The good news is that it's coming
along, and it was built at a remarkable pace. It's in pieces still in
an empty mini-warehouse. I am staying with
Addi's family, all of whom have been engaged in this endless and
very physical labor of love as well. Old dad up till 2 am riveting
metal triangles! It's quite a beautiful thing. But at this moment Addi
is upstairs sulking, in boxers. He's watching football. We didn't make
our deadline for being a part of the design event, but I really don't
care. Next weekend is our new deadline and hopefully the hours will be
less brutal. A lot of corrections. Patience.
Last night Addi and I finally ate something besides Subway sandwiches. We had some nice lamb at the dinner table, with potatoes and salad. We had a long discussion about the availability of Icelandic lamb at Whole Foods, and Addi was indignant over the price of it- $6 per pound, cheaper than any other meat and, well, clearly superior due to its Icelandicness. I asked him why, and he observed that it was probably due to the need to compete with New Zealand lamb. Sock puppets came to mind. We then discussed Skyr, Iceland's signature yoghurt, and his dad asked me if I noticed that it tasted differently than it used to, as it is now made by another dairy farm. It was pretty funny, I could not imagine having such a conversation in America. No one I know in the States has the foggiest notion where food comes from.
We talked about the process as we polished off some ice cream, and all of the botched triangles that Addi's dad had taken to the recycling center. I moaned in humilation; many of them were due to mistakes I had made in the long mornings in front of the computer. Just that morning, I had fallen asleep in the lobby furniture of the office building we were working at to complete the digital production. Addi assured me that a lot of the errors were just due to the imperfect process of production. "It's not just that I'm retarded?" I asked. Biggi, his dad, laughed. "No, it's because you are redheaded. We must be kind to redheaded people."
I remember a few weeks ago in New York walking over the Manhattan bridge with a very talented trumpet player. He talked about his constant awareness of his shortcomings musically, and how technique is judged in his specific realm. I expressed my shock at this, since I find his band to be totally awesome. He dismissed my praise, saying that as a non- musician I perhaps was not trained to notice these things. "You'd better be glad of that," I retorted. He went on to say that he constantly felt like a baby in a new environment, bewildered by the depth of music. This I feel a very deep affinity for on this particular project; I think that a sense of being in over your head is one of the most important indications of going in the right direction. So much effort has been put in already by all these people, and so many mistakes made, there is no turning back.
