Hanseatic League, Epipens, Bottlenecks & Gunboats

Of course what I’m really talking about is markets.  And access.  And heterarchies.  And manipulations/contortions…

Access to the Baltic Sea from the Atlantic is restricted to three primary passages (prior to the Kiel Canal completed by Kaiser Wilhelm in 1895): the Lillebelt, the Storebelt, and the Øresund.

Travelling by boat from the town of Skagen on the northern end of the Jutland penninsula to the Baltic differs as follows:

Passage	Distance	Time	Fuel Cost
Øresund	362 km	19.5 hours	$487.45
Storebelt	537 km	29 hours	$724.39
Lillebelt	604 km	32.6 hours	$814.31

(Assuming modern day fuel prices in Europe for diesel, averaged across Scandinavia, and a speed of 10 nautical miles per hour, burning roughly 15-20 gallons of fuel per engine per hour.)

Travelling via the Øresund is roughly 40% cheaper than the Lillebelt, 33% cheaper than the Storebelt.  Additionally, both Belts are relatively shallow.  Not to mention you would be wending your way throughout the island homes of former Vikings (the etymology of the word itself is probably derived from Old Norse: “creek, inlet, bay” & Old English: “settlement, camp,” although it came to mean piracy – Old Norse: fara í viking means “to go on a viking,” “to go about pirating”).

A fort existed at Helsingør (derived from hals, “neck, narrow strait”) as early as 1200.  King Eric of Pomerania institued the “Sound Dues”(Øresundstolden) in 1429.  Every ship passing through had to pay, and that money went straight to the Danish royal family.  In 1567 the clever King Frederick II changed the tax to 2% of the cargo value (which tripled the income to the throne).  Shrewd Frederick reserved the right to purchase the entire cargo at cost, which tended to keep captains from undervaluing their merchandise.

All that money went into constructing the Kronborg castle, and to funding the King’s militaries to patrol for pirates and guarantee safe passage.  Restrict access (output).  Inflate prices.  The Sound Dues account for two-thirds of Denmark’s state income in the 16th and 17th Centuries.

After the age of the Vikings, the Hanseatic League came to dominate trade and markets across northern Europe for over 400 years.  These merchants spread all around the coasts of the Baltic, stretching to Brugge and London in the west.

The Hansa had no flag.  No seal.  No king.  No real laws or regulations.  But it acted en masse like a cartel.  Hansa towns (mostly ports) dealt in bulk.  Grain from the east.  Herring and cod from the seas and oceans.  Timber, pitch and tar from the north.  Cloth from Flanders and England.  All items with low profit margins.  So to make money, they had to establish a monopoly on shipping.  Control of the flow of goods, and therefore price.

A fascinating economic analysis of the “Hansa” inspired by Network Theory models posits:

Compared to hierarchical forms of enterprise, a network features a horizontal, little formalized and constantly changing structure.  It is often a self-organizing form of cooperation and develops around one or more hubs or nodes, be it in the sense of an ego-network or a heterarchical network.  In the first case, the actor is at the center of the anlysis, whereas the second case resembles a neural network with multiple nodes of varying density.  Unlike the market, the relationship between the actors are not solely regulated according to competition and price or supply and demand.  Instead, the reciprocal transactions are determined by a web of social factors such as obligations, trust, solidarity and reciprocity.

The cohesion of the network is thus produced less through formal rules and contracts than through the presence of a common culture and common goals.

Control of a resource or a product – such as a shipping channel, or a shipping network, or a life-saving shot of epinephrine to counter anaphylactic shock – enables a means of manipulating normal price elasticity.

Control or dominance of “information shipping lanes” resulted in the massive increase in marketing departments in the 20th Century; a trend that the “information superhighway” invented by Al Gore only exacerbated.  The explosion of information repositories has experienced an unusual and mostly unanticipated consolidation to relatively few platforms of social media, many of which serve as the primary source of news content consumed by users.

Mylan’s “EpiPen” is an interesting example of a product whose history demonstrates the kinds of information market control efforts undertaken by the holder(s) of its (copy)rights.

In 2014, the Tufts Center for the Study of Drug Development updated their 2003 estimates for the cost of developing a pharmaceutical product to market approval (the FDA bottleneck) to: 10 years development, $2.9B investment.  In the USA our regulatory agency is responsible for:

… protecting the public health by ensuring the safety, efficacy, and security of human and veterinary drugs, biological products, and medical devices; and by ensuring the safety of our nation’s food supply, cosmetics, and products that emit radiation.

(Whether you believe that the role of a government is to attend to the needs of the people, as in a constitution that is “of,” “by,” and “for the people,” is up to you.  But governments interfere with markets: that’s unquestionable.)

A feature of this market is an approval bottleneck.  A feature of 21st Century markets in particular is the (social) “network effects” (also called network externality or demand-side economies of scale: the effect that one user of a good or service has on the value of that product to other people).  Combine the two and you have a unique regulatory & policy framework that, when leveraged cleverly, tips markets to a particular winner.  

Exempli gratia: Mylan acquired the rights to the EpiPen in 2007 when it produced $200M in annual sales and controlled 90% of the market.  The company spearheaded initiatives to “raise public awareness” (to increase demand) by enabling patient sponsors and lobbying the federal government to mandate that epinephrine autoinjector devices are stocked in public schools (and also, ideally, in restaurants, hotels, and any other public spaces (much like defibrilators have been – Mylan hired the same marketing consultants who generated this advocacy).  With few competitors approved through the FDA (bottleneck) process, essentially a de facto market dominator, you now create a de jure market winner: mandated public institutions, compelled by law, will pass on the (C.Y.A.) responsibility to the parents of at-risk children.  (Id est: “you must buy this epinephrine auto-injector product, and no other” – many parents face this prerequisite condition, or their kids don’t go to school.)

Result: 2007, sales are $200M and 90% market dominance.  In 2015, sales are $1.5B and still 90% market dominance.  As a single product it accounts for about 40% of Mylan’s profit.  The device delivers about $1 worth of drug, and costs around $35 to manufacture.

But I’m not trying to paint Mylan as a company motivated by nefarious intent: they are a for-profit entity who has invested in creating demand (manipulating the market) by the means available to them (and for which they are facing regulatory and public backlash).

This is not a free market.  As the examples of the Sound Dues and the Hanseatic League modus operandi demonstrate, rarely are markets ever truly free.  And conditions for a “perfect market” are unobtainable.

Neither am I apologizing for Mylan’s business model.  I’m rather fascinated by accumulating information: much of this tends to bolster my belief that certain products are not best served by the market structures we create for them.  Particularly those where we weigh the balance as such:

“Lives are at stake” vs. “Lifestyles are at stake.”

The Sound Dues ended in 1857.  The Copenhagen Convention which turned the three “belts” into “international waterways” (free to all commercial and military ships) was precipitated by a US merchant vessel refusing to pay.  They were backed by the declaration from the US government.

In 1853 the US Navy, ordered by President Fillmore, sailed four gunships into Uraga Bay outside Tokyo and threatened to open fire.  Their demands: to open Japanese ports to American trade.

These aren’t “invisible hands.”

Elsinore, and her cyborg twin

Like Britain and France, like Japan and Korea, like Good and Evil, the history between Sverige and Danmark has been amicable, humanitarian, and surprisingly unsanguine.  That’s why the copper canons at Kronberg, Helsingør are entirely for decoration.

Helsingør – Elsinore – 4km across the precipitously deep Øresund (“THE sound”) from Helsinbørg: a familiar location to Shakespeare fans, for here is where Hamlet saw a ghost and all manner of meanings topsy-turvied, and two of Tycho’s cousins went from bit part to starring role.

(Rosencrantz and Guildenstern were two relatively well-known households in the days of the Brahe ascendancy, and related to King Frederick II.)

But I’m surprised more people don’t know the older story of Elsinore and her cyborg twin, Elsinborg.

A millenia before nation-state boundaries distinguished the two sides of the sound, the talented young Elsinore found herself the target of sundry suitors.  Some said the preternatural girl was a demi-offspring of Wodin, some said she was Vanir blood.  The trolls sang her praises in the whistling winds through the fir and spruce that swept down the salt seas from the north to the briny Baltic in the south, their moss-coated heads rippling with the deep baritone of the earth.

But Elsinore knew the weaknesses of men, and thought to teach everyone a lesson about respect and authenticity.  So with the bracken limbs of dead birch and nets of pampas grass, she waded into the Øresund and captured a time-traveling sea bream, constructed of discarded plastic toys and other unwanted trash.

She entreated the trapped fish to teach her engineering, and she constructed a cyborg in her own likeness.  Setting up Helsinbørg in her place, she studied the wooing habits of the love-blind land barons.  To her unsurprise, their affections remained constant and undisturbed: she knew this to be their shallow attraction to her comeliness, and that none of them valued her for her essence, for her cooking, for her intellect, for her collection of cicada shells, not even for her time-bending mastery over pear-shaped atomic nuclei.

So in a fit of rage, she flipped the switch and Helsinbørg breathed forth a wicked concoction of liquid nitrogen and froze all of the suitors.  Then one by one she shattered them, using a plastic hammer she borrowed from the composition of the Yodogawa-style bream.  All but one, who winked at her, despite his frigid condition.

Too late, she realized this one slender youth had been true and sincere in his professions of love.  So she spared him, and set him upon the docks near Kronberg where he remains.

In her sorrow, she banished Helsinbørg from her presence for fear that she would be tempted to utilize her power.  Helsingør grew around her as a city of culture and canons and castles, while Helsinbørg became much more industrial (as you might imagine would have happened).

Of course I did attend a play inside the castle grounds.  I missed the Nordic opera Hamlet: In Absentia by one day, but I did get to see Two Gentlemen of Verona set in the 1960s.  Vinyls replaced the letters, and there was a musical shift mirroring the decade’s progression from first to second half.  They went with the ambiguous version of the tricky ending.

PSYCO-PATH, I mean PROTEUS

Bear witness, Heaven, I have my wish for ever.

JULIA

And I mine.

Julia’s final line is delivered not as a sated happy bride, but as a weary, cynical and perhaps guilty Elsinore.  The play closes not when the men leave the stage, but when they huddle together, and Julia picks up the nearly ravaged Sylvia, and the two share a powerful rendition of All Around is Sorrow.

Now, perhaps more people will recall that Ophelia didn’t jump in the Øresund.  She instead went with a net of woven twigs and grass in hopes of catching that still-floundering unfound fish.

Good night, sweet protector of Danmark.

Tycho & the Mayans

The best of the best of pre-telescopic or pre-instrument star charters: Tycho Brahe, the epic personality, and the Mayans, those clever Mesoamerican engineers.

My bicycle, lashed to the still-useful horse hitch outside Tycho’s church on the isle of Hven (like “Vain”).  It rises from the narrow sea channel between Denmark and Sweden, 50 meter chalk and sand cliffs (called “backafall“) rising to a level plateau.  On the southeast cliffs, an enterprising local has imported alpaca llamas to graze the cliff faces.  He’s planning on doing guided llama rides someday, too, although it only takes about 90 minutes to bike around the entire perimeter, so he’ll probably just stick with wool.

The beneficent, munificent, and scientifically curious King Frederick II (1534 – 1588) offered the island to Tycho in 1575.  Frederick had incidentally been saved from drowning (probably while drunk, as he was a famous soaker) by Tycho’s uncle Jørgen (who died of pnemonia later, as a result).  But Tycho had also been elevated by his accomplishments with fashioning new instruments, publishing De Stella Nova, and catching the eye of some wealthy landed gentry in Germany/Pomerania who shared an interest in astronomy.  The competition for great science pushed Frederick to make an offer Tycho couldn’t refuse.

He couldn’t, and didn’t, and especially appreciated that the island afforded him the luxury of avoiding the social etiquettes and responsibilities of courtly existence: all distractions – in his mind – from doing good work: staring at the night sky and writing everything down.

His sour relationship with the locals has become a persistent bitter history.  Although the requirements of the peasants – content in their half-timbered villages and golden fields – to serve their noble lord with two days every week of manual labor was not unusual for the rest of Denmark at the time, it was epochal change as far as they were concerned.  The island of about 50 families and some 300 people hadn’t had a lord for over 300 years.

Tycho, the hyper-systematic and obsessive control freak, with his census and surveys and measurments, built his utopian Uraniborg smack dab in the middle of the best arable land and disrupted their universe.  Complaints to the crown are consistent throughout his 20+ year presence, and when he finally did lose the island, the locals tore all his buildings down by hand.  Fortunately, a great museum now exists, and inside the grounds is the island’s elementary and middle school.

It is his meticulous attention to detail that makes Tycho’s mark in history.  He is also often remembered for his flaboyant character, his golden nose (he usually wore one of copper or bronze, though), his unusual death*, and the rich and lordly lifestyle he enjoyed.  True enough, silks and spices and all manner of  expensive items were shipped to Hven, and many stories of his ostentatious feasts remain, with detailed herbs and plants painted on the ceiling tiles (as above, so below).

But with his wealth and patronage, he could afford to construct the finest measuring instruments in the world.  And for Tycho, bigger was better.  His sextant took four people to move, his quadrans maximus was twenty feet high, his celestial globe of wood may have been even grander, though it was abandoned when his father fell ill.  Not only this, but he recruited and became patron to a variety of mathematicians, alchemists, engineers, blacksmiths and more who rotated in and out of his properties.  He turned Hven into the first research institute in the western scientific tradition.

The precision and consistency of his records are what enabled Johannes Kepler to distill his three laws of planetary motion: a crucial starting point for Isaac Newton to utilize new mathematic methods (calculus) in an attempt to prove his theory of gravity.

About four years ago I was in Tulum, ancient Maya territory.  The Maya are 4th dimensional thinkers, or we can say they have a quadripartite cosmic philosophy.  A classic example of this thinking:

“Your plane takes two hours to fly from your home to here.  It takes me two hours to drive to here.  In two hours, our cousin can walk from his home to here.  We all live the same distance from here.”

Time is the undifferentiated past, present and future.  And it is cyclical.  They could, “remember the future to anticipate the past.”  Observation of astral motion became witnessing a narrative.  They invented a base-20 mathematics to accommodate for large array numbers (for instance, representing numbers in the hundreds of trillions with three symbols) about 1,100 years before European mathematicians.

the Maya calculated the length of the solar year to be 365.242 days; modern astronomers calculate the solar year to be 365.242198 days. This is only a difference of 0.000198 days per year. The Dresden Codex tracks the moon over a period of 405 lunar months or 11,960 days. These calculations produce an accurate period of 29.5302 days for a lunar month. Modern calculations yield a period for a lunar month equal to 29.53059 days. This a minute difference of 0.00039 days. Their calculations of the synodical period of Venus were calculated as 583.92027 days, compared to 583.93 days by modern calculations. Their uncanny capabilities also included the synodical period of Mars, which was calculated by the Maya to be 780 days compared to modern calculations of 779.94 days.

O’Kon, James A. The Lost Secrets of Maya Technology.

(Was the end of the Mayan calendar meant to indicate apocalypse?  Of course not.  It was merely the end of one of the recurring cycles.  But astrology always sells better than astronomy.  Astrology is what kept the Mayans and Tycho in business, of course.)

I could on and on about Tycho and the Mayans, particularly the similarity in their concept of “levels” or “crystal spheres,” but there are better sources out there.  Not X-Files out there, either, but right here, seated in human ingenuity.  Tycho may have had a research institute unique for its time, but the quadripartite Mayans had an entire hierarchy of society dedicated to astral observation.  They both designed buildings with features expressly for celestial survey.

And they both loved astrology.  As above, so below.

* = the fun part first.  My Austrian high school calculus teacher – brilliant and unique and deserving of his own dedicated attention – told us that Tycho’s death started with self experimentation.  He claimed that Tycho, well-known to be a strong Melanchthonion adherent and therefore believer in God’s ultimate harmonies, thought that consumption and excretion would be an interesting area of study.

That is to say, if we consume only those things that deliver the proper nutritional value, we will not need to defecate or urinate.  So, using himself as a test case, Tycho began refusing to use the facilities.  Extended discipline resulted in him being unable to do so altogether, and he died when his bladder burst during a nobleman’s dinner where it was inappropriate to excuse himself.

Conspiracy theorists (probably astrologists, too, in fact) think Tycho was poisoned, perhaps even by Kepler himself.  An exhumation of his body in Prague in the early 20th century revealed levels of arsenic and mercury, but a subsequent exhumation in 2010 debunked this theory: the levels were not fatal nor unusual.

On October 13, 1601 Tycho attended dinner at the palace of Peter Vok Ursinus Rozmberk, where it is true that it was discourteous to rise from your seat if your host has not.

Holding his urine longer than was his habit, Brahe remained seated. Although he drank a little overgenerously and experienced pressure on his bladder, he felt less concern for the state of his health than for etiquette. By the time he returned home, he could not urinate any more. [Kepler here noted down the positions of the Moon, Saturn, and Mars on the night of the banquet.]

Finally, [after five days of rest] with the most excruciating pain, he barely passed some urine. But, yet, it was blocked. Uninterrupted insomnia followed; intestinal fever; and little by little, delirium. His poor condition was made worse by his way of eating, from which he could not be deterred. On 24 October, when his delirium had subsided for a few hours, amid the prayers, tears, and efforts of his family to console him, his strength failed and he passed away very peacefully. At this time, then, his series of heavenly observations was interrupted, and the observations of thirty-eight years came to an end. During his last night, through the delirium in which everything was very pleasant, like a composer creating a song, Brahe repeated these words over and over: “Let me not seem to have lived in vain.”

Ferguson, Kitty (2013-01-31). Tycho and Kepler: The Unlikely Partnership that Forever Changed our Understanding of the Heavens

Cooking = Language, Resources & Ends

From Farm Forest to Table, from Table to Forest.  Read it and weep, foodies.  I ate at noma.

I met a young programmer in the Fælledparken green space north west of Copenhagen.  I had gotten to meet the boys from Ragnarok, and they let me play along a bit at their team practice.  He told me that he had written a program that leverages zombies in a bot-net to continuously attempt to book a reservation at noma.

“I got in,” I told him.

“No!  How long did it take?”

“Less than five minutes.”

“Oh, ok.  Who do you know?”

“No one.  I walked across the bridge, asked if there were cancellations, and they said, ‘Sure, stop by on Saturday.'”

And that is how you get a kind and well-spirited Danish boy to spike a frisbee in your face.

I squeezed in to the community table.  Rudolfo and Ampara from Barcelona on the left, Judith and Steve from New York on my right.  The Spaniards and the Yawkers spoke about the famous molecular gastronomy of (3-Michelin Star) elBulli, and Judith (working with the James Beard Foundation), said, “Instead of Farm to table, this is going to be forest to table.”  Steve leaned toward me and whispered, “I draw the line at moss.  I’m not eating any moss.  We’ve got to have standards.”

Before food was cooked, did we have a word for “raw”?  A carrot was not a “raw” carrot until it could also be a cooked carrot.  Burnt, roasted, fried, smoked, steamed, sous vide, boiled.  Or rotten.

Claude Lévi-Strauss postulated a culinary triangle in a 1965 essay, presumably the result of some thought during his legendary four-volume Mythologiques.  Picture a triangle.  Heck, I’ll just draw it:

CLS had a point here (that has been refuted numerous and elsewhere) in drawing an analogy of language and “cooking”:  that both have an inherent and unconscious structure of binaries (and therefore, shifting valuations – or perhaps I should say: valuations subject to the specific cultural inertia of their synchronic space).  (Goes down like a mouthful of moss to some people, I get it.)

When we position “Raw” at the top, we can think of transformations down the sides to reach “Cooked” or “Rotten.”  We can further consider gradations.  For example, roasting can be done on a simple spit.  I’ve seen Alton Brown grill a flank steak directly on the charcoal, in fact.  But boiling requires not only water as a medium, but pots and pans as tools.  At different times and in different societies, certain techniques are not only valued above others, but ritualized to specific events, times, and locales.  If you flip the triangle to have “Rotten” or “Cooked” on top, we can envision numerous other modalities and spectra of difference (and différance).

We came through the kitchen of 80 workers, all of whom greeted us.  We were invited to watch them prepare our food, and given a tour of everything on site.  Transparency is highly valued here.

The plate served on the mossy rocks is a pickled quail egg underneath the watercress-like leaves, a black currant berry coated in an armor of seeds and unripe strawberry juice (which apparently mimics a citrus juice) laid among some flower petals, and an edible twig (forgive me, I forgot the name and it wasn’t on the menu) with an ant paste.

The greens they are preparing in the kitchen are from different kinds of seaweed.  The server admitted to me, “We can get this seaweed here, but it is small and not well cared for.  We get it from Japan, because they really care for their seaweed.”

The charred greens come from forest and from sea, from bushes and from weeds.  Grilled on an outdoor barbeque because the building is an old warehouse where they used to break down whales.  Dry, aged and brittle wood means there is a policy of no open flames inside. They are brushed with a dark paste made from caramelized scallops.  I quoted from the New Nordic Cuisine manifesto when I asked them serve it on my frisbee: because that is part of my natural habitat, and the food is best presented that way (yes, I know it means in the food’s own natural habitat, but I wanted my moment).

I would love to have a kind of foraging restaurant in Colorado.  Mel with your fancy nutrition and herbal studies degree, what do you think?  Want to open a restaurant where we serve only what we forage?  Jaime can cook (for everyone except Marlowe, because, you know), and I’ll read the books.

Here’s some topical wall posters I found at the Roskilde Viking Museum cafeteria:

What would Lévi-Strauss say if he encountered a Viking contemplating a block of stinky cheese?

Copenhagen Opera Week,あそばせ言葉, Danish Design & Art

The Operaen, seen here through a chain fence on an approach bridge, is one of the most expensive and well-equipped facilities of its kind in the world.  Opera has always seemed inaccessible to me.  This week is Opera Week.

Stages and soundsets are erected at sundry major city intersections and gathering places.  One is at the Torverhallerne, an outdoor/indoor/warehouse-style collection of dozens of boutique specialist micro-vendors: an olive vendor from Greece, a kimchi-sandwich specialist, a Paleo-friendly bakery, a wine pub, three different charcuteries, two fresh fish vendors directly across from one another.  Yes, a juice bar.  Duh.  Picnic tables, sunbrellas, bistro tables and recycling bins, just above the metro stop.

Free opera stage at Torverhallerne

I don’t know the operas.  I don’t know the language of most of them, nor even the plot.  I know them on a mythological, Campbell-esque level of ISMs and basic human empathy, but I can’t place a song within a piece.  The barrier has been cost, more than anything.

So I tell myself.  I’ve met ballerinas – one a prima from Azerbaijan, who quit because she is too tall for most men to dance with her (she is also perhaps the most well-read person I have ever met) – who don’t make enough money in their craft to afford tickets to their own shows.  But they do.

So has the barrier been monetary?

There is free opera on the street, for anyone to consume.  This shining examplar of design sensibility (I mean Danish design): it is everywhere, in every curve on a shipping container to the shape of the LED street lamps to the three self-evident circles on the public washroom sink tap.  The island next to the Operaen is the Papirøen: a kind of permanent food-truck island.  The entire structure is old shipping containers, and the inside is reminiscent of a Singapore food market.  It is cheap, fresh, vibrant, and has an art space currently showing Yoko Ono’s Wishing Trees.

“Wishing Tree” exhibit by Yoko Ono at Papirøen

Not far beyond the Papirøen is Noma: twice (or more) the greatest restaurant in the world, culmination of Chef Rene Redzepi’s gastronomic manifesto, housed in an abandoned whaling butchery.  Not far beyond Noma, in a squatted military base, is the Freetown of Christiania, a kind of social experiment since 1971 when the local homeless tore down a fence to make a playground for their kids.  (They ask you do not take photos, and they have signs banning Pokemon Go collectors, but I snapped a pic of this statue before knowing the no-photo rule.)

Untitled statue at Freetown of Christiania

Finally, overlooking Freetown rises the spiral tower of Vor Frelsers Kirke (“Church of Our Savior”).  The classic Scandinavian baroque project of  King Christian IV (who drove Tycho Brahe to Prague) stands out with an external winding helical staircase that climbs nearly 300 feet into the otherwise low skyline of the city.  People wait more than an hour to ascend, step by step in a line.  At the top, there is no grand viewing platform: you simply turn around and go back.  It wasn’t built for the general public, nor for a tourist market.  It was for the King or the Bishop to view, to ponder, to consider.

Is it the money?  When art is comercially and financially successful, when the trappings of moneyed culture glom onto it, has the art changed?  Or just us?  It costs me nothing to look at the statues in Christiania.  Does that make their art more authentic than the musical showing at the Operaen this week (which happens to be “Dirty Dancing”…), on a stage with a rotating outer ring and an inner hydraulic collapsible fence, with hi-res cameras projecting onto movable screens, with world-class musicians in the pit?  (Did they sell out to sell out?)

I saw an opera student singing outside Torverhallerne who pulled off her bracelets, her earrings, her scarf, her rings, and pulled down her “f*ck me red” panties and threw them into the crowd while laughing falsetto.  (While I drank a 25cl Odense Classic.)  I saw Yoko Ono’s re-hash of a scene at every 神道 shrine I’ve ever visited in 日本 labelled as an installation exhibit.

We bring class/division/categoricals into our Art.  We find it there, because that’s how our minds work.  We layer platitudes like, “All Art is political.”  To me, that’s as genuine as saying “All Art is made by humans.”

Audre Lorde, self-identified: “black, lesbian, mother, warrior, poet,” in her essay “Poetry is not a Luxury” writes:  “If what we need to dream, to move our spirits most deeply and directly toward and through promise, is a luxury, then we have given up the core – the fountain – of our power, our womanness; we have given up the future of our worlds.”

So who makes opera luxurious?  All art for that matter?  A public or private delineator, a cost barrier, an expectation, a purpose.

Chef Redzepi of Noma, in his New Nordic Cuisine [PDF], defines the French terroir as “the combined conditions offered by nature – soil and sun, wind and rain – that endow food with its unique identity.”

Redzepi speaks of nature, Lorde speaks of experience.  The Copenhagen Design Museum looks at production.  Papirøen is an urban design experiment.  Yoko Ono is an installation/importation.  Christiania is a social experiment.  Vor Frelsers spire is responsibility.  Opera Week is ambush art.  Some of us are pasting over all of this with thoughts of, “Yes, but homogeneity…”   Homogeneity is quite loaded, and will take some time to unravel, to unwind.  For now, I’m thinking about Homo Ludens and how it can distort perception.

Johan Huizinga in Playing Man (“Homo Ludens”) is quoted by Joseph Campbell:

“[Japanese language] still preserves this conception in the asobase-kotoba (literally, play-language) or polite speech, the mode of address used in conversation with persons of higher rank… the revered person is imagined as living in an elevated sphere where only pleasure or condescension moves to action.”

However… in her text “Women’s Language, Men’s Language,” linguist Ide Sachiko writes:

“Asobase kotoba (exaggerated politeness) is a specialized form of honorific or polite speech used only by women wishing to emphasize or draw attention to their femininity…. The form was commonly used by women of the upper classes and high-ranking courtesans.  By adding the verg asobasu to action verbs in the second and third person, the user may feel that she is elevating the referee’s status – even if only marginally – in the specific context of the immediate conversation by implying an association with a social elite, past or present.”

Two rather different takes on the terroir of language use.

Opera is graffiti across the public spaces, across the terroir, of Copenhagen.  How we watch, smell, listen, taste, participate – where we do so – how we do so: it is for the Lordes and Huizingas, the Campbells and Redzepis, the Ides and Onos.  I’m just here, seeing the same thing in different ways.

Stay for the jousting (and the mead)

“If you do not drink your schnapps in one go, then tomorrow it will rain.”  So says hyperbolic Nikolaj, the college student pub crawl guide with a shock of red hair, trim mustaccios, and a flair for overacting.

I sat on a wooden bench under a monastery from the late 1300s.  Cross vault overhead, red brick church sprouting into a large cathedral sometime over the next 400 years.  The Danehof pub crawl underway, locals carrying steins and a length of twine to hang them around their necks.  Nikolaj crouches and stands tall, ebbing and cresting with his body and his voice as he enspirits the longship crawl, Baltic Crusades, the free and easy flow of beer, the Varangian graffiti artist Halvdan in the Hagia Sophia.

Skål.  Danish.  From old Norse skál (“bowl”).  Swedish: skål.  Mythically a Viking ritual of raising glasses and looking one another in the eyes as a demonstration of trust; i.e.: you haven’t just poisoned your drinking partner.

Danehof 2016 begins.  The Danehof (“Danish Court”) is an early parliamentary institution that existed between 1250 and 1413.  King Christopher I (1219 – 1259) lived precariously (read: was a man of his time).  His father a King and second son.  Accused his dead eldest brother of murdering his second brother.  (The machination being to transfer succession to his own children rather than the alleged fratricidal sibling).  Most likely died from poisoning at the hands of the church – they disapproved of his incarceration of the archbishop.  He disapproved of the archbishop denying his son Erik V recognition as the rightful heir.  He only ruled from 1252 – 1259.

His wife, Margrethe Sambirsdatter, a slav from Pomerania, became queen regent until 1264.  Son Erik V lived and “reigned” longer than his father, but by 1282 the Danes – ever freedom-loving and independence-craving (Bede wrote (mid 8th C) that they would draw lots to pick a leader in times of war, but “the lords revert to equality of status” once completed), forced the Danehof to be gathered.  A royal charter limited the throne’s ability to tax and to impose law, and redistributed authority to the collective.  The seat of the Danehof was the drinking hall of Nyborg Slot (“Castle”).  Even with the appeasement of this charter, Erik was still murdered in 1286, only four years later.

Annually the Danehof festival occupies the town.  A medieval costume party, everyone pitches in.  Ripe peas and strawberries are abandoned in the fields to knit liveries.  Breweries load their barrels onto wagons.   Smiths and jewelers hammer out swords, armor, and shiny trinkets.  The town square is layered with sod and wood pulp, pine branches are fashioned into lances, and horses are prepped for battle.

The jousting is the main attraction.  Four knights in full regalia (three boys and one girl) are accompanied by their squires and pages.  Spouting Nikolaj ascends the king and queen’s box with a flourish and an olive smock, the color commentator.  These are not staged.  These are not faked, or for show.  Not a facsimile.  This is true competition.

At full tilt and in full armor, it is difficult to imagine how they can see anything: narrow slits high in the helmet, and an alarming number of shots to the head.  Points are scored for striking your oppoenent’s shield, extra for breaking your lance, extra for knocking off their helm adornments, and the most points for unseating the rider (nearly impossible with these high-backed saddles).  Wooden mallets clang away to both put the helmet on and to take it off.

The horses are extremely difficult to control.  The woman knight is the best rider, executing a beautiful sideways trot.  She also has the most spirited horse.  Most of them shy away from the squires bringing the lance, but once they know the rider is armed, they are ready to charge, and do not like to wait.  At least half of the contests result in no hit and missed aim, often because one horse charged too soon, or ran too far off course.

(I will post my brief 10 sec video clips when I upgrade my account.  But for now, here’s a 2012 video on youtube that does a great job highlighting the preparations and execution of the joust, filmed at this same festival.)

“Mad med mere.”  Food and more.  Finally found him.  The mead brewer.  He knows people in Durango (he looks to me like he’s from Durango).  Brews about 1,000 liters per year, all homemade, all alone.  Has no interest in going commercial.  A German company sold mead at Danehof, as well, with four stalls around the city.  “But they put weird stuff in there, I don’t trust it.”

 

“Male-gaze” & Statuary: e.g. 3

A plaque label says: “Gerettet von Adolf Brütt.”  Gerettet translates from German to English as “Saved.”  However, this piece is known as “Der Fischer.”  Bronze, done sometime between 1887 and 1894.  

This is a second casting, placed in 1991 in Möltenort.  Brütt taught sculpting in Kiel before training at the Berlin Academy of Art.  Born in Hutum, he took many holidays in the Kiel region.  Apparently during one of these holidays to Möltenort – about halfway between Laboe and Kiel – he witnessed fisherman Klaus Löpthien rescue a young girl from drowning. 

From the linked page: “Der feste Stand des Fischers und die kraftlose Haltung des Frau ergeben einen eindrucksvollen Kontrast. Der Körper der Frau formt weich fließende Linien, während der männliche Körper stabil aufrecht steht.”

Roughly, something like: “The firm/fixed stance of the ‘Fisherman’ and the powerless/lifeless/helpless pose of the woman gives an impressive contrast.  The woman’s body is in soft flowing lines, while the male body stands firm/straight/upright.”

Second is the “Bullayer Brautrock.”  It doesn’t translate directly as “bridal gown,” but more like “The Bridal Skirt of Bullay.”  Bullay is a village on the Moselle River (part of German wine country).  Records show that as early as the 12th Century Bullay existed as a free city with its own local customs and laws.  Even today, Bullay is part of a “collective municipality.”  The values of independence, self-discipline and entrepreneurial spirit are the bedrock of the story to which the statue pays homage.

According to local folk tradition, a Count Beisel lived in the area in the 16th Century.  Either he or his son (or both) lived lavish and large, squandering most of their money.  When the time came for him to propose a marriage of his son to the daughter of a well-heeled local knight, he rather awkwardly requested that the bride’s family pay for the ceremonies.  This was not the local custom at the time.

The bride’s cunning father drafted a contract to protect his daughter.  He agreed to the marriage and to covering all expenses, but he leveraged this against the security of the Count’s assets.  He required that any and all profits from the Count’s “Brautrock” vineyard become the sole possession of the bride to protect her in the event of the groom’s family continuing in their fiscally unsupportable habits.

To commemorate this tale and the prudent self-reliance it venerates, we have a statue of a naked girl presenting her “wedding skirt.”

Third and last, the “Havfrue Springvand” (Mermaid Fountain) in the center of Svendborg, Denmark.  By Neils Hansen Jacobsen (1861 – 1941).  This has been moved to various places around the town, and moving it to the current location – at eye level in the middle of the market square – made it a centerpiece for a protest.  While it seems that protest had to do with displeasure at the nature of “rennovation frenzy” in policy and practice, what struck me when walking past it just how highly sexualized it is.

Sometimes, these kinds of fundamental displays are so transparent and so frontal that they go unnoticed.  Art (read: values) surrounds us so frequently, so constantly, so immanently, that we are blind to it.  Inured to our own societas.  Even the “Other” can become interpolated in this orthogonal way.  In these three cases, it is revealing just how deeply unremarkable the male gaze [PDF] is within the mundane perception of the dominant cultural aesthetic.

A Viking without a ship is like…

German philosopher Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche wrote, “A Viking without a ship is like God without a fish.  And I sure do like riding my bicycle.”

Ladby (roughly meaning “Loading Town”) sits on a small fjord that empties into Kerteminde Bay to the east.  Odense Fjord lies just to the west.  A sentry can be posted to a hill to watch ships entering into either fjord: just the kind of place a local despot with means and ways would look to control.

In 1930, a farmer’s plow dug up a viking burial mound from 930.  It remains the only one of its kind found in Denmark (other mounds have been found in Norway of roughly the same age).  So a museum has been hoisted over the site.  I reach Ladby riding north-northwest from Nyborg about 25 km.  Through yellow fields dotted with bright ponceau, clouds of bugs, pebbly shores, squat timbered houses with thatched roofs, white churches from the 17th-18th century, peppery rain drops, roadside stalls with “Nye Kartoffel,””jordbær,” “ærter” and “kirsebær” (new potatoes, strawberries, peas in the shell, and cherries).

I didn’t see any Vikings.  Locals say they have all retreated further into the forests.  Every now and then there are stories of village girls being taken while foraging, or an occassional iron axe buried in the back of a car or van.  But it appears most Vikings have become very reclusive.  They shun Flickr and Pinterest but sometimes post to Instagram, and their twitter has been inactive for centuries.

Their relative disappearance has coincided with a sharp drop in mead consumption.  I’ve visited many a local “bryggeri” on Fyn and the surrounding islands.  They all make typical IPAs and heavy malts and ales (one with Baltic seaweed that is salty, and one with walnuts that is rich and creamy).

“Hi, I’m looking for mead.”

“For what?”

“Mead.  Honey wine.”

“Never heard of it.  We have ale…”

“It is an old Viking drink, traditional Danish.”

“Oh, you mean mjød.”

“No, I don’t need a mule.  Mead.”

“No one drinks it any more.  You might find it at a specialty store.”

“Do you know where I can find one in town?”

“Nope.”

You can find it, but not often.  When you do, it is about 135 kroner ($20 USD) for 750ml.  I have seen it in Boulder for about $34.  There is a “honning” (honey) tour on Fyn – this island which prides itself on living local (Svendborg is one of the recognized cities of the cittaslow association).  And one of the stops is labeled a “Mjød bryggeri,” so I know there is one on the island.  I just haven’t found it.  Doubtless it is surrounded by the remaining Vikings, probably hanging out with Nessie and the chupacabra.

The ship in Ladby had been dragged up onto a hill: these longships have virtually zero draft.  A prince lay in the stern, a servant killed at his feet.  A half dozen horses and four dogs were slaughtered, then left to drain inside the shallow ship.  The anchor remained in the prow.  Layers of wooden planks wedged against one another to form a canopy, and the dark rich soil covered it over.  Oak logs formed a pallisade to hold the mound in place.  Within a few years, the chamber had been looted.

The ship lies 24 meters in length, shallow and narrow.  There are slots for 16 oars on either side.  The slots have optional Thule racks for carrying traditional shields or 11-speed touring bikes (with hydraulic breaks and carbon belts instead of chains, of course – the Baltic is pretty brackish but once you get out to the north sea the salt will rust chains within a day, c’mon).

Volunteers have been building a replica of the ship using old traditional methods of construction.  The fittings are all local iron, forged and hammered.  The boat is made from oak, and the mast will be pine.  Pics in the gallery include the anchor and chain, a view of the burial mound, skeletal horse jaw imprints, classical Viking Stihl chainsaws, pendants and brooches (assuming some are Huginn and Muninn, worn in pairs), a 1:10 scale model of the original ship, the “Aunslev Christ” (Denmark’s oldest crucifix), and some recreations of Viking clothing (spoiler alert: they are not like the Vikings you have come to expect).

The “Aunslev Christ” appears straight from the Old Saxon language of the Heliand (“Savior”): all four gospels relocated from the Middle East and the Mediterranean to Scandinavia.

“Jesus is baptized, and the dove that represents the Holy Ghost comes down; but the dove doesn’t stay above his halo’d head, it settles on his shoulder, just as Wotan’s sacred bird, the raven, settles on his shoulder. The disciples wait for him on the shores of a lake that is really a sea, with sands and dunes, and they sail out in ‘well-nailed’ boats made from overlapping planks ostentatiously nailed in place, ‘high-horned’ ships with prows like Viking vessels. They sail like veterans of such North Sea ships, turning into the wind to stop the waves catching the flanks of their ship.”  Edge of the World, by Michael Pye.

 

 

Fåborg and Norse Origin Mythologies

Traipsed into Fåborg, a portly hamlet of south Fyn  (South Fyn – Funen – Fiòna). The city of Odense sprawls out on the north coast, the birthplace of Hans Christian Andersen (1805 – 1875).

Danish has true vowels (while English has diphthongs).  Try saying your English vowels out loud:

A	like in the middle of “hay” or”hey” – notice how your jaw slightly closes as you go from start to finish, and it rises
E	mostly a constant long sound, like in “flee” or “flea”
I	more pronounced closing of the jaw as you draw this out from start to finish – end sound is like an ‘E’
O	just like when you overemphasize saying “no,” as in, “Are you the one who ate my flan?”  “Nooo.”  It rises at the end, just like ‘A’ and ‘I.’
U	like “yew,” or the middle of “yule,” the beginning sharp with the “y” shape and sound, the ending a sound of disgust

English “vowels” as we native American English speakers pronounce them slide (or glide, depending on your mood) – they change their sound depending on where you are: the ending of an “I” doesn’t sound at all like the beginning of an “I,” and same with the “U.”

(The term diphthong comes from the Greek: “diph” meaning “two” and “thongos” meaning “sound; tone” – also means someone who dual-wields thongs.)

Danish vowels are true vowels: short, crisp, attentive and standing to order.  They have one sound, and do not glide.  In the map above, two examples are:

Fåborg	We call å “a hat.” Sounds like “aw” in “paw. “Faw – borg,” which we write (read: transliterate) as “Faaborg.”
København	Ø becomes “o bar,” which sounds a lot like the German or Swedish ö (which is “o umlaut”), and sounds a little like the middle “e” in “her” (which is why when you hear a German say “Göethe,” it almost sounds like a little “r” is creeping in there (“GRR-tuh“), which drives my sister crazy – “I don’t see any damn ‘R’ in his name!”).

Fåborg is tiny, with one or two cobblestone streets.  Painted with the typical pastel colors outside Scandinavian homes: pale & bright yellow, luscious ruby, sighing turqoise.  I think it is because these colors become so vibrant in the long and low light that drags across the southern sky like an overripe tomato that is flung against a wall.  It creeps slowly, leaving a brilliant residue.

Mid-day is harsh light, like the Colorado summertime: raw and stinging.  But from 4pm to 10pm it lingers thickly, like fingers sticky with syrupy cotton candy, or a tenderloin marinade heavy with tamari.

Stumbling through the town square I meet this statue.

If I remember my Norse mythology, this is Bure (or Bùri) and Ymur.  (My saga transliterated him as “Bure,” which I read sometime in junior high school and apparently has been obviated in the age of wikipedia to a more proper translated entity: like diphthongs, translations glide over time.  There’s something about when your childhood memories get corrected by collective wisdom…)

No plaque explained the statue, but I recall an elemental bovine licking at a cube of ice, out of which Bùri formed.  Both Ymur and the cow (Auðumbla) spawned from a primordial river.  While the cow nursed Ymur – who was the progenitor of the ice giants – she licked away at the salty ice.  After three days (it is always three, isn’t it?  Unless it is seven), Bùri emerged.  He is the grandfather of Odin.

Curiosity drew people to the statue.  Most people were impressed by Ymur’s exagerrated non-circumcised condition.  (He is far better endowed than Michelangelo’s David, let’s get that right – my father, with a fatherly penchant for inappropriate exhortations at inappropriate times, once stood in a throng of tourists beneath the contraposto pre-pubescent youth as he stared from Florence to Rome and said, “Yep, David.  The most famous penis in the world.”  And then guffawed to his own inimitable self.  My poor, mortified mother.)

Two German boys, about 4 and 6 I’d guess, found it a great handhold when ascending the statue.  Their father couldn’t help but giggle, and his wife, laughing, kept slapping him on the arm when he took out his smartphone.

I don’t recall any early daguerreotypes of the mid- to late 19th century being used to shame our progeny.

A couple more pictures of Fåborg scenery (yes, that Thor Heyerdahl):