Hostelsurfing and Swedish Artists

Credit http://www.hostelmanagement.com/

Another day, another relocation.  After nearly a week with a lovely Portuguese/British family in Shoreham, UK, I'll be heading back down to central Brighton to spend the next two days with a very lovely friend from the University of Sussex. Getting ready for the transfer is always stressful - particularly with pretty serious financial constraints. 

As most people I've met while CouchSurfing or hostelling can attest, life away from home base is both fun filled and challenging. Fun filled for reasons such as being able to go out with people from foreign lands, discover new locales and have an occasional drink, and challenging because it all comes at a price which you must somehow recover. Sometimes it even comes at a variable price.

In Brighton, when the weekend comes up, automatically every hostel charges double from the Sun-Thur cost. Fair enough: more people, more labor, more clean-up should equate to greater cost. However, for someone like myself, who's basically got enough to support himself for a week at this point, it's serious business.

Of course I don't want to spend every post discussing money issues, but I figured I should at least try and drive one point home about it. With considerable planning and time, it is possible to live on the cheap abroad. If you have the patience to deal with no fixed residence or income, then the world is yours to experience. Some people experience it living on the streets - thankfully it hasn't come to that yet, but if it did, I'd have no problem doing that, either.

A long while ago, I gave up on the notion of stability. I myself, being a very shaky character, relish the thought of not knowing where I'll end up next week. For the time being, I'm happy occasionally going back and forth between Brighton and London. After all, I need to find a job in order to escape this island and put food in my stomach.

"I drink beer very slowly, and Hemingway was drinking beer with me, in the saucers you get in those Paris cafes. And the saucers began to pile up..." Morley Callaghan

For me, having a cooked meal is a heavenly experience, no matter the variation. For a short while, the twists and twirls of flavor in my mouth relieve all stresses and worries. 

Imagine how this guy must have felt after 127 hours of it:

He makes the American expatriates in 20's Paris look like lightweights. 

One of the best experiences I've had lately with CouchSurfing friends was with the Uni Sussex student I mentioned earlier at a gathering of the group Sussex Hijackers, a film club devoted to really great foreign cinema. Last week I was take aback by the Ingmar Bergman film that we watched, The Seventh Seal.  A tale of pending doom for a Swedish village during the Black Death,  its protagonist, a former Crusader, plays chess against the Grim Reaper, hoping to do one more meaningful thing before demise. Here's the trailer of the film:

Whoops! That's a scene from the 1993 Arnold Schwarzenegger film Last Action Hero which tips a hat to Ingmar's masterpiece with a cameo from Sir Ian Mckellen. Here's the real deal from 1956...it's become a personal favorite.

The Seventh Seal (1956)

But it's not all about food and uncertainty and Ingmar Bergman for me these days. I've also taken a real interest in visual art. There's a really fantastic Swedish artist whose work I've recently seen online, who I believe has also been featured in Sweden's Lyrikvännen and Ordkonst. The works are whimsical and austere at the same time. Though I'm by no means an expert in drawing or painting, the detail that she stresses is evident in nearly all of her pieces.

For me, its a total departure from the pretentious artistic landscape of contemporary art in Europe and America to be found at august modern art institutions. The emotions conveyed are real and vivid, and not depicted in a half-assed manner under the clear stress of a deadline.  In doing so, they demand a great deal of attention from the viewer.

Attention is something that few gems of art receive. In talking about hostelsurfing and art, one film can rest on laurels with a timbre of both. It's a combination that all non-starving artists should aspire to.

A very important film to me, not for children or safe for work.