2016: A Farewell

I'm writing this late afternoon on New Year's Eve in Inverness, the city at the heart of the Scottish Highlands, where I'll be spending Hogmanay this year. It's not the most outlandish or extravagant celebration in the country (Stonehaven's kind of a dream, though obviously Glasgow and Edinburgh have slightly less fire-twirling festivities, and I was weirdly unable to find any north-coast traditions to tap into) but there's a festival and fireworks and it's allowed me time to write, with a few hours of rain-free daylight each day to get out of my lodgings and explore a bit. More on that (and the chaotic trip over here) in the coming days, but first I wanted to post a register of this year here, because with the time and reflective space of travel to sift things through, I've been struck anew at what a remarkable, inconceivable shape the year has taken. Random think-blobs after the jump...

The famous Penguins of Inverness... CONTEMPLATING THE PASSAGE OF TIME???

I wrote a draft of this that was a bit more explanatory, but if you know me, you know the story of this year, and how mind boggling it is to have gone from basically incapacitated in January/February to, primarily, grateful and even a bit hopeful (personally, at least) in these last months. So in lieu of rehammering all of that, I thought I'd drop a list of memories in this space that make me grateful, happy, and sort of dazed at how this year could have been so full and rich. It might be incoherent to somebody who wasn't there! And absolutely is leaving out far more moments that could have been included if I wasn't trying to make it out to the world for a celebratory bash! Sorry to bother you with it on my extremely expensive blog. If you want actually high-quality list content, I would refer you to the masterful work of David Rees. In no particular order:

1. Surprising my dad by showing up to his concert in Prague a day before I was scheduled to arrive, and later finding out that he had a hard time playing the second half of the show after he'd seen me. Holy cripes I love my dad so much it'll make you sick.
2. Wandering Stockholm with my friend Hilary, having unspooling conversations about relationships, life plans, and totally dumb nonsense, laughing ourselves stupid while spending something like 96 hours straight together.
3. My friends from Miami University showing up en masse to a sitzpub in Chicago, a wave of support and love amidst a large and equally delightful crowd. There's something about having what feels like a whole chapter of your life showing up to give you a hug that's... profoundly emotional.
4. Listening to Transcendental Youth on the long walk to the conversation where it became clear that divorce was the only road my ex-wife was willing to consider. (John Darnielle did me some very good good this year.)
5. Having the most delicious vegan/gluten-free chocolate raspberry cake on my friends John and Krista's balcony while we caught up on life and they laughed at how bonkers I was in late August.
6. A twilight walk to the Tiber River the night of my divorce.
7. My friend Kate meeting me in Krakow so that I'd see a friend the week that things became official, playing board games in a Polish bar and yelling "CLOTH HALL" to each other
8. Kate and Stuart taking me to Yayoi Kusama's exhibit in London. Getting to see my friends totally absorbed in art is one of my favorite things.
9. Long talks with my friend Sarah in a Glaswegian graveyard; getting to chat with her (now my) friend Emily in the midst of Edinburgh madness as we all tromped over to see a Chicago troupe work their magic.
10. Sharing my divorce news with classmates late in the spring semester, surprised (for no good reason) at how immediately kind, empathetic, and supportive they were. New and deepened friendships is a theme of 2016
11. A pair of "my most recent breakup" conversations this fall that helped solidify the page-turn, no-one-is-alone progress of the year.
12. WEDDINGS SO MANY WEDDINGS
1. My friend Dan's best man, late in our bachelor party weekend in Kentucky confidently ordering a health warning about oysters, being gently told that he was ordering a warning and not a dish, and firmly saying "I'll have that."
2. Getting to watch Dan's wife Abbey's joyful, radiant, electrified face throughout their ceremony
3. The absolute perfect-for-2016 Lutheran-Muslim-Bengali fusion wedding my friends Chris and Pinju held (also in Kentucky); cutting a rug with my friends J.D. and Katie, who own the dance floor
4. My friend Monica turning out to be the calmest bride I have ever met, making introductions and laughing her way through her wedding just a few days after the election. This was a joy restorer.
13. Spending the weekend before the election listening to David Rees's stupid/great Election Profit Makers Mixtape, almost entirely this final track (starting around 1:20; brief profanity ahoy!). I don't wanna forget what that hope felt like.
14. Spending a day in Providence with my friend Anne, reflecting on the changed shape of our lives after recent breakups
15. Showing up at Over Easy in Chicago after two years away and having a waitress delighted to see me back
16. An image: my friend Nicole, in Kopi Cafe, listening as she does (intently, furrowed, wholly engaged), fierce in her support and thoughtful in her words. Being able to set my stuff aside and talk about her own impending life decisions, glad to fill the role I like to serve in my friends' lives again.
17. My friends Steve and Devon nonchalantly mentioning her pregnancy on a walk up the street to get burgers and my total inability to be chill about it
18. An unplanned dinner with my high school friend Noah in Prague, getting to see how his life has taken form in the fifteen or so years since last we met.
19. A lakeside walk with my friend Jake, realizing that my friends have in common an unerring ability to listen actively and empathetically
20. A perfect-for-my-heart mixtape from my friend Casey, whose selections provided the soundtrack for about half of my European adventures
21. Drinks with my friend Erin, swapping divorce stories and how we were handling it all
22. Recrafting a friendship with Danielle, once the only ex I'd been on nonspeaking terms with, glad to find a path back to good things (maybe involving far too much fancy food)
23. Seeing Hamilton with my friend Sara, ugly-crying through the entire second act while clutching each others' arms, and hours of conversation on either end of it all.
24. The eightysomething journalist who showed me around Vienna on my second day in the city, an elegant cravat-wearing fellow by the name of Ernst. We all love Ernst now, he's our hero.
25. Spending a full afternoon learning about Hungarian politics and culture on a tour that turned out to be one-on-one, and then gradually became a conversation about our lives. A few other similar moments of connection in my time abroad.
26. Getting to see my friend Jenna have the best cappuccino of her life in Florence
27. Apokalypse at the Volksbühne and Shakespeares Sonnette at the Berliner Ensemble, two shows that embody all the stereotypes of "German art theatre" while also being purely delightful
28. Suddenly realizing my friend John and his partner were in Bergen, Norway, and rushing to a delightful round of drinks with them. (As with many of these things, this was something I didn't initially want to do - purely because it seemed like so much to undertake. As always, Doing Things was the right choice.)
29. New friendships in Chicago and on the East Coast, reawakening to that sense of constant discovery and the possibility of newness in all people, whether new to me or not.

Ugh I'm cutting it off there, because I just had a six-car pileup of moments careen into my head and I'm beginning to realize that this year was packed with goodness and that MAYBE I'm not gonna fit it all onto one list.

But I guess that's the takeaway. On a personal level, this year was pretty awful. But it's also impossible to write a list of good memories that doesn't feel like it could go on forever. And that is the awareness I want to have heading into 2017.

Happy New Year, friends. May all your Januaries be luminescent!

The Apple. Oh, Does It Seem Big To You Because To Me This Is Just A Regular Sized Apple

FELLAS!

This is a quick one (RELATIVELY SPEAKING), largely because I didn't bring my camera to NYC on my two whirlwind trips this fall, but I wanted to register two things and two things only. After the jump, in order of significance...


1) Friends are the best. Friends you've had for something like a decade or longer are the double-best. Friends that throw beautiful weddings and are thoughtful and gracious hosts and generally make life delightful (and find partners who add to the pile o' delight) are the triple-best. And what can you say to such people except for "sorry for dancing like a weirdo at your wedding."

Seriously: it's been really wonderful to find out how much I still love weddings - even more than before this year, to be honest. Between a sense of how I'm promising to be there for the couple and a deeper appreciation for what their commitment to each other entails, it's become a more profound occasion, and one whose core values I still love and believe in: committing to a process of ongoing work, of ongoing listening, and of mutual sacrifice and perpetual forgiveness. And also there is dancing. It's pretty groovy, you guys.

2) Manifesto is incredible. I did very little New Yorking aside from blitzing around to see friends I hadn't seen in forever, given the centrality of this wedding to my time there. And those friends were/are great! Hooray for friends! (Coming up next week: I will discuss how friends made this year... good??)

But I did get a second, even-more-whirlwind trip in a couple of weeks later, mostly to see a few friends I hadn't been able to catch my first go around, and had the ridiculous pleasure of getting into Manifesto at the Park Avenue Armory a few days before its official opening. That's the main impetus for this post, is to suggest that: if you are in New York while this is running, you must see it. A video installation featuring Cate Blanchett and using the text of dozens upon dozens of manifestos about art and by artists, it manages to simultaneously be a top-shelf set of short films, a collective meditation on artistic conviction, and a choral, musical, transcendent experience. (That last detail recurs about every ten minutes or so, and is the main reason I had no problem losing the better part of an afternoon in the installation.) It's good, gang, and so is art! Go ye forth and check it out.

So.

I'm saving my "holy crow what was this year" reflections for next week, but this wraps up most of my travel for this year. Next up: more travel! As I may have mentioned in this space (maybe not), it was actually cheaper to book a round-trip flight than a one-way when I returned from Europe, so I had a window of opportunity to return if I decided to take it and could find a budget that worked for a post-Christmas loop. One dirt-cheap mid-January Barcelona-to-Boston airfare later (almost as cheap as flying back from Chicago would have been!), I locked it in. And so there'll be a little mini-revival of this blog's ostensible purpose (photographing and videotaping random buildings in other geographies) as I return to Scotland to explore and write in the Highlands, revisit pals in Glasgow/Bristol, and see an old friend in Barcelona. Can't stop, as the younger generation is prone to say, but also most likely won't stop.

All that, and the realization that I am ending this year feeling grateful, loved, and lucky, coming up next week! Til then, have a Merry Christmas, whoever is reading this ol' dishrag, and tell the folk you love that you love 'em! They like it, I bet!

Twin High-Maintenance Machines

Well, that was a gap. Hello.

This fall has been bonkers. Between weddings, conferences, festivals and a couple of trips to see friends, I haven't spent two consecutive weekends in Boston since... well, since April. Madness! Strangely, it's still felt more like home than it has in years past - a testament to the excellence of my new neighborhood, the support of friends, and I think a real and tangible change in perspective that came about this summer. Suffice to say that after the holidays, I look forward to burrowing for a month or two before I leave town again.

But in the meantime: Minneapolis! I've been too crazed writing my first dissertation chapter (in and under revisions!) and on the road to get to this, but here 'tis. Video is, as usual for these stateside ones, a bit gappy, as I am incapable of remembering to pull out my camera when I'm with pals, but still gives a little hint of how great this spot is - still a city that I could gladly call home, and where I'm glad to have grown up. (Well, nearby anyway.)

All that and a coupla rambles after the jump...

(The song in that video became an anthem at some point this year - right before the election, David Rees used it in an election-based mixtape and it rocketed straight to my heart for just about every reason humanly possible.)

AUTUMN HAD SPRUNG

Minneapolis falls into a similar feel as some of the other smaller American cities I've bounced around this fall: with a later heyday than New York, Boston or Chicago, they're built a bit more for cars and less for pedestrians and mass transit commuters. They're cheaper, smaller, and in some ways friendlier, but still have avid art and performance scenes and superb food culture. And maybe it's hometown boosterism talking, but I think the Twin Cities are a cut above in all these ways.

Minneapolis is ALSO the first city in which I saw The Phantom of the Opera, which was an extremely important event as a child. I am pleased to see that the theatre where I saw it has kept up with my tastes (and was staging The Curious Incident... when I visited)

 For the long weekend I was there, I was unable to get out to do much of what I usually like to do when I'm in town - seeing shows at the Guthrie or Children's Theatre, getting to the science museum I remember loving as a kid, zipping out to the zoo in the suburbs or Como Park, getting to a concert, even visiting the Walker Art Museum. But I did duck out for a series of fantastic meals with dear friends, which confirmed that this is still an incredibly delicious and special place when it comes to confident cookery with local/seasonal/organic ingredients, and spent one afternoon walking along the river in one of the gorgeous park spaces that litter the city.

FOR INSTANCE, this vegetable tart from Heyday, which was basically the earthy secrets of autumn in tart form. I felt plunged into memory and fatness. It was: GOOD.

I was also taken again by how friendly the place is. Minnesota Nice can get a bad (and sometimes deserved) rap for being a vein of passive aggression couched in polite stoicism. But as often as not I find that people who live here - on the clock, off the clock, however they're living - are genuinely thoughtful, empathetic human beings who enjoy other such folk. And it was tremendously nice to reconnect to that (as I would again in Chicago over Thanksgiving weekend). It was also wonderful to see the thriving Somali refugee community in the city - it's been a success story from what I understand, and they're a visible and energetic part of the fabric of the region. That was a good thing to connect to given the dark turn of the following weeks. We're capable of better, and I hope we manage to make our way back to the model this area sets.

The Guthrie, whose "new" (to me) theater I'd never actually been to until this trip. It is a lovely and excellent public space!

It whetted my appetite, and I'll almost certainly be back sooner than later, hopefully in the summer for a Twins game and some more time outdoors or even up north into the lakes that provided innumerable family vacations growing up. I don't have especially profound thoughts here, I just... am happy to have gone? And cannot wait to return.

Nor can the rusted gates to the Mill City Museum wait for my return! THIS PLACE: ALSO COOL.

OKAY! I may have a li'l post up here about my two New York trips this fall when we get closer to Christmas break, and then... a little revival of Europa! More on all of that soon. Hugs and kisses, cats 'n' kittens. We're all making it!

View from one of the Guthrie's lobbies. C'mon, guys. C'MON.

After The Deluge, What?

Writing this on an Amtrak to New York, where I'll spend the weekend celebrating a friend's marriage for the third time this fall (third friend, not third celebration of the same marriage) and exhausted after staying up late last night watching returns come in. I'm sleep deprived, sad, and scatterbrained. So, in short, we're in for a highly typical post here.

Primarily, I wanted to post in order to link to this list of organizations that will need financial and volunteer support during the years of this presidency.

I don't have anything to say that other people aren't saying more eloquently or urgently. As a cis straight white man, I have very little to fear from our president-elect personally - yes, his lack of experience, terrible judgment and prioritization of vengeance and selfishness over thought and service mean we're in for an ugly time across the board, but I'm not one of the refugees he demonized through the campaign, I'm not an LGBTQ person whose vice president-elect thinks should be subject to conversion therapy, I'm not a person of color who watched a candidate win the presidency with the vocal and enthusiastic support of white supremacists, and I'm not a woman who just saw an admitted sexual assailant elected to the highest office in the country. I owe it to the most threatened and marginalized to give what I can of my time, money, and energy to these groups, and I hope you'll find ways to do so too.

I spent the summer seeing turbulence abroad. There was the Austrian presidential election, in which a nationalist right-winger nearly won (and in fact forced the country into an electoral redo). And while Brexit seemed to be universally shattering to the Brits I met along the way - with the Scots particularly contemptuous - I met an English couple in Poland that ran through hand-waving "it won't be the end of the world, they need somebody to rattle the cages" justifications before the vote took place that feel all too familiar now. About a month after the vote, a pair of drinking companions in Berlin - one Swedish, one Irish, disagreeing on virtually everything they discussed - both instantly came to the same conclusion about Brexit, which was that it was a disaster but that the EU had asked for it by inflicting painful austerity measures on Greece for ideological reasons, causing human suffering while creating the impression of total indifference to human suffering.

But of course nothing seemed quite like this does now, if only because this is happening here, in a place we thought we knew.

I hope you'll find ways to dedicate more time and energy over the next four years to those in danger, to political movements aiming to preserve the experiment of American democracy, and to the project of keeping these years from being as destructive as they might be without a lot more work on all our parts. I need to do the same. This election has to have an upside, and that upside (I think) must be a generation that re-learns what active service in the real world looks like.

And in the meantime: be kind to each other. Be gentle and loving to those around you, and to strangers. This is a good time to reach out to people - authors, artists, politicians, creators - whose work has moved you and who have helped keep you afloat through the ugliness of the past year. They will be kept afloat by your encouragement in turn. Hate and fear and anger and selfishness have ruled so much of this year. We are capable of better things, and we'd do well to practice them day to day in our lives, honing a sense of gratitude for the blessings we have, of our need for those who nourish us, and of our obligation to those who need us.

OKAY! I'm done bossing everybody around, and if you've made it this far you deserve to eat at LEAST three cookies (oh, they're small? Yeah, go ahead and have five) because hi why are you even listening to this dope mutter about how The Things Are Bad But Could Be Better? But I will tell you what: thank you. I think I believe in us? Let's go be flawed but ravenously-hearted humans.

Post-lanta

Well, I didn't get much of a chance to explore Atlanta this past weekend, not for lack of interest, but because the wedding in question was about an hour north of the city, and as a member o' the wedding party, my time was mostly occupied with family celebrations and logistical odds-and-ends, and the occasional last-minute hunt for a violin bow on a Sunday morning in Georgia. Apart from a quick breakfast on my way back to the airport, I basically didn't see Atlanta proper at all. Which is a shame - the Southeast is an area I really want to road trip (Atlanta, Savannah, Charleston) - but also not even remotely a shame, because being around Dan, Abbey and their friends and family is exactly where I wanted to be. Some meandering thoughts after the jump...

What the trip lacked in geographic exploration, it made up in deep joy. My friend Chris's wedding in Lexington last month helped confirm that I still love, love, love weddings - and more than ever feel the deep significance and joy they represent, and the privilege of being asked to attend. And Dan's did much the same, with even more deep conversations with new friends, heartfelt explorations of love and commitment, and laughter, stupidity, stories, and late-into-the-night connection with just-before-that-moment strangers. Weddings are magical, kiddos, and I'm thrilled to have one more on my horizon this fall.

In fact, this fall has been exhausting and diffuse in all the best ways - out of town just about every other weekend for weddings, conferences, or other adventures, busy at work on the dissertation, and keeping an active social life afoot in Boston - and looks to continue the pattern up til Christmas break. Beside the last of three weddings, I'm also tremendously excited to revisit the Twin Cities for a conference - it's been years since I've been there with the freedom to actually explore the metro area, one of my favorites, and I am eager to get back to it.

So, there may be some updates here on those trips, and attendant music-collages, although I don't expect the blog to kick back into an especially globetrotting gear again until the end of 2016, when I'll be returning to Europe for a little work and a little adventure. Still working out the itinerary, but that's the next big trek on the horizon...

IN THE MEANTIME, here are a couple of bonus Autumn tunes excerpted from a playlist I recently put together. They're seasonal and relaxing and they sound like my heart feels I guess??

Hometown Redux

Holy crow, fellas. It turns out that working on a dissertation, a stack of on-campus responsibilities, and pursuing an active and three-dimensional social life in Boston all adds up to an extreme lack of time to tap out updates on your dumdum blog. WHO KNEW!

But tonight, while keeping one eye on the debate (with a Manhattan in hand), I finally got around to cutting together a li'l video commemorating my long weekend in Chicago a couple of weeks back. This was a swell time. Video, photos, etc. after the jump!

Having only had a couple of days to slingshot through Chicago when last I was in town, I was happy to have a long weekend to catch up more thoroughly with old friends and make plans with some new ones. Typically when I'm in Chicago I arrange what I call a sitzpub - basically a night where I camp out at a bar in my old neighborhood and make merry with anybody who stops by. It's usually a lovely time and reminds me how many excellent people I've been lucky to find in life.

This time, I decided to skip that and instead make more deliberate one-on-one or small-group plans. This was great, and also led to a totally manic weekend in the best possible way. I came back to Boston exhausted and happy and only slightly bloated and not quite broke. It was a great trip. Hit a few of my favorite food spots and a new joint or two (The Northman, Lincoln Square/North Center's new cider bar, was a nice stop on the way), got some excellent thrifting in, and generally was delighted to be surrounded by people I love who've known me for what suddenly strikes me as an incredibly long time.

With my pal Schmadz at The Northman! GET THE CIDER THAT HAS GINGER AND FIR TIPS IN IT

The video reflects the trip in some ways - I did a better job capturing at least some of the people I spent time with on camera - and not at all in others. (I could do a whole series of posts on places in Chicago for any number of things - film, music, books, food, theatre, artisanal soaps, anything, but this ain't that.) Suffice to say, I love that town for many reasons that are clearer after a summer on the road, and although I'm not getting back as often as once I did, it feels awful good when I do.

I'm back now, albeit only briefly - this weekend I'm off for another trip, this time to see my pal Dan get married in Atlanta (hooray!). In the time that I've been back, I went through the Konmari process on my place - a really radical, sort-of-froofy, bracing and self-confronting process of basically dealing with every individual item you own and reckoning with its place in your life. I shed a lot of stuff that I didn't need and emerged with a clearer sense of my taste and enthusiasms- again, a nice chapter on this year of rediscovering my self after having gotten knocked around a bit.

The Publican, probably still my favorite spot in Chicago, with some of my favorite humans - teachers, directors, colleagues, pals. I'm a lucky dude, you folk.

Basically, if there's a way to summarize the fall of 2016, it's something along the lines of "total exhaustion balanced out by a sense of gratitude for the people in my life, joy at the rediscovery of who I like to be, and a li'l sense of wonder at the Adventures To Come."

Okay! Atlanta calls. More in the future, kittens!

EVERYBODY ENJOYS FRIENDSHIP WITH THE POSSIBLE EXCEPTION OF JOHN

Provincetown: A Quick One While He's Away

Two weeks ago (good lord time flies when you're chasing a deadline and making plans and living life to the fullest capacity) I spent the weekend in Provincetown, mostly having a real sleepy time and seeing a bundle o' skits at a festival. It's a funny li'l place: has its roots in a fishing village, essentially, and over time became a haven/refuge for artists and the gay community. Now, it's a touristed-up hybrid of the two, offering seaside kitsch and a fab countercultural vibe that's somewhat manufactured but still charming.

It's crazy to me that in four years of being in Boston I never got down the Cape, easily the most high-profile getaway from the city. This was I guess a legacy of having monthly (if not more frequent) trips back to Chicago, the rigors of the grad program, and a bunch of other hurdles not worth mentioning here. I'm glad I finally got to go - and if nothing else, it feels like I have a somewhat better sense of Bostonian culture - this is irresponsible spitballing and overgeneralizing, but it feels like the ability to outsource relaxation to these seaside retreats keeps the city the brusque, blunt place that it mostly is, where I'm more used to cities sort of splitting the difference. Does this make sense? Does anything on this blog make sense? I'll tell you what: maybe.

And now: off to Chicago! Maybe I'll post about that? Who even knows what this blog is for before the next big junket abroad, but I guess we will all learn that answer... together...

Most of my photos replicated the video above (as is usually the case, since I tend to snap photos and video at the same time) so I'm SORRY if you already saw this shot and are BORED of it by now I guess you must be the kind of person who gets bored by ART huh

Autumnmania

Autumn has always been maybe my favorite season.

There's something magical about it to me - the darkening of the world, the bracing cool air, the attendant love of warmth and coziness. It's a season that's rich with associations - the newness of a school year, the warm kitchens full of fresh bread, soups, pies, the crunch of leaves and the impulse to explore. I love the rain, atmospheric and soothing and grim all at once somehow. I love the preparation for winter - relishing these days when being outside is a brisk pleasure and beginning to think of how to prepare for the cold, and who you'd like to stay warm with when the snows come rolling in.

"Fields of Our Home," Tallest Man on Earth. This album has quickly become the soundtrack for fall 2016...

It's been a busy week - rushing to get a conference paper drafted amidst a slew of meetings, and on the heels of a weekend away to Provincetown (photos and a video likely to come in the next few days) that left me without much time to reset and prep for the week ahead. Hence the silent blog (though who knows, maybe we're trending towards a more-silent blog in general in this lull of travel).

But today was a marvel. After sending my paper off, I met a friend for tea, made a grocery run, and stumbled across one of the only bottles of wine that I know even remotely well enough to know that I like it (Domaine Leon Barral, a Faugeres wine that is funky and delicious). I came home to bake bread and throw together a curried squash soup. Made plans to see an avalanche of wonderful people (some of whom I haven't seen in ages, some who I've only met in the past month or so) back in Chicago next weekend. Texted furiously about how Crazy Ex Girlfriend is probably the best show on television. Made the first Manhattan I've ever made for myself (pretty delicious) and sampled a digestif that my friend Mike recommended.

In short, it was a perfectly full and perfectly ambling day, exactly the balance of active-but-not-frenzied that makes me happy.

Autumn is this beautiful season where decay somehow feels like the promise of something new. I feel that this year more than ever. I'm just happy, and that's pretty grand. Feeling the love of my friends, a world alive with possibility and newness, reconnected to my playful, outward-focused instincts, feeling a core of calm as I face a year of unknowable and unpredictable happenings.

I'm not sure exactly what this post is for or about. To commemorate a lovely day, I suppose, and to mark a season that makes me happy and hopeful. To continue to celebrate the rediscovery of my sense of self. To put a little something up until I have time to cobble together a Provincetown post (Provincetown is so weird and nice you guys). But mostly it's about what I'm happiest being about: gratitude, a li'l bit of wonder, and a big dash of being open to whatever mysterious things are headed my way.

Plus, it's October, which means it's practically Christmas! Hokey smokes, you guys!

Songs Redux

Before leaving on the trip, I had a post up about my last trip's traveling tunes. This summer was a little unusual in that I had my headphones in a lot less than I usually do, following the pattern of my surrounding cultures. But I still had some songs, albums, and artists whose work is now melded to the trip. After the jump, a few of those albums.


 While a lot of songs from earlier stages of my life stuck around here (including most of the songs on my earlier list, The National and a bunch of other favorite bands) I'm focusing here on albums that were either new to me this trip or shifted in my sense of them on this trip.

A lot of the tracks on these may be familiar from showing up in videos over the course of the trip - I tried to lock cities to the songs that were in my head while I was there, which has proven to be a great instant-sense-memory machine. There's a bit of a temporal quality to this collection, moving from the early-summer, still-depressed, putting-my-heart-back-together material to the late-summer, more-hopeful stuff. Let's track that journey!

Early hardtime tunez

Beyoncé, Lemonade. Shortly before the trip, another friend going through a divorce texted me during this album's HBO launch to say "ummm you need to listen to this." And she was right - it's one of the great breakup albums (even if Beyoncé and Jay-Z ultimately reconciled), and it showed up at exactly the right moment to feel the truth behind its articulations of the gut-wrench of abandonment and loss. But the thing is: this album is also super not only (or even primarily) a breakup album. It's very, very about the experience of being a black woman in America. Definitely seek out the Lemonade Syllabus for an impressive rundown of the works that the album (and even more so the jaw-dropping "visual album") responds to and builds from. This thing is about a lot of things.

Noah and the Whale, First Days of Spring. Funny - the last time I was in Europe, their song "Five Years' Time" was in my ears, and this time around it was an album about the breakup between two members of the band (one of whom is no longer in it, obviously). This was one of those albums that morphed over the early days of the trip - its tracks follow something like a stages-of-grief progression. The standout here was "Blue Skies" (which I used in my Rome video), but the whole album came in and out of focus as the trip went on.

Better time tunez
Lucius, Wildewoman. My friend Casey gave me a mix tape with a live version of "How Loud Your Heart Gets" this spring and the album became a huge mainstay on the trip. These people are awesome and I am positively cheesed that I missed them playing in Boston this weekend.

Oh Wonder, Oh Wonder. Another friend-pick! Dan sent this my way, and from the first track ("Livewire," which I used in my Glasgow video) it had a pretty good grip on my heart. Funny enough, even though it's got its fair share of breakup songs, I never thought of it in that camp - I think having come to it a little later in the summer and further along My Journey, it stood on its own terms.

Bayonne, Primitives. Oh wait these are all friend-picks really. Well, this one's from my friend Paul, in response to a Facebook post asking for travel music recommendations. This was spot on - perfect for rapid transit days and urban landscapes. It's still in regular rotation back in Boston.

Mountain Goats, Tallahassee. I'd gotten into them a few years back through Transcendental Youth, but somehow in Italy this earlier album in particular came into focus for me.

 Rufus Wainwright, Take All My Loves. Found this after seeing the Berliner Ensemble's Shakespeare's Sonnets, for which Wainwright wrote these songs. A wide range of tunes, many fantastic, though the linked track will long be my favorite as it's welded to my favorite sequence in the production. Check out All Dessen Müd for some top-notch Kurt Weill pastichery!

Civil Wars, Civil Wars. My friend Sara passed this along sometime in early June, as I recall, and the track "Dust to Dust" became a huge part of my travelin' tunes as hope and newness filtered in. The whole album is great and moving and wonderful! Whatever!

Sufjan Stevens, Carrie and Lowell. I had this pegged as my favorite album of last year, though The Tallest Man On Earth's Dark Bird is Home may be eclipsing it now that I've heard it. Either way, this was the one that kept cycling up for me all across the continent. It's perfect train-travel music.

Cloud Cult, Light Chasers. I always associated this album with my last show in Chicago before moving (a fantastic Arcadia) but something about its narrative - a journey of unknown duration, uncertain success, and self-sacrifice required along the way - really hit me strong as I got into Venice, and it stayed with me for the weeks that followed.

I don't think any of these are particularly elusive or marginal picks, but they're the sonic world I swam in this summer - and will likely form the basis for the playlists with which I'll leave for my next extended travel whenever that is. Music is fun and nice!

Bourbon, Bluegrass n Bgentlemen

I had barely gotten re-acclimated to America (and really: have I mentioned how thankful I am that my family home is always the most relaxing and recharging place ever thanks to my incredible parents? I think I've made that clear on previous occasions in this space?) before I jetted off on another mini-journey, this time to Kentucky, "The Limestone State," as it is probably not known. The occasion: the bachelor party for my dapper, soulful, clever, funny, and relentlessly thoughtful 'n' kind pal Dan. Video and the rest of it post-jump!

The gang, on the town. We clean up... fine?

As per the usual, a bit o' video - though pretty well fatigued from the return home and pretty dazed by the return of Americana and Pal Overload, I was able to capture a li'l bit of the sense of joy that fueled this weekend. Good lord it was a swell 'un.

Lexington is pretty fantastic - I am sure both cities are, but I returned to Lexington just two weeks later for another friend's wedding (an absolutely heart-swelling occasion for dozens of reasons, among them being that a Bengali-Kentucky Muslim/Charleston Lutheran wedding might be exactly what 2016 needed at a bone-deep level?) and was struck again by its undercurrent of cool.

It's bourbon country for sure, and there's plenty of focus there: restaurants and bars all trumpet the stuff, highway signs clearly point the way to the distilleries on the bourbon trail, and we did our share of distillery-hopping. After a few sessions we could all call out the basic facts of bourbon by memory (the minimum and standard percentages of corn in the mash bill, the percentage made within Kentucky, the fact that the burn is known as a Kentucky hug, the list goes on).

A little hand-bottling underway at the Buffalo Trace distillery. FUN FACT: Buffalo Trace is a kind of bourbon. Bourbon is a kind of whiskey! Blogs are a kind of deadening morass of confusion and discontent!

But it's also just a cool spot. Both of my weekends in Lexington had me (and us) stumbling across artists and thinkers doing their thing, restaurants doing that local-organic-seasonal no-frills stuff that I love, and public art to beat the band.

A little art deco in Louisville. We tried our best to be fancy for Dan and I can only hope we succeeded??

 A couple more photos below; there are many stories from the weekend but they all benefit from an in-person telling. What's worth saying here is that the more I've visited the mid-sized cities of the States (Kansas City, Lexington, Louisville, Cleveland, etc.) the more I appreciate how omnipresent artistry and hustle are. And again: coming back from my adventures this summer, I'm a smidge better positioned to look for it and find that excellence wherever it happens to be.

Louisville was cool too! I had a great early morning walk through it, I just didn't solo explore much, so mostly I know it has a few great bars and a stupendous restaurant from Edward Kim! Whatever you guys!

Bourbon n smoke at our last stop of the night, which began with a server saying "We're closed. What can we get you to drink?" It was: highly nifty.

Three gents (OR ARE THERE FOUR) preparing to Step Out in Louisville. FUN FACT: Louisville and Lexington are entirely different cities and apparently do not like to be referred to as The Estranged Twin Cities of Kentucky! STAY TUNED TO THIS BLOG FOR MORE CULTURAL SENSITIVITY.

Home again home again

On August 23, I returned to the States, and had a crazy week of readjustment: a couple of days with my folks, a couple of days in Kentucky for my friend Dan's bachelor party, and a couple of days in Chicago proper before jetting back to Boston. I'll have a separate post up about Kentucky later this week, along with some lagging trip-in-retrospect posts, but for today I cut together this little video about homecomings - not as complex or observant as most of these, as I was exhausted and mostly too happy to be seeing friends to remember to capture almost any of it on camera, but it gives a good sense of how my heart felt about it all.

Palimpsests

One of the sub-hobbies of this blog is applying literary nonsense to my liiiiiife, and this is no exception. A little reflection on layering memories after the jump.

Szimpla, a ruin pub in Budapest, its own kind of palimpsest.

When I had first started coming to terms with my impending divorce, my friend Casey asked an incredibly smart question: “Did you lose any music in the breakup?” Not in the sense of physical albums, but were there songs, artists, albums that I couldn’t listen to any more.

There was really only one song that I could definitively point to as a lost song at that time – S. Carey’s “In the Dirt.” Kate had sent it to me on a mix early in our dating, and it became something of an anthem for our long-distance relationship. It was my ringtone for her, and something about the song’s drive and longing for a lifelong bond, a shared journey all the way to the finish, felt intimately connected to that period of distance and anticipation. With the shift from a shared longing to be together to her desire to be done with the relationship and with me, the song felt emotionally barbed. I don’t know that I listened to it once between January and the trip. Something and hopeful had transformed somehow into a cold reminder of what I had lost.

One morning in June, on a train from Budapest to Krakow, I woke up to see the Polish countryside rolling across my window at dawn, like a canvas unrolling some impossibly idyllic landscape scene, the sky a splay of pastels. My brain somehow leapt up and connected with something – tying the rhythm of the train and the smooth ripple of the fields going by to “In the Dirt.” Something about that moment felt instantly right for the song. I grabbed my headphones and gave it a whirl. And it was good. It was perfectly married to that moment - the air, the light, the motion, the rhythms and textures of the music all sang together.

There was a little miracle in that moment – the song didn’t suddenly become something new, a pure and unadulterated memory of Poland. But where before its meaning seemed to have completely flipped, to be destroyed and rewritten, now it felt layered. It was connected to this transcendent memory of awaking to movement in an unfamiliar new world and to the loss and destruction of the past six months. And if it could connect to those two things, it could also connect back to its initial meaning: love, longing, certainty. It became a palimpsest (one of my favorite literary concepts) -  a piece of writing atop another piece of writing, faint traces of the past visible beneath each iteration.

I think that's what this year is about for me. It's about seeking out that layering - the complicated commingling of tragedy, sadness, anger, frustration, and peace, hope, excitement, and newness. About allowing cities, memories, tokens and relationships to retain all their meanings, rather than blocking out that complexity and simplifying things down to the easiest-to-digest best-or-worst iterations of themselves. And along the way I'm reclaiming my sense of joy, my sense of discovery, my sense of potential and of hope above all.

The video I cut for Krakow was scored to "In the Dirt," and you can find that on the blog if you want. But here's the official video, which feels perfect in its own way. Let's keep refracting until these things are as rich as the world itself???

Stockholm: The Magic of Friendship

And the last stop on the trip: Stockholm! (I did make a one-night stop in Malmö, which was charming and cute, but due to Travel Fatigue and having a friend hook me up with a proper hotel room, I was mostly asleep and/or watching the Olympics while there. Though, if you're looking for a restaurant recommendation, Bastard was actually pretty stellar.)

Stockholm was an interesting space, almost a transitional one in preparing me for my return to the States. More on all of that - and the requisite video and photos - after the jump!

MORE CITIES FROM BOATS! If there is a sub-theme to this blog, it is "I like going to cities and then looking at them from boats." FELLAS! Who wants to get together and buy a boat?

First things first: my good friend Hilary met me in Stockholm, another Europe-tripping intersection as she made her way from Iceland to meet her (extremely excellent) partner in Berlin. Hilary's been an amazing listener to me for years, and most of what I remember about Stockholm are our conversations. That's why the video for Stockholm is, in its way, a video about paaaaaals as much as the city!

Making the jump to Vimeo since it seems like they're not gonna stick ads on my videos when I use copyrighted tunes. Fingers crossed??

That said, it was a neat place. Oddly, as I said above, a transitional one - much of the city was knocked down mid-twentieth century, with Gamla Stan as the outlier in retaining much of its eighteenth-century architecture, and a lot of the newer construction is unlike Copenhagen in that it's utilitarian more than artful. That doesn't mean it didn't have its high points, though.

Swedish Gothic

We made a visit to Strindberg's final apartment (as I had Ibsen's in Oslo), and I was struck at seeing the nearby subway station plastered with his portrait and paintings of the apartment building - given how grim he is, it's easy to forget that Strindberg is a literary national hero in Sweden. And we enjoyed wandering Gamla Stan, but the highlights were both ferry-rides away: a tour of the city's archipelago, and a day spent in Skansen and its neighboring park/farm on Djurgården.

We couldn't hear what this extremely dapper fella was saying, but I like to imagine he was mostly explaining "Lookit them islands, that's an archipelago. Them islands over there? Same deal. Basically it's all an archipelago, on account of the islands, who wants to get me a drink."

 One big discovery from the summer is how important nature is to me - something that can be easy to forget or lose track of. And while much of Stockholm follows the concrete-and-glass model of American cities, it was nice to so easily get away into the greens and blues that surrounded it. The archipelago - or more precisely, the vacation homes on the shores of its islands - strangely reminded me of Minnesota's lakes and the waterfront culture there. And the attractions of Djurgården felt like a little glimpse at how Swedes, given the sometimes-harsh climate, make the most of their summers when they come.

Hilary in Skansen, just before she RIPPED a pole out of the ground and started hacking at this thicket of trees. Hilary! Trees are nice, don't attack the trees.

(As a side note, I think that's part of why Jamaica Plain is treating me so much better than Allston did - there are trees lining the streets in a way that feels much more designed for enjoyment-of-the-world than did my last neighborhood.)

I would have enjoyed Allston's trash culture a LOT more if it had this groovy little guy helping to contain the garbage-piles that accumulated.

In any case, between some persistent drizzle and the relatively staid nature of a lot of the city (I'd still be interested in going back to see Drottningholm) it oddly prepared me for my return back to the States... about which more in the next couple of posts!

Copenhagen By Canal

WELL, turns out that starting up a campus routine and setting up a new apartment and prepping for a weekend back in Kentucky for a friend's wedding all adds up to not a lot of blogging, I know this has been devastating for everybody involved. But a sleepy, slow start to my day in Lexington (which continues to be an extremely groovy town) gave me time to finally put together this video of my trip up the main canal in Copenhagen. Again: it is mighty fine to see what the price of a bus ticket can get you in some of these places. Later this weekend or early next week: Stockholm, friendship, and the return to Amer-i-kay!

What's a blog post without a picture of a hypnotic glass enclosure lit from behind by the setting sun canalside in Copenhagen? What have I even been POSTING for before now?

Back in Town: Surprise Twists

Not a photos-y/videos-y  update, but another navelgaze! Keeping the meat below the jump so you can ignore this if you're just here for the shiny stuff (which is absolutely the recommended route to reading this blog)!


I'm back in Boston and have to say I'm pleasantly surprised at how much I'm enjoying the return. There was some anxiety and stress going into it - this city holds a lot of hard, unhappy memories, both from the at-times-overwhelming stress of my grad program and from the past year of depression and relationship deterioration. I knew that this was the "smart" decision, but it was by no means my first choice. I'm really grateful for how it all turned out, though - like a few other choices I've made during this transitional year, I'm glad I stuck with the hard-but-healthy path forward.

And some of this change is absolutely stuff that was wrought during my time abroad. I feel a greater sense of exploration than I have had here before, in part I'm sure because I'm coming to the city with new eyes and a habit of looking. And I'm more used to taking inconvenience and dead ends as a matter of fact and adjusting myself to my circumstances. (This does not mean that Boston's civic planning can be forgiven its many ungodly sins, but I'm at least not taking it personally, which I think we can call the most infantile version of progress?)

But some of it is circumstance as well - after two years in Allston, it's an incredible relief to be in Jamaica Plain. A little further out from the city center, it's unlike any other spot I've lived here in that there's a real sense of community, of residents who have put down roots and invested in each other and their environment. This morning I went to a bakery for the second time in a few days (my stove is from the 1950s so I'm not quite comfortable firing it up until I get a tutorial from my landlord) and the owner recognized me; on my way out I picked up a brochure for the neighborhood's "open studio" art gallery program later this month. Neighbors smile and wave and let me pet their dogs (possibly the greatest thing to ever happen in the Boston metro area). A nice shift from the undergrad-heavy, trash-in-the-streets vibe of Allston.

I've also got a much better sense of structure and routine than I did during the overwhelming emotional and professional chaos of my comps year. And that's helping me figure out how to have a full, healthy personal life in tandem with an ambitious, productive year of scholarship and academic knick-knacks. Again: a nice shift.

All of these things keep me circling back around to the same thing, something I feel like I keep saying to my friends (sorry, friends!) - which is that I feel like me again. I didn't for a long time, well before the divorce. I'd felt adrift and alone and humiliated and stuck and sad. And those things still visit from time to time, but my core self feels present again in a way it hasn't since at least early 2015. And man, that feels tremendous.

In the year I've got left here, I'm pretty committed to doing my best to keep riding this wave of positivity and happiness, while knowing that there will obviously be stress and emotional setbacks as the academic year cranks into high gear and life moves past the settling-in phase. But I feel like in this year I've re-learned how to share things with my friends, how to accept and release frustrations, and how to take joy in all things, up to and including disasters.

That all feels great. That all feels new. That all feels like the future. I'm awfully keen to see what comes next!

Next up, a Copenhagen boat ride! Stockholm adventures with an amazing friend! The bourbon trail with another amazing friend! A sudden and destabilizing shortage of exclamation points!!!

Copenhagen!

Boy, fellas. Copenhagen surprised me. I'd been told how great it was by a few friends I'd run into in Bergen, as well as close friends from back home, but it really just sent me swooning in a way that no other Scandinavian city had done or would do. This city was a joyful spot, and I'll try/fail/try-again to articulate how after the jump...

Near the Little Mermaid statue is this infinitely-cooler sculpture/fountain, which is frustrating ONLY IN THAT as a photographer you're technically only supposed to be able to take pictures in one dimension so you can't take a picture that shows you the boats behind the fountain in one direction AND the gorgeous church on the other side of the fountain, because reality is a crock!

My friend John talked a lot about how Copenhagen had a great culture of play, and: yes. It's full of playgrounds and little green spaces, and sure, there's a part of the city where the sidewalk is suddenly made of trampolines (NOT KIDDING, WATCH THE VIDEO), but it goes beyond that. The architecture itself is playful - for a city packed with modern buildings, it's gloriously thin on boxy skyscrapers, opting instead for a slew of approaches that cumulatively feel like the city's poking fun at the old line that writing about music is like dancing about architecture. Well, this city's buildings dance, so whatever, apocryphal-quote-speaker.

Two major points of Copenhagen stick out as worthy of mention here. (Three if you count food -  while there's plenty of overpriced and not-great stuff, the Noma trickle-down effect has left the city full of people making incredibly tasty, delicious food at reasonable-for-Scandinavia prices.) Tivoli Gardens and Louisiana Museum both feel like variations on the city's playfulness, and both made me very, very happy. (I should note that while I visited Christiania, I didn't take any photos or videos inside the gates - partly because in much of the settlement you're not supposed to, and partly to unplug from that end of this project. It, too, is a special spot, but one I didn't get a ton of time in and didn't love quite as much as... well, at least the Louisiana.)

"Nyhaven" is the Danish word for "dumdum creek with some stupid old boats stuck in it who even cares, what time is Netflix on"

Tivoli is an amusement park, with an "It's a Small World" style ride modeled on Hans Christian Anderson's stories, a handful of roller coasters and big drops, and a sprawling arcade with games and food. I sidestepped most of that (with the exception of the ferris wheel and the HCA ride) in favor of the park's surprisingly extensive cultural offerings.

A corner of Tivoli as viewed from an extremely dangerous Ferris wheel. Whoaaaa some brave photographer must have risked a lot to get that shot huh.

 As evening rolls in, the park becomes a bit more adult-oriented, with jazz, classical, and pop concerts as well as theatrical offerings. Some of these are free in the open air (the above video gets you a glimpse at the kind-of-terrible panto the evening I visited, and below there's a little snippet of a jazz concert) and some require an additional payment (the night I was there, the Norwegian Youth Symphony was playing the Symphonie Fantastique). There's also a lot of green grass where people just sit, drink, picnic, play around on rolling wooden seats, and generally enjoy the fading light of the day. As amusement parks go, it's hard to top (if, like me, you aren't a roller coaster hound).

But if there's one place that blew me away in Copenhagen it was Louisiana. This museum is incredible. All modern art, with a collection far too extensive to be displayed all at once, the curators rotate their displays and fill the rest of the museum with new works, loans from other museums, commissions, and the like. It's beautifully curated, but the actual layout of the place is what makes it special. It's built out of an estate on the sound separating Denmark from Sweden, and as it was developed, the grounds were turned into a sculpture garden designed to serve as a playing space for museum patrons.

Giacometti is the coolest, and this place is jam packed with his stuff. Also: NATURE???

The result is the most balanced, humane, relaxing and invigorating museum I've ever visited. Most of the galleries open out to the grounds at some point, so that you can move effortlessly from gallery to grass, down to the water, over to a wooded area, across a bridge, down a slide, back up through the (delicious!) cafe, and back into another gallery.

Blah di bloo, some kinda "sculpture" if you can even call a mesmerizing interplay between lively and untrammeled nature, its reflection in sleek modernity, and an inverted slab of earth "a sculpture." MY KID COULD HAVE SCULPTED THAT, etc.

There's even a children's wing, multiple rooms full of supplies for kids to create their own pieces, many of which are hung in the wing itself. I came expecting to spend three hours or so (I tend to fade after that point in most museums.) I stayed the entire day. It's just the best.

Botanical gardens? More like... substantial gardens! Wait, hang on, I know I have a sicker burn, just give me a couple of hours and a rhyming dictionary, please give me a chance to redeem my family's honor

In a way (SPOILER ALERT) I was happy that Stockholm, while fun, didn't blow me away, because it made Copenhagen seem more real/meaningful. I wouldn't have guessed it, but this is one of the cities I most want to spend more time in, and I think stands with Berlin and Glasgow as a top-three city in which I would jump at the chance to live. But we'll chat more about Stockholm, the end of the trip, palimpsests, the bourbon trail, and my return to Boston, in the coming days and weeks. (After another post dealing a little more with Copenhagen's architecture and a li'l video of a canal ride thanks to The Magic Of Public Transit.) For now, let's just all get ourselves a slice of rhubarb pie and think about how lucky we are to be alive and on this planet for some reason! Okay!

Oslo! Bergen! And a little more about the fjords.

Ibsen kind of hated Norway, and Norwegians were thoroughly not crazy about him in his day, which is why it's funny to see statues of him all over Oslo and Bergen (the latter of which has an exhibit on his time in the city that defensively states "We think Ibsen quite enjoyed his time in Bergen!"). But he was fascinated by his home country, returning to it again and again - writing Peer Gynt in Italy, for instance, Ibsen worked through his frustrations with his home country through the use of mythology, fantasy, satire and the grand scale of an epic journey. (The play is also readable through any number of philosophical lenses but we aren't talking about that now.)

After the jump, videos, photo, ramblings, as per always.

Oslo City Hall is incredible. Started construction before WWII, finished in the mid-50s, with many elements altered in the wake of the war, the place is an allegory-packed series of murals, rooms designed with entirely home-sourced materials, and the cumulative effect is an architectural meditation on liberty, human rights, and Norway's place in the world. IT'S NEAT.

Oslo!

I hope I don't fall into the trap of "I visited Norway and now I understand Ibsen," because: hahahaha NOPE. But what I will say is that spending some time in modern Oslo and Bergen, with a fjord visit between the two, was illuminating. Both Oslo and Bergen, while in no way small towns, don't have the same sense of internationalist cosmopolitanism that you get in, say, Berlin/Rome/Copenhagen. And the fjords - oh man. You get a sense of why Norse mythology is a thing, why the idea of trolls in the mountains felt resonant, and you also get a sense (as gray and rain sweep through with regularity) why Ibsen found the place depressing, drab, and provincial when he wasn't busy using the environment to generate powerful allegories about morality, philosophy, Norwegian society, and a host of other concerns.

 Bergen!

I have said this elsewhere, but fjord country is indescribable. Photos and video don't do it justice - the magnitude of your surroundings, the otherworldly feeling of being in the clouds while you're at sea level, the thick air heavy with water vapor - it was one of the most transporting environments I spent time in over here.

Sognefjord! If you didn't see it the last time I yammered about it on this blag!

Barrage of photos below. As I think I said before, if I were to do this leg again, I'd spend almost the entire time on Sognefjord. Oslo gave me one of the top-five meals of my entire life bite-for-bite (no exaggeration) and Bergen was cool, but here's how stunning the fjords were: it was something like 40-50 degrees Fahrenheit while I was there, raining most of the time, and I'd booked a cheap cabin on a campground in Balestrand for the night without realizing that the campground wouldn't have rentable linens or blankets. I spent that night under a mattress that I pulled off the top bunk of the cabin (it was a very nice mattress! Scandinavia is very clean and nice!) and still walked away thinking I could have happily spent a week camping in the fjords.

OKAY. Pictures ahoy, and then next stop: COPENHAGEN, a leading candidate for favorite city of the entire summer.

HENRIK! In front of the National Theatre, where I was just a bit too early to see an adaptation of John Gabriel Borkman. I also realized too late to make plans accordingly that I was missing an annual Peer Gynt festival about three hours north of Oslo, built around a production featuring professional actors and about 100+ amateurs performed outside on the shores of a lake. It's maybe the strongest argument for making a return to Norway sooner than later...?

Visiting Oslo's open-air folk museum! These places are super fun - another will be coming when we get to Stockholm. Basically, the government purchased and relocated homes and farm/town buildings built in different eras in different parts of the country and brought them to a park near Oslo. It's a bit of historical reenactment, a bit of architectural and agricultural museumry, and a bit of... just fun wandering time. On a gorgeous day (which this was), that was pretty swell. This shot comes from a great demo of folk music and dancing. These people were great!

The Oslo opera house, which doubles as a public plaza and is just sleek and modern and cool in all the fun and human ways you can be those things.

FJORD COUNTRY IS ATMOSPHERIC

FJORD COUNTRY IS LUSH AND MYSTERIOUS

FJORD COUNTRY HAS STAVE CHURCHES BUILT 1,000 YEARS AGO OUT OF THE SAME WOOD THAT THEY HAVE NOW, IT'S JUST THIS BIG OLD GHOST TREE HANGING OUT AT THE FOOT OF SOME MOUNTAINS OK COOOOOL

Bergen from atop Fløyen mountain! The sunlight in the mountains across the city is a little prank, it was cloudy the entire time and it always will be. But the city was cool! My photos from the Hanseatic Quarter (wooden buildings all leaning into each other, extremely Deadwoody-feeling) didn't come out great, so you will have to imagine that for YOURSELF

This is how Bergen looks as you walk to the bus station at 4 AM to catch your flight to Copenhagen. Shortly after taking the photo, you'll sometimes be greeted by people who are sleeping next to the bike path that runs by this lake down to the bus station! It's a fun and groovy time, more or less!