my office. To my despair the soundtrack for this race is far more obnoxious than ABBA. Instead, for the next 4 hours I get to hear a loop of three mindless contemporary europop hits, hard-packed with trance techno. If I were a runner in the Stockholm Marathon, I would go mad before I got tired.

So I've been using the office stereo to drown out these sounds with my own marathon tunes: “Serge” by The Folk Implosion, “Me And Giuliani Down By The School Yard (A True Story)” by !!!, “We Like Having These Things” by Numbers, “Take A Walk” by Spoon, “Date With The Night” by Yeah Yeah Yeahs, “Not The Same” by Ben Folds, and “Take Me Out” by Franz Ferdinand. They’ve all got that aggressive beat to keep your feet pounding the pavement and they aren’t hideously irritating.

Everything Must Go!

Sellin’ stuff before the move.

Midnight Stockholm

I just got back from Monteliusvägen on Södermalm. The view across the water to Stockholm’s northern islands is always postcard material, but tonight the sky is especially cooperative. It's almost midnight and the sun is still setting. Took some photos. Click them to biggify.

Voyage to Bruhnland

I am off to spend a weekend in Sunny Southern Sweden at the summer home of the great Mr. Bruhn — font designer, father, and one of my favorite Svenskmen. On your next visit to this space expect jubilant photos of bearded boys playing badminton.

Photographic Documentation of Swedish Roots

I played proud Stockholmer host to two sets of guests this month. Details coming soon, but first, because my Mama is anxious to see evidence thereof, a link to photos from a visit with our Swedish relatives, the Länerfeldts. For those keeping track: Börje (pronounced burr-yuh) is my grandpa’s nephew.