Here’s a new piece for the Resurfaced series. An old friend in L.A. is often wakeful and finds it difficult to fall asleep. The time difference is mostly to my advantage, from a chat perspective, but I worry that the sleep deficit is harmful.

I sleep relatively well nowadays. For several years I’ve used podcasts to help me relax and in due course, fall to sleep. Sometimes, I’ll wake up after a short while, frustrated that the podcast hosts won’t allow me to share my opinion verbally on their show.

One trick that I used to do to fall asleep is map neighborhoods where I’ve lived. The one area I returned to with great frequency was in West Hollywood and the general vicinity where I grew up, hung out, or walked through on my way to or back from somewhere.

I would start along Santa Monica Boulevard going east and then west, visualizing all the buildings, stores, shops, and places I can recall. Then, if that didn’t put me to sleep, I’d map La Cienega Boulevard starting from Sunset and going down what must still be one of L.A.’s steepest hills, then heading south until my personal map starts moving into unfamiliar territory. I haven’t lived in that part of L.A. since 1978, more than forty years ago. So it’s fascinating that I still have such vivid memories of places like The Bowling Alley, John & Pete’s Liquor Store, Alan Hale’s The Lobster Barrel, The Melting Pot, 49 Steps, Rexall’s Drugstore, Norm’s, All America Burger, Pup n’ Tail, Kiddyland, the oil pumps on Beverly, and the row of art galleries and fine dining eateries around Melrose Place.

I remember one time when I was out alone at night (having been locked out of the house by my mother after yet another tumultuous conflict), that I saw what I believed to have been a prostitute on the southwest corner of La Cienega and Santa Monica. She had placed one of her shiny white boots on the edge of the bus stop’s green wooden bench. The woman was extraordinarily tall and wore a wide, black or dark brown hat and a long matching coat that revealed short white hot pants above her legs.

As a prepubescent 12-year old, I was beguiled to say the least. At first, the woman smiled coyly at me, but after realizing I was way too young, her smile shifted quickly to a disappointed, vacant gaze. Maybe she saw in me a version of her younger self and acknowledged that neither of us should be where we were at the time. Certainly not on Santa Monica Boulevard in the middle of the night. I walked home and snuck in through a window along the long side of our house, hoping that by then, my mother had finally fallen asleep. Her sleep was usually induced and fueled by Smirnoff, but I wonder if she had preferred Absolut if it had been available at the time. Probably not.

Maybe I should have written this in Swedish. No, I don’t think he would have cared either way.

It was Charlotte that captured this shot of Bengt Nielsen and me during the unveiling of the five collages I was commissioned to create for Kockum Fritid, the sports center he was Managing Director for at the time and had worked at for the majority of his life.

About a week ago I learned from a friend and Bengt successor Magnus Steen that Bengt had succumbed to cancer. I hadn’t seen him since his retirement, but I’d known about the battle for several years. In our very last email exchange, Bengt told me about his poor health and how his cancer had metastasized.

Kockum Fritid has been the Raboff family’s preferred sports center and I’ve also been their supplier of film and photography services for about a decade.

Though my relationship with Bengt was purely professional, whenever we met, whenever I dropped by, he would almost always take time off from whatever he was doing to chat about this and that; from work to wine to family and, towards the end of his tenure, about the battle he was going through and trips he’d hope to be able to make with his wife despite decreasing health.

I’ll always remember Bengt Nielsen as one of the most unpretentious people I’ve ever met. Friendly, kind and generous with inspiring anecdotes from his life. R.I.P.

Finally a new installment in my Resurfaced series. I haven’t been giving it much attention lately. Hope to remedy this soon. I honestly don’t remember where I shot this utility box. Possibly in Malmö. Maybe in Göteborg.

With the release of the United Nations pan-governmental climate report yesterday, one can either envision a forboding cataclysmic doomsday scenario or, see this as the beginning of the most exciting era to be a human. Either way, there’s no denying that planet Earth is in dire straits.

I prefer the latter position.

Why? Because the contents of said report, the urgency it proclaims, means we must now wholeheartedly embrace the climate crisis just to have a fighting chance at staving off the potentially devastating consequences of our neglect and ignorance – which means that a lot of really smart people will need to come up with some incredibly smart ideas very, very soon.

Then again, perhaps all everybody has to do is just sit down for a minute, take inventory of how we live our lives, and come to the reasonable conclusion and insight that we all actually have many of the required solutions within reach…

We went for a lovely long walk here in Vejbystrand yesterday evening. The day’s intense rainfall had finally ceased and a wonderful smell of fresh, robot-cut lawns permeated the air.

Not every house, but most of those we walked past had two rain-washed cars parked in driveways and under carports. All but a few of them were really fancy automobiles, some electric, others hybrid but most were fossil-fueled.

As we walked past the cavalcade of shiny vehicles, I thought to myself how difficult it’s going to be to legislate against leading a lifestyle that at least from a global warming perspective can’t be described as anything but excessive and collectively ruinous to the planet. The same goes for what we wear, what we drink and eat (contents and volume) as well with long-distance and regional travel.

The most optimistic scientists don’t think the problems at hand are unsurmountable. Demanding? Yes! Life-changing? Yes, for sure!

And this is what makes this era so exciting!

Being coerced verbally or legally into redefine so much of what we’ve taken for granted for so long is undoubtedly going to take a lot of effort. Especially for us lucky folk that live up here in northern Europe where we don’t much realize how rich we actually are.

I’ve said it before and now I’ll say it again. We’re going to need a lot of philosophers and psychologists to help us appreciate life with less.

I don’t have the faintest idea how we’re going to get where we need to be for the planet to cool down some. But I am looking forward to taking part in the master plan – however it rolls out.

I’ve been shifting gears, switching paths, and changing goals all my life. I wouldn’t have a hard time at all. You know what? The pandemic has been inadvertently helpful in getting me to appreciate more with less and feeling more content with what I have.

I don’t think many governments will take drastic action after this latest report. That would just lead to panic and more violent disruption. I mean, if so many people refuse to take a simple vaccine to help against Covid-19, just imagine the insanity if the EPA and other nation’s equivalent environmental agencies mandated against owning more than one car or shopping for H&M clothes more than once a quarter. Just conceptualize the havoc if you as a meat-lover could only eat steak, pork chop, or, fried chicken once a month? Weekend trip to Paris or London? Fuhgeddaboudit!

I do hope that countries like China and the US immediately close all operating and planned coal-fueled power plants. And more importantly, I sincerely hope that Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, Mark Zuckerberg, and Larry Page – along with their teams backed up by us minions – use their spectacular brain power and formidable money muscle to help Earth get through this crisis.

Met this curious creature on my way back from last night’s dip in the sea. Good to be back in Vejby again after an intense visit to Malmö. Finishing up the new book next week as the printer’s deadline is rapidly approaching. Will be heading back up to the Gylsboda this Saturday to shoot stills and footage from the annual festival which has been added to the book’s scope.

A series of powerful storms have been passing through northwestern Skåne for the last two weeks. Torrential rains are often followed by beautiful, dramatic skies like the one above, shot night before last.

Compared with the summer’s prolonged heatwave, the temperature has now dropped to a much more agreeable level, oscillating gently, but never reaching July’s feverish peaks. Today it’s a mere 18C/60F.