I haven’t exactly had to follow a team of huskies across arctic wastes in order to reach the pole but my dogs are tired nonetheless.
We struck camp at 0900 this morning after noting processions of horses in the street below. No idea. They probably didn’t just graduate from anything though. EJ agreed to make a trek to the Museum of Photography our first order of business, and thought we could stop at the 7-11 if I wanted coffee and a pastry. Ha.
Fortunately there are plenty of little coffee shop/bakery places on the way to the museum, which was half an hour away by foot. I got my interesting local color cafe and a bun with poppyeed and what may have been star anise. EJ wasn’t going to have anything, which evolved to tea (note: there is no English breakfast tea in all of Scandinavia. They think Earl Grey is the last word in tea. Fine. Make it so…}, then a bite of mine, then suddenly its twin appeared across the table.
Onward to the museum. Hey, want to see a boat going through a lock? Sure.
The locks between the harbor and Lake Mälaren, where Stockholm gets its water, are pretty amazing. Big steel slabs pivot into the water letting the lock empty or fill rapidly in a minute at most. Awesome stuff. EJ notes that if her brother Paul was along, the tour would have ground to a halt as he spent the rest of the day questioning the lock crew and watching the mechanisms. Well, she was talking about him at 12, but like me, I’m sure he’s fully in touch with his inner twelve-year-old. It’s the age of wonder, and should never be completely forgotten.
We made it to the museum and, after some brief confusion about how to use the scanner at the entrance to admit us, we wandered through floors of really weird photography with no technical details anywhere. Fine. I get it. This is photography as art, and the technology is supposed to be the transparent medium through with it’s transmitted. I’d still like to know what cameras people are shooting with, but yeah, I get it
We were wandering through the work of Dana Sederowsky, an absurdist performance artist and photographer, whose multi-room exhibition consisted of pictures of her standing in front of a wide range of settings, from the Apollo Theater in Manhattan to the interiors of an abandoned clinic, all in the same starched nurses outfit, her lips painted the exact shade of red in the cross on her bonnet. Think the traveling gnome in drag as a nurse from the 50s. A woman stopped me and asked if I got this stuff? Seriously, these look like pictures I could have dressed a friend up and taken. Yes, but you didn’t. Actually, the quality of the photography was quite high. Lighting isn’t as simple in a lot of those shots as it seems. But that’s not the point.
Like all of the exhibits in the museum, I don’t know that I got them, but I know that they all got me to one degree or another, which is pretty much the same thing. Later, after seeing a number of exhibitions that skirted the edge of comprehensibility, I came across a nice enough landscape with an attractive woman facing the camera in the middle. My mind was unsettled that she wasn’t wearing the nurse’s uniform. That’s how art gets to you. Subversively.
Throughout our tour of the museum I could feel something common among the images, each photographer racking their brains to find something new to say, something worth expressing through their pictures. Or maybe that’s just me projecting. I know I feel it when I pick up the camera and look around. I’m sure there’s a picture here somewhere that says something interesting about what’s going on inside me. It’s like being in a bubble and wanting to be able to break through it, but not being able to pierce the skin.
Hey, that would make in interesting series of shots.
At the end of the tour, off to the side of the cafe, there was a music video playing in which a person falls through the wall that had seemed solid but then became a cutout picture of itself, as did the various people in the video, reality becoming imagery and back again. Really nice work, and as EJ noted, it was the most accessible piece in the museum. Being a video, of course, it could provide the continuity and context that the still photos couldn’t.
We walked back toward the old city section (Gran Stamla) to the science fiction bookstore to see if the owner, or at least the public-facing portion of the ownership, a guy named “Math,” was there. Just to say hi. We snagged a clerk who said no, maybe after lunch…and managed to communicate it with such disdain that I was willing to give up the mission on the spot.
Off to lunch we went, both of us more than a little tired and bonking out, and discovered one of the great truths about Stockholm tourism. Get the “Swedish” lunch. It’s really reasonably-priced (95 SEK), comes out quickly, and is generally quite good. Fortified with a sampling of “entrecoat” and sweet potatoes, as well as a very interesting pear cider, we returned to the scene of the crime.
I didn’t feel like any more confrontations with annoying geek clerks, but I did at least want to see how much that new book (Cibola Burn) cost.
Behind the counter was a slightly older guy who looked more interesting than the clerk with the sallow complexion and close-cropped hair. I asked him if “Math” was in. Indeed, he was him.
Great conversation about science fiction followed. I’m not the first person to stop by and give him props for the store, which he says has the advantage over either US or UK stores in that it can carry titles from both countries as soon as they come out. He says that he thinks his customers appreciate their putting the books first and the games second, unlike Forbidden Planet in NYC, which hides the books in the basement and looks more like a con gift shop than a bookstore. There’s still a strong sf and fantasy reading population in Sweden, he assures me, and it continues to grow. Of the ratio between sf and fantasy, he says that sf dominated until the 80s, when Robert Jordan and others came along, at which time it flipped, and now fantasy sells at about 2 to 1 over sf. But sf is slowly gaining share back. Which ones? Well, space opera, which has had some quite good releases. What’s selling there? Corey was the first thing that came to his mind. OK, I may have led the witness, but the Expanse series is just damn good. We talked authors for a while, and I was delighted to find that we read much the same stuff. Robinson, Stross (though neither of us will vouch for Neptune’s Brood), Schroeder, and others. Math also wrote a near- future dysto-punk novel with Heinleinian undertones (set in Stockholm), and I got him to sign a copy for me. I’m betting I’d really like it if I could only read Swedish. By the way, if you happen to be one of my author friends, consider looking him up if you’re ever in Stockholm.
Math also suggested that we visit the Nobel Prize museum, which was just up the hill. Serendipitously, we happened to stumble over it a few minutes after leaving the store, so we went in. EJ was reluctant to tour the place, because she has issues with the selection committee… she is not overly impressed with some of the choices they made recently. Of course, I have to think twice to remember that in addition to a prize in physics, chemistry, and economics, there’s also one for “peace.” Unfortunately, while they only give out the other prizes for what actual accomplishments, they seem give out the peace prize as a political statement about what they’d like to see happen. We went in anyway. It is a pretty lame museum…but being a museum isn’t their mission.
Back to the hotel we trudged, past the “Taste of Sweden” festival blaring out rock from behind white canvas walls. The festival sounded like a really good thing to visit before we got here, but at this point, we’re pretty sure we know what Sweden tastes like. Sorry about that, Rudolph.
A few minutes to rest our feet in the hotel and back out we went, this time to hit a food market with lots of stalls and things we could take back to the room for a picnic dinner. EJ scored a great deal on a shrimp salad and bottle of wine by throwing kroners at the merchant as he was trying to close up shop, and we picked up a collection of classic open-faced sandwiches to go. On the way back to the hotel, we poked our noses into a Chinese restaurant and scored some crab and corn soup that was ok, if not brilliant. We were amused that they’d used faux crab here, but it’s not like we minded, really.
Now, back in the room for the last time today, probably, it’s good to put our feet up, watch the sun settle over the buildings…and…wait…sun? It’s been cloudy for three days and the sun comes out now? Great. Well, better late than never. I can see that EJ’s having a good time relaxing in the deep window sill, watching the boats come and go, and I’m nearly human again thanks to the crab soup and a beer.
Tomorrow is another day of trains, buses, taxis, and fotvandring (foot wandering) as we make our way back to Copenhagen, but also a good time to do some reading and relaxing.
