9/25-30: Umea
On the plane to northern Sweden I had a conversation with the woman sitting next to me about Americans’ perceptions of the Swedish. I told her about the insane conservative backlash currently popular in the states, the great fear of socialism and how conservative American pundits scare their audiences (who know shit about social democracies) by telling them that if Barack Obama has his way “we might end up like Sweden!” I also mentioned how Americans generally consider Scandavian people to be especially attractive, and she tied the two points together with an interesting theory: her proposal was that there must be some genetic link to the fact that there are better social programs in Scandavia to the seemingly higher proportion of attractive people there. If social programs are better, she argued, people are less stressed out and therefore better looking.
In spite of obvious holes in the theory, it comforted me briefly, as I’d been a bit disappointed in myself because of how succeptible I’d been to the aryan beauty standard. You could attribute it to American socialization and the high number of Scandanavian models who are imported by the American beauty industry, but as soon as we got to Denmark, Jordan and I were both embarrassed to admit that everywhere we looked we saw beautiful people, men and women equally. For example, In Copenhagen a girl fainted suddenly on the bus. We stopped to wait for an ambulence, and after a few minutes two ruggedly handsome EMT’s rushed on the bus, both of them with muscular model’s builds shown off by tight white tee shirts. They gazed sincerely at the girl (who was really pretty herself) and asked “are you alright? Can you hear me darling?” It was like a scene from a soap opera unfolding in front of us.
When we got to Umea I shared my friend from the plane’s theory with our friend Viktor, and he shot it down immediately. “That’s bullshit that people are less stressed in Sweden! We have the highest suicide rate in the world! You’re so bombarded with this beauty standard from a young age. That’s the only reason people think Scandanavians are more attractive.” He was right. The high suicide rate in Sweden is interesting too. Some people we met attributed it to the idleness of a society where people have so many things provided for them, though I think it’s probably related more to the fact that in the winter there gets to be as little as 3 hours of sunlight a day, and people who work indoors can go a whole week without ever seeing the sun. But hey, I’m no expert.
The show in Umea was easily one of the best of tour – a house show in a town where house shows are extremely rare. From an American perspective, its funny to think that the fact that a show is taking place in house might be the main attraction, especially since the house show circuit in the U.S. sprung up mostly in response to the lack of available venues for underground music. But several of our European friends who had traveled in the U.S. expressed their respect for the U.S. house show scene. They described an admiration for the intimacy of the house show that was lost in squats and venues, and said they thought house shows were often more welcoming and condusive to building relationships and communities than squats where squatters who have developed their own culture can be unwelcoming to outsiders. It’s funny because the same criticism of exclusivity is leveled against punk scenes based around house shows in the states, and the fact that shows are in houses often is seen as alienating by people who are less comfortable with the idea of coming to someone’s private home than a more public setting. The problems of inaccessibility and exclusivity surely transcend the settings that their found in. Nevertheless, I did find myself more comfortable in the house show setting and the fact that 100 or so people crammed into the house didn’t hurt.
One of our shows in Sweden fell through, and we’d already scheduled a couple of off days to break up the long drives in Sweden and Norway, so we ended up staying in Umea for 4 nights which was a nice break. Whatever people say about the “idleness” of Swedish lifestyle didn’t seem like much of a problem, as everyone we met seemed always up for hanging out and working on creative projects. On the first day someone showed up at a house we were hanging out at and solicited Jordan and some others to be filmed for a scene in their music video. The next day we started a Swedish hardcore band, wrote two songs, one that sounded like Motorhead, and one that sounded like Warzone and recorded them with Jordan singing in Swedish. His attempts to pronounce the lyrics as a non-Swedish speaker were described as the ranting of drunk Frenchman, which everyone agreed gave the songs their own character. On the last day, one of our friends made a short movie starring Jordan as a lonely horse. We finally left Umea to drive for a few days with Viktor’s band Lycka Till and drove out to a cabin in Western Sweden that Viktor’s parents own. It was a nice little spot to spend the night, with a word burning stove and a sauna, though it was too cold for any of us to get motivated to use the sauna, so we drank tea and ate spaghetti.
