Seems like 2023 will be remembered for a string of colorful anniversaries…

Yesterday, someplace along the train route from Stockholm to Malmö, I realized that it was 45 years ago this summer when I relocated from Los Angeles to Göteborg. My mother had just passed away and my father, whom I hadn’t seen or heard from in several years, popped up out of nowhere like a springy jack-in-the-box and in a matter-of-factly kind a way, offered to move into our house and take care of me and my younger brother Tyko. If we agreed (and my father couldn’t see why we wouldn’t), he’d move in from the tiny apartment where he was currently living together with his two young children and their mother Adeline, the woman he’d abandoned my mother for some eight or nine years earlier.

My aunt Lillian and grandmother Agnes had flown over from Sweden to L.A. and took care of us during this turbulent time. Both were adamant about declining my father’s suggestion. Even I remember seeing how cynical the idea was and that nothing good could ever come from reuniting with him. Instead, we, brother Tyko and I opted to move to Sweden. I’d leave first and Tyko a few months later. Before long, I was on a SAS flight to Sweden where I’d begin a new chapter in my life.

In retrospect, with fort-five years worth of hindsight, moving to Sweden was the only reasonable option. It provided a healthy distance and above all, a necessary distraction from a childhood saturated with chaos, calamity, and confusion.

That’s not to say that I haven’t subsequently been forced to unpack, dissect and deal with all those years of turmoil and madness. But I am enterally grateful for having had the opportunity to move to Sweden and start fresh.

I put together a new page on this site the other day with images of all of my books. I even added links to where some of them can be ordered. I’ve posted more than 400 clips and short films on Vimeo and Youtube and I’m reasonably sure they’ll be around for a while. But it’s the 21 (and counting) books that I’m hoping will have the longest shelf life (pun intended) of all my creative output. It would be kinda cool if Elle’s granddaughter someday found a dusty old book of mine in an old box and asked Elle if I was somehow related to her.

So for the past couple of months, off and on, I’ve been editing a mini-documentary about painting. Almost every session in my old studio, I shot a scene or two and now all the footage is edited and neatly placed on the timeline in Final Cut Pro. The background music is on the audio track and the stuff I want to say has been spellchecked.

For some reason, I’ve been feeling a little angst about publishing this five-minute film. It might be that I want to savor the experience a little more. Perhaps I’m feeling anxious about what the next project will be. Not that I don’t have umpteen other projects in the queue…

Maybe it’s just simply that since this particular project sums up my transition to, or, return of expressing myself creatively through painting, I’m being unusually sensitive about how it will be perceived. Is there no end to this engulfing self-consciousness?

I may or may not have mentioned my infatuation with Tokyo’s Kappabashi Street or “Kitchen Town” here before. I probably have. Anyway, it’s called “Kitchen Town” because on both sides of an 800 meter short street called Kappabashi, you’ll find just about everything and anything related to restaurant equipment and food preparation, including two of this neighborhood’s main attractions: serious chef knives and hyperrealistic fake food. However, the vast majority of the close to 200 shops on the street mostly sell kitchenware, cookware and tableware.

Kappabashi is located near the Asakusa (浅草) district in Taitō Tokyo. Among most tourists, the area’s draw is the famous Sensoji, a very popular Buddhist temple.

I’ve spent several hours wandering up and down Kappabashi during my two visits to the Japanese capital and when I return one day, I’m sure I’ll once again dedicate some time there.

What Kappabashi means is somewhat disputed. It could be a derivative of the Portuguese word “capa”, which in turn is Latin for “cape”, as in what Darth Vader and Batman wear. But “kappa” could apparently also be an ancient word for a mythological, amphibious humanoid that lives by Japan’s rivers.

So infatuated with Kappabashi was I that I decided to create the above 50 x 60 cm acrylic painting.  

Accept, embrace, own, and move on. That’s my new mantra and approach to this sixth decade. I’m going to focus on the important creative stuff and navigate away from shallow distractions of which there have been far too many.

I am going to paint, write and travel more with the overriding goal of cranking up real-time life experiences. And instead of incessantly and superfluously sharing what I photograph, I intend to integrate the aggregate of what all my senses record into the flow of my creative output. Whatever the fuck that means.

Well, I made it. It’s life after 60 from here on. I’m going to own it and then forget about it. It’s just a number (my new mantra). Here are a few questionably interesting milestones that I’ve apparently passed from the moment I was born at 5:55 pm on July 22, 1963, at Saint John’s Hospital in Santa Monica, CA.

• Years: 60
• Months: 720
• Weeks: 3,130
• Days: 21,915
• Hours: 525,960
• Minutes: 31,557,600
• Seconds: 1,893,456,000
• Heartbeats: ≈ 2,000,000
• Breaths taken: ≈ 505,000,000
• Dog Years: 253 🎉

Yesterday, I surfed the waves at the classic Fistral Beach, south of Newquay here in Cornwall. What became immediately clear to me was that I raised the average age among the surfers around me by at least 3.5 decades. Which was totally fine since it turned out that I still caught the most waves with my 9ft longboard. At the doorstep of 60, anything shorter and it would probably not have been nearly as fun yesterday.

After a few intense hours in the Atlantic, knee and arm exhaustion inevitably set in. A bit hard of hearing from all the water in my ears, but euphorically happy, I finally gave up and staggered up the beach with the board firmly clutched under my right arm. After maneuvering through what seemed like hundreds of English holiday-making families with their colorful tents, fluttering windbreakers, and shrieking kids, I finally reached the surf shop. At that point, I was so physically depleted, that it felt like I needed a defibrillator. I settled for an ice-cold beer instead.

Like a Houdini, I eventually wriggled out of the waterlogged wetsuit and promised myself that after this trip, I’ll only surf in warmer latitudes. Today, I’ll head for the waves at Watergate Bay.

Today would have been Brother Tyko’s 56th birthday. I’ve created a memorial page for him here.

The idea of turning 60 on Saturday is slowly settling in. After all, it’s just a friggin’ number, right? And numbers are petty much just made up to keep track of stuff like days, months and years.

The other day, I got an email from a 103-year-old friend of the family in L.A. That kinda put my six-decade short life into a more palatable perspective. And the other day, Esther, my 90-year-old great aunt and cherished pen pal (we communicate mostly via iMessage/SMS) told me not to worry as 60 is now the new 30.

Photo: Charlotte Raboff