Closing the Doorway On Norway

“Everywhere was the atmosphere of a long debauch that had to end; the orchestras played too fast, the stakes were too high at the gambling tables, the players were so empty, so tired, secretly hoping to vanish together into sleep and ... maybe wake on a very distant morning and hear nothing, whatever, no shouting or crooning, find all things changed.”

Defied custom and woke early on the last day. Dressed quickly and went outside to find the neighborhood surprisingly a-bustle. Which Oslo is this? Surely not the sleepy frozen place I'd spent the last few days in. People rushing to work, people hurrying to their cars, people. How about that? It's an actual place.

There was even a coffee shop open in a building that had seemed abandoned over the weekend. It was part of a shambling complex of rooms that may have been artist studios or rehearsal spaces or flophouses. There was definitely a theater in there.

The latte was very nice and the barista made an unusual mandala in the foam. I also had some of that thick yogurt they have up here. It almost breaks the spoon, baby! Dumped a few seeds in the mix, and I was ready to head parkward.

Frogner Park was about an hour's walk away, and frankly, I didn't think the city was an hour wide. I'm cool with that length of walk, but I wanted to try their subway. It's called the T-Bane. Which makes it sound like a steak and a Batman villain all at once.

Made my way back toward the Munch Museum and spent some time in the snow paths of the surrounding botanical garden. Found the entrance to the T-Bane and navigated the ticket machine. By never tipping any servers, I was able to make sure I had the correct coins! I'm a genius!

The system seems pretty comprehensive. Like, it looks like it goes every-damn-where, and there was an interesting mix of business people, students, folks, and golden-haired gods with skis. They looked like magazine ads for Blistex or something.

Got out at Majorstuen, where something major was stewin'.

A very different feeling in this neighborhood. Tall office buildings and shadows. City canyons. Much more like a city capital than the sleepy, friendly surrounding neighborhoods. It's all very clean, just not very... singular. It kind of feels like the city you build in a video game before you have the budget to start customizing it with funny landmarks.

There was an old movie theater that looked like an abandoned planetarium.  I bet the interior was cool. The were showing the new Fifty Shades movie, though, so there was no chance I would enter. The park was very close to the station, so it was a quick little march there.

And such a park! Sprawling and wide and bright white with packed snow. A marvelous testament to the power of civil landscaping. Row after row of dramatic trees with their spiked branches giving a "haunted forest" vibe to the whole scene.

A bright blue sky above and perfect light.

I passed a closed waterpark. Something about the dead leaves in the chutes of the slides made me think about the sad imbalance between the people who love you and the people you love. It so rarely aligns. Pathetic triangles. Dead leaves on a corkscrew-waterslide in winter. Behind a chained-up fence. Such are our hearts!

And in that frame of mind I came upon the wonders of the Vigeland Sculpture Park. Truly wonderous to experience in that atmosphere of winter silence with a faded sun. Strange shapes and emotions representing a whole range of human experience and feeling. The figures are a triumph of imagination and understanding and skill.

Women comforting one another, men with their faces turned to the light, people wrestling in strange ways, a man kicking a baby, a woman spreading out her hair as she dances, a man pinching his chest, boys laughing at one another. All frozen in dreamlike green. All lining a beautiful bridge.

In the distance, strange spires in mist. The edge of the park.

I was using my actual camera, and it doesn't communicate with my new laptop, so it will be a few days before I can extract the pictures. For want of an SD Card slot, the Vigeland was lost.

Very moved by the sculptures. They were exaggerated but universal. And like no others I've seen. Funny and sad and true and unsettling at the same time. Some of the highest functioning art I've encountered -- if you believe as I do that the function of art is to produce emotion that transcends culture and language.

Further on, there was an alien fountain surrounded by bronze trees. In the branches were men, women and children, groups of babies hanging like bunches of dates. Skeletons. A child balancing on a tusk in a mammoth's skull. Snow clung to some of their limbs, which produced the effect of making them seem somehow more dead than they were.

And then, oh, and then. A great column rose to the sky.

A giant tower made up of writhing people and surrounded by strange, fantastic stones, polished and carved to look like.. the symbols of relationships.

A woman being ridden by her children, her braids in her mouth like a harness. A woman bending to pick something up being fed upon by a pack of babies suckling at her breasts and abdomen like a litter of lower mammals.

Old men huddled together for warmth. Friends reclining in philosophical positions. Strange granite dreams frozen forever.


I left full of feeling. It's as profound a cultural experience as any I've had in my travels. I felt alone, since I was, and part of "greater humanity" at the same time, since I am. 

T-Baned myself back to the nabe after a long crunch through the forest. A St. Bernard came bounding toward me at one point. Patches of brown and caramel and black.

Shopped at a little second-hand place and found marvelous shirts for people younger or differently gendered than I am. At one point I had a drawer of clothing that didn't fit me but that I wanted to photograph girls wearing. My dream drawer of 70s catalog nonsense. Crazy patterns and tailoring. Much of what I found here would have fit right in it.

But a kid in his 20s asking someone to wear a long shirt and sit on the bed for photos is different than a lecherous bullfrog in his 40s asking the same thing. I've given most of those clothes away. Or sold them. I didn't buy any here. Farewell, dreams from an Italian film. Farewell.

Outside I shooed away the Romanian beggars. I'm sorry, I said. Good luck, I said. I'm sorry.

Ate a hilarious burrito stuffed with nonsense. It was warm and filling and served its purpose. Bought a super-soft, soooper-ugly sweater I'd seen on the first day. It fit like an Italian Movie Director's Dream.

Came home and read for a while, wrote for a while, dozed for a long time. This was it. This was Oslo. Took a hot shower and caught up on work. Like a fool.

A lot to do when I get back. Early-morning meetings with the team in India. If only I could call them from here. It would be a reasonable lunch hour.

My hosts came home, and we spoke for a while.  They're waiters and teachers and sports enthusiasts. That's what you do here. You work until you have money for a lift pass and then you go up into the mountains. Until the money runs out, and then you take another shift and wait for your next chance at the slopes.

Renting a room in this place helps a lot. Gets you up the mountain.

It was a good trip. Quiet surprises and a return to an old way of traveling. One city, museums, local spirits, local food. Reading for hours in a leather chair.

Shorter than usual. A cool getaway. If I come back, I'll see the fjords, I'll see Kristiansand.

Every trip has a song, and this one's was Johnny and Mary by Robert Palmer. Some goofy Norwegian DJ covered it (with Bryan Ferry vocals) and it led me to the original. I listened to them both back to back about a hundred times. Who knew Robert Palmer was a New Wave genius? Who knew Bryan Ferry could sound so tremulous, a libertine in his velvet apogee.

Easy flight tomorrow. Back to the cat. Back to work. Back to the play. Back to the things and people I love. Back to the world. Back.

Farewell, Oslo. I planned an O, Slo Down joke the whole time and never used it. See you in the fjordy papers.

Strong Coffee at the Munch Museum

“Some people say that beauty is a curse. It may be true, but I'm sure I should not have at all minded being cursed a little.”

Went native and slept in. Proud of myself. At one point there was an idea I might take a side trip to Stavanger or Gothenburg, but this trip has been more about absorbing a single city than the "See all you can! You'll never be back!" type.

Feels like the right choice, or certainly did today where the goal was to explore museums and take a long, quiet walk.

Started at the Munch Museum, which has a very nice cafe. Some very interesting people, as well. Marvelous old man with a big Hans Christian Andersen nose was wrapped in one of the gaudy sweaters they make here. He read the paper while his grandson picked the capers off of his salmon bagel.

Papers and capers, I thought. Capers and papers.

I drank a very nice cup of coffee and read more from the Cowley book. It's so good, so happy it found me. Long, interesting chapter about how Americans were taught that all culture, all real culture, was to be found in Europe. Then, in WWI, all the schoolboys who has learned this got the chance to go and see it.

And because what they saw was the slaughter of the war, Europe didn't seem as magical as they had dreamed. So they began forging their own American style. Tinged with a kind of cynicism. You know, your Hemingways, your Dos Passoses, your E.E. Cummingses. Fitzgerald dodged it all, but they told him what it was like. He went later. After the shooting was over.

Finished the chapter and went inside. Small place with a very beautiful collection. Paintings you've seen reproduced on Penguin paperback covers your whole life.

Curiously, many of them were displayed at waist level, so you had to crouch to face them. I got a burst of raw emotion when I saw Munch's "Madonna." It's objectively beautiful, of course, and I suppose it was the shock of recognition that did it. I think I also like that she looks like someone I could be related to or could... love.

As opposed to the traditional, sterile white madonnas. This Madonna knows what Joseph likes and also what she herself likes. And she'll show you both after he falls asleep over his woodwork and you're invited inside for tea.

I don't think I've ever compared Munch to Matisse before, but their styles struck me as similar. To the degree that it's an obvious comparison. Colors where they don't belong. Strange drafting for emotional effect.

It was a nice walk through a very fine space. Someone was working on a project where they took photographs of people in poses from the paintings. It was... I hurried past it. There was also a dude there who kept standing in front of people and staring at the paintings for a long time. As if they were there for him alone.

"You don't understand. I've had The Scream as my iPhone case for, well, since forever. My connection with Munch is much deeper than yours."

In one of Munch's self-portraits, there's a bedspread with an attractive red and black geometric pattern. The museum has seized on this for their logo, and I bought a mug with that pattern on it. Now I can have coffee served in his bedspread forever.

The gift-shop also had a bunch of hilarious baby clothes with The Scream on them. I think the Norwegian word is "Skrik" since that word was everywhere over the famous home-alone-lookin' alien on the bridge.

But The Skrik was in another museum, the National Gallery. So that is where I went next.

Long walk. Through a snow-covered park decorated with interesting wooden sculptures of apples and mushrooms. They looked very beautiful in this environment, brown with white crowns. 

Sparrows looked for berries. The silver-chain crows hung out in the trash cans. We don't want no fruit, mate. It's pizza we're after.

After the park, you wind your way through where the city keeps its Middle Eastern restaurants and "ethnic" supply stores. After you cross under an overpass, you see a fascinating large statue of a fist bursting through the pavement. It's holding a rose.

Again I was struck by how unstriking the city is. There's a reason you don't have an image of Oslo in your mind. The buildings are all functional. Even the old churches look like they were put up cheaply and in a hurry. Dude, it's cold, slap a spire on this thing and let's get inside.

The National Gallery was just a big, solid block. The door was nice. They were having some sort of computer problem at the ticket counter, so I went back outside and got a hamburger. It was that or Subway. Not a lot of cafes open on the Lord's Day.

Caught up on the play's progress while I ate. The dances have come together and the prop-master is back from Thailand, so that should all be awesome to return to next week.

Shook the fry salt out of my pathetic, patchy beard and tried the museum again. They had gotten it all worked out.

You're not allowed to wear a jacket inside, but they give you a free locker with a card key. Very civilized. New York would charge you for this service, fine you for some imagined transgression, and afterward, your stuff would have bird shit on it. Sahry, pigeons get to the lackers sometime. Have a nice day, ok?

Very cool collection in a pretty spare building. The focus is 90% paintings. There was the odd sculpture. Of those paintings, most were Norwegian painters I'd never heard of, and they were great. Like, so many of them made me feel like fame is almost random.

Got turned on to a dude named Johan Christian Dahl whose sad landscapes I liked very much.

Room after room of paintings that I thought were by someone I knew but were by a Norwegian who had jacked their style. Beautifully.

One painting showed an old man sucking on a young woman's breast. The title was "Roman Charity" and that cracked me the fuck up. Come here, grandpa. You can have some. I feel sorry for you.

The shrill new laugh I have here carried through the galleries. It's my Oslo laugh, I guess.

That would make a great title for a play or a great name for a burlesque dancer. Roman Charity stars in Roman Charity. Written by Roman Charity.

Big room with more Munchs in it. The Scream at last. It's the only thing behind glass, since it's been stolen a bunch. Probably by that dude who got in everybody's way at the other museum. It's faded, the colors all washed out.

There was also a larger, brighter version of Madonna. All very cool. I like thinking that Freud was writing while Munch was painting.

Took the long way home and took a long nap. Then went out briefly for salmon and akkavit. Touristy little warren of bars and restaurants called The Mathallen. The usual mix of pricey tapas, expensive cookware, tacos, and whiskey.

And the little fish place I went to. They were kind of in a rush, so I only had time to read one chapter while I ate. Quick cup of coffee and a quick walk home.

In a window, I saw that the movie Frozen is called "Frost" here.

Lucked out with some sunny days. Hoping it holds out tomorrow for the crazy sculpture park. I bet it will. Why wouldn't it? It's destined to be a day of nutty sculptures, second-hand sweaters, and maybe a cruise 'round the fjords.

Who knows? Maybe I'll see a Norwegian Blue parrot. Who really knows?

Papers and capers.  

Akvavit at the Kulturhaus

"It is a glorious afternoon for tennis, but tonight perhaps I shall write you again; for I shall probably be all alone, and there is an awfully tempting moon that haunts the boulevard these nights. A lavish donor of delicious sadness she is, and I should love to watch her with you over the chilly somnolent farms. I love the moon and the memory of ma petite jolie, and the lesser Chopin, and the cross-eyed girl next door. All that doesn't fit me for literature, but oh Christ, it makes it hard to renounce." 

I woke up shortly before the sun and through the window watched the crows getting a jump start on the dawn. There are the usual European cardigan-wearing version but also a thicker, blacker species with a silver ring around the neck. Silver-Chain crows.

It was supposed to snow, but as it grew lighter it looked more and more like the weatherman was a famous fool.

What I thought was a shadow under my boots was, in fact, a dark, spreading pool of water. The snow and dirt from beneath them had melted on my host's floor. Toweled it up and put the shoes on a mat near the front door. So that's what that was for!

Back in the room, I took out my camera equipment. It smelled like the cat, which... how had he.... I had been so careful to hide the suitcase from him. He always finds a way to follow me when I travel. 

It was a shirt I'd had laying on the bed while I showered. He stealth sprayed it in that brief window between my cleaning myself and kissing him on my way out the door. The lenses had been closest to it. Tossed it in a pile next to the dirty towel. Almost enough for a load of laundry!  

Sat at a large wooden table in the living room and polished the lenses. Some of them still had sand from the Sahara in their creases and folds.

There was nothing to eat.

Went out in search of breakfast. This is not... an early town. I was going to have to kill three hours before I could get anything like a meal, and the coffee shop was still an hour away from opening as well. I guess the folks here sleep in on Saturday. Which, you know, makes sense.

Since it was cold.

Tooled around on Inges Gate, which was really only a few steps from the apartment. "Gate" means "street" here which took me a moment to understand. I had been looking for... a gate. The abbreviation is Gt. and some maps condense them. Ingesgt.

Inges Gate is some sort of warehouse district that's been converted to gallery space. And gallery spaces mean street art. Some really marvelous pieces. A few political, but most abstract and strange. A building with stripes and a woman's face was particularly effective. An enormous curling alligator was a real stunner.

Didn't want to miss any, so I picked around slowly. A homeless-seeming woman sat on a stoop and drank from a cup of coffee. I wanted to ask her where she got it, but I also didn't want to rouse her. Just watched each sip with cowardly jealousy.

Found my way to a river bank and watched ducks drift helplessly in the current. Some sections were frozen, and the whole scene was bordered by a canopy of leafless trees. A spare winter scene. People were starting to stir now, and I saw many off-leash dogs. Labs mostly.

Teens in pajamas ran for an idling bus. They had snowboards on their backs and pillows in their hands. It was easy to imagine them having woken up late in some hostel. I imagined the bus was taking them to the mountains.

Found, at last, an open cafe, sat in a high-backed leather chair next to a very low table and sipped myself awake. The strange dimensions of the furniture made me feel like I wasn't the average size and shape as the locals.

Which is true. They are almost all taller with longer arms and fuller beards. Much thinner. Though, still half as thin as those living-willow-reeds in Latvia.

I drank black coffee and ate yogurt with seeds in it. I was finally as comfortable as that homeless woman!

I read Exile's Return by Malcolm Cowley for about an hour. Really rich and wonderful. A used copy, and I lot of it is underlined. I tried to look for a pattern in what the previous owner had marked. What was their focus? Who were they? Was it for a class? Were they a writer?

Walked down more lonely gates of closed shops and found a diner called, hilariously, The Nighthawk. It was "American Breakfast" and it was open. I tried to order the most Norwegian thing on the menu - Salmon Eggs Benedict.

The server was Australian (the closest to an American they could get to work there, I guess) and when he seated me he used his normal voice, but after he had taken my order he whispered "the drinks are really strong here, mate."

I guess he was trying to upsell me... but if I drink in the morning, there's no afternoon. I really don't know how people do mimosas and stuff. Can't do it. Ordered tea.

The table was small, so I had to prop open the book with a ketchup bottle. Read more Cowley and ate my eggs without looking at them.

The place was full of mothers with their children. Infants in arms. Many of the tables had two woman who took turns holding a baby while the other ate. I thought that was a nice "village" moment, everyone helping one another out. A few toddlers ran around with such freedom of range it was unclear who their parents were.

To whom did they belong? The community.

Finished up and went back out. The stores were opening now, and I discovered I was in some sort of vintage and antique district. Drifted in and out of stores full of dead men's tea sets. Found an incredibly soft sweater for $50. That seemed like too much, so I didn't buy it, but... spoiler warning, I soon discovered that is the Cheapest Sweater in Scandinavia. I may return for it tomorrow.

Stunned by a mural of a peacock on the side of a building. An enormous splash of color and truly marvelous. There's nothing like that. Turning a corner and seeing some crazy street art is my purest joy. I feel it in my chest, my feet. 

Crossed some nutty bridge with four excellent statues at the corners. A woman riding a bear, a dude with a violin mounting a wild horse, a guy wrestling a stag, and a chick on a bull. This city is mostly... unlovely architecturally, so these were nice to see. The city was truly awake now.

Children were sledding on trash can lids down snowy hills in the park. One boy screamed all the way down and smashed into a garbage bin. For whatever reason, some primal feeling, I burst into shrill laughter. Like, I didn't recognize my own laugh. He wasn't hurt. Just, the scream ending in a crash was so... cartoonish. It awakened some Saturday Morning Cartoon part of my brain.

Got a little lost on purpose and found this crazy huge area called the Mathallen. A sprawling complex of restaurants and shops. 

Made my way through the crowds back to the apartment. Did laundry and rested a while. My host was home, Camilla. Her work was forcing her to get certification in Windows 10, and she was really sweating it. She showed me how to operate a strange light in my room that I thought was just an art installation.

When the laundry was done, I went back out. Just needed a little break.

Went a different way than I'd gone before and ended up near a theater with an installation of... tiny statues. They were astounding. Hundreds of them all huddled together. I took a bunch of pictures. They were so cool, and their size was such that a few snowflakes buried them completely.

Found what I guess is Downtown. Churches and juice shops. Trams and buses. Shopping shoppers. This section looked like anywhere. But colder. Fairly normal stores and avenues. Near an overpass I found a little record shop with a cool sign. Browsed for a while. Everything is expensive here and there were no bargains to be found.

Backtracked to a bustling square and tried to get a chair at a fish place, but it was SRO, baby. So I went to something called the Kulturhouse and drank akvavit. Large coffee shop and bar with many connected rooms, each with a different theme. Games, music.

 Little blond toddlers screamed in delight and terror. Free-range. Like in the diner, no parents chased them. The drink hit me pretty quickly and had two effects. Firstly it made me fall deeply in love with the book. Each sentence followed the other in such a pleasing, akvavit-enhanced way, that I grinned along with it. Wildly. When my face hurt from smiling, I had to close the book.

The second effect was I bought a giant wedge of cheese from a farmer outside. I might have balked if I hadn't been in such a good mood, but it was like I'd had a magical cup of Why Not!

And the cheese was mine. He offered me some "cheese paper" to wrap it in, and that was also strangely funny to me. A good mood.

Floated home, took my shoes off at the door and slept for a thousand years. In the morning, I plan to go to the Munch Museum and the sculpture park. I think those are most people's priorities here, but I have my own.

As ever, I have my own.

The Journey to Oslo

"The king's sharp sword lies clean and bright, Our brave king is to Russia gone -- Prepared in foreign lands to fight: Braver than he on earth there's none; Our ravens croak to have their fill, His sharp sword will carve many feasts. The wolf howls from the distant hill. To wolf and raven in the East."

Quick trip to Oslo for no better reason than I was tipped off to an impossibly cheap ticket. It costs more to take a train to Walla Walla. Research has shown I'll need every dime I saved, though. It's an expensive city where the locals are fish-rich and ski-crazy.

A strange time to go away -- a lot going on on the home-front, a new play in production, new programs developing at work -- but that's the way the aurora borealises. Gives the choreographer time with the cast and some of my directs new responsibilities in the office.

An old-school cabbie played saxophone music so loudly, he had to shout over it. "Why you leaving a cold place to go to a colder place? You're doing it backwards, man! Take my advice, when we get to the airport, trade in your ticket for one going to the beach."

Simple flight. A yoga person was in my seat, but she did the right thing and moved. This happens more and more lately, folks just taking the seat they want on the plane, like it's a bus.

Now In front of me, she told her life story to the guys in the row she belonged in.

The flight was laying over in Reykjavik, and that's where most folks were going. It's the new Hawaii. She asked the two tall bearded dudes if they were from Iceland. "No," one of them said, "But we used to own it."

That meant they'd be going on with me to Norway where King Harald Fairhair once ruled over distant Iceland with an iron comb.

She said the trip was supposed to be with her boyfriend, but he cheated on her, so she's going without him "To see the Northern Lights on Valentines Day alone." If I lived in Los Angeles, I'd have sold this script by now.

I didn't sleep. Read for eight hours. Finished a book called The Feud about a long, public fight Edmund Wilson had with Nabokov about how weird the latter's translation of Eugene Onegin was.  Also a long New Yorker article about fighting in Mosul and a massive book of interviews with people living in modern-day Ukraine.

Never would have finished that at home, but tore through it on the flight. That's the real reason for these trips, time to read without distraction. I got a lot out of that book from reading it on one greedy gulp (and I pictured the city of Lviv where I was last year).

Very beautiful to fly in low and drift slowly over Iceland. The sea lit by the moon, lighthouses flashing on the rocks, a lone car in the distance on a quiet road.

The connecting flight had a mechanical problem and we were delayed a few hours. Dozed. The sign on the door of the plane read - "Your plane is named Hekla. Hekla is a volcano in Iceland."

Ok. Hey, Hekla, get your shit together. I want to go to Norway.

Easy flight once we got going. I ate yogurt called Skyr, which is not pronounced skeer or skyre, but somehow both ways at once.

We were above the clouds in the sun, then dove suddenly into impenetrable grey. And then.... the landscape. A blast of white with streaks of green. A stormy Christmas collaboration of JMW Turner with his friends Currier and Ives.  

Arrived a few hours late, which queered the meeting time with the apartment I'm renting. The airport was like a glorious spa, though, wood-paneled and calming with soft music, so it was a pretty tranquil place to orient and reschedule the key pickup.

Ah, the pleasures of Scandinavian design.

Waited for the train to Oslo S, the city center, and watched a pretty hilarious English family try to control Wild Henry, the youngest of them. There were six of them of three generations, and all very nicely dressed and reserved... but for Wild Henry who kept tearing off his wool "Leicester City" hat and running away. His hair made him look like the feral boy from The Road Warrior.

The shuttle arrived and it was a simple ride into a very fine city. Wild Henry begged for snacks from a vending machine. The salt licorice and "Cheez Doodles" were very expensive for what they were, though. "It's two pound!" said his mother. "We get sixteen bags for that price at home!"

"They're not shy here, are they?" said Grandpa.

"And you're meant to have grapes, anyway, Henry. You're meant to have grapes."

"Gripes!" the boy shouted, "It's gripes I like best!"

Hearts burst from my eyes in a smeared crackle of candy-colored Northern Lights

Then I was in Oslo. Giant tiger sculptures, broad avenues surrounded by gracefully curving roads for trams, snow and glass. Street art everywhere, and I am going to have a great little walk in the morning. I expect it to be sunny.  Because I'm a dreamer.

Kind of a cockup getting into the place. The long delay meant a neighbor would have to let me in. She took a long time, and I was letting myself get upset...but when she at last appeared in the stairwell, I saw she was on crutches and her foot in a boot. It must have been agony for her to come down to get me.

I thanked her and told her all the beautiful things I never could to Wild Henry.


And then I wrapt myself in sleeping silks and slept. In the morning! A diner!