Too much time on my hands. I was looking at the wood grains on the floor the other day and tried to draw their outlines. I thought they looked a little like country shapes, or islands in the ocean. A friend said they looked like dead animals. But then I invented dialogue for them too. It made perfect sense in my head, of course, that a group of knots and burls on the ground would be chatting with one another, likely in a southern accent, discussing things like who gets to buy beer next, or where's the best skeet-shootin' in town. But now that I write it, it seems a little silly. Knots wouldn't have a southern accent at all. It would probably be Norwegian.
I was recently invited to a dinner party at an undisclosed suburban location, which looked pretty much like every Icelander's 'American Dream' house, fit with designer furniture, multiple bathrooms, and giant ceilings. The only thing missing was a three-car garage, and the Icelanders who actually inhabit the house. Unfortunately it was also situated in an area of Iceland that was hit by the financial collapse, with half- or quarter-built houses sprawling around it, piles of dirt and timber everywhere, and general folly of human greed. What a delightful start to dinner, right? Well, the interior of the house wasn't that bad, and it was about being with friends and having fun anyway. The houses ended up having some totally hilarious delights that I just had to photograph. Like this! Husband and wife painting with flying fish! Or maybe they're tossing fish for good luck. And this! The most amazing embracing lopapeysa (traditional Icelandic sweater) couple you'd ever see. It's like the Icelandic version of those little Christmas statuettes- charming and sweet but strangely anonymous. I'll call them Siggi and Sigga. Siggi works on the farm, and Siggi takes the wool to be processed, and then they both spent a few warm winter nights knitting their sweaters by the fire. (Knitting used to be a man's job in Iceland, stemming from the sea man's skills at knots and nets, and needing to make and mend very durable clothes for themselves. Fun fact!)
The bathroom was trés fancy and had built-in starry lights above a jacuzzi! You could have a starry night whilst in your bath on a cloudy windy winter night, or pull the blackout blinds closed in the middle of the summer, and you have fake night to try and fool yourself into thinking there isn't 24-hour daylight. Look, some of those stars are even blue-shifting. Maybe they are in the Andromeda galaxy. Just kidding. It's just LED's, silly.
The baby room left a little to be desired, at least in the way that I would pamper my child. Not through monochromatic color schemes. Someone is perpetuating gender stereotypes right here, I think. Or perhaps they won an inclusive baby package from a giveaway, and that's just what they ended up with. Unlikely. Soon dinner was ready and I quickly forgot about the pink-radiating room; it was time to sit down to a delicious home-cooked lamb with new friends and great conversation. Then off to the city for evening drinks and dancing. What more could life have to offer? Only one thing. And if you said a gay version of lopapeysa couple, you'd be right.
I did a little creative exercise and listened to a couple Joanna Newsom tracks from her latest album (the amazing Have One on Me) while drawing some shapes that flowed along with the music. They seem very appropriately Joanna Newsom-y to me, don't you think? But they also reminded me that I once did the same kind of thing in a music class in fourth grade! I hadn't thought about it in years. We used to have a fun listening skills exercise that the teacher would play something on the piano and we would draw shapes that sounded like what we were hearing. I think she even played a recording of Beethoven 5 once, and I had big orange circles for tympani, and little pencil lines for the violins. I think this would be a good exercise even for adults in a music appreciation class or an intro music course. Now that I 'get' what it does, it still amuses me to play around. It gets you thinking about the form of a piece, what ideas repeat, the shape of the sound, orchestration, so many things...and you don't even have to know much about music- you just have to like to color. (Screen shot from Disney's 'Fantasia 2000', which, with its older 'Fantasia' counterpart, basically lets adults do the same exercise, but then get paid for it, and we watch it as entertainment.)
I saw three German films during the first-ever German Film Festival Days here in Reykjavík, and each film was amazing. I can safely say that they were some of the best films I've seen in a long time (and they all had English subtitles). Curiously, I chose the films based on their plot summaries in the brochure, but they all ended up featuring musicians in one way or another, in major character roles! Let's talk briefly about showing music in new German films, shall we.
Now, professors can make a whole degree-program of this stuff, so I won't go into too much detail about diegesis or music theory, and I know very little about film theory, but I thought I'd highlight some musical tidbits that stood out to me.
The first movie I watched was 'Poll', the opening film of the festival. Thanks to Annika Große, the amazing organizer and much under-credited founder of Þýskur Kvikmyndadagur, for the free ticket (I felt very fancy). 'Poll' is epic. Gorgeously shot. Totally dramatic, riveting even. And, there is a lot of clever use of music. Folk songs, chamber music, live bands playing- there may have been almost as much music on-screen (the characters can hear it = diegetic!) as 'scored' music (non-diegetic, background or extra-diegetic). Even in the trailer one may sense that the light classical ditty in the background mix will be featured in stark contrast with the violence and darkness of a family torn by war. And then the war drums enter for real. (Sorry about the trailers, I couldn't find them all with the english subtitles).
There are a couple scenes in particular that use lighthearted jolly music in direct opposition with tense visual scenes- it heightens the violence of what you're watching all the more. A boy in the film has his fingers crushed as punishment for lying, and then he's forced to play a song on the accordion. At another family gathering, the heads of the house play some little chamber ensemble piece together. Meanwhile, we the audience unravel the interplay between the characters- infidelity, lies, deceit are flying around the room, very cleverly shown through unspoken camera shots and quick glances (and historically appropriate salon style interaction). I could imagine that there was a lot of communication between the musical team of the movie and the director.
The most potent musical scene in 'Poll' occurs when the wife of the house plays a solo cello piece while her abusive husband's life's work explodes into flames in the background. Take that for indifference. Her cello playing also opens the whole movie, and basically closes it as well- musical bookends of the same sad solo.
The biggest problem with the cello is that it looks great on camera but it's really hard to fake like you're playing it. This film (out of the three) gets the lowest grade for fake-playing realism. It doesn't bother me so much that say, the fingerings of the cello notes aren't always right. I sure can't play the cello. A violin could have even hidden that fact a little better, it's smaller and the finger positions are subtler. But even weirder, the actress plays a low solo, and even furiously bows some low open strings, but she's shown playing on the highest string of the cello! Definitely Not Possible. DNP. Maybe she thought it was like a left-handed guitar, strung backwards. No, probably not.
Our second film today is 'Sasha' or 'Sascha', depending on which country the film is playing in. Actually, correctly: 'Saša'. This crowd-pleasing film stars a piano-playing young man who prepares for his piano audition into conservatory while also having a huge-ass crush on his male piano teacher while also wanting to come out to his traditional family. Some hilarity ensues, but mostly tenderness, frustration, a little scariness, and real-world kind of emotions, especially in culture clashes of Sasha's family from Central Europe and their lives as emigrants to Germany.
Mostly I loved the film for this scene, I wonder why. I forget that American movies with gay characters or plots often shy away from even showing shirts off (unless it's for comedy) let alone a hot makeout scene and a romp around in bed. Even more un-american is the teacher-student relationship theme, which is usually pretty taboo. But this is a German film, and this is the 21st century, thank goodness. One of the best-made sex scenes I've seen in a long time, tasteful but also not shy.
Back to the music! I was distracted by pectorals for a second there. Sasha plays piano for much of the film, mostly a Beethoven Sonata. His mother at one point plays 'Moonlight Sonata' which is awfully melodramatic, but it works well to tie in the relationships between Sasha and his mother, her sacrifices for her child, the family's unraveling, and Sasha's 'hidden identity'. If Sasha doesn't actually play the music in the film, which he actually may, the editing is extremely careful and stylish and doesn't look staged. The hands are in the right spots. There is a lot of live-playing, which sounds particularly interesting to hear the same piece on different kinds of pianos throughout the film. Using a Beethoven sonata is a bit symbolic too, it lends an air of culture, of education, a 'better life' for an immigrant family's child. But this is also brilliantly contrasted with pop music from the family's home culture, and club music from the nightclubs in Germany. There are also long stretched of mostly Classical-era music, and then BAM! We're in a gay club and hear some serious sexed-up club beats. It made me laugh out loud at the absurd contrasts of music in the scene cuts, between this nerdy piano kid and the adult gay world he's about to enter. Well-done on the picking of trashy music, director Todorovic.
The final film I saw for the festival was probably the most 'artsy' and symbolic, but also the most interesting in terms of human emotions. 'Renn Wenn Du Kannst' (Run If You Can) involves a young paraplegic man named Ben, his able-bodied assistant-friend Christian, and a cello-playing girl Annika that they both fall in love with. The movie's full of dark humor and curious philosophical-themed dialogue; I would suspect like many brooding Germans, the topics of death and mortality and existentialism come up more often than in say, Idaho. The actor who plays Ben acts his handicap with brilliant precision- he drives a car like a maniac, gets angry and hurts people's feelings left and right, and wields an equally sharp sense of humor that rides a fine line between hilariously bizarre-sarcastic, and sad and lonely. Sadder still is the fact that the trailer doesn't have subtitles, but we can all gaze upon the beauty of the three main characters, and watch a bust of a composer fall out of a window and hit the hood of a car.
Wow, Ben (the actor Robert Gwisdek) is gorgeous. Well, everyone's pretty attractive, I'm easily swayed by color pallets. Annika plays the cello, though for most of the film we see her with an acute version of stage fright, and she can only squeak out the first three notes of a Brahms piece. Brahms is also played in their car, on the stereo, and in the symphony (perhaps it's Brahms's head that comes crashing though the window, we never find out). For acting like she's not even able to play the cello, the actress kind of does a B+ job, but redeems herself to A- with good-looking vibrato at the end of the film, when a beautiful solo emerges (I won't give too much away). Thankfully, the overdubbed sound that emerges in said performance seems also that of someone around the same skill- not too brilliant, not too juvenile, so there's a good match.
Annika may not have great hand positions, but at least she's not playing the opposite end of the instrument. Or conducting the orchestra. Don't get me started on the conducting, which is NEVER good. It's either edited out of the actor's control which makes him look like an idiot, waving his arms about to no beat in particular, or no one ever bothers to even look in a conducting book for a basic 3 and 4 pattern.
All I can think about when actors begin to play music on video is 'don't ruin it for me'. It's really difficult to overdub sound of live classical music playing, but harder to be a musician watching a movie of actors playing musicians (unless of course, they're Adrian Brody and have some sort of weird piano genius inside of them). If you're going to fake it really badly, I might as well just watch you play the highest part of the piano, and have the lowest, darkest, clangorous sounds come out of it. Or maybe someone playing a trumpet, and then an oboe timbre comes out. That would be very curious. That being said, I was still able to take myself away from the nit-pickyness of my viewing and escape for a bit. The cello bothered me less and less as the film went on. The piano sonata became all the more powerful, the Brahms more elegant and heartbreaking. I want to be transported to a world where people walk through their dreams, where the little guy wins, where CGI can built an impossible house out of some sticks and stones propped up in the ocean. A good movie, like any of these three, can put me in this sort of magical mood all the rest of the evening, where I just want to go for a long walk and think about life and light and color. In their best moments, these films had some quiet revelations. Watch If You Can.
(All images and trailers copyright their individual films and websites, I make no claims to the images but to show screenshots for examples and promote the films in my small way.)
Sometimes Iceland can be such a borehole. Haha, get it? "So what is this crazy place?" "Oh, you know, just some scientific drilling for geothermal energy that mysteriously exploded, and now steam and water and minerals come boiling out of the earth. No bigs, just a borehole. I'm hungry, got any chips?"
Here in Iceland you may end up putting your foot where your mouth is, sotospeak, if you aren't careful about what you say, where you say it, and to whom. Everyone knows everyone, shops at the same stores, goes to the same bars. It can be comforting in a weird way. But the moment you want to criticize something, be careful. There isn't the same kind of removed constructive critique of artwork that I've found in the States--which is usually a blessing, to try and do whatever you want, learn as you go, but it also puts a lot of weird crap into the world, sometimes without much forethought.
Me: "I love this shirt, but it was printed kind of crappily. And the tag is sewn on badly." New Friend I'm Trying to Impress: "That's my best friend's shirt company, she made that." Me: "I, uh, well, the design is great, that's for sure." Thankfully the shirts have indeed gotten better since then. So all is right in the world.
It's been a while since I posted comics! There are a few coming up soon.
A while ago I met the American ambassador in Iceland, at a fancy party at his residence. There was delicious food, and nice drinks! Unfortunately there were beef sticks, which I love and they were delicious, but they were a bit hard to chew. It looked a bit this this. People would come up to me and I'd have a beef stick in my mouth, and how do you act casually about that? Hold it in your hand like a lollipop? Eat the whole thing in one bite? It's not like a deviled egg that you can just pop in your mouth, or a cracker that you sort of hold onto. In any case, problem solved: I ran to a quiet corner and devoured my hors d'oeuvres like a caveman, nam nam nam nam! Then returned to civilization as my charming self, oh how DO you do, sir, it's a pleasure to meet you.
I am the proud owner of a certificate completing Icelandic course Level 4 (of 5 offered). I don't know if I'll take 5 yet, but I'm proud of my accomplishments thus far! Til hamingju...mín? Congratulations me? I don't even know if that's correct, so maybe I do need to go back to school.
I saw about the longest compound word I've ever seen in Icelandic, which was in the program notes at the Symphony, talking about how Steve Reich was once the principal tympanist at a filharmonic orchestra. In icelandic, Steve was was the 'pákuleika Fílharmóníuhjlómsveitarinnar í New York'. And for most people something like sinfóniuhljómsveit (symphony orchestra) is enough to wrap their brain around, let alone make it a possessive word and with a definite article.
There is a website for Icelandic sex toys and lingerie called Pen.is. Clever, eh? But it's also a play on words! 'Pen' in Icelandic also means 'coy'. A+ for you, Icelandic Penis website!
I've also been collecting Icelandic words that have originated in English slang, but are respelled phonetically (and often conjugated/declined accordingly) into the native language. Here are a few!
Stæl =style Kúl =cool Smart (but with rolled R) =well-dressed, very proper Djass =jazz Djók =joke Hringitónn =ringtone að Djamma =to jam (in a band)
Grammatical nuts will also enjoy the fun fact that while most people here say 'Facebook', using English pronunciation (and almost every Icelander is on Facebook), one can also say 'Fésbók', which is also literally 'face+book', and I sort of prefer the sound of 'fésbók'. After all, in the States I often called it 'Fa-ché-book', as if were some fancy Italian invention. And then there is also 'MySpaché.' But that's going off the deep end of pronunciation, really. There comes a point where I need to reel it in.
This past weekend I took an afternoon trip with friends to Keflavík and around the Reykjanes Peninsula (more commonly known as 'the area with the blue lagoon and the airport'.
We first stopped at Duushús, which could be considered one of the only 'cool' places in Keflavík, being the town that sprang up to service the US Army base that was in Iceland for decades (from about 1942-2006). Duuhús houses a multitude of things, count 'em: art gallery, restaurant, cafe, model ship museum, photo museum, theatre, army artifact gallery, and possibly other hidden surprises. And it's free to visit! I loved this model desk of the army base, here I am making a very important phone call on a 1990's phone. I'm not even sure if you should be sitting at their installations, but there's nothing saying you can't reenact some top-secret conversations about nuclear warheads, the cold war, and whale meat.
We saw an art exhibit of printers from Reykjavík, among them my Fulbrighter friend Nicole Pietrantoni had a few great prints on glass, which when light was projected upon them, would show their images as shadows on the walls.
And here is a recreation of the American foods that came to Iceland. It's all a little strange, as it's quite familiar for me to see these products, but really out of their natural context (i.e. in Iceland, where we don't even have a McDonalds, thank heavens, but thankfully we do have Honey Nut Cheerios). Near Duuhús was a little cave-like thing attached to a coastal rock cliff. I wandered over to it and it turns out to be the home of a literal giant- one named Sigga who is definitely involved with Christmas celebrations. But the best part about the interior of the cave was this: A million icicles; we must have discovered the cave at just the right time between freezes and thaws, and the light coming in was beautiful!
We drove on to see several lighthouses around the coast of the peninsula- I had been to the Blue Lagoon before and to Seltún's hot spring area, but never in the other direction on the coasts. It has been snowing a bit lately but the weather was quite beautiful for a drive. The southmost coast of the peninsula has the most dramatic rock formations, and you can see the bird-filled island of Eldey in the distance from here. These cliffs are known for their bird colonies all swarming around- it's not yet crazy bird season but it will be soon! This will be a beautiful place to hike in the summer, and perhaps reenact a little Sound of Music. The hills will be alive...with the sounds of gannets.
I visited the Music Museum of Iceland today. A bit by chance, I glanced through a book of cultural attractions in Iceland and noticed that there was a music museum, that I had somehow overlooked! It was also right next door to the art museum that I planned on going to anyway, so I stopped into both.
What a delight! I was treated like royalty by the staff and got a personal tour of the exhibit by Guðrún, the curator. I was also the only guest that day, so I guess she was happy to show me around. The staff was really excited that I had learned so much Icelandic in seven months, so we could basically talk about the exhibit only in Icelandic (mind you with a lot of simplification, and me asking questions, but still it was a proud moment). Here is Guðrún next to her life-size poster ancestor Sveinbjörn.
The Museum of Music in Iceland is more like an online collection of scanned documents and recordings for use on the internet, but it has a small exhibition space that changes based on funding and as time allows. Tónlistarsafn Íslands is one of the only places that researches the physical artifacts of Iceland's mostly-oral musical history.The current exhibit is on the composer of Iceland's National Anthem, Sveinbjörn Sveinbjörnsson. There were letters and artifacts from his life, donated by his granddaughter, texts and scores of his music, and a couple particularly cool items including a blanket from Sveinbjörn's bed and a solid-silver piano sculpture, given as a gift.
Sveinbjörn was one of the first composers in Iceland, though originally trained to be a priest and later a performing musician. As there was no rigorous academic training in music in Iceland until later in the 20th century, Sveinbjörn moved to Leipzig to study with Reinecke, and eventually to Edinburgh to work and raise a family (I'm sure a really crazy idea at that time, nearly impossible for the average Icelandic citizen to do, just up and move to a foreign country and become successful). The king of Norway and all his entourage attended the premiere of one of Sveinbjörn's works, but unfortunately, his music was constantly panned...'well, he's no Greig, that's for sure.' Sveinbjörn's music certainly isn't much in the way of originality or daring avant-garde, but the music is pleasantly Mendelssohn-y. He received a lot of accolades in his life, like a pension from Iceland, much fame in Canada (some of his family ended up moving there), and the Order of the Falcon (Iceland's version of Knighthood). There's a cool picture of Sveinbjörn's funeral procession, with hundreds of Icelanders parading down the street in the rain to show tribute to the man, their black umbrellas all a-bobbin'.
It was only recently that the melody that Sveinbjörn composed became the 'official' Icelandic national anthem, which was a setting of 'Ó Guð Vor Lands', a poem written by Matthías Jochumsson (side note: it's rare for Iceland, and I would say for anthems in general, that it's basically a poem to God, and not to nature or the landscape or the people). Matthías was reported to have heard the premiere of his poem and hated it, he thought his own words were terrible, but then again he was also severely depressed. In any case, the national anthem became common to sing in Iceland, though very few people that the museum surveyed actually knows who wrote it or who wrote the lyrics. They also say that it's very hard to sing, and requires a big vocal range, which I could say the same thing about the national anthem for the States as well. (America's is 'The Star-Spangled Banner', and was written by Francis Scott Key, a poet, but set to the music of a drinking song by John Stafford Smith. I must admit that I didn't know the drinking song fact about the Anthem. I would think most Americans, if they remember Francis Scott Key, would side with me and say that he wrote the music as well. Right?)
There are also several verses of the Icelandic anthem, but people only sing one--much like the American anthem, which has up to five giant verses but people only sing or screech or mess up the first. There's also debate of getting a second anthem, or making a more populist anthem that really gets the country all patriotic-like. Some countries have two anthems, why the heck not.
After the Sveinbjörn chat, I was also showed several other projects the Music Museum is working on, including digitizing of documents, receiving donations of instruments and memorabilia, maintaining Iceland's giant musik.is website, and I got to see a couple of old wax cylinders made by Jón Leifs (the Bela Bartók of Iceland, if you will, who went around Iceland recording traditional melodies).
Certainly I did not expect a dance remix of a folk song to enter the conversation at this point, but this is where we break it down, now. I listened to a wax cylinder recording of an (probably crazy) old man singing this folk-song 'game' (the first recorded sample on this Icelandic page). The story goes that the Devil tests someone to sing this difficult song, and each time sing it up a fourth, hardly breathing, and if you can pass the test, then I don't know, maybe you won't be taken away by the Devil or something. This old man passes the test. A composition student heard the piece and used the recording, and worked on it and it actually is quite successful (and hilarious) as a dance remix! It was even on Icelandic radio and everything. To top it off, the remix was then found by a class of children, who choreographed it into a hot dance jam. Musical dissemination through the generations at its finest!
I took a small excursion to Hafnarfjörður today (pronounced a bit like 'Hap-na-fyor-thur' but definitely not like 'haf-nar-fa-jar-dar'), and boy, was I in for some hits and misses. For one thing, every museum there happened to be closed (and there are about four in town). One museum is definitely open all year but happened to be closed in mid-exhibit transition. There are a couple really cute bakeries and coffeeships, but both churches I peeked into were also locked. It was snowing out and pretty quiet on the streets, so I thought I'd find a hidden gem of a harmonium somewhere to play and revel away some winter songs, but also no luck with that either.
But then I noticed this lookout point on a hill, and decided that I was already walking around in the snow, why not have a dramatic view to boot (or should I say boots, I put on my heaviest boots today). I was not disappointed by this! There were even some trees up there, how delightfully big they were. And on the way there and back I saw some of the things which Hafnarfjörður is known for- it is a small 'town'(essentially now a 'suburb' of Reykjavík's urban sprawl) full of old, charmingly detailed houses, neat architecture, and small harbor. The town is also sort of hillier than anything else around it, which felt like another country, maybe Switzerland (though I've never been there) or some alpine village, where many of the streets are joined with staircases and the houses are built a bit precariously on the edge of cliffs. Many of them have the old-style Icelandic detailing, like 'gingerbread' of Victorian homes, sprucing up the tin-clad walls of the historic timber houses. There was a really bland building which I still kind of liked for its moderist repetition:
And this ominous-looking school (or so I think it's a school) on the hill: I bet it was an amazing gargoyle of a building once, until the town sprang up around it.
At the base of the lookout there is a crazy Viking hotel/restaurant/souvenir shop/tourist trap. I didn't go in but actually this one looked far less hideous and actually kind of fun, compared to some of the ones in the city. The architecture of this building is also intense, I might shop there just to see what it looks like inside. Is that a traditional rooftop decoration up there, or did someone just take a Viking ship prow and adapt it for the roof?
On my way back, I stood next to some 11-ish-year olds who asked me for cigarettes; they were disappointed that I didn't smoke. They also couldn't stop spitting every approx. 3 seconds. Really, who has that much saliva? It's just a competition at that point. Icelandic teen angst at its finest. Even in a sleepy little harbor town, there's plenty to be angsty about. Like having to wait until June until the museums open. Ptew.
I'm pleased to announce that I'm going to be releasing an album! With a tentative release date of August 1st, 2011, my plans are to release works I've been experimenting on here in Iceland which I'm been making since September in collaboration with Pittsburgh writer & poet Mark Mangini. Mark sends me texts, and I send him musical 'responses' of various kinds. Then he sends me a poem, or words, or a story in response. It's like The Postal Service, except one of us is doing music and the other is writing, and we have yet to physically mail anything. Okay, it's not like The Postal Service at all. Maybe it should be called 'Gmail:Send!'. Nope, that's a bad idea too.
'Course, there could also be extra treats on the album too, we'll see what happens in the next couple months. One very interesting thing about my working process(es) here in Iceland is that my work has been more about the process of making music and experimenting than really knowing what the finished product is going to be. Or caring, really, for that matter. It's not like I want my work to be crap, but I've rarely made music just for the experience of making it- in the past it's always been about a particular end result, how do I get there, gotta have it done by this time, gotta be for this ensemble, etc. These Iceland works have really been evolving more organically, much different than writing my previous chamber music (more like writing music for Music of North Side Spaces, where each site or place called for a different way of working). But that's a good thing for me, I get bored doing the same thing the same way every time. Except for minimalism, heh heh.
I'm certainly excited to put some more material out there in the world to be listened to. Perhaps a small record label will be interested in picking it up. I hope whatever the finished project turns out to be, it includes some delightful gems for your lovely ears!
Three little holidays, all in a row, lined up for this past week's entertainment. Bolludagur involved lots of moms making puffed pastries, and families gorging themselves on whipped cream. Then Sprengidagur was the following day, literally 'bursting day' as one's stomach explodes from eating too much salted lamb and bean soup, with potatoes and carrots. And a lot of water to drink, to combat all the salt. And then you spend the night alone with some Tums as your date, but it was worth it, gosh darn it.
I went to IKEA on a little adventure for Sprengidagur, not because it was a holiday but because I hadn't been yet, and this is supposedly the biggest IKEA in Europe. It also snowed quite a lot (a bit of a rarity here) and it was doubly adventurous to wade through some small snowdrifts to get to bus stops, and try to act casual about slipping a lot on ice. Just kidding you guys, I planned to do that! Whoahauoh!
Little did I know that IKEA would be having a Sprengidagur feast in the cafeteria, and I got a heaping plate of lambakjöt and potatoes, carrots, and soup, for only 2 kronur. That's right folks. That's practically free! Apparently in the past it was totally free, but maybe they now need a head count so they charge two pennies, essentially. I didn't really believe the sign until I went to the cashier. My Bolla, the cream-filled pastry, was 155 kr (about $1.40US) and the meat and beans were 2 kronur. Best deal ever at IKEA, and I didn't even buy any furniture. Then I bought some sparkling pear juice and I was satiated all day.
The day after that was Öskudagur, or 'Ash Day'. Traditionally, maybe only 10 years ago, children would sneak around and try to pin little bags filled with ashes to people's backs without them noticing. A bit like France's prankish 'April Fish Day', which I always loved the title of. But nowadays it's more like Halloween, except that the kids in costumes go from storefront to storefront, asking for candy. I saw some great costumes today including ghosts, cowboys, glamour girls, and some very creative throw-everything-wacky-together costumes. The kids also sing songs for their candy! At least there's a certain amount of talent involved, rather than sugar-induced begging and pleading.
(photo credit: Stefán, visir.is.) A bit more on the holidays can be found on the Grapevine.
I went to what could easily be a horror-of-horrors concert for my personality type, the "Family and Young People" concert on the Iceland National Symphony's program. It was full of classical excerpts all pertaining somehow to trolls, goblins, fantasy, and magic. What in the States is usually a feeble attempt to rally children into thinking "classical music is fun!...Right?!..Anybody??...!" here was really a fun and delightful little program that kept the Icelandic kids (and myself) totally entertained.
Icelandic-raised kids seem to have a higher standard of musicality (choirs, festivals, sagas told in song-rhyme, holidays devoted to singing, music schools in many towns), and they grow up learning that 'classical' music can be enjoyed in the same ways that other genres of music can. Thus as adults, there is less of a stigma that the classical repertoire is something highbrow and elitist, and frankly uninteresting to the masses. I have yet to talk to anyone here that's asked, 'so how do you plan on making a living, when classical music pays nothing and nobody listens to it?', a question I'd often get in the States. With relatively few of them around, many composers in Iceland can actually make a comfortable living writing music, and be admired for it.
What made the kids' concert so enjoyable (besides the sound of the orchestra, which is good as always) was the completely engaging host, who talks to the kids between every song. She's kind of an Icelandic character actress, so I'm told, and appears at various cultural events and wears a red nose, jumps around and makes jokes, tells really fabulous stories about the classical pieces you're about to hear, and even keeps the kids engaged with little group activities ('raise your hand if you've seen a troll!' and 'we have to help the clarinetist play really high, everybody blow real hard!'. Also, her level of Icelandic is just simple enough that I could understand most of it, especially good when I understand a joke! She loved picking on people who were coming in late- at one point she jumped off the stage and helped people to their seats as they couldn't find their way. Those people won't be late to the symphony again.
The best moments of the music concert included (surprisingly), hearing John Williams' 'Hedwig' theme from Harry Potter, in which several tiny kiddies sitting around me hummed along with the theme with scary accuracy (the melody is not exactly linear, it has a big weird interval jump and chromaticism throughout it). Then during 'Uranus' from Holst's Planets, the boy next to me pretended to conduct, and at one point imitated playing the tympani, again with scary accuracy of the rhythm happening on stage. Then he stood on his chair for a better view, took out some cheese puffs from his mom's bag, and ate them loudly. All in a day's work for a cultured five-year-old.
Four times in the last month have my music-related questions led me to dead ends, or frustrated me to the point of giving up (until the next wave of ambition hits).
I'm a member of ASCAP, the American Society of Composers, Authors, and Publishers, which should more often than not be called 'Throwing Your Time Into a Black Hole if You're Not Famous Yet'. (TYTIBH-YNFY). Not quite true; I did make a couple bucks two years ago, but the rules have changed since then so now I won't be making anything until I reach a certain 'royalty limit'. I do register all my works with them, though, in the slim case that one piece might get played somewhere random that I don't know about (only slightly >0% right now).
Classical music 'business' with ASCAP is kind of a mess. It's easier if you have music on the radio, for example. X number of plays of your work, multiplied by a formula, = your royalties. But with classical music, someone, a literal person from the ASCAP team, has to happen to go to your concert and write down that you had a piece played, and then I imagine he or she takes it back to an Apple IIE somewhere and plunks in a composer's information, to see if you get any credits for your performance. Otherwise, you have to physically MAIL them copies of your concert programs, to prove that you exist. No printed program exists of your concert? TOO BAD.
Let's not even talk about the design of their registration pages, which really grosses me out. There's like, several font colors and sizes and graphic styles trying to vie for my eyes' attention! And it still manages to confuse me every time, or I end up composing something that is an exception to all the drop-down boxes you could possibly choose from.
This is sadly not even the part that frustrates me. Twice now I've sent ASCAP questions, and have received no response. There's a weird rule about not getting any royalties for having works performed in academic institutions. But what if one can rent out a college concert hall for one's own concert? I once asked this question, and did get an actual human response, but it said, "I don't know the answer to this, but let me forward your email to this guy whose job it is to handle this." And then I got no response from guy #2. Way to go!
Any advice for me from the networld of readers out there? I'll give myself some advice. 1. Take a deep breath. 2. Have a snack. 3. Keep working on music and don't worry about it right now.
I also want to know about copyright boundaries. I've written works that are sort of like cover songs (known as 'derivative' material, in copyright-speak), but also including original material. They're like arrangements, most of the original melody is there, but I've changed the underlying structures of the pieces. Where does a song's copyright end, and my material begin? I've emailed two copyright lawyers now, and big surprise, no response. Any music copyright lawyers out there willing to send me an email?
The 'industry' or whatever is constantly changing, I know, I know. I would almost go about my business in pleasant naivety about copyrights, royalties, stealing blatantly from pop musicians, if it weren't that I was trying to be one of the few better-informed artists out there. Maybe this is all part of the learning curve?
Lastly on my tirade about the minutiae of things that don't really matter right this second, are websites that make me sign in twice. ASCAP is one of them, and being able to add more funds to my phone through my phone company is another. Seriously you guys, I already signed in to see my balance, why do I need to sign in again to add to my balance? I don't. Game over. I win. I BIWIN.
I know I've mentioned Christian Bale in previous posts, in fact all the way back in 2006 he was in a collage I assembled, and then one sweaty summer he was my role model for looking good whilst shiny. This is another post that I mention him! I recently saw 'Velvet Goldmine', in my quest to catch up on a few movies that I've heard about but never got around to seeing. The movie had its moments, and some fun glam scenes, though I was in general just a bit whelmed by the whole thing (a bit indifferent, not overwhelmed, not underwhelmed, just whelmed). Ewan McGregor plays a fiercy Iggy-Pop character, Jonathan Rhys Meyers plays a David Bowie-esque lead, with plenty of sex, drugs, and rock and roll, and Toni Collette.
However, one thing kept my interest through the whole movie: Christian Bale's lips. They look good in every scene, and apparently in every decade! Though his current mustache and beard hides the top points of the lip which I think are the defining part of his face. And that's too bad as I usually love beards.
I regret not being able to find an IMDB image of him wearing his glam-rock makeup and giant gold earring. But you can imagine it was broodingly captivating.
400 more views, y'all, and someone is going to be the 25.000th viewer to this blog. What an honor! It could be you! I want to know who it is. I remember MW was the 10.000th, maybe she'll refresh her page so many times that she's the winner again! If you let me know that it was you, you could get a prize from Iceland. I'm surprised that I've lasted this long; since 2006, just over once a week, gosh.
I did a couple random things lately that I thought I'd share with you.
I went to this random-ass museum in the middle of the 'ghetto' of Reykjavík, and by 'ghetto', the locals just mean that there are mostly children and immigrants living there and there aren't any designer boutiques within spitting distance. It's really quite nice otherwise; the pool has a hot-pot moat that you can lounge in underneath the lookout tower, and two waterslides. Anyway, the museum was a sort of civic-center/cafe/children's museum/doctor's office/cultural house, and it had these fabulous 'exhibits' (are they even? is it for kids to play on? is it about learning? I still can't figure it out, but I guess that's not the point) that combined a wall of clocks, a dragon that you could climb through, sound installations, a room of green felt hands, boots, wall carvings, runes, and a wall of TVs. And a giant stuffed dog the size of a small car. In the basement of the museum were offices, but the treasures lay outside! There were these amazing displays of old icelandic postcards from as early as the 1900's, and shelves upon shelves of old children's toys, categorized by themes around Christmas.
I went to a concert of Harpverk, a harp and percussion duo. It was pretty amazing! There were some great moments, some very ideomatic works, some not-so-interesting and/or badly written moments, and then a couple REALLY wacky pieces that pushed the boundaries of the categories 'harp' and 'percussion'. Like this one, by Jesper Pederson, which looks bizarre, and indeed sounded about how it looked, but it actually was quite effective and fun. The percussionist put a blinking light on his head--the blinks were generated from a signal generator in a computer--and every time it blinked, he'd slide ball bearings down a tube which made quite a fun sound. The harpist played her new electric harp in a mostly textural way. Another piece involved a cardboard box with a demon face in permanent marker on it, with some duct tape. I'll leave it at that. I think the eclectic mix is what makes it a really good show! Very profesh the whole time, but relaxed as well, not taking themselves too seriously. I left wanting to write something for them really badly. That's always a good sign.
A lot of life in Reykjavík involves regrouping. Change of plans! Change of schedule! Last minute curve-ball! Re-thinking the course of projects. And also spontaneous fun! Perhaps a lot of that stems from the weather, which seems to change quite quickly here, much more than in the States. Sunshine one minute, hail the next. Cloudy and rainy one morning, windy and snowy by lunch, then sunny by sunset. Only a couple weeks ago, it looked like this outside, sort of gross: And then within minutes it looked like this, kind of Swiss-ly sunny and bright. And then it would change right back again.
Now, I can see the sun, poking real rays of light around the buildings. The other day I got direct sunlight rays into my apartment! It's been a while since I've seen you little buddies, welcome back.
With the sun suddenly showing its big fat fés, the whole city looks different. The streets appear wider. The sky is much bigger. The days are more open to long walks, and people's attitudes get a little chattier. Long, lazy sunsets are returning! I also discovered the joy of the best-kept-secret in Iceland- a footbath! It's a giant rock, right on the ocean, with a carved out hole in it, that has constant hot freshwater pumped into it. Don't believe me? Here's my leg in it. You could fit about four happy foot-bathers in here (but nothing more than feet or perhaps a tiny person might fit.) I walked out to it the other day and dipped my toes in, in between snow squalls. The view I got from the footbath was breath-taking. Check out those contrasts- dark black sea rocks with the snow on Mount Esja in the distance. The light and air were so clear and bright. Amazing!
