Gimlé

Here in some stranger’s room
Late in the afternoon
What am I doing here at all?
Ain’t no doubt about it
I’m losing you
John Lennon—“I’m Losing You.”

I hate this place.

The few people who were reading my ’blog over Christmas must have noticed how my posts were increasingly cynical, bitter and harsh.

Sort of the internet equivalent of watching milk turn into some sort of rancid gelatinous bile.

It’s this place that is annoying me.

Not my Dad’s home or any place my family lives in at all. Not their homes. I love my family. I’d visit them in the wastelands of the Kalahari desert if they lived there.

It’s this country. Iceland. I’ve got plenty of issues with the place. Bad vibes.

But Iceland is in vogue, popular, in the new Bond film, populated partly by UK popstars, has got decent musicians of its own.

Somehow the wires have crossed
Communication’s lost
Can’t even get you on the telephone
Just got to shout about it
I’m losing you
John Lennon—“I’m Losing You.”

Iceland’s cool. Literally as well as, in the minds of those who think they matter, figuratively.

It has a very active party and club culture (you can find people to party and booze with any time of day, any day of the week, all year round).

We make around 2-3 films each year (note the word, films not DV based semi-coherent crap).

We have a novel-writing culture dating back to around the year thousand. Quite a lot of it is really good stuff.

And we export most of this stuff.

But there is one thing we just cannot ignore:

It’s a sparsely populated, barely habitable shithole.

This little piece of nowhere foreigners love to visit and leave only has around 280 000 inhabitants. A small town pretending to be a country. You can’t do anything without everybody knowing about it. Privacy is a piece of science-fiction.

It’s corrupt, nepotism is rife. Take the worst example of nepotism you can think of and magnify it by a thousand and you’ve base level of honesty in employment here in Iceland.

You can’t get decent English beer here and the nation fanatically believes in the idea that any place where you can buy yourself an alcoholic drink should have ear-piercingly loud music.

My hearing is a couple of notches worse than your average person’s which means that I’m effectively out of the loop in any bar, club or pub that plays loud music. The result is that I pretty much go only to quiet pubs where you can have a conversation without shouting. A rare breed here.

And those that do exist have crap beer.

You say you’re not getting enough
But I remind you of all that bad stuff
So what the hell am I supposed to do?
Just put a bandaid on it?
And stop the bleeding now
Stop the bleeding now.
John Lennon—“I’m Losing You.”

Tiny-town vibes.

The worst part has to do with how I felt when I lived here. I lived here, in this country, during the worst periods of my personal and emotional life. Some of my problems were exaggerated by the small-town nature of the country.

This place will always remind me of the darkest emotional pits I have experienced.

And it’s a shithole, which doesn’t help.

If you are a lager-drinking party-animal then you’ll love this country. It’s populated by like-minded people.

If you are a fan of geology and landscapes then you’ll love this country. It’s populated by like-minded people.

If you are both, then this place will be heaven.

Anybody else shouldn’t really come here unless they have a really good reason to come. Most of the good stuff that you’ll like is exported, these days.

Me, I’ll continue to come here once or twice a year to meet my family.

I will write more later about the Icelandic New Year’s Eve.

Baldur Bjarnason.
Garðabær, Iceland.

I love Film.

I hate TV.

Now before you go for my jugular and remind me that TV produces good, quality storytelling as well—

Yeah, I know that.

That’s cool.

TV does produce good, solid storytelling and characterisation.

But it’s not the individual programs that annoys me, it’s the principles of TV I dislike.

Hours and hours of programming a day. Low margins which push the production values down into Inferno’s inner circles. The true industrialisation and componentisation of our entertainment culture. The values of mass production.

These are the principal values of television. Film and music and novels don’t have that role to the same degree. The role of mass-producing hours and hours of entertainment.

Somebody working on a film is working towards one story, two hours of entertainment, often a production of three or more years leading up to just those two hours.

Compare that to a group of workers, often a smaller team, working on producing thirty or fifty hours a year, ninety to a hundred and fifty hours in the same period of time a film team will make two hours.

What I hate about TV is not its output. If that was the case I’d hate Film and Music with a passion.

It’s the fact that the fundamental principles—ideals—of TV go counter to the basic principles of good storytelling.

Good stuff comes out of the idiot-box in spite of TV, rather than because of it.

There are only two things media mass-production can accomplish, things we’ll henceforth call the “Two Dissappointments.”

The first one is a consequence of the mass production principle I so dislike in entertainment. That principle should push production costs down far enough to make experimentation dirt cheap. TV should be able to match every single hour of experimental Film with a hundred hours of experimental TV.

Trust me, it doesn’t.

The second Dissappointment isn’t as total as the first:

Training.

TV should be prime training grounds for content producers. The BBC used to be. TV, unfortunately, has delegated that responsibility to the advertising and music video industries.

Look at where most of the new Film Directors in the last five years came from.

Decent industries that generally do what they are supposed to do.

Too bad they don’t tell stories.

So content producers today are not trained to tell stories but to sell products.

Filth—plastic crap—as a result permeats every single particle of our culture.

Television’s legacy.

Baldur Bjarnason.
Garðabær, Iceland.

The aurora borealis is strong here tonight.

The sky is covered.

From horizon to horizon.

Like glittering waves in the sky itself.

And the stars are the glittering pebbles just under the surface, on the dark rocky beach covered by shallow water.

I’ve just returned from my grandmother’s annual Christmas gathering in Kópavogur.

Yesterday (the 25th) I was at my Dad and his wife’s do here in Garðabær.

Today’s do was for my Dad’s family. Yesterday’s do was my Dad’s wife’s family.

The contrast between the families is noticable.

Not that one’s nicer than the other. Nothing like that. It’s like when you sit in a bean bag for a while. You leave a groove.

My Dad’s new in-laws is a seat that doesn’t have a groove for me.

Not that they wouldn’t make some space. Lovely people. But becoming a new member of a famly like that is hard work, takes time.

And it requires you to be there.

But neither me nor my sister live in Iceland anymore. And won’t for the next few years.

Which leaves me only with a few precious moments to even connect the faces to the names in her family. And less time to get to know them as a part of their family.

But that is exactly what my Dad has done, and a very remarkable job he’s done as well.

The proof was in the Christmas cards.

My—I suppose I should call her my step-mother or something, like I tend to refer to my mother’s partner as my step-dad—she has a tradition in her family.

On Christmas Eve, the main day here in Iceland, she curls up in the sofa with her kids, and the three of them open up and read all of their Christmas Cards.

Of course, her son, the same age as me, has just bought a small flat with his girlfriend (just about the nicest couple I’ve met, and I’ve met a lot of people) so he’s not partaking in that tradition anymore. Leaving just my Dad, his wife, and her daughter (who is almost the same age as my sister, strangely enough).

This year I was there as well.

It was nice, to hear my dad, his wife and her daughter referred to as a family, as a whole so many times, on so many cards.

But in a strange way it only hammered in that my Dad has formed a new family here. A fully functional whole that everybody acknowledges, knows and loves.

It’s different from what happened on my mother’s side. I got to know her partner and his kids very well before I moved.

His family is much smaller as well.

My Dad has formed a fully functional family unit.

A new whole.

Almost as if I had never been a part of his life.

Of course I realise that that is not true. Not even remotely.

I’ve always been a very family-oriented person. When I lived here in Iceland I used to see my grandmother almost every week. My cousins, aunts and uncles populate a large proportion of my social world.

But this makes me think about what you can lose when you move away from your family.

It also makes me think about how much more of a family oriented culture Iceland is, than the English one, which focusses almost exclusively on the tiny unit of a married couple plus kids.

I’m not a part of my relatives’ regular life anymore. Not like I was.

I guess that’s just something to get used to.

Baldur Bjarnason.
Garðabær, Iceland.

I’m a cynical bastard.

On the 23rd of December, as has become a tradition over here, a large number of people participated in a “peace march” which goes down Reykjavík’s main shopping street.

People who on every other day of the year don’t give a rat’s arse about peace or the poor, don’t recycle, vote the usual bastards into power, don’t support fair trade, think that the World Trade Organisation is something run by Nestlé, and are generally inane, shallow consumerist twats, participate in this mass fantasy that their Christmas has something to do with peace on Earth and goodwill towards all men.

They rush down the shopping street in their GAP gear and Nike shoes, walking past the shops where they have spent the money they don’t have using the credit cards they shouldn’t have, for goods put together by a bunch of people in China, Taiwan or Korea working for a few cents a day.

Then they go home to drink their coffee, grown by impoverished farmers who slash and burn rainforests to be able to grow a cash crops because that’s what the government and the market wants.

Christmas as a celebration of friendship and love for those near and dear is something I get. The idea that this consumerist free-for-all does world peace and world poverty any good is something I don’t get.

Going to the cemetaries to put flowers and such on your relatives’ graves, making your kids aware of the large number of good people their family has had and lost, instilling in them a sense of history, respect for the dead and pride of their family—

That I get.

And that is what we do (as do many other Icelanders).

Near and dear.

Tomorrow I am getting up early in the morning. I’m heading off to the main cemetary in the Fossvogur valley with my Dad, Grandmother, six year old cousin and a couple of other relatives.

We’re going to walk around the cemetary. Make sure the graves and stones for our relatives look fine. Light some candles for them.

And tell each other stories about all the cool people we have had enrichen our lives.

Baldur Bjarnason.
Garðabær, Iceland.

Maybe I’m just paranoid but I can feel my English deteriorate while I’m here in Iceland.

It is a process—which repeats itself exactly in reverse when I return to an English-speaking country after being in Iceland.

Makes me worry about these posts I’m writing, resulting—of course—in a lengthened writing process where I try to check and double check everything I write.

It’s not just that I’m in an Icelandic environment with little to no English about. One of the reasons is the fact that I don’t have the time to do my regular daily reading (both online and offline) which I’m sure would have delayed the “language switch”.

Today we had my grandmother’s pre-Christmas do where I did my studious best to avoid eating roasted sheep’s heads, preferring the smoked and salted lamb.

Family gatherings like these always seem to be teaming with children, running about and screaming. More every year.

People, without fail, put up an expression of shock and horror when I call the little monsters “monsters” (or “skrímsli” in Icelandic).

Thankfully, most people have given up on the expectation that I should father a few myself (not likely, my dears).

And the perpetual “what do you do?” problem continues to plague most people who work and study away from their family.

On one hand when somebody is actually interested you are likely to put the rest to sleep or, worse even, somebody might actually view themselves as a bit of a “specialist” striking up a conversation on web design and media just because they’ve made a web page in Dreamweaver and are capable of firing iMovie up.

Cringe.

Vapid, superficial party-speak is unfortunately an international problem.

The 23rd of December is the last day before Christmas over here. Traditionally everybody wanders downtown in the afternoon to take care of the last minute shopping as well as simply to see everybody.

Running into friends and family is guaranteed.

One of the main traditions on this day, though, is on the Icelandic National Broadcasting Service’s Radio One (roughly equivalent to a mix between BBC’s Radio 3 and Radio 4).

After the 13:00 news the announcer begins to read the Christmas Greetings.

These are short 22 word greetings that the public can buy for a small amount of money to send their best wishes to all and sundry.

This year they are over forty four thousand words in total.

That’s a lot of goodwill.

Baldur,
Garðabær, Iceland.

I don’t know how it is with most people but Icelanders tend to spend their Christmas with their close family.

The problem is that “close family” in Iceland generally refers to your siblings, parents, your parents’ siblings, your parents’ siblings’ kids and grandkids, your grandparents as well as some of your grandparents’ siblings.

And their dog, if they have one.

Today we had the do that was on my mother’s side, with her siblings and all the lot that comes with them.

Good fun, a buffet, as well as the usual family gathering sort of thing, complete with the bored teenagers in the corner.

No alcohol, but apparently my family’s unusual in that regard. This is probably because my grandfather on my mother’s side (who has now passed away) was an alcoholic.

Tomorrow, we have the routine last minute Christmas shopping as well as a traditional Sunday meal at my grandmothers’ on my dad’s side.

The dinner will consist of sheeps’ heads and a large leg of lamb smoked in stuff you don’t want to hear about as well as salted.

Traditionally, then on Monday, people eat fermented ray (a kind of flat fish, I think it is also called skate) and get absolutely smashed. Probably because you have to be drunk to tolerate the taste.

Thankfully, Iceland has imported a few dining traditions from abroad so that I can get away with eating turkey on the 24th, which is the main day of celebration over here.

More later.

Baldur.
Reykjavík, Iceland.

I’ve been awake for almost 22 hours now.

Met up with my sister in London. Spent the afternoon there.

Heathrow was… well, Heathrow. Security definitely a bit tighter than it was this summer. More checks, and each of them more thorough.

Flying’s going to be more difficult over the next couple of years, but I think everybody and their dog knows that at this point.

It is dark and cold back home here in Iceland, no false advertising in the name here.

Tomorrow, the first family Christmas gathering takes place, my mother’s side this time. Her mother, sisters, their children and grandchildren.

Just the close family, y’know.

But I’m knackered.

I also hate the Icelandic keyboard layout (doing this on my Dad’s computer in the middle of the night).

More on Icelandic Christmas traditions later.

Baldur.
Garðabær, Iceland.