Back North A Bit, Then South

Just in case I hadn’t made it clear that being on the road is tough, I offer this piece of overheard conversation:

(girl): “You know, there was a music festival here two days ago. You guys really should have been here for that!”

(Zhu Lei): “Hmm... Two days ago... Ah, we were fishing for salmon two days ago.”

Hey, the rock and roll life isn’t for everyone.

Here is as good a time as any to send our collective shouts-out to gas station food: Hoorah! For logs of chicken wrapped in soft tortilla shells! And, at the risk of sounding like a corporate shill, Hurrah! for Statoil offering this newest contender for nature’s perfect food. The wraps are the band’s most requested food product, overtaking kebabs (aka: gyros/shawarma/donnair), last year’s most-chowed chow. And yes, the log of chicken does, in fact, taste as good as it looks and sounds. At least it’s got veggies inside...

Because of the difficulty in finding a solid internet connection that doesn’t constantly go in and out of service (picture me in both our Trondheim host’s apartment and the Halden hotel lobby doing the laptop dance trying to find the strongest signal to no avail), you’re getting two updates all at once, that is, those of you who are still checking in after my lengthy absence. I write from Halden, where we arrived Tuesday night after a ten-hour (uneventful in the way that treats an ‘event’ as a car problem) drive from Trondheim. Halden is in southern Norway, near Sweden -- near enough to Sweden that I was told that we might want to do as others before us, who head across the border for cheaper groceries/food.

Monday saw us take to the road heading east and north, to Trondheim club Ramp. We had already been told about Trondheim’s self-governing part of town in which the venue sat -- Svartlamon -- by Bjorn, a journalist who we met up north in Karlsoy. He had given a talk about squats in Norway which Kang Mao had -- as much as she could understand via quick English translations supplied by Kristin the Kamerawoman -- loved. Turns out that Bjorn was staying in the same home on Karlsoy as the band, so he had told them lots about the neighborhood. Bjorn lives in the ‘hood, and also helps with the administration thereof. After a tasty dinner (I had a lovely fishburger, in case you were wondering), Bjorn and friends gave us a tour.

Just over 200 people live in Svartlamon (160 adults, 50 kids), and the area comprises a few buildings mainly built between 1850-1900 (or somewhere around there). Many of the buildings were cheap housing for labourers, so the legacy of the conditions remain: shared bathrooms are one legacy, but so is the slow tilting of the building housing Ramp, in Pisa style, the building lurched 30 cm forward (they’ve since fixed the building so it will tilt no more), giving the person standing in the top floor window a different kind of vertigo.

While I don’t know the exact details of the hows and whens of the area’s occupation, I can tell you that a major part of the fight was over an expanding car dealership. The residents built a park over the course of a weekend to prevent the dealership from expanding the parking lot. This is the park (left). The archway entrance is supposed to be the shark’s teeth of the real estate industry. There is a bonfire pit in the middle, plus grass and a small playground. The mural on the wall at the back was painted by two very famous Norwegian artists, both named Haukend (I’m spelling that wrong, aren’t I); it was a ploy to prevent the building’s destruction since it’s trickier to destroy a piece of art than it is a building.

Bjorn, here in the middle, giving the lowdown on the neighborhood while a camerawoman (a new member of the ongoing documentary family) takes it all in. In the background is the car dealership mentioned above, now being transformed into the neighborhood kindergarten.

What we learned was that the neighborhood is overseen by a committee of five; three residents and two representatives from the City of Trondheim (in a strange twist, the City is actually a Kommune in Norwegian). If I understood right, the majority of residents can veto any City decision through a majority vote. Meanwhile, plans are in the works for creating an expanded culture/business centre in which they hope to have rehearsal spaces, a theatre, offices and more.

A committee goes through applications for new residents; Bjorn guessed that there were anywhere from 70-100 applications piled up. Priority goes to artists, students, and foreigners; the latter brought raised eyebrows from a few of Subs. A neat example of a ‘squat’ that works, and that has moved from occupation (hence the skull and cross bones) to institutionalization.

It ain’t Chinglish, but hey. At left “One’s I wished/I was someone/No I know/I should/Hawe aimd/Higer”. A cool thought, yes. But something in the execution... At right, well... Not quite the call for Jews to revisit their roots. The politics of activist communities like this one aside, not half a block from here was a poster advertising a march to end Israeli occupation of Palestine that I can only assume the scrawler attended.

A little bit of Beijing in a room packed with people: Paul (I think that was his name) showed up in his Yu gong yi shan tee to give us a little taste of home. His wife, Yuan Yuan, had known Subs back in the day, and between the two of them, the band finally had someone else to speak Chinese with. There were, however, no shortage of other people who wanted to talk with the band, and the line around the Subs merchandise remained for an hour after the show. And then there were the fans who stuck around to gather round the musicians into the wee hours, here paying rapt attention to Kang Mao’s every word: