Post Written While Trapped In Hotel Room
Right now would be a perfect time to get to bed, but I’m in the middle of the freakiest darn crisis. I was about to put the Do Not Disturb sign on the door and turn in for the night only to discover that I couldn’t unhook the chain. I don’t know whether I somehow got the thing in backwards or what, but it’s just about a quarter of an inch shy of the necessary length to tease it out again. Minutes of struggling later, I give up and call the front desk. After some initial confusion on the part of the poor guy working nights at the reception desk, he comes up, confirms that I can’t get it open, and concludes that there’s nothing to be done except get a screwdriver. As of this writing, he’s been gone for about fifteen minutes. Maybe I should be freaking out about this but so far I’m remaining mellow. If there’s ever a convenient time to be trapped in one’s hotel room, I suppose this would have to be it. Still, it would be nice to get some prolonged shut-eye.
Today was a cultural threefer: Kiasma, a large museum of contemporary art located downtown, then the home/studio of seminal Finnish painter Akseli Gallen-Kallela, and finally Hvittrask, the residence of influential architect Eliel Saarinen and his collaborators.
Kiasma looks like a bloated, post-modern tool shed on the outside but is entertainingly white, organic, and labyrinthine on the inside. I like me some contemporary art but consider a gallery trip a success if I respond to one piece out of five. Here the batting average proved significantly higher than that. Video installation artists seem to have finally figured out that the way to make looping or essentially unedited footage hold the viewer’s attention for more than a few seconds is to put up multiple screens in parallel, so that the onlooker possessed of a 21st century attention span has enough different things to look at simultaneously. My favorite show was a whimsical one-room installation called Top Secrets of Finland, in which a pair of designer/conceptual artists collaborated with local manufacturers to create loopy fake products such as accordion boots, a bed that’s dreaming it’s a chair, and fake woolen beards.
The Gallen-Kallela and Saarinen homesteads redound with arts and crafts flavor. They made me want to create a fantasy setting based on their fairy tale design aesthetic. The Saarinen is especially engaging. Hard to imagine that the generation of architects would look at all that controlled yet flowing decorative work and say, “This is awful! Let’s ditch these disgusting flourishes and make everything a brutal concrete box!”
After dinner we join a publishing party thrown by local designer/writer Mike Pohjolan, who is celebrating both a novel contract and the imminent release of his game about mutant Maoist girl bands in a futuristic Finland. Fellow foreign dignitary Emily Care Boss arrives, cautiously optimistic that her luggage will eventually do the same. We bail early when a band commences to crank out the old time rock and roll. No point blowing my voice struggling to be heard before even one of my back-to-back cons rolls out.
Okay, I’ve written this whole thing and still no sign of clerk or screwdriver. Good thing I don’t need to be anywhere anytime soon. If this is the last you ever hear of me, tell the staff at the Espoo Radisson to look up my room number, unscrew the bolt plate, and scoop up my moldering bones.