video killed the radio star

as i told you all last week, my TEDx experience opened up a whole new avenue for me - on nationwide talk radio! it was a bit nerve wracking to "appear" on the radio in a language not my own, and i'm sure i made mistakes (that whole det and den thing still eludes me), but i'm also pretty happy i was able to do it. i also managed to find the clips to share with you.

my radio "appearance" on october 27 with the new US ambassador to denmark, rufus gifford. fast forward to around 35:00, that's where i begin - in danish initially, but in english once the ambassador joined. and i would like to note that just as i began to answer their first question, the ambassador and his entourage (including a guy who puzzlingly had a herring sandwich on plate) came in and i was very distracted. i was nervous, but my fumbling around was much more due to my utter inability to multitask than to my nerves and i did get better:

the conversation i had  that day led to a second "appearance" this week, in a conversation with lise thomsen, who is responsible for a website called expatindenmark. this whole thing is in danish, but you can catch a word here and there (chicago and golf club). i was much more at ease the second time around and i feel so privileged to be part of opening the conversation around the expat experience in denmark (the very next day, berlingske ran a piece on the unfriendliness of the danes by a 12-year-old girl!). the only way to change things is to talk about them and i'm glad we're finally doing so. this one starts at about 41:40:

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big storm heading for south dakota.

watch more of this guy's videos on youtube, he's a worldwide weather man. 

have your rubber boots ready!

a tweet will take you pretty far

© photo credit us embassy denmark via this tweet.

probably the coolest thing that came out of my TEDx Copenhagen experience happened the day after.

but first, i have to back up a little bit. during the afternoon break at TED, i was standing in the long line for coffee. i tried to break into the conversation the two guys in front of me were having with some or other funny remark. i was rebuffed completely. so, feeling fed up with the way that danes often are unwilling to talk to people they didn't go to kindergarten with, i tweeted, Dear Danes, you suck at talking to people you don't know. #tedxcph. almost immediately, @TEDxCopenhagen tweeted back that i just needed to keep trying. i answered them that i had seriously only talked to fellow ex-pats that day and wrote in danish that i even spoke danish, so i didn't get it. i saw a few retweets and favorites of my tweet before my phone ran out of battery and gave up the ghost.

i didn't really think anymore of it until i got home that evening and plugged the phone in and got it charged up. there were a whole lot of retweets (more than the 4 that show when i click the tweet, which is weird) and a lot of answers to it. and people weren't mad at me either, they admitted it was true and that it was sad and that we should do something about it.

but it got even more exciting when i checked my mail, where i had an email from a radio journalist who wanted to interview me on the air on friday on a national talk radio station about the tweet. it also happened that the new us ambassador to denmark, rufus gifford, would be in the studio as well, so they thought it would be fun if i gave him advice about living in denmark, since i'd been living here for 15 years. i couldn't say no to that. so on friday afternoon, i found myself giving the following advice to obama's top fundraiser:

~ book a holiday somewhere warm and sunny in january, because it gets really dark here then.
~ buy a bike and ride it.
~ visit all of denmark, because there's a lot going on, even over here on the mainland. in fact, the top three richest people in the country all live in my geographical area.

it also didn't hurt that the ambassador was a bit of a hottie (as is the journalist for that matter).

and tho' i'd rather gone off twitter, it kinda restored my faith in it as a happening place. and it goes to show that just a little tweet will get you pretty far. so get out there and start tweeting!

glass distortion

although artist mette colberg was very nervous and it seemed like she cut her TED talk abruptly short (probably due to her nervousness), my interest in her work with glass, especially her filter project, was piqued. she works in glass and has made some blown-glass "lenses" to fit onto a camera, in order to explore the way which glass transforms the objects which we look at through it.

always keen to do something new with my daily photo project, i came home and started looking at the glass around the house in terms of how it might give me a new view on the everyday scenes around me. last night, at the dinner table, i noticed the orangey sunset light coming through the big jar of stones on the windowsill and decided to snap a few photos through the thick glass of the jar. the double layer of thick glass rendered the sunset scene almost watery and wavy, despite the clear skies. the tree branch sticking up outside the window ended up looking a bit like one of the big steampunk electrical pylons that are visible in the distance when you look at it through the much clearer lenses of your own eyes.

it's interesting how glass both clarifies and distorts. if i didn't have my glasses or contact lenses i'd practically need a dog to guide me around, so some glass makes things clearer. but other glass, even the glass on our windows, can distort the things we see, transforming them into something strange and unfamiliar.  to do this intentionally is an interesting notion.

this is the sort of thing i hoped TEDx Copenhagen would do for me - inspire me to look at the world around me in new ways. so, although i thought mette become overwhelmed onstage and exited much before she had intended to, she did inspire me to see the world just a bit differently.

more on TEDx Copenhagen as i continue to ponder the experience.

reflections on TEDx Copenhagen, part one

i've had a few days to let the experience of TEDx Copenhagen wash over me. on the day itself, i think i felt a little bit let down and disappointed, feeling that the talks didn't live up to the quality i had come to expect from TED. that feeling hasn't really changed after a few days of pondering it. to be fair, there were a couple of exceptions - young entrepreneur sara naseri, of persian descent, but raised in denmark, took us through her development of a molecule to protect from uv rays at the age of 17. she was utterly charming and wonderful, as well as having an inspiring story of having the courage to pursue your idea and to continue even in the face of roadblocks. i also thought mads lodahl's call to challenge the straight world order, questioning how our notions of normal came to be what they are and who benefits from them, was worth the trip (more about that in another post).

the overall theme was "mirror, mirror," a reference to snow white's step-mother's truthful mirror on the wall, unable to speak other than the truth, even if it was uncomfortable. the talks didn't all fit this theme, to be honest. and the quality was all over the place. low points were the oddly-dressed eva kruse, founder of copenhagen fashion week, who had a vague message about how the clothing industry needed to be more sustainable, but few notions of how that could happen aside from utilizing the cloth more efficiently. it was a shame her talk was so empty, as she had pretty much gotten top bill on the TEDx Copenhagen website. i spent most of her talk distracted by the odd outfit she was wearing, sort of 80s aerobics wear meets star trek with a peplum.

other low points were the emotional talk by comedian and cancer survivor geo, who did a short plea for people to not be afraid to talk to people with cancer. it was sweet and his tears seemed real, but i couldn't see how it fit with the program. there was a sales pitch by a blind man named hans jørgen wiberg, who had invented an app called be my eyes that could enable us all to be volunteers from the comfort of our own couches. again, he was sweet, but it didn't provoke me to think the way i had expected of TED.

i was suprised by how many of the online TED talks (five or six) they showed throughout the day. at one point, i tweeted that i could watch these at home, why were they using valuable time on them? especially as they had chosen hard-core science and math talks that, in my view, were mostly far from their theme. they then explained (far too late), that they were required by the licensing agreement to show a certain amount of TED talks from youtube. they really should have explained that up front.

the two organizers, lærke and ronni, behaved onstage like they had recently broken up and couldn't stand one another. happily, they only came onstage and subjected us to this at the beginning and the end. i think if they'd acted as hosts, it would have really ruined the day.

late in the day, i wrote in my notebook: this conference needs higher caliber presenters. a girl who helps homeless men play soccer gave a sweet, but ultimately pointless talk. an artist, working in glass, gave a strange, disjointed talk on the properties of transparency and then rushed offstage in a way that struck me as far before she originally planned to. a young brit, harry fear, who was a documentary filmmaker and a bit too in love with himself promoted his films about the gaza strip. he had a valid message about how we should seek news in alternative sources, rather than from the monolithic mainstream media (which he left undefined and unquestioned), but missed the chance to delve deeper into how the mainstream media has come to present the version(s) of events it presents. in my view, his gloss on it was just as shallow as theirs. i'll take bets that he'll be working for the BBC the next time we see him.

but it wasn't all disappointing, the opening talk, by head of the danish design center, nille juul-sørensen was interesting and started the day off well. he brought one of arne jakobsen's ant chairs onstage and issued a call to danish designers to stop thinking about designing iconic objects and instead design the future in a meaningful way. he cited two areas where he thought that the design of the future could make an impact - in the area of waste (thinking beyond recycling) and in the notion of a circular economy, where things get shared or reused or repurposed for another use when their original use is over. he said, "the coolest thing about the future is that we're going to live there." 

some of the unexpected highlights were the various performances that interspersed the talks and the videos. when all you've seen are online TED talks, you don't realize that as an event, there's a whole lot more going on at a TED conference. there was a very provocative burka-related dance/video/music/theatrical performance by EUrabia. improvisational music directed by sound painting (it sounded an awful lot like jazz) by a group called borderline. and my personal favorite, a phenomenal performance by one-man band kalle's world tour. there was even live entertainment in the bathroom by niels gröndahl.

i thought that TED stood for technology, education and design, but learned that it actually stands for technology, entertainment and design. entertained, i definitely was, but not always provoked to think at the level i had expected. sometimes tho', it can be good to check your expectations at the door and just let the experience wash over you.

i have more to tell about something unexpected that came out of the conference, but i'll leave that for the next post.

a laundry list of impressions from tedx copenhagen

my head is spinning and i'm still processing the whole TEDx Copenhagen experience, so this is just a quick post to check in and make a little list of all the things i want to remember to tell you about. most important is that a tweet i tweeted during the event has quite likely landed me a radio spot tomorrow, giving advice about denmark to the new us ambassador. yup, it was that kind of day.

but don't let me forget to tell you about:

~ live musicians in the bathroom
~ the homeless guy who helped himself to some of our lunch
~ a lovely, charming young girl who invented a molecule at the age of 16
~ the crazy, bossy coffee lady
~ the lack of swag
~ how the two hosts had obviously recently broken up and couldn't stand one another
~ the human arabesque video
~ now, new, next
~ pretentious anti-everything poseurs
~ an annoying irish woman to whom i lost a competition i didn't know i had entered
~ be my eyes, an app that will let you volunteer from your couch
~ the really weird outfit the copenhagen fashion week woman was wearing
~ changing the straight world order
~ a pretentious young brit who was fighting a battle against the so-called mainstream media without knowing what their agenda was or who/what might be behind it
~ why they played 5 TED videos i could have watched at home
~ the filter project
~ why we are biologically inclined to avoid being reflective for too long
~ surprises and disappointments

but i need to process it all first, it's still tumbling around my head.

for now, i leave you with a youtube video i managed to find of kalle's world tour, a most amazing musician who may have been the highlight of TEDxCPH for me today. this will just give you a taste, but today, he combined death metal and children's music and it was awesome: