Mikael Jansson celebrates spring...

Monday night will see the opening at Stockholm's classic Sturehof restaurant of the exhibition Primavera, named by Yours Truly, a series of powerful images, to phrase it moderately, by the one and only Mikael Jansson, my dear old friend and Big Brother in that big bad world of fashion – Sweden's greatest fashion photographer ever, in a league of his own, and indeed one of the world's greatest, with a list of clients that includes American, French and Japanese Vogue, Interview, Calvin Klein, Dior, Chloé, Donna Karan, Tod's, and so many more. 

Since we discontinued the publishing of our own magazine Stockholm New back in 2002, Mikael hasn't produced a fashion story of this magnitude here in his homeland, but when Stefano Catenacci, the maitre d' at the legendary The Opera Celler grand eatery, asked him to contribute his own vision of spring for the restaurant's upcoming cookbook, which will feature His Majesty King Carl XVI Gustaf himself, Mikael accepted, flew in his team from Paris and New York, including Polish star model Anna Jagodzinska, and staged this horrorshow visual drama, inspired by Peter Greenway's "The Cook, the Thief, His Wife and Her Lover", of course with the raw, blood-dripping lamb meat as the spring part of it all, the son of a buther as Mikael is...

Phrasing it mildly once again, the images weren't quite what The Opera Celler or the publishing house Bonniers had expected. That they wouldn't want to touch them even with a ten foot pole, as the American says, was something that Mikael should have been able to figure out with the less noble parts of his body. It's so much just like him to execute his idea all the way out all the same, cost what it will, without worrying all too much about the consequences. I can see the expressions on the faces of ladies at the publishing house when they first laid eyes on these pictures. The Royal Court most likely never got to see them, which was probably just as well for several reasons...

My even older friend Pelle Sturén, patron at Sturehof, has been asking Mikael to exhibit something at his restaurant for many years. As he usually does, Mikael has answered that he would very much like to, the day he has something suitable for the venue. When the Opera Celler and Bonniers very definitely turned the story down, the awaited phone call finally came, when Mikael said that now he did indeed have something "suitable". Pelle and Sturehof flex some gusto when they now go ahead with showing these images originally produced for their competitor. The exhibition has been deemed so controversial that the restaurant has fashioned a curtain seperating the dining room where the images are exhibited from the rest of the large brasserie.

It will be intersesting to follow what kind of response this shall we say alternative spring vision will trigger among the restaurant's guests and others, considering that back in the days when Mikael and I regularly produced large-scale fashion stories together, we were just as regularly faced, in Swedish media and elsewhere, with the most atrocious accusations, for elitism, sexism, promotion of twisted beauty ideals, drug romanticism and god knows what, even nazism and pedophila – all this for images that were considerably more innocent than the ones that Mikael is now showing at Sturehof.

If your Swedish is decent, you can visit the Sturehof website and read the essay I've written for the Primavera exhibition, where I also discuss the fascinating impact of fashion photography and its relationship to other media and art forms. A translated English version will follow.

Then get down and go and see the show, goddamnit, and come back and tell me your opinion about it!

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Can we Swedes pride ourselves of having the world's most bold, daring and sexually liberated state television management?

For weeks now, I've been brooding over this trailer for the "Web Joker" challenge to the upcoming, unbelievably popular Eurovision Song Contest competition that has been pumping on heavy rotation on prime time, before the seven-thirty and nine o'clock news in our Swedish state television.

Two young girls, of the age of shall we say fifteen or so, are sitting on a sofa, lightly dressed, nietly pierced and quite "challenging", singing a song with these lyrics:

"I like girls
I like boys
it's our life
it's not a choice
F-U-C-K
every day
it's a game we like to play
F-F-U-U-C-C-K-K
Gonna eat you alive
Gonna go insane"

Nowhere, in our media or elsewhere, have I seen or heard a single reaction to this rather blunt and straightforward message. I see two possible explanations to this:

1.  We are not becoming like the good ol' US of A in every sense after all. The concept of Swedish Sin is still alive and kicking. Nobody in our state selevision, in the media or in the general television audience sees anything out of the ordinary in two underage girls singing in prime time that they like to play the game of f---king every day, with boys and girls, eating eachother alive and going insane - a message I doubt would be allowed to run for long on prime time on state-owned, tax-financed television in the United States, if there were such a thing.

2.  Our understanding of the English language and capacity of understanding song lyrics, in the television management, in the media and in the general audience, is not quite as advanced as we like to think.

My experience tells me that the second of these alternative explanations is likely to be correct. Say what do you think?

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Two walks in the park

I took myself out on on the eve of the Sunday before the previous, and then again on the ensuing Monday morning, for a pair of quite mighty two hour power promenades - with ski poles, but of course! - encircling our glorious Royal Djurgården park. Still, I rounded no more than the northern part of the unique National City Park, one of its kind in the world. There could have been no doubts that it was summer, this so eagerly awaited annual guest of honor, which had now arrived. Each and anyone who views my imperfect mobile images from these walks will instantly understand wy I, unlike so many of my friends and associates, never even considered moving away from my hometown. Central Park? Kensington Gardens? Bois de Boulogne? Thanks, but I think I'll pass...  

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Beckmans goes luxury

One of fashion's fascinatiing, often comical traits is how everybody keep suddenly marching off in the same direction, though the course is new. At last weeks graduation show for the fashion students at Beckmans College of Design, staged at the Berns pleasure palace, it was abundantly clear that exclusivity, femininity and discrete elegance are now the qualities of choice amongst our fashion designers of tomorrow; luxury in cuts, color scale and materials. The graduating students' collections were similar to the point of confusion, with repetative use of fine leather, suede and satin, in a soft, light nuances such as beige, cream, silver gray and dusty pink, the looks frequently bordering between upgraded business and party. A bit more Danish you might call it all. All of the above are features that I've long requested in Swedish fashion, and though I've heard and read others calling the show dull and boring, I myself think that this is an interesting development in our Swedish fashion scene, as we've already seen more that enough of trendy, streety youth cult and, in latter seasons, homegrown couture. This time, Frida Ringström really stood out as the class freak with her amusing The Foam Rubber Collection, while her classmates presented looks that you would actually like to see a woman wearing. Not that new or innovative, perhaps on the contrary, but nice, tasteful and flattering, which is quite good enough for me.

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Thirty quick hours at the throat of Milan

Of course I won't withold from you a handful of inferior quality cell phone snaps of questionable sobrierity from our quick stop in Milan last week, this town which I've visited more frequently than any other over the past eighteen years, right under the mean wheels of a full-blown Furniture Fair. It was of course our dear friend Joel Berg, the great art director and my old Engelbrekt homeboy, featured before in this column, who had made us conduct this brief trip, to endow the launch party for his agency Studio Berg, which he has recently moved from Treviso to Milan, opening in new and spatious premises. Joel wouldn't be Joel and his newlywed wife Kajsa not Kajsa if they hadn's seized the opportunity to make something bigger of it all, by showing "objects" by three other mutual friends of ours, no lesser souls than Marc Newson and James Irvine, the designer stars, and Carsten Höller, the great artist.

It all ended up in, once again, some three tens of highly intense hours in the weak heart of the Lombardian design and fashion metropolis. In addition to Joel's cocktail, we squeezed in a pair of gargantuan three course lunches, complete with grappa and limonchello, a visit to the well-meaning Swedish design event "Swedish Love Stories" (of which I say nothing, so that I've said nothing, as a disgusting old Lutheran saying phrases it), Bar Basso and more or less interesting and rewarding conversions with numerous dozens more or less colorful characters from our Swedish design elite, all these events interspersed with generous numbers of foaming glasses of spumante. Still, I abandoned the design elite to its destiny at a quite early hour on this evening, withdrawing instead with my old homeboy Anders Lindholm, the half Italian who is firmly established in Milan since over a quarter century back, to a Libanese tavern down the steet where we sat for several nightly hours in the company of a fivesome of exasperated Arabs, joining forces in relentless efforts to reform the mind of a solitary fascist, this Italian disease, Anders orating indefatigably in Italian, myself prompting in Swedish in the role of something of a pulled-back ideological safety — the climax of our journey. Don't you believe we ultimately succeeded in our task too! Our dear fascist left the tavern at four in the morning, calm and mild, shaking hand with each and every one of us, with the farewell comment that he was, in reality, a communist! I fkn love it! The prize for Achievement of the Day also went to Yours Truly, for having asked a pair of certified street muggers from an Eastern neighboring land to help give us directons on our map where we came strutting in full gold ringed cocktail rig, our friend Tomas Asplund nursing a volumnious Prada suit shopping bag, to complete the image, in a dark and obscure one-way alley down a ruin railroad track, a notoriously dangerous passway, as we later learned. Their homemade jailhouse tattoos gleamed impressively on their palmtops as the fingered my map in confusion, before regaining their composure, asking for the mandatory "cigarro". We were greatful that the old saying that muggers hesitate to mug a mugger once again proved true...

I add a couple of equally poor quality images from our dear old friend Thomas Sandell's opening at Galleri Brännström here in Stockholm a few days before our Milan expedition, where he showed unique glass objects which he has produced over the past two years with Italian glass manufacturer Murano.

— Hey Brother I still don’t understand, man. I’m still high off this shit, man. I’m calling my black woman i bitch. I’m calling my people all kinds of shit that they’re not. I’m lost Brother, can you help me?

Wu Tang Clan

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At last: back in the Motherland

Our human memory is mercilessly short. Of this old truth we are constantly reminded, so that at least we should be able to keep in mind.

When I traveled in Ethiopia with my dear father in the eighties and nineties, in the times of the famin disasters, Bob Geldof and Bono, I was met with shocked expressions from my fellowmen, along with questions about how on earth I could stand to face all this starvation, this war and suffering (of war and real starvation, I saw nothing during my travels).

Now when it was time to return at last, for the first time in more than a decade, we received no such looks or questions. Instead, the common reaction from friends and associates when we told them wherabout we were traveling, was: "Oh, how wonderful", but with something lingering and wondering in their tones of voices, apparently in the vague presumption that Ethiophia was some new warm and sunny African tourist destination, in the same league as Gambia, Kenya or Zanzibar. It became quite clear that Ethiopia has completely slipped from our northern frame of mind. Few seem to recall that it was for the people of this land that Band Aid and We Are The World were created, or even less why.

Well, Ethiopia hasn't become any sunny international tourist destination. The country maintains its position as one of the very poorest nations in the world, alongside its neighbors Somalia and Sudan. The destitution and the suffering remain omnipresent, of this our journey gave decisive answers. New famine disasters appear more likely than in many years, some claim, with droughts and galopping over population. The Ethiopian population is now more than 80 million, with an appaling annual growth of three percent, meaning that the population will increase by some 50 percent in a decade — a figure wich few other nations, thank goodness, come even close to matching. Someone we met on our journey even harshly remarked that a new famine catastrophe may well be the best that could happen to Ethiopia, as such an event is probably the only thing that could get the country back into world focus, and as news images of starving children can always be exchanged into hard cash. Good news, if I may use that expression, is that the nation is currently not in war — a state of exception. Ethiopia recently withdrew its troops from Somalia, this disaster of a nation, which it has occupied for the past years, on orders from the United States. Ethiopia and its dictatorial regime serve as the United States’ private police in the hotbed for radical islamic fundamentalism and terrorism which this entire region, the horn of Africa, constitutes. The voluminous Ethiopian army and air force are fully financed and equipped by the U.S. Along the border with Eritrea, the nation whose mere existance is regarded as an ongoing deadly insult by Ethiopia, the nation maintains approximately 200,000 troops, as a reminder of one of several regional and ethnical conflict that are far from resolved.

No, wonderful is perhaps not the first adjective which springs to mind when I am to describe Ethiopia. So many others push forth, like wondrous, fantastic, magnificent, enchanting, exciting, Biblical, primordial, cruel, merciless, heartbreaking, mindboggling, and many more. It’s a land which grips and holds on. Ever since last, I've always been longing back to Ethiopia and all its views, colors, scents, flavors, sounds and people. It's a kind of fascination with which the country, in all its hopelessness, bestows many visitors, as I've understood. Perhaps this can even have something to do with its primordiality. It was after all here, in The Rift Valley, where we homo sapiens first emerged. It was here she was found, Lucy, the oldest ever discovered human being, three to four million years of age or so, not far from Awash National Park, dear in my memory after several visits. The fact that life evolved from here is something you can sense, because life is so incredibly intense here. Just sitting with a bottle of whiskey in the immense blackness, listening to the mighty symphony of vibrant life in the Ethiopian night ranks among the most sublime pleasures of life.

Now it was my father who, occasioned by his seventieth birhtday, had invited his entire family, a party of twelve, on a voyage to his second homeland where he lived for a number of years in the eighties and nineties and where he has always regularly returned over the past quarter century, frequently leading large groups of young doctors in field studies in tropical medicine. His home base during all this time has always been Alert hospital, towering on a hilltop in central Addis Ababa, originally a lepracy hospital, the only one in Ethipoia, but now, with lepracy on decline, with most of its patients suffering from the inseparable sister diseases of contemporary poverty, aids and tuberculosis. It was here that we slept the first night, after a day when we had first been invited to lunch by friends of my father, then spent the afternoon relaxing by the pool in obscenely luxurios Sheraton and then finally enjoyed an exuberantly generous dinner in the home of my father's dear friend and driver Girma in the so-called Lepra Village, below the hospital grounds. As the name indicates, this village, or city district, rather, has a population of leprousies and their families who have migrated here from all over Ethiopia, erecting sheds, huts and simple houses in the slopes below the hospital, where Girma's impressive home, built singlehandedly by himself, is a shining exception. The "village" today has approximately 20,000 inhabitants. The short walk through the pitch black night in the Lepra Village alone is a highly exotic, slightly frightening experience for us freshly arrived from the polished western abundance; carefully negotiating our ways with flashlights through rocky dirt streets, fires flickering through sparsly woven grass walls, the smells of smoke and goat dung, dogs barking, leprous ragamuffins jumping along on crutches i the dark — Biblical, was the word...

Addis Ababa, yes, the name means "New Flower", is a city which has undergone a dramatic metamorphosis over the past decades, its population growing from three million or so a quarter century ago to over seven million, all according to very rough and uncertain estimates. More than half of this population live on daily incomes of less than one dollar a day. My memories from here are manifold and vibrant: the sizzling hot tennis matches, the birdsong and the blazing colors of the flowers in my father’s hospital’s compound garden; the jackal that peeped off from the porch when we came home one night; the nerve-tickling drives at night into the nearby, violently stinking garbage dump, where the hyenas' eyes glowed visciously from the car lights and obscure Blade Runner figures shuffled about in the halflight outside the beams; the boundlessly swarming, almost Hades-resembling market, the largest in Africa, where some half million souls manage their daily affairs, and where everything from grain and rope buts to refrigirators and roadwork machines can be purchased, with growing crowds of children and beggars following our rear, surrounding us, grabbing, screaming the inevitable "fareng, fareng" ("stranger, stranger"); the open air slaughter house on the road to the hospital, where four-foot high vultures sat squeezed together covering the entire rooftop and the at least forty-foot high pile of white polished bones in the backyard, where children and vultures climbed around among eachother, looking for scraps of flesh; a salary man dressed in a rugged three piece suit, hat and brief case, standing pissing with a proud and mighty golden arch into the creek crevice at the bus stop below the hospital in the morning; the shepherds calmly herding their cattle and goats through downtown traffic, dressed in timeless moss green cloth — once again, straight out of the Bible; beggars with elephaniasis och grotesque disfigurations, blind beggars, legless beggars rolling along among the cars on simple wooden boards or hopping on their hands, and then these countless child beggars; the delicious Italian dinners at Castelli, this oasis in the midst of the turmoil; the thousands, yes hundreds of thousands head strong choir of dogs barking after nightfall that merges into a sound backdrop so consolidated that you don't even notice it if you don't listen carefully — only then can detect the individual barks; the many fires flaming at various distances in the hills of the blacked out city as we sit drinking on my fathers back porch after dusk.

Addis, on first appearance, has changed a lot since last time. Skyscrapares have been erected in the city center, and the Chinese have built a ring road through the city. The Western features are more flagrant, but the timeless remains. Donkeys and cows walk and shit in the thick of traffic. Goats and chickens are sold and slaughtered in the roadside.

This time we’re not staying in Addis. I awake around four in the morning, long before dawn, to the beautiful, hypnotically monotonous chants of the morning prayers being called out, orthodox Christian as well as Muslem, as I understand, lying there in the in the darkness listening to the city and nature awakening with their mounting myriad of sounds. After breakfast, which we eat in company of patients from the hospital in the already burning heat in the hospital garden, we're picked up by Girma and his co-driver in two Land Cruisers för the 500 kilometer long journey south, which dad has divided into three days. The first two stages are short, with just a few hours driving, and nights spent in hotels by the lakes Langano and Awasa. Langano I've visited several times before. The lake water has the color of tea with milk and lathers your hair without shampoo or soup, due to its richness with calcamine and minerals. At Awasa, the hotel compound is alive with inumberal green guenon monkeys. In both places, I savour the Ethiopian night with wine from the box and mini cigars.

After a memorable early morning visit to the Awasa fish market, we then set out on the final leg, bound for the goal of our journey, Arba Minch, the regional capital of southern Ethiopia. The 220 kilometer drive takes us more than seven hours to negotiate, including a lunch break, on miserable roads. The start of the journey is adventurous. We intend to fill up with gas in the utterly scruffy, hot and filthy town of Sodo, known for its colony of rastafari migrated here from Jamaica who have lived here for generations. We ask at least at a dozen gas stations, but the answer is always "yellum, yellum" — there's no gas. At last we find the only station in town which has gas, where over hundred-yard long lines of trucks are stretching out in both directions. Dad suggests that we go up into the hills and spend the night in a hotel by a hot spring, while Girma and the co-driver set out to find gas, but Girma decides to take a chance and go for it, hoping to find gas in one of the small villages along the road before we run out. The first stage of the drive takes us up on an dreadfully dry and impoverished high plateau, where crowds of people carrying yellow plastic drums swarm in the dust around dried out wells, surrounded by herds of skinny cattle. At last, sure enough, we find a gas station which indeed has diesel in its pumps, in a hellish hot, dust covered, fly buzzing village that could have been something straight out of a spaghetti western, only much more dilapidated of course, with beggars with watering eyes surrounding our cars. This far arrived, we no longer meet any cars, nor any horse trolleys, just the occasional old truck laborously puffing along in the heat, blowing clouds of deep black smoke, and shepherds driving herds of cattle in the road. The road is scattered with pot holes like a swiss cheese, and the Land Cruisers bounce about violently, though we can't do more than 40 miles an hour maximum. For long sections, the road is closed for construction, and we drive long detours in the dusty red dirt. Then the landscape turns greener and more tropical, banana plantations flanking the road, as we descend down to the great lake Abaya, Ethiopia's second largest, along which we drive for the last hour or so of our journey, before we finally arrive, tired and dusty, at the Catholic Mission in Arba Minch which is to become our home for the next five days. Here in Arba Minch, a small city gorgeously located overlooking the so-called "Heavens Gate", the mountain pass separating Lake Abaya and Lake Chamo, labeled "The Brown Lake" and "The Blue Lake", for very visual resons, there is a hospital and a young university where dad frequently brings his groups of students. This is also where some advanced travelers come, en route to the lands of those primeval tribes in the accessible parts of the Omo valley, several of the less accissible of which I visited myself, together with dear father (see further down in this column), on our adventurous river trip more than twenty years ago. Even further south in this district, Gamo Gofa, dry, unforgivinging, roadless witdths of land expand, populated by a multitude of tribes, many of them nomadic. This land is also where you'll find the so called "marginalized people", a kind of Ethioian untouchables, cast out of society as they're deemed to ha "evil eyes", bringing curse upon the evermore. These people live in indescribable misery, working with extremely health hazardous crafts such as tanning and galvanazation in they're horrificly miserable huts.

It amounted to five unforgettable days and nights, which I gladly share with you in images. The Ethiopian south filled me to the brim with its impressions, most of them acutely sensual, many horrible, often in combination. I awoke at two in the morning, at the first calls of the roosters, then lay there listening to that approaching orchestra of the tropic day. It can't be helped the fact that the memories most firmly embossed in my memory are those of the all too adult and aged faces of all those inumberable, ever present children who from the age of three or so live their lives on the roadside. herding cows and goats, running begging after cars or just stading, staring, or, as on the road ascending to the wondrous mountain village Chencha, dancing joylessly in the middle of the road, in the vain hope of stopping some of the few passing tourists. An bad memory is when the fiancé of my dear step sister, Big Mike, threw an empty plastic bottle over the fence from the Catholic Mission, and a herd of children threw themselves at it, fighting desperately for this booty; another was that of the torn and dirty little boy who snatched that wrinkled one-birr note out of the hands of Christina, then ran for his life, chased by the other children. It's so cruel to say it, but it's not high that these poors have been able to elevate themselves above the grim reality of the animals. If the rains don't come as they should in April, and above all in June, many of these children will be dead, that's the simple fact of it. The only thing at least I can do is to push back these truths, othterwise I couldn't travel in Ethiopia. Nevertheless, I see those faces so vividly before myself now, several weeks later, when I'v e returned to this absurdly privileged western world, where street lights light up up the night and the hot water of profution flush with force from the taps.

When we return to Addis by luchtime on the day of our departure, by domestic flight from Arba Minch, my impression of the Ethiopian capital is different. It now appears as a perfectly proper, western city, let be that we in this day move only in its business center, where we are also treated with an abundantly generous dinner by yet another friend of my father, the fourth in line on this journey,

On homecoming, I'm reached by the news that our new Swedish ambassador in Ethiopia is no other than my old friend Jens Odlander. See there — yet another reason for me to return, and return I will, the sooner the better. All my senses, with the exception perhaps of the taste, already yearn to go back. It is also my firm conciction to return to this land literary, in deeper, more extensive forms in the near future, not in one but in two very different books.

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Human vanity in the Omo and Borås...

And so it is now inaugrated at last, and shown in public for the very first time, our dear friend and longtime collaborator Nicho Södling's great exhibition Vanity of Man. We were a small but rock solid crew of first rate homo sapiens who had endeavoured the journey down from the Royal Capital for last Saturday's grand opening at the Abecita Coresettfabirik Art Museum i Borås in southwest Sweden.

It's a tribute to this museum, and to that entire textile town, that they became the first in Sweden, and in the World, to show this unique material. I've been engaged in the project ever since 2003, when Nicho conducted his first photographic expedition in the Omo river delta in southwest Ethiopia. Ever since, Nicho, with the help and support from Yours Truly, among others, has been trying hard to interest various instititions and publishers in the exhibition, and in a book with his images, all in vain until now. A number of ignorant, unsensitive representatives have routinely dismissed his work as "Africa pictures" of a kind that they've "seen" before, even though Nicho's "fashion portraits" of these tribespeople are better and more powerful than even Irving Penn's and Leni Riefenstahl's "similar" images. It's a comfort that some of our leading Swedish senior master photographers, the likes of Hasse Persson, Håkan Ludwigsson and Hans Hammarskiöld, have recognized the superior quality of Nicho's work and strongly endorsed the project. All three were present at well crowded opening, where Hammarskiöld simultaneously inaugrated his exhibition Barnasinne (Child Spirit), and they were all as taken by the rare power, nerve and personal presence of these prints as everone else in the audience.

Later this spring, the exhibition will visit Stockholm in a smaller fomat. We hope that the ice is now broken and that it will then be able to continue its voyage through Sweden and the world. Also, we're sternly committed to publishing a fantastic book with the images.

Morevover, at the Friday night dinner, I made a binding promise to accompany Nicho on his third expedition to the Omo delta, to gather material for the text for the book.

Besides the unique quality of the images, more than enough in itself, yet another reason for my engagement in this venture is the fact that I myself have already once visited this remote, previously isolated area near the Sudanese border, back in 1988, on a most exclusive and highly adventurous river expedition on the Omo together with my father, under the leadership of the legendary American wildlife guide Conrad Hirsh, who tragically passed away from brain tumor in 1999. The first ten days of the journey took us through a river valley which is completely unpopulated due to the massive amounts of tse-tse flies — huge, nasty beasts who chewed proper chunks of flesh from out of you — but all the more rich with wildlife, hippos and crocodiles above all. At most, we saw more than 300 hippos in one single day. They were interesting but quite intimidating acquaintances, as they constantly threatened to flip our rubber rafts over, to the benifit of the countless crocs, a kind among the largest in the world, no less. On several occasions we had to fire our flare guns to back them off. One and a half of our four rafts burned up one morning which might well have become fatal. We negotiated with great difficulty and hazard a couple of mighty rapids and encountered a number of other obstacles, without safety devices such as satellite phones or other means of communication, so there was certainly no lack of excitement. Then on the last week of the journey, when the great river flattened out and lost its force, branching out in its delta, we motored slowly between the various villages, one more screamingly destitute than the other, with misery stone age style, visting these tribes whose contact with the outside world had then been even more minimal than today, more than twenty years later, when a road has been built, and several renowned documentary films have been shot here.

Of course I can't deny you a few photos from our trip that time.

PS. This Friday, by coincidence, it's finally time to head down to that dear and distant Ethiopia once again, for the first time in at least a decade. I promise to be back with word. DS.

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The dream of yet another summer...

Of course I have to post this magic image of our mutual favorite city (along with Tokyo), photographed last summer by my dear friend and colleague here at BrittonBritton, Stefan Andersson, our gifted art director. I'm sure that you see right away which city in is, that you know the name of the river and the bridge shot throgh by the low evening rays, and perhaps even of the lookout point from where the image is shot. See it as a soothing prelude to my much less sublime report from our past weekend's adventures in quite another city, Borås to be more precise.  

On the train ride home, we discussed, among many other topics, the perils of being born with a name as generic as Stefan Andersson is in this country. With such a name, you certainly can expect any free or even cheap extra attention or benefits as in the case of, for example, hyped artist Karin Mamma Andersson. We exchanged thoughts about the possibilities of a name change, and it was Stefan himself who came up with the concept of simply adding the appendix Stefan Papa Andersson. I found this idea absolutely brilliant and needless to say endorsed it with storming enthusiasm. Say how do you like it eh?    

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Gone in the wind: a pair of drab Stockholmian fashion days in the midst of minor key mid winter

Something about these aspiring Stockholmian fashion days in the thick of the grimmest, ugliest late January turns me downhearted; or, more correctly, some things. This should come as no surprise, since merely stomping around in the gray frozen streets of our cityscape this time of year, spared though they may be from the curse of filth-saturated snow and ice, is enough to tune the merriest, most sparkling of moods into doomsday D-minor, all the more with that deep black mental backdrop of recession looming beyond the lowly steel gray winter skies. No more joyful did one become from the off-black, thick-knitted masses of cloth in audiences and upon the catwalks, weakly contrasted only by bleek grays and the odd, faintly flickering gleam of light and color. The signs we saw in the past season of a heart for more color and play were now eradicated, perhaps by the ghost of recession. The notion that dressing anonymously and non-descript in faded nuances of black is a Swedish national tradition was once again reinforced.

Then there's something about this blogging following shrouding our domestic fashion scene these days — those muster-strong herds of black-clad school girls eternally busy photographing each others' "outfits", who now dominate the fashion week crowds. It's indeed a brand new reality, radically different from that of our small Stockholm fashion family as recently as a decade ago. Say, why do I find it so hard to rejoice and enthuse over this new and expanded scene, heavy as it may be with the feel of suburbian schoolgirl den? Why do I feel, once again, like Burt Lancaster's aged patriarch in the film 1900 part 1, who, clad in a tailored white linen suite and wide-brimmed straw hat, hangs himself in the barn, after the young maid vainly has tried to milk his withered teat, while the young farm workers are dancing to the tunes of inciting flutes in the summer greenery outside?

I didn't see all that much this time around, but ran out of steam already after the chilled out walk back from the Whyred show at Liljevalchs art gallery in Djurgården island on Tuesday afternoon. From what I did see, Minimarket made something of a mark with a show that, in spite of some annoying whims, featured qualities such as color, playfulness and neat, cute cuts, casted and styled with brilliance by our beloved friend and collaborator Ingela Klemetz Farago. Much as before, I didn't quite know what to make of the Fifth Avenue Shoe Repair show. It was once again a whole lot of everything, draporama, spectacle and gimmicks, reminiscent of those childhood masquerade days. Prosaic reality, saggy volumes, coarse materials and black, black, mixed up with gray and faded complementary colors were the main impressions from the Rodebjer and Whyred shows, both congenial with the weather as well as with my own personal state of mind.

Most fun and inspiring was, as ususal, the knitwear show from the Beckmans College of Design, where playfully creative fashion theatre has not yet been confronted with our middle class commercial reality. This season's show was even sharper than usual, with several highlights. The brightest shining star was Hedi Nilausen's "Warriors" — singular, mysterious and imposing ankle-length silhouettes. Another original, feminine and actually sexy — a rare quality in Swedish fashion — mini collection was Azade Habibnia’s "No Color", slim-fitting long dresses with interesting optical patterns. Fanny Ollas’ and Erik Anerborn’s androgyneous male collections wer also amusing, if not as surprising. I could name several others, even though we’ve now seen quite enough of those knitted bobbins inspired by Sandra Backlund. Let’s hope that there’s some room for all this creativity, if not down home, then elsewhere.

What surprised me most with this fashion week was that the shows, after all, were so numerous. I was expecting that the collapsing market would already have inflated the bubble infused by venture capital in our diminutive fashion industry. The next test will the the spring/summer shows which, as I understand, are once again planned for the first week of July. We can only hope that the event "Fahion Week by Berns", now with Princess Madeleine as "patron", has gathered enough critical mass to survive in the long term. There's now finally some talk from our authorities of founding an official institution of a kind that has long been in operation in, for example, Denmark, with the ambition of building a stronger, more farsighted organisation (a somewhat higher finish would also be welcome...). More and more politicians are waking up to the news that fashion is an "industry of the future", now that they’ve tired of interior design as flavor of the day. This could indeed be so, though I fear that our Swedish designers and brands at least in the near future will continue to be confined to our own particular niche — low-key, trend-conscious ready-to-wear in the lower and mid-prize ranges for the younger middle classes, above all denim. Not that glamorous or sexy perhaps, but quite honorable and in best case "job-creating", as we say. In any case, a proper fashion week in our city core is of course a substantial addition to our urban array.

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It is sometimes claimed that some models are more than a little sheepish, but in this case we were dealing with a righteous goat

When, some twenty moon revolutions back or so, we were entrusted by Moderna Museet with the honorable and committing task of designing and producing the massive, recently published The History Book, in celebration of the world famous museum's half century anniversary, it wasn't long before the vision for the cover of this book appeared crisp and clear in the mind of Yours Truly. It should of course be the two glass eyes of Robert Rauschenberg’s monumentally famous goat "Monogram", the most iconic of all the modern masterpieces in the museum's magnificent collection, a work that has indeed become something of a logotype for the museum and which will be, to be sure, even more so hereafter; one eye on each side of the cover of the slip case, one bright, one darker: the two sides of art and life, and by no means nothing lesser.

The reason that this idea came so naturally to me is certainly that I grew up in this museum, where my beloved, long diseased aunt worked in the children’s cinema and where I, my brother and my cousin — and with considerable success — spent a good deal of our childhoods’ fall and winter weekends in the late sixties and early seventies in the children's workshop and play room while my mother and, in particular, my father were drinking cheap wine in the company of politically sympathetic friends and contemporaries in the restaurant: a geniously simple concept far more sensual and intellectually and creatively rewarding, I dare claim, than today's gastly "ball rooms" and other atrocities in McDonald's, Bauhaus, IKEA and other godless doldrums. Those omniscent, so profoundly kind and loving and yet so heartbreakingly sad and resigned eyes had captivated me from as far back as I can recall. They told a tale of the inevitable suffering, humiliation and enslavement of spirits in this world. In those days, the goat was standing free in the center of the museum's main hall, without its present glass cage, even if we were no longer allowed to pet it, much less ride upon it, which the somewhat older kids had done when the goat had first arrived in the museum, in swinging 1962, for the pivotal exhibition "4 Americans" (Rauschenberg, Johns, Stankiewicz, Leslie).

It's a tribute to our comissioners, if I may allow myself a moment of self-glorification, that they instantly approved of my idea, and with considerable enthusiasm, which my friend Frederik Lieberath, the master still-life photographer, also did, later.

Creating the necessary conditions for this photographic shoot, however, proved a much more complicated and time-consuming matter. It took a good deal of arguing from my side before I had convinced our clients that it was absolutely necessary to move the goat down to the museum's photo studio and remove its glass cage, and that we needed two full days for the shoot — one to build the rig and do some tests, one for the actual photography. Moving "Monogram" out of its place on the Monday, when the museum is closed, was one thing, but Tuesday quite another, as visitors would then be disappointed, since the goat is the musem's number one mouthpiece and crowd pleaser. "Monogram" is an extremely fragile work of art, which is only lended very rarely and exclusively for unique exhibitions at other world leading museums, in exchange for other masterpieces of equal magnitude, and which for this purpose has its own customized freight box, the size of a lumberjack’s cabin. It took even longer before our clients in their turn had seceeded in persuading the staff of technicians and conservators to perform this operation. Finally, there we were all the same with the ol’ goat in the studio on two grim, gray late winter days in early March. At nightfall on the first day, when we had framed the goat with screens and cloth, rigged the entire truckload of equipment and started doing some tests, the chief conservator strolled into the studio to inspect these strange proceedings which he had done his best to prevent. Checking out our rig with a stance reminiscent of a big boy looking at younger kids playing, he said, en passant: "I take it you know how much this piece is worth, don't you, boys?" No we don't, we answered truthfully. "Well then I will tell you", he said, which he then did, nonchalantly wiping off one of the glass eyes with his sleeve (not succeding, however, in removing the misty spot that I guess has always been there, along with some small paint stains).

I will now give you an opportunity to guess the value of Rashenberg’s "Monogram" — its value at that time that is, which was just a few days before Rauschenberg passed away and long before the eruption of this present capitalistic crisis. A clue could be that both Frederik and I had nightmares that same night about the goat being damaged and severed in various ways due to clumsiness on our side — screens and tripods falling and breaking horns and such...

Not that I reckon there will be many guesses on this value, as nobody ever comments in the English version of this column, as opposed to the Swedish version, where by old basketball teamates and home boyz are flooding the damned thing with utterly outrageous and downright bizarre and demented babbling.

Yes, this life moves us on along some strange paths. One thing that I've learned is that time is longer than we tend to think but memories much shorter. When I, back in 1998, wrote a massive, highly freaked out and gloriously scandalous literary short story fomat article in the weekend section of Sweden's leading daily Dagens Nyheter about the museum and Stockholm's bourgoise cultural scene in general, published shortly after the inaugration(s) of the new musem and letting loose all hell all over me, well the last thing I would have guessed was that I, that very same person, less than a decade later would be trusted with the task of producing the very same museum's grand 50-year anniversary book. Today, few seem to remember that I ever wrote this, I must confess, rather nasty and, should we say, somewhat imature piece, which is also included in my book "Sekelskifte i Stockholm" ("Turn of the century in Stockholm"). That's the way life goes. Matters that you yourslelf see as crucially important are quickly obscured and then forgotten.

Those of you who may be able to read Swedish can judge for yourselves, as I've added the piece piece to my text archive (the Swedish version), where my frequently quoted extensive interview with the museum's legendary founding director Pontus Hultén, based on over ten hours of exclusive interviewing and published in Stockholm New N0.5, 1998, can also be found.

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