Concert

GusGus played an outdoor live set for us last night and we fell in love with them all over again.

Balance

Image by Óðinn, three years old.

Today is 20.09.2009 and I've little to say but that fall is here, and dark nights still warm enough to stroll around in without mittens or muffs or such. We walk a thin line these days between hope and dolor, and I think it's safe to say that, honestly, at this point, the waiting is the hardest part. Our collapse lingers, a slow motion graceless tumble, as infighting and fracturous party bickering keep us clinging to old structures and ideals when letting go, fully falling into true humility, admitting fault, releasing blame and dissolving useless, demeaning obligations might be the only way to save our national soul. But what do I know. I've always found politics, finance and the ways of the worldly truly confounding.

And then there's all this, the true measure of our life force: our art. Visit these links and know that our hearts are still beating and our blood runs as hot and cool as ever, and that we'll never, never give up:

Add This Song by gusgus, directed by Heimir Sverrisson and Jón Atli Helgasson

gusgus web site

Hljóðaklettar Icelandic Music Label, feat. Rúnar Magnússon, DJ Musician and Thor Magnússon

Anonymous feat. Tanya and Marlon Pollock, video by Berglind

Reykjavik Roundup

gogoyoko Fair Play in Music

E-label Designs by Ásgrímur Már Friðriksson

Thormuzik

Reykjavik International Film Festival

Nikita Design

Eve Online

Olvis

Ólafur Eliasson at TED.com

Ragnar Kjartansson at the 2009 Venice Biennial

Snorri Ásmundsson

Steinunn Designs

11th annual Iceland Airwaves music festival

Sequences Art Festival


And so many more...Do yourself a favor and check them all out *.*

Beach

I've dug deep into classic Iceland Eyes and pulled out this photo of a little Valentína on the black pebble beach at Djúpalónssandur, a most beautiful Icelandic landscape.

Íslendingur

Íslendingur, originally uploaded by blue eyes.

Ok, people, time to vote!

Go to this link, Blog Tournaments, and check out my competition, then leave a comment on the Blog Tournaments site to cast your vote for Iceland Eyes.

Let's take this to the next level, my friends!

Squat

Squatters recently took over an abandoned house on Skólavörðurstígur, with the (approval) of the owner, who's looking the other way, ahem. For last Saturday's Culture Night they spiffied up the yard and announced a Schengen-Free Zone with a free-stuff bazar in the house's basement. Very cool.


p.s. Iceland eyes has been invited to take part in a joust! Really just a blog tournament, but cool anyway. Go here for more info and get yourselves ready to vote!

Carrots

Locally grown carrots in Reykjavik

The thing is, Icelandic carrots like these are absolutely delicious and while munching away one is hopefully not mulling over their price per pound. Local produce is, in general, super good, especially the greenhouse stuff like tomatoes, cucumber, paprika (bell peppers,) zucchini and various lettuces. I buy local, despite the cost, almost without exception.

Oh, of course, you nod understandingly, Iceland has all that geothermal power to heat greenhouses for cheap, just the reason why Alcoa and Alcan have set up aluminum smeltering shop there. And you'd be right about the smeltering part. But please know that greenhouse farmers are not subsidized in any way or offered reduced energy rates at all, though Big Aluminum is. Though I usually don't take political sides, this is a very dear issue to me. Read this article from Saving Iceland for more info. It's two years old, but totally on topic*. Here's a more recent one by a possibly even more controversial source, but it raises some interesting topics.

Here's the deal: Iceland is on the very verge of self sustainability, of creating a green eco-culture that will provide an international model of development. This book excerpt helps to define in more scientific terms our capacity to provide nutrient-rich foods for our local population. And this article from the Guardian adds a hopeful note to the argument. And here's a post of mine with links to great articles re: this issue of our future.

Out of chaos comes order, every time, without fail. It's the nature of systems at all levels, ultra-micro to macro and beyond. We have the opportunity, we have the technology, we have the attitude to make something brilliant, innovative and of lasting global impact out of the rubble of our economy. The Heart Park is a good start: a little patch of green in the heart of the city where obsolete structures once stood. A small gesture like that gives hope in an unmeasurable way. That's our future. We tried the other way and it failed us. Now its time to return to the land that made us.

We live here, we are forged and bound together by ancestors, survivors of tremors and blasts and lingering ash clouds that suffocated the less hardy, smothered the flora and culled our numbers to the quick. We were parasites then, half-dug into the raw skin of the island, barely covered by sod roofs and what we could weave off the backs of sheep. We were destroyers, desperately hacking away at the gnarled and primitive birch forests til the fragile soils ran loosely into glacial rivers, leaving nothing behind but the stripped volcanic muscle of our mother. We fought each other and killed, bore children too weak to live another day in the hostile depleted world into which they came.

Hundreds of years ago the island split and raged, taking back her own life through destruction. Dank black clouds lay thick in the skies for months, starving so much of what fed on her, breaking down the tenuous cycle of life until a numb stillness overwhelmed the last people, until the starved cattle and sheep could no longer raise their heads in protest. The oldest groves, home to Baldur and to sacred things, were finally felled, burned, lost. The island had sundered herself, had shaken and seared and smothered the desperate, uglied population that burrowed itself like lice into her fragile moss derma.

Yet some survived, and we are the children of those people. We are cousins, we are rare, and born of destruction. We are inheritors of a memory of overwhelming sorrow dusted with hope, and the progeny of the precious moments of lust between members of a dying race. We owe great debt to those who made us in the wake of devastation, and to the land that ultimately spared out lives.**

*I do not necessarily support the overall political views of the sources I link.
**excerpt, MAR 2004

Mural

Mural at Frakkastígur in Reykjavik

I was tempted to post about the price of carrots [update: I did just that] but thought better about it and decided to display this artsy beauty shot instead. Who really cares out there in the world that locally grown carrots are up to 900 kr/kg ($7/kg., or ~$3.50/lb.) though organic? Not you. It may not even seem like that much when you do the currency conversion. It's more a local issue. Like the cost of milk almost doubling over the course of the summer. It's a relative thing. And we are on a remote island. And it's expensive in Hawaii as well, I've heard. And H1N1 didn't really even get a toehold here. AND we've had the Most Excellent weather EVER here this summer. So what's to worry about?

Everything's fine.