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Parting shot: 2021
Here’s an artifact captured from a wall somewhere in Porto, Portugal. I found it right outside a big and busy art gallery where hundreds of paintings were hanging side by side, absurdly close to each other. When I identified the part of the wall that intrigued me, I realized how much more interesting it was compared to anything the gallery was exhibiting.
Well, another tumultuous year is coming to a close. A year, like most, full of ups and downs, ins and outs. I feel both worrisome and optimistic about life. Conflicted as usual.
Creatively speaking, it’s been another remarkable year full of some fairly steep challenges and hard-fought accomplishments. Receiving acknowledgment from a few choice peers as well as the Swedish Art Council for my Resurfaced series was certainly an encouraging highlight of 2021.
The reportage-style book I produced for Sliperiet Gylsboda, the cultural center deep in the mystical woods of southern Sweden during the spring and much of the summer, was both challenging and awe-inspiring.
The commissioned films starring Lennart the Sausage Dog were both fun to produce and financially welcome.
I typically don’t make new year’s resolutions. But I do make anticipations or, at least a few solid predictions.
• I have written several short stories during 2021and I will make a stronger effort to publish them in 2022.
• My book about everyday surfers will be published in 2022. Somehow.
• An exhibit and possibly a book about my Resurfaced project will be completed by the end of 2022.
• I will return to my music experiments sometime this forthcoming spring or summer.
• A studio or ateljé with my name on the front door will be opened sometime in 2022.
Christmas Stuff
If you think about it, whether online or in a store, shopping has long been something we all do to entertain ourselves. I’m not talking about actual necessities for survival. I’m talking about stuff.
We buy stuff because we feel we deserve new stuff. We buy new stuff because we think new stuff might make us happier and feel nicer about ourselves. We buy new stuff because we’re tired of our old stuff.
We buy new stuff because we are bored and because our kids are bored and because we are bored with our kids.
We largely buy food that makes us feel better, that satisfies our urges more than our physical needs. Interestingly, we allow our tastebuds, not our whole body, to decide much of the stuff we eat and drink.
I don’t know about you, but I believe our poor planet is in a bit of a pickle. Earth is coughing up thick phlegm from the dense smoke our crazy addition to new stuff creates. Including “Christmas Stuff”.
#consumerbehavior #environmentalchallenges #planetearth #ecofriendly #ecommerce #fcktheplanet #phlemg #savetheplanet #stuff #christmasstuff
Provocative Art
The writer and novelist Joyce Carol Oates has summed up what I’ve long thought about art:
“My belief is that art should not be comforting; for comfort, we have mass entertainment and one another. Art should provoke, disturb, arouse our emotions, expand our sympathies in directions we may not anticipate and may not even wish.”
I completely understand if the Resurfaced project is provocative to some. I didn’t intend it to be, but if that is the takeaway for some viewers, so be it. Compared with much of my more traditional work within photography and film, be that commercial, editorial, or anything I’ve produced in between either category, the artifacts I capture in the Resurfaced series, at home, and during my travels, continue to challenge and intrigue me.
Resurfaced: Iberian Shuffle Nr03x
Another artifact from another visit to another terrific resurfaced repository, namely, Lisbon, Portugal. One of many intriguing things about this project is how each time I return to a place where I’ve found an interesting surface, there’s likely been several new posters, stickers, and, announcements posted on them.
My old Telefunken HIFI system
When I saw this old German record player in a hotel room, it reminded me of my all-in-one stereo system from Telefunken.
In the States, all I owned was a tiny transistor radio with a corded, mono earpiece. But when I moved to Sweden in 1978, all of my friends, at least my male friends, had their own stereo.
I was living with aunt Lillemor and her fiancé Karl-Erik at the time, and I think some friend of theirs donated the all-white Telefunken HiFi system to me. It was really wide and had a ton of knobs and levers. It also came with a hefty clear plexiglass cover which if you didn’t close slowly enough, would come crashing down and make the needle on the record player jump two or three tracks.
I never used the built-in cassette player much, or, even the radio. I did play the few LPs I owned back then quite a lot, one being a picture disk version of Peter Frampton’s “Frampton Comes Alive“.
I don’t really miss not having a record player and I’m definitely not glamorizing the old cassette era. What I do miss is listening to entire albums instead of randomized playlists. Especially thematic albums.
Carefully Curated and Corrugated
I notice them. And they notice that I notice them: the folks that look at me as I look at the walls and utility boxes to see if there is something interesting, a potential and undiscovered resurfaced artifact, on them. At some point, I will need to document these occurrences.
Resurfaced Faces Nr 909
Resurfaced Faces Nr 909 – yet another addition to the Resurfaced series. I find comfort in returning to this project time and time again. Especially now with a new wave of corona chaos rolling in over Europe. I don’t exactly “doomscroll“, but even just keeping up to date via BBC and NYT can be a little testing.
Resurfaced Number 00
Some of the “Resurfaced” artifacts. are more or less colorless when I discover them. Not that there isn’t a hint or any clues of color when I look closely. Augmenting these minuscule telltale signs is part of a delicate process that aims to reintroduce some the colors which have faded through years of exposure to all kinds of weather.
Ressurfaced Number 25
Captured this from a wall in Costa da Caparica, a sleepy, soulful suburb of Lisbon, Portugal. Like many of the places in other southern and eastern European cities that I’ve visited over the last couple of years, just as soon as I leave a big city’s ginormous urban footprint, small-town village life reappears without hesitation or embarrassment. And even there, hints of an even older era can often be seen. And it’s not unusual for me to find some really interesting artifacts in these places. Like the one above.
Resurfaced Nr 300(xc)
One of the great beauties of creativity is its unlimitedness. Most of the projects I work on do have a clear scope, a goal in somewhere insight, and often a set deadline which in itself automatically adds to the creative challenge. But not so for my Resurfaced series which is endless insofar that I keep traveling and discovering new surfaces created by a wide variety of unknown contributors. A collective of anonymous people posting stuff on surfaces that over time become an artifact worthy of my collection. Like the piece above, from the learned city of Lund in Sweden.
We Are Malmö Opera
After listening to Alec Baldwin’s interesting recent interview with Estonian conductor, Paavo Järvi, I was reminded of a tangential subject. Five years ago, I started working on a 240-page coffee table book with 54 interviews and portraits of the folk working behind the scenes at Malmö’s premier cultural institution, Malmö Opera. The book was aptly titled, “We are Malmö Opera/Vi är Malmö Opera” and though I’ve since produced several other books, I still consider the opera book to be my career’s magnum opus. At least so far.
With time, I tend to forget how much effort and affection goes into my book projects. Especially those where the human component is so central. With the opera book, I was thrust into a world where I had very limited knowledge, but over time learned so much about and became in awe of.
A multitude of technical complexities (like lens and lighting choices), thousands of small and large creative options, and months of social interaction and policy navigation made producing content for the book an inspiring challenge. And it’s really only when I dig deep into the vast archive of published and unpublished photographs from that 6-month project, that I fully grasp how tremendous an undertaking it was. According to Bokus, the book is now out of print. But you can read more about the project here: www.operaboken.se
The One That Got Away
Every summer, one of the village’s many wild meadows gets populated with a dozen or so cows and bulls. During our daily walks to and from the harbor, we pass these gentle summer guests. Seeing them graze so peacefully with the sea as a beautiful backdrop, always gives me a sense of privilege. To experience these wonderful creatures up close is such a great gift. A reminder of how we used to respect the animals that give us so much and the contemptuous behavior we have for them today.
From time to time, I also consider that the summer meadow is the last place the cows will exist in freedom before being trucked to a factory and slaughtered. Yesterday, during our long walk with Lenny on the fresh, crunchy snow, I imagined what it would look like if one of the past summer’s cows had somehow managed to escape when the rest of the herd were removed from the meadow, unknowingly headed towards their final moments as living beings. And so, I call the above image, “The One That Got Away”.
I haven’t made up my mind about the burgeoning lab-grown meat industry. It’s interesting and I’m sure to try a BBQ:e ribeye once it becomes available. But this is kind of like electric cars. EVs are cool and certainly better for the planet short-term. But even when electric cars and trucks become mainstream, will they really help reverse the environmental impact we’ve inflicted on the planet long-term?
I’m skeptical.
There’s just so much energy and raw materials needed to produce an electric vehicle that it’ll take years before today’s embryonic benefits will offset the cost of excavating all the precious materials needed for batteries and the emissions generated from the car industry’s manufacturing process. Not to mention that most of the electricity used to charge all the car batteries, especially in countries like the US, will for decades continue to predominately come from fossil fuel sources.
So, correspondingly, I worry that all the raw material and chemicals needed to produce lab meat (as well as much of the processed ingredients many fake-meat, vegan products contain) won’t justify the means environmentally.
Get Back: The Beatles
Like most reasonable people my age, The Beatles played an immeasurable part in my musical upbringing. The band’s entire catalog of tunes literally defined pop music as a genre and they set the gold standard for how harmonies, catchy lyrics, and a chorus with a hook should be crafted, sung, and played.
I have never been a Stones fan. It was always The Beatles. More talent, less flare. Better songs, less heroin.
Kenny Stewart, a good friend up the block from me on Alfred Street in West L.A., was of Scottish descent and his parents loved the Fab Four. He and I would sit in his tiny bedroom and listen for hours to the family’s scratchy LP collection with the Beatles. This was back in 1970 or 1971, shortly after John, Paul, George, and Ringo went separate ways.
I never got to see them live, but I have a vague memory of my mother saying that she saw them at the Hollywood Bowl in 1965. I used to own the album Introducing The Beatles, but sadly, like my old Gibson SG Junior, it too was stolen. Possibly during one of my life’s umpteen moves.
I’ve not yet seen Peter Jackson’s new documentary with footage from The Beatles last studio session. But I am planning to do so soon.
Abandoned Studio
Since I began painting in 1986, I’ve had at least a half dozen dedicated studios and combinations of gallery and studio. It’s been a couple of years since I last had a proper space to paint at and I can feel the urge growing. Whenever I see an abandoned interior like the one above from Zadar/Croatia, I try to assess whether or not it would work for me. The very first studio I had in Malmö was in an old brick building on Neptunigatan and it was torn down a couple of years ago. It was huge, had great light, and was reasonably affordable. I do much of my current creative work on a 27″ iMac. But I long to paint on a canvas the size of the wall behind it.
Cabin Life in Zadar
A wonderful shot of us in front of our rented cabin at the Falkensteiner Premium Campsite by friend and Community Manager Forrest Stilin. Just back in Sweden after a few weeks of remote working via Grab a Home in Zadar, a scenic seaside city in western Croatia along the Adriatic Sea. Crossed paths with several interesting fellow coworkers from around the world and thoroughly enjoyed the off-season experience. Even held a couple of energizing Qigong sessions for community members on the beach.
Coincidentally, today is the 25th anniversary of our meeting for the very first time in Göteborg, Sweden back in 1996. It’s been nothing short of an amazing adventure ever since and I feel humbled when I consider how great our lives have turned out thus far. Far greater than either of us could have imagined at the onset and probably better than what each of us could have managed on our own.
Charlotte and I have always had traveling as our highest priority. Together, we’ve visited, as well as experienced living, in many amazing places around the world. And yet, somehow, within our adventures, we’ve also both managed to have two relatively successful careers and raised Elle, our beautiful daughter, who’s now creating an interesting storyline on her own.
Hysteria Free Zone, Anybody?
A friend recently wrote an interesting piece, the first in a multipart series, about the state of America today. The gist of his very first installment is that we are currently living in an era of hysteria.
I couldn’t agree more.
Hysteria has become a norm, a default state of mind for so many, many people. It’s as if some folks don’t feel alive if there isn’t a reason to get hysterical about something or someone. The media obviously plays a huge part in this drama. They literally feed off every sensational, click-baiting headline they can muster. More hysteria means more ad revenue. I might need to stop feeding the media and find a hysteria-free zone somewhere.
But you don’t have to have a mail-order degree in psychology to deduce that it’s the vial divisiveness on the most popular social media platforms that are fueling the hysteria fire. I’ve been thinking a lot about this lately. How practically everyone has strong opinions about just about everything these days. Especially the really dumb people that feel compelled to argue vocally about all kinds of stuff.
Like the folks that have previously allowed themselves to get vaccinated nine times without a complaint, but now feel increasingly threatened by even the thought of preventative covid-19 shots. They don’t care about the greater good, if the ICUs are maxed out or if their stupidity means the virus gets a chance to mutate again and again and again. They just don’t give a shite. Instead, these dumb-asses take great comfort in being part of militant antivax groups where nonsense makes sense.
Hysteria.
Also a decent song by Def Leopard, a band I listened to for a short while back in the early 1980s.
The image above is called Pacific Blü Resurfaced 1983.
Within My Wheelhouse
Today I put together a short film from this morning’s Qigong by the Sea, worked on an illustration with a few cows from Vejbystrand, worked on a short fiction story about when a lawnmower exploded a while ago. Oh, and I almost forgot that I also published this blog post with yet another artifact for the Resurfaced series.
Half-jokingly, half-seriously, I like to say that creativity is both a blessing and a curse. Once you get a taste for it and discover that you can be creative in so many, many ways, it’s hard not to find yourself spreading the juice across many spokes in the wheelhouse.
A Return to Painting
I painted this canvas a couple of years ago in my studio in Malmö. It’s called “Shadowbanning the Koj” and was bought by friends Alexandra and Per in Göteborg, where it’s now hanging in their apartment.
In a recent post, I wrote about how liberating it is to feel fluidity between various creative mediums. And though my computer provides a lot of opportunities to express myself artistically, not even the fanciest of Apple’s offerings will ever be able to remotely come close to the hands-on joy and meditative state I feel when painting.
It’s been a while since I’ve had an easel, a few tubes of paint, brushes, and something to paint on. But I don’t think it will be much longer until I once again return to where my creative spirit was first discovered.
More of my art can be viewed here.
Resurfaced: Off the Wall
Here’s another discovery from a visit to Croatia – a country I’ve been to a few times and find increasingly agreeable for each visit. Especially Dubrovnic and Zadar, two totally different cities but where both offer visitors an astounding amount of architectural heritage. I found this piece off a wall somewhere in the old town of Zadar, one of Europe’s oldest cities.
COP26: A Most Complicated Conundrum
COP26 is over. In all honesty, I’ve been mildly interested in the conference. These climate conferences have mostly been PR events ending with agreements that have clearly done way too little to cool the planet. Nothing more. That’s not to say that I haven’t (naively) hoped for a solid plan from the politicians and corporate leaders to begin curbing the global use of fossil fuels and the emissions that are cooking and choking the planet.
This conundrum is obviously complicated. I’d argue that it’s the hardest math problem our species has ever tried to solve. I’m not even sure we can. Why? Well, because there are so many unknown variables in this particular equation.
While I think we actually could immediately lower emissions by drastically reducing the production of non-essential products and services, including all kinds of meat and farmed fish, and, by adding a steep carbon tax on just about anything that isn’t locally sourced and absolutely everything that originates from oil and the entire petrochemical industry, this would still only keep rising temperatures at bay short-term
The world’s population is growing. By 2099 (78 years from now), the projection is that we’ll be just shy of 11 billion people on Earth. That’s close to 3 billion more people than today or, approximately the combined amount of folks living in India and China right now.
I’m starting to think that Elon Musk might be right about moving to Mars.
The big question, the 800-pound gorilla in the corner of our ever-decreasing room, is, should we just cap the population growth for the sake of our species’ future? I mean, will we actually be able to feed all 11 billion hungry mouths, let alone build homes, create jobs, make furniture and supply all the other stuff that we “the privileged” take for granted today, for so many more earthlings? How could that possibly work? I mean, we’ve populated 50-70% of the world’s total landmass already. Where’s everyone going to live and what are they all going to eat? Lab steak? Rice milk? Seaweed salad?
However you slice it or dish it out, from an environmental perspective, COP26 was nothing but a huge fiasco, a failure. Yes, I think Greta was absolutely right when she said it was all blah, blah, blah. But I wonder, how could COP26 have been anything but blah, blah, blah? Decisions that would have had a real, tangible impact on the climate crisis were just too tough for any politician or corporate dude to dare take. How could they without risking the beginning of a global financial meltdown?
How could a CEO of a company like H&M, one of the world’s most successful retailers, tell stockholders that no, sorry, the company’s actually not going to be expanding into new markets anymore? That the leadership team has instead decided to reduce production, lay off workers in stores, close factories, and from now on will only produce collections of clothes, accessories, and furniture using 100% renewable and locally produced material?
Like many other consumer-faced corporations, H&M is dependent on increasing sales, expanding aggressively, high volume turnover, continuous cost-cutting, and streamlining their distribution channels in order to increase, or, at the very least, maintain profitability. Stockholders, especially enormous institutional investors, don’t care about the planet. Not if caring means lower quarterly earnings and plummeting annual dividends.
What politician would dare tell his or her constituents that they now have to make tremendous sacrifices, including putting an end to shopping sprees at H&M, quitting their daily one-click consumption at Amazon, and obsessively renewing gadgets every year at Apple? That they from now on can only eat real meat once a month and have to start taking the bus to work, or, just stay home and learn to get by on a meager UBI? Who’s going to put in place a law that says couples can now only have a single offspring (a la Deng Xiaoping’s one-child policy) and that no, there will be no more two-week all-inclusive holidays at exotic, faraway destinations?
From an existential perspective, I think the only relevant philosophical question is, should I really care about global warming, as it’s unlikely to impact me directly for the remainder of my lifetime? In other words, is it really my moral obligation to be worried and concerned enough to make profound sacrifices today, just to help my grandchildren and their future existential circumstances on the planet, if I’m already gone and at best, a fading memory? Or, should I just enjoy the life I have created for myself and hope/pray that people much, much smarter than me will somehow figure this stuff out? Even if it one day ultimately means abandoning Earth altogether?
Yes, this certainly is a complicated conundrum. There are no easy answers in sight and we clearly have yet another one of them divisive, contentious topics. But just as so many times before, it’s only a conundrum for those of us lucky enough to have time to even ponder an issue like global warming. People literally struggling to survive, be that in Africa, Asia, South America, or the US of A, certainly do not have this luxury. In all likelihood, they will once again see their lives changed by people they’ve never met or heard of.
Above image: “Complicated Conundrum Nr 33(b)”. Part of the Resurfaced series. Shot in Zadar, Croatia.