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A tale told by twelve idiots

knorgaard@mac.com — 2008-05-29T01:24:14-04:00

I spent last night tied to a chair with my own sweater in an old-fashioned Southern-style living-room a couple of blocks off Broadway. Except for the mummified intellectuals and anaemic youngsters that crowded the room with their glasses like two-eyed cyclops, it was exactly the kind of scenery I would have expected to find on Broadway - classic, conservative, drab, boring. The muffled sound of a radio crackled sleepily in the background. Outside a storm was whipping up the streets of New York, making the theater seem even more stuffy and claustrophobic. Then the actors started filing in, twelve in all, taking up their positions on stage like athletes before a track race. I took them in, one by one, waiting for the gun to go off, and somebody to start running. I was on my second or third round when I finally noticed the subtitles. They ran like a border projection along the top of the back wall set:

... / Quentin - committed suicide in his freshman year at Harvard just after his sister Caddie got married / ... / Benjy - thirty-three years old, a life-long idiot in the care of a boy half his age / ... / These are the characters / The rest are negroes / ...

William Faulkner wrote the "The Sound and the Fury" in 1928 when he was thirty-one years old. It is the kind of book that your teacher praised to high heaven in literature class, but never succeeded in convincing you to actually go read. In other words, "The Sound and the Fury" is your average modernist masterpiece, artificially kept alive by professors and librarians in haunted basement vaults, exerting strange and subtle influences on authors that you always felt to be its antithesis. Such is the true curse and the blessing of the avantgarde and the avantart. Even though you might hate it, you know you really should love it. And so I do.

Firmly fixed inside the mind and sweater of a soon-to-be castrated idiot child headed for his thirty-third birthday, the strutting and the fretting began. Two of the actors went over to Benjy, and a bluegrass banjo fired up the hearth from hidden speakers. They hiked up their pants, and started dancing around like drag queen cowboys stuck on the horns of a rodeo bull. Nobody seemed to pay them any mind, and when they finally collapsed on the floor, out of synch and out of breath, Benjy responded by tracing the flight of imaginary golf balls with his eyes. His sister Caddie picked up a book, and began reading out random paragraphs from Faulkner's novel.

The dialogue was filled in by different actors who made sure to read the tag lines identifying the speakers: "'You're not going out into the snow, Benjy,' mother said," the actress playing the mother said. Or rather, the actress currently playing the mother said. Suddenly she would get up, and hand her nightgown to one of the other actors, and then let him play the part of the mother. The emphasis on tag lines and the physicality of the character swapping almost made it too easy to follow, but at the same time it lent a certain rhythim quality to the text which combined especially well with the deafening array of hyperrealistic sound effects. It was not really about understanding at all, it was about the ebb and flow of things around you, and the actors sure did a good job of dim-witting me to the point of actually becoming my own personal Benjy.

The Elevator Repair Service acting company came into vogue with their 2006 adaptation of Scott Fitzgerald's "The Great Gatsby". With a title like "Gats" and a running time of six hours it was set for instant off-broadway success. Unfortunately, I only heard about it last night during the intermission. The elderly lady who told me was the same elderly lady who told me that the present play only concerned itself with the first chapter of Faulkner's novel. Chapters two and three are seen from the perspective of other characters in the story, while chapter four is told by a third-person narrator. What the story is actually about, I am not going to relate in any detail here, except to say that it is a pretty ordinary tale about a pretty ordinary family somewhere down south. Sure, emotions are somewhat melodramatic, and skeletons seem to pile up a bit high in the closets, but apart from that - really nothing out of the ordinary.

The play dragged on for some two and a half hours which definitely was a bit on the long side. Luckily, it was staged like a series of crescendoes - or, perhaps more appropriately, sketches - that usually developed from some trivial matter like a birthday cake or a death in the family. What started out as a deeply immersive reading of a passage in the novel tended to end up like a full-blown circus act of uexpected activity and intensity. But somehow the actors never lost control, and I am almost inclined to agree with the pompous conclusion of Hilton Als' review of the play in The New Yorker:

This show runs on something more substantial than chic, more difficult than irony - namely, the real blood and sweat that go into making stories feal realer than reality.

A chart depicting family relations was handed out before the play, and the couple to the left of me spent most of the first act trying to figure out who was who, and when. During the intermission they left. Tracing the free associations of Benjy's mind must have been like tracing a pinball trapped in a machine with all flippers and no holes. It is a box, a frame - a mind! - and the only exit is through the base of your skull. Alternatively, you can shut down your brain and go to sleep - just like the guy to the right of me did. He woke up all happy and smiling as the lights went out on stage for the last time that evening, and jolted out of his seat to deliver an impressive standing ovation. It was as if he wanted to return the favor of the Faulknerian clowns with his own little parody of theatrical conventions. It was all part of the game last night, and when the sound and the fury finally subsided, everybody hurried back out in the streets as if, suddenly, they had become aware of themselves in an embarrassing moment.

Outside, the storm had calmed, and another begun. "I'm not crying, but I can't stop," all the Benjies of the night seemed to say. They spilled in and out of bars all the way up Third Avenue from 4th Street to 51st Street. I followed the throng, and we all felt happy and warm in our own little idiocies. The question of good or bad did not seem to apply to neither play nor people, and I just smiled my little secretive smile, signifying nothing.

More Preachings from the Pulpit of the Profane Prophet

knorgaard@mac.com — 2008-05-23T10:48:23-04:00

... the Commissioners have provided space for a greater population than is collected at any spot on this side of China ... and it is improbable that (for centuries to come) the grounds north of Harlem Flat will be covered with houses. (The Commissioners' Plan For Laying Out Streets And Roads In New York, 1807)

An Asian-American man in a business suit steps out in front of a moving cab, nonchalantly waving it over. The driver swerves to miss him, slams the brakes, and starts screaming abuse. The businessman violently pulls open the back door, and gets in. He shouts out directions with his arms crossed, suitcase between his legs. The driver floors the gas pedal, and sends the cab flying down 42nd Street. Welcome to The Grid!

Manhattan is an anthill, a beehive, a cloud of flies, a festering of maggots in the stomach of a carcass. Trees of stone, leaves of glass, strips of sky like the inverted net of an Indian god hunting for butterflies. The only Nature is the nature of Man, and the ocean but a far-off dream. It is all around me, isolating me, connecting me, yet I cannot hear it, I cannot see it, I cannot smell it.

All I know is the traffic of people in the architectural forest. They come out of holes in the ground, they climb down the sides of buildings, they stream past me like a fast forward slideshow of variations on the human form. They bash and scrape their wings against the walls you see and the walls you don't. They work four jobs to save up for a lesson in flying that they have not got time to take. The grid is slowly expanding and contracting with the frantic beating of their collective hearts, exposing true chaos blossoms in false order cracks.

Ever since I got off the train at Penn Station in Midtown Manhattan, I have not been able to stop walking. Even when my feet are still, my mind keeps on going. The city is all corners and no curves, and all I wanna do is see what is behind the next one - the wind, the sun, the moon, the stars? I am trapped in a maze with exits all around, and still no hope of escaping. It is a matter of will. The will to stay is the will to leave, and I possess neither of the two. I just want to be swept around like the leaves off the trees in Central Park. I want to be coated in the grease that runs the machine, I want to be struck by the lightning that sparks the fuse. A self-abducted alien on a flying island with a subway to the sea.

There is no sense for me anymore. There is just my fingers walking the keyboard. Around and around, up and down, side to side, looking for circles, finding squares. Times Square, Union Square, Any Square. It is all just a slab of concrete, chiselled in the shape of the Self. Put it behind bars, and watch it break free -

Coming home to Uncle Howie

knorgaard@mac.com — 2008-05-14T21:50:38-04:00

Ever since we hit Boston a couple of weeks ago, I have had this strange feeling of coming home. At first I thought it was the smell of the ocean or the colors of spring, then the fact that we were staying with old friends from Denmark. Still, none of the explanations that I came up with was really satisfying to me. I simply used them as proxies to avoid getting too bogged down in thought. I knew that when the stars were right, the true explanation would dawn upon me, and with blinding light wash away every little shadow of doubt from the features of my face.

Yesterday - that was exactly what happened.

The place that I call home is not the place or the country where I grew up. It is a certain frame of mind that I associate with my coming of age. It involves imagination rather than physical landscape. It is not the garden where my brothers and I played with the boys next door, nor is it my teenage room where I spent so many hours listening to music, reading, and writing. It is the actual mood that I was in when I did all of those things. The day dreams, the phantasies, the sense that one day it would all become manifest, real. I yearned for other worlds and other truths than the ones I saw in the news and outside my window. I knew my quest was different from all that, and I did not give a freaking fart when grown-ups told me otherwise. "Get real," they would say, and I would just answer: "I'll show you, I'll make it real."

I had to travel halfway around the globe to find the stuff that I am made off. It is right here in the US, in New England, in Massachusetts and Rhode Island. Edgar Allan Poe was born in Boston, Ralph Waldo Emerson spent most of his life in Concord, Henry David Thoreau built his hut at the banks of Walden Pond, Nathaniel Hawthorne conceived some of his most memorable short stories in the Custom House by Salem Harbour, and Howard Phillips Lovecraft wrote his tales of dark and foreboding horrors in and about Providence for almost his entire life. These writers and visionaries are the keepers of my true legacy. They were the ones who inspired my childhood dreams. They were the ones who formed my budding intellect. And today, they are the ones who make old New England feel just like coming home.

Yesterday our current host Luc dropped me off in the Brown University part of Providence. It was late afternoon, and the sun had begun its downward journey towards the horizon. Its rays were warm and slanted, filtering their light through trees and leaves, casting crazy shadows on the walls and windows of old Victorian mansions. Years of reading about the atrocities that lurk behind every facade of every house in this area had told me not to hope for anything but a quick death should someone or something come jumping at me. Calm in the face of my own insignificance and potentially imminent destruction, I started the steep climb up Prospect Street, armed only with my patience and my camera.

There is no such thing as time when you are lost in the land of dreams. Stone fences and iron gates, crooked trees and bursting flowers, warped around me, and drew me into a world of their own making. There must have been loads of college students walking around the quiet streets, frolicking on the lawns, drinking in the sweet nectar of the sun - but I cannot for the life of me remember seeing them. But then again, I am sure they cannot remember seeing what I saw either. The door to the Historical Society that slammed shut in the windlessness of the afternoon as I was about to enter. The pale face quickly withdrawing from the window of the disturbing red stone structure where the ill-fated Charles Dexter Ward is said to have conjured up the ghosts of his ancestors. The impeccable gentleman with the silver-studded cane and the strangely elongated features that kept coming towards me every time I turned down yet another street. "It's all in your mind," the students would probably say, like grown-ups, and my only retort would be: "Too bad it isn't in yours, too."

When I finally came upon the house where Lovecraft spent the last and most prolific years of his life, I found that it had been moved from its original location further down College Street. Up here, surrounded on all sides by monstrosities of brick and stone, it looked somewhat small and unimposing. A gatekeeper's residence, perhaps, but surely nothing on a par with the gargoyled mansions around it. I wondered if this was the reason that his prose, for all its inherent stylistic faults, had come through to me with such power and intensity. The sense of almost aggressive belittlement of man and his endeavours that you often find in Lovecraft's writings seemed somehow intricately connected with this dwarfed latter-day home of his. He had spent the last decade of his life in poverty here, dreaming of the ancient Victorian houses up the street, a thwarted soul spinning yarns of a compromised legacy that he felt was rightfully his.

Leaving the old part of town behind, I set out for Swan Point Cemetery where Lovecraft's headstone is supposed to be, carrying the megalomanic inscription: "I am Providence". From Angell Street I took a left down Blackstone Boulevard, and kept on past Butler Insane Asylum and the mysterious Beth-El Temple of which I could learn nothing more than its founding date of 1855. The sun was hanging low in the sky, and I knew that I had to hurry if I were to find his grave by the light of day. I followed the crooked wall of unhewn stone that lines the cemetery grounds for a mile or more. My pace was up a good notch or two, and I could tell that I was getting impatient. It was the first signs of defeat, and when I arrived at the gates, they had long since been closed for the day. A sign read "Open till 7 pm", and I could not believe that I had already spent three hours or more walking around old Providence. I wrestled with the gods of time, insisting that they give back the hours they had stolen from me. But all to no avail. The ghost of Lovecraft had escaped me, and even though notices like "Trespassers Prosecuted" and "24 HR Security Patrol" might not mean a hell of a lot to those who had already passed beyond the grave, it sure meant something to me, traveling on a Visa Waiver which basically means that I can be kicked out of the country for littering.

But even though I did not get to visit my mentor at his final unresting place, the story is not quite over yet. The gateway to the horrors of the past had been barred before me, but just a few minutes down the road, the gateway to the equally horrific realities of the present were opening up. Somewhere deep in the soil of Swan Point Cemetery, old Uncle Howie rolled comfortably in his grave.

I am crossing Hope Street to catch a cab to Manville where Luc lives when a woman literally jumps at me, screaming hysterically. I barely manage to dodge her attack, and put a few feet's distance between us. She is wearing jeans and a scruffy shirt, her face covered in blood. "It's him again!" she bursts out in a high-pitched voice. "You gotta get me out of here!"

I scan the street for potential cultists and disguised monsters, but my third eye has apparently dosed off to sleep. For a moment I consider screaming and running, too. For all I know, she could be the ominous deity herself. Too late. She grabs me by the arm, and starts raving about a safe heaven at her girlfriend's somewhere in Providence. At this point, whatever is following her, I am pretty sure it is following me as well.

I wave down the cab that I was going for myself, and open the door for her to get in. She is halfway through the door when the driver turns around, and sees her bloodied face. He immediately steps on the gas pedal, and shoots off into the darkness, sending the woman flying right back into my arms. I grab her by the hand, and drag her quickly down the street. Another cab comes by, and this time I manage to explain the situation somewhat before we get in. He continues reluctantly down the street, but soon starts talking about driving us straight to the nearest police station. Well, what do you know! Lady freaks out again, and less than a minute after actually getting into the cab, we are back out on the street again. And this time she is even crying. I precipitate a long and troubled night.

The third cab is our lucky cab. The driver is a young Mexican with a closely shaved head and a white shirt embroidered with threads of gold. Upbeat Latino music rattles every little nut and bolt of the car. He looks in the rearview mirror, puts on a disgusted face, and casually asks me what happened to my woman. Once again I find myself in the rather complex situation of trying to explain to a complete stranger what I do not know happened to another complete stranger. Luckily, being our third cab driver and all, he buys in.

As we roam the seedy-looking southern parts of town, my eyes shift from the woman's face to the meter ticking away my own cab fare home. Her voice quivers somewhere between tears and intelligibility, and to be honest, she is not making much sense. The story that I do manage to piece together is about her having a bad time with her boyfriend in Providence, going out to somewhere in Connecticut to get away from him, and then ending up returning to him, anyway. Apparently, her beaten up face is the result of that unhappy reunion.

When she finally yells out for the cab to stop, we are in a partly industrial area at the far end of Washington Street about a half-hour walk from the city centre. She blesses me with the mercy of whatever god she believes in, then scrams out the door, and disappears into some derelict apartment block. The fare is up to around thirty dollars, and I only got a few bucks more on top of that. I guess I could have just told him to drive me to the nearest ATM to pick up some more money, and then get me back home. Unfortunately, however, the damsel in distress has drained up most of my sanity, and shaved my mind down to where it could almost compete with the driver's balding head.

Just about this time I realize that I have been away long enough for people back home at Luc's place to start worrying about me. It is night, and Washington Street is long and straight and empty. I jog down a couple of blocks, more concerned about the guys back home than about myself. Only after noticing a couple of street kids hanging out in the lamplight, and a police car cruising down a side street, do I start to think that all this jogging around - done by a skinny out-of-shape white guy in a black hood - might make me seem more suspicious than necessary. I slow down, and arm myself with what is left of my patience. My camera, on the other hand, has long since run out of battery.

I make it down to the central Kennedy Plaza in good shape, and decide to check out the bus schedule, knowing as I do that bus 54 only runs every one-and-a-half hour. Magically, the next one is less than five minutes away.

It is a slow and bumpy ride, reminiscent of many a good experience aboard Romanian busses. My mind starts to trail off in the direction of Transylvania, so I quickly shuts it off, and take in what is around me instead. A couple of exchange students are sharing Ipods and bitching about not knowing where the fuck they are. I soon realize that I do not either, and decide to find a more cheerful seat closer to the driver. He has never heard of Sayles Hill Road, or even Manville, but I am way past the point of concerning myself with anyone or anything.

The bus enters a darkened parking space the size of Brown University, and pulls up in front of a mall with only the bars left open. A couple of old geezers climb on board with their walkers. They sit down next to me, and continue what appears to be their usual doomsday conversation. "This country's going down the drain," the man with the thick, combed-back gray hair and the Packer's bomber jacket says. "I don't trust any of the candidates left. Obama, Hillary, McCain - they're all in it together. Wanna give up the whole damn country to the government, and not let us decide anything for ourselves anymore." The guy with the quilted shirt and the bad breath nods in agreement. "Only good thing about it, though - we won't live to see it. Our children and our grandchildren put us in this mess, and now they're gonna have to sort it out for themselves. Suits them right, if you ask me."

I am almost reluctant to get off when a jet black woman with a big smile on her face pulls the yellow cord that runs down both sides of the bus, and tells me that she is getting off at Sayles Hill Road, too. A stop sign appears on the display at the front of the bus, and the driver pulls over. I step out, and begin the two-mile hike back to Manville. I have never been down this road before, and it is not really as if there are any sidewalks or anything, but I know the general direction and the acute sense of triumph that is growing within me. I smile at the sky, and wink at the stars, all happy to have had the cosmos play one of its little Lovecraftian horror jokes on me.

Half an hour later I am sitting at the porch with Luc and Kristian, enjoying a beer and a cigarette in the dead quiet of night. Suddenly, Luc almost jerks out of his seat. "Shit!" he says. "I just saw a meteor! All plutonium green, and whatnot!" I pretend that I am looking, but really I am not. I have had enough for one day, and I know that all the stuff I experienced today will be there again tomorrow - or any day of the week, for that matter. Providence is just that kind of place. To me it is, anyway. A phantasy home more real than I had ever imagined it to be.

Bloated Barbies and Sickening Saras

knorgaard@mac.com — 2008-05-01T20:33:19-04:00

This might sound like a somewhat far-fetched comparison, but the more I travel over here the more I tend to liken the US to its archenemy Iran. It is not just the constant threats of mass destruction they exchange with each other, nor is it the Barbie and Sara dolls they use to promote their different cultural values. Rather, it is the way their governments seem wholly out of touch with the people they were meant to represent.

When I visited Iran back in 2003, I found the country to be frozen in time - US time, that is. Prior to the Islamic Revolution of 1979, the Shah of Iran shared strong ties to the US, and was popularly considered the West of the Middle East. With his overthrow by Ayatollah Khomeini, all that changed. Khomeini instituted an Islamic Republic, and basically cut all of the Shah's ties to the US. But still, the influence of Western culture persisted. Big American cars roamed the streets, canvas trousers and smoke-colored glasses were all the rage, and hot dog stands and burger joints crowded the downtown shopping areas. In a turn of irony, Kentucky Fried Chicken was even converted to Khomeini Fried Chicken.

A quarter of a century after the revolution, nothing much seemed to have changed. Walking down the streets of cities like Tabriz, Isfahan, and Yazd, I almost felt like I were touring the set of some American cops'n'robbers movie from the late 70s. At one point I even got into a big ass chevy with a front seat that went from door to door, and drove through a dimly lit neighbourhood to attend an illegal classical concert with a Persian tar (lute) player in a private apartment block (illegal because traditional Persian culture has been outlawed under Islamic rule). Hailing from the country that pioneered free porn, the experience was as exhilarating as it was absurd.

Before I crossed the border from Turkey, I was warned not to mention any of the three majorly tabooed topics - sex, religion, and politics. It took less than a day before I had discussed all of them with local Iranians. People would join me on my walks through town, and talk non-stop about brothels, head scarves, and the ludicrousness of Iranian politics. I still remember the man in the tea shop telling me that he believed in God, but that he could not be a Muslim in a country like Iran. I still remember the guy in the park telling me that the Iranian government acted as if they lived on Saturn. And I still remember that in the entire month I spend traveling Iran, I did not meet a single person who agreed with the politicians who were supposed to represent them.

Going through the US five years later, it strikes me that much of the same could be said about the American people. So far I have not meet a single person who supports President Bush, and so far I have not met a single person who felt duly represented by his administration. The media, here as in Iran, is one-sided, and wholly out of touch with the diversity and day-to-day reality of the people. News reporters and commentators have reduced themselves to a constant crackle of white noise that nobody really knows how - and fewer even cares - to turn off. It is like the droning of cars on the highway outside your house - either you learn to live with it, or you pull up your stakes, and go someplace else. If you are an Iranian you go to the provinces, if you are an American you take to the woods.

The famous provocateur and natural philosopher Henry David Thoreau showed the way back in the mid-1800s when he left society behind, and moved into a cabin by Walden Pond near Concord, Massachusetts. Today, his legacy still seems to live on in the minds and spirits of many Americans sickened to near-death by the current trend of politics and the media. If it was not because lending deaf ears and turning blind eyes do not really seem to stop anybody from doing anything, I would be out on the bleachers applauding for sure. I would stand on the seats of an empty stadium at the bottom of the ocean that separates continents, drowning for joy while Bush and Ahmadinejad led armies of Barbies and Saras across the field to a final showdown of plastic and polyester. But I do not see it happening anytime soon. So do not be too surprised if you see Kristian and I heading off for a rerun of our project next year in Iran.

Beautiful bastards

knorgaard@mac.com — 2008-04-24T21:15:03-05:00

Americans have words for just about everything. They might not mean a whole lot, but still they are there. That is how you sell stuff over here. You take the same old product, dress it up in a different coat, and invent a new name for it. Fast food is a good example. Since we got here we have had Baconators, Whataburgers, Big Baddies, and whatnot - and they have all been the same old combination of beef and bread in various disguises.

So, of course, they would also have a name for what we are doing over here. In fact, not just a name - but an entire genre! I found out by chance when I was talking to Kevin, an English major at Northland College, Ashland, with a knack for writing and sculpturing. I described to him how we would stuff our experiences into a shake'n'bake bag, throw it around our motel room for a couple of hours, and then funnel the mixture onto our bathroom floor in occult figures. That is how we make sure that whatever comes out is factual in all the senses that it needs to be factual - only the context might not be even remotely recognizable.

"That's it!" Kevin said out loud, excitedly pointing his finger at nothing in particular. "That's exactly it!"

"That's exactly what?" I replied, lost for any other words.

"Creative nonfiction!" he blurted out. "What you guys are doing is creative nonfiction!"

I guess the reason Kevin was so excited about defining our genre is that so far nobody has really been able to give out any definite definition of creative nonfiction. So even if he could not exactly name it, at least he could recognize it when he saw it. I believe his best attempt at describing it was when he called it "an intermediary between the personal and the journalistic essay". A kind of bastard child of self and surroundings ("Oh, if I could fuck a mountain," the sweet voice of Bonnie Prince Billie flows chemically through my brain).

Kevin went on to tell me that just as the Americans used to baby the short story, they have now increasingly taken to babying this creative nonfiction sibling. All high on being part of a trend that I did not even know existed, I kept pestering Kevin with questions about it. In the end he wrote me a long list of relevant writers, and even gave me a book by two of the leading authorities on the subject. Tell it slant is part introduction to writing creative nonfiction, and part anthology of acclaimed creative nonfictionauts. When I am done reading it, hopefully I will be able to tell you more about this beautiful little afterthought of a genre.

In conclusion, allow me to quote the poem by Emily Dickinson that prefaces the book:

Tell all the Truth but tell it slant
Success in Circuit lies
Too bright for our infirm Delight
The Truth's superb surprise

As Lightning to the Children eased
With explanation kind
The Truth must dazzle gradually
Or every man be blind

* Thanks to Kevin for kicking in new doors for me. I wish you the best of luck out there in your sea kayak on Lake Superior. I know it is raining hard, and there is a snow storm coming up in the weekend - so take care, and keep warm!

The Lambeau Field of Worship

knorgaard@mac.com — 2008-04-17T23:45:36-05:00

Lambeau Field is the crown jewel of National Football League (NFL) stadiums in the US. Sitting on the outskirts of the smallish and rather drab town of Green Bay, Wisconsin, its history is a legend unto itself. Since 1957 when it was first built, it has been home to the Green Bay Packers, named after the workers that used to pack canned meat for the Indian Packing Company. One such worker was Curly Lambeau who formed the team back in 1919. Twenty-five sturdy guys responded to the ad he printed in the paper, and he swore them all in by the holy rules of the game. Ten years later they became the first to win three championship titles in a row. The only team to repeat the feat is, of course, the Green Bay Packers themselves.

We learn all this from the ordained football priest Lee who shows us around the sacred stadium premises. Lee has attended Packers games at Lambeau Field since the very beginning. He still remembers the fabled Ice Bowl played against the Dallas Cowboys in '67. With an on-field temperature of -13ºF (-25ºC), and a will chill factor of -48ºF (-44ºC), it is the coldest game ever to be played in the NFL. It is also known to have been one of the best. With only 16 seconds left of the game, and the Cowboys leading 17 to 14, quarterback Bart Starr called the Packers' final timeout. After a short conferral with legendary coach Vince Lombardi, Starr executed a quarterback sneak, and scored the touchdown that for the second time in NFL history won Green Bay Packers their third consecutive championship. As Lee recalls that glorious moment, I can hear his voice quivering with awe.

He then takes us through the majestic gates, and into the oval field of service itself. Expanded several times over the last fifty years, the most imposing expansion to date was the $295 million renovation in 2003. In order to raise the money, a half-cent sales tax increase was approved by the entire county. The only condition was that bleachers seating an additional 4000 people - increasing the total number of seats to 72.000 - were to be reserved for fans living in the county. As tickets have been sold out for the last 48 years, and season cards are passed down no further from the holder than first cousins, the decision was one of great significance. At the beginning of each season the additional 4000 seats are distributed randomly among the appliers for four games at a time. Even though the Packers only play eight home games in a season, it still means that 8000 new fans get to worship at the field each year.

The stadium where the ceremonies are performed is an explosion in gold and green. The colors were decided upon by Vince Lombardi in 1959 when he first started coaching the team. The bleachers are lined by golden walkways and fronted by golden railings. Even the bars that make up the goals are golden. The field, on the other hand, is kept green by man-made grass seeds specially imported from Holland. Though covered by tarpaulin until the season starts in early september, the lush green color can still be made out underneath. The contrast to the yellow-brown countryside surrounding Green Bay this time of year is striking. I feel like reaching down and stroking the soft blades of grass, but the stern look on Lee's face tells me that it would amount to sacrilege. As direct and down-to-earth as I have heard the gospel expounded in American churches, as uplifted and even transcendental is the spirit I feel surrounding American football. Fans are not just fans. They are disciples.

The tour continues through the Hall of Fame in the vaults below the stadium. A time tunnel takes us all the way from the earliest days up to the present. Year by year we proceed down the hall, stopping to inspect the shrines along the way. Buttons activate audio and video clips of famous games and players, and saints and martyrs like Lombardi and Lambeau each have their own walls tracing their life stories from birth through death to martyrdom. It is a place of mythical proportions, like an American version of the ancient caves of Lascaux in France. This is where football history began, and this is where it is still being written. Here is a letter of congratulation on yet another great victory from John F. Kennedy, and there is a photo of Nixon with a congregation of fans in the stadium pews. Lambeau Field is a nexus of American culture and worship, and one that cannot be dismissed with a simple lack of interest in sports.

At last we come to the final chamber, the innermost sanctum, the holiest of holies - the Shrine of Trophies. The room is circular with a likewise circular locker room bench in the centre. The walls are lined with portraits of all the players, coaches, managers, and moneymen that made Green Bay Packers what they are today. Photographs are encouraged, but lighting is dignified and dim, giving the flash on my camera a hard time penetrating beyond the glass frames unto the sacred faces of the chosen few. Instead I turn my attention to the three trophies at the back of the room. They, too, are sealed off behind bulletproof glass, but focusing my flash on the polished silvery surfaces of the trophies themselves, I do manage a few good shots. Though, not even knowing the rules of the game, I cannot help but feeling like an intruder, a blasphemer. But at least I try to understand. Kristian and cable educate me as we go along, and before we return back home I hope to be able to grasp more of the phenomenon that manifests itself on tv screens all over the country every autumn and winter.

Stepping back out into the open, I find myself standing in the shadows of two enormous sculptures. On the right side of the entrance Curly Lambeau towers, one hand holding a football, the other pointing down an imaginary field. On the left side Vince Lombardi stands tall, wearing a trenchcoat and sunglasses, hands neatly folded behind his back. They look like something out of an Al Capone flick from the thirties. Yet here they stand. Objects of worship. Modern yet ancient. Emblems of the constant paradox of American history. I zip my jacket to shield myself from the strong winds, and start walking across the empty parking lot to the Road Star Inn across the street.

An American Anarchist in Nashville

knorgaard@mac.com — 2008-04-15T00:20:56-05:00

I learned this, at least, by my experiment: that if one advances confidently in the direction of his dreams, and endeavors to live the life which he has imagined, he will meet with a success unexpected in common hours. He will put some things behind, will pass an invisible boundary; new, universal, and more liberal laws will begin to establish themselves around and within him; or the old laws be expanded, and interpreted in his favor in a more liberal sense, and he will live with the license of a higher order of beings. In proportion as he simplifies his life, the laws of the universe will appear less complex, and solitude will not be solitude, nor poverty poverty, nor weakness weakness. If you have built castles in the air, your work need not be lost; that is where
they should be. Now put the foundations under them.

- H. D. Thoreau

Nate is a couchsurfing ambassador to the city of Nashville, Tennessee. In the past year and a half he has had some sixty or seventy travelers from www.couchsurfing.com staying in his house for shorter or longer periods of time. He lives together with his girlfriend Sara and their three cats, the youngest of them just two weeks out of its mum. Unfortunately, we did not get to spend enough time with Nate to justify a full-blown portrait, but in the following I will try to do a little personal sketch, anyway.

We first met Nate and Sara in the drive-way outside their house. An inconspicuous if somewhat scruffy-looking couple, they were both carrying several armfuls of icecream rescued from a dumpster outside an organic grocery store in town. As the icecream was obviously melting in the late afternoon sun, we nodded a quick hello, and immediately offered to take them wherever they were going. That is how we ended up at the intersection of four softball fields in the beautifully laid out Shelby Park.

The team they rooted for turned out to consist of a bunch of former drug-addicts and homeless guys who now lived together in a commune house on a rehabilitation programme. They took some serious blows out there on the field, but when the game was over, we got their spirits back up with our free-for-all eat-till-you-burst icecream buffet. It was a huge success, and it gave me a good feel for the kind of activities that take up most of Nate's time.

Nate is 23 years old, educated in economics, and a professed anarchist. He agitates for open source computer programs, and endeavors to make www.couchsurfing.com a non-profit organization with public budgets. He swears by Henry David Thoreau's uncompromising manifest of simple living known as Walden (1854), and once he even stayed the night at the site of Thoreau's cabin near Walden Pond, Massachusetts, to read the book where it was written. I myself have been strongly influenced by Thoreau's views, and I still like to quote some of his one-liners such as "read not the Times, read the Eternities" and "they pay you to be something less than a man". All in all, I guess I consider Thoreau to be a kind of early day Unabomber substituting his own being for bombs.

Not surprisingly, Nate is part of Nashville's "Food Not Bombs" programme. They cook vegetarian meals from dumpster food, and give them out to whoever is hungry - and with a homeless population of some 2000 that actually amounts to quite a few. Nate, however, does not allow himself the luxury of being strictly vegetarian. "I don't like food being wasted," he says while munching on a slice of pizza fresh out of the bin, "so as long as it comes from a dumpster, I'll eat just about anything."

Nate's involvement with the homeless continues into his protests against expropriation of low income housing in East Nashville, and his fight for the rights of squatters to occupy empty houses around town. He is planning a big event to create awareness about the situation, and is also due to deliver a talk to the mayor and the city council sometime next month. And then, of course, there is the rally against the proposed completion of Interstate 69, a highway four football fields wide projected to go all the way across the US from Mexico to Canada. According to Nate, the prospects of I-69 are dire. Not only will it contribute to the erosion of the landscape, the pollution of underground water systems, and the extinction of rare animal species, it will also further the exploitation of workers from Central and Southern American countries.

Later in the evening, Nate takes us to his usual haunt to meet up with fellow activists. JJ's is a two-in-one convenience store and coffee shop. It has a large sitting space flanked by red brick walls with a rugged collection of photos by local artists. Students and other youngsters occupy most of the tables, talking and typing while enjoying Noah's Float, Schoppenhauer's Will, Studying Nietzsche, and similar pseudo-intellectual drinks. Sara drifts off to a radical women's meeting in the corner, leaving us behind with Nate and an oversized bottle of microbrewery beer.

"I'm not a revolutionary anarchist," Nate explains. "For all I care, capitalism can just rot on the vine. I'm here to create alternatives. Ideas that aren't implemented don't really interest me. Like Thoreau, I try to live as I preach. Who knows where I am in ten years? I sure don't. That's why I try to make the most of my idealism why I still got it. I mean, what else is there to do?"

Nothing much, I think as I finish the rest of my beer. At least, not if you want to effect changes. I know I want to for myself, but when it comes to others, I always start to falter. Can it really be justified? Can I really pretend to know better than they? Perhaps it is just my European preference for reflection without action that rears its ugly head. That is how I feel around Nate. In fact, that is how I feel around most of the Americans we meet. The distance from idea to implementation simply seems to be way shorter over here. The only remaining truly primitive society, French philosopher Baudrillard calls the US in his book America.

Nate is currently writing a book of his own. Its working title is The Economics of Isolation. A long kind of essay on alternative social organization, he tells us. He has got the whole thing set up and laid out in his mind, but finding time to actually put it on paper is a real hassle. Volunteering often comes in the way of researching and writing, but he does not complain. This is how he chose it to be - never to let thought get in the way of action.

Before I go to sleep that night, I remove an old-school typewriter and a box of research material from the mattress in the room at the far back of the house. Piles of articles, leaflets, and underground magazines cover the floor. A cat tray and a couple of partly assembled bicycles take up any remaining space. I sense chaos and creation. Just like I sensed it when I squatted with a punk band in an abandoned pizza joint in Melbourne, Australia. Back then I felt drawn to it. Now I feel somewhat put off by it. Still, I retain the romantic notion that a pure mind is best contrasted by an impure body. Apparently, without the latter I often become sceptic of the first.

I lie in the dark with my eyes wide open. Outside, I can hear the freight train go by, blowing its whistle over and over again. I try to adjust to the change from a sterile and personal motel room to a warm and friendly if somewhat unsanitary hovel. A passage from Alexis de Toucqueville's On the Democracy in America keeps popping up in my mind. He wrote it back in the 1830s when touring the US from France to conduct a survey of the American prison administration. Instead he wound up writing his magnus opus about the democratic institutions of a young nation.

I remember copying the passage from the chapter "Why great revolutions will become more rare" to my computer. Unable to sleep, I take out my laptop, and start browsing through my documents. The screen sheds a sharp light on the objects lying about in the room. I feel serene, sitting there all quiet in the dead of night, alight with the thoughts of the past. When I find the passage, I immediately read it out to myself:

As I stand amidst the ruins of our revolutions, do I really dare speak it? Do I dare say that revolutions are not what I fear the most for coming generations? If we continue to wander restlessly around our own narrow circles of domestic interest, we may ultimately shut ourselves off from those great and powerful public emotions which perturb nations - but which also develop and renew them. Seeing how property changes hands continually - how wealth is pursued with incessant ardor - I cannot but fear that we might reach a point where every new theory is considered a threat, every innovation an irksome toil, and every social reform a stepping-stone to revolution. Then the race of men shall refuse to move any further, afraid of being moved too far.

I dread the day when man shall no longer be able to control his cowardly love of passing joys, when he shall lose interest in the future of himself and his descendants - the day when he shall prefer to glide along the easy current of life rather than make an effort to change its direction according to his own will.

It is a common belief that modern society is a changing society. However, I am afraid that it will become too rooted in its own institutions, in its own prejudices and mannerisms, and that the evolution of man will stop in its tracks. The human mind will forever circle the same point. New ideas will no longer present themselves. Man will ultimately waste his powers on small, isolated matters of no consequence, and though in constant motion will cease to advance.

I close down my laptop, and roll over on the mattress. Again, darkness reigns supreme. I wonder if this is really what it has come to, if Nate is the incarnation of Tocqueville's hopes and fears. A non-revolutionary activist fighting to keep society alive and changing, yet refusing to tear down its walls. Is Nate part of an evolution that Tocqueville could not possibly foresee? Or is he just the last spasm before complete paralysis sets in?

Obviously, I do not get any answers. But the thought of it all slowly numbs my mind, and prepares it for sleep. Long, uninterrupted, dreamless, wonderful sleep. And in the morning, I once again postpone waking up.

Preachings from the pulpit of the profane prophet

knorgaard@mac.com — 2008-04-05T02:22:09-05:00

Bourbon Street is the unholy river of sex, drink, and jazz that runs through the famous French Quarter of New Orleans. People from all over the US come to bathe in it like saddhus on a non-stop pilgrimage to the Ganges. The river will wash away the tediousness of everyday life, it will cleanse the body of its desires, and carry them into the vast sea of forgetfulness. The course of the river can change, but its flow can never be halted. Whatever you do to stop it, the river runs through it.

Bourbon Street is an all-out attack on the senses. Bright neon blinds your eyes, clarinet solos compete for your attention, naked skin brush up against your own. The night air is warm and gentle, carrying the reek of sweat and alcohol on its wings. Perfumes mingle with strange odours from stalls and alleyways, creating small pockets of pure smell like nexuses of sound in a gallery of whispers. It is not a sight for sore eyes, and nobody walks the street unchanged or untouched. The reason you go there is the reason you stay away.

Bourbon Street is the necessary outlet for sin in a society obsessed by virtue. It is the kind of place where college kids go to lose their virginity, where middle-aged business men go to humiliate themselves in front of twenty year old girls whose disgust is proportionate only to their nuditity, and where big mamas too fat to fuck go to flaunt their right to obesity and potentially cripple desperate drunks craving for a lap dance. Redemption is reserved for elsewhere.

Bourbon Street is an ongoing everyday carnival fenced in by state police. No masks are allowed on the circus grounds, no bystanders get to see the processions. Participation is the only rule, and observation is not an option. The balconies are crowded with beer-bellied men, throwing necklaces at mini-skirted girls passing by underneath, screaming for them to show their titties. Everybody is blowing off steam for the greater good, and when they return to their homes, debunked and deflated, the light of a better tomorrow comes shining in.

Bourbon Street is a public display of forbidden fruits. Bourbon Street is a taste of Paradise sanctioned by the Devil. Bourbon Street is the loving embrace of a vengeful God.

Bourbon Street will fulfill your every need, and leave you wanting twice as bad.

Pensacola resettled

knorgaard@mac.com — 2008-03-30T22:59:31-05:00

Pensacola, Florida. Originally settled in 1559 by the Spanish conquistador Tristán de Luna y Arellano, it was the first European settlement in today's continental US. Then as now it was located in a turbulent area prone to hurricanes. In fact, the first settlement only lasted for about a month before being swept away by one. The Spanish was so disturbed by the event that they did not attempt a resettlement until 1696.

Now, 312 years after the permanent settlement of Pensacola, we have arrived in a Ramada hotel on Route 29 going all the way to Baltimore, Maryland. The old colonial feel seems to have diminished somewhat over the years, and we are left with a view of a heavily trafficked highway and a microcosm of archetypal American fast food and hotel chains.

I guess Kristian could sense my disappointment with the place. At least, he quickly suggested that we take a ride downtown to look for alternatives. When the scenery still had not changed for a few miles, we hung a left, trying to go by the salty smell of the sea. Soon we were lost in seemingly endless residential sprawl, our only hope of escape the raised highways arching their way across the horizon.

Suddenly the sea came into view. But not even the vast expanses of blue, nor the perfect whiteness of the beaches, could calm our sense of being cornered. Whatever trouble the Spanish had had in settling Pensacola back in the day, it seemed to have been somehow passed down to us. We hit the brakes, and made a U-turn in the middle of the road. It was our only option.

Half an hour later we finally made it downtown. Apart from the marina and a few historic buildings under reconstruction (probably to get them to look even more historic!), there was not a whole lot to see - and certainly not a whole lot of places to stay! So back we went, to Route 29 and the two-starred conveniencies of the Ramada. And here we are, all settled in and ready to write our next portrait before another hurricane comes to drive us away.

Small Town Gay Bar

knorgaard@mac.com — 2008-03-28T15:29:36-05:00

Last night some twenty people came together at the Gallery Above in Panama City, Florida, to watch the first of a series of gay movie screenings scheduled to run every third Thursday from now on - and of course we were there! Our currrent host Mark - a middle-aged guy who looks wonderfully like Woody Allen, and seems to be somewhat of a local celeb when it comes to the gay, art, or political activtist scene around here - invited us to tag along. And so we did.

Gallery Above is surprisingly spacious considering how small the entrance is. It is right there on the main street, but you will have to know what you are looking for to find it. It does not have a shop front or anything, just a colorful flight of stairs crammed in between two stores. Arriving at the top, you find yourself in a large room that extends all the way to the back of the building. The main exhibition section is reserved for a local artist who paints a kind of mythological pop culture icons on small pieces of wood. Going through them I find everything from portraits of William S. Burroughs and Rasputin to Jonah in the whale and your great Lovecraftian god Cthulhu. The style is a mixture of traditional and modern. Native Americana, I guess you might call it.

After being introduced around to the local gay community of writers, surfers, farmhands, and Uzbek dissidents (!), we grab a seat and settle down for tonight's movie. Small Town Gay Bar turns out to be a documentary about the hardships of being gay in rural Mississippi. It tells the story of the rise and fall of gay bars throughout the area, and makes sure to include all possible extremist points of views. A Baptist preacher forgets about forgiveness, and openly condemns the whole lot to hell, while a 300 pound lesbian tells people who do not like her to go fuck themselves.

I am a little surprised at how everybody in the movie seems to be bogged down in what I thought to be the civil rights conflicts of the 1960s - but apparently even reforms tend to slow down in the blistering heat of the Southern sun. This point is only made all too clear in the story of a young man who was brutally murdered for being gay by three kids his own age. They tied him to a chair in his own trailer home, and spend several hours torturing him before partly decapitating and then burning him. Even though we are in Florida, I begin to wonder if I should be more paranoid about spending time with gay people. Of course, I decide not to, but just the fact that the thought somehow had to cross my mind gives me the creeps.

Horror stories aside, the evening ends in good cheer. I practically have not eaten all day, and I am starting to get a kick out of it. My head is buzzing, my feet are numb, and my whole body seems to be spinning around the vortex gnawing away at my stomach. I am sure a beer or two would have sent me straight out of orbit, but unfortunately they only serve soft drinks at the gallery. Instead I just talk my head off, and even promise to return the next day, and buy one of the Native Americana icons. Well, that day has come, and I have actually ended up buying three. I still really have not eaten anything yet, so I had better get down to some lunch business before I spent more of the money I have not got. Not that I worry about it, though. Not after watching Small Town Gay Bar, anyway.

O sweet Georgia sun!

knorgaard@mac.com — 2008-03-26T10:00:27-04:00

I got up this morning with a strange feeling that something was not quite right. After spending a week in the South, I knew that I must finally had gotten the blues, and that I must had gotten them pretty bad. My skin felt all puffed and sore, and my throat was crying out for water. When I turned around to see what bed could possibly have treated me to such a poor night's sleep, I was met by a godawful sight - my skin had come clean off my face to form a complete replica of it right there on the pillow!

I guess this is the kind of stuff miracle hunters pay thousands of dollars to see, yet to me the only miraculous thing about it was that I still knew how to breathe. My forehead stung like hell, and to every smile there was a grimace of pain. I tried to recall exactly what scenario might have produced such a crippling effect on my skin. I went through the moves of the past few days, and kept coming back to that fated morning outside Jittery Joe's Coffee Shop in Athens. The sun had been low in the sky, and the parasol had cast its shadow across the chairs at the other side of the table. Thinking back, I do in fact remember a pricklish sensation on the left side of my neck and face. Tellingly, I also remember a cooling breeze, and a whole lot of good cheer. A mind over body experience, I guess you might say.

Seven hours and 300 miles later, I am finally out of the scorching Georgia sun. A crate of Nestlé® Pure Life® water has rehydrated my body, and my skin is beginning to take on the nostalgic color of Danish bacon. Luckily, we have just decided to spend tomorrow at the pink and peachy Best Western Hotel we checked into this night. We have a literary portrait to write, a portico to sip sweet tea under, and a pool to cool our aching bodies in. Though Florida is nicknamed the Sunshine State, I swear by the bright light that burns above that I will creep by the walls, and keep my head in the shade. Tomorrow, that's really all that matters.

Almost on the road

knorgaard@mac.com — 2008-03-24T12:05:37-04:00

We have checked into our first real roadside motel on the outskirts of Athens, Georgia. Admittedly, we had expected to go somewhat further, but all the car rental places in town were closed due to the EasterSunday holiday. Tomorrow, however, all that is gonna change. We are renting a car at the local Enterprise Rent-A-Car, heading towards ... well, originally we wanted to go to Nashville, Tennessee, but considering our future itinerary we might opt for Birmingham, Alabama, instead. Whatever we end up doing, we will fill you all in shortly.

For now, we are enjoying the peace and quiet of the Travelodge. Standards are a bit lower than at the Super 8 Downtown Motel in Atlanta, but so are the prices. Catching a decent meal proved somewhat harder than expected, again due to the Easter Sunday holiday. We ended up at a 24 hour diner epitomically named "The Grill". Burgers and fries were decent, and so were the coffee we got from the local gas station on the way home. Unfortunately, we forgot to buy water, so now I am stuck with the chlorine-infested liquid that pours from the motel tap. I tried to pick us up something a bit more decent at the vending machine downstairs, but I did not really seem to accept my choice of water. Instead, it dropped a can of Sprite on me. Just can't beat the sugar around here!

On the bed next to mine, Kristian has settled down for a televised game of baseball. I think I will go for William Faulkner's As I Lay Dying instead. After all, we are in the south, and the guy actually did win the Nobel Prize sometimes back in the 1940s. Anyway, I finished Joe Queenan's America yesterday - and boy! was it cool! A sometime movie critic, the poor snob's flirtations with American pop culture got him hooked so badly he had to go cold turkey in Paris. Writing about his horror tour of Suck, he compares his orginally vague awareness of the existence of Michael Bolton to his similarly vague awareness of the Ebola virus plague in Africa. Discussing the absurdity of front page quotations in mainstream bestsellers, he even goes as far as suggesting a Danielle Steele quote to kickstart The Satanic Verses with: "His eyes drank her in like wine, and she looked up at him with a small smile".

Thanks to my local supplier of underground movies and literature back home for this particular parting gift. Jan, you're the man!

Counting the little differences

knorgaard@mac.com — 2008-03-22T16:37:44-04:00

Integration starts early. The airplane personel aboard the DL69 from Copenhagen to Atlanta were by no means young, good-looking, or predominantly female. Rather, they were middle-aged, and wonderfully differing in shape, size, and color. One looked like anybody's granny, another like some rich guy's butler or driver, and yet another like your average middle-class big'n'burly BBQ American. Interestingly, the only true beer-bellied rednecks and bullnecked footballers aboard were all Swedes.

Everywhere, service is at the fore. The stewardesse aboard the plane commended me on my choice of beverage - a tiny bottle of Jacob's Creek red wine. "Excellent choice, sir," she said, "this one is new on the menu, and actually quite good." I'm not sure if that meant that the other wines on offer were quite poor, but frankly I didn't really care. I just sat enjoying my moment of feeling just a little bit special.

Foodstuffs tend to be sugary or greasy - or both. Aboard the plane they served potato chips and soft drinks as an appetizer before lunch, and when we decided on the healthy choice of grits (a porridge-like, corn-based substance) for breakfast at a local Atlanta diner, they served it floating in a sea of melted butter. Kristian has proposed spinning at hotel gyms to help burn off calories, but I think I'll just go for plain fat. Anyway, it'd be a new experience.

After food comes toilet. I know the subject might be somewhat offensive to you, but I simply have to mention the high water levels they keep in their toilet boils over here. Not only is it a complete waste of water, it is also an open invitation to inspect your own poop. Not always the most pleasant of invitations after a diet consisting mostly of fats and sugars. But don't worry, I won't go there. Instead, I'll leave you with the non-image of the delicious banana split cum sunday fudge cum caramel and whipped cream snack Kristian treated me to in downtown Athens today.

Even army boots were made for walking

knorgaard@mac.com — 2008-03-20T23:10:43-04:00

Since we arrived here I have mostly been looking to the sky. Not only for fear of getting pierced by falling glass, but also out of fascination with the Atlanta skyline. Today, however, I resolved to lower my gaze a bit, and start looking people in the eye. Unlike me, most of them are colored. Yet unlike back in Denmark, it doesn't in the least influence my impression of them. It is hard to admit - and even harder to describe - how the color of somebody's skin can influence the way you think about them. Because of the relatively high concentration of Middle Eastern Muslims back home I tend to feel relatively positive towards them, while the opposite is usually true about people from African countries. I don't dislike them or anything, I just don't know enough about them and their culture to feel wholly at ease in their presence. I see young African girls forced to prostitute themselves in the streets, side by side with their male counterparts pimping them, selling drugs, watches, goldchains, and whatnot. I see other people with African background, too, but I don't see a lot, not anything like here in Atlanta.

Walking around town today, I found my immediate impression of the people I met based not on the color of their skin, but on their choice of clothes, hairstyle, pose, and words. The difference, of course, is the one between the biological and the social. Not what nature has condemned you to, but rather what society and you yourself have condemned you to in unison. The point is that society is not the only one to blame - though, for sure, it carries a huge part of the blame, too - you also have to add yourself in the equation. I guess that's what America's all about. No matter how righteous your indignation, it is always partly self-righteous. You can tell as many tall tales as you like about the unjustice that has been done to you, but justice is never simple, never uncontroversial.

I won't hesitate to admit that I have never been a huge fan of the overseas operations of the US Army, yet today I found myself shopping for boots in a US Army Surplus Store (my other pair of shoes didn't quite make it past yesterday's umbrella salesman). I didn't feel in the least uncomfortable about it, and when I finally found the one pair I just had to have, all I could think of was Lee Hazzlewood subwoofing his way through "These boots were made for walking". Van Gogh would have been a happier man and a worse painter if only he could have worn them, don't you think?

Irony aside, I truly feel that the US has already taught me the first lesson about integration. It's not about who made the boots, or for what purpose, it's all about how you wear them. And honestly, I can't wait to go a-bouncing down the sidewalk to the Greyhound Bus Station tomorrow. Athens, I come prepared!

Hard rain and soft packs

knorgaard@mac.com — 2008-03-20T00:33:08-04:00

Sitting on a bench by the Atlanta Underground this evening - smoking a cigarette, going over the events of the day in my head - I enjoyed the silent company of an elderly hobo. He just sat there, his rolled up sleeping mat safely beside him, and stared at a dove staring back, just as silent as him. No big wonder, I guess, since they were both made out of bronze. But still it gave me some comfort, sitting there by the side of a kinsman of the road.

However, my moment of Zen was soon to be shattered. A strung-out local youth with a nasty-looking sore below his right eye approached me for a cigarette, and decided to strike up a conversation. A soliloquy of pseudo-Shakespearian obscurity, that is. It lasted for ten minutes straight, and all I ever gathered from it were the three central phrases that kept coming back at me in a rhythmic, almost mesmerizing, way - "girlfriend", "up there", "it's so good to meet people", "girlfriend", "up there", "it's so good to meet people", "girlfriend", "up there", "it's so good to meet people", etc.

Eventually I finished my cigarette, got up, and just sort of trailed off, his persensical chorus drowned by the onset of a tropical rainstorm. Half a block later I was soaked through. Ankle-deep in a major puddle at the corner of Martin Luther King and Peachtree, "Strange Fruit" playing in my head, a shrewd businessman of the street waved an umbrella at me from the other side of the crossing. I fumbled for a coin, well aware that I was trying to paddle the Titanic into safety. I pulled out a crumbled piece of paper that turned out to be my cigarettes. So much for hard boxes.

Anyway, smoking policies considered, I mostly keep my little cancerous sticks of instant badness in order to get in touch with strangers - and my umbrella salesman was no exception. He carefully rolled up three cigarettes in a small piece of cloth which he had somehow managed to keep dry (no, seven folded umbrellas don't make an unfolded ditto!). He pressed my hands, and told me that - God willing - the clouds would part to let the sun dry my bones before I got home. Well, whatever home means, it certainly doesn't mean the Super 8 Downtown Motel in Atlanta, Georgia. I know for sure, because this is where my clothes are dripping water into the tub right this moment.

Personally, I have recovered. I can't say as much for my cigarettes, though. Hopefully, they will be all dry and ready to strike me up some chance encounters tomorrow. If not, I guess I'll just have to go buy myself an umbrella. Flood warnings are all over the news, and they just declared a state of emergency for downtown Atlanta. God knows when we'll all be safe home and dry again.

A descent into the maelstrom

knorgaard@mac.com — 2008-02-20T12:14:17+01:00

I wanna start this whole thing off by telling you about a dream I had last summer. Kristian and I had finally agreed upon touring the US together, and I had gone to visit him in Århus, some three hours by train from Copenhagen. We wanted to seal the pact by going on a binge at the local Spot Music Festival.

We arrived back at his place in the wee hours of the morning, ears ringing, eyes wobbling. Kristian put on a free-form, full contact Fight Club-like show on the computer. I drifted off to sleep to the sound of grown-up men beating the living shit out of each other. Blow by blow they hammered me down into the foam of the mattress. My parades were all down, and I soon lost consciousness.

A couple of hours later I woke up drenched in sweat. The screen had blacked out, but it felt as if the fighting continued inside my head. Outside, birds were chirping in the dawn of a new day. As I sat up, blood rushed from my temples. The effect was dizzying. I plunged into the maelstrom at the centre of the universe. I dimly remembered how the protagonist handled a similar situation in a short story by Edgar Allan Poe. I grabbed hold of a piece of driftwood, and let it spiral me back up to the surface. Only, the driftwood wasn't really driftwood at all. It was the remnants of the dream that had woken me up.

I was living in a mansion somewhat reminiscent of my parents' house in the suburbs of Copenhagen. I had invited all of my friends over for a farewell party before going away on a long journey. We were sitting at a ridiculously long table in a ridiculously huge hall. The room was full of music and laughter, food and drink. I believe we were having a good time, but something kept nagging me, something I had to do before I left. And then it dawned on me. I had promised to clean up the place. And there was no two ways about it.

My flight was due in a few hours, and everything was a mess. Tension mounted as I felt my farewell party turning into yet another inescapable drunken debauchery. I tried hard to suppress my anxiety, and just lose myself in the merriment and laughter. But the laughter had turned ominous, and people began reminding me of past favors owed. When would I return them the money I borrowed last month? Why hadn't I stopped by to see their first-born? What was I thinking leaving them like this?

In a fit of rage I got up and threw everybody out of the house. I can still see the disgusted looks on their faces, I can still hear the abuse they shouted at me. It seemed to take forever for them to get their coats, and leave the house. Finally I slammed the door shut behind the last one of them. I pulled open a cupboard, and took out a vacuumer. This was it. I still had about an hour to go. If I forgot about minor details like doing the dishes and sweeping up the floor, I might still make it.

I turned on the vacuumer, and started working my way from the hallway into the orgy room. The noise was deafening. As I rounded the corner, I was met by a horrid sight. My friends were all back at the table, glasses held high, cheering and toasting. I let out a scream, and descended unresistingly into the maelstrom. I guess that's when I woke up. Outside, birds were chirping in the dawn of a new day, and I felt more certain than ever that I was on the right track. Out of Denmark, into the US.