One of my traveling companions remarked that Copenhagen was awfully nice, but that it looked as if they had put the same building everywhere. He’s right. There’s a uniformity to the old parts of the city, where all the blocks are built to a six- or seven-story height, with an identical, rather relentless pattern of high, wide windows lined up across long, flat facades. Yet the feeling isn’t banal: the buildings vary in detail, and are scaled so that they’re solid but not oppressive. The streets, open to the sky, are relaxed. The big windows let in daylight, a precious commodity in this part of the world, and their insistent rhythms measure one’s passage through the streets.

Of all the tasks an architect needs to contend with, crafting a compelling facade for a city building might be the most difficult. The street elevation is most often what shapes an image for the building and a character for the city. Copenhagen offers an important lesson in how simple a good facade can be: it’s just a wall with windows in it.

June 18, 2012 by Nalina Moses

After seeing a show of contemporary art at Scandinavia House last summer I was disappointed to come away without a better idea of what Scandinavia is. What I conjured about the place continued to be based on various random associations: long winters, virgin forests, Bjorn Borg, the Villa Mareia, Aga stoves, the movies of Ingmar Bergman, and the magnificent, misanthropic, coffee- and alcohol-swilling character of Kurt Wallander. This fantasy of Scandinavia was predominantly Swedish. If one image prevailed, it was the views of Faro at the end of each episode of Scenes from a Marriage, which show a lyrical, desolate island landscape. The panoramas offer a stripped-down beauty that refreshed after the heated, tangled emotions of the narrative. (There’s a good account of Bergman’s life in Faro in this spread from W Magazine.)

Then last month I set off for Scandinavia – the real place, that is – still wanting to know what Scandinavia was. I accepted the platitudes that it was an orderly culture within a powerful landscape, whose peoples valued socialist politics, good design, and healthy living. Now, after I’ve returned, I might agree that there is no single, uncomplicated Scandinavia. Nonetheless what I saw left me with a tangle of new impressions, which follow here.

June 15, 2012 by Nalina Moses

Last summer all the lads were sporting ribbon-trimmed straw fedoras pulled down low in front, and this year it looks like they’re going to be sporting black porkpies perched at perilous angles. At a diner I spotted a young man wearing one just like that and it took me right back to the 1980’s, when I was in high school, and, more specifically 1986, when Madonna wore one in the video for Open Your Heart.

I can’t tell you how much videos meant to us back then. We listened to music on the radio and on cassette tapes in our Walkmen. We saw what artists looked like by reading Creem and watching MTV, whose original mission was to, like, play music. And I can’t tell you how much Madonna meant to us back then. It wasn’t all the obvious things she did to provoke – like singing about being a virgin and wearing wedding dress. It was the way she dressed up and then dressed down and wore too much makeup and transformed herself into the different women she wanted to be: lady, artist, ingenue, whore. After seeing the videos for Burning Up and Borderline I acquired fishnets, black leggings and an oversized white t-shirt with neon graphics. I didn’t wear them with the boldness that Madonna did and I couldn’t, as I was a trapped in a Catholic school uniform and my own nice-girl inhibitions. But I started, tentatively, using clothing to make myself the person I wanted to be.

June 12, 2012 by Nalina Moses

I was not one of those little girl who dreamed of horses, but after seeing War Horse at Lincoln Center I might very well become one. The primary enchantment of the production is the life-size horse puppets, made by Handspring Puppet Company, used to depict the title character, Joey, as he is raised on a farm in the English countryside and moves with a cavalry troop through the battles of World War I. Each puppet is managed by three actors: two crouched inside the torso moving its legs, and one standing outside, in front, moving its head and mane. There’s no attempt to camouflage the actors against the dark stage; they’re dressed like farm hands in boots, caps and suspenders, and move about just as freely as the actors portraying the other (far less compelling) human characters. Yet a minute or so after the curtain rises all you see are the horses, which whinny, stomp, rear, and roam around with all the impetuous majesty of real horses. You just don’t care about anything else.

While the production credits the horses as puppets, that word doesn’t feel entirely adequate. They are brought to life (really, they seem alive) by the transparent work of some very skilled actors, yet they’re not as passive, as inert, as conventional puppets are. Instead, in their condensed, calligraphic movements, they summon something like the essence of horse.

June 11, 2012 by Nalina Moses