fulbrighterinfinland

Signing Off

kenjanekolson@yahoo.com (Washington Buckeye) — Sat, 30 Dec 2006 16:45:00 +0000

When, nearly thirty years ago, Ted Turner started the Cable News Network, critics scoffed. How committed are you to this crazy idea? they asked. What will you do when the novelty wears off?

When he grew weary of answering such questions, Turner came up with an all-purpose retort: “We will stay on the air till the end of the world and then we will cover the story and sign off playing ‘Nearer My God to Thee.’”

I think I can declare this blog a success, albeit a modest one, unlike Turner’s. I know that I have learned much from those who have shared their ideas publicly or by way of private emails. At times, I have been sorely challenged—and at other times, immensely entertained—by readers’ comments.

I left the land of glorious birch trees (see photo above) on December 20 and have been home--and reunited with my luggage on Christmas day--ever since. Meanwhile, fulbrighterinfinland has been running on fumes. I will be calling it quits after this post, but the site will remain open for awhile so that readers might conduct any residual business they might have.

I have begun to edit my previous posts and to compose a few more on subjects not covered heretofore to see if there is a book in here somewhere. I would welcome your suggestions about topics that should be explored further, or about blog-to-book conversions. (I’ve been told that they’re called “blooks.”)

Naivete is a wondrous thing. When I began this venture last August, I had no idea it would prove to be so demanding a master, so addictive, or so intensely gratifying. I am sorry to see it end, but life goes on. I sincerely thank you for your company and your support.

Hei hei!

Granite Igloo

kenjanekolson@yahoo.com (Washington Buckeye) — Thu, 28 Dec 2006 14:57:00 +0000

On the day I first arrived at the Oulu railway station last August, I espied an unusual structure alongside the tracks, and I made a note in my journal: “rock igloo,” followed by a question mark. Later, it occurred to me to ask one of my students about it.

“Interesting you should ask,” Hannu replied, “because the ‘igloo’ is currently being threatened by demolition. I believe the structure was built during the war or just before it. It was used as an auxiliary station house in war time because the area was often under bombardment by Russian planes for its strategic importance.” What had looked to me like an “igloo” is the fortified roof of an underground bunker.

Hannu went on to report that VR, the state railway, wants to build a “travel center” on that particular parcel of land, which would mean razing the igloo and the brick building next to it. He said the project had been controversial, in part because the city council caved in so readily to VR, and also because preservationists recognize that it “is one of the few buildings that represent the war time here.” Hannu noted that it might be a good place to install some kind of exhibit on Finland’s complicated role in the Second World War, which unfolded in two distinct stages—the Winter War (1940-41), and the Continuation War (1941-44).

This conversation took place mainly by e-mail. I wrote back and asked if the structure has a name. “They call it a kivikukko,” he replied, “which means ‘Stone Cock’ (and before you think much further, that really refers to a male chicken). I have no idea where the name comes from. Maybe because it is shaped a bit like an egg?”

Well, now I was starting to be intrigued.

Upon further reflection, Hannu noted that the shape of the structure “resembles a food that has been eaten in the Oulu region,” which is called kalakukko (fish cock?) In the meantime, I had been wondering, with all due respect to “cock” and “male chicken,” whether kukko might be better translated as “cuckoo.” The cuckoo is a fairly reclusive bird that looms large in Finnish—indeed, Western—culture, mainly because of its perverse practice of depositing its eggs in other birds’ nests so that its offspring might be raised by “foster parents.” Etymologically, cuckoo actually is related to “cuckold,” which seemed to me yet another reason to think that kivikukko might be a reference to surrogate, or even unnatural beds, or nests.

While we were speculating in this way, I was planning a trip to Rovaniemi, where there is a before-and-after exhibit devoted to the destruction of the city by the Germans at the end of the Continuation War. A close inspection confirmed that there was no rock igloo in 1939, and sure enough, the 1944 display shows a circular structure in ruins not far from the railway station.

At this point, I was pretty far along in the process of becoming a rock igloo connoisseur, which reminded me of the time—many moons ago, while living in Ohio—that I developed something of a romantic obsession with Indian mounds. Once enchanted, a landscape can appear littered with plundered Indian mounds or derelict rock igloos.

Meanwhile, the indefatigable Hannu discovered that there is a scholarly literature on the subject, and that the definitive work has been done by Dr. Paavo Talman, a human geographer at the University of Helsinki. Dr. Talman confirms that Oulu’s granite igloo was constructed in 1941-42, that it is a particularly “stately monument,” and that it was subject to heavy bombardment.[1] Dr. Talman has done his homework—even the measurements, apparently:

Steel and concrete walls are 0.75 meters thick and the roof is 0.85 meters thick. Steel rails inside the concrete casting support the roof. Brick into two larger and two smaller rooms, a small toilet and a storeroom divide the interior space. The bunker has two entrance/exit corridors on opposite sides of the building. The corridor pathway is angular, to lessen bomb pressure wave intensity. Entrance/exit corridors are equipped with think steel doors. Doors and ventilation channels sealed tight enough to give protection from gas attacks. The base under the bunker, about 1.5
meters below the ground, is kept dry by drainage pipes. [2]

Among the miscellaneous factoids reported by Dr. Talman are that Oulu’s igloo is somewhat unique in never having had a sodden roof, and that it sometimes is rented out to a rock band that practices in the chamber. Dr. Talman endorses Hannu’s theory about the origin of the name. “Because of its odd shape, townspeople have given it a cosy name, kivikukko, which can be roughly translated as ‘Stony Pie.’” [3] And he makes a strong case for igloo preservation: “Their protection, as special national landmarks, should become part of a comprehensive architectural preservation program.”[4]

Not long after this barrage of disappointments (I so much preferred the cuckoo theory), I found myself boarding a southbound train to Helsinki, where I planned to spend a couple of days before flying home. There, I found another message from Hannu, who now reported that “the rock igloo is doomed. The last appeal for it has been turned down by the regional environment centre. It was felt that all the new buildings and the removal of some earlier ones caused the area to lose its special value and there was no basis for saving the stone cock and the brick building next to it.” He predicted that there would be a protest “that will not be able to change much.”

In the annals of preservation history, the loss of Oulu’s granite igloo probably does not rank as a disaster of epic proportions. Still, one wonders why the good citizens of Oulu are so indifferent to an important chapter of their city’s history. Even more mysterious is the tourist bureau’s willingness to let VR destroy a cultural resource that could, with a little creative marketing, become a major tourist attraction.

I am, as I said, a romantic. In my mind’s eye, I see a television advertisement—produced, perhaps, by the firm that came up with the suggestive “what happens in Las Vegas, stays in Las Vegas” ad campaign. A helicopter flying low over Agra swoops down on the Taj Mahal, then circles the structure as the cameras capture, in slow motion, every gorgeous inch of it. “Been there?” asks the narrator—David McCullough, say. Suddenly, the helicopter is transported to Tuscany, where it hovers over the Leaning Tower of Pisa. “Done that?” the narrator asks again. Cue Peggy Lee. “And when you had been there, and done that, did you think to yourself, ‘Is that all there is?’ Admit it, you thought there must be something wrong with you because visiting these fabulous pilgrimage destintations wasn’t anywhere near as thrilling as you’d imagined it would be.”

Gradually, Peggy Lee yields to Sibelius, and the screen fills with black-and-white images of soldiers in white parkas, skiing through the forests of Lapland, rifles slung across their shoulders. It’s the winter of 1940. Over this footage, the narrator continues, “Isn’t it time you experienced something truly exciting? In northern Ostrobothnia, there is a place—a magical place—that conveys like no other the meaning of heroism, love of country, and manly devotion to duty. Come and behold the Rock Cock of Oulu, a UNESCO World Heritage Site. This message was sponsored by the Oulu Tourist Bureau, with our partners, VR and Viagra.”

I can dream, can't I?

[1] Paavo Talman, “Finnish Wartime Emergency Railway Stations (air raid shelters),” perhaps available through Dr. Talman at paalvo.talman@helsinki.fi.
[2] Ibid.
[3] Ibid.
[4] Ibid.

Darkness at Noon (with apologies to Arthur Koestler)

kenjanekolson@yahoo.com (Washington Buckeye) — Sat, 23 Dec 2006 13:52:00 +0000

At about 11:50 a.m., ten minutes before check-out time at my hotel, I ran a quick errand up to Rovaniemi’s main square, which used to be called Sampo Square, which is the name of a bank. It’s now called Lordi’s Square, after the heavy metal group that has been adopted by the chamber of commerce here in Santa Claus City. Times change, eh?

Imagine my surprise when I encountered a reindeer, tethered in the heart of Lordi’s Square and surrounded by a score of curious on-lookers. Most of them, strangely enough, seemed to be locals. I’m not sure where all the Japanese tourists were when I was making a spectacle of myself, trying to frame my face with the reindeer over my shoulder. I’m afraid all the light ended up on me and left Donder over yonder in the semi-darkness. You can just barely make him out if you squint.

Reindeer are shy creatures, and the vibes I got indicated that Donder didn’t care much for the flash. So it all came down to one low-percentage shot, a long three-pointer at the buzzer. I nearly nailed it.

Rovaniemi and Hagerstown

kenjanekolson@yahoo.com (Washington Buckeye) — Sat, 23 Dec 2006 02:13:00 +0000

The other reason I went to Lapland after the semester ended was because I wanted to track down a loose end having to do with the history of city planning. Here’s a link to Rovaniemi's website, http://www.rovaniemi.fi/?deptid=3694, and here’s what my Lonely Planet guide has to say:

After its complete destruction by the Germans in 1944, it was rebuilt from a plan by Alvar Aalto, with the main streets radiating out from Hallituskatu in the shape of reindeer antlers, though this would only be obvious from the air.

First, let the record show that the reindeer antler plat would not be obvious from the air, any more than it is from a map. If you were to take a highlighter and use it very selectively on the city’s streets, I suppose you could produce a pattern that looked like reindeer antlers. I don’t doubt for a minute that Aalto saw reindeer’s antlers in the city’s streets, but then, as I learned years ago from good ol’ H. W. Jansen, Pablo Picasso could see a bull’s head in an old bicycle seat and a set of handlebars. But having a good eye is not the same thing as executing a “plan.” There is, too, the question of why a world-class architect not known for his egotism would impose a conceit of this sort on a client, especially one that happened to be an entire city.

My heart skipped a beat when I walked into the Rovaniemi room at Arktikum and saw what I immediately recognized as a city model, much like the model of Oulu that captured my fancy at the Museum of Northern Ostrobothnia. Then I noticed that there was actually a second one right next to it, and sure enough, both are models of Rovaniemi, one in 1939, the other in 1944—before and after the devastation wrought by the retreating German army. And they were done to the same scale.

That it was a disaster of Dresden-esque proportions is clear at once. A few buildings, not many, were left standing. I didn’t have time to study the street plan and compare it with a modern map of the city, but looking at the models, it seemed to me that while Aalto knocked out a few walls, so to speak, he didn’t build a new house. I would say that the main innovation was Hallituskatu, which seems to have been conceived as an imposing stage, one on which Aalto was able to perform himself. The avenue could justly be called Alvar Aallonkatu (Alvar Aalto’s street). He built the concert hall, the library, and the town hall there. (The photo above was taken inside the library. Fiat lux!)

Nearby, in the same room as the models, there is a TV monitor on which a film about the destruction of Rovaniemi runs on a continuous loop. The narration is in Finnish, but there can be no confusion about the story line, which has to do with the physical and human toll exacted by the leveling of this city. Much of the film looks as if it came from a government archive, but some of the footage appears to have been borrowed from home movies. It is apparent that there were, as always, romances between the soldiers and local women, some of whom are shown holding babies. The film ends with footage of cement mixers and bare-chested men shoveling the wreckage away.

The film is riveting. Afterwards, I looked around for an exhibit on Aalto’s reindeer-antler master plan. If there were anything to the story—anything other than a casual epistolary reference, maybe—surely it would be exhibited here, in this room, with the models and the film. But it’s not. I asked a tour guide if she knew the source for the story about the reindeer antler plan. She said she didn’t, and she said that she suspected it was not a “plan,” as such, but probably a “literary” reference. Even then, a direct and explicit “literary” reference would be well worth displaying—unless, of course, it were off-hand to the point of undermining the claim. I came away from Rovaniemi with more doubts than ever about Aalto’s alleged Big Plan.

I also came away with a better understanding of the scale of Helsinki’s effort to avert the depopulation of the Finnish countryside. A comparison might help to convey a sense of the scale here. The population of Rovaniemi is roughly 35,000—about the same as that of Hagerstown, Maryland. Hagerstown, of course, is not a state capital. It doesn’t have an air force base. It also doesn’t have a major museum, or a university. God knows it doesn’t have a concert hall, let alone one built by a world-famous architect. It has a library, though. I checked, just to make sure.

My impression is that the Finnish government has largely succeeded in making provincial centers such as Rovaniemi desirable places to live, with the result that young people do not think that they have to move to Helsinki, or the south, generally, in order to have a decent life. Finnish university graduates seem to be willing to relocate to wherever the jobs are. But all things being equal, they would prefer to stay close to hearth and home—in Oulu, or Rovaniemi, or wherever.

I think one of the reasons that Finland has been able to pull it off has to do with the university system, which is somewhat monolithic—all important decisions come out of Helsinki, or now, Helsinki and Brussels—but it is much less hierarchical than American higher education. The University of Helsinki is probably Finland’s leading university. But it simply does not have the paramount status that a Harvard or a Stanford enjoys in the States. In Finland, each university has its distinctive niche in the national system. The Ministry of Education tries to avoid duplication of effort. By consensus, any sense of hierarchy is downplayed—even at the University of Helsinki, and that is precisely what an egalitarian political culture requires.

Not that Helsinki is winning any popularity contests as a consequence. I told a colleague that I was planning to spend some time in Helsinki at the end of the semester. "That sounds like fun," he said, but then he qualified that by saying that people in Helsinki aren't as "genuine" as people in Oulu. From such incidents I infer that people in the provinces have an ambivalent attitude toward the national capital, and I suppose that's true of the United States as well.

Ho! Ho! Ho!

kenjanekolson@yahoo.com (Washington Buckeye) — Wed, 20 Dec 2006 02:04:00 +0000

In Finland, Christmas is Joulu, which is related to our word, “yule,” and Santa Claus is Joulupukki. It is said that he lives in Rovaniemi.

This post is being composed on a laptop computer in the Hotelli Cumulus Rovaniemi, just a few kilometers south of the Arctic Circle (Napapiiri). I have just had dinner here in the hotel, at the “Polar” restaurant, which has lots of reindeer on the menu. The Finns have staked out a claim to be the world’s official “North Pole,” and they have pretty much made it stick. Here’s a link: http://www.rovaniemi.fi/?deptid=3694.

Rovaniemi is the capital of Lapland and offers many attractions that they’d be pleased to tell you about over at the Santa Claus Tourist Centre. You can mail your Christmas cards from the Santa Claus Main Post Office. Lots of people do. You can stay in the Santa Claus Hotel, if you wish. You can have a Big Mac at the world’s northernmost McDonald’s. Not far outside of town, up at the Arctic Circle, and easily accessible by reindeer-led sleigh (or snowmobile), is Santa Claus Village. As the Lonely Planet guide puts it, “Rarely do you get a chance to see such unadulterated commercialism in one neat little package.”

Let the record show that I came to Rovaniemi for two reasons. First, I wanted to see Arktikum, a museum of Arctic natural history and culture, which is said to be one of the better museums in Finland. Second, I wanted to find out more about Alvar Aalto’s contribution to the rebuilding of Rovaniemi after the Second World War. I’ll cover that subject in a separate post.

Insert pregnant pause here.

Okay, I’ll admit it. I thought that if I came away from Rovaniemi owning a picture of myself with Donder or Blitzen, well, that would be pretty neat, too.

Rovaniemi is only about two hours north of Oulu, where all the snow has melted, so I was disappointed, but not particularly surprised, to step off the train and onto bare pavement. Then I discovered that I’d have to share a snowless, lightless “North Pole” adventure with several thousand Japanese tourists. I think most of them are high-school kids, and the ones who have acquired the traditional Sámi hats with the pointy little tops are cute as all get out. I hope they didn’t have their hearts set on a snowmobile safari.

The locals complain about the lack of snow because it is very, very bad for business. In addition, there is the concern, usually unstated, that the weird weather might be a harbinger of global warming. The rivers and lakes here aren’t even frozen.

If nothing else, a nice blanket of snow would have helped to brighten things up a bit. I am composing this particular paragraph at 10:45 a.m., while waiting for the sun to come up before trudging over to Arktikum. I would settle for its lurking just off-stage, if you know what I mean.

* * *

Okay, I’m back. I decided to shove off in the dark this morning. I’m glad I did, because Arktikum is well worth a visit. It’s on the water, not too far from the city center, and it’s a very sophisticated, haitekki facility. I saw a ten-minute film, called Under the Northern Lights, that features the most gorgeous nature photography this side of the National Geographic Society.

The building itself, which is the work of Danish architects Birch-Bonderup & Thorup-Waade, is spectacular. Most of the exhibition space lies under a long, glass atrium that looks like a streamlined diesel locomotive, pointing due north. That’s because Arktikum is all about the natural history of the circumpolar region, and also about the Sámi and other peoples of the far north. Many of the exhibits lie underground, and that makes a certain amount of sense, as well. There is a library for those wanting to do serious research. The exhibits at Arktikum have been prepared by two different institutions, The Arctic Centre, which is part of the University of Lapland, and The Provincial Museum of Lapland.

And that raises the issue of government subsidies. Rovaniemi is not a large city. There are only 35,000 people here, and it is the capital of a region with a depressed economy. Without a program of systematically re-directly resources to this part of the world, Lapland would be in big trouble. My point is that cultural institutions such as the University of Lapland and Arktikum are part of a much larger strategy.

I have heard people here lament what is happening in Sweden, where it is said that the population is declining everywhere but in Stockholm. I don’t know if that’s true; I’m just repeating what I’ve been told. Years ago, the Finns developed an antithesis that involves substantial investment in regional development nodes in the hope that they will be able to hold their own, economically and culturally, against the magnetic power of Helsinki. In Oulu, for example, government subsidies have made the University of Oulu a major regional university, and the university has helped to turn the city and surrounding area into the “Silicon Valley of the North.” It’s the reason Mikhail Gorbachev came to Oulu in 1989, when he was still in charge of saving the U.S.S.R.

But the puppy doesn’t always grow into its paws, at least in quite the way that was intended. And you never know when an unexpected turn of events will render your Big Plans superfluous or irrelevant. In Rovaniemi, a funny thing happened on the way to the Arctic museum.

What happened was Lordi Mania, and then its (entirely predictable) appropriation by the local chamber of commerce. For the uninitiated, Lordi is a heavy metal rock group. From Rovaniemi magazine:

Lordi blasted Rovaniemi onto the European map with its historical Eurovsion win on 21 May 2006. For years to come this win will surely spark off questions such as “Where were you when our monsters won the Eurovision?” How has this mania changed Mr. Lordi’s home city of Rovaniemi? Read our Lordi ABC.

The Square: The Rovaniemi Sampo Square (the main square in the city center—KK) was renamed Lordi’s Square in the group’s honour and the group pressed their hands into cement for posterity.
Cola: Lordi Cola came on the market last September. Mr. Lordi designed the labels for the six-packs.
Hard Rock Hallelujah! Lordi won the 51st Eurovision Song Contest with Hard Rock Hallelujah. They received 292 points, the highest in the contest’s history.
Kebab: Torikeidas on the edge of the Market Square sells Lordi Kebabs, and it gave the group members VIP passes for a lifetime’s free supply.
Honorary citizenship: The City of Rovaniemi awarded the group’s members honorary citizenship.
Souvenirs: Lordi shirts and pins sell like hot cakes in Rovaniemi shops. The city’s tourist office printed their own shirts “Bringing back the balls to Rovaniemi.”
Rockaurant: December 2006 will see the opening of the monster-themed Lordi’s Rockaurant. A family restaurant by day and a rock pub at night, the idea is to go international.
Tomi Putaansuu: Mr. Lordi from Rovaniemi has positively brought Lapland to world attention. The group has brought Rovaniemi’s international image to the fore.
The group’s history: It all started with a horror movie fan’s homemade masks. Mr. Lordi has made music since the early 90s. He has always had a clear vision on how he wants the band to look and sound—they make all their own costumes, masks and props themselves. Their breakthrough hit was Would you Love a Monster Man? in 2002. They released albums in 2002 and 2004.[1]

With all due respect to my Lonely Planet guide, I don’t think that Rovaniemi is all about “unadulterated commercialism.” I think it’s about the tension between a central planning ethos and the imperatives of global capitalism. A city—especially one on the socio-economic margins, but any city, really—can ill afford to risk everything on one or the other. So they hedge their bets. If public works projects don’t bail Rovaniemi out, then maybe an unholy alliance between Father Christmas and Lordi will.

I hope that readers will forgive me for making an irresistible Pittsburgh reference. The city of Andrew Carnegie and Andrew W. Mellon—of iron and steel, of the Urban Renaissance and the Golden Triangle—is now a city that has lost its heavy industry and half its population. Today, its largest employers are its universities and hospitals. So Pittsburgh has harnessed itself to an engine of growth called Andy Warhol. The idea is that the Andy Warhol Museum on the city’s north side, which is being marketed as the world’s largest museum devoted to the work of a single artist, will generate enough tourist revenue for the city to compete in the post-industrial age. Something had to be done. You were expecting Santa Claus, maybe?

[1] “Lordi Mania—who, where, when?” Rovaniemi (Winter 2006-2007), p. 27.

Star Boys

kenjanekolson@yahoo.com (Washington Buckeye) — Tue, 19 Dec 2006 06:37:00 +0000

I’m not at all ready for Christmas. That is due in part to the fact that we’ve had almost no snow since the storm that buried us at the end of October. It also is due to the absence from my life of the choir of Trinity College, Cambridge. Ordinarily, we take our CDs out immediately after Thanksgiving and gorge on descant for a month or more. They don’t always go back on the shelf right away after we’ve rung in the new year, either.

This year, I’ve had the Star Boys competition (tiernapojat) instead. Let me back up a minute to say that Oulu is well known for its eccentricity. Actually, it is making a decent living off its quirks. This is the city that hosts an annual Garlic Night food festival. One of the big events of the year is the Air Guitar World Championships. In March, there's the Ice Swimming competition, and in June, the Tar Rowing event on the Oulu River. Let’s not forget the statue of a tubby little policeman who “guards” the market square.

Then there are the epiphany boy carolers, better known as the Star Boys, who perform a play based on a medieval folk adaptation of the story of the Three Kings, or Wise Men, who follow the Christmas star. The tradition was imported from Sweden and ultimately from Germany, but the people of northern Ostrobothnia made it their own in the nineteenth century. In Oulu, Star Boys performances date to 1873. Oulu appropriated Star Boys in the way that Rovaniemi appropriated Santa Claus (more on that subject next week).

There are very precise requirements. The boys sing in unison. Their voices can’t have changed yet. Girls need not apply. The play “is always performed in the Oulu dialect, although a healthy mix of variations has begun to emerge in modern days.”[1] There are four characters. King Herod is dressed in a red cape. The King of the Moors wears a black costume and blackface. There is a knight in the employ of Herod, who often wears a blue cape and brandishes a sword at key moments. Finally, there is the “Star Twirler” known as Mänkki. I am not making this up.

The script calls for a certain amount of fighting, posturing, and boasting. The Church never approved of these folk performances, which were inclined to embellish the biblical narrative. Some parts of the story have been rearranged, and at some point in the nineteenth century, the play acquired an imperial coda when a tribute to Tsar Alexander was tacked on.

Traditionally, the boys travel about serenading the townspeople in exchange for money or some other type of prize. The photo up top was taken on the ground floor of the Stockmann department store. After their performance, I followed them up the escalator and noticed “a healthy mix of variation” from tradition; the Star Boy second from the left—the one with the blond pony tail—is a girl. I also saw Star Boys performing in Zakuska the other night. It is said that they do their most successful fund-raising in the city’s bars.

The music itself is entirely unlike the Christmas carols we know and love, or hate. It is a little like a stylized version of chant, and I have heard the word “pagan” used to describe it. I suppose it is an acquired taste. I’ll say that I vastly prefer it to “I Saw Mommy Kissing Joulupukki,” which I have heard twice or thrice.

Happy holidays!

[1] Look at Oulu: the Official Oulu Guide, p. 26.

The Mysterious Rites of Sauna, part three

kenjanekolson@yahoo.com (Washington Buckeye) — Mon, 18 Dec 2006 08:23:00 +0000

In part one of this trilogy, I reported that the sauna in my kerrostalo is on a thermostat set at 80 degrees Celsius—176 degrees Fahrenheit. (Since then, someone has raised it to 85.) I said that I thought the sauna had helped me recover from a serious head cold. I also confessed that I don’t really know what to do with myself in there. What I didn’t quite say was that some serious waves of loneliness—the only ones I’ve experienced here, really—have swept over me in that Nordic caldarium.

In part two, I said that I had learned to attend to the rites of sauna for their own sake, and not as a means of spiritual transcendence, and that from now on I would be content to let sauna theology take care of itself. I have been enjoying my sauna ever since I adopted this Episcopalian attitude.

I thought I was ready for part three, which coincided with a visit from a friend from the States. George and I go way back—to the fall of 1965, to be exact. He was my teacher in college, and I asked him to serve as the outside reviewer for a student project I had been supervising over here. In addition to being smart and well read, George is an unusually curious and amiable human being, which is why he’s good at asking questions and offering constructive criticism. It’s also one of the reasons he enjoys travel. He talks to strangers. He is a fellow-traveler of the Finnish Sauna Society, and he actually has a sauna in his basement. In fact, he had written to me earlier to explain that sauna was a social occasion, not a set of rituals. You can see why I was eager to sit at his feet, so to speak.

We had a very nice dinner at my favorite Russian place, Zakuska. Then we repaired to the Holiday Inn across the street from Oulu’s Lutheran Cathedral (see the September 26, 2006 post, “Yikes?”). We headed straight for the sauna, where we stripped and stood under the shower for a minute so we’d have some moisture to contribute to the atmosphere right away.

The sauna in my block of flats is nice. You walk up two steps and sit on an elevated bench, across the aisle from the stove. There is a little railing that you can put your feet on, but mostly you just have to face forward with your feet flat on the floor, and that gets a little uncomfortable after awhile. When it’s time to pour some water over the rocks to generate some holy löyly, you have to get up and negotiate the stairs—not that easy when you’re a little woozy. If you had company, you’d be sitting side-by-side, which is okay, but ideally, there would be the possibility of some eye contact. But basically, as I have said, the sauna in my kerrostalo is almost all right.

The sauna in the Holiday Inn is infinitely better. It’s an in-the-round affair. The stove sits in the middle, down below the circular bench. You don’t have to stare straight ahead at a wooden wall. You can make eye contact with the man next to you, or across the way. Then too, there’s a railing that somehow invites you to prop your feet up and lean back. Plus, you can summon the löyly without having to get up. This is a vastly superior design, not only because the seating is more comfortable, but mainly because it facilitates socializing.

But if you can’t stand the heat, you should get out of the sauna, to quote good ol’ Harry Trumalainen. It seemed awfully hot in there right from the get-go. At one point George checked the thermometer: 106 degrees Celsius. That, brothers and sisters, is 223 degrees Fahrenheit. Jaysus, it was hot in there.

After awhile, a young Pakistani fellow joined us. George engaged him in conversation right away. We learned that he works in Oulu’s haitekki sector, and he seemed like an amiable chap. I could tell that the two of them were going to bond. Meanwhile, I couldn’t think of a thing to say. I lasted maybe twenty minutes, start to finish, before bailing out. The real rites of sauna are social, and I’m just not gregarious enough. “Know thyself,” someone once said.

It occurred to me later that at the very least I could have asked our Pakistani mate to take a picture of George and me—a G-rated one to decorate the blog, natch—but I didn’t even think to do that. I wonder, what is the boiling point of digital cameras? Does anybody know?

Tornio-Haparanda Site Visit

kenjanekolson@yahoo.com (Washington Buckeye) — Sat, 16 Dec 2006 08:42:00 +0000

In Rome, years ago, I was told a joke about two English women who couldn’t decide which of the two palaces in the city center was the actual Palazzo Venezia, and which was the otherwise undistinguished nineteenth-century building that had been constructed, just for the sake of symmetry, to frame the piazza. Back and forth they went, consulting their Blue Guides and Georgina Masson and making the case for one, then the other. “Either way,” one of them concluded, “we’ve seen it.”

There are some things that you need to see just to cross them off your list. Because of what I learned this semester about the Tornio-Haparanda border erasure project, the planned EuroCity at its core became just such a destination for me (see Out on the Border and HAPARANDATORNIO, posted on 01 and 04 December, respectively).

So off to the formerly Janus-faced border city went I, with friend George in tow. George is a good sport. From Oulu, it’s a two-hour-and-twenty-minute bus ride each way. We shrewdly calculated that the 9:20 bus would get us there at mid-day, the only time that outdoor photography would be even remotely feasible.

We arrived on schedule at 11:40. As luck would have it, the skies were overcast and yellowish, with intermittent rain. A few weeks earlier, ten or more centimeters of snow on the ground would have helped illuminate the city. As it was, my bossy camera insisted that there wasn’t enough light to take pictures, even at what passes for high noon in these parts.

The temperature must have been hovering right around nolla, because while the ground appeared to be merely wet, there actually was a layer of ice underneath that made the footing extremely treacherous. During the earlier snowstorm a layer of gravel had been applied to help people get traction. George told me that it’s called “grit” in the U.K., and that it is laid down by “gritmen.” For some reason, that captured my fancy. In my next life, I want to be a True Gritman.

As it turned out, there really were not a lot of photo opportunities in Tornio-Haparanda. By far the most photogenic thing we saw was an odd little Orthodox church that was built in the nineteenth century. There is actually a very famous church in Tornio, a 1686 beauty that tourists come from all over to see. It’s two blocks from the bus station. For reasons that will become clear, we never saw it.

Within a few minutes after our arrival at the Tornio bus station, we were standing at the international border. At this writing, EuroCity is a massive construction project that began with the building of a dike designed to seal off one of the channels of the Tornio River. Land is now being reclaimed on the former river bed, and that is where the celebrated EuroCity will rise. I was reminded of the Dutch new towns that have been built on “polders” reclaimed from the former Zuider Zee. But here, of course, it’s all high-rise apartment buildings in the Scandinavian mode. See photo up top.

The two former customs houses stand on either side of the land reclamation project. Both are slated for adaptive re-use. In between, on what is called the Green Line, is a new joint tourist center that objectifies the “branding” and “visioning” mission that is at the heart of EuroCity, and of Tarmo Pikner’s thesis project. For some reason, the tourist center was closed, so we had to just gawk at the embryonic EuroCity without guidance or plan.

From the Green Line, we made our way—careening, like Ray Bolger and Burt Lahr, down the yellow grit road—into Sweden and past the big new IKEA store, which has already opened with great fanfare. The store is intended to serve a four-nation market (Sweden, Finland, Norway, and Russia), and also as one of the anchors of EuroCity. It is on the Haparanda side, and that is no coincidence, as the Marxists used to say. IKEA is a Swedish company. International boundaries still count for something, it turns out.

We were reminded of that several times—first, by signs cautioning us that the border is temporal as well as spatial and political. Finland is one hour ahead of Sweden, and presumably always will be. PR types have made much of this quirk. It is said, for instance, that if you time it just right (anytime after 11:01 p.m. on a sunny Saturday night in summer, I suppose) at the jointly operated golf course that straddles the Green Line out in the ‘burbs, you can tee up in Sweden and drive a ball into both Finland and “next week.” I suppose this makes Haparanda-Tornio a “City of Tomorrow,” but I’m not sanguine about the marketability of this arcanum.

Like all IKEA outlets, the one in Haparanda is a Very Big Box. So far, at least, nothing has been done around its edges to accommodate the kinds of “mixed primary uses” that Jane Jacobs says are essential in combating “border vacuums.” There are some existing shops adjacent to the Green Line on the Tornio side, and they will help to generate activity, just as the high-rise apartment houses will stimulate demand for local services. But how any IKEA can ever become integral to healthy urban tissue remains a mystery to me.

Along the way, we noted that while the city seemed pretty dead, the Alko on the Tornio side was hopping. In fact, we noticed that a bus had parked out front, and that passengers had debouched, some with empty suitcases. Others already were struggling back with their loot. Clearly, they were here to re-stock their vodka cellars.

At first, I thought, these people must be from remote corners of Lapland, and this is the closest Alko. Later, I remembered reading in a guide book that people routinely travel from Sweden to Tornio because the booze is cheaper in Finland. What we were witnessing was a busload of thirsty Swedes taking advantage of another feature of the international border that is not likely to be erased soon. The Swedes buy their booze in Finland, and the Finns buy their booze in Estonia. I wonder where the Estonians go.

By the time we had seen what there is to see of the incipient EuroCity, it was only 12:25, and we realized we had a chance to catch the 12:35 bus back to Oulu. We crossed a different bridge back into Finland. We picked up the pace and made it with a couple of minutes to spare. We had spent less than an hour, all told, in Tornio-Haparanda, but now I can claim to be an expert on international border erasure, and I have a under-exposed photo of the Green Line Tourist Information Centre to prove it. George promised not to blow my cover. He really is a good sport.

O would some power the giftie gie us to see ourselves as others see us

kenjanekolson@yahoo.com (Washington Buckeye) — Fri, 15 Dec 2006 07:01:00 +0000

I seem to be having an attack of the lit’ry fever today. Bear with me.

The Finns are famously curious about how they are regarded by others in the world. Part of that curiosity seems to originate in concern about whether they are regarded by others at all. Assure them that every American knows all there is to know about Mr. Lordi and his heavy metal group’s victory in the 2006 Eurovision Song Contest (okay, just in case: http://www.lordi.fi/main.site?action=app/gallery/random&dir_id=7), and they will beam. You’ve made their day. Aurinko paistaa. Tell them that you’ve never seen Conan O’Brien’s celebrated telecasts from Finland, and you will send them into a slough of despond (it’s from John Bunyan’s The Pilgrim’s Progress, here: http://www.classicallibrary.org/bunyan/pilgrim/2.htm.).

Americans, I would submit, are less curious about how they are perceived abroad. We are confident, rightly so, that people round the world know who we are. Though one must beware. Here in Finland, there is always the distinct possibility that the person to whom you’re speaking will know more about U.S. history, geography, and culture than you do.

How, exactly, America is regarded abroad is another matter entirely. I have been peppered with indelicate questions (“Did you vote for Bush?” “Why are there no grocery stores in your city centers?” “How can people pay for healthcare in your country?”) so frequently by the supposedly reserved Finns that I am inclined to think that our “approval ratings” aren’t what we’d like them to be. There is not much one more or less mild-mannered Fulbrighter can do about that, alas.

Let me introduce as evidence of the sorry state of American credibility abroad several conversations and email exchanges I have had with a colleague over here. Our dialogue began with a casual query on his part about my seminar on the history of Pittsburgh. I asked him if he had ever been to the city. He said no, but that he had relatives in Morgantown, West Virginia, and Ashtabula, Ohio. I know a little bit about both towns, as it happens, so I told him what I knew, and then followed up with a link to Morgantown’s dopey people-mover system, which he enjoyed. Later, he printed out the lyrics of Chuck Berry’s “Sweet Little Sixteen” (“They're really rockin Boston, In Pittsburgh, P. A.”) which was when I started to realize that he not only knew something about Pittsburgh, it was clear that he knew more than a little about American popular music.

I probed a little, and he explained that he and his brother had visited the States in 1984, searching for the roots of rock-‘n-roll. That led naturally enough to Rhythm & Blues, and to Chicago, where the two Finnish lads somehow found their way to a club so deeply buried in the city’s South Side that the performers felt they had to drive them back to the Loop, for safety’s sake, after the show.

These two Finnish pilgrims paid some serious dues. They measured their progress in Greyhound bus miles. They slept at the YMCA (cue the Village People). They dined at McDonald’s and Burger King so they could add to their collection of vintage 45s. The trail eventually led them to the Delta Blues Museum, in Clarksdale, Mississippi, where they

signed the visitors’ book in the public library where the Blues Museum was (and still is, I think—Muddy Waters, B.B. King and John Lee Hooker lived there in their younger days). The apprentice (white, young) was smiling as he saw that we wrote Helsinki, Finland (adding Europe) and asked us if that was in another county! (not country, but COUNTY!)

My colleague was, of course, appalled. And it made me think that that gift “to see ourselves as others see us” might be a mixed blessing. Click on the title of this post for a link to the Delta Blues Museum.

Blood Language

kenjanekolson@yahoo.com (Washington Buckeye) — Thu, 14 Dec 2006 15:47:00 +0000

Whenever I venture out of lovely Oulu, I consult my Lonely Planet guide to prepare myself. Last week, on the train to Tampere, under “Places to Eat,” I read the following: “The scary-looking Tampere specialty, mustamakkara, a thick black sausage made with cow’s blood, can be found lurking at any of the city’s several markets, including the kauppahalli (indoor market). Some locals insist mustamakkara tastes best with milk and cranberry jam.”

Well, that got my attention. I had seen mustamakkara (literally, black sausage) many times, but I had never tried it before. Tampere seemed just the right place to give it a go.

Blood sausage is scary-looking. I tried it with my scrambled eggs on the morning I checked out of the Hotelli Cumulus Pinja in Tampere. I immediately wished I had taken the nakki instead. They’re too bland! The blood is responsible for the color, but the flavor is mild, and the consistency is more mealy than meaty. Somewhere I have read that it contains rye, and it’s possible that there are other cereals in there. Once you get past its looks, mustamakkara is anything but scary. It’s Felix Unger "lurking" under the Lordi mask. I decided finally that it tastes best with milk and cranberry jam.

And that makes me think of the notoriously scary language that is spoken in these parts. Suomea is in fact a very hard language to learn, especially for a sixty-something guy who was never particularly good at learning foreign languages in the first place. (In an earlier post, I described myself as under-endowed, which elicited a number of private email messages, several of them hilarious. I know what you’re thinking: thanks for not sharing.)

Anyway, last Friday night, in Tampere, over a dish of Finnish meatballs, I told my dinner companion that I had found studying Finnish very enriching. He asked whether I intended to continue my language course when I returned to the States. I said I thought I probably would. “Why?” he asked. I wasn’t ready for that.

What I said, was, “I find it a really fascinating language, and language is the best route into the culture,” which avoided the question of whether I could ever hope to learn enough Finnish to get “into the culture,” or to actually use it in-country. I couldn’t tell what he was thinking, but I suspect it was something akin to “Sure, Finnish is a fascinating language. So is Chinese.” Good point.

Yes, Finnish is difficult. It’s not an Indo-European language, there are precious few cognates, and the nouns decline. Even the word for “no” declines. There are fifteen or so cases, and the language lacks articles, prepositions, grammatical gender, and future tense. It does have postpositions, though, and the challenging partitive case. Perkele!

But why should it be any harder for an American to learn Finnish than for a native speaker of this unusual language to learn English, which is not intrinsically easy, either. Surely English must seem just as bizarre to a Finn, at least at first, as Finnish does to us. Why should tit for tat not be identical to tat for tit?

To which there is one good retort, and it has to do with the World Wide Web, television, movies, and popular music. English is pervasive, and Finnish is arcane—everywhere but here.

Still, . . . One of my colleagues here complains that people in Helsinki think that the distance from Helsinki to Oulu is farther than the distance from Oulu to Helsinki. “They invite us to mid-week meetings in Helsinki,” he moans, “as if we were just down the street. When you invite them to come to Oulu for something, they act as if you want them to fly to the moon.”

In the gospel according to Jean Piaget, children go through an egocentric stage where they can understand that they have siblings, but not that they themselves might be someone’s sibling. Without a sense of reciprocity, you get the “My brother was an only child” phenomenon. People in this country take it for granted that it is unreasonable to expect an American to learn Finnish. They will tell you that in unaccented British English (though, granted, even some of the most fluent will stumble over our pesky articles, or mix up their third person singular pronouns). Frankly, I find this double standard a powerful incentive to re-up—I mean, just to prove a point.

There might be more to it than that. I wonder if, subconsciously, I’m not ready to let go of Finland just yet.

Vanha Rauma

kenjanekolson@yahoo.com (Washington Buckeye) — Thu, 14 Dec 2006 14:41:00 +0000

I was adopted for a day by a family in Tampere—which rhymes, by the way.

Attentive readers of this blog know that immediately upon my arrival in Finland I fell in love with the old wooden buildings in the center of Oulu. Ever since, the self-deprecating locals have done everything they could think of to cool my ardor. They’re nothing special, ‘twas said, more than once. Remember the devastating fire of 1822, people reminded me; they’re not that old. And there aren’t that many of them, what with the Russian bombing during the Continuation War, not to mention the urbanist enthusiasms of the 1960s, which might have been worse. Oulu has been unlucky on the wooden building front, was the verdict of those who live here. You should go to Raahe, they would add.

Raahe is only a little over an hour away by express bus. Twice I consulted the timetables, but then, both times, I had to scub the mission at the last minute. And so it was that Raahe, like many a hometown attraction, was a victim of convenience. Now it ranks close to the top of my list of things to do—right up there with Porvoo and Savonlinna, just a notch below St. Petersburg—when I return to this part of the world, which I surely will do, with my better half in tow, one fine Kesäkuu or Heinäkuu day.

One reason I never made it to Raahe is that I arranged a trip—on non-refundable terms—to Rauma, which is much farther away and harder to get to, instead. Rauma has a medieval church with rare paintings on the ceiling, a city hall built in 1776, and several masonry houses. Everything else is wood. Vanha Rauma hasn’t had a fire since 1682, and it suffered no twentieth-century war damage, which explains why in 1991 its 28 hectares were declared a UNESCO World Heritage Site—Finland’s first, along with the fortress of Suomenlinna. It consists of some 600 wooden buildings—that’s right, six hundred—on an essentially medieval street plan at the heart of a modern city of 37,000 souls. Vanha Rauma claims to be “the most complete and widely preserved wooden town in the Nordic countries.”[1]

According to my knowledgeable and thoroughly charming tour guide, an expert on the history of UNESCO World Heritage policies, one of the keys to understanding this site is that Old Rauma is adamant about being a living city, not an outdoor museum. It is no Williamsburg, with its citizen-interpreters. There are four little museums here, and while their collections are of some interest, they are probably more useful as a means of penetrating the architecture, of seeing the facades from the other side, as it were.

The architecture fairly leaps off the street here. The buildings are drop-dead gorgeous, but by that I don’t mean that they are anything like a Palladian villa, or the Taj Mahal. Rauma’s wooden buildings are gorgeous in the way that the Greek Revival farmhouses of Ohio’s Western Reserve are gorgeous. A few of Rauma’s houses were owned by wealthy nineteenth-century merchants, but most of them were intended as, and have been, the homes of ordinary people. One of the chief virtues of Vanha Rauma is that people were not thrown out of their homes to make way for gentrification. Nor does the UNESCO designation signify that Old Rauma aspires to be an elitist ghetto. It probably could be called a “gated community,” however.

I mean that in two senses. Once, there was a palisade around the whole town, with tollgates at several points on the perimeter. As my tour guide explained, the individual homeowners bore responsibility for maintenance of the wall, and so they had an interest in limiting its length, and that made for a city that was compact and densely populated. Growth was managed by “in-fill” on the existing streets and blocks, rather than by sprawl. Vanha Rauma is the special place that it is today largely because of that circumferential enclosure, which was put up in the 1620s and not removed until 1809.

Vanha Rauma was and is gated in another sense. Private homes consisted of a “narrow double cabinhouse,”[2] plus porches, kitchens, and various outbuildings used for storage, animals, privies—and saunas, of course. New rooms and outbuildings were added incrementally, as needed. There would be several such residential complexes on a block, and the building walls themselves, plus interstitial fences, were used to enclose the whole block. What was contained within, in both form and function, would have resembled the medieval settlements that John Stilgoe has described as landschafts.[3] Access to the introspective blocks and private residences was and is gained through wooden gates. Today, Rauma’s gates—along with its windows—are among its most attractive physical features. I was even able to get a few photos, despite bleak mid-winter skies and a landscape that cried out for a blanket of reflective snow.

At one point, strange as it may seem, I was reminded of New Mexico—specifically, Chimayó, a very early Spanish settlement in which the walls of individual residences were conscripted to serve as part of the town’s fortifications, and which used free-standing walls for its interstitial connections. The sense of enclosure at Chimayó is palpable, and very much the same as at Rauma.

The integrity of architectural style at Vanha Rauma is the result of a period of prosperity beginning in the 1890s. A brochure published by the Rauma Museum explains:

The late flourishing of sailing ships in Rauma brought in its wake building construction. However it was not possible to construct new buildings because they would not follow the square area plans, as this would have required buildings on several plots to be acquired and then knocked down, so the people in Rauma referred to rebuild the old. Over a period of ten years, two thirds of the buildings in Old Rauma got a new appearance, when their cladding was changed to the decorative Neo Renaissance style. Due to the short period of change the appearance of the area was preserved as a whole and has remained nearly the same for the last one hundred years.[4]

A few of the details here are distinctive—or were new to me, at any rate. Some buildings, for example, have “breathing bases,” squarish openings in the foundation to allow for better ventilation. I couldn’t figure out what they were at first. My guide explained that they sometimes lead to crawl spaces that could be used by homeowners to check for moisture and dry rot. A brochure published by Tammela, the Old Rauma Renovation Centre, has a drawing that shows how the ventilation system works, complete with a cat underneath the floorboards.

Then there is the story of renovation, which begins in the late 1960s, and of the subsequent preparation of what is called locally the “preservative” townplan, which went into effect in 1982. This was a period of intense consciousness raising that culminated in the World Heritage designation in 1991. In the beginning, many people in Old Rauma were unaware of the architectural glory that lay under their peeling paint and sagging cornices.

How could they have known? In those days, the Old Town was a decidedly unfashionable section of an unglamorous city in a country that had embraced Modernism in the way that it does everything else—that is, by consensus. The buildings of Old Rauma had been carved up and jerry-rigged to accommodate people who would have preferred not to live so modestly, and in such close quarters. There was no central heating here. There was little in the way of electrical wiring, let alone plumbing. There was talk about demolition and rebuilding. But homeowners renovated, one house at a time, instead, and the people who did so have profited from the improvement in their standard of living as well as from the increase in property values.

They were educated by the aforementioned Tammela, which also, it must be said, is an architectural review board with the authority to grant or deny building permits. That in turn means that it must balance the public interest in preservation against private property rights, and that is never easy. Tammela occupies quarters in one of the larger buildings in the old city, which it uses to demonstrate restoration techniques. It’s the building on the left in the photo up top. You can, for example, learn about different kinds of insulation techniques at Tammela, and the staff will help you choose the one most appropriate to your needs. You can learn how to do the work yourself. Tammela also maintains a “bank of spare parts”—things like doors—that were obtained when buildings have had to be sacrificed. I picked up a flyer containing “a recipe for traditional red ochre paint.” The education campaign required to get local residents to buy into the World Heritage Site campaign is a story in itself, one that my guide has looked into in some detail.

I was very surprised to learn that only 800 people live in Old Rauma’s 600 wooden buildings. The explanation begins with the fact that people want more elbow room nowadays, so makeshift partitions and other innovations have been removed, making spaces more commodious. And modern plumbing has been installed, meaning that privies could be removed or converted to other uses. In fact, many of Old Rauma’s 600 wooden buildings are the outbuildings referred to above, along with a number of shops.

One of the appealing things about the place is that it does not seek to be a pristine, decontaminated cultural district. In general, of course, the neo-Renaissance religion in architecture holds sway here. But the preservationists seem to have a very enlightened attitude about non-conforming structures and uses. The occasional incongruous building is tolerated. I saw one, a cheap 1970s structure that tries hard to fit in, but really can’t. Yes, it is an eyesore, and yet it seems to be generally understood that its continued presence helps to tell the story of how preservation was regarded at one time, and how neo-Renaissance forms were apprehended at the level of the individual resident.

There is also a poignant dimension to Rauma, and that has to do with its UNESCO-ratified status as the poster child for wooden towns. Rauma’s success pleases me very much, and I’m impressed with the way people here have handled their leadership responsibilities. At the same time, I sympathize with the Raahes of the world, which have been relegated to the status of permanent also-rans. Raahe, as my guide put it, “is Rauma twenty years ago,” but it will never, ever, catch up, mainly because Rauma got there first. It reminds me of the hierarchy of American higher education. For every Princeton and Amherst, there are probably fifty thoroughly admirable but entirely anonymous and under-endowed liberal arts colleges in Ohio that deserved a better fate. There is something utterly unfair about that.

Finally—to return to the script—there were within living memory as many as eleven grocery stores, most of them mom-and-pops, in Old Rauma. Now there is none. But soon, there will be a Prisma in the buffer zone just outside the historic district. Prisma is a supermarket, and it typically is a Very Big Box indeed. It will come with a vast parking lagoon, and we can expect it to be an incongruous excrescence on the face of a well-preserved dowager queen.

Here is where I began to worry, not so much about the aesthetics as about the threat posed by the Prisma to Rauma’s continued existence as a living city. This worry actually gave rise to a second New Mexico memory, which occurred to me in the bus on the way out of town. A few years ago, a friend introduced my wife and me to a young woman who had grown up in Taos Pueblo, and who spent the better part of a day showing us around, introducing us to her relatives, all of whom seemed to be artists and/or artists’ models. Taos Pueblo is an artists’ colony, it seems, where the residents take in each other’s laundry—in a picturesque way, of course, to attract the tourists. That is not so very far—minus the Rockefeller money—from Williamsburg. Nor is it all that far—minus the saunas—from Rauma. And it’s precisely what Old Rauma has sought, quite rightly, to avoid. My point is that the old town could use some grocery stores, and that will be impossible once the Prisma opens.

So, you might well wonder, if this post is all about Rauma (and New Mexico!), why did I open with the little jingle about Tampere? It’s because Tampere served as my base camp for this expedition. That’s where I met up with both of the learned and generous scholars who did their best—while a third minded a baby at home—to introduce me to Tampere, a city that actually has a much better claim than Rauma to uniqueness among Finnish cities.

I was escorted past the carnival of brick—the power stations, factories, textile mills, chimneys, and tanneries—lying alongside the Tammerkoski, in the industrial heart of a city that was Finland’s Manchester (or Pittsburgh, I fancy to think). In recent years, most of the brick buildings of the Finlayson and Tampella factories have been successfully converted to recreational use. They have done their heavy lifting and their sweating. Now they have been ordered to have fun. It seems they’ve learned how.

One of my Tampere informants extolled the virtues of the Amuri Museum of Workers’ Housing, a block of tenement apartments and shops that is open only in the summer. I also learned about the flat, once occupied by V. I. Lenin in exile (1905-1906), and now, I take it, a rather campy museum. Next time. After Raahe.

[1] Old Rauma: World Heritage Town, brochure published by the Rauma Museum.

[2] Old Rauma: World Heritage Town, brochure published by the Rauma Museum.
[3] John R. Stilgoe, Common Landscape of America, 1580-1845 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1982).
[4] Old Rauma: World Heritage Town, brochure published by the Rauma Museum.

Independence Day in Helsinki

kenjanekolson@yahoo.com (Washington Buckeye) — Wed, 13 Dec 2006 07:07:00 +0000

After the patriotic singing in front of the Oulu City Hall, I watched the choir walk away with their torches to the cemetery at Intiö, where there was another, smaller ceremony. Meanwhile, I rushed back to the flat to do what people do all over Finland on Independence Day. I turned on my TV and watched the annual Gala Reception held at the Presidential Palace in Helsinki. This, too, is a Very Big Deal.

There were 1,800 people at this year’s event, and it appeared that each one went through the receiving line to shake the hands of President Tarja Halonen and her husband, Dr. Pentti Arajaervi. I wasn’t surprised that the TV cameras were there to cover the poo-bahs and nabobs of Finnish high society as they pressed the flesh of the republican queen and her prince consort. What surprised me was that the cameras remained riveted on the receiving line for what seemed like hours. (I didn’t know enough to time it.) The thing is that this—the receiving line—was not preliminary to a main event. There would be dancing later, but this was the main event.

Out of devotion to this blog, I watched the whole thing despite the fact that I didn’t know enough to ask, let alone answer, the most basic questions, which, according to Jukka Laakkonen of the Oulun Ylioppilaslehti (the student newspaper here), were “Who will have the most amazing dress this year? Will the prime minister arrive alone or with someone special? What will happen if Olli Saarela and Eero Heinäluoma should meet in the wc-queue after few drinks? Will Mr. Lordi arrive with his mask on or will he arrive at all?” (“News in Brief,” 05.12.2006, p. 6).

I suspect some readers might be wanting a little background here. I’ll do my best. Since 2003, Finland’s prime minister has been Matti Vanhanen, who is divorced and has been the subject of numerous tabloid stories, despite the fact that he is a teetotaler, a centrist, and generally pretty boring. On the other hand, he stands tall at 6 feet 5 inches, and Jacques Chirac—who keeps making cameo appearances in this blog despite my best my efforts to keep him out—once referred to him as “the sexiest man in Finland.” I have seen pictures of the Mr. Vanhanen, but I wouldn’t recognize the man if I ran into him in the herkku at Stockmann’s.

Olli Saarela is a film director who is married to the present Minister of Culture. Eero Heinäluoma is the Finance Minister. In a dispute that somehow arose in budget negotiations several months ago, Mr. Saarela called Mr. Heinäluoma a “miserable, big and bald-headed sissy.” As for Mr. Lordi, he definitely did not arrive in his latex mask. I can say that with confidence; I watched the whole bloody program. Whether he arrived at all, I couldn’t say, because I don’t know what he looks like--I mean, without the mask.

Here are my impressions, offered strictly for the amusement of my Finnish colleagues, who tell me they enjoy my naïve observations about Finnish society. One of them said they remind him of Mark Twain’s Letters from the Earth, which seemed flattering until I remembered how many people were deeply offended by that weird book, which Sam Clemens had the good sense to publish posthumously:
Tarja Halonen’s open face, and especially her broad, easy smile—yes, she does look like Conan O’Brien—are immensely appealing. She and her husband did well to greet 1,800 guests without having to ice down their swollen hands.
I think her feet were killing her.
For a country that seems egalitarian in the extreme, the Gala Reception certainly featured a very large number of sashes and epaulets, not to mention large medals dangling on chains from wrinkled necks.
The sashes and epaulets and medals may help to explain the “now equally-traditional reception for the poor” that was held in Hakaniemi Square. That’s a quote from the Helsingin Sanomat (click on the title of this post above for a link). On the other hand, it doesn’t begin to explain how “anarchy” would help to address Finland’s “inequalities,” whatever they might be.
I noticed that most people just walked up to the President and stuck out their hand. Every now and then someone would bow before offering their hand, and that seemed to me a lovely way of showing respect for her office. In the Far East, batters bow to the umpire before entering that batter’s box. We don’t bow anymore, do we? It’s a shame. I would draw the line at the curtsy, though.
I noticed that many people fawned over the President and then dispatched Dr. Arajaervi with something like a perfunctory glancing blow. I hope someone was taking names.
I couldn’t help but notice the uncanny instinct that people have for pairing off--springer spaniels with springer spaniels, beagles with beagles, mastiffs with mastiffs, as if they had been matched up by Noah himself. Every once in a while, there’d be an Irish setter (usually a young one, female) paired with a bloodhound (usually an old one, male), but not very often. Really, I’ve never seen a better argument against central planning. People can do these things for themselves, by golly.
It seemed to me that as the receiving line dragged on and on, people started speeding through, as if to say, we know we’re worthless, and we hate to burden you with our presence. I thought that the very last person in line, a gentleman with a white beard, gave new meaning to the word “shame-faced.”

And when everything was said and done, the hosts moved to another room in the Presidential Palace, and there commenced yet another receiving line, this one (I think) featuring bishops and university rectors and senior civil servants. Whatever they’re paying her, it isn’t enough.

Independence Day in Oulu

kenjanekolson@yahoo.com (Washington Buckeye) — Mon, 11 Dec 2006 12:46:00 +0000

It’s called Itsenäisyyspäivä, and it’s a Very Big Deal.

Enlightened people say that one needn’t bother memorizing dates, because you can always look them up. But I’ve found that properly contextualizing a given event usually involves memorizing a bloody date, like it or not. Finnish independence, which we are celebrating as this post is being constructed, is one of those events.

The story of Finnish independence is vaguely familiar. They declared it, and then they waited for the world’s verdict. In the case of Finland, the world waited in turn for V. I. Lenin to decide what to do. Remember that the October Revolution had just occurred, the implications of which were unclear for Finland, which was a Grand Duchy of the recently deceased Russian Empire. Remember, too, that while hindsight allows us to see that the days of the German Empire were severely numbered, the outcome of the Great War still seemed uncertain on December 6, 1917.

Lenin cleverly recognized Finland’s independence, and then armed the Finnish Red cadres, based in Tampere, to spread the Bolshevik revolution in these parts, while he was taking care of business at home. What happened next is summarized succinctly by the Lonely Planet guide to Finland, and while it might be an over-simplification, it manages to put things in an international context:

On 28 January 1918, the Civil War flared in two separate locations. The Reds attempted to foment revolution in Helsinki. The Whites (as the government troops were now called), led by CGE Mannerheim, clashed with Russian troops near Vaasa. During 108 days of fighting in two locations, approximately 30,000 Finns were killed by their fellow citizens. The Reds, comprising the working class, aspired to Russian-style socialist revolution while retaining independence. The nationalist Whites dreamed of monarchy and sought to emulate Germany.

The Whites eventually gained victory under Mannerheim, with Germany’s help. The devastating war ended in May 1918. Prince of Hessen, Friedrich Karl, was elected king of Finland by the Eduskunta on 9 October 1918—but the German monarchy collapsed one month later, following Germany’s defeat in WWI. Finland now faced a dilemma: the Russian presence was a clear security risk, but Germany was a discredited political model because of its war loss.”[1]

Keep in mind that new Soviet-style regimes were cropping up all over the place—in Kurt Eisner’s Bavaria, for example—and in a world of general strikes and revolutionary rhetoric, even the American “Red Scare” of that era may not have been as far-fetched as it might look to us, with the benefit of hindsight.

At any rate, it was under these unpropitious circumstances that Finland—i.e., the victorious Whites—created a republic, and then the issue was essentially the same one that faced the people of the United States after the ratification of the Constitution—whether they could “keep it,” to nick a good line from Benjamin Franklin.

Finland’s declaration of independence is what we’re celebrating today. Meanwhile, a cone of silence has been lowered over the Finnish Civil War that followed so closely on its heels. Thirty thousand casualties are a lot for a small country, and every casualty represented an incalculable loss, for that is the nature of internecine warfare.

Let me now take this global narrative down to the level of what we used to call the “common man,” and daily life in the city I have called home for these past months.

The Independence Day celebration in Oulu took place from 5:45 to 6:00 at the City Hall (kaupungintalo, literally town house) on Kirkkokatu. Since I got a late start, I had the good fortune to see one of the choirs in procession on Kasarmintie, each member wearing a “school cap” and carrying a torch. I tagged along behind the police escort, and we all moved briskly toward the city center.

A second choir had already assembled on the steps of City Hall, and it was they who did most of the singing. They sang four or five songs, each of which was followed by the clomp clomp clomp of people applauding in gloves and mittens. At the end, everyone was asked to join in singing a song that I didn’t happen to know. I kept busy trying to get a decent photograph in the dark. I failed.

Only one of the songs performed was familiar to me, and that, of course, was Sibelius’s Finlandia Suite. Now, let me back up a minute to say that I am probably as patriotic as the next guy, but I do not normally get all misty-eyed when I hear patriotic music. For me, the Star Spangled Banner means that the first pitch is just moments away. I strongly prefer America the Beautiful, but I am able to contain my emotion when I hear it. I find both God Bless America and its counterfoil, This Land Is Your Land, far too strident. Sousa fires me up, but that’s martial, rather than patriotic, music, per se.

The music of romantic nationalism, on the other hand, “peels my potatoes,” to steal another line, this one from a friend who will let me get away with it. I am not generally a Francophile, or an admirer of the French Revolution specifically, and yet Le Marseillaise knocks me out. Every time. By the way, in the painting above, that’s Rouget de Lisle, composer of Le Marseillaise, singing it for the first time.

As for Sibelius, I am not a fan of his, either. There’s just something about the Finlandia Suite. If I had allowed myself, I would have burst into tears last Wednesday at the Itsenäisyyspäivä ceremonies, and it would have had nothing to do with patriotism and everything to do with music. I have always responded strongly to music—many different kinds of music—and I have always been glad of it. Still, I felt a little silly, choking back my emotions in front of the Oulu City Hall.

[1] Paul Harding and Jennifer Brewer, Finland (Melbourne: Lonely Planet Publications, 4th edition, 2003), p. 13.

What's Showing at the Alvar Aalto Museum

kenjanekolson@yahoo.com (Washington Buckeye) — Thu, 07 Dec 2006 08:48:00 +0000

Finland has proposed Paimio Hospital to be inscribed on the Unesco World
Heritage List. The nominated property covers the entire Paimio Hospital area, including the residential buildings, the water supply and purification plants, and their surroundings. The scope of the buffer zone is circular, extending from the main building as the centre point. This ensures that the view from the roof terrace of the hospital towards the forested landscape is preserved.

Paimio, a tuberculosis sanatorium designed by Alvar Aalto and built in 1930-33, enjoyed acclaim around the world during its construction and influenced the breakthrough of Functionalism and its spread through Finland and Scandinavia in general.

Paimio Hospital combines a new approach to sanatorium design with the breakthrough of modern architecture. Aalto’s chief aim was to promote the well-being and recovery of patients through architecture. He availed of the potential in new architecture to meet the demand for standarisation and hygiene. He
combined these with artistic creativity and a personal touch. Experiments with innovative technical solutions and advanced interior design, especially regarding wooden furniture, can be seen in the hospital. A humanism that is distinctive of Aalto’s design, and has enriched modern architecture, can be found there.

The spirit and key features of the sanatorium period are still strongly evident. Paimio’s significance lies in it continuing role as a hospital. The buildings and their immediate surroundings form an integral whole. The ambience and the hierarchy of spaces have been preserved despite the many changes. The relationship between buildings and landscape still endures.

Paimio Hospital represents a synthesis that is characterised by a milieu formed by buildings in harmony with nature, the functionality of a ‘medical instrument’, the innovation of both buildings and building methods, the design of details and appropriate materials, and harmony of the colours used. These properties are the foundation of the hospital’s continued use in the future.

Paimio Hospital meets many of the criteria required for a building to be inscribed on the World Heritage List. It represents a unique example of human creativity, exhibits an important interchange on development in architecture and is an outstanding example of a type of building and architectural ensemble which illustrates a significant stage in human history.

The proposal of Paimio Hospital to the World Heritage List accords with the recommendation that Finland concentrates on cultural heritage from underrepresented categories of the global strategy. One of these is e.g. the twentieth century architectural heritage. The proposal was prepared by the National Board of Antiquities. Contributing parties and experts were Turku University Hospital, Paimio Hospital, Paimio Municipality, the Alvar Aalto Foundation, and the Finnish Museum of Architecture. The earliest possible occasion for decision on Paimio Hospital nomination will be at the World Heritage Committee Session in 2007.

Click on the title of this post for a link to the Alvar Aalto Museum.

Tuiran Paloasema

kenjanekolson@yahoo.com (Washington Buckeye) — Tue, 05 Dec 2006 13:36:00 +0000

I have mentioned in previous posts that I live in a neighborhood called Tuira, which is just across the Oulu River (Oulujoki) from the city center (keskusta). Ordinarily, I walk back and forth through a series of parks lying on islands separated by rivulets that form part of the river’s delta. In Scotland these rivulets would be called “burns”; as a matter of fact, Finland is a lot like Scotland (starting with the light, or lack of it).

I have written, too, that my block of flats (kerrostalo) is situated on a street called Koskitie, which translates as Rapids Road. Yes, the river used to get pretty wild just at this point, which is why there is a power station across the street from my flat. The Merikosken power plant looms large here in Tuira. I bike or walk down Koskitie every morning past the power plant to Merikosken Street (Merikoskenkatu), where I catch a bus to the university, or else I run into friendly drunks (see the post called “Hyvää Matkaa!”). In the afternoons, I might stop at the Merikosken Grilli for some takeaway stir-fry. In any case, I will give a wide berth to the Merikulma Pub and the rowdy fellows who tend to spill out of it at all hours.

I have written, too, about the museum in the park, the Museum of Northern Ostrobothnia, that contains a huge and highly detailed model of the city of Oulu as it was in 1938, and which I have used to form a mental image of what had been “a traditional ‘wooden town’ in the late 1930’s, a ‘white city’ which had a dreamy air about it on a Sunday afternoon in summer, when a gentle breeze fanned the people as they sat in the lush parks alongside the stream, on the islands of Hupisaaret or beneath the lilacs or rowans on their own gardens.” The source of this passage is Olavi K. Fält, “From an Idyll to a New War,” in Oulupolis: The History of Oulu as an International City (Oulu: Oulu City Council, 1999, pp. 89-108 at 99). All subsequent references are to this valuable essay.

Laying a modern map next to the model in the museum, one can easily perceive that Tuira was completely rebuilt after World War II. The Merikosken power station was the centerpiece of this project. A channel was dug and a dam was built to feed the river into the power station, and land was reclaimed to accommodate Toivoniemi, a suite of modernist high-rises that were built on a ground plan attributed to the great Finnish architect, Alvar Aalto, who also gets credit for a set of fountains that transformed the river into an urban amenity. Officially (i.e., on the maps), this area is called Koskikeskus, Rapids Central, in other words.

I also have written about the footbridge that I ride my bike or walk across when I’m headed for the city center. Actually, it’s part footbridge, part dam. The dam in turn explains why in recent years they have installed a kalatie (fish road) here; we would call it a “ladder” that allows salmon and other species to make the journey upriver to spawn.

“I knew all that,” you’re thinking to yourself. Of course you did, since you are a conscientious, not to say compulsive, reader of this blog. But there are some things you probably didn’t know, because I didn’t know them either. First of all, there is the matter of the “Second World War.” People don’t call it that, because here it was a drama that played out in several discrete acts. The first was the Winter War, during which the Finns covered themselves in glory by repelling a massive Soviet invasion. Those old clips you’ve seen of soldiers in white parkas and skis, rifles slung over their shoulders—that’s the Winter War, which formally ended on March 13, 1940. What followed was a period during which Finland attempted to chart its own destiny while being moved like a pawn in a high-stakes chess match between the Soviet Union and Germany.

The second act was the Continuation War, which followed hard upon the German attack on the Soviet Union that began on June 22, 1941. The Finns now began carefully to do business with the Germans, whose occupation of Norway and whose opening of the eastern front invested Finland, especially the northern part of the country, with strategic importance. Meanwhile, the Soviets metamorphosed into allies of the Allies—that is, of Great Britain, the United States, and “Free France.” And that complicated things for all parties, not least for Marshall Mannerheim, the Finnish Commander in Chief.

In the final act, when Germany’s prospects were looking increasingly bleak, the Finns prudently make a separate peace with the Allied army that was at its gates—the Red army—the terms of which unfortunately required them to disarm any German troops remaining in Finland after September 15, 1944. In the unhappy “coda” to the Continuation War, practically everything north of Oulu was torched or leveled by the Wehrmacht as it retreated from the country. A well informed source with a mordant sense of humor explained to me that while the Soviets won the Continuation War, the Finns came in second.

The uniqueness of Finland’s role in the Second World War makes fascinating reading in any event. But for a political scientist practicing urban history without a license, and one who happens to be renting a flat in Tuira, the narrative is powerful enough to add a somewhat sinister overlay to an otherwise benign and familiar landscape. Olavi Fält writes that by the summer of 1942, Toppila, a port adjacent to Tuira proper, “was becoming the Germans’ main supply port in the whole of Finland. The Wehrmacht placed the office of its commandant and its transport headquarters, patrol battalion and centre for troops on leave in Oulu, and in the autumn the SS troops set up an extensive servicing and training centre in Tuira” (p. 103). On page 102 of Oulupolis, there’s a photo of German tanks rumbling down Tuira’s main drag, Valtatie, which is probably not more than 100 meters from my flat.

Fält writes that the most conspicuous German settlement in the Oulu region was right here in River City; in fact, Tuira was known locally as “Little Berlin,” and it “consisted of 275 temporary buildings and covered an area of 64 ha.” (p. 104). Most of these buildings were easily removed after the war, but one structure was built to last, and that was the German officers’ club, which survives today as the Tuira fire station (see photo up top), in a part of town that has been known ever since as Alppila, owing to the vaguely Alpine style of the club.

Adding an element of surrealism here is evidence that the Germans “brought a measure of affluence to the city. The high wages that they paid and the free food given to their employees attracted people to work for them, and both the City Council and private citizens obtained an income by renting land and accommodation to them and offering various services. All this increased the city’s tax revenues, of course, and reduced the need to raise the rate of tax during the war” (pp. 105-107). Fält observes that relations between the German and Finnish authorities in Oulu “remained good throughout the Continuation War” (p. 104). When it came time for the Germans to extricate themselves from Suomi, that operation, too, was orchestrated by their leadership in Oulu, and it seems to have been conducted in a manner that could fairly be described as courtly.

Completing the story of the alteration of the Tuira landscape during this period is the altogether extraordinary image of “Russian prisoners of war at work building the Merikoski Power Station in January 1942.” At times, there were up to 150 of them working on the project. In the photo that appears on page 105 of Oulupolis, the POWs appear to be rearranging Tuira’s landscape and riverscape underneath what looks like a foot of snow. Believe it or not, these were the lucky ones.

Recently, there has been a flap in Finland having to do with photos of the war in Lapland that have been suppressed for the past sixty years. The images have now been released, and they are not for the squeamish. Some show alleged Russian spies having a smoke with their executioners, and then, minutes later, facing a Finnish firing squad. Bloated corpses lie in the weeds, or are piled promiscuously on trucks. Most gruesome is substantial evidence that cannibalism, especially on the part of desperate Russian soldiers, was “not uncommon,” as the Helsingin Sanomat puts it. One photo shows a pile of human ribs artfully arranged next to a cast-iron skillet that was discovered in a snowbank. Click on the title of this post up top for a link.

Hyvää ruokaa Oulussa, part three

kenjanekolson@yahoo.com (Washington Buckeye) — Tue, 05 Dec 2006 07:12:00 +0000

Hei, foodies. It’s time for the November edition of Good Eats in Oulu. This month third place goes to the Merikosken Grilli, mainly for yeoman service in the Cheap Eats division.

On the day I arrived in Oulu, I was met at the railway station by one of my handlers, who predicted, as she drove into my neighborhood, that I would have more than one meal at Merikosken Grilli. She was right. I have found it to be a very valuable resource—in part, truthfully, because it is located next to my bus stop. On days when I stay late at the university and don’t feel like either going into the city center to forage for dinner or rolling up my sleeves to prepare a meal in the flat, Merikosken Grilli is a godsend. Aside from the issue of propinquity, it has its own distinctive merits.

Maybe I should back up a minute. When you are living for an extended period far away from home, you have to figure out how to eat well without breaking the bank. And this can be tricky, especially if you don’t have a fully equipped kitchen. We all know the drill. You stay away from the main tourist attractions and the big hotels. You avoid places that are full of empty tables in prime time. You eschew the ooh-la-la Francophone establishments and any joint that has to advertise. You look for ethnic cuisine, diners, and fish houses—places lying ever so slightly north of greasy spoon territory. You stroll around blue-collar districts in search of that special neighborhood-oriented eatery with six tables, a talented mummo (grandma) in the kitchen, and a big dog dozing by the front door.

That formula works in Italy, but not in Oulu. For one thing, while there are loads of fish here, there are no fish houses, per se. Also, there are no diners, and no Finnish knock-offs of that legendary Alexandria monument to incompetent spelling, the Wafle Shop. Yes, there are the usual ethnic restaurants, and we’ve reviewed several of them in previous posts, particularly New Bombay and Pikku Thai. I have tried four Chinese places in Oulu. I enjoyed the Szechuan chicken at Flavour Palace on Saaristonkatu. At Kiinalainen Ravintola Beijing, on Rantakatu, I had a bowl of scrumptious chicken and mushroom soup, but I thought the entrée I ordered there was only so-so. Neither of the other two Chinese places was at all satisfactory; one of them had pizza on the menu. A new favorite is Pailin, in the Kasarmi area, which could with some justice be called an “Asian fusion” place. Oulu’s smart set meets there on Sunday afternoons.

Merikosken Grilli is about as close as Finland comes to a neighborhood diner. It is run by Asians. Whether they are all members of the same family is unclear, though it seems likely. My hunch is that they are Vietnamese, but there is no telling that from the menu, which is a not-all-that-common blend of blue-collar and international.

Some of the staff members are fairly proficient in English, and when they’re behind the counter you can dispense with the menu. One time I just asked for shrimp fried rice; it was excellent. When the non-English speakers are working the counter, it’s more of a crapshoot. They would prefer to have me point at something on the menu—or, even better, at one of the signs posted overhead to advertise the daily specials. A moment’s hesitation, and they are steering me toward the hampurilainen—hamburger, of course. I never order hamburgers out because I prefer the ones that I make at the flat with high-grade ground beef from Stockmann.

The last time I was at Merikosken Grilli I ordered the Szechuan chicken from the generic Asian menu. It cost 6.50 euros. No matter what you order, the wait is about ten minutes. I carried it home and had a very enjoyable meal in the excellent company of BBC World, appropriately enough.

Second place for November goes to Pizzeria Napoli, another Merikoskenkatu institution. I read somewhere that there are 45 pizza places in Oulu, and I would be willing to bet that at least 35 of them are also kebab joints. And they are all essentially the same. All feature salad bars, where the main attraction is cabbage soaked in vinegar. There will be other things on offer, such as cucumbers, pickles, and maybe bell peppers—even chili peppers, if you’re lucky.

At Napoli, I usually order the #8 pizza, which is a seafood medley. It comes with generous quantities of succulent little shrimp, fresh mussels, and tuna fish. I think I could justify giving Napoli the silver medal on the basis of the fresh mussels alone. When was the last time you had mussels on a pizza?

Pizzeria Napoli seems to be a family-run operation. Dad stands at the oven and is clearly in charge. Like Merikosken Grilli, there is absolutely nothing pretentious about this place. I order my pizza and a nice cold Karhu, then fill up a little plate with cabbage at the salad bar. I pick at the cabbage and read my International Herald Tribune while the pizza is baking. After awhile, the pretty blond daughter with the short attention span delivers my pizza. Every time, I think to myself that I’ll eat half of it now and ask for a box to take the other half home. Then I marvel at how thin the crust is, and before you know it, I’m approaching the finish line. I wash down the last bite with my last swig of beer, and then I belly up to the counter to settle my account—never more than 8 euros. I pocket my change, say kiitos and hei hei, and then I wobble home on my bike. Is this the good life, or what?

The Grand Prize this month goes to Ravintola Matala (see photo above), down on the market square, Kauppatori. It’s actually next door to Kiinalainen Ravintola Beijing. Yes, this place is the anti-Napoli. It is definitely pretentious, and it counts as a Big Splurge.

I had often studied the menu near the front door of Matala, and once or twice I pressed my formidable nose against the glass to check the place out. The candelabras on the window sills were, I thought, a good sign, though I made a note to myself to bring my credit card. I decided this would be a good place to order reindeer, poro.

I arrived at about six o’clock on a weeknight. I noticed that the place was set up for two big parties, and the staff was momentarily spooked when I showed up, with no reservation, asking for a table for one. Soon enough, I was offered my choice of two desirable tables, both of which had been set for parties of four.

My reindeer was beautifully presented—three little tenderloins on a bed of vegetables, with port wine sauce poured over the top. I had spent enough time inspecting reindeer—in the kauppahalli and Stockmann—to know that it is extremely lean. Since reindeer doesn’t produce enough juice on its own, the port wine sauce at Matala seemed just the right treatment.

The meat itself tastes a little like venison. Poro would never be confused with any of the common red meats—i.e., beef, veal, or lamb. The consistency is not entirely unlike that of liver, though it is not like liver in any other respect. My reindeer—I ordered it medium—was served with baby kernels of white corn and a mix of julienned vegetables that included peapods and mushrooms, quite possibly shitakes, though I couldn’t be sure.

Good as the poro was, I can’t say that it was the star of the show. On the waiter’s recommendation, I ordered the cauliflower soup, which was divine. A creamy cauliflower lagoon encapsulating an atoll of fried foie gras, it was garnished with a few sprigs of basil. Bread infused with sun-dried tomatoes was accompanied by Spanish olive oil. The service was exemplary. With two glasses of Kadette, a South African red wine that nicely complemented the reindeer, plus an espresso at the end of the meal, the bill came to 55.50 euros—well worth the money, though not absolutely perfect in every respect. Let us now pick the nits.

I had unwelcome company at the table. I am starting to think that when we are finished with it, planet Earth will be inherited by fruit flies. The problem with fruit flies is that, first, they are very difficult to catch in mid-air, and second, while they are likely to drown in your wine, that is a Pyrrhic victory at best.

The espresso was excellent, with a nice creamy head, but it was not quite hot enough, and it was missing its partner of choice, lemon peel. Plus, it was accompanied by a little square of milk chocolate; dark chocolate would have been infinitely better.

Finally, the background music was provided by a commercial radio station offering an eclectic mix of artists ranging from the Grateful Dead to Patsy Cline. True, it was barely audible, but that is not an acceptable defense. A restaurant maintaining the highest standards in its kitchen needs to have classical music—Handel or Vivaldi, perhaps, but certainly not Jerry Garcia—on whatever one calls a “turntable” nowadays.

Hyvää ruokahalua! Heippa!

HAPARANDATORNIO

kenjanekolson@yahoo.com (Washington Buckeye) — Mon, 04 Dec 2006 13:48:00 +0000

(Continued from 1 December post, "Out on the Border")

With an international border, you essentially have one monolith (a nation state) rubbing directly against another, and the whole point of the boundary (although enforcement efforts can be vigorous or lax, depending on international relations) is to prevent seepage in either direction. Insinuation or penetration will be more or less unacceptable in this context, and it often will be regarded as infiltration, illegal immigration, smuggling, or worse. And “triangulation”—i.e., introducing a third element to complicate land use patterns and facilitate integration, or dovetailing, is not ordinarily an option.

And triangulation sometimes only exacerbates the problem. I’m thinking here of the international border between Great Britain and France, which didn’t have “border vacuums” because the English Channel served as a buffer—i.e., a fuzzy, multi-functional “seam”--for many centuries. But since triangulation—that is, construction of the Channel Tunnel and the opening of a high-speed rail link between London and Paris—the international border has become a no-man’s-land of chain-link fences, German shepherds, and high-tech security systems designed to thwart would-be illegal immigrants willing to take grave risks.

We have the opposite of those dynamics on display at another international border, the one between Finland and Sweden, at Tornio-Haparanda, or Haparanda-Tornio, where the European Union is helping to finance an effort to build bridges—literally, and also figuratively—between two adjoining cities.

The scene of this experiment is about 130 kilometers north of Oulu, where the Tornio River (Torniojoki) flows into the Gulf of Bothnia. Given its location, Tornio was from the beginning a key link between Lapland and the rest of the world. The town was chartered by the King of Sweden in 1620. With the peace of Hamina of 1809, the international border was fixed at the river (which, like many rivers, has not wanted to stay put), and Tornio was incorporated into the Russian Empire along with the rest of the Grand Duchy of Finland. To compensate for the loss, the Swedes established Haparanda on the west side of the river.

The border between the two empires was well guarded for a long time, but in the course of the twentieth century it became relatively porous. In 1944, to cite just one instance of international cooperation, Haparanda sent a volunteer fire brigade all the way to Oulu in response to wartime bombing. I gather from various websites dealing with the borderlands that there were a number of cultural links between the two cities, and that the municipalities began to seize opportunities after the war to cooperate any time it meant saving money. In the 1960s, the two cities agreed on construction of a jointly owned and operated swimming pool. Wikipedia reports that the two towns “also have a common golf course, situated astride the border.” You can tee off in one country into the other country and a different time zone. Sweden is one hour ahead of Greenwich Mean Time; Finland two.

In 1987, the two municipalities established a kind of advisory council called the Provincia Bothniensis. Since that time, a number of cooperative projects have been undertaken involving fire and ambulance service, schools and libraries, heating services, health care, and tourist information offices. The key event in the history of cross-border integration took place in 1995, when both Sweden and Finland entered the European Union. In recent years the municipalities have undertaken co-sponsorship of a state employment agency, as well as various infrastructure projects.

Today, Tornio is a community of about 25,000 predominately Finnish-speaking people; Haparanda has a population of maybe 10,000, most of whom are Swedish speakers. Tornio has a steel mill and a major brewery. Today, it is estimated that approximately 16,000 people cross the border daily. Access to each municipality’s official website is provided through a common portal (click on the title of this post for a link).

The E.U. has made funds available specifically for border erasure, and Tornio-Haparanda have (has?) aggressively pursued these funding opportunities. Wikipedia provides a characteristically concise account of the current situation: “Tornio and Haparanda have a history as twin cities, and are set to merge under the name EuroCity. A new city centre is under construction on the old border and many municipal services are shared.”

But here’s the neat part. At the precise point where the customs houses (and, presumably, the border vacuums) used to be, down by the Torniojoki itself, there is a major construction project underway to try to knit these two communities together. Evidently, cooperation between the two urban planning authorities is fairly recent. It is said that in the 1980s Tornio was planning to build a new city center (keskusta) on its east side, which would have meant literally turning its back on Haparanda. Nowadays, at EuroCity, the two cities are preparing for a warm, hopefully lucrative, embrace.

I have learned most of this from a post-graduate student in geography at the University of Oulu, Tarmo Pikner, who has written a paper called “Moving imaginations in development networks: a case study about the cross-border town planning” (all subsequent quotations are from this paper). Pikner is interested in the role of spatial imagination, which he sees as a metaphor moving the planning process through three stages—generating interest, “enrollment,” and circulation. The content of the idea becomes active as both a sign and an agent of change. He also is interested in attendant patterns of discourse in the “construction” of cities. Thus, he is very much interested in the metaphorical dimensions of urbanity and the role of language in promoting international integration.

The common ground of EuroCity itself conveys something of the spirit of cooperation, and according to Pikner, the joint enterprise of Tornio-Haparanda is now being referred to as På Gränsen-Rajalla, which is an expression that means “on the border,” and usually is formed by Swedish on the left side and Finnish on the right, though I have sometimes seen it the away way round. Either way, it is a trope, one that “moves and carries the changing package of ideas, practices and institutions.” And it is an exercise in branding, and in “visioning.” There is even a sense in which Joseph Schumpeter’s concept of “creative destruction” applies, in as much as images of EuroCity and På Gränsen-Rajalla replace strictly municipal (i.e., national) ideas and nomenclature.

At the same time, there is a physical, or material, dimension to the new enterprise on the border. “European Union membership removes partly practical bordering function(s) between the states and both towns. The border-line area around the river water becomes un-used and it can be translated into transnational development networks. Custom offices and border guards leave beside them activity space for new mediators around the border area development.” The rhetoric is all about “building bridges,” and there will literally be bridges, as many as four, perhaps, to carry vehicles, bicycles, and pedestrians back and forth across the border. And there will be boats, as well.

Pikner writes that “The metaphor of centre continues through the development plan.” One vision of the EuroCity would have at its heart a “new market as open square creating contact surface between the towns on the border.” Another vision advocates multiple “markets” that would include a dance stage and various sports activities. A somewhat zanier idea involves a cross-border altar for international marriages. “We build without borders,” boasts a newsletter distributed in both municipalities.

In an effort to promote Jane Jacobs’s ideal of “mixed primary uses,” the common ground of EuroCity will include residential development, including housing for seniors, as well as commercial activity and cultural tourism. A dike is being built to close off part of the river and create new land for these purposes. A map published more recently than the one accompanying this post shows EuroCity under construction on land reclaimed from that bit of blue just to the west (above) of the Tornio town center. The new map also shows the flag of the European Union on that parcel of land, straddling the "green line." There also is to be a shopping mall, anchored by IKEA, which envisions a market that could potentially stretch into four countries—Norway and Russia, in addition to Sweden and Finland.

These, boys and girls, are Big Plans, and I am having a hard time with some of these abstractions. For one thing, it is hard to imagine how IKEA, it being precisely the kind of monolith that tends to generate border vacuums, is going to be incorporated into the higgledy-piggledly unplanned glory of healthy urban tissue.

But I intend to see Tornio-Haparanda for myself before my time in Finland is up. And I will file a report from the front.

Out on the Border

kenjanekolson@yahoo.com (Washington Buckeye) — Fri, 01 Dec 2006 14:44:00 +0000

In 1961, while I was in high school (sigh), Vintage published one of the great books of the twentieth century, Jane Jacobs’ The Death and Life of Great American Cities. I read it for the first time a few years later, and there is a sense in which I am still recovering from the experience. Obituaries published after Jacobs’s recent death (in April, 2006) testified to the book’s impact on the generation that grew up in what might be called the “long” 1950s, which stretched well into the ‘60s, but then was exploded by the strange brew of Vietnam, urban rioting, and counter-culture romanticism.

The Death and Life helped to explain some of what was happening, or about to happen, in America’s cities—the urban rioting, at least. Jacobs argued that the prevailing wisdom about urban form and function had been concocted out of an intellectual stew that featured three principal ingredients: the celebrated White City of the 1893 World’s Columbian Exposition in Chicago; Ebenezer Howard’s Garden City concept of a few years later; and the Skyscrapers-in-a-Park ideology promoted after the Great War by Le Corbusier and other International Style visionaries. Jacobs coined an epithet, Radiant Garden City Beautiful, that she used to lampoon all three of them at once.

The Death and Life opens with the following sentence: “This book is an attack on current city planning and rebuilding.” She then recalls a visit to Boston’s North End. “The streets were alive with children playing, people shopping, people strolling, people talking.” The North End struck her as “the healthiest place in the city,” though when she reported that to her city planner friends, they insisted that it was a miserable and dangerous place, “a terrible slum.”

The planners thought that the North End, in all its higgledy-piggledy unplanned glory, needed to be rebuilt along Radiant Garden City Beautiful lines, and there was no talking them out of that, just as there was no dissuading “urban renewal” authorities from tucking into the federal trough to build high-rise public housing projects and expressways (think Robert Moses), or private developers from tearing down buildings just because they happened to be old.

Jacobs’s sweeping indictment of the city planning profession, and of prevailing attitudes about the dynamics of “slumming” and “unslumming,” was so radical that its lessons were instantly rejected by the smart set, most famously by Lewis Mumford, who ridiculed her for prescribing “home remedies for urban cancer.” Jacobs offended people by expressing her ideas in deliberately provocative prose: density is good; zoning is bad; old buildings are inherently valuable; parks and playgrounds are dangerous; children should play in the street. And yet anyone who suspended disbelief and actually read the book was shaken to the core. Page after sparkling page, chapter after relentless chapter, Jacobs stalked her rats and then set upon them with the jaws of an Airedale terrier.

Those of us who internalized Jacobs’ message will find that certain passages or concepts can come back vividly and unexpectedly back to life—when driving through the kind of area that she called a Great Blight of Dullness, for example, or walking through a neighborhood enlivened by mixed primary uses and the kind of natural surveillance systems that she termed “streets with eyes.”

I recently had occasion to recall Jacobs’s memorable treatment of the subject of “border vacuums.” Not having the book in front of me, I will do the best I can to summarize it from memory. Basically, the concept refers to the fact that some urban districts are dominated—not architecturally so much as functionally—by a single over-riding use. The problem, as she explained it, is not so much that single use in itself as the fact that it will try to suppress all other uses. Borrowing from the lexicon of such 1950s narratives as West Side Story, Jacobs liked to refer to these monoliths as “Turf.” Whatever is on the periphery of Turf will morph into barriers and dead ends, “border vacuums." Kevin Lynch called them “edges.”

Jacobs often cited large urban universities and hospitals as examples. Columbia University and the University of Chicago particularly provoked Jacobs’s wrath because of their insatiable appetite for land and their fear that they would be “contaminated” by non-conforming uses. A railroad right-of-way is almost a textbook case. As a swatch of linear, one-dimensional Turf, it will admit of no other uses. Not much can be done to mitigate the baneful effect of railroad tracks on adjoining property because trains do not mix well with other urban activities, except where there are railway stations, which, to the extent that they generate cross-traffic and commercial activity, precisely illustrate Jacobs’s point about the virtues of functional integration.

Jacobs suggested that addressing the problem of “border vacuums” required the fashioning of “seams,” or dovetailing, to effect a gradual transition from monolithic Turf to non-Turf. Sometimes, the best way to do that is by triangulation—that is, by introducing a third function to the mix. The goal is to create an area rendered lively and safe by a complex pattern of use by different kinds of people at different times of the day. Commercial activities in border areas, even on a small scale, such as with street vendors, can often serve to break up the hegemony of large-scale Turf.

The worst possible kind of “border vacuums” arise in places where one monolith directly abuts another. I don't recall whether Jacobs talks about international borders, but there is every reason to think that they would represent notable Turf-on-Turf challenges. The whole point of an international boundary is Turf guarding—to define us and them, in and out, and to prevent insinuation, penetration.

You are no doubt wondering where I am going with this narrative. The answer is that I’m going to Tornio-Haparanda. Come with me in the next post.

Allu, taas sulaa jää, Lenin elää ja alus saa tulla!

kenjanekolson@yahoo.com (Washington Buckeye) — Thu, 30 Nov 2006 08:13:00 +0000

In response to an Infrequently Asked Question (over there on the right under Links), and then in a September 27 post called “Take a number for service,” I have expressed my admiration for the Ota vuoronumero! system used by many retail establishments and offices to determine the order of service. Basically, it’s the drill that in the States we associate with the deli counter.

Responding to my suggestion that Ota vuoronumero! is a manifestation of Finnish orderliness and voluntary restraint, a friend wrote to me about a traffic accident caused by a woman who, out of sheer willfulness, or, if you prefer, sisu, crashed into his car because she refused to yield. (He won the ensuing court case.) Because the Finns are so assertive, he argues, they “somehow realize . . . that all hell would break out” if order was not imposed on them. I have actually had Finns tell me that it is not sheer coincidence that their language, amazingly, doesn’t have a word for “please.”

Roman Schatz, the author of a book called From Finland with Love (Helsinki: Johnny Kniga, 2005), offers testimony in support of my friend’s contention. The prevailing ethos of Finnish motorists, he claims, is “Drive as fast and as recklessly as possible, ignore all rules unless the police are near, sabotage, hamper, and impede everyone else on the road” (p. 78). I’ll have to admit that I have occasionally seen this streak of misanthropy for myself at bus stops, where Finns eschew the queue in favor of the scrum.

From Finland with Love is an insightful, albeit vulgar, little book written from the perspective of a German man who fell in love with a blonde he “met in a subway station in West Berlin” (p. 9). He followed her to Finland in 1986, and now he is “happily divorced” (p. 10) with two blonde children. Schatz’s book opens with a testimonial: “I love Finland, and I’m not ashamed to admit it” (p. 10).

Of course, I say that Schatz’s book is insightful because he seems to be impressed with many of the same things that have impressed me about this country. For example, he marvels at the way Finnish pedestrians refrain from crossing against the light. They will “stop at red lights, even in minus thirty degrees at four o’clock in the morning with absolutely no cars in sight” (p. 75).

He argues (persuasively, in my view) that the celebrated Finnish love affair with nature exceeds the bounds of reason: “For the Finns summer provides a great opportunity to leave behind the unnatural urban way of life that they never really felt comfortable with anyway: It’s back to their roots—meaning back to the state of bliss where you don’t have to see anybody for weeks and thus can afford to walk around in rubber boots and old sweatshirts, your face, hands and legs covered with mosquito bites” (pp. 85-86). Nokia, incidentally, made rubber boots (see photo above) before they turned to cell phones.

Based on a memorable experience with a drunk at the Merikoskenkatu bus stop (see the post called Hyvää Matkaa), Schatz’s account of the drinking habits of Finnish men rings all too true. “For a foreigner it’s difficult to share the Finnish enthusiasm for that one more drink at six o’clock in the morning” (p. 127).

There are other little nuggets in From Finland with Love, which I will reproduce here more for their entertainment value than as product endorsement:

"When you first arrive, Finland looks like a normal, pretty, expensive little country. Well, the light and the colours are different, at least in summer. In winter there isn’t really any light” (p. 13).
“So what exactly are the benefits of learning Finnish? Well, you can enjoy the most beautiful palindromes in the whole world: Allu, the ice is melting again, Lenin is alive and the vessel may come! Allu, taas sulaa jää, Lenin elää ja alus saa tulla!” (p. 23).
Finnish women “run the show. Finland is a matriarchal society” (p. 28).
“If you have decided to become a better person and rid yourself of everything unhealthy, unsafe and immoral, you’ve come to the right place. Finland cares for you like a loving mother” (p. 43).
Ergo, “Finland has the highest taxation and the lowest purchasing power in Europe” (p. 80).
“Where you’re from is of absolutely crucial importance in Finland…. The Finnish identity is based on places and ancestors rather than on work and career” (pp. 106-107).
“Losing control under the influence of alcohol (except behind the wheel—KK) is perfectly acceptable in this country” (p. 126).
On bridging the culture gap: “Give them (the Finns—KK) everything you’ve got. Get drunk with them, go to their saunas, jump in their lakes, eat their food, learn their language, sleep with them. See where it gets you” (p. 133).

Click on the title of this post, if you dare, for a link to Roman Schatz’s personal website.

What's Showing at Aboa Vetus

kenjanekolson@yahoo.com (Washington Buckeye) — Wed, 29 Nov 2006 08:01:00 +0000

I live in one of the world’s great museum cities, which is I why a strict accounting of the number of hours per week, or month, or year, I manage to log in the museums of Washington, D.C., would be profoundly embarrassing. The problem is that the regular round of errands and chores somehow fills every minute of every day.

As a Fulbrighter in Finland, however, I have plenty of time, after fulfilling my duties as teacher, housekeeper, and self-improvement faddist, to hit the museum trail, and I have been taking careful notes.

This is the third installment of a series on museums in Finland.

Some readers of this blog probably suspect that I have not had a single undocumented experience in Finland. At times, it seems that way to me, too. But that is not quite the case. I have not, for example, written about a trip in late October to Turku, where I participated in a seminar called “American Voices,” sponsored by Turun Yliopisto and the Fulbright Center in Helsinki. It was a great opportunity to learn more about my fellow Fulbrighters, who are a remarkably talented group with a wide array of interests, ranging from African-American history and culture to the making of rustic furniture, autobiographical writing, the treatment of autistic children, Japanese internment during World War II, and not least, NASCAR culture.

I stayed over a second night in Turku and tagged along with a family who were on their way to a museum of contemporary art, Ars Nova. I was mainly interested in their company, plus it was nice to stretch my legs, and there was the attraction of dinner afterwards. On our way to the museum, we walked past Turku’s venerable Lutheran Cathedral, the seat of the Archbishop of Finland that has served as the city’s corporate logo for roughly 700 years.

Our path led underneath the cathedral spire and down the hill to the river Aura below. In just a few minutes, we were at our destination, which turned out to be something of an Upstairs/Downstairs affair. Upstairs is the museum of new art, which was more interesting and less intimidating than I had feared. But the real surprise lay in the basement.

There, one discovers Aboa Vetus, or Old Åbo, which was the name of this medieval town when it was trading with the Hanseatic League and serving as a spearhead of Germanic and Swedish culture on Christendom’s northern frontier. Aboa Vetus is not just a museum with the standard exhibits and labels and dioramas, but a working archaeological site. Let me hasten to say that I have visited a number of archaeological sites that welcome guests and promise a window on the past. I have been disappointed by most. And I have never been to a museum that succeeds so completely in delivering on that promise as Aboa Vetus.

In 1994, more or less by accident, it was discovered that a busy block of the medieval town, including streets and shops and part of a convent, lay under the art museum’s floor. Researchers were aided by detailed and accurate medieval and early modern maps. Once they knew there was something down there, they had a good idea what it was. And with plenty of sweat equity, they found most of what they were looking for and more. Together, the artifacts dredged up—coins and tools and jewelry, and some skeletons, human and feline—constitute an extraordinary time capsule, one that can be unpacked like a matryoshka doll, and one that contains quite a lot of urban history.

Aboa Vetus is thus not just a collection of display cases. You can literally walk the streets and cellars of the medieval town. And while the term “multi-media” is usually thrown around pretty loosely, it really means something here. There are the streets, stairways, walls, gates, and lintels themselves. Then there are explanatory films that exploit all the bells and whistles of “virtual reality.” Blown-up maps apply a cartographical dimension to the archaeological evidence underfoot. There is a sound track. There is a narrative line that recruits a fictional family to breath life into the old stones. None of these would be terribly compelling alone. But the total package adds up to quite a moving experience.

For me, the most impressive part of Aboa Vetus is the constant presence in the maps and other images of the cathedral that stands nearby still, and which, later that evening, we passed again as we made our way back to the university guesthouse. What Aboa Vetus helps us to remember is that the cathedral in Turku was originally a Roman Catholic institution assigned the mission of wresting this part of the world from Thor, a project that took many centuries. Also, Turku’s monastery and convent remind us that Roman Catholicism was no monolith. Rather, it was a congeries of religious orders, of both laity and clergy, that pulled in many different directions while pressure also was applied from the East—by Constantinople, and also by Islam. In Turku, as almost nowhere else, we are reminded that Scandinavia has a pre-Lutheran history.

Click on the title of this post for a link to the Aboa Vetus website.

International Thanksgiving 2006

kenjanekolson@yahoo.com (Washington Buckeye) — Tue, 28 Nov 2006 08:36:00 +0000

I had not expected to have a Thanksgiving this year, and the day itself passed uneventfully. But I was invited to a real American Thanksgiving dinner on Saturday night, where a lively group of Finns, Brits, and Russians gathered for turkey with all the trimmings: stuffing, potatoes and gravy, sweet potatoes, corn, peas, Finnish cranberries, and four pies—two apple, two pumpkin. As the American, or maybe just as the most senior citizen, I was allowed to carve the bird.

Thanksgiving is my favorite holiday by far, not just because of the feast but also because of the requirement that we count our blessings. It is “meet and right so to do,” as we Episcopalians are wont to say. I have always thought that America could be a little more aggressive in exporting this fetching holiday. Then again, maybe the idea of marketing a tribute to humility is way too oxymoronic. Anyway, I noticed that everyone at the event on Saturday night seemed to understand the spirit of the occasion, so maybe Thanksgiving is catching on internationally without our making much of an effort.

Children, most of them bilingual or trilingual, loomed large at this Thanksgiving feast. They wouldn’t have sat still for a photo, so you’ll have to settle for the grown-ups, pictured above. A fine time was had by all, particularly by this innocent abroad.

What's Showing at Kunsthalle Helsinki

kenjanekolson@yahoo.com (Washington Buckeye) — Thu, 23 Nov 2006 08:12:00 +0000

I live in one of the world’s great museum cities, which is I why a strict accounting of the number of hours per week, or month, or year, I manage to log in the museums of Washington, D.C., would be extremely embarrassing. The problem is that the regular round of errands and chores somehow fills every minute of every day.

As a Fulbrighter in Finland, however, I have plenty of time, after fulfilling my duties as teacher, housekeeper, and self-improvement faddist, to hit the museum trail, and I have been taking careful notes.

This is the second installment of a series on museums in Finland.

You still have time, but you’d better hurry, if you want to see the exhibition on the Finnish-American architect Eero Saarinen at Kunsthalle Helsinki, Nervanderinkatu 3. On 12 December, it’s “wheels up,” as the show, called “Shaping the Future,” moves to Oslo and Brussels, and then to the United States.

It’s well worth a visit, though you could wait for it to come to us. Saarinen is not a favorite of mine, though like most Washingtonians I have learned to appreciate the charms of Dulles International Airport, particularly the singular swoosh of Saarinen’s dramatic terminal (see photo above). Over the years the elegance of Saarinen’s original design has been compromised in various ways, particularly in the 1980s with the introduction of the clunky “mobile lounges”—part moon rover, part Edsel—that transport passengers out to the mid-field concourses and back. The mobile lounges finally are being replaced by an underground train shuttle service that is very much in vogue at major airports these days. My guess is that the mobile lounges will find a new home at the Air and Space Museum, where they could be exhibited along with a Concorde, in a gallery called “Where the Future Went to Die.”

Airports were one of Saarinen’s specialties, he being very much a man of his times. The exhibit does an excellent job—mainly just by showing photographs of the man and his buildings and renderings, many of the last culled from the archives of Yale University—of recapturing the spirit of the 1950s and early ‘60s, the period just prior to the Kennedy assassination and everything connoted by the word, “Vietnam.”

Saarinen was the son of the Finnish architect who built, among other things, the Helsinki railway station, a blend of the functionalist ethic with whatever frayed remnants of romantic nationalism and Art Nouveau managed to survive the Great War. The Eero Saarinen revealed by this exhibit was a child of privilege—of Cranbrook and Yale, and then of Madison Avenue. He displayed talent at an early age, naturally enough, and also a strong need to establish his own place in the world, vis-à-vis the pater. There are moments in the exhibit when one can’t help but cry out, Freud lives! In New York, anyway, the era of post-war prosperity was also an age of angst and therapy. That may not have been the case in Gopher Prairie, but then it was one of the legacies of the 1950s that Gopher Prairie no longer counted for much.

It could be argued that Saarinen’s corporate campuses and university research parks foreshadowed the end of industrialism and the triumph of technocracy over liberal learning. The photos of the man at work—in white shirt and tie, sometimes with a pipe or cigar, almost always with cronies in tow—are intriguing, though it’s hard to say exactly what they reveal. They could pass for out-takes from a movie like Cash McCall--or maybe, The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit Shags Doris Day under the Gateway Arch. Above all, there is the image of Saarinen looking out from the cover of Time magazine, but now we’re not in Hollywood anymore, Toto, we’re back in the “real world.” The corporate Eero, working long hours, entering competitions, trying to satisfy demanding clients, attending yet another cocktail party, was constantly burnishing the image he wished to project—a preoccupation that we would now call “branding.” His output is remarkable when one considers that he was only fifty-one when he died suddenly of a brain tumor.

Those of us who are creatures of the world that Saarinen and his contemporaries built need to come to terms with these images. I’m still working on it. Visit “Shaping the Future” when it comes to a gallery at an airport near you. Then, on your way home, stop at a newsstand and pick up a copy of the latest issue of Metropolis magazine to see for yourself the long reach of the “long” 1950s.

Click on the title of this post for a link to the Museum of Finnish Architecture.

Immigrants and Teachers

kenjanekolson@yahoo.com (Washington Buckeye) — Wed, 22 Nov 2006 08:07:00 +0000

Yesterday's Helsingin Sanomat, international edition, had a story on the Finnish government's efforts to recruit immigrants to serve as school teachers. "Increasing numbers of Finnish residents with foreign backgrounds are to be trained as teachers. The University of Helsinki is doubling the quota for new students to be taken into the multicultural class teacher training programme next year. A similar scheme is also under consideration to recruit more immigrants to become kindergarten teachers." Click on the title of this post above to go directly to the story.

The story coincides with my becoming introduced to some people in Oulu who have been working overtime to address the needs of immigrants in this community, and also to try to encourage inter-cultural communication of various kinds. The driving force behind this project is Jacob Matthan, to whom you can be introduced through the blog of the group called CHAFF (the Chamber of Assistance for Finns and Foreigners). Jacob likes to refer to himself as a "Findian," which gives you some sense of the spirit in which he has undertaken this serious work. See the link to Oulu CHAFF over on the right-hand side of this page.

What's Showing at the Ateneum

kenjanekolson@yahoo.com (Washington Buckeye) — Tue, 21 Nov 2006 08:01:00 +0000

I live in one of the world’s great museum cities, which is I why a strict accounting of the number of hours per week, or month, or year, I manage to log in the museums of Washington, D.C., would be profoundly embarrassing. The problem is that the regular round of errands and chores somehow fills every minute of every day.

As a Fulbrighter in Finland, however, I have plenty of time, after fulfilling my duties as teacher, housekeeper, and self-improvement faddist, to hit the museum trail, and I have been taking careful notes.

This is the first installment of a series on museums in Finland.

While I was in Helsinki last week, I was encouraged by a fellow Fulbrighter to visit the Finnish National Gallery, also called the Ateneum. The collection, consisting of some 17,500 works of art, is housed in a late 19th century palazzo situated directly across the street from the main railway station, an Eliel Saarinen shed that has been a city landmark ever since its completion at the end of World War I.

Let me confess up front that I generally prefer railway stations to museums, and that if forced to choose only from a list of museums, I would always select the one specializing in urban history over those devoted to art, per se. In D.C., for example, I will, ceteris paribus, gravitate toward the National Building Museum. In Helsinki, my default destination is the City Museum on Sofiankatu, which, by the way, has a very interesting model of one of Saarinen’s planned town extensions. It’s worth a look.

The argument that persuaded me to visit the Ateneum had to do with a special exhibition of works assembled by a Stockholm-based museum administrator and curator named Pontus Hultén. Here’s a link: http://www.ateneum.fi/default.asp?docId=14926. I had never heard of Hultén, but it turns out that he was a devotee and promoter of Marcel Duchamp and subsequently of a number of avant-garde artists, including Jasper Johns, Claes Oldenburg, and Niki de Saint Phalle, who have long since ascended to the modernist hall of fame. One of the interesting things about Hultén is that he did not systematically collect art. He was, evidently, a charismatic fellow who inspired artists to give him things, which just sort of accumulated. Andy Warhol also seems to have been one of his pals.

I don’t know how many Warhols are in the permanent collection of the Hultén collection over in Tukholma, but there are two on loan to the Ateneum, one a relatively uninteresting self-portrait, the other Warhol’s oddly affecting portrait of Chairman Mao, or more precisely, Warhol’s gloss on the official PRC icon—I guess you could call it the “Gilbert Stuart” Mao. (I have borrowed the expression “oddly affecting” from a music review I read years ago that described Neil Young’s voice as “oddly affecting,” when it was clear that what the reviewer really meant was untrained, unsteady, generally not worth much, and yet…. Somehow, I don’t think Neil cares about such reviews when he cashes his royalty checks. Neither did Andy.)

Anyway, I gaped at the works in the Hultén exhibition, some of which are quite humorous, and several of which are portraits of Hultén. It took about a half-hour to take in the Hultén show, which left me wondering how I was going to get my 8 euros worth out of the Ateneum.

I needn’t have worried. I wandered through the other rooms and was reminded straight away that Finland is, by European standards, a very young nation, and an even younger independent state. The oldest work in the collection dates from about 1750, when it was a colony of Sweden. According to the Ateneum’s English-language guidebook, the eighteenth century “is best represented by Isak Wacklin’s (1720-1758) portraits.” I never had heard of Wacklin, but I found his work in the Rococo style to be subdued and urbane. I didn’t quite get my fill of Wacklin.

Then I discovered Albert Edelfelt. I had never heard of Edelfelt either, which completes my personal Trifecta of Artistic Ignorance. Edelfelt (1854-1905) was only “the most esteemed Finnish artist abroad, and his foreign contacts influenced the development of art life in Finland. The best known paintings by Edelfelt include the historical painting Queen Bianca, 1877, and the outdoor scene A Child’s Funeral, 1879. From the Luxembourg Gardens, 1887, tells of Edelfelt’s close contacts with France.”

Putting aside the issue of foreign “contacts,” I found Queen Bianca to be a profoundly humbling work of art. The Queen is shown bouncing her young son on her knee. Perhaps there is more to the story, but that is all the narrative I can detect here, and it is more than enough. With extraordinary technical skill, Edelfelt has managed to produce, not a queen, and not a secular Madonna and Child, but what seems to me a faithful representation of the intensity of the mother-son relationship. How it is possible for an artist to capture so much human emotion and hold it on a humble canvass is quite beyond me, and always will be. And then there are the folds of her dress!

To characterize A Child’s Funeral as a mere “outdoor scene” is surely unjust. It is a heart-rending account of a family in a rowboat carrying a small casket out to sea. The dead child’s sister clutches a small bouquet in a hand that has gone pathetically limp. I have to believe that even those who genuinely abhor sentimentalism would be moved by this painting. A Child’s Funeral is an unsparing depiction of grief, and also of duty, which is etched in the faces of the rowers. Edelfelt had a gift for fashioning convincing faces.

And feet. While studying these paintings, I found myself thinking of Edelfelt’s contemporary, Winslow Homer, and wondering whether he knew Edelfelt’s work. Edelfelt's angular boys, teetering precariously on rocks, elbows all akimbo, to launch their toy boats, are entirely convincing. The feet clasp the rocks as best they can, within the limits of the human anatomy. I am aware that Edelfelt’s art represents precisely the kind of bourgeois claptrap that dismayed the great Impressionists of the late nineteenth century, but those of us who never advanced beyond stick figures must stand in awe of this level of technical skill.

The Hultén exhibit is on display through 10 December 2006. For Wacklin and Edelfelt, there is no particular hurry. They are part of the permanent collection of the Ateneum.

Click on the title of this post for a link to the Finnish National Gallery.

Never Mind

kenjanekolson@yahoo.com (Washington Buckeye) — Mon, 20 Nov 2006 07:33:00 +0000

Last week I tossed a few bouquets in the direction of VR. On the basis of my weekend trip to Helsinki and back, I continue to think well of the Finnish railways. Train travel here is comfortable, convenient, and in my experience reliable, albeit expensive. I also wrote some ignorant twaddle to the effect that people are quiet and considerate on the trains. Those moronic statements I hereby retract.

My trip to Helsinki on the Pendolino train 60 started uneventfully. But at some point a woman boarded the train and deposited herself in the seat directly behind me. As soon as she got settled, she pulled out her cell phone and began to place calls, one after another. She must have called everyone she has ever met. Although my rudimentary knowledge of the language sheltered me from the actual content of those conversations, I could tell that they were banal in the extreme. Each started the same way—basically, “I am on the train.” From that point I was in over my head, linguistically speaking, but that didn’t in any way soften the blows. I held my head in my hands, covering my ears. I repaired to the restaurant car for a beer, but you can nurse a beer only so long. I gave her the evil eye. She turned up the volume, which I hadn’t thought possible. I suspect that even casual readers of this blog have discerned that I do not handle torture well. After two hours of unrelenting assault, I would have confessed to any heinous crime to get her to stop.

Misery loves company, but I didn’t have any. Much to my consternation, my fellow passengers seemed oblivious. I received no discreet looks conveying sympathy, no silent commiseration. Perhaps they were all deaf? Or stoical to a fault, at the very least. Or, it occurred to me after a while, perhaps each was contemplating murder, and was therefore maintaining an angelic mien to deflect suspicion. That was it, I decided, and immediately I assumed the role of silent co-conspirator. But then it occurred to me that they might or might not be plotting against the squawk box operating at full throttle behind me. Their intended victim could with equal justice be the source of constant groaning just a few inches away.

As I am writing this on Monday morning, back in balmy (+5), rainy Oulu, you can see that I managed to slip the noose while shedding my illusions about the Finns and their kännykkä. But I'm told there are 10,000 Nokia employees in Oulu, and each has something to answer for today.