(Click Bjork to launch a slideshow of Iceland photos.)
[slideshow:82350:large]
The
clouds in the sky at 2 a.m. looked like whales. They were heavy and momentous
in strange orange light, splayed across wowing distances and rounded at the
tips of ovoid shapes that seemed to swim as much as hover. The ground below
looked rich enough to eat: glow-green moss on crunchy rocks, dirt the color of
chocolate cake. It would be a while before my group wound up watching Björk bang a drum in the interest of advocacy, but
for now, we were wandering a remote realm where her message didn't need to be uttered
to be understood. This was "the environment" doing what it does in Iceland, out
on the Golden Circle under the midnight sun.
The
occasion was a trip to Reykjavik for Náttúra, a free outdoor concert held last
weekend to raise awareness for environmental issues in Iceland and, by
extension, everywhere else. The show was the source of much fanfare: Björk had been battling with her homeland's
government in high-profile talks leading up to the event, and National
Geographic was there to
broadcast the show live across the planet on the web. A guy from the Sugarcubes
helped organize. Sigur Rós played. The crowd
was estimated at 30,000, including old people, kids, reporters, photographers,
and the actor who played Tommy Carcetti on The Wire.
The
message of the weekend was environmental moderation, and, true to Icelandic
form, the tone was more suggestive than coarse. At issue was a complicated
paradox. Thanks to its abundance of rushing rivers and geothermal steam,
Iceland is home to some of the world's greenest sources of energy. But no
thanks to recoiling global markets that have left Iceland's once-booming
economy high and dry, those sources of energy are being earmarked and sold to
international companies for nefarious uses. (Namely aluminum smelters, which
require vast amounts of energy to run, and produce astonishing levels of carbon
waste.)
Our
guide to the most vexing aspects of the matter was Andri Snær Magnason, the
author of a book just published in English with the title Dreamland: A
Self-Help Manual For A Frightened Nation. The book has been wildly popular in Iceland since its 2006
publication—it's said to be in one of every five households in the
country—and it was a big part of what steeled Björk
to action.
Björk hasn't
spoken out against Iceland in the past, but her ways have changed so much so
that she recently called an Icelandic senator "childish" in a venomous letter
published in the newspaper The Reykjavik Grapevine. Magnason, by contrast, is mild-mannered,
an unassuming character with a ready supply of rhetorical questions and
self-effacing asides. His modest charm figures into his writing, which juggles
reasoned talk of carbon emissions with aspirational ideas for how we might
think about living in a world with changing wants and needs. It's a testament
to Dreamland that it
was always tempting to set aside quiet time to read—even if little else
in Reykjavik, at least in a weekend, allows for anything so civil.
Instead,
we bounded around a city that churns with more energy than a population of
200,000 would seem fit to breed. After Friday's opening press conference, at
which former Sugarcubes rabble-rouser Einar Benediktsson grew teary over his
cause, we went to another sanctioned gathering where Magnason showed parts of
an in-progress documentary to accompany his book. The film featured a
succession of images from Iceland's outlying areas—all dramatic
waterfalls and volcanic expanses brushed by a sort of Middle Earth majesty.
(J.R.R. Tolkien professed an abiding love for the wilds of Iceland, and
Magnason even traced his familial ties to the woman who introduced a young
Tolkien to an Icelandic nursery rhyme about an elusive ring.) A curious guy
lurking in the crowd talked to anybody he could corner about elves, fairies,
and ghosts. Whether such beings are real proved immaterial; of more pressing
interest was what the presence of such spirits says about a culture equipped to
acknowledge aspects of what can't be seen. The same guy also regaled us with
the archaic heritage of devil-horned "rock fingers"—a stock gesture whose
two upraised fingers originally conspired to signify the known and the unknown,
the darkness and the light.
Björk is just an
okay drummer; she basically just makes do when banging on a snare. She had
support: The stage she banged on was teeming with other drummers, some of whom
rushed out with her from backstage, and others who had been there all the
while, dressed like ancients and droogs. The concert on Saturday opened with a
hushed set of folk songs by Ólöf Arnalds. By this point, though, Sigur Rós had converted delicacy into something else. It's
hard to imagine another place in the world where a big outdoor concert would
boast a sound system so adept with tiny xylophones, and then came the guitar:
that immense, eerie guitar sound that comes from scraping a bow across strings
that fan out into a thousand microtones.
The
drum gang accompanied "Gobbledigook," an unusually manic song from Sigur Rós' new album, Med Sud I Eyrum Vid Spilum
Endalaust (translation:
"with a buzz in our ears we play endlessly"). Björk
had been hiding in a corner of the stage for a while, singing along with
Arnalds' opening songs and bouncing around like an 11-year-old happy to be
among friends. When she finally sprang out, the crowd sprang to. What had been
an ethereal atmosphere took on a primeval roar.
Björk's own set
followed suit. The songs and stage dressing were the same ones she's been using
on her tours since her 2007 album Volta, but it was striking to see her so literally at home. The
floor in front of her held four thermoses full of elixirs (including one with
honey she drank with a spoon), and she never once spoke in anything except
Icelandic. She rarely spoke at all, really, which was surprising at an event
with such a weighty premise. Instead, she just sang and danced with a big band
dressed in Technicolor-nativist garb. Her cheeks quivered when she dug down
into certain notes.
The
strange thing about Iceland's storied strangeness is how it doesn't appear
particularly strange in its own setting. The same goes for any place subject to
preconceived notions, of course, but Iceland seems especially aware of its
oddities and immune to the ways in which those oddities might be caricaturized.
What's weird about it is how routine weirdness proves there, by habit. During
the concert, two guys barreled through the crowd carrying a velvet couch to set
down on the grass like it was the only reasonable action-plan for an outdoor
show. During a bus ride outside of town, Magnason broke from talk about his
book to point out a mountain that functions as the "Gateway To Hell."
The
talk about his book took similar turns between the pragmatic and the
fantastical. The crux of Dreamland
is the way governmental and economic thinking runs on a profoundly different
track than the kind of thinking that should matter to the affected, which is to
say all of us. Announcing the wider availability of Dreamland in English was one of the main causes for
the Náttúra concert, and it was easy to understand why Björk
and Sigur Rós would take to Magnason when he
spoke about getting a book of poetry about supermarkets stocked as an actual
product on the shelves of Iceland's Bonus supermarket chain. Such weird
conceptualism didn't exactly flow naturally from citations of numbers and
figures related to Dreamland's
analytic charge, but then, Magnason's brand of analysis seemed to stem from
something other than simple number-crunching.
Or
maybe it just came from the sun, which never went away the whole time we were
there. After the concert, the streets of Reykjavik jumped off with people
stumbling wasted to bars at 3 a.m., basking in the sun all around them. At an
after-party, the members of Sigur Rós jumped
around like they'd been drinking for days. (For a band with such a mum persona,
Sigur Rós appeared way more wry and lively
than perception would allow.) In line to one of many packed bars later, talk
turned from the sun to the way the sun treats Icelandic horses, which by breed
are maybe half the size of what count as horses anywhere else.
The
way those horses looked out in the open countryside stuck as a take-home image
for the whole weekend—the concert, the mood, the talk of environmental
hubris handed down to people who don't, by nature, overprivilege their presence
against the landscape. The horses look perfectly normal from a distance, but as
you crane and grasp for scale, they start to look small to the point of
surreality.