The Paradise moved to it its original position in 1971
Give us back our Paradise lost!
During my dire and longstreching labour with plowing through our Modern Muuseum’s entire photographic archive, for our mammuth ongoing project with the museum’s 50-year anniversary book, I’ve of course come across pictures from several decades of the magnificent ”Paradise” sculpture group by artists Niki de Saint Phalle and Jean Tinguely — the two perhaps most dsitinguishing artists of this museum’s gloriuous sixtes — which during my childhood was a spectacular landmark near the bridgehead to the old naval Skeppsholmen island in the centre of Stockholm where the museum sits, but was subesequently moved to a more discreet and anonymous location in the knolls below the courtyard in front of the museum entrance.
These pictures brought back memories of the flaming controversies which these irresistably life-evoking sculptures provoked throughout my childhood (I spend most every weekend of my youngest years in the museum’s playroom and cinema, where my aunt worked). Today, when ”modern art” has become established and mainstream to a point when even our very own King, and no other, eagerly stresses his own personal interest in it, it’s easy to forget the debate, yes battle which raged a quarter century ago. To younger folks, it would be worth reminding that as recently as a couple of decades ago, the entire phenomen ”modern art” was considered by our conservative and reactionary fellow men in the bourgoisie as one great humbug — the Emperor’s new clothes. Picasso was actually viewed as a perverse charlatan, etcetera, etcetera. More than anything, modern art was associad with rebellion, communism, decadence, frivolity and all those other evils of the sixty-eight leftist movement. From the outset, ”Paradise” became the utter symbol of all the wild-bearded, dope-smoking, red wine-sipping bolshevik hippies and faggots who dwelled at that museum, plotting out their revolutionary plans. To claim that the sculptures were a poke in h in the eye of the Stockholm bourgoisie is phrasing it all too mildly. A conservative contra-revolutionary protest movement was instantly launched, couragously commanded by a certain Erik Trädgårdh, a local conservative politician and former army reservist, with the simple quest of having ”Paradise” moved. The chief argument was that this brightly colorful and blatantly ugly sculpture group, located right across the bay from no less than our Royal Castel, marked a deadly insult on the righteous honor of our Royal Capital — yes, of everything that is just, orderly and proper here in this world.
After more than a decade of relentless struggle, this protest movement sure enough bore its primitive fruit. The political decision to relocate ”Paradise” to its present, more discreet location was made in 1983 and executed in 1986, after a few years of inevitable bureauocratic delays.
Some twenty years later, when works of artists of the dignity of Niki de Saint Phalle and Jean Tinguely fetch mounting numbers if millions — a languade which our bourgoisie has always understood — these sculptures are hardly the least controversial any longer. So wouldn`t the time therefore be right now to move the group back to its rightful original position, for which it was once donated by the artists back in 1971? While at it, why not complete a chess castling and move Picasso’s wonderful ”Breakfast in the Greenery” from its even more obscure present position in the bushes on the museum’s western flank to the nolls where ”Paradise” now sits. These two world famous sculpure groups, made a complete glorious trio by Calder’s ”The four Elements” in the center of the entrence court yard, would make an even more splendid and worthy prelude to a visit to one of the world’s most oustanding museums of modern art.
PS. To hear the peerless story the story of this great museum from its legendary, recently diseased founding director Pontus Hultén, see my text archive. DS.
A weekend of righteous Roman pleasures
Too many years have passed since I last found time to honor the Eternal City with my personal presence. When I, together with my dear father and brother, at last returned the weekend past — the second of three or even four visits in my second homeland this spring season, blessed be my soul — I was relieved to find that most of it, in general and on the whole, remains pretty much the same more or less after all these milleniums. I’m delighted to share with you some private pictures of poor quality from our fifty plus hours under the sweet Roman skies, where we were hosted, once again, by my father’s old friend Giuseppe Visco, whose kind hospitality I’ve used, abused and badly battered time after time again over the years, both in his patrician Rome residence and in his splendid eagle’s nest villa on the cape of the Sorrento peninsula In Campagna, with a breathtaking 270-degree vista over the Gulf of Naples, Capri and Vesuvius. There was time enough to enjoy a sunny morning jog in the Villa Borghese, a vintage Roman family lunch with all extras and accessories, the Roma-Milan showdown in the Olympic Stadium, where the home team was able to turn it all around and escape with the victory in final stretch, though our friend Francesco Totti merged among the field’s anonymous middle classes on this night, a luncheon visit at the exclusive Tiro a Volo (”Shoot at the Bird”) bird shooting and tennis club at the crest of one of seven Roman hills, where time unfortunately forbade us to duke it out with the Roman veteran elite on the invitingly red clay courts, some hours uf purposless wandering amongst the monuments, ruins and human herds of the city centre, as well as a couple of gargantuan dinners and bar rounds on top of that — yes, we were even able to squeeze in quick meetings with the Swedish Ambassador and a distinguished former Italian Minister of Industry.
Image from our book "Fur" (Stockholm New Publishing 2004), photographed by Peter Farago
Speaking about fur, moral inconsequence and hatred of the classes
When touching the subject of fur, an old favorite topic, I can’t restrain mysel from marvelling once again, in the name of moral philosophical inconsequence, over how the issue of class remains a core driving force in our society, even though we in this country like to pretend that we’ve abolished the phenomenons of classes and class struggle once and for all and altogether.
Fur is indeed one of the most blatant, flamboyant symbols of class superiority, and I’m fully convinced that it’s precisely these two qualities — the class symbolism and the flamboyance — which makes fur such a perpetual object of raging controversy, while drinking milk, eating ice cream or wearing suede shoes and leather belts are acts which rarely evoke such powerful reactions.
Anti-fur activism is something that comes and goes in sprees. We remember the supermodels photographed in the nude by Herb Ritts in the early nineties under the slogan ”I’d rather go naked than wear fur”, all except one of whom have later not only worn fur but been photographed commercially and editorially in it.
After a few years of relative tranquility, aggression has once again caught flame, especially in this country. The poor furrier down the street from our office has had her shop window smashed, bombed with graffiti and gushed with blood repeatedly, and friends wearing fake fur have been attacked in the street.
We homo sapiens took the right in ancient times, without asking, to enslave, humiliate and consume our fellow animals to satisfy our every need, lust and whim. That’s the simple, brutal truth of it. As young journalist, somewhere back in the late eighties, I wrote an extensive literary feature from a Swedish slaughter house in the Sunday issue of Sweden’s leading daily Dagens Nyheter. It was after a full color image on the cover of that same paper of a baby seal being brutally butchered by an evil Norwegian hunter somewhere way up there in the Arctic had caused a nationial outrage, fueled by our dear King, and no other — himself an anxious hunter — which in its turn lead to a bitter feud between our two brother peoples, to some extent lingering to this very day. The pictures from my reportage, which were no less cruel and brutal, but stemming from a nearer and more urgent domestic everyday reality, were radically censored just before publication by editor in chief Christina Jutterström herself, after pressures from the National Farmers´ Association. All color and front page images were simply removed, along with many of the other more powerful black and whites. This drastic move was motivated by Jutterström in a memorable quote: ”If we accept that we shall have meat on our dinner tables, we can’t serve this to our readers for their Sunday breakfast.
I myself am appaled by the barbaric and sadistic ways in which we use our brother beasts, but my flesh is too weak to give up eating meat or loving fur, that utter of fashion fabrics.
In our book Fur (Stockholm New Publishing 2004), I wrote a short piece on fur, class and moral philosophical inconsequence, which I’ve added to my text archive for your benefit and the repulsion of others. Read it and brood!
Baum und Pferdgarten
In the local Scandinavian fashion week rat race, we in Stockholm get beaten with a broom by Copenhagen
I’ve been on my way for several seasons, but at the end of last week I was finally got down to spend some 36 intense hours in the thick of Copenhagen’s Fashion Week, during which I was able to squeeze in three fashion shows, a magazine release, a shop opening and two cocktail parties, as well as proper visits to two of the three fair venues. It’s been several years since my most recent visit in the Danish Capital, where I was a frequent guest in the late 90s and early 00s, when we worked with our magazine Stockholm New, and also later, in the mid 00s, when several projects for Saga Furs connected with their 50-year anniversary frequently brought us down here.
If much has happened with Stockholm’s Fashion Week, Copenhagen’s has exploded. When I last visited the week, around the Millenium, it was all in its infancy, quite small and amateurish, a concern for a slim few. Copenhagen’s first PR agency Inq was newly founded, and so was their first photographers’ and stylists’ agency Style Counsel, which were both very friendly and helpful and took care of us at the time. Today, both of these are heavily established players, the latter now transformed into a fashion agency. The many shows around town — in spectacular venues such as City Hall and Danish Radio’s beautiful concert hall (now operated by The Gallery Fair) — are large-scale, very professional productions, on a whole different level than ours in every detail, that must be said, with the models also of a much higher standard. Stockholm has made serios efforts to compete with Copenhagen, partly by altering dates for our Fashion Week. This ambition is certainly admirable, but the question that imposed itself, to me and several others of the many visiting Swedes with whom I discussed the matter, was whether it wouldn’t, after all, be more practical if we were to collaborate in a mutual Scandinavian fashion week in Copenhagen, if maximum international impact is the aim, which I guess it must be. Copenhagen also has a strong asset in the centrally located and most pleasant fair hall The Gallery, where all Scandinavian brands of interest, Danish and Swedish, were represented at the convenience of buyers from around the world. In addition, there is the younger, streetier Øksnehallen and the large-scale, mainstream Bella Center, while we in Stockholm have nothing at all besides the shows.
I also found the fashion itself quite inspiring. Even if the Danes still have a general lenience toward the tacky, with a weekness for glitter and applications, their looks are also generally more exclusive, feminine, delicate, colorful, extravagant and sexy han ours. Brands such as Noir, Baum und Pferdgarten, Rützou, and others, simply have no Swedish peers. After Stockholm’s fashion week, where you can easily get a feeling that it all has become a concern exclusively for 22-year old bloggers, it felt good, that I must admit, to stroll through the fair booths and browse my way through racks of well-produced garments with high finish in materials such as silk, fine leather, fur and cashmere — however smart and trendy our own many succesful denim brands may be.
Anders Berggren’s vacuum-packet jackets and mohair pants at the Beckmans School of Design’s knit show at the recent Stockholm fashion week.
So it has has once again come to its end: the subpolar fashion week of the industriously trend-conscious middle-classes...
Bigger, better, more professional and international for each new season — this proud trend was maintained with honor during the past fashion week here in Stockholm, or Sthlm Fashion Week by Berns, as it’s now called, with the art noveaux pleasure palace Berns i the city center as the dominant main scene. The twelve shows from last sesaon had been increased to no less than twenty-two at berns alone, with even more staged around town, including large-scale shows by trendy mainstream brands such as Acne, Filippa K and even Björn Borg. Interest from international medis also reached new levels, with some fifty or so visiting journalists from around the world. I myself was able to squeeze in a total of thirteen shows, though I missed a full day, and parts of the other three.
So what about quality? Well, to be honest, I must conclude that our fashion week remains typically Swedish both in its overall streety trendiness and in a certain caution and restrain i choice of colors and materials, cuts, etcetera, even if many of the designers nowadays wisely garnish their shows with outfits, accessories and details designed uniquely for the catwalk. There’s more than plenty of street, youthfulness, punk, rock’n’roll and London flying around, but little of elegance, glamour, sex or true extravagance. There’s no denying that a certain scent of aspriring, industrious, painfully trend-conscious middle-classes continues to permeate our fashion week...not to mention this myriad of young fashion bloggers that just keeps building in numbers...oh Lord, where does it end..?
Two of the higlights for me this season were Rodebjer and Carin Wester, both distinguished by their own subtly tasteful personal style, even if they could both be referred to the above mentioned categories. Our two young gifted and highly celebrated couturièrs Helena Hörstedt and Sandra Backlund — both of whom I´ve written about repeatedly before in this column — both showed fantastic new creations. However, this time they both lacked a quality that is just all too essential in the cruel world of fashion: the pleasure of the novelty (at least to me, having followed them ever since they were classmates at Beckmans School of Design). I think that the challenge for Sandra lies in applying here style and creative temper to other techniques besides knitting, while it must surely be time for Helena to relinquish her fixation with black and open up to color.
Best and most amusing of all during the entire week was, once again, the knit show by the second grade fashion students at Beckmans, presenting an abundant amount of free-flowing fantasy and fresh ideas (even though it was very clear that ex-students Hörstedt and Backlund are now important heroines at the school). My personal favorites were Kristina Lundsjö, with her equally simple, cool and original arm solutions (”they will be ripped right off by H&M”, as someone said), and Anders Berggren with his quite edgy and high-tech, yet sleek and elegant mens’ collection with mohair pants and vacuum-packed jackets.
I’ve said it before and will say it again: let us hope that our friends at Berns, Ekstranda, Patricksson Communication and elsewhere have the stamina to keep developing Stockholm’s fashion week, which is becoming an important attraction in this city. Later this week, I will visit Copenhagen to see a few shows, for the first time in years. I look forward to seeing how we face up in the local competition!
www.sthlmfashionweek.com
www.beckmans.se
www.bullshit.com
Assholes of the world, unite!
So someone somewhat irreverently phrased him/herself when on the subject of this very media, that infamous Worldwide Web, back in the days of swelling dotcom bubble of the late nineties, when so many others were reliogiously prasing this wondrous new media and all its magic possibilities in every imaginable key and mode (I’ve written about those uniquely bizarre times in Future.nerd, my own personal favorite chapter in my book Turn of the Century in Stockholm).
Well, a decade later I guess we can sum up how the prelude of it all turned out, and you couldn’t call it a particularly uplifting story.
My old and dear friend Tyler Brulé, to whom I seem to return almost compulsively, appeared on CNN the other night, together with an author whose name escaped me. The duo discussed an issue which just keeps getting more urgent, not to say acute — the accellerating globalized stupidity, amateurism, vulgarity and bullshit that keeps flushing over us all through that WWW, also flooding all ”traditional” media in the process.
I’m referring of course to the notorious ”blogosphere”, this entity through which amateurs and dilettantes keep stealing away market share from professionals at an ever increasing pace, resulting in galloping newspaper death (particularly in the U.S.), general decline of quality across the line and other evils. As we know, newspapers, magazines, television and other media are responding to this competition by lowering themselves to the levels of the blogosphere, unleashing all manner of gossip, amateurism and free-flowing opinionating, resulting in nothing but further accelleration of their own downfall. We need only consider the monstrous success of TV-shows such as ”Idol”, ”Top Model” and various ”reality” shows, as well as the overall degeneration of daily newspapers and magazines. Another highly irritating phenomena which Tyler and the author, I think rightly, attributed to influence from the internet is the now mandatory custom af always asking ”the man in the street” of his/her opinion on everything from the risk of war on Iran to the death of songbirds in rush hour traffic. Who the hell gives a shit? Tyler and the author pledged for the return of elitism, expertise and quality in media. The author, who’d studied the blogosphere extensively, said: ”blogs have provided little else but huge amounts of loudmouthed, untalented and above all boring banalitity, stupidity and hostility”.
I can only second these emotions and thank my good grace that I, and no other, just happen to be a most rare exception from these truths...
”In the olden days, if you didn’t get it right, you got killed. Now you only rik losing the competition. It’s like everything that’s modernized — it loses quality”
-Takayoshi Nagamine, Master of the Eight Dan at Shorinryo, Japan’s oldest karate dojo on the island of Okinawa (from ”Okinawa, mon amour” in Stockholm New No. 11 – the Tokyo issue).
Watch that German suit burn, baby
I just have to post the ”brand promotion” film that my dear friend and partner Peter Farago recently made for Hugo Boss, where I think he proves, once again, that the simple is so often the sweet. The thing is thirteen minutes long or so, but in my opinion it never gets boring, just beautiful, to watch.
Twendy-One — a friend to trust to your dying day.
At last: a robot for company, comfort and assistance at the dusk of life
Ah, I freaking love it! Now they have taken yet another great step for humanity out there in Japan, that Promised Land of all nerds (and also one of my own very favorite countries, whichever conclusions may be drawn from this coincidence). Already in my book Turn of the Century in Stockholm, I wrote about robotized cuddly animals developed by Panasonic for the purpose of offering some company, soothing and tenderness to Japan’s rapidly expanding elderly population (presently over 30,000 over the age of 100 — and rising fast...) before it’s time for that final encounter with that ol’ Grim Reaper. Well now, tecnology has made the next conquest, as media reported today, when a Japanese science and industry consortium has presented the first prototype of Twendy-One, a 111-kilo ”humanoid” (I freaking love it!!!) robot in bright white composite material, with clear blue eyes, warm red elbow joints and baby soft hands, capable of helping the elderly in and out of bed, serving them tomato soup and taking care of their dishes — as well as upholding a rudimentary conversation. Whether Twendy-One also possesses the comptence to aid the olden folkes with their intimate hygiene is not clear at this point, but surely this must be just another technological detail soon to be sorted. How’s that for a future perspective, eh? Old age — here I come!
PS. Do yoy want to see the devil in action? DS.
Our Sandra's design is indeed fine art
All that talk about fashion and art, fashion as art and links between these two entities is generally just pretentious and tiresome. When it concerns our dear Sandra Backlund’s peerlessly personal knitted couture, however, even I can’t restrain myself from coming up with such an irritating expression as fashion-cum-art. I can’t resist posting these three new outfits of hers, either. Say aren’t they beautiful? I`ve said it before and I’ll say it again: we have reason to be proud of sporting two such highly talented and original contemporary fashion designers as Sandra and Helena Hörstedt in this country.
The Fair’s keynote speaker.
Who the hell mentioned the Man in the Moon?
Feel like I’m walking on the Moon.
So goes the rhyme from that notorious Method Man, in that classic sex rap from the epic classic double CD Wu Tang Forever from 1999.
Well, down in Cannes the other week, we had the privilege of of hearing how it really is from one of the few — even the first! — who actually knows. The opening speaker at the 60th annual Global Travel Retail Fair was no other than the guy in the picture, Neil Armstrong, the first man on the Moon. It was a true treat to get to see the man in real time. The wings of history blew a real horrorshow breeze. What’s more, he was the best speaker I’ve ever heard and seen — masterful in language, expression, gestures, humour and, above all, content.
The theme of the speach was the future in general, and the future of the aviation industry in particular. ”Looking into the future is like looking into a fog,” Armstrong said. ”We don’t know anything about it. What we can know is our history, and from that we can learn something”. I pricked up my ears even more, as this precise thesis — our vain and childish fixation with the future, at the expense of knowledge of history — is one of the central subthemes in my own book Turn of the Century in Stockholm. Armstrong proceeded to speaking about the World Future Exhibition staged in New York in 1939, of all years, which was a tremendous success so popular that it was extended with a full year, drawing a total audience of 20 million (our fascination with the future seems a universal syndrom). In this fair, Armstrong said, nobody came even near to forseeing that three such major inventions as the transistor, the jet engine and nuclear energy would be more or less fully developed less than ten years later (war is of course the turbo of technological innovation).
Armstrong recounted that we entered the nineteenth century at the speed of ten kilometers per hour, on horseback; then entered the twentieth century at one hundred kilometers per hour, by train, and then entered the twenty-first century at one thousand kilometers per hour, in jet plains. He posed the question whether it would be possible for our future fellow men to enter the twenty-second century at ten thousand kilometers per hour, answering the question himself with that, yes, this should be no impossible feat. Our supersonic passanger air traffic history as of yet, as we know, is limited to Concorde — a splendid machine, as Armstrong, himself originally a pilot, said, which flew for 35 years with only one accident, even this not caused by technical faults in the plane, the only major misigiving of which was that is was too small to be commercially succesful. Future supersonic commercial air carriers, however, will not have the conventional bird shape, Armstrong said, but instead that of rays, as the fear-imposing American Stealth Bomber, seating many hundred passengers, with no window seats at all. The real longterm, environmentally sustainable solution for commercial aviation, however, Armstrong continued, may well be liquid hydrogen, which of course is used as fuel in space rockets. The two main technological challenges that must be mastered are that liquid hydrogen requires huge tanks and that these are very difficult indeed to insulate, as the temperature of the hydrogen is 272 degrees below zero Celsius.
Armstrong then told the tale of what already in the fifties evolved into the Space Race, in which Russia won gold, silver and bronze for the first satellites in space (Sputniks). and then gold and silver for the first men in space (Gagarin and Titov), while the United States had to settle with bronze with John Glenn. He then concluded by saying that this race then continued with the moon expeditions ”a project in which I myself have a special interest.”
He didn’t get off quite that easy, though. The host speaker excused himself for having to pose the question which Armstrong must have been asked too many thousands of times and must be dead tired of: so how was it then — walking on the Moon?
”Well, it’s a quite special experience, as the day is about 300 hours long, and the night the same. Then it’s Earth, which never moves, but remains fixed in the exact same position. Then there’s the surface temperatures, which causes some problems, as it’s about 170 degrees above zero Celsius in the daytime and about 85 below in the nighttime. So on an averege, it’s quite OK.”
”As Isaac Newton said: to every advantage, there’s also a disadvantage. Well...to be honest, I’m not sure that he actually said that — but he would have if he would have thought about it...”
-Neil Armstrong