Gunillocentrism – web diary of a freelance journalist

As usually, I was extremely late to the airport – and then it turns out the plane was delayed with almost 4 hours!

(Actually , I _thought_ I was late, but I wasn’t. For some reason, I thought the plane left at 10.10, but it’s 10.40 as usually. So I was precisely in time…)

Too bad I didn’t know; I can think of lots of things I could have done at home with a couple of extra hours… Well, I’m hanging out in the airport café now. Not so bad, but they have started charging for wireless now (Arlanda had a free introduction period until August 31.)

/Gunilla

Zozo, måste ni se! Mycket bra. Sex välförtjänta prickar av SvD:s Jeanette Gentele, även om jag kanske skulle ha gett den fem eller så:
SvD: Zozos resa en lysande bildpoesi

Det blev alltså bio igår till sist…och travarna med kvitton och fuktiga kläder och sladdar att sortera ligger kvar här hemma.

Men det kanske är som Laila Freivalds sade på en pressfrukost igår, att det krävs viss tidspress för att man ska nå resultat. (Hon talade om FN-politiska/-diplomatiska förhandligar, inte om packning, men det är väl samma sak). Jag har två och en halv timmar på mig nu på morgonen innan jag måste kasta mig iväg till Arlanda, alltid något.

En (1) enda person kom som hastigast igår kväll, så det tänkta trädgårdsmyset förbyttes till att jag stod i regnet utanför Grill Ruby på österlånggatan i en och en halv timme. Men med paraply! Vem har glömt ett paraply här hos mig (troligen den 6 augusti)? Det är ett litet paraply med tryck av tidningstexter.

Och sedan träffade jag Irena för bio och temys och deep talk på Söder - hemma hos henne, vilket var ganska märkligt, eftersom det är ett hem som jag suttit och druckit te med mera i, av och till sedan jag var 16 år.

Nu: hetspackning! På Newark kommer min hyresgäst att hämta mig, för vidarebefordran direkt hem eller möjligen till FN där det pågår “global talmanskonferens”. Ikväll blir det vernissage i Chelsea!
Anton Kern Gallery - Lara Schnitger Och så blev jag just bjuden på middag hos goda vänner i New Jersey! Hoppas att det där med jetlag går över snabbt, för jag har inte tid med sådant…

/Gunilla

Hmmm….det verkade så stabilt soligt och vackert och skönt när jag skickade ut inbjudan till min trädgård.

Nu har det börjat regna i Gamla stan , och om det fortsätter är det kanske kanske klokast att kila ned till Grill Ruby (Österlånggatan 14, nedanför S:t Göran och Draken-statyn) med en gång…

Jag sätter upp en lapp på Kindstugatan 14 med besked..! Vem vet, det kanske spricker upp plötsligt.

Gunilla

Ingenting gör mig så nervös som moln på himlen när jag har bjudit in folk till min trädgård. Nå, denna gång är de synnerligen lätta, vad det verkar. Om det skulle börja regna är någon ute efter mig.

Så, välkommen till Kvarteret Cepheus! Jag måste packa och fixa och betala räkningar och sköta korrespondens och annat nu – så tyvärr blir det nog inget som helst tilltugg, utan bara en omgång lådvin, i bästa fall. Hinner inte gå och handla!

Återigen: Kindstugatan 14, 17.30–19 (barnvagnar och cyklar kan lättare komma in på Köpmangatan 11, men jag har inte den koden så isåfall får ni ta er in på annat sätt).

/Gunilla

Kära vänner,

Det blir inget barhäng ikväll. Det blir avskeds-gettogether i min trädgård! Det är så himla varmt och soligt och skönt här, trots regnprognoser - och jag har nog aldrig i världshistorien haft någon tillställning här i september. Så det kunde vara på tiden.

Adress: ingång från Kindstugatan 14; gå in på gården och håll till höger där det är sol (kring brunnen)
Portkod: yes, den funkar nu återigen, men jag vågar inte lägga ut det här för då kanske alla i min BRF blir galna
Tid: 17.30-19 (sol fram till c:a 18)
Förtäring: inte mycket, mest vin tror jag

Så kom förbi om ni känner för det (ingen behöver OSA!).

Nästa Gunillafest äger rum i New York i mitten eller slutet av september, samarrangemang med Annika Östman; datum oklart och beror helt enkelt på världsläget. Hör av er om ni är i New York då – eller senare!

Gunilla

P S Vid 19-tiden eller så planerar somliga av oss att gå vidare till Grill Ruby på Österlånggatan och äta middag. Restaurant - Grill Ruby; klicka på “grillen”. (Och egentligen vill jag se Zozo på någon lämplig biograf klockan 21 ikväll, men jag måste väl packa och stryka och skriva texter och göra min bokföring någon gång också?!)

I wanted to have the TV on in the background tonight - so I could watch the political debate between Swedish party leaders, while doing other things (see previous posting).

But my TV-set hasn’t worked for weeks and probably needs to be replaced. It is completely black.
I thought that it would work well today – because it did last time I watched it, last week.

Hmmm…when I think about it, that was when TV3 showed no less than four (4) episodes of Sex and the City during the same evening.

Isn’t that strange?! My TV doesn’t work, but makes an exception for when there is Sex and the City on? Perhaps it felt I really needed some doses of televised single life in Manhattan, before it went back into darkness…

/Gunilla

Today, I have been a nice family girl, and spent lots of time with my parents and with my tante Inga. She is 93 years old, and not going very strong – but she has kept her great humour, so it was nice to spend a couple of hours with her.

My mum came up with the brilliant idea of going to Zetas - finsmakarens trädgård, close to Kungens Kurva.
We had thai fish cakes (dad and I), dried ham and bulgur (mum; my dad thinks he has had a bulgur overdose), and cookies in the nice café, and then strolled around in the garden.
I’m not a big garden person at all – but this place made even me want to buy lots of things in the plant shop, and create a faded romantic garden corner somewhere, with lots of weird sculptures and strange flowers!

Now time for all the things that I need to fix before leaving for New York: edit radio clips into a programme, wash some clothes, write articles, clean up my apartment, pitch stories, scrub the floor, do my accounting, send out invoices, write lots of business correspondence, write e-mails to editors, write e-mails to everyone else (I know, I’m lagging months behind! sorry!), yield some money for all of my rents…eat some vanilla yoghurt, making an excursion.

/Gunilla

I just finished a 4,5 hours (!) long telephone conversation with a friend of mine who lives abroad. There were simply some things we really needed to talk about.
This is what I find most amazing with modern technology: It has become so cheap, comparatively, to stay in touch with friends in other parts of the world!
With a minute cost around SEK1 (?) this call will for sure make a bump in my phone bill. But it is indeed possible to chat with friends and have an ongoing “everyday” contact, instead of the occasional post card or – at best – annual phone call. This kind of social interaction does so much to alleviate being an expat/living in exile/move around – and to come back to where you started, without feeling like a total alien to your close friends.

/Gunilla

I am so sorry I am not in Louisiana right now, reporting on the catastrophe. For lots of reasons (family affairs, technical woes, the usual bad cash-flow, und so weiter) I didn’t manage to buy a ticket for New York so I could leave by the end of August, as I had planned. So, I won’t go “home to Harlem” until September 8. That ticket wasn’t even cheap! (But at least it is a direct flight.)

And last Thursday, my editors at TT finally asked me if I could go to Louisiana.

Note, this is the first time they asked me to go somewhere in the USA that did not involve a Swede. Previous fieldwork that has been initiated by TT has been on Kenny Bräck, Annika Sörenstam, Annika Östberg, and Jan Eliasson; all my other report trips in the USA has been initiated and paid by me, myself and I. (Well, TT did pay for my trip to Pennsylvania and Washington for the presidential election in November, which was excellent. But I really had to struggle to make that happen, because they thought I could stay at home in New York and report – despite the fact that they already had another reporter there, and noone else anywhere in the USA.)
This is to say that I couldn’t really expect them to send me even to a great scale disaster zone as Louisiana. But of course the story has grown really big now.

Too late. I had to decline. Can’t change my ticket. So typical! Not that I exactly *want* to report from disaster zones – but I do feel I’m ready for it somehow, after all my university courses on humanitarian affairs and yes, with my still-humble-but-ever-growing field experience.

Also, I have been in New Orleans before, which I believe makes for better reporting – and as a resident of a ghetto, albeit a privileged resident of a pretty privileged ghetto, I do know a little bit about marginalized people in the US (I like to believe). Of course, what I reported about last time I was there was gourmet restaurant and tourist activities, but I did walk around in the slum areas and certainly knew Louisiana has a huge population of black urban poor. (I was a little astonished that so many Swedish media concentrated on interviewing the few Swedish people who live in New Orleans, about their evacuation plans.)

And, as many of you know, I have been lamenting for months that no editor was interested in my stories from Gonaïves in Haiti last year. In September of 2004, Gonaïves experienced exactly what New Orleans is experiencing now, albeit on a smaller scale and without the economical, world-political, and cultural ramifications (hence, of course, the lack of interest). I and photographer Karl Melander was there in November, see my posting on this here; click on “Exemplet Haiti” to the right.

All this means I am very frustrated right now, sitting in my beautiful but a little too idyllic garden in Stockholm. (TT will send a reporter from Stockholm to the disaster zone.)

My editor tried to cheer me up by saying that there will probably be reasons to report from Louisiana for months to come. So true. But still frustrating.

Gunilla

P S I
I won’t say anything about the disaster here, so many people do it much better than I could (from my garden…).
I would, however, recommend you to check out Mark Lynas’ blog where he makes the link to global warming. I read his book High Tide /check out the reviews!/ during my trip in Greenland. It’s highly recommended reading for anyone interested in how climate changes are affecting people around the world! The book is also translated into Swedish: Oväder/Ordfront.

P S II
I guess I should have categorized this posting as “NOT covering something”. The category “media criticism” should, this time, be interpreted as “self criticism”.

I hope I soon won’t have to bore you with more details from my eternal struggle with technology. Let me just say that what I wrote in the previous posting about having had my Internet fixed was sadly _not_ true, at least not then.

Some hours after the bug with _sending_ e-mail had been fixed, I disovered I could no longer _check_ them! I had to crash the office of my friend Michel again, and harrass another poor programmer. After sju sorger and åtta bedrövelser, as we say in Swedish, we _finally_ solved all problems – so now I can really send as well as check my e-mails. It hasn’t worked properly for a month!!!
I haven’t been able to work at all, so I am really lagging behind with story deadlines, story pitching, etc… Even going to New York has been severely delayed, which means I have missed the *opportunity* of going to Louisiana and report on the catastrophe there (I hope to blog more on that later). Argghhhhh!!!! What a shame for a humanitarian affairs reporter like me!

The thing we had to do to solve the bug was to write this script into the system:
x-eudora-setting:12909=plain%20cram-md5
from this Eudora support site. Hey, was that complicated, or what?! I hope a blonde like me could be forgiven for not figuring that one out on her own (it wasn’t easy for the pro-programmers, either).

Other than trouble shooting all kinds of technical problems, I have been very busy hanging out at fancy restaurants in and around Stockholm lately, such as Kafé Pladder, Lux and Riche with friends.
Today, I took my sick and poor and lonely dad to Bockholmen Hav och Restaurang. It’s fabulous, and the chicken we had and the view of sea and boats cheered us both up a lot!

And then I spent the evening playing with my cute nieces. Clara, the 2-year old, is so clever - today I taught her pretty strange words such as “fyr” (light-house) and “mullvad” (mole) because they were depicted in one of her books – and she picked them up immediately.

/Gunilla