No AC

It´s been pretty warm for the last couple of days and we´re going through the whole summer with no air conditioning and three fans. So far so good. Although I´ve never really liked ACs and I certainly don´t care for how it´s overused here, I must admit that during days like these, I do miss it. So what do we do when it get´s too hot? We take a cool bath or a shower. This being Óðinn´s first summer, I guess he hardly misses the AC.

Pecora

Why on earth has Hollywood not yet made a movie about Ferdinand Pecora?

He is the man who led the investigation of the fraud and other criminal behaviour that led to the Wall Street crash of 1929, which started off the great depression. The story of his investigation is amazing, and couldn´t be more appropriate for a major film production. It has everything, including the David and Goliath theme, where Pecora was a lowly Italian immigrant, who was aided by a staff of two people, taking on the giants of Wall Street on behalf of the Senate Committee on Banking and Currency. With only a staff of two people, obviously they weren´t supposed to uncover anything. Except they did, and the Committee hearings became major news at the time, letting out a huge public outrcy over the greed and fraud that had brought about the depression. The populist nature of the hearings irritated a lot of people, including a senator who compared the hearings to a circus. This comment was famously siezed by a Wringling Brothers promoter, who brought along a circus dwarf to sit on the lap of J.P. Morgan, who had been grilled by Pecora.

All of this was huge news at the time and it seems like the action of bringing in these people for public questioning led to a sense of justice being done, that these powerful bankers could not act with impunity (at least not all of the time). More importantly, the hearings led to the Glass Steagal Act of 1933 and the foundation of the SEC (Securitites and Exchange Commission), which stabilzed the U.S. economy for about half a century until neoliberal ideas of deregulation got the best of us.

Go to the excellent Bill Moyers Journal for more info on Ferdinand Pecora the Pecora hearings and an interview with Michael Perino who´s writing Pecora´s biography.

Coming back

It's been a while since I wrote here. Work was really busy for a while, with the 8th session of the Permanent Forum going on, and then we went up to Canada for a week trip to visit family up in Ottawa. I'm glad we drove up there, getting to see a bit of the country. I particularly liked Vermont for a lot of reasons, including the ageing hippies, fantastic cafés, great food and a generally chilled out atmosphere.

Óðinn did remarkably well in the car, considering how unused he is to driving around. This will be the last time he uses this car seat, which is already too small. He´s teething these days, which makes him pretty grumpy and disrupts his sleep a lot, so the poor guy is constantly waking up his parents. Such is the way of things...

We had elections back home a week and a half ago. The left wing parties won a majority for the first time ever in Iceland. The primary reason for this is not so much Icelanders´ happiness with these parties, but rather their profound anger towards the conservative party and to a lesser extent the progressive party - the two parties that bear most of the responsibility for the failed neoliberal policies that made Iceland bankrupt.

Now we´re one step closer to the EU and who knows? Maybe some of the crooks that bankrupted my country will be brought to justice? Not very likely... and anyway, although it would be pretty satisfying to see these bastards get what they deserve, that in itself would not right the wrongs that have been done.

What I do hope for we´ll end up with a better society, where values such as brotherhood, sharing, integrity and kindness become more important than the competition, greed, entitlement. Where professions, such as teaching or caring for the elderly are valued for their true worth... I'm not holding my breath though.



Óðinn´s doing very well these days. Making lots of noises and getting to be pretty good at recognizing people. One grandma just left and another has taken over looking after him and I´m so thankful for having such great families who have our back. He and I enjoyed some harðfiskur (dried fish) recently. I was surprised at how much he liked it. I suspect he liked how it felt on his gums, which often irritate him.

Trying out video

We just got ourselves a camera with a video function. Nothing special, but fun to play around with.

Back at work

Paternity leave's over and I'm back at work. Mixed feelings about that of course. My mom's been with us for a couple of days now and my dad came yesterday. They're taking care of the little one these days.
This shot is taken in South Slope Coffee (19th St. and 6th. Ave.) who make the best coffee that I've found in Brooklyn. For that matter, they're better than any of the places I've tried in Manhattan.

As an Icelander living in the United States, I frequently compare my current home with my homeland. One of the recent things that has interested me is how differently the two countries are responding to the financial crisis. In the US it's all about stimulus packages and using the economic downturn as an opportunity to invest heavily in education, healthcare, infrastructure and energy independence. In Iceland, guided by the IMF, it's all about austerity measures, repaying debt and massive budget cuts in health, education etc. How is it that the IMF (which is pretty much run by the US) always instructs countries to cut government budgets and privatize as much as possible, but when the US is in trouble, the Americans do the opposite?



My sister has recently complained over the paucity of color photos on this blog. The thign is that I´ve been having so much fun developing film recently and I only develop B&W, so I haven´t done much digital shooting recently. From here on, I´ll look for a more balanced approach. This is from last Sunday, when we went to Prospect Park.

It´s april already!

I only have about a week left of my paternity leave and I must say I´ve enjoyed it thoroughly. Just as I expected, time has gone by incredibly fast.

Most of the time has been spent just hanging out with Óðinn, but the last week has been different. My friend Óli is visiting and Óðinn and I are introducing him to different parts of Brooklyn with the odd visit to Manhattan. So far, I think Óli´s been the most impressed with Red Hook, although he´s still quite excited about visiting Brighton Beach and Coney Island, which we´ll be doing this weekend. The other day, we went for walk at night, and I thought it woud be fun to bring along the film camera, loaded with Kodak T-Max 3200 film, which I pushed to 6400. Here are a couple of shots from that evening, one obviously shot by Óli.

A lover of books

Óðinn is developing his academic skills these days and displaying an appreciation of literature. This is from yet another film, which I developed in the kitchen yesterday.

as time goes by

Just over two weeks left of my paternity leave. Time's gone by pretty fast. Earlier this week, I moved a chair to a window where the light was pretty good, put Óðinn in the chair, and shot one roll of film (Ilford HP5+ pushed to 800 ISO in Xtol). I was really happy with the results. I´ll definitely be asking other people to pose by the same window to improve my portrait shooting technique.

I´ve shot a lot of photos during this leave, and it´s cool that the leave has coincided with my getting heavily into shooting with film. It´ll be great look back at these photos as time goes by.



It's also been fun having the paternity leave coincide with the NCAA basketball tournament, although I'm disappointed in how there have hardly been any upsets. Still, lots of good basketball is to be appreciated.

Óðinn´s almost 6 months now and just keeps growing. The cheeks are getting pretty impressive.
These were all shot in the last couple of days, from the same roll of film. Kodak T-Max, 3200.

It's been a good weekend. Yesterday Catherine, Óðinn and I walked to Williamsburgh where we had lunch at the Radegast Hall in Brooklyn, where they sell excellent German beer and Central European fare, such as potato pancakes and dumplings, both of which I loved so much when I visited the Czech Republic. I brought my Mamiya with me, but due to a stupid mistake, I lost all three rolls of film which I shot that day. I had spent over an hour trying to develop two of the rolls, by the time I realized what my mistake was - I left the camera set for mirror lock up, so none of the frames were exposed. Well... I won´t make that mistake again. Today has been nice and quiet. Went for a run in the park, baked cookies and now I´m making a curry. I also shot a roll of film this morning, of Óðinn on the floor. The above photo is one of the better ones.

Recent photos

Into the big city

The first week of paternity leave if over and the time has gone by incredibly fast. It feels like ages since the snowstorm on Monday. It´s a lot warmer now so we can go on longer walks these days. Today we went into the city with Catherine to join Gwen and Peter for breakfast. They were in NYC overnight because Peter had won an award for his book, which he received last night. I brought the Mamiya with me and shot a roll of film with them.



Then, after a short meeting at the UN, Óðinn and I were able to walk for a couple of hours down Manhattan, which was great. We're going to do a lot of these walks in the coming weeks, and I'll be working on my street photography.

Staying at home

I've been at home now for two whole days with Óðinn and it´s been as expected, I guess. He misses his mother. At five months he has to get used to not having breasts on demand, and settle for pumped and refrigerated brestmilk supplemented with bananas, apple sauce and the odd sweet potato. What made the first couple of days at home with him more difficult than I had hoped for was the weather. On monday we had the biggest snowstorm of the winter and it was quite cold yesterday, so long walks were out of the question, making naps harder to come by. I´m hopnig that within a week or two, he´ll be used to no having his mother 24/7.

5 months old

Óðinn is 5 months old now. I shot and developed some film this weekend from the Mamiya. This time, I made my first attempt at pushing, which came out ok, considering that the film I used (Kodak Tri-X 320) is not generally supposed to be pushed. I´m happy with the outcome.

Saturday morning with Daneille and Óðinn

I recently bought a Mamiya RB67 medium format camera, and these are some of my first shots, using Ilford HP5 film, developing in the kitchen and then scanning the negatives. Danielle had just woken up and came to hang out with Catherine, Óðinn and me.

Supply and demand?

Monopolies are bad. Everyone knows that, yet it seems like our societies are remarkably bad at preventing their existence. I am certain that this is quite deliberate and not a coincidence - that powerful interests benefit from the monopolies´existence and thus allow them to operate and thrive.

One such example are cable and internet providers. Where I live in Brooklyn, the only cable provider we have access to is Cablevision, while in other parts of Brooklyn, people can only deal with Time Warner Cable. There are no alternatives where I live. The companies seem to have carved the borough between themselves, not unlike colonial overlords and the users are stuck with companies where all normal rules of supply and demand, quality of service and consumer choice simply do not apply.

What I don´t understand is why on earth these companies are allowed to operate in this way. They should be required to compete with each other. The result of this system is a cable operator like Cablevision which has left us with no service (no tv, phone or internet) for a week now, and they know that they can get away with doing nothing and providing incredibly poor service it since we cannot take our business elsewhere. This seems to be pretty common. We´re either stuck with them or we can simply go back to dialup, which, by the way is starting to look pretty tempting.

Too big to fail

Why were the banks, insurance companies, car makers and others allowed to grow to such sizes that their failure could bring down whole national economies, if not the whole world financial system? Isn´t it obvious, given that there seems to be a consensus about the obligation of the government to save these companies, that government should also be responsible for restricting their growth, to prevent such companies from ever becoming too big to fail in the future?

More film

I developed my second roll of film yesterday after work, which was shot on our brief trip to Iceland. Ilford SFX 200. I like these two shots of my good friend Óli and "uncle" Jói.

Developing film

Yesterday I developed my first film at home and scanned it this morning. Kodak T-Max 3200.
The high iso makes the film very grainy but also allows low light photography without a flash.

Change we can believe in?

At the Earth Summit in Rio de Janeiro in 1992, President George H.W. Bush said that "the American way of life is not negotiable". In his inaugural address in 2009, President Barack Obama said "We will not apologize for our way of life".

Something tells me that the current financial situation may be a cause for reconsidering this policy.

The revolving doors

As usual, I listened to NPR this morning while making my first coffee of the day and one of the stories was about a Congress hearing on the failures of financial regulators to act on information that might have exposed the Madoff ponzi scheme a long time ago. The Financial Services committee listened to Harry Markopolos who had informed the SEC 10 years ago that Madoff was cheating his investors, yet the SEC did nothing, despite repeated writeen submissions by Markopolos. This sounds awfully familiar to us Icelanders, where whistleblowers seem also to have been ignored by the bodies charged with regulating the financial sector. It seems like, in both countries the primary reason is that the regulatory bodies are simply too weak, staffed by inexperienced people and completely lacking any systematic way of dealing with information provided by whistleblowers. They seem to be both unable and afraid to take on the big banks and other powerful actors.

In Iceland I heard that it was not uncommon that staff from the financial regulating body were recruited by the banks which offered much better salaries. If that is true, then why would you go out of your way to investigate the very banks that may one day offer you the job you always dreamed of?

This reminds me of what has been called a revolving-door practice, as is seen for example with people who move freely between legislative bodies and government, lobbying firms and sitting on boards of big corporations, where the potential conflicts of interest are obvious. Concerns have also been raised about personnel moving between state minsitries, international financial institutions and multinational corporations.

Back after a while - this time in English

I´ve decided to revive this little blog, not because I have anything more interesting to say, but because things have changed. My son, Óðinn is born, and I´d like to post some photos here every now and again. Also I´ve become very interested in photography recently so this will be a venue for me to post some of the more personal photos, which I´d rather not put on my flickr page. I´ve also decided to switch over to English, seeing as so many of the people I care about don´t speak Icelandic.

Anyway, we just got back from a short visit back home in Iceland which was lovely. Great to meet the family and friends and good to get a break from work. It was Óðinn´s first time back in the home country and the first time he met the family, with the exception of my mom and dad who came to Brooklyn shortly after he was born. As was to be expected, he and Hildur got along well.



The visit was also interesting for the fact that the government of Iceland finally resigned after weeks of protests and just before we left, we got a new left wing coalition government. This is the first time in 18 years (or is it 17? it feels like a hundred years) that the conservative party is not in power. Irrespective of political views, it is never healthy for a country to be governed by the same party for such a long time. I hope the new government does well. At least they´re off to a great start by appointing Jóhanna Sigurðardóttir as the first Icelandic woman to be prime minister. She´s also the first openly gay head of government in any country, but in Iceland that´s less of a big deal, and more of a private matter. I just wish her well.