Sigvard Hammar lived his life in a wheelchair, and while that is a true fact, it is perhaps one of the less important ones about him. Here’s another fact: Once you got to know Sigvard you forgot about the wheelchair – mostly.
He was a small man, and not much of him was functional except his brain, his mouth, and one hand. Nothing stopped him from doing anything. Anything. He traveled the world, he wrote columns which made people mad as hell, he loved classical music and opera especially.
It was impossible to forget his eyes; they burned past your brightly polished exterior, and before you knew it, you had the clear impression that Sigvard had burrowed into your core and was beginning to pull open the dresser drawers where you store your ideas, opinions, plans, hopes, and fears. Most of what he found, he tossed into the corners, but when he came across a part of you he found interesting, then the questions would begin, coming at you in a cascade. It was fun and exhausting.
If you asked him a question about himself, often he would deflect it….I knew him for over two decades and in spite of valiant attempts, I could tell you nothing about his growing up, just a little about his education, nothing about his family. He was the most interesting cipher I’ve known.
You should know that Sigvard was Swedish, worked as a columnist for several newspapers through his career and also as a music presenter for Swedish National Radio, and he began a chamber music festival in a small town in the North of Sweden. His live was spent in almost perpetual motion, in spite of his handicapped. (Friends, bear with me, not being able to walk ever is not a “challenge,” it is a handicap.)
He rolled into my life when I was program director at Minnesota Public Radio. I thought I was just being hospitable to colleagues from another public service broadcasting organization. What happened was that Sigvard changed my life.
He peeled back the smooth carapace of the touristy Sweden and made sure I met singers and conductors and instrumentalists and broadcasters and people in the recording business, the symphony business, the opera business, the music management business.
.
åTwo of them were the baritone Hakan Hagegard and Elisabeth Soderstrom (because of the variability of the internet, I have not entered the Swedish diacritical marks which are an integral part of their names, and I hope they will forgive me.) You may remember Hakan from Ingmar Bergman’s film of The Magic Flute and his long and notable opera and recital career, and Soderstrom, now retired, was a performer of such intelligence and good judgment that I had wanted to meet her for years. So, we ended up making a radio series with them in Hakan’s country church in the west of Sweden.
That wouldn’t have happened without Sigvard and other friends of his in “the radio.” He was like a chef who took ideas and sprinkled them with people – or maybe it was the other way around. The chaos he created upset some, delighted most, himself particularly, and he managed his way around the world with the help of the magical Monika who calmed the waters he’d just passed through and loved him through all kinds of weather.
I last talked with Sigvard at Christmas. He said he had cancer, but it was nothing to worry about. He left us during the midsummer celebrations in Sweden. Typical of him to wait until everybody’s attention was somewhere else, and then he just slipped out a side door.
I shall miss him to the end of my time.
Thursday, July 25, 2002
Monday, July 1, 2002
Schadenfreude
It just won’t stop…will it? I mean all the news from large corporations about platinum parachutes for executives who departed under a cloud with a small mountain of stock options, who’ve ordered the shredding of documents, authorized accounting games to ensure their wallets will be filled while the stockholders reel in shock at the results – these incompetent and dishonest employees, consultants, auditors. The innocent lose their hard-won pension funds; then the layoffs and firings of the innocent begin in order to “save the enterprise.”
After the events have been uncovered, the good ship Mendacity pulls up in front of the cameras, and the statements of innocence come down the gangway and present themselves for our delectation – the charges are baseless, without foundation, it didn’t happen, you don’t understand, we’ll leave it up to a jury of my client’s peers, what’s the big deal, everybody does it, I didn’t know that what I was doing was against the law, and I was not trying to avoid paying sales tax…you know the drill, you’ve seen it enough by now.
Enron, Arthur Andersen, Sotheby’s, Christie’s, Martha Stewart, Tyco, the Catholic Church in America, Global Crossing, Merrill Lynch, Qwest, WorldCom, and any American corporation moving its headquarters to Bermuda to avoid taxation, there appear to be so many miscreants you need a program to keep track of it all.
The distance between us and the corporations with which we do business or in which we own stock has become vast and uncrossable, and as our capacity to have much influence on how they deal with us is null and void . I used to put my money in bank with headquarters here in my home town. Now the bank is run from the West Coast, and to get my money, I go to what they call their local “store.” When I go to the big, bullseyed discount chain store, I am not a customer, I am a “guest.” When I go to the annual shareholders’ meeting of a company, that is the one day in the year when it is “my company,” at the end of which we ratify that salaries are up and the dividend is unchanged. “The map is not the territory it represents,” wrote Alfred Korzybski, the father of semantics, but, alas, the proxy statement and annual report don’t seem to represent the scheming and shenanigans of today’s swashbuckling corporate pirates.
In these parts and in a small way, we’ve had some fun with Martha Stewart, and it turns out that we weren’t doing satire as much as accurately anticipating the future (i.e., our “Martha Stewart Doesn’t Knead My Dough” products). No matter what your opinion on her ImClone transaction might be, she remains innocent until the law determines otherwise, but some of us must enjoy imagining her saying,”Yes, my new 7 by 10 foot home will look larger when I paint it in a calmingpastel color, and you can diminish the strong verticals of the bars by painting each of them in several contrasting hues.”
That’s called Schadenfreude, the pleasure we find in the misery of others, and none of us is exempt from it. So, as the mob did in the Place de la Concorde in Paris a couple of hundred years ago during another revolution, when aristocrats arrived at the guillotine in their carts, we shall look forward to the humbling of these corporate swindlers with their skewed values, their insensitivity to their larger responsibilities, their ability to foam at the mouth with claims of innocence which will, I am sure, turn out to be good old-fashioned codswallop which is English for bull droppings.
Lest we get carried away with our feelings of moral fervor, we might do well to look at how we’re doing as a country. Let’s see - we still haven’t paid our UN dues, don’t wish to participate in international treaties concerning human rights, international tribunals, or global warming, think of the environment as nothing more than an economic asset, celebrate our reliance on imported petroleum, and incarcerate aliens with no access to legal counsel. We have a hard time acknowledging the AIDS crisis as it sweeps through an Africa, one of several places in the globe where starvation rules, we are unlikely to admit that much of what is made for us to consume world is produced by children of the third world, and our government, in spite of its own scientists, pretends that global warming is not a fact. Nor are we shocked to accept the opinion that we are the moral judge of the rest of the world, label nations as evil without providing much in the way evidence, and we would like to determine who rules where.
This is the same country whose people contributed fully and freely to the victims of last September’s horrific events, whose people have sent and continue to send aid to a myriad of poor countries, many of which remain ungrateful, whose people were willing to stand up for the country of Afghanistan when it needed our help, and whose people welcome immigrants by the thousand each year, as these newcomers express anew the impulse of freedom which brought our forebears here in the first place.
Our barrel seems to have more rotten apples in it just now. Maybe it’s a phase and will pass, but only if we ensure that it.
Have a nice 4th. Read the Declaration of Independence, ooh and aah at the fireworks and the music, and let’s get to work – me, you, us.
After the events have been uncovered, the good ship Mendacity pulls up in front of the cameras, and the statements of innocence come down the gangway and present themselves for our delectation – the charges are baseless, without foundation, it didn’t happen, you don’t understand, we’ll leave it up to a jury of my client’s peers, what’s the big deal, everybody does it, I didn’t know that what I was doing was against the law, and I was not trying to avoid paying sales tax…you know the drill, you’ve seen it enough by now.
Enron, Arthur Andersen, Sotheby’s, Christie’s, Martha Stewart, Tyco, the Catholic Church in America, Global Crossing, Merrill Lynch, Qwest, WorldCom, and any American corporation moving its headquarters to Bermuda to avoid taxation, there appear to be so many miscreants you need a program to keep track of it all.
The distance between us and the corporations with which we do business or in which we own stock has become vast and uncrossable, and as our capacity to have much influence on how they deal with us is null and void . I used to put my money in bank with headquarters here in my home town. Now the bank is run from the West Coast, and to get my money, I go to what they call their local “store.” When I go to the big, bullseyed discount chain store, I am not a customer, I am a “guest.” When I go to the annual shareholders’ meeting of a company, that is the one day in the year when it is “my company,” at the end of which we ratify that salaries are up and the dividend is unchanged. “The map is not the territory it represents,” wrote Alfred Korzybski, the father of semantics, but, alas, the proxy statement and annual report don’t seem to represent the scheming and shenanigans of today’s swashbuckling corporate pirates.
In these parts and in a small way, we’ve had some fun with Martha Stewart, and it turns out that we weren’t doing satire as much as accurately anticipating the future (i.e., our “Martha Stewart Doesn’t Knead My Dough” products). No matter what your opinion on her ImClone transaction might be, she remains innocent until the law determines otherwise, but some of us must enjoy imagining her saying,”Yes, my new 7 by 10 foot home will look larger when I paint it in a calmingpastel color, and you can diminish the strong verticals of the bars by painting each of them in several contrasting hues.”
That’s called Schadenfreude, the pleasure we find in the misery of others, and none of us is exempt from it. So, as the mob did in the Place de la Concorde in Paris a couple of hundred years ago during another revolution, when aristocrats arrived at the guillotine in their carts, we shall look forward to the humbling of these corporate swindlers with their skewed values, their insensitivity to their larger responsibilities, their ability to foam at the mouth with claims of innocence which will, I am sure, turn out to be good old-fashioned codswallop which is English for bull droppings.
Lest we get carried away with our feelings of moral fervor, we might do well to look at how we’re doing as a country. Let’s see - we still haven’t paid our UN dues, don’t wish to participate in international treaties concerning human rights, international tribunals, or global warming, think of the environment as nothing more than an economic asset, celebrate our reliance on imported petroleum, and incarcerate aliens with no access to legal counsel. We have a hard time acknowledging the AIDS crisis as it sweeps through an Africa, one of several places in the globe where starvation rules, we are unlikely to admit that much of what is made for us to consume world is produced by children of the third world, and our government, in spite of its own scientists, pretends that global warming is not a fact. Nor are we shocked to accept the opinion that we are the moral judge of the rest of the world, label nations as evil without providing much in the way evidence, and we would like to determine who rules where.
This is the same country whose people contributed fully and freely to the victims of last September’s horrific events, whose people have sent and continue to send aid to a myriad of poor countries, many of which remain ungrateful, whose people were willing to stand up for the country of Afghanistan when it needed our help, and whose people welcome immigrants by the thousand each year, as these newcomers express anew the impulse of freedom which brought our forebears here in the first place.
Our barrel seems to have more rotten apples in it just now. Maybe it’s a phase and will pass, but only if we ensure that it.
Have a nice 4th. Read the Declaration of Independence, ooh and aah at the fireworks and the music, and let’s get to work – me, you, us.
Wednesday, May 1, 2002
The Queen Mother
I never knew either one of my grandmothers…one died the year before I was born, the other within a month of my arrival. The closest person who played that role for me was a warm and loving nurse who worked for my grandfather, and she was a grandmother in all but name.
Upon her death (and burial in our family plot because she was so beloved), I decided that Queen Elizabeth, the Queen Mother would be a good substitute grandmother, so I began thinking of her as my grandma, on the basis that if much of Britain thought of her that way, one or two of us “colonials” could participate in that fantasy.
never saw her in person, but I read a lot about her, heard stories about her, two of which I’ll tell you in a bit, and, to the best of my knowledge, neither anecdote has ever been published.
Now this may sound silly or bizarre or more than a bit “off plumb,” but I genuinely enjoyed reading about her, watching films and video of her opening this, unveiling that, going into hospital, leaving hospital, accepting bouquets from small children, and smiling, endlessly smiling, and waving, endlessly waving to us.
I worried about her when her grandchildren had marital woes (why did I first type that “martial?”, I celebrated at the royal occasions of celebration, most of which she attended, and toward the end, I was concerned about the impact of the death of her daughter, Princess Margaret, and what it might do to her otherwise indomitable spirit.
When the Germans bombed Buckingham Palace, there was considerable damage. Next morning, the Queen (as she was then) said, “Now, we can look the East End in the face,” a reference to the pasting that part of London had taken from the Germans during the Blitz. Who could not love and cheer and wave back at a monarch like that, one who did not escape to Canada during the War and kept her daughters close to hand?
With her support (and indeed, direction), her husband George VI managed to be a better King than anyone might have expected, and his death, from cancer at a relatively young age, was a terrible blow to her, but she sailed onto the next chapters of her life with the same enthusiasm and energy which had marked all her years.
She loved horses (the late mystery writer Dick Francis, rode for her for many years, and she enjoyed music, poetry, art, and a healthy dollop of gin and tonic, it has been said.
She managed being both royal and human simultaneously, and that is no mean accomplishment.
Upon her death (and burial in our family plot because she was so beloved), I decided that Queen Elizabeth, the Queen Mother would be a good substitute grandmother, so I began thinking of her as my grandma, on the basis that if much of Britain thought of her that way, one or two of us “colonials” could participate in that fantasy.
never saw her in person, but I read a lot about her, heard stories about her, two of which I’ll tell you in a bit, and, to the best of my knowledge, neither anecdote has ever been published.
Now this may sound silly or bizarre or more than a bit “off plumb,” but I genuinely enjoyed reading about her, watching films and video of her opening this, unveiling that, going into hospital, leaving hospital, accepting bouquets from small children, and smiling, endlessly smiling, and waving, endlessly waving to us.
I worried about her when her grandchildren had marital woes (why did I first type that “martial?”, I celebrated at the royal occasions of celebration, most of which she attended, and toward the end, I was concerned about the impact of the death of her daughter, Princess Margaret, and what it might do to her otherwise indomitable spirit.
When the Germans bombed Buckingham Palace, there was considerable damage. Next morning, the Queen (as she was then) said, “Now, we can look the East End in the face,” a reference to the pasting that part of London had taken from the Germans during the Blitz. Who could not love and cheer and wave back at a monarch like that, one who did not escape to Canada during the War and kept her daughters close to hand?
With her support (and indeed, direction), her husband George VI managed to be a better King than anyone might have expected, and his death, from cancer at a relatively young age, was a terrible blow to her, but she sailed onto the next chapters of her life with the same enthusiasm and energy which had marked all her years.
She loved horses (the late mystery writer Dick Francis, rode for her for many years, and she enjoyed music, poetry, art, and a healthy dollop of gin and tonic, it has been said.
She managed being both royal and human simultaneously, and that is no mean accomplishment.
Tuesday, April 16, 2002
Nicholas Nash Another Return of the Loons www.nashco.com
At the end of a long dreary stretch, I moved my computer down to a table in the guestroom, primarily because that room has more natural light and a view of the small lake on which I live.
As each gray and dreary day arrived, I even stopped looking out the window: I knew there was ice, it was gray at the end of winter, and there was no compelling reason to lift my head to look out.
One morning last week, I noticed that there was some open water just off the shore, and on my walk I noted a pair of geese observing the water from the road like two timid swimmers, afraid of the shock of the cold. I looked to the edge of the receding ice and saw ducks behaving just like the geese.
At last, signs of real Spring, not that awful Mother nature joke she’d played on us the previous week, she gave us a sweet Sunday full of sun and incipient warmth, followed immediately by six inches of snow just after dawn on Monday. People were beginning to talk to themselves, and I was one of them.
That afternoon, something made me raise my head and look out toward the lake. In a glance, winter ended, Spring began, and Summer could not be far behind.
Just off the shore was the very first loon of the season….a large bird, with its black and white stripes up the neck, flattish head, and long beak, serene in the narrow strip of open water. The loon can only be a loon – it is unique, can’t be confused with other water birds. At the sight, my heart leaped up.
Primitive, with a series of haunting, wailing calls, the sound of a loon seems to connect with the primitive parts of our brain. One cannot hear the call of a loon without feeling a frisson of excitement, of delight, of the ageless call of the wild. Once heard, the sounds of a loon are never forgotten.
In these northern climes, the calendar is often irrelevant, and that is why we discuss the weather endlessly and why the television meteorologists with their gizmos and gadgets and dopplers still seem to have a sixty percent chance of getting the forecast wrong, sixty miles either side of a line running between any two points in Minnesota.
So Spring began here - with a loon, swimming in silence.
More than enough, I believe.
At the end of a long dreary stretch, I moved my computer down to a table in the guestroom, primarily because that room has more natural light and a view of the small lake on which I live.
As each gray and dreary day arrived, I even stopped looking out the window: I knew there was ice, it was gray at the end of winter, and there was no compelling reason to lift my head to look out.
One morning last week, I noticed that there was some open water just off the shore, and on my walk I noted a pair of geese observing the water from the road like two timid swimmers, afraid of the shock of the cold. I looked to the edge of the receding ice and saw ducks behaving just like the geese.
At last, signs of real Spring, not that awful Mother nature joke she’d played on us the previous week, she gave us a sweet Sunday full of sun and incipient warmth, followed immediately by six inches of snow just after dawn on Monday. People were beginning to talk to themselves, and I was one of them.
That afternoon, something made me raise my head and look out toward the lake. In a glance, winter ended, Spring began, and Summer could not be far behind.
Just off the shore was the very first loon of the season….a large bird, with its black and white stripes up the neck, flattish head, and long beak, serene in the narrow strip of open water. The loon can only be a loon – it is unique, can’t be confused with other water birds. At the sight, my heart leaped up.
Primitive, with a series of haunting, wailing calls, the sound of a loon seems to connect with the primitive parts of our brain. One cannot hear the call of a loon without feeling a frisson of excitement, of delight, of the ageless call of the wild. Once heard, the sounds of a loon are never forgotten.
In these northern climes, the calendar is often irrelevant, and that is why we discuss the weather endlessly and why the television meteorologists with their gizmos and gadgets and dopplers still seem to have a sixty percent chance of getting the forecast wrong, sixty miles either side of a line running between any two points in Minnesota.
So Spring began here - with a loon, swimming in silence.
More than enough, I believe.
Saturday, December 15, 2001
A couple of weeks ago, I went off to a lunch sponsored by one of our oldest cultural organizations. As part of the event, several performers from an organization I had only heard of, sang a few holiday selections from a cultural tradition I knew nothing about. (When it comes to music, I don’t know very much at all to begin with, and I seem happiest when I’m wandering through English choral music, Mozart, Broadway, and contemporry Celtic music – pretty ordinary stuff, I suppose, by today’s global standards.
This group was so intriguing, I made certain to attend one of their holiday concerts – it was beyond enjoyable – it was terrific. A dozen young singers singing a program of Czech and Polish Christmas music from centuries ago, and the scholarship which undergirded the evening’s presentations was, in a hyphenated word, first-rate.
Why am I rambling on like this? For two reasons. The first is that there is beauty everywhere waiting to reveal itself if only you can get out of your own encrusted habits and to be open to it, but you knew that, didn’t you?
These days, we’re reading about charitable organizations which are having a hard time finding support after the autumn horrors in our country, and that’s probably especially true for the arts.
So here’s the second reason: Go out and explore, find a young arts organization with excellent leadership and lots of possibilities, and “adopt” it: Attend events, write a check or two of support, enjoy the beauty of what they present, take and talk to friends, advertise in their program or newsletter.
In my case, it’s a group called The Rose Ensemble in Saint Paul, MN. You can visit their website by clicking here. There will be something worthy like it in your neck of the woods, so in 2002, resolve to find that organization and give it a hand.
There is something exhilarating about the shock of the new, and it’s a great stimulus for the heart and mind. Oh, go ahead!
This group was so intriguing, I made certain to attend one of their holiday concerts – it was beyond enjoyable – it was terrific. A dozen young singers singing a program of Czech and Polish Christmas music from centuries ago, and the scholarship which undergirded the evening’s presentations was, in a hyphenated word, first-rate.
Why am I rambling on like this? For two reasons. The first is that there is beauty everywhere waiting to reveal itself if only you can get out of your own encrusted habits and to be open to it, but you knew that, didn’t you?
These days, we’re reading about charitable organizations which are having a hard time finding support after the autumn horrors in our country, and that’s probably especially true for the arts.
So here’s the second reason: Go out and explore, find a young arts organization with excellent leadership and lots of possibilities, and “adopt” it: Attend events, write a check or two of support, enjoy the beauty of what they present, take and talk to friends, advertise in their program or newsletter.
In my case, it’s a group called The Rose Ensemble in Saint Paul, MN. You can visit their website by clicking here. There will be something worthy like it in your neck of the woods, so in 2002, resolve to find that organization and give it a hand.
There is something exhilarating about the shock of the new, and it’s a great stimulus for the heart and mind. Oh, go ahead!
Tuesday, November 20, 2001
For Thanksgiving, 2001
In a difficult time, full of shared anxiety and concern, Thanksgiving seems almost a day of irony this year. Families and friends will gather to honor their connections to one another, and it is important that they do so, as they have for years and years.
I wish you a happy time, and I hope you are able to take time to reflect – to reflect on those who gather together in deep sorrow to remember family and friends lost, on those who work tirelessly to retrieve remains and clear the wreckage so that the process of renewal can begin, on those volunteers and others who support them, and on those who, both known and unknown to us, fight to stop terrorism in all its forms.
Be well, and carry on.
Nick Nash
Thanksgiving, 2001
I wish you a happy time, and I hope you are able to take time to reflect – to reflect on those who gather together in deep sorrow to remember family and friends lost, on those who work tirelessly to retrieve remains and clear the wreckage so that the process of renewal can begin, on those volunteers and others who support them, and on those who, both known and unknown to us, fight to stop terrorism in all its forms.
Be well, and carry on.
Nick Nash
Thanksgiving, 2001
Thursday, November 15, 2001
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