19 october 2019 part B

So a year ago today I was in Turku, en route to Stockholm. I still feel I don't really know Turku properly but I do feel that the Park Hotel made me like it a hell of a lot more. Check it out:

This is the window of my room

So old school so Turku

Actual Turku event memorialised:

In the early 1920s CJ DeGaris used to bemoan how little people knew or understood Australia. His main beef was that people in other countries thought most Australians were black, I don't know precisely what that meant to him (i.e. most people in South Africa were/are black, it wasn't cause to denounce SA per se). Anyway, it seems to me that no city on earth these days, and Finnish cities are not exceptional in this regard, fails to have its fucken Australian 'pub' which I guess is largely an excuse for steak and exploded onions, Australia's chow mein (i.e. no-one in Australia would ever eat such a thing without commenting that they last had one in for instance Turku). 

This is not that, this is another restaurant and actually I think it might have been the one where I had my dinner a year ago today (in truth because of time difference it was probably a year ago yesterday but just go with it OK)

Tomorrow I'll show you how breakfast went at the Park Hotel, it was pretty spesh. I just want to marvel at the 'personalised' lollies I saw in a little IGA-style supermarket after dinner, and wonder at what sort of self-respecting Turkulainen would say 'oh wow, Haribou have printed up special packs with two Finnish cities on a sign post, and since it's clear that Haribear and Hariboy are not in either Oulu or Helsinki, I guess they're tourists in Turku!'  

19 October 2019

 

we

Over the last couple of years I have become extremely sensitised to the word 'we' when used in relation to nationality/ethnicity (or even all of humanity). I really battle with it, and of course it's so incredibly ubiquitous I also often find myself using it, too, and as often as I notice that I correct myself, but it's not always possible.

I think 'we' is a massively exclusive term, which looks absolutely inclusive. 

I have particularly noticed it in all the anti-US fb groups I've joined in the last year or more. I'm not anti-US per se but I am anti-US provincialism, and like others in the group I have a hundred examples of times when Americans showed themselves to be extraordinarily ignorant of the world outside the US, which is the point of those groups ('This just in - The US is not the only country', 'Sounds like outlandishly misapplied USA-centrism but OK', and so on; all these people, presumably Americans, responding to fb posts/comments with 'this is the USA' or, and this is one that posters in these groups particularly love, Americans responding to posts or questions specific to other parts of the world with 'in Connecticut, we eat crayfish' or 'a beer at 18? You wait three more years like everyone else!' etc). 

But the non-US people in those groups can often be as bad. We helped the US win WWI, and so on. Ridiculous stuff about amorphously conceptualised racial/national constructs, which never stand up to scrutiny for a second, but they're so endemic we don't scrutinise them. My antenna hum even over stuff about 'in Australia, we take the attitude...' ie not even historical stuff substituting for what our ancestors (or people who used to live where we live now) thought or did, but generalisations about 'us'. 

Look, I am always up for talking about collective benefits but I think that the use of that terminology is damaging. Certainly 'we' don't believe anything, if it's a 'we' bigger than three people (even then, take it with a grain of salt). There has to be a better way to do this. Perhaps, it's a variation of the weird and somewhat irritating device of defining yourself as part of a particular group, so as to explain your position: most notorious is 'As a mum...' but also for men 'As the father of three beautiful daughters...' etc. So, 'as an Australian, I have been allowed to drink alcohol since I was 18', very specific (and also not about what Australians think but what law applies to them). 

More to the point, people talk about (for instance) Australians as a 'we' but even within that 'we' they take an exclusive viewpoint: 'we accepted Vietnamese migrants in 1975...' in terms of government acceptance, but of course now those migrants and their children are part of 'us'. The only thing that stops it being as legitimate to say of all Australians 'we migrated to Australia as refugees after 1975' is numbers. But it's true of 1.4% of the population, except those are both migrants and their descendants, so a lot of that 1.4% were born here and were part of the population putatively 'accepting' subsequent migrants. I appreciate that the word 'accepted' is dodgy, because of course a lot of Australians didn't accept certain migrant groups, and I suppose there is a weasel word 'we' in this regard - we, Australians, voted for our government who then acted on behalf of us. Although of course most Australians alive now were either not alive in 1975 or too young to vote (that's a guess but surely it's true). 

Am I right? Is 'we' stupid and wrong? It really feels like it.

18 October 2019

In no special order, pictures from this day last year in Helsinki.  

An op shop I like, just around the corner from the Hotel Anna where I stayed the first time I went to Helsinki, probably 2011? 

Just an amazing building, no more no less. 

A high-class junk shop I spent quite a bit of time in but bought nothing:

A courtyard. I have to tell you, whenever I travel I am running a narrative in my head about things I can use in books, lectures, papers. I am pretty sure that's why I photographed this but I have nfi what I was thinking I'd do with the image:

Just another amazing building 

This is the parliament/university/library precinct

The H is for the museum of Helsinki

I am going to put forward a theory that there is some kind of character called Black Pekka and Pekka is essentially the Finnish form of Peter, but I am going no further. Note fez. 

This little man is, if I remember rightly, in a display in the museum about how people lived around a century ago. 

I can't see this that clearly but my memory is that this display really elides the 1940s and WW2 for Finland. I am sure there were a lot of discussions about this. Or am I sure? Maybe everyone just knows why you don't talk about that stuff. In any case, note the importance of the Olympic games in there. 

I remember an elderly American (?) couple who were looking at this when I was and I pointed out to them that WW2 was missing. They didn't seem to even really register that I was talking to them, though I am fairly sure they were English-speaking.  

I don't know who this is but s/he is situated in the cafeteria area of the museum. 

The rest of these images = the unbelievably beautiful National Library. 

i am not your superstar

So as mentioned this is the graphic novel I am going to do next, starting with four or five pages I drew in 2003. I can't remember if I showed you these panels. I figure it will probably not be called I am not your superstar which is the title I originally gave it, although I'll decide later about that (I was planning to call my second one Camouflage or perhaps Bricolage (I looked up bricolage in wiktionary, actually looking to check the spelling because I wasn't 100% certain of that, but I saw that it said 'see trash fire', so that kind of led me more in that direction...). 

The top half is good, the bottom half is abandoned - I photocopied this page, cut it in half and continued it in a different direction. 

I'm really looking forward to working on this, I have a whole new cast of characters for the present-day stuff (the woman is the only important character in the above as far as I'm aware, although the guy with a bull on his shirt, Dominic, might play a pivotal role in the story as I'm formulating it, but let me tell you, 17 years later he hasn't aged well). 

In the 2003 pages she is referred to as Desiree but I have decided that is too much. But with people you have to think not 'what sums them up' so much as 'how did their parents sum them up with precisely nothing to go on', so at the moment I am calling her Posey but I think that might change. l guess she is a bit over 40 right now, which means she was born in about 1978, makes sense, she was 25 in the 2003 pages, now she is a very high-ranking public servant with a daughter aged about 15. That's as far as I've got so far. It feels very promising though, I hope you agree. I am going to do this one in colour. 

Re: her name I actually wanted to call her Monica which would have been perfect but that would be pretty unfair on Monika Fikerle who deserves better! 

17 October 2019

Yes, a year ago I was in Helsinki. I had an air bnb house for a couple of days in one of my favourite places in the world, Puu Käpylä. I don't know for a fact but I imagine that this was one of those situations where the home owner(s) just disappear to their weekender whenever someone wants to book their house. Because the house was clearly lived in, but sort of lived-in lite, if you know what I mean. Like they treated it like an air bnb too. 

Love the caged Moomin, though, I'd forgotten about that. 

It was a small house and looked out into this communal garden, shared with I think two other homes (not sure about that entirely, it wasn't obvious). I didn't see another soul. 

This is me using the google translate camera to figure out how to use the washing machine. What did people do before... civilisation? (That said, wtf is 'take up space'? Just don't select that option, I guess). 

If I remember correctly this is just a yard (or space) as seen from the street outside. Not sure why it appealed but it did and on reflection it still does. 

One of two or three statues outside (I think) (or at least near) a school. It might not have been this moment, but I do recall a little kid wanting to pat one of these pigs. 

I'm as sick of the 'I could be wrong's as you, but I think these are some of the 1950 Olympics apartments, which are just nearby Käpylä (actually maybe a part of it; I have trouble distinguishing Puu Käpylä from regular Käpylä and I think for many the distinction is a bit amorphous). Just regular housing today and while they were a bit of a showcase for, I guess, post-Nazi, USSR-resistant Finland in the early 50s, they don't stand out massively now from hundreds of thousands of similar buildings (at least from the outside). 

A place. 

Another place. Or the same place. You can see it's getting twilighty. 

I am the worst for letting the mundane get me sentimental / sentimotional 

A 'koulukasvirtarha' is a 'school nursery' which I think means a nursery school, not a school for people who want to learn about how to work in a nursery. 

I only remember that the cool tower was somehow a marker for me, I was heading for that across this open space, some of which, as scrubby as it looks in this picture, was in use as gardening allotments. 

This was funny. This bell end in monkish garb (munkin vaatteet) shooed me away from taking photographs of whatever the fuck was being filmed here, secret fool's business (sailaisen typerän liiketoimintaa) I suppose, under the overpass which was to the left of the above picture. 

I think soon after this time it either got too dark to photograph anything or I got preoccupied by whatever I was doing - tbh I don't remember - to take more pictures of my 17 October, 2019 but it was wonderful and just to keep restating the bleedin' obvious, one bleak afternoon in suburban Helsinki is worth a year in most other places I can think of, in my opinion (minun mielestäni).