why yes, it is another interview...

lynne of wheatlands news, who i interviewed during the great interview meme, actually interviews people for a living, so i asked her to send me five questions. what can i say, i'm a girl who needs an assignment.  i've found this interview thing to be so much fun! it has provoked my thinking and helped me explain things even to myself while i was writing the answers. that's how a good interview should be.  so i give you lynne's questions and my answers:

lynne:  Your daughter Sabin has an unusual name. Where does it come from and how do you pronounce it?

me:  sabin is a twin, born 10 weeks early because i had the first case of listeriosis seen in denmark in 25 years. her twin sister, sophia, was stillborn. sabin, although only 1570 grams, was perfect and fine and healthy, but just very small. we felt she needed a very strong name after such a difficult beginning. so she was named after my paternal grandmother, whose maiden name was sabin. we decided it would work as a beautiful first name and would carry with it the weight of the strength of my amazing grandmother, who lived to be 96 years old and had ten children (not necessarily in that order) and was truly the matriarch of our family. although she didn't live to meet sabin, i know she'd have loved knowing her and would have loved that she had her name.

sabin's middle name is amalie, in case she grew up and didn't feel sabin suited her. amalie is a more common name in denmark. however, she strongly identifies with sabin and wouldn't dream of using something else. i call her all sorts of pet names and she often insists that her name is sabin and i should stop calling her pooka.

and it's pronounced "say-bin" with the stress on the first syllable and a soft i (not e-sound, but also not really a schwa (one of those upsidedown e's you might remember from linguistics and which i can't seem to make blogger produce)).

lynne: What do you feel about long, dark winter days?

the dark winters are something i struggle with living in denmark and something which makes the prospect of norway, which is even darker in the winter, a bit daunting. it might be ok if you had proper snow along with it, but instead, the winter is grey and dreary in addition to dark. it rains more often than it snows and there isn't much snow or even frost. most mornings when i run sabin to school, although it's still pretty dark out around 8 a.m., i don't have to scrape frost off the car.

i remember the first november i spent here, the sun never shined a single time. it rained an annoying cold drizzle the entire, grey, bleak month. that definitely gave me pause as to what i had gotten myself into.

where i grew up in south dakota, you had a proper cold, snowy winter and the winters were dark, but nothing like here. just as an example, chicago is more or less on the same latitude as rome and here in denmark we are more or less on the same latitude as the hudson bay. it's not as cold here due to the gulf stream and the fact of being surrounded by water (i guess that was what we called the lake effect in chicago), but the darkness is similar.

i think it's why the danes have this thing about "hygge," which is translated as "coziness," but which carries far more weight than that word carries in english, at least for me. inherent in it is a combatting of darkness with candlelight and red wine and good food and good design and laughter together with friends in your home. and that feeling wouldn't be the same without the darkness of the winter, so i've come to think that's something i can live with. i just have to be sure that when the sun shines i get out for a walk in it, regardless of how cold it is. we also try to go to the swimming pool on a weekly basis and there they have a "health cabin" with light and warmth treatment where you can spend 20 minutes or so and i've found that really helps.

lynne: What makes you feel most content?


as i'm waiting to start my new job (with the same company i worked for last year), i've actually been thinking a lot about this. because despite the doom and gloom of the newspapers and the television news going on and on about GEC, i actually feel quite content in my life at this moment. if i think about the reasons why, it has a lot to do with the fact of being in a home i love with people i love, surrounded by things i love, getting to do the things i love--cooking, sewing, painting, drawing--all domestic things.

despite spending a number of years chasing a career, i have to admit that many of my moments of contentment come from being in my home.  and the moments when i'm most often aware of feeling content are when i'm cooking with ingredients that inspire me or painting the walls a rich color that makes me feel good or sewing up a lap quilt or a pillow.

for me contentment also has to do with being able to spend a number of hours alone nearly every day. despite being seen as an outgoing person and largely being that, i have a great need for time alone to think. i love the quiet of the house around me or of listening to the same album or even the same song over and over. i love letting my thoughts wander as i sew seams. i crave the time to do that and feel most content when i have plenty of alone time.

i guess contentment comes as well from generally feeling that i'm where i should be at this stage in my life. although i didn't finish my Ph.D., because life took me in another direction, i don't regret it. in fact, i don't have a lot of regrets in general. all of the choices i've made and the experiences i've had have brought me to this place and this time where i feel satisfied. and it really does seem to be true that we have to go through bad experiences in order to be stronger and to appreciate the good ones.  i know that i am far more content now than i was at this time last year.

on the other hand, contentment is highly subjective and personal, isn't it? and who knows, i might wake up feeling far less content tomorrow because i also know that one of the things that makes me content is change and if things stay the same for too long, i get impatient and restless. i'm likely going to need to have some plane tickets pretty soon if i'm going to maintain this sense of contentment that i have at the moment.

lynne: How important is music in your life? What is your favourite type of music? I notice you write a lot about books your read and about your crafts but seldom mention music.

interesting you ask. music is very important and it's actually rare that i am without music. we have more iPods in this house than i care to admit and seven different speaker sets to plug them into so there can be music anywhere in the house(s). we have henry kloss radios in both of the bathrooms so we can listen to the radio while we're getting ready in the morning.

i've written a few of times about music, and pretty much all of the times i mentioned alanis morissette, who is one of my big favorites and the one i return to again and again to keep my equilibrium and sanity. but largely, i think i don't write about it much because it's something that's always there for me, like air, which i also don't write much about. :-) and i definitely don't have one of those widgets that triggers a playlist when you come to my blog--i have to admit that really bugs me when i come across those on blogs. i'm cool with people TALKING about their music, i just don't really want them to play it for me automatically, mostly because i have my own music playing. plus, i don't know where people are when they're reading my blog, perhaps they're somewhere where it would be really quite inconvenient to have regina spector blasting out of their computer speakers. because my list, if i had it, would have some regina on it.

my musical tastes run from what my sister calls vag rock (by which she means everyone from alanis, regina and sheryl crow to katy perry and lily allen) to chill and house, which i got into on a trip to turkey a few years ago to scissor sisters (might be vag rock too, now that i think about it) to jamiriquoi to nirvana to andrew lloyd weber's evita if i'm in the mood. i got totally into that, even before madonna played evita in the mid-90s and read every biography of eva peron that was published at the time. oh, and i love madonna and have since the beginning.

music was important in our household growing up. i had 9 years of piano lessons and almost as many of the flute. i continued playing the flute into college and although we don't have a piano these days, i do have my flute and should play it more often than i do. we sing a lot around here--with the music that's playing and especially in the car. and especially when my sister is here. sabin loves that.

the only thing i'm not a big fan of is most jazz, tho' some i do like. for me, there is a certain kind of jazz that just agitates me and makes me feel really restless and on edge. that's not what i want music to do for me--i generally use it to clear out emotions and find my balance again or to uplift my spirits and much jazz actually makes me feel the opposite of that.

but alanis, she's there for me every time.

lynne: What really makes you laugh?


husband. he's so funny and always says things that are so unexpected and hilarious. he can burst into a little song or make up a story and he makes me laugh every time. he's ironic and smart and just so funny. we laugh together every day and that's an essential component of my contentment as well.

jon stewart really makes me laugh too. intelligent, biting, satirical humor is the kind that's best for me. mr. bean-style humor doesn't really do it for me--that often just makes me cringe. but give me black adder any day. historically astute, bitingly accurate and just so funny, that's my kind of humor.

being with people i can laugh with, especially in a work setting, is really important to me. one of the things that made me realize i had to leave my job from hell was that i found that i wasn't laughing anymore. for me, laughter is a sign that things are good and if it's absent, i need to pay attention to that. and do something about it.

* * *

well, that was it, i think that was the last one. at least for now. thank you, lynne, for asking me these questions and thank you all for reading. now go, listen to some music you love, laugh and be content!

an eye-opener

today was the day of the inaugural meeting of the artists' group that's being formed in my community. i decided last month to join and paid my 100DKK fee to be part of the group, but as the meeting approached, i felt less sure i wanted to go. however, i took hold of myself this morning, flat-ironed the hair and drove over to the meeting, artwork in hand for the photo for the local newspaper. it was one of those moments when you dress up a bit too much because it feels like the best way to feel psychologically prepared. so, on with my fave gap dress, funked up with electric blue tights, grey socks and purple furry boots--looking suitably arty, right? (why did i not have someone snap my picture--oh right, because they were all still asleep when i left.)

thankfully, i pulled up at the same time as a very nice, smiling older man who actually spoke to me (i actually wondered for a minute if he was danish--he was) and walked in together with him and ended up finding a chair and sitting next to him in the back of the already-crowded room. no one said hello (not that i expected them to). soon, the meeting got underway. strangely, it started off with a list of what the association wasn't, given by the presumed chairman of the board (she wasn't elected yet at that point). i found it a strangely negative tone to start off on, especially as it mainly consisted of a lot of whining and pushing away of responsibility by the board that wasn't even yet elected and foreseeing of problems caused by group members who weren't yet causing any trouble. i sat back and reminded myself to put on my anthropologist hat and just observe the natives in their natural habitat. they say that anytime there's a group of at least five danes, they will form an association of some sort, so i wanted to see this in action.

one of the most interesting and to me, incomprehensible, aspects of the meeting was the presence of what they called an "overstyrer." this seems to translate, as near as i could tell, as meeting nazi--as she rudely interrupted people, spoke in the most patronizing, agressive manner, only allowed grown adults to speak if they had raised their hands, cut them off and loudly answered "no" whenever the gentleman taking us through the by-laws point by point asked if there was any feedback--thereby preventing anyone from offering any feedback at several junctures. what was most strange is although this particular individual was not elected to the board, she ran the entire meeting, even closing it with a little speech that conveyed that she thought it was a room of small, dull children rather than grown-up adult, creative artists, most of whom were in their 50s and 60s. it was really quite astonishing as a cultural phenomenon. i'll admit i don't yet have my head around it.

i wasn't the only one astonished, as at the end, one of the older gentlemen--one of six in the room that i had decided really looked like an artist--called her on her patronizing speech. she didn't take it well and the other righteous women in the room rallied around her, so she didn't actually learn from it at all, which was a real shame.

however, there are good things about the group. it's cool to be part of a group of 68 artists that live in my community. there's going to be an "art route" on may 17, where the public can go around and visit the studios and workshops of all who want to participate. i signed up for that, as my studio is perhaps my main point of pride (other than the famous kitchen, of course, which i'm still a little giddy about) and it will give me the push i need to be ready for that (i'm a girl who needs an assignment). i think it can only do me good to meet artists and find sources of inspiration within my own community, rather than almost exclusively online (as much as i love and appreciate all of you).

i guess overall, what surprised me most is that i thought that a group of artists would be extremely open--open-minded and generally open as people, but quite the opposite was true. their views on the incorporation of the group were really very square and what i can only characterize as non-artistic in nature. at one point, several people wanted to exclude young people under 18 from joining (not that there were any there), but why should young artists not be welcome? i just really didn't get that and luckily one of the elder voices of reason spoke up on that point and it was voted down. there was a closedness that surprised me, tho' i suppose it shouldn't have in light of how denmark is in general. i just expected artists to be different. in all, i guess it was an interesting experience.

i'm curious to get to know some of the others and find out why they got involved. i think it could be a real eye-opener for me to learn that, because i'm beginning to think that it's not for the reasons i would have imagined.

when one thing becomes another

husband and i went for a walk in the woods on sunday. our real purpose on such a walk is what we like to call forestry. because we always spend some time liberating small beech trees to bring home for our hedges. we're thinning them out, helping the forest, you know, forestry. husband is making a labyrinth in front of our house (we hate being like the neighbors, you see) and it requires quite a lot of beech hedge. we don't mind waiting for it to grow up, so we bring home really small saplings from our forest walks. you can see the beech trees above, they're the ones with the brown leaves that don't fall off 'til the new ones push them off in spring. the ones you can see in the photo are larger than the ones we take, those are like only a foot high.

anyway, on our walk, i kept stopping to take photos of things like seriously tiny mushrooms:

i am amazed at how there are always mushrooms of some kind growing in this forest, no matter what the weather or when you go. year round, there are mushrooms or fungi of some sort. i only know of edible ones in the autumn, but there are probably some you can eat year-round. it's just that you don't want to mess around with that if you don't really know them well. 

we got to talking about inspiration, which, as you well know, is on my mind of late. i said i felt driven to take pictures of mushrooms for some reason that i didn't yet understand, but that i felt it would come to me eventually. and i wondered aloud if there was some way to fast track that process, because right now, it seems like it's taking an awfully long time from inspiration to product, so to speak.  

just as an example, two years ago, when peter, my father-in-law died, we got these ceramic "odin's eyeballs" that had belonged to him. odin is the head god in nordic mythology.  part of the story, which i need to do a bit more looking into, is that odin dropped his eyeball into a well, in order to gain the gift of knowledge. i don't remember the exact reason that peter had these eyeballs (there were several sets, we got one of them), but it also had to do with seeing clearly after the breakup of his long marriage in the late 90s. in any case, they have held a strange fascination for me since they came into our home. they reside on the window sill in our addition and i am drawn to them often. one snowy day, i took them out and took some pictures of them and we used them for our snowman's eyes.

combined with the memory of my friend michellea's fantastic i-eye collage and heavily influenced by this photo from flickr (and who wouldn't be inspired by sandra juto?), i have been feeling that i need to do something with eyes. and somehow, all of this input clicked into place on friday and i came up with this pillow, which will be the first item i list in my etsy shop later this week, together with two more i'm working on that are of the same theme.

but it took me a really long time to get to this point (especially if you take into account that the first inspiration came clear back in 1990). if i really want to have an etsy shop and be part of a local artist's group and contribute something to eyebuzz's first 'zine, i'm going to need to fast track this inspiration a bit. (i'm trying to find my way here and any advice is appreciated, by the way.) 

yesterday, in an attempt to get on this creative fast track, i gave myself a little exercise. i saw this beautiful embroidery by the ever inspiring margaret ooman of resurrection fern on flickr :

and i gave myself the assignment of making one like it from all of the scraps that were laying on the table after a weekend's worth of creativity. what i thought was that i would imitate it, that i would make a nest and a bird and eggs. that it would, of course, reflect my scraps, so it wouldn't be an exact copy, but that i would somehow end with something similar. well, something interesting happened along the way. i began by making the nest, but when it was finished, i saw something else. i saw a bowl. and among my scraps, i spotted a red felt circle, which demanded to be trimmed into apples. and in the end, this is what i created (#24):

i can hear the echo of margie's lovely nest, but i did end up making something my own. which i guess is what inspiration is about. and i did manage to fast-track the process--since i saw the nest on flickr on friday and made this already on sunday. so perhaps there's hope if you just push yourself a bit. if not, there's surely a ton of things i've been pondering in the back of my mind from the inspiration gleaned years ago, if i can just coax it out. 

i promise to stop harping on about creativity very soon. i'll start my new job and get out of the house and be with people and the navel gazing will surely taper off.  thanks for bearing with me in the meantime!

she was born in a small town

since i feel a little bit like their fairyblogmother, i am going to take the liberty of doing a 5 things i love about growing up in a small town list ala VEG & extranjera over on Ocean (and to think i was calling it siamese. my bad.). plus, you know how i love lists. and need an assignment. i've written about growing up in a small town kind of a lot of times before, but i'm not sure i've ever really thought specifically about what was good about it.

1.  getting to try everything

in a small town school, you don't have to choose whether you're a band person or a cheerleader or a theatre person or smart girl or a sporty girl. you can be all of them. and in fact, the only way the school thrives is if everybody does everything. so you try it all and find out what you like and what you're good at. and you learn not to be afraid of trying new things. and that will get you a long way in life.

2.  getting a driver's license (learner's permit anyway-able to drive without an adult between sunup and sundown) at 14

there was nothing to run into. it was flat and the ditches were wide.

3.  having horses

i grew up with horses. we always had them. we showed them, and i've written about my horse trainer before. she was awesome. and having horses is just a wholesome thing to do. you learn responsibility. hard work. caring. getting up early to feed. mucking out stalls. and that standing in the barn at dusk on a summer night, listening to the snuffling and munching of a horse is just plain good for your soul. and your sanity.

4.  big old house with a front porch

the house "in town" that we lived in 'til i was 10 or so had a front porch with a porch swing, big columns and it was all covered in vines. i loved sitting in there in the cool shade, protected from prying eyes by the vines, watching people go by. that was great. there was a silver milk box there and i remember milk being delivered into that box (yup, i'm old). ice cream jim came up on that porch dressed as santa one christmas. lots of good memories and some not so good. it was on that front porch that our dog stella bit my friend tracey on the nose. tracey kinda deserved it, she had totally gotten in stella's face and stella was an old crotchety shetland sheep dog. and there that time i got a huge sliver in my foot and my dad had to sit on me to hold me down while mom got it out with a needle and a tweezers. ouch. but for the most part, it was awesome for dressing up and playing laura from little house and just swinging on the swing.

5. always feeling safe 

it was a totally safe place to grow up. i don't even think our house had locks on the doors and if it did, no one had seen the key in years. you knew everyone and they knew you. and you trusted each other. and looked out for each other. i think it has made me a person who, for the most part, feels at ease in the world and isn't afraid. it's grounding to grow up feeling safe like that. i'm glad i had that ground to grow up on.

so those are my five things. what are yours?

5 masterpieces - #1 matisse's goldfish

once again inspired by the summer column on page 2 of the berlingske kultur section, i'm assigning myself 5 postings this week on masterpieces that changed my life. last time it was people and things (as it turned out), this time, masterpieces of art and literature (and maybe a bit of architecture--i'm leaving my mind open, as last time i was surprised where the assignment took me). and let's face it, i need an assignment.

so, i'll start with the first one that comes to mind. matisse's 1912 goldfish. (aside: i so wish i had lived in that era--and maybe i did, but that's the stuff of another posting on another occasion.)

it was the summer of 1994, i was leaving russia alone after studying there for a semester. i had a few days in moscow and spent one of the them by myself at the fantastic pushkin museum, where this wonderful painting hangs in a wonderful, large room that's full of other matisse paintings. strangely, i found myself alone in the room, standing there before the wonder that is the dance. i turned around and across from me, there it was, goldfish.

i approached slowly, savoring the moment and savoring the fact that i had it all to myself, even the mean old guard lady who usually sits on a stiff chair in the corner was elsewhere. i could scarcely breathe. i got closer and closer to the vibrant colors. and then, there i was, standing close enough to touch it. i could actually touch it, there was no glass, just the thick layers of paint that matisse himself laid on the canvas. and no one there to stop me.

so, i did it. i touched it, gently and just with my index and middle finger. right there in the leaves near the pink flower of the lower right corner. i felt a nearly electrical thrill pass through me and i felt transformed, even if just for a moment. i had literally touched greatness. and no one would ever be able to take that away from me.

if passports could talk

yesterday, in the flickr group, kristine had a shot of her passport and used it to tell the story of how she was soon moving on to her next assignment. i didn't have any idea what i was going to do for my photo, so i did one of those tribute shots, as they're called when you blatantly copy what someone did and give them credit. i located my old passport and my current one and, as can often be the case with these daily photos, took a little trip down memory lane.

old on the left, current on the right

my passports are fatter than your usual passport. and that's because both of them have had pages added to them. twice. you'll also notice that my old passport was green. it was my first one and i didn't know that most americans have a blue one. i was "lucky" and got the green one during a very small window when they issued ben franklin commemorative passports. it's actually thanks to benjamin franklin that we all have passports at all, as it was his idea. the unusual green passport caused me no end of grief when i was traveling a lot in the balkans in the late 90s. border guards constantly questioned its authenticity and one guard at the turkish-greek border actually said, "green passport, very bad, very bad," and made a slicing motion across his neck. i was quite alarmed, but the conversation stopped there as that was apparently the extent of his english and my turkish was nonexistent. i've survived to tell the tale, so i guess it wasn't really very bad. and i never did ever meet anyone else with a green one.

as an american, you get stamped everywhere you go and you often need visas. the first passport filled up because the macedonian visa took a whole page every time and i had to have a new one if i popped down to thessaloniki for a weekend or up to belgrade for a coffee. it was early days after macedonia found themselves, rather to their surprise, with their own country, and it took them awhile to realize they could issue multiple-entry visas. i eventually got one of those, but not before they had used up ten pages of my passport.

a number of countries - china and india come to mind - think nothing of taking up an entire page of your passport for the visa. and the visas are elaborately colorful and often feature shiny holograms. i guess they want you to feel you got your money's worth. on the bright side, they're usually good for a least six months, so you don't need a new one should you be sent those places again.  i did use up two whole pages on indian visas, as i had to go there frequently enough that one expired and i needed another. (audible sigh.)

the bulk of my travel occurred during the bush administration and i clearly remember standing in lines at passport control, concealing my passport, as i felt a little sheepish about being american during those years. i happened to be in the philippines when obama was elected and i very clearly remember the sense of relief (tho' bush was still president) when i realized that i no longer had to hide my passport while i stood in line. on that occasion, people in line saw it and several actually smiled and gave me a thumbs up. with the incomprehensible debacle of health care reform (who would seriously not want to limit the influence of insurance companies on their personal health?) going on in the US right now, i'm not sure i wouldn't actually begin to conceal my passport again if i were queuing today.

many of the pages are covered in stamps that say "københavn" because i get stamped every time i come back into the country if it's not from scandinavia or the schengen countries. it tapered off because eventually, i knew all of the guys at passport control and convinced them to not to stamp me every time.

i've loved the travel opportunities i've had through my various jobs. the job i'm starting in april will not have so many travel opportunities, but i've been thinking about it and i'm really ok with that. looking at all of these stamps exhausts me a little bit. when i see the dates for the convoluted trip i took from copenhagen to singapore to heathrow to gatwick to budapest to constanza and back to copenhagen in one crazy week, it makes me tired. i hope companies today are using the possibilities afforded by electronic meeting software, rather than sending someone to give a 30 minute presentation in singapore on monday and the same one in romania on wednesday. i remember thinking it was all very exciting at the time (tho' having to switch from heathrow to gatwick was madness and an example of how bad the travel agent was). but today, i wouldn't even want to do it. and i would probably have the good sense to say no, but in those days (sounds like long ago, but it's not even three years ago), i actually quite liked it and of course, felt i had to do all of the things that were asked of me.

these stamps document for me how far i've come not just literally, but metaphorically as well. i think i've learned to say no to such madness today. and i hope that one good thing to come out of economic crisis is that employees aren't asked to do trips like that these days, because companies think twice before spending 40,000 ($7,300) kroner on such a ticket. i'm going to lose my gold status on both SAS and KLM here in the next couple of months. and tho' there was a time, not so long ago, when that would have panicked me, i'm resting quite easily in the knowledge. the world is changing and times are changing and it's no longer environmentally defensible to pop over to london for lunch or take a private plane back from newcastle like we did in the mid-noughties. i loved those times and am grateful for all the places i've been, but i'm quite ready to stay a bit closer to home for awhile. and besides, taking the train down through europe is quite romantic.

a quiet sunday

it's raining one of those bone-chilling cold rains--the kind with really big drops that somehow land exactly down the back of your neck when you poke your head out the door or dash back and forth to feed the fire in the studio.  so, we sit, the three of us, here indoors, each at our own computer, quietly existing in our own mutual but parallel worlds. we'll soon take a fika break to eat hot banana bread together, fresh out of the oven.

it's the kind of day that breeds introspection, but introspection is the last thing i'm feeling that i need these days. i've had quite enough of that lately. i'm reading malcolm gladwell's blink, which is a book that explores intuition and our decision-making processes. and i'm led to believe that all this introspection is keeping me from my intuitive side. there is such a thing as over-thinking. so i'm trying to get away from that today.

but my mind wanders to the dinner party we went to last evening with husband's old work team. it was at his old secretary's house. it was a nice evening with catered food and everything. the hosts had prepared a powerpoint slide show of photos of their holiday last summer. they'd done a grand tour of the US--starting at niagra falls, then going to hawaii and ending up in las vegas and the grand canyon/zion. then, another of the couples happened to have a memory stick full of pictures of their recent safari in kenya. although i inwardly groaned when the powerpoint opened, both viewings and hearing the stories attached to them were actually both amusing and interesting. i will, in the interest of trying not to be so introspective, spare you my thoughts on the bourdieuvian cultural capital present last evening. at least until another day.

and so my thoughts turn to how awesome sabin looks on a horse and it's only her second lesson. she would seem to be a natural, tho' she hasn't gotten the thing with posting the trot. she's fearless and she just sits so well. definitely makes me very proud.

my latest eyeball-related project is shaping up nicely:

on thursday evening, i was IMing with a friend who has recently gotten back from a six-month stint in china. she does a lot of painting and so i sent her a link to an art exhibition where you can buy a stand and be part of it--showing and selling your art. it takes place at the end of october in a nearby town. anyway, during the course of our conversation, we decided to go together and get a stand! so yes, i'm going to do an art exhibition in october! i'm a girl who needs an assignment, so i figure it's the best way to kick start my production, since i'm full to the brim with inspiration. so, on that note, i think i'll go out and work on these:

 photo taken the other day when the sun was shining.

i'm working on another something that's really exciting and i'll be back to share it with you later today. in the meantime, don't forget to go vote for my photo assignment!

a to å challenge: a is for awesome

it's a bit predictable, i realize, me, saying things are awesome. everything is awesome, as they sang in the lego movie. and things were awesome in those days (2014), then late in 2014, things got less awesome when they (read: an uncommunicative, short-sighted middle manager with no vision who had only worked in lego in all his life and never had any other job) decided to do away with my awesome job. and then my father died. and then i worked for the lego.com team (which was decidedly not an awesome place) as a freelancer (can you say incompent psychopath at the helm?). but then, in august 2015, i decided to listen to what my fatalist presbyterian soul was telling me and look for something else. and that something else led to me awesome job back in shipping. a job where i'm using all those skills i honed right here on mpc - writing and photography and generally being creative. things really couldn't be better. in the next week, i'll spend a couple of days in a creative workshop on a ship, then i'll fly to london and spend a couple more days sailing back and forth on the english channel on another ship (or two) taking photos and then head home. it's hard to imagine that life could be any better. so for now, everything really is awesome. and i'm definitely well on the road to healed (and wiser) from the wounds inflicted by my lego experience.

i have to thank my awesome friend amy from tilting at windmills for tipping me off to this little blog challenge. because goodness knows, i'm a girl in need of an assignment.

*this is really supposed to be the #atozchallenge, but here in denmark, the alphabet ends in å, so i'm gonna go native.

5 masterpieces - #3 1913 at the Hermitage

for a time in the late 90s, i had a very cool occasional job. i traveled with wealthy retired alumni association members from alumni associations like stanford and harvard. i wasn't a tour guide, but more a tour coordinator--making sure everything went smoothly and that hotels and transport were up to expectations. 

one of those trips was to st. petersburg. since these were VERY high end trips, the groups got to do things like get into the hermitage museum in st. petersburg 2 hours before the masses were let in at official opening time. and since i was responsible for it all going smoothly, it meant i also got to go along. (yes, this is going to be about having paintings to oneself, again, again.)

let me say that i have a strange thing for the decade of 1910-19 in general and for 1913 in particular. it's when i would most have loved to be alive and in my twenties. in my occasional interest for reincarnation, it has occurred to me that perhaps i WAS alive and in my 20s then and that's where my fascination originates, but it's hard to say.

but, that's why it was especially moving for me to be able to stand before these paintings, breathing them in, emotions washing over me as i gazed at them, greedily absorbing them in the privileged situation of having them all to myself. i give you three fantastic paintings from 1913...

composition VI (1913)

vassily kandinsky

landscape (1913)

vassily kandinsky

arab coffeehouse (1913)

henri matisse

i've realized several things doing this assignment:

1. it means perhaps an inordinate amount to me to have fabulous paintings all to myself, to have the quiet to absorb them without interruption and especially without sharing the experience with anyone else.
2. this has ended up being only about paintings and i had used the word "masterpiece" so that it would include books and an ancient ruin or two, but paintings have come forward in my mind.
3. i am eternally surprised where my writing takes me.
4. the hermitage has an awesome digital collection of their works online.
5. i need to get back to russia. it's been almost ten years!
6. i hear paintings as if they were music.

monday musings

i have a love-hate (hate, mostly) relationship with the work of lena dunham, but her fierce, feminist lenny letter is growing on me. it's a gathering of smart, honest, courageous, strong women, writing about politics, culture, the workplace and even menopause. i highly recommend subscribing, especially if you're a woman, but also if you know any women. 

in one of the many excellent podcast newsletters i get, (this one from gimlet's reply all) i learned about the vibration cooking cookbook, by vertamae smart-grosvenor. i found it available as an eBook through my library and i was paging through. it's only part cookbook (including recipes for racoon and squirrel), but mostly memoir. and in it i came across this lovely notion on the upside of being tribal. i'll admit i didn't think tribal behavior had an upside, what with the state of the world today, but this passage made me reconsider:

"when you are tribal you don't have slots for loving--you love. you can find a different kind of love for everyone. you love cousin blanche because she was your granddaddy's sister's child; "aunt" belle, even though she ain't really your blood aunt, because you feel just like she was kin to you. what i mean is, it (being tribal) gives you a big heart."

and it strikes me that these days, we are in need of bigger hearts.

* * *

it was about time we started to openly discuss the lies.
and you know it's bad when the wsj calls him on it. 

* * *

and because we need to think about something else:

why not about design, AI and future cities?

or the future of photography?
speaking of feminism, the british library is making material from spare rib available online.
maggie may is always able to write beautifully, even about the pain of life.
look what you can find if you go dumpster diving in denmark - enough to feed an army!
and how about a writing assignment from the vinyl cafe?
this animation by kristen lepore is profound and sad.
and this one is just plain weird.