on the road – Stockholm (Nov'18)

We step off the Arlanda Express at Stockholm Central Station and make a stop at a kebab place that serves a full portion of potato fries to go along with a falafel roll. Just mentioning this because I think we are not on this planet to get stuffed with ugly fries if we already have a nice falafel roll. Capitalism and our life based on inevitable financial growth won’t help us solve that one any time soon. I am not sure how this fries thing is, just in general food is one of the few new things I ever buy. Can’t really imagine eating old food except the wines&cheeses you know. I have also thought that if we stopped producing crap (majority of things produced today) then maybe food can become affordable and great again? But we gotta do it on our own cause they won’t do it for us! sO, we are at a standing table and start crowd surfing the view. I spot a long haired and very handsome Japanese man who looks like a musician. On zooming in he is not alone but in the company of three more long haired and handsome Japanese guys. I assume they are a band. Two of them come and take positions at our table. I get stranded in a sensation of starting a conversation with them but not doing it. Ugh well. Soon we find ourselves on a bus heading to Larrys Corner where we will play tonight. We drive through the dark winter evening and finally arrive at Södermalm, an area in Stockholm situated on an island that also hosts Larrys Corner – an extra groovy corner store / gallery dealing with music released on tapes and vinyl, photography of Leni Sinclair & the best coffee on the block. Tonight we will have a concert here. We set up the set up and chat with Larry. We go on at 20oo. As Larrys Corner is a tiny corner, the audience is very close to us creating some unexpected sensations. After the concert we meet the audience and the vibe of this corner. Larry tells us about a Japanese psychedelic music group Kikagaku Moyo who also played in Stockholm tonight. He had asked them to maybe step by The Corner before the show, but that apparently did not happen. We also meet George, an American who moved to Stockholm in the 1970s. Although Larry came to Stockholm in the 1980s, Larry and George met just a couple of years ago. Turns out George, a man in his 80s is currently taking care of his 90 year old friend Izzy Young. Izzy Young was the founder and manager of Folklore Center in Greenwich Village that hosted Bob Dylan’s first shows in New York in the 1960s. In 1973 Young also moved to Stockholm and started a similar venue here. It’s closed now but turns out he was running it for a very long time and closed permanently just recently about a year ago. George thinks Ringhold would have sounded good at Izzy’s (*Izzy Young passed away some months after our show at Larrys). Larry closes his corner round about midnight and we take a taxi to home. We see George cross the street, as he is heading to another show he thinks should still be on. Great to meet people in such a high age going around and being curious. Next morning stepping outside reveals us that the night has turned Stockholm into icy, crisp and still winter day with first snow of the season surrounding us. Larry takes us down a couple of blocks to his wife Barbara’s bakery store. It’s called Spigamadre and they make sO! good foccacia, and we get to try it after it has just been pulled out of the oven. She has prepared three foccacias this morning – one is olive and sea salt flavour, second is also olives and something else flavour, and the third one is with more olives and things and flavours. Spigamadre goes green and juicy tomatoes and very good for your stomach. From there we take a bus and soon land back at Larrys Corner. Larry serves us his version of the best coffee on the block, and yes – this coffee is a blockbuster. It tastes so good you could miss a flight!!! Soon we say good-bye and get on a bus that takes us to the Central Station to catch the Arlanda Express that takes us to the Arlanda Airport. As we arrive at the airport we realise that our flight will take off in 5 minutes. Hm, yes, we missed our flight. This is not cool at all. The plane is actually still on the ground. And it won’t wait for us. Nobody offers to take us straight to our flight in a flashy emergency vehicle, nope! And… going back in time some 20 years – in April 1998 I missed a flight from Catania to Milano because it was on the day Italians were switching their clocks to summer time. Before the flight I even had three hints during the day when I thought something was not right with the time (but that’s another story). Well, at the end of the day, when I got to the Catania airport one hour too late many airport workers ran to me asking if my name was Eleonora and that they called me so many times and even delayed the flight a little since it was the last flight of a Sunday. And then they were very nice and caring and really happy to hear I had a place to stay for an extra night in Sicily. Notice the difference of now and then? But that time it was good I missed my flight, because when I drove away from Catania airport that night, i saw lava crawl down the Etna volcano. with. my own eyes. in the middle. of the night.