Melodifestivalen

Ever wanted to see Dolph Lundgren (he's the Swedish guy who played the big blond Russian in one of the Rocky movies) sing "A Little Less Conversation" while he chops ice and wood blocks in half with his bare hands? No? Well, the Swedes do, and now so do I!

It's all part of the annual magic that is the insanely popular Melodifestivalen. Melodifestivalen is the Swedish run-up to the Eurovision Song Contest. Each week you watch 8 performers sing some of the greatest and most horrendest pop songs ever and vote for your favorites. Then there's a finale in Stockholm at the Globe theater and the winner gets to be Sweden's official entry at Eurovision in the summer. The cheeze! The fashion! The Swedish pop! We have been watching on Saturday nights with the kids, who tell us whom to vote for. Julian always likes the blond ladies with big boobs and flashy clothes, like the lady from the Alcazar in the picture above. Ava actually picks songs she likes, for example this catchy number called Kom from a band called Timoteij (and yes, the girls in the band do all look like those old Timotei shampoo ad girls).

Swedish Pygmalion

The first summer we were in Sweden I posted about the oddity of seeing West Side Story in Swedish during Kulturkalaset. What struck me then was that everyone was white and blond (I still contend this is a bizarre choice), but there was more to it than that. Must have been because I keep thinking about it. If I think that the translation, casting and removal from the cultural context did the play a disservice, then think what the Russians might think of an American staging of a Chekhov play (egads!) or the French about a Kansas high school's revival of The Misanthrope (quel horreur!). Call me dense, but I'd never given much thought to how much you miss of what the foreign playwright or author meant and was when the language changes AND you don't have a good sense of the cultural context. On the flip side, I suppose we non-native speakers give the piece new life viewing it with our own cultural maps. The original idea in the piece of art makes connections to our own lives and can transcend language (is that possible??), and maybe that is the power of art.

Anyway, I didn't quite mean to get into all THAT artsy nonsense, but I saw a piece in the paper today about a Swedish staging of Shaw's Pygmalion and the difficulty of figuring out how to translate Eliza Doolittle's cockney dialect into Swedish and it reminded me of that earlier post. The dialect IS Eliza before her transformation and when you hear it and know so much about her (even more true if you are actually British, not just English-speaking), so how on earth do you translate that and make it work in supposedly classless Sweden?

The accent the actress apparently decided on was based on a suburbs-Skånska (Skåne is in southern Sweden and the accent is, er, unique) that she tweaked to sound like nothing that actually exists. She basically created her own language. If I had any hope of understanding said suburbs-Skånska I'd love to go check it out. Sadly, the only Skånska I can vaguely understand is that of creepy Anna Anka (she's the Swedish personal trainer who married singer Paul Anka and is now infamous in Sweden after appearing in a ridiculous reality show called Swedish Hollywood Wives), and that's not saying much.

The Sing-along Wedding

After surviving the winter bazaar at the kids' school Saturday morning (think tons of people, games, auctions, crying children, bake sale, bead explosions, etc.), Adrian and I went to Trevor and Malin's wedding in the evening. (Trevor and Malin are the owners and lead consultants at the small firm I work with called Lorensbergs). The ceremony was at Utby Church -- very oldy-wordly-Swedish and cozy on a dark December night. The ceremony was in both English and Swedish, and except for the time when the minister said Malin and Trevor were now of one fish when I'm pretty sure he meant one flesh, it was very traditional and tear-enducing.

The fun began when we went back to their house for dinner. I sat next to a zesty British woman named Leigh. Even after she told me for the fifth time: "Nevada, couples have to grow TOGETHER, not APART. Graham and I grew TOGETHER. K. and A. grew APART" (and boy do I wish I could write that with her West Midlands accent), I still loved her. Here we are before dessert:
Some time after the first course little sing-along booklets were passed around, a guitar player jumped up, and the singing started. A sing-along wedding! We sang Sailing by Rod Stewart, Love me Tender, a Swedish song called Främling that everyone seemed to know, and on and on. At one point Olle, another Lorensberg consultant (and psychologist) got up and sang this incredible Swedish a cappella song about 3 flowers representing faith, love and trust (I think). Watch for Olle on next season's Swedish Idol.

My pictures from the wedding suck, but I blame that on a) what is probably by now an antique digital camera and b) not being able to move from my seat between 5pm-10pm. So every picture I have looks like this (Malin and Trevor are, sadly, right behind the flickering candle in the middle of the frame), but you get a sense of the cozy atmosphere: Swedes really love singing, and especially group sing-alongs (allsång), so I shouldn't have been so surprised by the musical wedding. There are huge televised sing-alongs from Stockholm (Allsång på Skansen) and Gothenburg (Lotta på Liseberg) every summer. If you knew the songs and could sing I could vaguely imagine finding this fun, but since neither applies to me, not so much.

Natural History Museum

Ava's reaction to this crazy-looking animal at Göteborg's Natural History Museum was about the same as mine: "Yuck." I mean, really, you could have nightmares. Luckily, the rest of the museum is not nearly so yicky and in fact is really old school cool, complete with dark wood paneling and lots of large stuffed animals in glass boxes with signs that read: "Brown bear. Canada. Shot by Hans Hansson 1905. Prepared by Lars Larsson." Both of the kids really enjoyed it. Julian kept running around pointing and shouting things like "moo cow!" "big neigh!" and "big wow whale!" while Ava patiently explained that the moo cow was actually a bison and the big neigh was some sort of deer. The "Malm" Whale (so called because it was discovered beached south of Göteborg in 1865 by a guy named Malm) they have have on display is sort of a big-wow-whale moment, so there was little debate there.

My favorite nationality is ...

Dutch! Yes, I've decided the Dutch are the most fun, friendly, outgoing and pleasant people on the planet. Merel is fantastic of course, but so is my buddy Dineke from Swedish class, and my new friend Ans, a Mom from Ava and Julian's school who, happily, has a daughter in Ava's class and a son in Julian's class.

Now it could be that I really only like Dutch people who have moved to Sweden, but I prefer to think that there's a whole country of fabulous, optimistic and energetic people just a short plane ride away. Forget joining the circus, maybe I'll run away and become Dutch. I could just speak a mixture of German, English and Swedish and maybe they'd never know.

Stadsbiblioteket

I am starting to think they're going to ask us to pay rent at the library because we are there so often. The main city library (Stadsbiblioteket) is around the corner from our house at the top of the Avenue and has a terrific kids section with a surprisingly large selection of English-language books (in the second picture above you can see the 3 red "bins" of English books). Good thing, because English kids' books are not that easy to find and when you do they cost about $20 a pop. The one book I haven't been able to resist buying is "Boo and Baa Have Company" about a pair of sheep who try to tempt a cat out of a tree. Ava and I laugh and laugh at the pictures and the oddly literal translation from the Swedish. It's so good.

I read the kids English books, but I'm always grabbing the Swedish books for myself because they are pretty simple and because the illustrations are wonderful. My favorite illustrator (and OK, he's actually Finnish, but close enough) is Olof Landström. He does the Boo and Baa books but also a series of books with a naughty pig named Benny that are fantastic.

I can't really get into the whole Astrid-Lindgren-Pippi-Longstocking-thing and am secretly glad there aren't many Pippi stories translated into English at the library because I think she's more weird than she is cute. I mean what's up with that hair anyway?

Kulturkalas

A cultural tsunami has been riding through Gothenburg over the past few weeks. It started with a big outdoor music festival called Way Out West (think L'il Kim and Neil Young) and continued with Kulturkalas, a 6-day humdinger mix of music, dance and then anything else happening around town that could be called cultural. This included a "learn to do graffiti" workshop, a little track where kids could drive around 1 mini electric car, and a collection of stalls with food from the middle ages. Anyway, the most interesting cultural event for me was the outdoor production of West Side Story right around the corner from our house. This classic tale of rival white and Puerto Rican gangs in New York in the 1950's was, wait for it, performed completely in Swedish and performed by two very blond, very white people dressed completely in white.

Now don't get me wrong, the singing was lovely, but hearing the, er, "Puerto Rican" women singing "America" in Swedish was a mindbender and frankly, the whole thing gave me the non-culturally-sensitive shivers by being so, well, white. Would this bug me if I were in Turkey and it was a totally Turkish production? Probably not. So I am left a little stumped about where I stand on making art accessible vs. cultural awareness. And this -- having things happen all the time that make me question my cultural norms and assumptions -- is for me the real beauty of expat living. Can't wait to see what the dance festival unearths.

Eurovision Song Contest 2008

Well, clearly the best reason to live in Europe is the EUROVISION SONG CONTEST! This year's contest, LIVE from Belgrade, included finalists from 25 European countries that, well, there are no words to describe the insanity. Perhaps this video from Spain's finalist will help:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iLWk_1oSUqI It's actually MORE offensive when you know the words, so my apologies. But can you imagine 25 of these hum-dingers in one fabulous televised broadcast, LIVE from Belgrade!!?? Our favorite was the Latvian entry with their catchy diddy "Wolves of the Sea," performed by "Pirates of the Sea" dressed as in the photo above. Our second favorite was Ani Lorak from the Ukraine (see above as well), mostly because her publicity people say she is "most beautiful and sexiest woman in Ukraine." She also writes poetry and books, including "How to be a Princess," which we will order shortly.