After we visited Japan in the fall of 2023, I started developing ideas that would eventually become designs printed on a series of T-shirts with a touch of Keith Haring. Here are a few of them. None are for sale.
One of the best things about Japan is the sheer range of options available while you’re on the throne. Do you go for an extra-hot, high-pressure jet aimed straight at the exhaust port, or a gentler, sweeping spray to rinse the whole caboose?
Alongside my street portraits and urban scenes here in Asia, I also devote time to using my camera and its 35 mm prime lens as a blunt painter’s brush.
The world around me is a palette of shifting shapes, light and colour; the sensor is my canvas.
With the shutter kept open manually – often for several seconds – my micro-movements create motion blur, pulling forms out of their contours and inviting geometric shifts and juxtapositions.
Some shapes come forward; others bend, soften, recede or smear into muted tones.
I’m not trying to tell the story of what’s in front of me. I use the physics of exposure and perspective to free the camera from its promise of reliable depiction – and myself from the rules of aesthetics and compositional theory.
I want my perceived reality to shift beyond recognition, into the realm of abstraction that we so assuredly call life.
Because you allowed me to photograph you during my walk around Talat Noi and Song Wat the other day in Bangkok, your spontaneously captured portrait may begin a journey that outlives us both.
The image will remain in my camera only briefly before I transfer it to my computer. There, I’ll study it, asking whether it does you justice: Have I caught a hint of your soul, or only your likeness?
Can the photo reveal some of who you are, what life has asked of you, the wear of years, and the tears and joys your eyes cannot conceal?
If it feels true, I’ll keep your portrait as a record of our paths crossing: two people sharing nothing more than the same stretch of ground. And if so, we will remain connected long after we’ve gone our separate ways.
But who knows, one day you might see your portrait included in one of my books…
This scene is from our house on 849 North Alfred Street in West Hollywood. Either my mother or my father took the photograph in 1967, probably using a Kodak Instamatic camera with one of those square bulb flashes (aka Flashcubes) introduced a couple of years prior.
I am holding our young cat, Caesar, and Coco, the family’s four-legged matriarch, is keeping at least one watchful eye on the kitten.
If memory serves, the two creatures got along fine. Sadly, though, I think that Caesar’s tail got caught in the back wheel of my Schwinn bike or Tyko’s and had to be amputated. He survived and looked like a cute tiny mountain lion with a stub where his tail had been.
This photo will definitely be included in the new book Dogs I’ve Met & Pet.
I’m currently working on a new 100-page photography book filled with portraits of dogs I’ve met and petted around the world. Curating all my dog photos and putting together this book has been on my mind for a while, so I am looking forward to seeing some of my favorite dogs being included in the new book.
Our family dog, CoCo, was probably my very first encounter with a dog. Her kind, gentle, and maternal way with children helped make me a lifelong dog lover.
Alongside the wide range of breeds, half-breeds, and thoroughbred mutts, what will really add to this new book is the many photographs I discovered in my archive of dogs with their owners.
For legal reasons, I am apparently putting myself at risk if I use those images (of dog owners and their dogs) on the cover, so they’ll be placed inside the book. Dogs I’ve Met & Pet should be ready for ordering in time for the pre-Christmas gift-buying season, along with my other books already available on Amazon.
The image above is of me and our Standard Schnauzer, Palma, in my first studio in Malmö.
Over the past several months, I’ve been preparing to relaunch my photography-centric site, www.raboffphotography.com, with a print-on-demand shop.
The design and implementation were fairly straightforward, thanks in no small part to my buddy and trusty code warrior, Yigit Telyakar.
The curation took most of my time, as it does for many artists: choosing the work you love and feel best represents your creative vision.
The site is now live. All images are available as fine art prints, produced locally or regionally and delivered ready for framing.
Here’s an illustrative example of an ICM (Intentional Camera Movement) exposure where I made minuscule circular motion during a 3 second, handheld exposure at an extremely busy intersection along Sukhumvit Road in Bangkok.
One battle after another. That’s what Charlotte and I keep saying to each other. Beneath it is a wish for refuge, respite, a little room to relax from the insistent stream of small and large challenges that keep demanding our attention.
I suppose it has always been this way: scattered brushfires, each one manageable until you let it burn for too long. The difference is that now, at 60-plus, our capacity, our bandwidth, has narrowed so much that even life’s normal share of whack-a-mole can leave us drained.
It’s worse for Charlotte than it is for me. Her capacity is greater than mine these days, but she also has both aging parents to think about and care for. I can’t imagine how badly I would manage if my parents had survived their tumultuous, self-destructive lives.
They died too young, but I can’t pretend that looking after them in old age would have been simple. My mother would have turned 95 this year, my father 105.
A different kind of milestone: as of 2026, I’ve been writing this blog for twenty years. It began in 2006, when we rented a house in Palma de Mallorca for six months.
At the time, I was commuting to the Swedish headquarters of a global furniture company, where my consulting work revolved around an endless variety of communication projects, some more interesting than others.
Like everyone else consulting there, I played the game as best I could, grateful for the money but under no illusions about how ridiculous it all was. “Donald Duck money,” one cynical colleague called the frivolous way the company spent so much of its enormous cash flow on mostly meaningless projects that seemed more focused on keeping all its consultants busy rather than accomplishing something tangible and valuable.
My blog was the perfect place to vent some of my frustrations and free myself from the constraints of the corporate soldier which I felt I, too, was slowly becoming with not a little self-loathing as a consequence.
Back to the battles.
Early this morning, at the gym, I had the first small battle of the day. After a 40-minute treadmill run, I moved on from cardio to build muscle – or at least try to maintain some of my diminishing strength. A young woman had claimed two different machines at once, one of which I wanted to use.
Her water bottle was on one of the machines while she was pumping iron on the other. In a small act of protest, I just sat down at the one with her water bottle and placed it firmly, almost demonstrably on the floor.
I knew she would react to my touching her property. And of course, she did, giving me a sour grimace before walking over to explain that she was still in the middle of her set.
I pointed out that occupying two machines at once wasn’t okay. She smiled and, somewhat to my surprise, immediately conceded the point. And just like that, Thursday’s first battle was over before it had even really begun.
At 63, it would be weird if I hadn’t developed a few breakfast favorites.
Having spent forty minutes on the treadmill at various inclines, followed by twenty minutes of lifting, dragging and pulling weights this morning, I was famished.
So I opted for one of my favorite weekends-only concoctions: the baked-beans, bacon and runny-eggs-on-buttered-toast open-faced sandwich.
I realize this isn’t the healthiest combination, but, as expected it once again provided an excellent eating experience, satisfying all my culinary cravings at once: chewiness, sweetness, and saltiness.
The crisp toast, soft eggs, crispy bacon and warm, saucy beans make it a dish that may be nutritionally questionable, but is undeniably delicious.
Books preserve the ephemeral: places, people, moods, thoughts, memories and moments already beginning to slip from my view and mind.
Clearly, I am drawn to what is easily overlooked – the transient, the forgotten, the weathered and the quietly human.
In a culture of speed, distraction and digital impermanence, making printed books has become my quiet act of resistance.
Unlike the fleeting image on a screen, a book can be held, revisited, lived with and passed on.
Link to my books –> here..
Among all the old photos I’ve digitized, this one from 1967 has an exceptionally mesmerizing pull on me.
There are a few others that lend some credibility to the idea that there was harmony and happiness in my early life, that things were, at least for a while, pretty hunky-dory.
I’m assuming my father took this particular photograph of me and my mom having breakfast or lunch on the porch in front of the wooden beach house in Malibu.
My parents rented the house from a woman who lived above us. I think her name was Thelma or Wilma.
We never lived there permanently, only on weekends and during summer vacations. Despite it being so long ago, I still have a few vivid memories of those early Malibu years.
Back then, Malibu wasn’t nearly as posh or expensive as it is today. It catered to all walks of life, including hippies, artists and creative folk like my parents.
What’s difficult for me to wrap my head around in this image is how beautiful and peaceful my mother looks. I’m not sure if Tyko had been born yet. He might have been sleeping inside, in the back bedroom of the house, which was so close to Pacific Coast Highway that I remember hearing the cars pass by.
The house is long gone, and the last time I walked along the beach in Malibu was when I turned 50. We stayed a couple of nights at the now-demolished Casa Malibu and celebrated my birthday at Nobu Malibu.
I’ve always been a cloud freak. Give me a blue sky crowded with clouds over a flawless, empty one any day. A cloudless sky can be beautiful, but it feels finished. Clouds make it restless.
I think it’s the constant transformation that draws me in. They build, stretch, dissolve and reform within minutes, turning the sky into something almost sculptural. There is depth, shadow and movement up there, but nothing lasts. Perhaps that is the real attraction – clouds are monumental and completely temporary at the same time.
You can look away for a moment and the whole composition has changed
Sometimes, when I sneeze or blow my nose, I can feel air escaping through the corner of my left eye. It feels incredibly weird, as if I’m no longer properly sealed. Have I developed some kind of “eye incontinence”?
Swedish summers are short, but this year most of it didn’t get washed away by rain. Instead, it’s been an absolutely excellent summer, filled with travel and experiences that will stay with me.
I’ve reconnected with several old buddies, met some new folks, and spent an entire month in a beautifully summery Stockholm (🙏🐥).
I also managed to squeeze in a summer party and family reunion outside Nyköping in July with near and dear relatives from the Andersson side of the family (🙏👩🏻🦲👱♀️).
I’ve exercised a lot, got plenty of writing done and, for the most part, managed to keep my mental protrubernces at a reasonable height, sometimes barely breaking the surface.
This summer I’ve also been inspired by watching a friend (🚍) make his way back from surgical hell and emerge alive, proud and standing tall from the depths of purgatory. What a painful journey that must have been.
And then there’s my great cousin Esther, who at 93 broke her hip in a fall and has since made a remarkable recovery. Extraordinary willpower, resilience, and apparently some pretty decent healing genes. So that makes two new sources of inspiration.
I don’t know if I’ve ever felt more politically unsteady than I do ahead of the upcoming Swedish election. My social-media feed is doing its absolute best to radicalise me in one direction or the other. I’m trying instead to mobilise against the worst of it – the crude, unnuanced populism that moves so freely and seeps so easily into already confused minds.
Soon Maurice White will be singing about September again.
During my first Interrail trip through Europe in the summer of 1983, I met all sorts of travelers. Among them was Andrew, a funny, adventurous dude from New York City. We crossed paths on the island of Corfu, and after a week or so of hanging out there, we took the ferry back to mainland Greece and continued north to Switzerland on a train bound for Hamburg. Andy wanted me to join him and experience the Montreux Jazz Festival, which had commissioned Keith Haring to design that year’s official poster. The festival had an astonishing lineup that year: Art Blakey, Buddy Guy, Fats Domino, Herbie Hancock, Rickie Lee Jones, Level 42, King Sunny Adé, Musical Youth, Gil Evans and Woody Herman among others.
At the time of Keith Haring’s breakthrough, I had never been to New York or encountered his art. But the motifs and neon color palette he used totally blew me away. His work inspired me, and I went on to create several paintings and murals that clearly reflected his influence.
Recently, a friend visiting Switzerland spotted this piece by Haring and sent me a photograph of it.
The color blue has always spoken to me, though never of sadness or melancholy. For me, blue is the color of stillness, depth, and release.
Above all, blue is the color of the ocean and the extraordinary calm I feel whenever I am submerged in it, whether diving or simply holding my breath beneath the surface for as long as I can.
I still remember diving in the early 2000s and hovering twenty meters below the surface with about the same distance below me.
The world above seemed to disappear. Noise softened into a distant murmur, gravity loosened its grip, and time appeared to slow down to a more manageable pace. There was nothing to do but breathe, observe, and remain suspended in that immense blue space.
While perfectly buoyant, my mind was so quiet. Everyday concerns lost their urgency, and the boundary between my body and the surrounding water became almost indiscernible.
Weightlessness somehow protected me from both the past and the future.
What I experienced was not so much excitement as a profound sense of immediacy – that rare feeling of being exactly where I was meant to be, with no desire to be anywhere else. Blue.
This image is taken from the new L’Escapade Éphémère series.
Here’s a piece from my ongoing abstract photography project, L’Escapade Éphémère, which I’ve been working on more consistently for about a year. I define L’Escapade Éphémère as a fleeting departure from the defined – where movement loosens light, color, and form, and places shed their certainty, dissolving into something fluid, ambiguous, and briefly liberated from the tyranny of the literal. This piece is called “Optical Flux”.
Here we are: Charlotte, Elle, and I, the other evening, just about to have dinner at a fancy-pantsy pizzeria in Malmö. This was two days after Charlotte and I drove up to Halmstad to spend a night at a hotel to celebrate our 28th wedding anniversary with a cozy dinner followed by a long walk around town.
My father was married four times, and only one of his marriages lasted longer than 10 years. I haven’t put any particular effort into my relationship with Charlotte just to ensure I beat my father’s chronic inability to work stuff out instead of fleeing his four wives and the kids he had with three of them.
Instead, Charlotte and I have had a ton of fun, done amazing things, traveled the world, and lived in several places. It has been a wonderful, often exhilarating ride, especially after we were gifted with Elle. That is why it made the most emotional sense to me to include her in this anniversary post.
Malmö. Friday. Genetic.
Had lunch with my rheumatologist the other day. We break bread a couple of times a month and talk about the joy of writing and traveling, and about the increasingly chaotic state of the world.
Even though we’re sitting there at the Lebanese restaurant as two private individuals, he understandably can’t quite leave work behind. He always asks how I’m doing, whether the arthritis is behaving itself, and whether I need anything in addition to the disease-modifying medication I take daily, Rinvoq.
This time, we moved fairly quickly from my sick joints to the world’s even sicker leaders. While we enjoyed hummus, tabbouleh, crispy falafel, and sambousek, the doctor floated a theory about why human beings, despite having spent a few hundred thousand years on the planet, are still so terribly bad at learning from their mistakes. Especially when it comes to conflicts that almost always begin with two groups disagreeing and surprisingly often end with one of them bombing the other.
Not entirely unexpectedly, we got onto the subject of religion. As usual, we were in complete agreement that there can hardly be a single divine entity with exclusive rights to the truth. With a few thousand religions, sects, and genuinely twisted beliefs, such as Scientology, the randomness of it all becomes almost cosmically comical.
If you’re born in India, there’s a good chance Hinduism will seem perfectly natural. If you’re born in Brazil, there’s a considerably greater chance that you’ll be raised in a Catholic tradition where the Pope has a direct line to God. If you’re born in another part of the world, you get an entirely different explanation of our existence and what happens afterward.
The oldest versions are fairly elaborate fables that generation after generation have been fed since childhood and absorbed with their mother’s milk.
At the same time, the need to believe in something is perfectly understandable. Death, after all, is one of life’s few absolute certainties and at the same time its greatest mystery. You never know when the Grim Reaper will come knocking.
An old friend whom I hadn’t seen in a long time died a couple of weeks ago. His heart stopped in the middle of a workout at the gym. That’s how quickly the curtain can come down.
RIP Aadu Aruvald.
So the fact that religion can serve as a life preserver, a source of comfort or an insurance policy against the unknown makes perfect sense to both my extremely well-educated rheumatologist and a considerably simpler fellow like myself. The problem begins when you feel compelled to oppress, persecute, or kill someone who happens to have signed up for a different heavenly subscription.
Then we got to genetics.
The doctor’s lunchtime theory, greatly simplified, was that biologically speaking, human beings haven’t progressed very far compared with the world they themselves have built. His more provocative point was that genetically, we are still far too similar to our ancestors for our emotional reflexes to have caught up with technology. Technologically, development has moved at rocket speed. In what amounts to a historical instant, we have gone from stone tools to nuclear power, satellites, and artificial intelligence.
Collectively, Homo sapiens has been phenomenal at inventing things. Individual members of Homo sapiens are a completely different story.
Emotionally, we’re still dragging around a brain shaped for small groups, territory, hierarchy, fear and survival. We can send a spacecraft to Mars, yet still go crazy if the neighbor believes in the wrong god, wears a red cap or lays claim to the wrong piece of land.
And when testosterone, fear, prestige and groupthink kick in, a few thousand years of civilization can apparently be reduced pretty quickly to:
My cave. My tribe. My God. Shut your mouth.
We finished lunch, paid the bill with our phones and went our separate ways. Artificial intelligence in our pockets. The Stone Age between our ears.
My arthritis, fortunately, seems to be kept in check by Rinvoq. Humanity clearly needs much, much stronger medication.
Photo: Charlotte Raboff
This is from earlier this evening during our semi-ritualistic after-dinner walk. The weather is usually superb in August and I can only hope it will continue for another few weeks.
We have known each other for close to half a century—in a few cases, even longer. We stay in touch almost every day through a WhatsApp chat group, but we can rarely synchronize our schedules for a full reunion. Missing from this photo is Tommy Sahlin, who wasn’t able to make it this past Friday. Jonas Brutt (left), myself, Lars Olemyr, and Joakim Eklund still had a terrific evening with endless memories and contemporary topics to talk and laugh about. I, for one, am grateful and happy that we maintain our occasionally combative, contentious, and cantankerous relationship.
A buddy of mine reminded me yesterday of something I had completely forgotten about: a photograph of a parrot that I had captured on Maui – licensed by the University of Cambridge for a scientific research paper that has since been published in Nature, one of the world’s most prestigious science journals. Now that the paper has been published, the NDA has been lifted.
It started a few months ago with an email that arrived completely out of the blue. The sender introduced himself simply: “I am Yoonwoo Kim, a Research Associate at the University of Cambridge.”
What followed was a request to license my parrot photograph for use in a scientific paper. Not something that happens every day.
The research itself is genuinely fascinating, even for a non-scientist.
The team at Cambridge has developed a new way to make extremely sharp, full-colour displays using tiny light-emitting particles called quantum dots.
The challenge until now has been placing millions of microscopic red, green and blue pixels precisely onto a screen without them bleeding into each other or losing quality. Their solution is elegantly simple in principle: deliberately introduce controlled microscopic cracks into the quantum dot material before picking it up and transferring it – a bit like scoring a sheet of chocolate before snapping it cleanly. This makes it far easier to lift and place individual pixels with high precision across a large surface.
The result is a cadmium-free – meaning non-toxic – full-colour display roughly the size of a postage stamp, with 341 pixels per inch, sharper than most phone screens, and pixels as small as 600 nanometres, which is actually smaller than the wavelength of visible light. The process also makes the displays brighter and longer-lasting than previous methods.
The technology is aimed squarely at next-generation screens, particularly for augmented and virtual reality headsets, where extremely high resolution in a very small area is everything.
And my parrot? It appears in Figure 4 of the paper, used to demonstrate the display’s colour reproduction.
Somewhere in a Cambridge laboratory, a quantum dot screen is showing the world through my lens. I’ve had images published in many places over the years – but never quite like this.
The full paper is available in Nature Electronics: nature.com/articles/s41928-026-01670-9
I did two very unusual things after arriving in Göteborg early this morning. The first was to have a decent breakfast at Jungrens Café along Avenyn – the city center’s main drag and a classic hangout that my friends and I used to frequent for hours on end, almost daily.
The food and coffee were okay, but they have changed so much of the layout that the old feeling is long gone. Had they been faithful to how it used to look – which I realize is probably an idiotic request or expectation to have – yet I was still kinda hoping to see the old owner: a tall, lanky, couture-dressed Polish woman with a strange aristocratic aura about her. Heck, today she would have been around 159 years old.
The second thing I did was to visit Lasse at Cornérs art supply store up the street from Jungans. Somewhat surprisingly, but in a good way, he was still there, waiting on customers who are about as scarce today as cash. Lasse seemed okay with the situation and even vaguely admitted that he was mostly there to have something to do.
I spent a lot of time and money at his store back then, and Lasse was always generous about allowing me to pay for canvases, brushes, and paints at the end of the month, when I hoped to have made enough to cover the rent and other debts I had accumulated during those days of living the life of a struggling artist.
I was a bit surprised that he remembered me. I mean, I was by no means one of his best customers, but I might have been one of the friendlier artists who bought stuff from him.
There is always a comfortable level of familiarity whenever I return to Copenhagen. Since moving to Malmö almost 30 years ago, I’ve visited the Danish capital more times than I can count, quietly accumulating way more than enough photographs to eventually put together a book with some unique perspectives of that great city.
Yet, every time I, for whatever reason, get to explore a new neighborhood or district, I realize how much more there is to uncover.
Some cities are just like that – they make it hard to ever really finish documenting them. The cutoff point is definitely nearing for Copenhagen, though. I’m itching to get started on that particular project.
Yesterday was a great example of this. I met a friend for a traditional Danish smørrebrød lunch deep in Østerport, where I have very limited experience and barely any frames.
While historically significant as one of Copenhagen’s four main ancient gate-cities (the others being Nørreport, Vesterport, and Amagerport), Østerport feels like a quiet, charming village tucked right against the bustling city center.
I was about an hour early to our lunch, so strolling through peaceful, cobbled streets lined with colorful houses felt a world away from Strøget and Nyhavn.
As usual, when I sit down for that kind of meal with someone who, like me, has lived with creativity as life’s dynamo, there was no shortage of topics to cover over the course of nearly four hours.
They say that one of the keys to longevity is having regular social interactions and keeping in touch with friends. Yesterday’s lunch was just that – a perfect blend of good company, inspiring conversation, and fresh perspectives.
Speaking of yellow… this is likely one of the most photographed objects in the Swedish capital. It is an irresistible cliché right across from the Royal Palace. As a commoner, I have not much in common with the Swedish royals; however, as a child visiting Stockholm for the first time while in Sweden for the summer from Los Angeles, I was given the opportunity to shake hands with the previous king, Gustaf VI Adolf. And a few years ago, I met and photographed Crown Princess Victoria here in our neighborhood during her and Prince Daniel’s visit to Turning Torso.
Not exactly sure where or how this particular ICM (intentional camera movement) came into existence except that it was created in Stockholm a few weeks ago. “Yellow He Yelled” seems like a fitting title.
After protracted and exhaustive deliberations and subsequent bilateral negotiations, the undersigned was recently tendered access and ownership of an unspecified quantity of personal chattel and effects, which had heretofore remained sequestered for a staggering duration of four-and-one-half decades. Intermingled amongst the aforementioned historical artifacts were archival visual representations originating from an epoch wherein the subject’s subjective state of felicity and general well-being manifested at a zenith of apparent maximum optimization.
Of an even more startling and unanticipated character was the empirical revelation, duly corroborated by photographic evidence, that for a circumscribed and transient temporal interval, the undersigned was possessed of naturally blond follicular pigmentation—or, at the very minimum, a follicular coloration tending toward a light chromatic brown.
The primary evidentiary document aforesaid was discovered to be in a profound state of physical degradation and structural compromise; nevertheless, by virtue of the technical interventions, restorations, and digital remediation, the undersigned succeeded in salvaging said artifact and restoring the same to its primordial condition. It remains a matter of ongoing procedural regret that the aforementioned technology has not yet devised a systemic mechanism capable of effectuating a commensurate retrogressive adjustment upon the biological age of the subject.
I’ve been eating very well while in Stockholm. There have been a few extraordinary culinary experiences, including both lunches and dinners.
I get a lot of pleasure when eating well-made, creatively presented food that challenges my palate and tastebuds. That said, I can still enjoy a functional meal of comfort food where there are no surprises or invitations to discover a hidden layer of flavor.
There is a time and place for both: the reassuring simplicity of the familiar, and the exhilarating friction of the unexpected.
The other day, as a belated birthday present, I was invited by friends to experience a new restaurant in Stockholm called Non Grata.
Though I have never actually eaten at its high-concept sister restaurant Persona, I knew of its formidable reputation. Persona was founded by chef Louis Cespedes and sommelier Jonatan Nyström – both alumni of Michelin-starred Frantzén – building a name on uncompromising precision. At Non Grata, they take that same pedigree and apply it to a far more relaxed, Basque-inspired concept.
It has been a long time since I worked in a hot or cold kitchen, and to be honest, the bar where I cooked was set pretty low. Yet, like any creative pursuit, the insight and understanding remain. It’s a lot like my guitar playing – even if I never learned more than rudimentary chords and rhythms, having spent time with the instrument gives you an appreciation for the sheer amount of discipline, training, and constant fuckups required to hone a talent and execute at a high level.
Because of that background, seeing what they are doing at Non Grata with Basque flavors and tapas was exciting. It sits as far away from traditional, oily tourist tapas as you can get. Classic Spanish components are re-imagined with confident technique and wonderful textural contrasts, all while maintaining an effortless presentation.
Sitting outside in the courtyard under the trees, surrounded by good friends and food that continuously sparked the senses, felt like a brief escape to a vibrant square in San Sebastián. More than just a great meal, it reignited a dormant spark in me.
Leaving the restaurant, I felt a genuine push to step away from predictable comfort food at home and get back to experimenting with more exciting, adventurous flavors.
Wednesday. Sixty-three. 2026 – 1963 = 63.
Well, I guess it’s time for another little inventory. In my youth, I aimed so hard not to make it much past 30. Now here I am, more than twice that age, several years older than my mom ever got to be, and with a good chance of soon passing my dad. Hopefully. He left the stage at 65.
Something in me obviously refuses to throw in the towel, even if – despite this auspicious milestone – I’m still looking for the instruction manual…
Sometimes I wonder if it’s simply the breaks between the rounds that make it worth hanging on in the ring. But why do I manage when my brother didn’t? Probably because I hit the jackpot with Charlotte and Elle. Love is a damn strong sealant for patching up life’s cracks.
Or maybe the friction and the fighting are the whole point? That we’re each a modern-day Odysseus on an eternal odyssey. Desperately trying to find our way home to peace, but constantly thrown off course by new monsters and distractions along the way.
It’s started to sink in that eventually, I’m going to lose the final battle, now that I’m back in my 60s – this time as a confused old dude in my seventh decade.
But how many more rounds do I have to go? Who knows.
When the Oscar-winning One Battle After Another came out last year, I thought: Jesus, what a brilliant movie title. Is it about me?
The battles might not be harder now than they used to be, but they definitely take a heavier toll, and they wear down my knees and my psyche a little more. I catch myself puffing, groaning, and sighing much more often these days. Yet, I live in a slightly incomprehensible symbiosis with my battles.
Like a crackhead who absolutely needs his daily dose of adversity just to feel his pulse beat. Maybe life would be way too boring without the challenges – without a few serious ditches to crawl out of and some steep mountains to climb over or around.
The question is: do I enjoy the fight itself, or is it actually that brief, almost euphoric moment when the “release” finally comes that I’m chasing? Those who know what I am talking about know what I am talking about.
At the same time, there’s obviously a comical gap in my perception: what I experience as an epic field battle is everyday life for others. So do I just have a low pain threshold, or am I getting too comfortable for life’s Whac-A-Mole?
At least two of my friends are currently fighting it out in a real purgatory. Cancer, in both cases. For them, the battle is hardly some romanticized metaphor.
A younger buddy called me the other day. As usual, he only gets in touch when the sky is falling. That’s perfectly fine. This time he was depressed because everyone else on social media looked so offensively happy. All his friends were more successful, raking in more money, and living a glamorous, carefree life, while he himself was treading water. Rudderless. I explained that that’s all just a mirage. No living person goes around being constantly happy. It’s especially rare among folks trying to make a living through creativity (which is what this buddy does).
And the really rich practically work full-time trying to convince themselves – and the world – just how incredibly successful they are.
See, I said, the battles are part of the package. One battle after another.
Some people have just bought nicer facades. They live behind their polished surfaces and would sooner die than let the neighbors catch a glimpse of the doubt lurking right behind the smile – their very own “triangle of sadness.”
A different and older buddy observed recently that over the years, it’s become much easier to see through the smokescreens and simply not give a damn what people think.
That it’s actually nice to sit in the stands with a beer in hand instead of standing right in the middle of the boxing ring, taking punch after punch. It was liberating to hear, even if I’m not quite there yet.
A totally different friend my age from Skåne went to a shrink every week for nearly twelve years. He spent half a million on it.
Then the pandemic came, the wallet went empty, and the shrinking ended. Do I notice any difference in him today? Not much. But maybe he got a decent toolbox to keep the ghosts at bay and the demons at a safe distance.
Though a little self-medication is still required now and then so he can disconnect from the battles for a moment and feel that long-awaited “release.”
Personally, I’ve upgraded the gym into a therapist’s couch. Physically, I actually think I’m in better mental and physical shape today than half a lifetime ago, when I was a wild fella of 31 and a half. But the real gain is between my ears. Everything else is pure bonus. Plus, the training has the excellent side effect of letting me treat myself to a little something extra without getting into a fight with my conscience. One battle at a time, please.
Started the day with a run around Söder and Reimersholme. Then a nice swim before the champagne cork flew off with a “pop.” Later, I was served breakfast in bed, treated to Japanese for lunch, and soon Greek for dinner.
Thanks for another lovingly soft landing, Charlotte! Thanks, Elle, for existing in Papi’s life. And thanks for all the wonderful congratulations via social media and over the phone.
Sixty-three. Not too bad.
My brother Tyko would have turned 59 today. He took his own life 23 years ago, leaving a silence I will carry in my heart for the rest of my days.
Tyko possessed a restless, wandering heart. Like me, he found immense freedom in traveling and meeting new people along the way.
I took this photo of Tyko in 1984, on a trip we took together to Corfu, Greece. He was 17 and I was 21 when we boarded a charter flight out of Landvetter, leaving Sweden behind for a week.
The granular details of those days have faded, but the brightness remains: we had a blast.
We rented 125cc motorcycles and tore around the island like two daredevils with nothing to lose.
Tyko had never handled a motorized bike before, but he found his rhythm almost instantly – guided, perhaps, by the BMX riding he mastered as a kid.
I choose to retain my memories from moments like these rather than the shadowy, difficult times of our childhood.
Losing someone so deeply woven into your life isn’t a single sharp break. It is an enduring, quiet tear that never ends. It just continues to rip, stretch, and pull at my heart.
Though my mind tells me that atheism is the only logical path, a quieter, less rational part of me hopes I am wrong.
That when my own life is over, that dirt road on the hill overlooking the gorgeous coastal village of Agios Gordios on Corfu opens up again, and I find Tyko waiting there for me with his warm smile. We’ll see.
Happy Birthday, Tyko.
You are infinitely missed.
This is from a cozy café in Stockholm where I wrote from last week. They closed yesterday for the summer but their interior was filled with colorful textiles that I had to attempt capturing in motion.
so this isn’t a traditional double or triple exposure. It’s another image where I am “painting” with the camera, using it’s lens and a very long exposure to create and fixate a (for me) interesting abstract scene. I captured this at a subway station in Stockholm just the other day.
I captured this abstract figure of a woman the other day when Charlotte, Elle, and I had lunch at Moderna Museet in Stockholm. It was the second time in two weeks that I was there. The previous visit was with Erica, a friend from New York, and her buddy Erik from Stockholm.
Both times we first took a look at the retrospective of Brassaï – The Secret Signs of Paris, which focuses on his iconic black-and-white photography of the streets, inhabitants, and nightlife of Paris during the early 1930s. Brassaï was born Gyula Halász in Transylvania (now Romania) in 1899 and found his creative home in Paris during the 1920s.
He actually started as a journalist, but that changed when he picked up a camera and began documenting his long nightly walks through Paris.
What makes his work so inspiring is that Brassaï never tried to make the city look like a postcard. He photographed high society, prostitutes, brothels, dive bars, wet cobblestones, fog, factories, and the corners of life most photographers ignore.
And it’s exactly this that makes his work feel so relatable to me. I can see something beautiful in almost every place and in every person I meet.
Brassaï was also not interested in photography as some rigid academic or technical exercise. His drive was chronic curiosity, and he seemed willing to point his camera at almost anything that caught his eye and captured geometry in streets, walls, staircases, and shadows. He even photographed Parisian graffiti decades before anyone seriously thought of calling it art.
Technically, he made brilliant use of whatever light was available. Streetlamps, headlights, reflections, thick fog, and darkness became part of the composition rather than obstacles to overcome.
Author Henry Miller famously called Brassaï “The Eye of Paris,” and the name fits perfectly. He moved freely between the elegant and the sordid, the beautiful and the broken, making photographs that were less about individual subjects than about the atmosphere and soul of Paris.
It was my old buddy Håkan who suggested we have lunch at Tennstopet the other day. He said I would experience something out of the ordinary – stretching far beyond the joy of the food itself, so that feels almost like stepping into a time capsule.
I trust Håkan and his description was tempting, so I avoided reading up on it beforehand. I wanted to arrive completely without preconceptions, without first being fed other people’s reviews and ratings.
My god. What a place.
It wasn’t just about the beautifully presented and deliciously good food, or the skilled yet personal service. More like the feeling of stepping into another era.
At first, it felt almost a bit awkward and alien, but gradually grew more and more familiar. Like being backstage at an old theater where every room is its own stage, and where the guests aren’t just props but active participants in their own play.
What I saw and experienced during our two-hour lunch awakened the memory of what eating at a restaurant once felt like – long before you were expected to scan some damn QR code at the table or stand there poking at a screen covered in old fingerprints, navigating hundreds of combinations and nearly starving to death before you’ve even figured out how the crap works.
Yes, I know. Old dude vs. new tech. Rarely a good combo.
That exact screen stuff happened to me and another old friend, Erika, later that very same evening at a Mexican place somewhere below Mosebacke.
The food was decent, but it was the great company – and only that – that saved the meal and made up for the otherwise non-existent restaurant experience.
Back to Tennstopet.
Despite its long history, the place feels more like an everyday eatery than fine dining place or a museum of bygone times. The interior is warm and beautiful, the walls filled with cool art, and the restaurant holds more rooms, nooks, and places to sit than I had time to count.
There is something almost labyrinthine about Tennstopet, yet everything feels cohesive and remarkably homely. A world-class neighborhood joint, for sure.
I dig restaurants where everything is still taken seriously – the attire, the movements, the conversations, the craft, and the care – without it becoming so pretentious that you end up feeling stiff, uncomfortable, or broke.
I have worked in both hot and cold kitchens, stood behind bars, and worked as a waiter. Over my soon-to-be 63 years, I have probably eaten at hundreds, maybe thousands, of restaurants around the world. So it is with a certain level of insight, both from behind the scenes and in front of them, that I can say our lunch belongs among my top twenty restaurant experiences ever in Sweden.
The food didn’t just taste like it did in the old days, but exactly how Tore Wretman, Kajsa Warg, or whoever the hell it was that once created these dishes must have intended them to taste and look like – straightforward, generous, and self-evident, completely free of unnecessary gestures or silly frills.
As we walked out of Tennstopet, it struck me that there might be hope after all.
Now that the world is becoming increasingly difficult to recognize and so much seems to be going south, Restaurang Tennstopet stands firm as a lighthouse in the fog – steady, welcoming, and fully visible to anyone who needs a harbor to dock in for a few hours just to unwind and enjoy some old-fashioned Swedish grub.
Folks, Tennstopet is my new benchmark for how a restaurant visit should feel. A lunch, a dinner, a drink, or just a cup of coffee is enough to understand why. I simply cannot recommend it highly enough.
But of course the local bakery on Ringvägen has “cinnamonbun123” (kanelbulle123) as its Wi-Fi password. Bull’s-eye, you could say.
Speaking of eyes, I’m sitting here at the cafe after a follow-up visit with Doctor Johnny at SÖS (Södersjukhuset, one of Stockholm’s main hospitals). The drops he put in my left eye were meant to dilate the pupil enough for him to peer straight through the lens, cornea, and vitreous body to see if the vessel that started bleeding during the vitreous detachment a couple of weeks ago had healed.
The thingamajigs that were fluttering in my field of vision have almost vanished, and the bleeding seems to have cleared up. Phew! That was a close call.
When you already have piss-poor eyesight, a thing like this gets a little extra stressful.
According to Doctor Johnny, I can at least start working out again, and as soon as my pupil returns to its normal size, I’ll also avoid looking like I’m on MDMA or something thereabouts.
I really have to give a shout-out to the thoroughly wonderful staff at the hospital. They made a fantastic impression that literally brings tears to my eyes – though that’s probably mostly the drops.
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