Danish notes #2: You already know a Danish word

    When I travel to French- or Spanish-speaking countries, I usually can suss out a few words, a bit of the language, enough to get by. Hommes are men, si is yes.
     But Danish is another kettle of fish. A difficult language to learn, heard by an English speaker, it's an incomprehensible gabble, like an audiotape being played backward. Luckily every single person we encountered in Copenhagen spoke fluent English. Considerate of them.

     Danish is, as I mentioned Tuesday, a Germanic language, spoken by only about six million people. So knowing a tiny bit of German helped, as did context. Take the sign above — Brug for lid frisk luft? Being a stamp collector, I recognized the word for "air," luft, as in Luftpost, or airmail. Frisk is close enough to "fresh" and lid must be "little." Putting them together, I came up with, "Want a little fresh air?" and was pleased with my growing Danish mastery. I was close: "Need some fresh air?" according to Google Translate. Of course the nearby bike and air hose helped immensely.
     This sign was even more enigmatic: Ungdom giv en fuck for din kommune! Based on the photo of the three happy multi-ethnic young people, it seemed a public service poster of some kind. I wondered: could "fuck" have some separate meaning in Danish? That would be awkward.

     No, fuck means in Danish exactly what it means in English, and the sentence translates out as, "Youth, give a fuck about your community!"

     Well, points for reaching out to kids, and speaking their own language, as it were. But that leaving us with the enigma of why the Danes don't have their own word for "fuck" — why import it from English? 

     Lots of languages import English words — "hamburger" "sexy" "smartphone" and such — just as English borrows lots of words from other languages: "taco," "rendezvous," "stein."

    And many languages have their own version of "fuck" — in Greek it's ya moto," which sounds very Japanese — ironic, since Japanese does not have an equivalent to "fuck" — if they're looking for an obscene expletive, they use kso, or "shit." Many languages do the same, using female body parts, for instance, to convey the sense we have with "fuck."

    Others, like the Danes, just take the blunt English word. In Afrikaans, it's fok. Ditto for Norwegian, it's føkk, which is quite close.

   I tried to find out why some cultures adopt it, and others don't, and pretty much came up empty, except for the general reason to snag English loanwords — because the language is seen in many quarters, still, as young, modern and cool. 

    As for why the Danes would display an obscenity in a context where it would never appear in the United States, that's easy. Remember, we are a nation of busybodies and prudes, the descendents of martinets, religious fanatics and busybodies. Denmark, on the other hand, is famously liberal. "The Danes are known for being cosmopolitan, well-educated, and open-minded people," the AFS website observes. Not three qualities that could ever be attached to our country, alas. A teacher was fired in Texas for reading "The Diary of Anne Frank" to her eighth grade class. It's starting to feel like, as a nation, we're føkked.

     

    

‘It’s YOUR fault if I hate you!’

     Just over 63 years ago, in the summer of 1960, the “Greenville Eight,” led by 18-year-old Jesse Jackson, were arrested. Their crime was insisting on reading at the main public library in their South Carolina town, despite clearly being Black, and thus not permitted.
     The case led to a federal court ordering Greenville to integrate its libraries. So the town did what it thought was the only decent, moral, Christian thing it could do: close all the county libraries rather than accept the obvious impossibility of letting Black people paw books intended for whites.
     Now nobody could use the library, and it was clear who was to blame.
    “The efforts being made by a few Negroes to use the White library will now deprive all White and Negro citizens of the benefit of a library,” Greenville Mayor Mayor J. Kenneth Cass said in a statement.
     The fault lay with the eight teenagers trying to use the public library, not with the town trying to stop them.
     Bear in mind this nimble sleight of hand, almost a magician’s trick. Because we see it all the time, now, in our day.
     The Greenville Eight echoed when Elon Musk said he was going to sue the Anti-Defamation League because the ADL called for companies to suspend advertising on X, the social media site formerly known as Twitter, until Musk addresses the neo-Nazis and other hardened haters he permits to run wild there.
     “ADL seems to be responsible for most of our revenue loss,” Musk posted. Not himself and his policies. The pushback is to blame.
     The NAACP also begged advertisers to avoid the website.

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Danish notes #1: Spiral city

 

Church of Our Savior, Copenhagen

     "Leitmotif" originated as a German word, used by critics picking apart the works of Richard Wagner. A fitting term to start my reflection on Copenhagen, as Danish is a Germanic language. It means, roughly, a recurrent theme, and in the case of our recent visit to the capital of Denmark, the theme we kept returning to was, of all things, spirals.

Eliasson bridge

    The overture began hours after we landed, with an enigmatic tower glimpsed from the canal tour my wife cannily put us on, in the sound theory that we'd been traveling all day and would need some low energy activity to introduce us to the city. It worked. We saw all sorts of wonderful sights — a bridge designed by Icelandic-Danish artist Olafur Eliasson that looks like a sailing ship and collapses in on itself to let boats pass. The Rem Koolhaas-designed Danish Architecture Center, which I immediately tweeted at Lee Bey ("EAT YOUR HEART OUT!" I wrote, having decided years ago it is hysterical to taunt Lee, our architecture critic, when I see noteworthy architecture abroad. I can't hope he finds it as funny as I do; but he hasn't asked me to stop, which I take as license to continue). We even locked eyes on the backside of the Little Mermaid statue, sparing us the need to carve out time and face the throng for the obligatory visit.
     Above all, the Church of Our Savior, whose spiral steeple is unlike anything I've ever seen atop a building. Gold and black, we could see tiny figures working their way up the staircase. I wanted to be one of them.

Dragon Spire

     Moments later, we cruised past a second spiral steeple, the Dragon Spire atop the Old Stock Exchange, hove into view, evoking my favorite German saying, Einmal ist keinmal und zweimal ist immer, or "Once is never but twice is always."

     I noticed a trend, but did not expect a third spiral. The next day, however, we were wandering away from the Rosenborg Castle — delightfully downmarket, compared to palaces in Paris and Madrid — and happened upon the Rundetaarn, or Round Tower. We were looking for a particular marketplace, to lunch on their brand of open-faced sandwiches, and I figured atop the tower would be a good vantage point to eyeball it. 

     Don't let the bust of Tycho Brahe outside the tower fool you — the Danish astronomer died in 1601, in exile in Prague, while the Round Tower wasn't completed until 1642.

     The tower has no stairs, but a spiral path  winding seven and a half times around the building, the way the tower of Babylon is depicted. We paid our eight Euros and marched gamely upward. 

     "What's with Copenhagen and spirals?" I typed into Google, expecting all sorts of sites rhapsodizing bout Spiral City. Nothing. A lot about Church of Our Savior.  And that's about it. Nobody seemed to have made the connection before. 

Path up the Round Tower

     So the field is open to me. Readers might remember how in 2015 I used four shapes as a lens to view Chicago — the parabola, the circle, the square, the triangle. A spiral is the perfect representation a city, which also unwinds out from a central point over time — in "The Wizard of Oz," remember, Dorothy starts skipping along a spiraling Yellow Brick Road that leads her to the Emerald City. 

     The Round Tower went up in 1642. The Church of Our Savior spire was added in 1759. So I assumed the former inspired the latter. Not so. The Church of Our Savior website says it is based on the Church of Sant'Ivo alla Sapienza in Rome, and I have no reason to doubt them.

     Those are the only two spiral church towers in the world I could find, which is odd, because spirals are an omnipresent natural design form, from starfish to galaxies. They've been used in architecture since Greek times — the capital of an Ionic column has a pair of spirals. Trajan's Column in Rome, built over 2,000 years ago, still has its spiral staircase inside. Modern buildings use them — Frank Lloyd Wright's Guggenheim comes to mind (though honestly, as a museum warrior, I'm no fan of that ramp). 

    I started to see them elsewhere in Copenhagen, pausing in the middle of the street to snap this spiraling brick chimney, the likes of which I've never seen before.

The Treetop Experience

    The Danes are still twirling. In 2019, a 148-foot-tall spiral ramp the Treetop Experience opened in Gisselfeld Klosters Skove,, a forest an hour south of Copenhagen. The structure is 12 loops around a hyperboloid, for you geometry geeks (an hourglass shape for everybody else) offering visitors a treetop view of the surrounding area. I didn't visit; next time (kidding; there never is a next time).

     My wife wanted to go to Christiana, the hippie commune turned tourist attraction, and I cut short her consultation with bus schedules by suggesting we bike there. 

    On the way, we saw the Church of Our Savior, first in the distance, then looming before us. Turns out, the church is a block from an entrance to Christiana. Sometimes it's better to be lucky than good. We parked our bikes at the church, and after wandering about Christiana, enjoying an ice coffee, we went up the spire, which, rather than opening out on an observation deck, basically got narrower and narrower until you were jammed into an endpoint below the giant golden ball. It was not something pleasurable to do, but definitely something worth having done.

Fence around the Church of Our Savior.

Show some respect for your elders

Respect for the Aged Day ask we “upload pics to honor the elderly people in your life.” My father Robert, 91, at home in Buffalo Grove.

    When I was a little boy, an elderly man from our neighborhood would go from house to house with a wheelbarrow, selling vegetables from his garden. I don’t remember his name or what he looked like.
     But I remember my father asking him a question: “Who was the first president you ever voted for?” His answer: “Teddy Roosevelt, 1904.”
     I bring that up because Monday, Sept. 18 is Respect for the Aged Day. Didn’t know that? No shame there. I wouldn’t know either, except that Chicago Public Media’s manager of diversity, equity and inclusion sent an email encouraging us to celebrate the day.
     It began in Japan in 1966 — that word “aged” is the giveaway. Not a word many Americans would use to describe themselves or anybody else. Nor is “old.”
     I remember being at the birthday party for Harry Heftman, who owned the Chicago hot dog stand at Randolph and Franklin. He was looking a bit rhumy about the eyes, and I thought of beginning a column, “Harry Heftman is looking old ...” and asked his daughter if she thought he would mind. “Oh no, you can’t,” she said, aghast, “Harry would hate that.” Heftman was 103 years old.
     If you can’t be old at 103, when can you be old? And the honest answer is: never. Not in our culture. Disdain for the aged is the last acceptable bias. Our culture sticks old people in ghettos, so automatically we never even pause to question the practice.
      At 63, age-wise I have a foot on the boat and a foot on the pier. Especially since my parents are both alive, at 91 and 87. Having moved them from Boulder to Buffalo Grove last year and been mother-henning their increasingly complicated care ever since, I have “respect” down cold, but can’t pen a general encomium to being old without recognizing that much of age is simply horrible — a sheering away of every hope and pleasure you ever had, while undergoing expensive tortures straight from Dante’s hell.
     “The cold friction of expiring sense,” as T.S. Eliot writes. “Without enchantment, offering no promise/But bitter tastelessness of shadow fruit/As body and soul begin to fall asunder.”

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The third prayer

View out our window Saturday morning at the Lion D'or Hotel in Haarlem

     Saturday was a long day. We woke up in Haarlem at 6:29 a.m., a minute before the alarm was set to go off. Caught the 7:36 No. 300 bus to Schipol airport at the train station across the street — the airport bus leaves every 10 minutes, on the sixes, which is kinda embarrassing when you're from a place where there can be two hours between trains.  

Note the little golf hole.

     At the airport I admired and participated in, once again, a tradition invented by the Dutch at that very airport — urinal targets. Cooked up by an airport custodial official to reduce "spillage," it was estimated that cleaning costs for Schipol bathrooms fell 8 percent afterward. Perhaps a dubious figure, in my estimation, but one cited in a captivating 2017 Washington Post article that gives the little images as an example of "nudge"economics: getting people to do the right thing by gentle persuasion, as opposed to, say, punishment. The piece quotes University of Chicago Nobel Prize winning economist Richard Thaler talking about the targets — I also saw a housefly used. One does tend to aim for the target.

     We boarded an 11 a.m United flight to Chicago. Airline problems are so commonly dissected we forget to notice that they usually work just fine, and are still a wonder. Here the flight was completely unexceptional — at one point I marveled, six miles up, 500 miles an hour, into a 100 mph, 50 degree below zero headwind. "A lot quicker than walking," I said to my wife. Three movies — "Singing in the Rain," "Eighth Grade," and "Bohemian Rhapsody" — and we were back in Chicago. As the plane taxied to the gate, the windows flecked with rain, the first we'd seen on our entire trip.

     O'Hare, as usual, was less impressive than the flight to it, or the urinal target for that matter. The passport control line to enter the country filled a room, and was worse because I knew it was coming. Open borders my foot. At least the huge line moved quickly. They're remodeling Terminal Five — so maybe it'll resemble those sleek and pristine European airports at some point in the far-off future. Right now the place is a maze of construction barriers and exposed conduit. As we snaked through the room, I juxtaposed the billboard boasting about Chicago being a "world class city" with the ripped up ceiling and the hundreds in line. It's an empty boast when we can't even put on a good face for visitors who have just arrived. (I spoke with a Dutch engineer on the plane, here for the first time, to spend 10 weeks working on coffee roasting technology in Lincolnwood. I gently suggested that Lincolnwood is perhaps not the best Chicago has to offer, that he not spend all his time there and, perhaps, make his way to the Art Institute. He hadn't heard of the place, but seemed willing to give it a try). A United official shouted to the mob that, contrary to the instructions they received, they'd have to retrieve their bags in the process of missing their connections. 

     At least American Taxi worked well, as always, a new electric car pulling up a few minutes after I ordered it. The skies were overcast, the familiar highway now felt odd. One of my favorite parts of vacation is that decompression back into your life, and after almost 10 days away, everything was satisfyingly strange, even new. "Nice house" I said, as the taxi pulled up.

     We emptied our suitcases, threw the laundry in the machine, stacked up our pile of presents for relatives and helpful neighbors. I hurried across the street to retrieve Kitty who, as always, was a much appreciated houseguest. We were delighted to learn that the first neighbor who had sat for four days later asked the second if they could have her back for one night, as a birthday treat for their daughter.  A dog of love.

     Saturday was Rosh Hashanah, so after a nap and a shower, we drove — "Nice car!" I said — over to my sister-in-law's in Skokie for dinner. We brought toys from Tivoli Gardens for the grand niece and nephew, plus Dutch chocolate and weird Danish licorice — spheres wrapped in lemon-flavored chocolate, purchased at a shop that resembled a jewelry shop in the basement of a swank Copenhagen department store, with two pretty clerks seriously handing us various orbs to sample.

     Before dinner, there were three prayers — over the wine, the bread, the apples and honey for a sweet new year, 5784 for those keeping track at home (not that anybody does, beyond the holiday, except for weddings and bar mitzvahs). The Hebrew rang a little melancholy, having been through Anne Frank's house the day before, and noted the brass "stumbling stones" in front of houses noting where residents had been rounded up and sent to their deaths — three-quarters of Dutch Jews died in the Holocaust, a much higher percentage than in Belgium or France.. You can't see the little animated film at the end of the tour, plugging the need to vigilantly protect democracy, and not think about our own orange fuhrer, still a growing threat.

     My brother-in-law, Alan, said the prayer over the apples, and added something I liked, quoting his friend, Rabbi Menachem — that at Rosh Hashanah, while we ask God to inscribe us into the book of life, it is actually we ourselves who do the writing. We whose acts and thoughts make the coming year a good one. Or not. We save our own lives, Alan said, by doing what we love. "You write yourself into the book of life for a good year." he said and I smiled,  thinking, That's a plan. 

Chicago Voices #3: Road sign warrior

     I was walking north up Wells Street the other day, looking for Erie, when I was reminded of a pet peeve of mine. The signs on one way streets downtown often only have print on the side facing traffic. Thus pedestrians, such as myself, going the opposite way of the car traffic, are left to our memory, or GPS, to figure what street we are approaching or, must pass the sign and look back. Which does not seem a system that behooves a great city.

    I thought of complaining, but what would be the point? Who would listen? Nobody. What would happen? Nothing. 

     That is not the way of Steve Bahnsen. Readers with long memories might recall the column in 2015 that I wrote about Bahnsen, a self-appointed monitor of highway signs or, should I say, the abysmal state of highway signs. Since that ran, I have received a steady stream of countless updates.  I thought I would share one. Whether you view him as a tireless advocate or a fixated crank, he reflects that very American notion that gaps should be filled and wrongs should be corrected, 

     I am thrilled and delighted to be able to share the attached photos of the new Exit Number plaques and gores just installed along US Highways 61/151 in Dubuque. This culminates a 20 year project to have these done.
     The photos are in an order coming from the south with the first exit being 183. The exits continue north with the last one being 190.
     (Not all of these have exits or entrances in both directions thus the gap in numbering them.)
     Gores are at the exit with a green arrow. New gore signs were installed featuring the next exit number also.   
     One photo shows the Mile Post 189 sign. Miles begin at the southern or western border of a state. US 61 enters Iowa from Missouri south of Keokuk. Mile Post 1 is a mile north of the border. Dubuque is thus 189 miles from the Missouri border.
     After crossing the Mississippi River, US 61/151 continues in Wisconsin where the numbering system begins all over with Exit 1 where the highways go to Hazel Green, Wis and East Dubuque, Illinois.
     Numbering these exits will be helpful for those who need GPS to find where they are going.
     Exit numbers are shown on the new 2023 Iowa highway map.
     These signs are near the US 20 bridge that was shown last year on the Mighty Mississippi River stamps.
     I hope you have enjoyed this information about I O W A.

     Steve

Which leaves a question: what is a gore? I put it to Steve. A few days passed, and then I received this:

     I was downstate and in Kentucky yesterday. Now I have about fifty reports to write about
signs and postal problems. So I just got to your message.
     To define a "gore" on an expressway or Interstate:
     It is the area where the exit is. And is between where the mainline continues straight
and the exit ramp begins. People get into the right lane to exit through the gore to get
to the exit ramp.
     The green sign here with an arrow is called the Gore Exit sign.
     If the expressway has exit numbers, that number is now shown on the Gore Exit sign.
as another reminder for travelers of where they are going.
     Those Dubuque exits were not numbered at all before so that is why everything is new.
     Also, less that one tenth of one percent of the exits nationwide are to the Left. So the
arrow on these signs point to the left. An example is when you are going to O'Hare on
I 190, there is a Left Exit to go south on the Tri State, I 294.
     However that Gore Exit sign has been down for months!!!

Wagon of Fools

Wagon of Fools by Hendrik Gerritsz Pot (Franz Hals Museum)

     It's not that I don't trust you. That would be nuts. I don't even know you. But my wife, well, she is convinced that if readers are aware when we go on vacation, then one will rush over and rob our house. Heck, she could be right. It is a crazy world. Things happen. And she does tend to be right. But even if she is not — and in this case, I suspect she isn't -- one secret to staying married for 33 years is to respect the  improbable concerns of your loved one. 

     So when we're away, such as our current jaunt through Denmark and the Netherlands, I try to draw the veil, and prop up the pillows of these posts to make it seem like there's a person here. 

     But now we're heading home. So unless you're very quick and grab your pry bar and your big sack and race over and start looting within the next few hours, we should be okay. (Not that I'm encouraging you to do that. We have a tight-knit, vigilant block of dog walkers and sharp-eyed, concerned people. My greatest protection is that there really isn't anything worth taking. A few nice Cooper lamps, maybe).

     That leaves me with the challenge of what to say. The past week was lined up before we departed.  But I carelessly left Friday unaccounted for, forgetting the bone-deep exhaustion that comes from marching around foreign capitals for a week. A few days ago, my wife looked at her FitBit and announced that we had logged 25,000 steps. More than 10 miles. Phew.

     So okay, writing. Mmm... There must be something, right? Observations galore, just waiting for me to blow a whistle and order them into formation. Tweeeeeet!  Line up!

     No? That didn't work. The perceptions just sprawl around the divans of the mind, gazing at me with languid torpor. 

     Can't have that. Not after biking around Copenhagen, climbing several tall towers, and seeing every painting in Amsterdam.

     Paintings like the one above, in the Franz Hals Museum in Haarlem, It stood out, or at least will have to do until I can get home, drop my bags, and slide behind my iMac — provided you haven't stolen it — and organize my thoughts, which right now pretty much revolve around where to get the next herring sandwich.

      It's called "Wagon of Fools" by Hendrik Gerritsz Pot. Painted in 1640, the work is a commentary on the infamous tulip craze of 1637, when the Dutch went mad for the bright flowers, and fortunes were made ... and then lost ... on speculation in bulbs. You see the travelers drinking and counting their profits while hope — in the form of a bird — flies off. Notice the tulips on the flag, and being worn as crowns, or cuckold horns. 

     I was about to say "I hope this doesn't perfectly encapsulate our current political situation," but hope, as I like to say, is not a success strategy. And it kinda does.

      But even if it is apt, there is also a kind of comfort. Some reassurance in realizing that widespread self-destructive idiocy is not the sole property of America in 2023, though it sometimes does feel like that. We didn't invent it. Folly is a general characteristic of the human condition. The Dutch somehow muddled through their tulip craze, and managed to laugh at themselves later. Americans will somehow get past this, and even learn to laugh at ourselves. We might as well. Everybody else does.