KIERKEGAARD FOR KINDERGARTNERS

A few weeks ago in Copenhagen I found myself with an empty afternoon and scurried over to the National Art Museum for tea, a nap, and some high culture. I know the collection well enough now (bless you free museums) to drop in and visit a few favorite rooms, but this time I was drawn to a new temporary exhibit called Freedom!

I recognized the piece just outside the entrance, as the work of Korean-American artist Nam June Paik, whose fantastic television sculpture Electronic Superhighway is a highlight of the Smithsonian's American Art collection. This work was delightfully entitled Søren Kierkegaard Robot.     

The floor beneath the umbrella-wielding robot prompted the viewer to ask "what is freedom? what is the opposite of freedom?"

 

A provocative question to be sure, but more engaging than I had expected from the venerable Statens Museum. Hunting down an exhibition booklet I discovered that Freedom!, inspired by the 200th anniversary of the birth of Danish philosopher Søren Kierkegaard, was in fact designed for children. The booklet, "for grown-ups" provided philosophical prompts to share with little Mette and Jakob, including, in this case "Can robots think? Can they cry? Can they be responsible for their actions? Does a robot always do what it is asked -- and what about the rest of us?"

Just inside the exhibition was a room of swings bolted to the floor. I stood bemused as several rounds of children ran gleefully up the stairs and climbed atop the wooden platforms. Expressions of happy anticipation gave way in an instant to confusion and disappointment. A swing that didn't swing? What kind of sick joke was this?

Adjacent to the swings was a more disturbing piece: a graceful goldfish in a modern household blender.

Marco Evaristti, Helen, 2001

The booklet provided keywords for talking about the artwork, including power, prison, zoo, rights, responsibilities, and smoothies. It also gave a primer on Denmark's most famous philosopher:

According to Kierkegaard freedom, choices, anxiety, and responsibility are all interlinked. Responsibilities can be such a burden that you do not act at all. Are you responsible for the death of the fish if you just stand by and watch while another person kills it?

As an aside, the booklet also informed readers that the goldfish on display was one of many: each had a one-day shift after which it was returned to a larger tank in the museum workshop. This detail made me laugh embarrassingly loudly and also seemed to sum up something broader about the Danish mentality: life is full of darkness and difficulties, but no power on earth can deny you your vacation days.  

Near the blender was one of 400 pieces of a full-scale copy of the Statue of Liberty created and divided by Vietnamese-born Danish artist Danh Vo.

Danh Vo, We the People, 2012

According to the booklet, "The work will never be assembled, thereby challenging the notion of the stability and monumental qualities of this vast symbol of freedom." Perfect for an elementary school field trip, don't you think? 

What could possess a person to put together an exhibition for children inspired by Kierkegaard? I'm a mopey sonofabitch sometimes, but even I think proclaiming "My sorrow is my castle" is overkill. More broadly, in what kind of society could such an exhibit have resonance? The same one, apparently, that produces these chocolates.

I imagine this is what Danish director Lars von Trier would bring as a gift were you to invite him over for dinner. I saw von Trier's controversial epic Nymphomaniac when it came out a few months ago, and remember remarking afterwards to my Danish companion that the most American thing about me is probably my desire for a happy ending (if you know absolutely anything about von Trier's oeuvre this is not a spoiler).

I thought the movie excellent, but also deeply unsettling. I enjoyed the philosophical and existential provocations the film proffered, but after 5+ hours of self-destructive hedonism, heartbreak, brutality, and approximately 35 close-up shots of penises, a little comfort and closure didn't seem like to much to ask for.

But if Danish youngsters are encouraged to talk about censorship of the arts during wartime (another piece from Freedom!) and whether we really can exercise free choice in our lives I expect they would disapprove of the kind of neat and tidy happy endings American children grow up with.

At the Community College through which I escaped my last year of high school I remember when a classmate well-read on critical theory summed up the thesis of Fromm's Escape from Freedom: the idea that some societies crave dictators because they are afraid to be burdened with the responsibilities of individual choice. Compelling, but surely heresy! My philosophical training to that point had consisted primarily of episodes of Star Trek: The Next Generation: my high school teacher for a comparative world religions course regularly used the show to introduce the fundamental dilemmas humanity faces. I still have love for TNG, but as far as the 'big questions' go it is a slow-pitched softball compared to the direct punch in the face of a goldfish in a blender.

The Danes are famously open-minded and tolerant, and that can make them seem rather mild, even unresponsive (making excitable me feel like an psychotic mime in their company). One of my colleagues here recently noted that as smart and mature as our students clearly are, they seem somehow more innocent and less jaded than their American counterparts. That seems to contradict the reality of a society that encourages children to watch as a genetically superfluous young giraffe is carved up for tiger snacks, but I think it's all of a piece. My American students are raised with happy endings, but grow up to a reality of student loans, a shrinking middle-class, and never-ending war; my Danish students are exposed at young ages to 'adult' themes and unresolvable questions, but grow up to free education, five weeks of holidays, and the cushions of generous unemployment benefits and pensions. That's glossing over quite a bit of course -- leave it to an American to oversimplify and overstate the case.

Freedom! runs through August 3rd 2014 at the Statens Museum for Kunst in Copenhagen. If existential philosophy doesn't appeal I can also recommend their Danish landscapes, works by Lucas Cranach the Elder, and the three-sided foosball table in the atrium anteroom.

EVERYTHING'S COMING UP LAKRID

A few weeks ago I gave my methods students a lecture on fieldwork and the senses. I focused primarily on how sensory experience is culturally constructed, i.e., how tasting can be seen as an extension of touching, how hearing can be more reliable than sight in mapping out one's location, and how the Western privileging of sight has colored the way research is carried out and ethnographies are written. I encouraged them to spend at least some time during their fifth-semester fieldwork attending to all of the ways their senses were engaged and constantly gathering information.

This, of course, got me thinking about my own sacred duty as a lazy migrant-ethnographer. Sure I've told you about ethnic homogeneity, fjords, and modestrømpebukser, but have I put any effort into conveying the rich sensual texture of Danish life? Have I even paid it much attention myself? Not really.

Well, there's a bakery I pass most days on my commute that sometimes exudes wonderful fragrances, and a yeasty goodness of another kind when the Albani brewery is cooking up a fresh batch. There is the merry discordance of singing drunkards passing underneath my window most weekend evenings, and the low hum of sleepy small town traffic, untroubled by horns or blasting stereos. There are the wonderful creature comforts produced by the national fetishization of cozy-ness: the plush slippers, soft lap blankets, and abundance of pillows and scarves, as well as the sensation of riding against a hard wind on my two-wheeled steed. Mostly though, the experiences are so familiar that I don't notice them. Rain? Check. Seagulls squawking overhead? Check. Salmon? That too. As far as I can tell, there aren't many things those early Scandinavian settlers would have missed upon relocating to the Pacific Northwest, unless, that is, they were as obsessed with licorice as their contemporaries. 

Licorice. Lakrid. It's fucking everywhere. I feel hounded, harassed, by its ubiquity. Only occasionally do I apprehend it directly through my senses, but the frequency with which it presents itself as an option, and the unlikely places it does so, makes me feel as if I taste it a dozen times a day.

At the grocery store across from my house (as well as at the one another a block away), there is an aisle-long pick-a-mix of gummy candies, perhaps half of which involve licorice.

Nearby is the aisle of bagged licorice candies -- this is only half of the selection.

How can there be so many different kinds of licorice? Isn't licorice just that? Oh no no no. There is salty licorice:

Fiery licorice (this particular flavor also comes in lollipop and booze forms):

And so many more.

You've probably seen these little pocket packs at Ikea. I quite enjoy the "dark humour" and "LOL" flavors. There is also a selection of these at the cash register, just in case you discover to your horror that you forgot to put "pineapple licorice" on your shopping list. Eugh. Do you see what this does to me? I could put down my computer and be eating pineapple licorice within 5 minutes. It's like being haunted by an herb.
[Ed: it is actually a root].

Licorice in tea? Okay, that's not so crazy. But with mint? I'm horrified and curious.

Every Danish chocolate brand has at least one licorice variety. The combination distresses me. Yesterday a friend from Eastern Europe told me she's lived here two years and never been much into the stuff but just a week ago something snapped and now she can't get enough. This also distresses me.

And yet, for some reason, I approve of licorice ice cream. I don't make the rules, I merely experience them through my senses.

These are like the grown-up version of the bags of licorice candy -- suitable for display on your desk or coffee table. From left to right: chili licorice, cute (?) licorice, salt licorice, and lemon licorice.

Licorice salt. For no food item must be allowed to escape this tyranny. 

Not even cheese. The horror.

And of course a meat rub, "perfect for game and beef". Just like the "Red Vines Roast" that grandma used to make.

Two Danish sugar obsessions in one shiny tube: licorice-flavored marzipan.

For the licorice-flavored alcohol traditionalist you can't go wrong with "Fish Face" (slogan "With that real fresh taste!"). The youngsters appear to enjoy vodka flavored with apple & licorice, menthol & licorice, and salt & licorice, while at least one intellectual of my acquaintance swears that the pomegranate & licorice flavor is the best of the bunch.

Not just licorice beer, but chili licorice beer. 

You can also buy licorice in powder form, useful for cake-dusting, freebasing, and a passable substitute for talcum powder.

And of course you'll need to have it on hand for making homemade licorice-roasted almonds.

 
I'M PART OF THE PROBLEM.
Why couldn't it have been cardamom instead?

STOCKHOLM SYNECDOCHE

How much can you learn about a country from three days in its capital city? Not a whole lot, I believe, though I hear that cruise ship passengers who spend three hours on shore are able to deduce timeless truths about all manner of cultures. That didn't stop me, of course, from issuing a running stream of "in Denmark they _____, do they do _____ in Sweden?" questions to my patient American and British hosts. In that sense, I suppose, I did learn something, but mostly that for expats from any other part of the world, working and living in Scandinavia is basically heaven on earth, even if we might sometimes secretely wonder whether the parties are better in hell.

My friend Michel is the director of a museum on the tiny island of Skeppsholmen in Stockholm. If you take the pedestrian ferry from the mainland on a foggy February day you'll come close to the amusement park Tivoli Gardens, a place that looks straight out of Pinocchio's nightmares. 

Docked along the shore are great big sailboats with mighty wooden masts stained golden orange. You can still fish in this water, Michel tells me. When the weather starts to warm he'll pass recreational fisherman hanging their rods off the pedestrian bridge he takes into work every morning.

We spent most of the first day at the enormous, open-air, 'living-history' museum Skansen. Covering 75 acres of yet another island, Djurgården, Skansen offers the experience of living in 'pre-industrial' Sweden, with a hodgepodge of homes, shops, churches, farmhouses, and a full-replica of a 19th century town. George Saunders would be in heaven. Although it was clearly off-season most of the shops were still open and staffed. The baker was doing a brisk business in cinnamon rolls, making this whole street smell delicious (and I don't even like cinnamon rolls).

The cobbler and blacksmith were closed, but the glassblower across the way was up and running.

Nearby we found a potter, a pharmacy and a general mercantile lit only by candlelight. As our eyes adjusted to take in the barrels of bulk foods, ribbon, snowshoes, tools, and copies of Aftonbladet newspapers from the 1870s, the nice man behind the counter with the period clothes and matching mustache told us about the kind of life his character would have had. As he showed us how the scale worked and what kind of spices he carried I took in all the details of the shop. There was something strange about it I couldn't quite put my finger on. Then I took out my phone to check something and the contrast of the digital with the textural made it suddenly clear. 

From teepees to tenements, all of the 150 or so buildings at Skansen are originals, many transported great distances and reassembled on site. In China the ideal is to knock down crumbling old historic buildings and replace them with shiny new replicas. To Americans this looks like a grotesque Disneyfication, to Chinese it seems like a vast improvement. This version was practically authenticity obsession -- concern not merely with getting the look exactly right, but with using materials with legitimate historical resonance.

Most of Skansen's mock residences were closed for the season, but I was thrilled to get a tour of this 1930s era upper middle class home. The wife of the family informed us they were preparing for a ski trip, hence the picnic makings and the suitcase full of woolens, and regretted that we had come too late to share the pot of hot chocolate she had just cooked up on the stove.

We also missed out on sampling cheese made in the mossy yurts of the Sami herders. Sadly no one was home.

 

I was desperate to figure out what this marvelous structure (also visible behind the yurt) was. Shelter for biblical-level flash floods? A really awesome fort where the Sami kids could avoid being trampled by the reindeer? I was disappointed when I found a sign explaining that such structures are used to store firewood. If I were an Ent I would totally hit on this thing.   

 

The reindeer looked bored, but their antlers were gorgeous.

 

An onion-domed belltower behind a fence made solely of artfully intertwined branches. 

Hobbit hole, northern-hemisphere style.

Michel and Damon explore an early settlement.

I don't know how long we spent wondering around, but we were famished when we came across a handful of open grills presided over by a portly pink-cheeked gentleman I can only assume was supposed to be the affable drunken mayor. Whoever he was he was DEEP in character.

 

I don't need to make any authoritative statements about Swedish life and culture to make observations about how Skansen sought to portray Swedish life and culture. While it's often strange to see history flattened and synchronic, it's even more so when that history is inhabited. But if I was expecting to feel hit over the head with Swedishness I was disappointed. I thought it was refreshing how free of national sentiment the place was. In the area devoted to the Sami herders, for instance, there was no attempt to link them to the national narrative, just an effort to represent their particular way of life. This wasn't China representing its 56 ethnic minorities as having "always been part of the middle kingdom." Instead the message of the place was a rather neutral and straightforward "here are some of the dwellings and places of commerce and recreation you might find in parts of the territory that is now known as Sweden."

I think the most interesting part of the place was not how Swedish history was portrayed, but how it was consumed, and yes, I know you knew I'd say that.

 

The next day we took a day trip to Sigtuna, the oldest town in Sweden, its thousand years of history flattened out and filled in with specialty kitchen stores, boutiques and handicraft emporiums, and at least one shop specializing in tanned fish skins (salmon wallets, perch cuffs, trout hats, etc.).   

That's not to say the place wasn't charming. Best of all, on the main drag, just to the right of the fisherman-chic gentleman below, I finally found what I had been looking for since the moment I arrived.

A CARDAMOM BUN!!!!! (thanks for the tip Carrie)

 

It was worth the wait. Screw cinnamon rolls, this baby had lovely big chunks of fragrant cardamom in all its braided crevices. I found another the next day, and ate it on the way to the airport while enjoying my last views of evergreens for a good long while. 

Speaking of which, I now understand Poulsbo. If I was a Swedish emigrant arriving in the Pacific Northwest I would have taken one look at the Puget Sound and started unpacking. Just look at this:

  

Ditto on this scene: this is basically the park in Kirkland where I used to take my brother to feed stale bread to the mallards.

 

After some fairly unambitious hiking in and around the woods outside town the boys and I sought out a cosy place and a warm beverage. This tearoom was packed with families, couples, and a table of briefly-shirtless bicyclists chowing down on baked goods. 

The tea was perfect. Well done Sweden.

On the way home I demanded we stop in a supermarket so I could evaluate the national diet, marvel at exotic snack foods and see if it was true that efficiency-oriented Swedes put every food they could in a tube. I didn't find any more tube-food than I'm used to in Denmark and was especially disappointed not to see the reindeer-meat-in-a-tube Michel promised me. I still believe it's out there. 

I passed on the supermarket cheeseburger but did pick up a poppy & marzipan yogurt for breakfast (it was eh). But I did eat well during my stay. Damon made a British-food-best-of one night, featuring cottage pie and raspberry crumble, and homemade bi bim bap on the other.

Thoughtful hosts that they were, Michel and Damon also made sure to have a cat, Mogwai, that closely resembles Zelda. Take note aspiring hosts-of-me!

On my last day we headed into the center of the city for some classic tourist views. I liked this lion.

And these art nouveau style doors

And lo, a flea market!

I spent a very happy hour there, but left with only a 1950s glass measuring cup that reminded me of my great-grandmother's house. 

Stockholm had various degrees of fogginess and cloud cover the whole time I was there, but only occasional rain.

It was still a very elegant city, though I'm sure spring is spectacular.

We crossed a bridge here to Slotsholmen, the center of Swedish government and single destination of most cruise ship passengers. You can see Christiansborg palace on the right here, where the Swedish royal family resides, under the watch of the Swedish Guard. I was delighted by their tall hats with what looked like white horse tails issuing from the top and squealed with post-feminist (jk!) delight when I saw a lady Guard.

  

It really was so pretty.

 Cafe and adjacent chocolateria. Yes please.

 Bakery featuring awesome pretzels.

More cobblestone streets to get lost in. There are only a dozen or so 'approved' paint colors in Sweden, all warm shades of yellow, orange, and green. I imagine it helps in getting through the long winter. 

At a church on Slotsholmen we admired this very well-preserved 1489 statue of St. George and the Dragon, carved entirely from wood. You can't see it clearly here but the dragon also sports impressive elk antlers (not sure why -- maybe the artist just had some elk antlers he'd been meaning to use?).

According to the accompanying placard, the statue was commissioned by Sten Sture the Elder, a powerful figure who had helped defend Stockholm from Danish invaders. Also according to the placard:

In St. George it may be that Sten Sture saw himself as the knight who conquered the Danish "dragon", thereby saving the princess (Stockholm) from ruin.

Princess my ass! Stockholm is a lovely place, but given the choice I'll take the dragon any day. And so, dreaming of my next Scandinavian excursion, I went home.

(Sky above clouds -- you know I can never resist)