Adrian is stepping up, now that it’s mostly just him and me in the house. (And Nysse, of course.) Getting groceries and cooking three or four meals per week.
Most days I enjoy cooking; even on tired weekdays I don’t mind it. But it is really nice to be surprised, to eat something that has been cooked based on someone else’s ideas, based on someone else’s tastes.
I went to see Liljevalchs’s spring art salon together with Adrian and Ingrid.
I’ve always moved through the rooms in a counter-clockwise direction, because that’s the direction that’s straight forward from the entrance. That’s put the room with the under-eighteens’ works as the first one. Ingrid and Adrian confidently steered us in the opposite direction, because that was obviously the right way to go in their mind. It does actually make more sense this way, because now we started in a spacious hall of eye-catching sculptures and large paintings.
The works at the salon are all for sale, at a price set by the artist. Some, I think, price them so as to be almost sure that they won’t sell. Others are very affordable. Some look expensive to me but then turn out to have been sold nevertheless. (There’s a board in one of the rooms with sticker dots marking what’s been sold and what hasn’t.)
One of glass sculptures above, which I rather liked, had been sold for a sweet 95,000 SEK.
This one-metre sculpture of a submarine was made of metal and wood, and had been aged underwater for three years, according to the label. (Nils Lagergren, “Belgravia”.)
I wonder how this work of neon tubes and black paint on the wall was even presented to the jury, and how it can have been transported here. (Josefin Eklund, “Mysterious goats and geometric heads”.)
There were of course not just weird sculptures but also paintings of all kinds. I liked this pair of very realistic but dreamy views of a spring forest. (Mats Nörle, “Ekbacken om våren”.)
Ingrid taught me about underpainting, and how it is often done in red or orange. (Anna-Christina Eriksson, “Picnic With a Red Cadillac”.)
I’m always curious about textile works – there’s almost always some embroidery and textile sculpture, sometimes weaving or crochet or knitting. The embroidery works usually tend to be concrete depictions of people or stories, which, yeah, I know other people like, but it’s not my thing. This year I liked this Sami-inspired piece of embroidery on tulle. (Yvonne Larsson, “Blodsband”.) There were, in general, quite a lot of Sami-themed works.
This piece was pleasing in its geometric simplicity. It looked like embroidery at first, but was acrylic paint on fabric. (Juanma Gonzalez, “Död ved ger nytt liv _ ad#07”.)
There were several intricate, lifelike bronze sculptures, including these coltsfoot flowers. (Vera Burkhalter Zornat, “Tussilago”.)
Finally, someone had painted a view of the exact same pillars of the Årstabron bridge that I photographed yesterday.
Halfway through the autumn term, Adrian was coaxed into playing with an orchestra attached to the music school. A quarter of the way through, he was frustrated and close to giving up: with a late start and lots of tricky pieces to learn, he felt like he wasn’t going to be able to learn it all by the end of the term. Plus it took quite a lot of time and led to rather late evenings. He was their only percussionist, though, and they convinced him to stay on at least until the end of the term.
Today they had their end-of-term concert and all that hard work paid off.
I came there expecting something rather like the previous concert. I don’t even know why: I already knew that this was going to be an orchestra and not just a few kids with drums and some backing from a recorded track. And that it was at St. Birgitta Church rather than the school’s somewhat scruffy rooms.
This concert was on a whole other level – very impressive. There were two orchestras in one – a smaller ensemble that then got subsumed into a larger one. The larger version was basically a full chamber orchestra: violins, cellos, double basses, a whole row of woodwinds and brass, a piano – and percussion, of course.
The repertoire ranged from Jingle Bell Rock and Sleigh Ride to the March of the Toreadors from Carmen. Adrian was joined by one of his teachers and they both had a lot to keep up with. Complicated music to play and a lot of switching between instruments. And I totally understand why they were so keen to keep him: percussion was essential to most of the pieces. Adrian did an excellent job, and now he’s even considering continuing with the orchestra in the spring.
For some reason they don’t place the percussion section at the front and centre of the orchestra. I could get a glimpse of Adrian at times, but mostly not. I rather suspected that this would happen, and got a photo in when they were still warming up. Adrian is not in the frame but this gives a feeling of the ambience at least.
End-of-term concert for Adrian’s percussion class. An eclectic mixture of Christmas music, pop songs, and made-for-drums creations.
Here’s Adrian expertly playing the marimba.
One of the pieces they played was “Crazy frog” which in its original version is known primarily for how annoying it is. Played by a percussion ensemble with several marimbas, xylophones and vibraphones in the foreground, it was surprisingly pleasant.
The photo is from their final practise run just before the concert. During the concert itself, the lighting was all weird and not at all photo-friendly: red and patchy. Some kids were squinting from having strong lights straight aimed in their faces; others were in total shadow.
After the concert, I tried to figure out what makes the marimba different from the xylophone. I asked a teacher but only got a mostly useless answer. (Yes, I heard that they have different sounds; yes, I can see that the marimba has a wider range.)
I did some reading when I got home and learned that one key difference is how they are tuned (to a different set of overtones) and how the tone plates are shaped. They look like flat pieces of wood at first glance but absolutely aren’t – they’re scooped out underneath into an arch shape, and that’s what changes the pitch. Yamaha has interesting articles about the tuning of marimba tone plates, among others.
The length of the resonators, the different types of mallets used, and the playing technique, all reinforce their characteristic sounds: deep and mellow for the marimba, sharp and bright for the xylophone.
Spånga Christmas market. Livelier than most years. An eclectic mixture of:
It feels like Spånga scout club takes up more space every year, but it’s probably just that they’ve gotten a better spot and more presence. Chocolate wheel, gingerbread houses, you name it.
Adrian’s group was making and selling bacon pancakes (and fake-on pancakes for the vegetarians) cooked over an open fire. I can’t honestly say that it’s good value for money, but they were working hard to earn it, and a hot, greasy pancake with lingonberries went down well in this weather.
For Adrian, I continue our tradition of daily chocolate toffees from Åre Chokladfabrik – a mixture of their Christmas toffees, saffron toffees, and salted caramel toffees. Except this year I only fill the pockets for every other week.
Ingrid asked for something weekly instead – daily sweets would be too much sugar, and daily anything would be too much to keep up with. So she gets a classical Christmas-themed short story and a Christmas-themed loose-leaf tea every Sunday in advent.
I occasionally vaguely consider giving myself an advent calendar of my own – there are even yarn advent calendars – but always decide against it. I generally don’t want more stuff in my life, and the stuff do I buy, I’m picky about. I buy with purpose. Random yarn, no matter how pretty, would be wasted on me. Chocolates, cheeses, liqueur… yarn, seeds, whatever – same. Something like the short stories that I got for Ingrid would possibly be the only exception.
First advent Sunday.
I hung up advent stars inside, and another light garland on the front porch, and sprinkled miscellaneous Christmas stuff here and there. Now the house feels very Christmas-y. As long as I don’t look outside, where it’s +8°C and rain.
We had glögg and advent fika after dinner. Haven’t had time to bake anything Christmas-themed yet – somehow the hanging up of lights took hours – so we have fika from Spånga Konditori. A saffron bun for Adrian, and cakes with saffron curd and vanilla pannacotta and a lingonberry glaze for Ingrid and myself.
Adrian and Ingrid, playing Cuphead together on one of their Switches.
They speak Estonian to each other these days, when they’re here in the house. Not all the time, but a lot. Even when I’m not in the room; even in situations and about topics that take me by surprise. Like, how did they even get the vocabulary for that?
It makes me feel very warm and fuzzy feelings inside.
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