Photography, art, things that occur to me.
could be worse – he could have gotten a tattoo
I’ve posted a gallery of my Iceland photos. I think there are maybe three that were taken in daylight. <a href=”This one didn’t seem worth preserving for posterity, but I still enjoy it. It says, “Warning: Björk is going through a Sherlock Holmes phase.”
What’s the statute of blog limitations for writing about your trip? I suppose I should go out and do something American so that I can move on. Maybe I’ll go to the mall, or invade somebody.
I’ve been home from Iceland for four hours. I am very, very sleepy. My eyes itch. My upper lip feels funny. I’m having that looming and staring and trying to remember how to type feeling. So why am I up and writing in my blog about Iceland when basically I’ve been writing in a blog about Iceland for the last four days? Because that one was for them. This one is for you. And just like in the daily diary where “we” meant “I,” in this case “you” means “me.”
Plus I’m really digging being back on a keyboard that doesn’t go all umlauty on me when I least expect it.
The trip home was relatively uneventful, despite my many close encounters on the Baltimore-to-Raleigh leg with a pair of fellow passengers from a country where the preferred mode of travel is clinging to the outside of trains. Not only did the man basically sit on me in the departure lounge, but he chose the seat next to me on the plane, thanks to Southwest’s cattle car approach to boarding. Then he placed his left elbow into my right side and held it there until it was necessary to move it to answer his mobile, which rang while we were landing. And he had a dry, hacking cough, which he made full use of throughout the flight from BWI to RDU. Should I succumb to dengue fever or beri beri in the next few days, be sure to send my regards to Passenger X.
Last night was the Airwaves wrap party, but I totally blew it off. After four days averaging three hours of sleep, I moved into a hotel for the final night, for a variety of reasons too mundane to catalog. But it was fantastic, and not just because I saw this from my window this morning. Being in the hotel allowed me plenty of time to re-establish my love for the minibar, which in turn helped me to ponder what the hell this sign hanging on the towels might mean. I also got to do my favorite thing in the world: order from room service, who supplied me with the worst $34 meal in history.
I just didn’t have the rock in me last night. I fell asleep at 8:00 p.m. with every intention of sleeping until about ten minutes before my plane took off, but I sprang fully awake at midnight. Apparently my body thought I was napping in preparation for once again staying up all night. From midnight until 4:00 a.m. I surfed the eight channels available. I especially enjoyed the Germans Doing Really Mundane Things channel, and the Two Guys Talking About Videos in Icelandic channel. There was also a channel with trivia questions in Icelandic. The multiple choice list of potential answers for one question was “Oscar Wilde, Robert Downey Jr., Kofi Annan.” I’m having no more luck coming up with a question for that list of answers than I had in the middle of the night with half a minibar in me.
And I watched “Detroit Rock City.” Perhaps if you’ve ever been in a similar situation you can understand how annoying it was to be wide awake watching “Detroit Rock City” at 4:00 a.m.
This morning I walked into town to buy some CDs by some of the Airwaves bands “Icelandic gangsta rap party at my house!” and availed myself of all that ReykjavÃk has to offer at 10:00 a.m., which is basically nothing. I suppose I could have gotten something to eat here, but there’s something about a chain of fast food places with a name reminiscent of the physical act of vomiting that I find strangely unappetizing.
I’m fading here, but I do have to share a story that is to date my favorite blog experience. “Warning: if it will lower your opinion of me to find that I am a shameless attention whore, stop reading now.” Before I went over, I wrote here about how excited I was to see the Icelandic band Ske, who I missed last year and whose album I fell in love with after I got home. I saw their show Thursday night, and it was amazing. I wrote about it the next day in the daily diary. Saturday night I was in a club, and an Icelandic guy walked up to me and asked, “Are you Fistful of Ploopie?” “Ploopie, Plooble… who can blame the guy.” It was Hrannar from Ske, who, according to the liner notes, plays rafgÃtarar, gÃtarar and forritun. Being a musician, and therefore a bit of a shameless attention whore himself, he had done a web search after their show to see if anybody had written about them yet, found this site and recognized me as the guy who was taking pictures at the show and singing along. We had a brief chat, and he’s a very nice guy, which makes me feel even worse that I invited them to a party after their show with no beer and a naked Scotsman.
Okay, now I’m going to bed. Or maybe I’ll be watching a really bad movie.
I’m a little worried about that molar
Want an update on my week in Iceland? Well, it’s like this. It’s 4:00 a.m. and you’re in a bar and someone asks if he can use your camera and it’s Siggi Baldursson “formerly of the Sugarcubes and now involved in a lot of cool other stuff”, and he takes that self portrait and hands you your camera back. And then someone hits you in the face <a href=”<a href=”http://plooble.typepad.com/bleef/rose in the face.html” onclick=”window.open”‘http://plooble.typepad.com/bleef/rose in the face.html’,’popup’,’width=528,height=396,scrollbars=no,resizable=no,toolbar=no,directories=no,location=no,menubar=no,status=no,left=0,top=0′”; return false”with a rose.
So, it’s like that.
submit your caption suggestions
Want to know what my week in Iceland is like so far? It’s like that.
I’m not going to write much here since it is way past beer thirty, but I had to post that picture. And besides, I’m writing this on Adda Snackfish’s computer, which has a Swedish keyboard set for Icelandic characters, but they aren’t marked, which means it’s basically a random character generator. I was writing the Airwaves daily diary yesterday and it took me ten minutes to figure out that to make a question mark you hit the shift key and the circumflex. To make a @, you hit ALT GR and Q. ALT GR?
But it can do this: Æ à ó ú æ ð à þ
Often when you don’t want it to.
I’ve started the daily diary entries. You can see them at the Iceland Airwaves site. Click on Airwaves Insider, then Daily Diary.
Tim Pogo, Tim Burgess and me
By the time you read this, I will be…
in Iceland. I’m going back for the third year to the Iceland Airwaves music festival in ReykjavÃk. “My previous visits are chronicled at my other site, Jostled by Vikings.” I went in 2001 and created that site when I got back. My friends at Icelandair, the festival organizers, liked it and invited me to come last year to write a daily online diary. It was a sort of, oh, I don’t know, “weblog” of the festival. “If you’d like to read them, go to the Airwaves site and click on Airwaves Insider. I wrote a lot of the other stuff in there, too.” They’re bringing me back to do it again, so in essence, Fistful of Plooble has moved to Iceland for the coming week. Maybe I should call it Fistful of Putrefied Shark Meat for the time being. Or Fistful of Funny Letters. “You use the character map a lot when you’re writing about Iceland.” I’ll start posting to the diary on Thursday. I might post here, too, if I’m not too drunk busy.
I would write more about Iceland and the festival, but I already did that, on the Jostled by Vikings site. Suffice it to say that it’s an amazing country and an amazing festival. There are dozens of great Icelandic bands playing all kinds of different music, as well as acts from the US and Europe. Last year I met a bunch of really cool Icelandic musicians including Siggi from The Sugarcubes and the guys from Jagúar, as well as visitors like The Hives, Remy Zero and Blackalicious, and narrowly avoided seeing Norman Cook “a.k.a. Fatboy Slim” in a bathing suit. I also got to hang out with Tim Burgess of The Charlatans and his wife Michelle. We went to see a geyser together, and later he played me rough mixes of his solo album, which was just released last month. It’s that kind of festival.
This year there are a bunch of Icelandic bands on my must-see list “SKE, Jagúar, MÃnus, Trabant, Úlpa, Vinyl and 200.000 NaglbÃtar, which means “200,000 nail clippers””. The Airwaves site has mp3s of most of the bands, and I highly recommend checking them out, especially SKE. I’m also eagerly awaiting the shows by US acts The Album Leaf and TV On The Radio. And I really want to see Bent & 7Berg. You haven’t heard rap until you’ve heard it in Icelandic. But I’m most excited about seeing SKE. They were one of last year’s buzz bands, and of course I missed the show. I bought their album “Life, Death, Happiness & Stuff,” and I couldn’t get it out of my CD player for weeks. This year they’re playing on Thursday at Þjóðleikhúskjallarinn. Right. Sure. I hope I don’t have to ask for directions.
I’m also looking forward to hanging out with Adda Snackfish Egbertsdóttir, and meeting Taavi. It’s nice to know I won’t be the only one in danger of peeing on the floor.
Okay, y’all be good while I’m gone. Oh, and please don’t rob my house. Thanks.
dogs love me ’cause I’m crazy sniffable
I went to a pet store yesterday to pick up some gifts for Taavi the Viking Wonder Dog. Now I was raised by with dogs, but I’ve been owned by cats for more than ten years and haven’t been down the chew toy aisle for quite some time. Man. If it was ever attached to an animal and can be dried and shrink wrapped, you can buy it. Care for a pig snout? How about a cow ear? There was some stuff I couldn’t even bring myself to look at. Taavi’s care package is full of desiccated swine and bovine appendages “I can’t wait to see what the airport sniffer dogs make of that”, and includes no fewer than five “steer pizzles” “Unfamiliar with the word? Here’s a hint: bulls have ’em, cows don’t. And it doesn’t mean “bad attitude””
I’m tempted to make a “fistful of… joke, but I will restrain myself.
I was chatting with the clerk there at I’m Not Gonna Pay a Lot for This Pizzle, and he said, “I guess it’s good that they find a way to use all the parts” Yeah, other than hot dogs.
You wouldn’t think I would have much of an appetite after PizzleFest 2003, but I stopped at Wellspring on the way home “where the pizzles are packaged in BMW SUVs” and picked up some stuff, including a package of sliced ham that reads “pork used never administered any antibiotics” Well, good. I’d hate to think I was eating some kind of doctor pig.