A Country of Irreconcilable Opposites

Here's what makes no sense about Norway. Let me set this up for you.

On one hand, it's incredibly laid back. Which is great, don't get me wrong. I walked around for hours today while every store was closed and the city, which is usually fairly empty, was in fact empty as expected. But that's because everybody prefers doing adorable outdoorsy things like ... gardening in the biggest community gardens you've ever seen ...


... or strolling in the biggest, most well-kept public cemeteries you've ever seen ...


And if you weren't gardening, or remembering the dead, then maybe you were at the parks sunbathing in all kinds of shameless positions.

Norwegians love free time. They can't get enough of it. In fact, the completely respectable, normal working day here is only 10a-4p. Don't think I'm exaggerating. At the opera house, we'll be in the middle of a crucial scenic moment with someone's life on the line, and then the clock strikes four and the entire stage crew start looking around like dogs at afternoon walk time. Woe to the opera director who tries to arbitrate for an earlier start time to the Norwegian working day, or for a later end time. Double woe to the director who dares interfere with the regularity of the 2 1/2 carefully-spaced tea breaks surrounding lunch time.

But the culture of laid back has a strange other side to it. Because if you weren't hanging out outside today, you might also have been here:


Can you read that? The largest hotel in the city, the Radisson SAS Hotel, was having a "House of Pain" tattoo conference in its ballroom. Hm, House of Pain. Does that go with sunbathing and gardens? Well, let's think about what we know about Norway. (Mmm ... it's close to Sweden?) Norway is the home of artists who have hit real rock-bottom. Think about Ibsen's Peer Gynt, that bizarre, horrible boy who goes off into the craggeldy Norwegian mountains after abusing his poor mother and marries a troll princess. Or death-by-icy Hedda Gabler. Remember her? Egad! Or maybe you remember that Munch lived and worked in Norway. Remember Munch?


The Scream? Come On! Where's the laid back in that? What about this, whatever the hell it is?


And oh my God!


Vigeland! Rabid babies? Who came up with that? Who is this guy? Did he ever sleep? I'm sorry, but I just don't see how the country that produced this guy ...


... also produced this guy ...


What a catastrophe. But there you have it.

I know I've avoided talking about opera almost entirely so far. I have a lot to say. But I've only been here a week. I'm still getting warmed up.

One End of the World

In Norway you can take a train an hour and a half from Oslo and see the "Verdens Ende," the end of the world. Strangely enough, there's a lighthouse and a bunch of boats at the end of the world lined up to sail off to God only knows where -- where do you go if you're already at the end? To Copenhagen, tee hee, the Norwegians would say. I sense some rivalry. (Incidentally if you're ever traveling in this part of the world, take care to remember that Copenhagen, when you actually get to Scandinavialand, becomes København. This seems natural enough, but on no sleep in a strange airport with a bunch of elves instead of people, you too might find yourself wandering among endless rows of baggage looking for the ones tagged with a C-word, instead of a K-word.) A quick Google search reveals that there's a World's End State Park in Pennsylvania. And as we all know, the Pirates of the Caribbean were also "At World's End." Everybody's got one. My guidebook, wrong as usual, suggested that the end of the world would be good place to take a swim.


Actually, it was pouring rain. But! It was lovely. And in Tønsberg, I had the longest and loveliest lunch of my entire life. I and my small party began eating at 1 o'clock in the afternoon and we were still half-eating, half-sleeping when we had to get up to catch the last train back to Oslo at 9 that night. In the course of this supermeal, I discovered Norwegian goat cheese, which is indistinguishable from chocolate, and is the best thing I have ever eaten in my entire life. Some chunks of it left with me in my bag and are waiting to be eaten from their shelf in my fridge in Oslo.


Two glasses of wine, two more glasses of port wine, and a lot of goat cheese later, we then ate the next best thing I've ever had in my entire life which is very much like a Russian blini (they tell me), only better. You can't possibly make these little pancakes in the states because every step of the making process requires things that you can't buy there. Like "sour milk," which has to go into the batter, and is maybe a little bit like buttermilk. With a pancake sizzling on your plate, you then drizzle on something like very liquidey sour cream. I don't know what the stuff is called but it's like really excellent tartar sauce with cream cheese and sour cream all up in it. We probably don't have that in the states either. On top of the liquidey sour cream you spoon super finely chopped sweet onions, and on top of that, yellow caviar, which we might actually have somewhere. The black stuff is evidently DYED, which I never knew. Or at least, it's a rumor that Norwegians like to encourage gullible Americans to spread.

During a short break before the main course, I wandered off into the pouring rain with an excellent pair of borrowed galoshes, and here I discovered snails, a lot of them, and a lot of fluorescent moss.

I probably stepped on thirty snails flapping back into the house and screaming about how wonderful it was with the masses of snails on the ground, and everyone gasped. Tønsberg apparently had an infestation last year, and I was the bearer of the unwelcome news that they'd returned. Snails are like small goats; they eat anything. According to people living in Tønsberg, these particular snails come from the dirty people living in Holland who don't know how to keep their snail problem to themselves. But how cute??!

øslø

I bought a package of gum today for 52 Norwegian kroner. Hm ... what's a kroner? Are they like yen? Well, not really. In fact, they're more valuable than Euros. USD to kroner value is about 1:5.3 right now. Easy math, but it's kind of hard to get into my head that I spent ... 10 dollars ... on a pack ... of gum.

Unless we discover an underground cubic mile of oil in North Dakoka (because there's nothing else that would prevent the American dollar from continuing its quick-tanking downward spiral), it'll be a once-in-a-lifetime kind of thing, this trip of mine to Oslo. And we'll all have to start vacationing in the Wisconsin Dells. Unless, and here's my plan people, we ALL move to Oslo now, do a little work for a couple of years, enough to get a pension at retirement, and then move BACK to America and eat nothing but pie and expensive cocktails. Think about it, with Norwegian kroner in your pocket, you'd never have to buy nail clippers at Walgreens again. You'll never use the same bath towel twice. You can buy friends, botox your entire body into incredible shape & live off the fat of the land.

Anyway, it's an idea.
Lemme know if anybody feels like visiting. The taxi ride from the airport is only about 750 trillion dollars.

Eternal Dusk of the Sleep-Deprived Mind

I slept on Friday night, but it's Monday and with only a couple cat naps in between, I'm actually feeling a little wired. It might be the perpetual sunlight, except it's more like perpetual twilight. From four o'clock in the afternoon on, it just feels like it's 7:30p. You keep expecting the sun to go down, but then it doesn't go down for another six hours. It gets dark at 10. Dark-ish.

How do you know when you're in Norway?

1. It sounds a lot like people are speaking English, or German. You can speak Norwegian, too. All you need is a retainer that lifts your lips off your face about an inch. You can also use your fingers. Try saying "Tuesday" in this position. If it comes out sounding like TEERSDAYK, you're in business. (The Norwegian word is spelled "Tirsdag.") Now try Wednesday and Thursday. UNNSDAYK? TURDSDEH? Right on. The Norwegian words for Wednesday and Thursday are Onsdag and Torsdag. See how easy?

2. When you're in Germany and you say to somebody, "Sorry, but do you speak English?" they answer either "a little" or "yeah." In Norway they look at you with unmistakable irony on their weathered, coastal faces. They don't sort of speak English here. They just do.

3. The entire city is actually a really enormous IKEA. And the people look like shoppers in an IKEA store, smiling quietly, sipping cappuccino, modestly looking left and right as they talk on their cell phones crossing the street. In fact, Norway has to be the capital of painfully nice, nervy, pale-faced white people. I've found my lost tribe. Boarding the plane from Copenhagen to Oslo was like walking onto the cast of Lord of the Rings.

I'd tell you to google earth Den Norske Opera (where I'm working) but the opera house is so new that Christopher Alden's L'Orfeo is actually the official, inaugural opera, there (our Mr. Orfeo is a little fatter than the one in these pictures ... more on that later.)

Berlin, It's Been Real

Friends, countryman, moms, wizened grad students, Berliners who bed at sunrise: you've been so kind to follow my bloo.. WHOA! ... I mean my thoughts here in Berlin. For the next month, please tune in to the Opera Cabal blog for more music-related commentary. I'll continue posting instances of idiosyncratic absorption on this page as well.

It's 6:19am at the Tegel airport and Starbucks is playing the same James Taylor/Neil Young/Rufus Wainright/Amy Winehouse mix I've been hearing here for the last two months. My last latte was ... divine.

I and this mystery here we stand

The curtain is falling on Berlin, and I feel like I am riding a tiny, broken tricycle down a steep, muddy gorge. It's starting to rain, and the slope is getting slicker. The ride is getting more dangerous, but also more fun. I may fall down and I will certainly get wet. But you can always do the laundry and start over again. All else failing, left, right; left, right.

Although I am always a willing ear if someone is willing to read out loud, I fell out of love with reading at some point after childhood WITH, however, the flagrant exception of the last three months, during which time I've managed to read 5 marvelous novels due to their titles having been implanted in my brain by more seasoned, less seasonal readers than me.*

I did however for some reason read Walt Whitman as a child, and it still seems to be the answer to my mood. Can you believe this stuff?

...

Have you reckon'd a thousand acres much? have you reckon'd the earth much?
Have you practis'd so long to learn to read?
Have you felt so proud to get at the meaning of poems?
Stop this day and night with me and you shall possess the origin of all poems,
You shall possess the good of the earth and sun, (there are millions of suns left,)
You shall no longer take things at second or third hand, nor look through the eyes of the dead, nor feed on the spectres in books,
You shall not look through my eyes either, nor take things from me,
You shall listen to all sides and filter them from your self.

...

I have heard what the talkers were talking, the talk of the beginning and the end
But I do not talk of the beginning or the end.
There was never any more inception than there is now,
Nor any more youth or age than there is now,
And will never be any more perfection than there is now,
Nor any more heaven or hell than there is now.


*A Prayer for Owen Meaney (John Irving), This Boy's Life (Tobias Wolff), The Magic Mountain (Thomas Mann), Herzog (Saul Bellow), and The Master and Margarita (Mikhail Bulgakov)

Bad Anthropology

Last Sunday, with less than one week in Germany remaining, I got back on the very same train I had taken the previous day to Dresden, headed back again through Dresden but ultimately on to Prague.

I really like being on trains. My dad tells me that when I was a fussy toddler he'd put me into the baby carrier in our Toyota because, once inserted into a reclining, forward-moving scenario, I always either shut up or passed out immediately. He'd just drive. I'm now a grown-up fussy toddler with a lot of nervous energy, and sometimes nervous energy is fun because it allows you to bolt around and do lots of things. But sometimes I get tired of restlessness, and being stuck in a train for 5 hours can feel really good. There's nowhere to go, and nothing to do.

I read The Unbearable Lightness of Being just out of college and it's the best oxymoronic-philosophic book title I've come across, with the possible exception of A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius, which isn't oxymoronic and is only glibly philosophical, but which has the same cheeky one-too-many-word-iness about it. I haven't read A Heartbreaking Work, but I've always been taken with the title. I tried to tell somebody about it once, but since I can never remember the actual title, only the general idea, I came up instead with The Unbearable Craziness of How Good This Book Is, which sounded even better, and which is what I will call my first book, if I ever write it.

Unlike A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius, I did read Kundera, and for a long time I couldn't get it out of my head. The genius of Kundera's formulation in the Unbearable Lightness is something like "The harder life gets the better you feel, cause sometimes when life gets really good, you wanna run away and die." I'd like to see a Kundera Daily Platitudes for the Average Guy Calendar. Tuesday, March 25: "Quit while you're ahead." Wednesday, March 26: "You can never get out. Make hay." I like his attitude, and I've always wanted to go to Prague to see the city where the attitude came from.

Prague is indescribably beautiful. But I spent most of my time there taking photos of street signs. Give me a chance to explain. Here's a sign.


Now, if you didn't know any better, you'd think this sign meant something like, "Man Crosses Street" or, "That's a person, he's crossing the street; I'm a person, ergo I cross the street here." And you'd be right! You're in a country that's nowhere near the U.S.A. and you wouldn't expect the same street crossing sign, would you? No, of course not. And yet we here in Germany can still make signs with universally intuitive significance, and everybody gets along just fine.

Ah, but then we cross the street and things start to look a lit-tle more complicated. Here we are by the river. What's that sign, there?


Hmm. I'm feeling very 10% about my German these days, but from what I can make out the sign says something like "People aren't building buildings here; also, don't ride your bike and don't drive your car, either." But what's strange isn't the German, it's the big, red circle with a white middle. This sign could be telling me "Stop now or you are such toast," but to me, I get ... empty set.

But wait. The party is just getting started. Check this out.


I found this sign in Dresden across from a tram stop. Now, here's my thinking: In Prague, the exact same sign except printed UPSIDE DOWN means "Here is a Metro Stop." According to my logic, a metro train is sort of the exact opposite of a tram train since the tram is above ground and the metro is below ground. Therefore, an upside-down metro sign means ... tram. Ha! Problem solved. But then, what's this?


Don't go into the sex shop? And here:


Leave your flugelhorns at home?


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