yustyoking

  

            Why run for mayor? “Because it’s there!” The same challenge that drove George Herbert Mallory to scale Mount Everest. Resulting in the Mont Blanc fountain pen, available at fine jewelers everywhere. In my case, sitting in my studio apartment staring at the four walls, I desperately feel the need to escape from NYC. “Oh, the pressure!” as the hooker says in the movie Pretty Woman. Let Anthony Weiner and all the other sexual deviants run against Christine Quinn for Mayor of New York City. Ce n’est pas moi! Ich will Bürgermeister af Alla tiders haben. I wanna become Mayor of Alla tiders.

Now since “Alla tiders” isn’t listed on the map at either Mapquest or Google Earth, look under Hemse. Southern Gotland. A farming area. Now run your finger along the screen northeast about an inch and a quarter and THAT’S WHERE THE FARMHOUSE IS that we christened “Alla tiders” (“Let the good times roll” in English) back in the summer of 1984.

Alla tiders. No one forbade us from putting it on envelopes as long as the address ended with postal code “62350” and “Hemse.”

“This is how new place names are created!” Björn assured us, his band mates.  A rock foursome, we called ourselves Social Security Safety Net. Think The Beatles minus a guitar and without Paul on bass. Synthesizers were all the rage back then, bands like Landscape, Soft Cell, Ultravox, Spandau Ballet, Depeche Mode and Kraftwerk. They weren’t us. We were synth-playing anti-capitalist crusaders.   

* 

            Russian opposition leader Alexei Navalny is out on bail. In typical Moscow show trial fashion, Russia’s most popular opposition figure has been accused of embezzling half a million dollars in timber from a state-owned company. And he’s been found guilty. Well, d’oh! He faces five years in prison. Well, d’oh! A Russian judge has released him, pending appeal. So why has he been set free? Because he is running for Mayor of Moscow! Vladimir Putin doesn’t want any more effing martyrs. This way, Alexei Navalny gets to run. And when Navalny gets thoroughly trounced by Putin’s own handpicked candidate, Sergei Sobyanin, yeah, then Navalny will be yesterday’s news. “The people have spoken…” and all that kal. Anyway, that’s the game plan. Let the bastard run and then defeat him. No way is an ex-KGB man like Vladimir Putin going to allow Alexei Navalny to become Mayor of Moscow! Never happen. This is going to be an interesting election: Only former members of the Communist Party will be eligible to vote! Yust yoking! And, you know, they have Putin’s people tabulating the votes… D’oh! Assassination is always a final option, but no one likes to use it, since it instantly produces a martyr. And Putin’s doesn’t want any more effing martyrs!

*

            I spent my Junior Year Abroad at the University of Uppsala in Sweden. Then I vacationed on the island of Gotland for the summer. You take the ferry from the mainland, an eight hour trip. Half of Stockholm heads to Gotland for a week or two of summer vacation. My college bros Björn, Ronnie and Hans wanted more than that, so we rented a ramshackle farmhouse outside Hemse, way down in the south. There had once been a railroad on Gotland. Imagine! It’s a pretty small island. Having torn up the tracks, SJ ran a bus service from Visby up north down to the southern tip and most points in-between. I took the bus.

*

            Like Navalny in Russia, I know I am facing an implacable government with total hegemony over legality, culture and public opinion. “That’s the price of democracy” I’ve texted Björn in Stockholm. “A gov’t that represents the views of the people. Scandalous! What R they thinking?”

Nyever mind that the government is unaware of my running for mayor in the middle of the annual, national July vacation shutdown. It’s an insidious plot to brand me IRRELEVANT.  As soon as I lose the election— to a fictitious entity, but still— all concepts of legitimacy go out the window. How Machiavellian of those devious Swedish bureaucrats! First they ignore me, and  then they ignore me some more!

I would admire their plan if it were happening to someone else. WikiLeaks’ Julian Assange, for example. Get him to run for President of Ecuador and when he goofs, declare the man superfluous! Ha! You got to hand it to the Swedes! How ingenious. Otherwise, poor Julian has stepped on the cultural landmine built into Swedish sexual equality: The ladies wear the pants and hold all the cards. You sleep with a Swedish woman, you are signing on for a lifetime commitment, whether you like it or not. Swedish women are nice and they don’t necessarily push us men up against the wall, but if they have a beef, the system of justice protects women and children first. Men’s rights come way down the list, after dogs, cats, horses, cows, pigs, sheep, lynx, wolves, hamsters and parakeets.

Full disclosure: This isn’t the first time I’ve considered running for Mayor of Alla tiders. It is, however, my current run for this elective office, now, in the summer of 2013. Printed posters, buttons, bumper stickers and yard signs are all in the works, although the Swedes don’t actually do yard signs. Over in Svedala, yard signs never caught on.

Big music acts like to include Gothenburg and Globen in Stockholm on their tour schedules. “Money, money, money, it’s a rich man’s world!” to quote all-time Swedish record holders ABBA. Authors of Mamma Mia!, “Dancing Queen” and “Fernando.”

Our band, Social Security Safety Net, never made that big a dent. In a nod to Heavy Metal, my first attempt at a band logo used runic lettering. Very effective (all those S’s), it made us look like a cabaret act from the Third Reich. Ditch that! “Forget how the music sounds,” reasoned Björn. “It’s all in the presentation.” We taped over the names on our instruments, replacing them with Cyrillic lettering, spelling phonetically names like “Pony” (for the synth), “Boris” (on Ronnie’s guitar) and “Pivo” (Russian for “beer”) on our travel cases. I spent $125 on band T-shirts for our roadies: White on black, “SSSN” which in Cyrillic comes out “CCCH.” Go figure! Pins: The enamel work was done in Leningrad, since the Soviet Union had decades of experience. Buttons were made in the USA for the same reason. Album covers! Boy, did I ever design album covers. Art work. Photography. Liner notes. Everything but, you know, music.

“Our musical creations are so colossal,” Björn predicted, “it’ll take TEN YEARS for anyone else to catch up!” Throwing himself onto his synth keyboard with both hands, he wildly pressed down on two keys, his body vibrating with tension, head thrown back, face filled with emotion.

Wow!

I couldn’t wait for the day when we had enough cash to actually rent or buy amplifiers, plug in and, you know, hear how our instruments sounded. I got tired of singing into a dead microphone.

Being a rock star, I needed my fill of “sex, drugs and rock ‘n’ roll.” My summer flame was named Ylva Franzén. She still lives outside Visby, happily married. Her father had a farm. He grew hay for silage, corn and sugar beets. I met Ylva through her bro’ Peter, who worked as a stevedore on the Gotland’s ferry. See, my buddies Björn, Hans and Ronnie knew their place in society. They weren’t going to shoot the breeze with any uneducated stevedore. As an American, I had no such qualms. After three sentences, Peter (nicknamed “Per”) led me below decks and aft, plucking a bottle from the pocket of his overalls. Boy, did I ever sleep that night, zonked out atop the plush carpet under the main staircase. When we docked in Visby, I hung around until Per finished his chores. We walked ashore together. “Oh,” he remarked. “I forgot to mention it. This is my sister Ylva.”

Holy shit! As I live and breathe. Ylva Franzén. One whiff of her garlic scent and I was smitten. Waves of Viking red hair, enormous green eyes outlined in mascara, siren red rouge, red lipstick, melon-shaped breasts almost bursting through her blouse and wide, luxurious hips. And tall… A whole oak tree of a woman. She had me at “hello,” eating me up with those lantern green eyes!

“I’m only 17. I don’t know very much,” she lamented.

“You’ve got time,” I assured her.

She laughed, showing straight white teeth. “Oh,” she said, “I like you.”

Björn, Ronnie and Hans hated her. “Uneducated slut,” swore Björn impotently whenever Per and Ylva drove down in Per’s EPA-traktor— a sort of four-wheeled moped— to pick me up and spend a day at the beach.

“Don’t blame me!” I replied. “Find girls of your own!”

No way. They despised— and imitated, clumsily— the local accent and dialect. They made fun of the farmers. I began to realize that my band mates were parochial college kids and effete snobs!

We look back on our high school sweethearts and say, “I should have married her!” Those young marriages never last. At 25 or 30, neither partner is satisfied with high school fare. That was never in the cards with my friend Ylva. It was refreshing that she knew her own farm girl limitations. “I’m as dumb as a stone and know it” was a great way to put down the university snobs, but it left something to be desired in the marriageability department. Still, I would have considered it, but for Ylva’s “Muhammad Ali syndrome.” — “Float like a butterfly and sting like a bee!”— Ylva flew into rages and threw punches. It took awhile to dawn on me, but that was why her brother Per and his friends looked so shocked when Ylva and I became an item. Within a week, I had my first black eye. We Feingolds, on my mother’s side, are Zakroiskis from Zabludova, Russian-Polish peasants. I grew up listening to my parents’ screaming matches. Only Shanty Irish, however, actually threw punches and broke things. Gotland introduced me to an earthier kultur.

Since we had an entire, secluded house for the summer, just off the main road, all our university friends came to party. Of course they did! I have hazy recollections of Björn and Ronnie standing on chairs at the dinner table, calling for attention by scraping knives along the ceiling, roaring drunk. “Here! Here! Just wan’ t’ thank all youse peoples for comin’ t’ join our little soirée,” they screamed in Swedish. Every night, if Ylva wasn’t around, some drunk college lass “accidently” fell into my lap, planting French kisses down my throat, all of us drunk as skunks. Jesus! My Prince Harry moment. As Samuel Pepys said, “And then to bed…”

Half our gang bicycled down to the beach. Bike rental is a time-honored tradition on Gotland. You rent a bike in Visby and pedal all over the island, overnighting in sleeping bags and pup tents under the stars. On the beach, where bathing suits were optional, our crowd attracted the attention of the locals. “The students” they called us, implying immature high schoolers. Or “the nerds” (plugghästarna) which wasn’t a whole lot better.

The famous “Goths” or “Visigoths” (West Goths) originally came from Gotland, long boats at the ready. For a small island, the Gutamål dialect has four distinct variations: The accent in Klintehamn in the west is very different from Ljugarn in the east. Slite in the north differs from Hemse in the south. Speaking the Swedish of Uppsala and Stockholm labeled us as transients, tourists. The locals tolerated us for the cash we brought to the island, but we were never truly accepted.

Poor Ylva! From Visby, she was a Gotländska, but still not considered kosher in the south. “Råire jär laddet! ” When she talked with the locals, they looked at her like she was crazy. “She’s from Visby,” I would interject.

“Aha! We thought she was putting us on!” answered the kids or the adult vendors, who I found blunt but friendly. Farmer style. “You guys aren’t with the ‘zero-eights,’ then?” they would ask quietly, glancing toward my Uppsala cohorts. Zero-eight was the prefix for Stockholm telephone numbers, a way of indicating folks from the mainland.

“She’s from Visby,” I would croak desperately, my English accent all over the map. “I’m from the States.”

They’d shake their heads understandingly, giving us wary looks.

Sweden’s other major island is Öland. I was amazed to discover a bond between the inhabitants of the two islands. One of our student visitors was Hélène, from Öland, and the locals treated her like a long-lost cousin. All the girls in our shack shared an animosity toward Ylva, a high school “townie,” a local. No one despised her more than Hélène. For her part, Ylva tried to be friends with each of us, before physically beating the crap out of my colleagues. I was never there to break up those fights. I was out gathering kindling or spending the day hauling nets on a fishing trawler. Open for any adventure, I found the Gotlanders ready to humor “the American.” I had a ball! Only to arrive back at Alla tiders to discover Björn sporting serious bruises and abrasions.

“Your girlfriend,” Ronnie explained, “wiped the floor with him.”

As film director Nicolas Winding Refn says, “Even though we’re taught not to enjoy the oldest form of justice, which is an eye for an eye, we’re still rooted in it and take pleasure from it.”

One day, big to-do, Hélène approached me with a major black eye on the right side of her face. She had her knapsack packed, water bottle filled. Hans sat at the wheel of our one and only car, ready to drive her up to Visby in time for the ferry boat. “This is quite enough,” seethed Hélène. “If you can’t control that witch of yours, I don’t intend to stick around and be anybody’s punching bag!”

“Ylva’s a regular Ingemar Johansson,” cracked Hans helpfully, incensing Hélène even more.

“You guys are such shits!” she screamed. I held open the door for her. Throwing her gear on the back seat, she hopped primly into the car without giving me a second glance.

Adieu, Hélène.

*

            Now it’s true that Alla tiders is a fictional entity. You may feel I’m selling you a lot of bull. But if Obama has taught us anything, it’s that YOU CAN SELL BULL AS LONG AS YOU ARE UP FRONT ABOUT IT. So what are the pro’s?

Unlike Detroit, Michigan or Virginia’s start-up airline Independence Air (remember them?), my entity is not saddled with debt. In fact, I’ve thrown a few bucks in the kitty and paid all expenses out-of-pocket, resulting in a positive, if limited, capital base. No debt.

We have a low burn rate, running through our money slowly, giving us a longer runway to push-back and start-up.

I’ve got a stupendous national anthem (“Rock Yer Socks Off” by Scam Artist), flag design (think Cuba’s minus the Communists), bird (Swedish wild turkey), flower (fläder) and  beauty queen (Yvonne Nyberg, 17).

Although we don’t have any industry yet, I’m hoping to lure some part of Tesla Motors to the island, even if it’s only to manufacture door panels, glove compartments and key rings.

Extensive tourism already established.

Extensive bird life.

Complete infrastructure regarding roads, electricity, potable water, telecommunications, bath houses, pristine beaches  and marijuana (all but the last c/o Hemse).

Neither Bradley Manning nor Edward Snowden know any of our secrets.

Young Swedish girls.

The cons:

Long Swedish winters.

Accessible only from the mainland by overnight boat.

Proximity to Russia (well…)

Young Swedish girls.

I’ve found a farmer who’ll give us a good price on Queen Anne walnut window slats and an 18th Century George III coal grate. He’ll vouchsafe their authenticity with a handshake.

Since math isn’t my strong point and market fluctuations are enormous, I’ve designated Ronnie the banker as Comptroller. I’ll simply quote verbatim from his statement: “Times are hard. Although our starting equity is limited, the possibility for a profitable expansion of goods and services is large. How large depends entirely on Kickstarter and investments by readers like yourself.”

I think that puts it rather well. Alla tiders is a fine property. The house is a little old, a little run-down, a fixer-upper with a mouse infestation in the foundation, bats in the attic and water rats over by the ravine, but it’s open to development.

I have realized why, in the past, we drove our college girlfriends crazy. We chose the prettiest girls and then expected them to cook, clean, wash our clothes and help us study for our exams. Lesson learned: Plain Janes should do the manual labor. They won’t resent it as much. For this project, we are choosing THE PRETTIEST GIRLS WE CAN FIND, requiring them only to do that one thing: Be pretty! Everybody wins.

Hans, who will be location manager, provides the following résumé: “Orchestra conductor (hobby), play the harpsichord, collect prints of Renaissance oil paintings, connoisseur of fine wines and ancient Greek philosophers including chablis, pinot grigio, Plato and Socrates. Graduate of University of Uppsala. Hope to own yacht and sail to Miami.”

Ronnie on potential: “Join the vanguard of investment opportunities! We are floating bonds to finance the following— The Hans C. Frumpélius Hydroponic Water Park for the indigenous rat population, all-night disco, “Guitar Playing Made Easy,” and The Björn A. Lindström Conference Center for Extra-Terrestrial Life (T.B.A.L.C.C.E.T.L., a $750,000 project, including dormitories). As for generating profits, we are orders of magnitude bigger than Van Dyes Properties, our nearest competitor both geographically and in terms of size. Our potential is insanely bigger than theirs. Like us, they also only have a single structure on the market, a whitewashed farmhouse with walls of packed hay. Very chic. Anyway, we’re way better than them because we just are!”

Björn, who wants to handle conceptualization, makes this pitch: “We have the advantage of being the post-Sputnik generation. The Soviet’s satellite had already circled the Earth. A fact, a done deal. Freed of that, we can now think in non-linear, non-factual parameters. We do intrinsically what the ‘holistic approach’ people can only accomplish in theory. Our business decisions are made entirely based on feelings. What feels right. Just like the supplemental health insurance companies, we’ve made investment easy, accepting all four major credit cards, Pay Pal, certified checks and wire transfers. I don’t know how you get your money out just yet, but we’ll cross that bridge when we get to it.”

To quote Micky Dolenz of The Monkees, “We’re not selling plastic.”

Angst pays. In 2012, Petter Olsen, scion of a Norwegian shipping family, sold the only privately-owned copy of Edvard Munch’s “The Scream” at Sotheby’s here in New York for almost $120 million, the most any artwork has ever garnered at auction.

As for me, whenever I reach a dead end, contemplating suicide, I opt instead to run for Mayor of Alla tiders in Sweden.

Be well!

– Kevin Feingold