Sit With Your Back To The Wall And Watch Out For Everyone

1. At or around 11:30pm the Danish Guy in the tee-shirt drops his beer and stares at it for awhile and tries to pick it up and instead falls over for the second time in about ten minutes. He lays on top of his beer for what seems like longer than anyone should do in a bar as crowded as this one is then staggers to his feet and stares his friend in the eyes the way that men do right before they do something stupid and then he punches his friend in the stomach and the Danish Guy's other two friends grab him and drag him out the door. It takes +/-2 minutes for the Danish Guy to come back and begin slow dancing with the woman who was once between The Danish Guy and His Friend. It's not clear whether or not the the slow dancing was the source of the original problem but it's very clear that the slow dancing is tortured and grim stuff. Brandon says, "When was the last time you were in a fight?" and I say, "I read a lot of science fiction growing up?" and we try to keep an eye on what happens next but that is a difficult thing to to do because in the time that we've been trying to keep an eye on what happens next a Nova Scotian fisherman in a "Tapout" teeshirt has begun -- and continued really, really thoroughly -- to perform for us "You Are The One That I Want" from Grease. We're not the ones that he wants -- he wants pretty much any of the women ages 16-65 that he's met/sung to/danced with/shouted at/accidentally spilled a drink on/tactically threw a drink on/etc in the six or so hours he's been here -- but just now he seems very happy singing to us and all things considered we don't have much of a choice but to watch. The fisherman gets down on one knee, sings the male and female parts of the song, pirouettes, strikes our pint glasses of Godthaab Bryghus Classic Beer with his three green bottles of Tuborg as hard as he can, grows frustrated that we aren't singing with him even though we are kind of singing with him just to make the whole singing thing feel a little less uncomfortable for everyone involved, kind of shouts, "Come on you guys!", and sings louder. Five or six security guards with ear pieces make their way past the Danish guy so they can each talk to/flirt with The One Pretty Bartender, the Danish Guy keeps falling over, the One Fisherman keeps singing to us, and the rest of his boat mates scour the bar for (omitted) and in fact began scouring the bar for (omitted) by asking the security guard where they can find some (omitted) and he shrugs his shoulders and says, "Ask around?"

This is Thursday night in the Kristinemut Saloon in Nuuk, Greenland.

2. When we arrived in Nuuk on Tuesday Brandon and I made camp on a quarter mile expanse of rock and moss separating the Davis Strait from the parking lot of Greenland University because a kindly guy from the Nuuk Tourism Board told us there was a pretty nice spot to camp out by the University and we said we'd check it out and when we saw it -- the water, the stone, white picket grave-markers, the sheer expanse of all that emptiness -- I did that thing I do where I start saying, "Dude" in really slow and meaningful ways and that was pretty much that. Out here there's us and a cemetery and no-one else: the sun falls below the horizon but there is no night; the air is cold and clean. This morning just after three I heard something like an explosion and shot up in my sleeping bag and got the the zipper on my sleeping bag all caught up on itself and said loudly to Brandon, "Did you hear that?" and, "Did you hear that?" and he said "Check it out?" and I said, "I'm going to check it out". I tried to unzip the zipper on my sleeping bag and couldn't because I was thinking: explosion = polar bear/something terrible/punishment for all my selfishness and bad thoughts etc. etc. so I kicked off my sleeping bag like a crazy person and got hung up in the tent fly net and tripped over a pair of boots and ended up on my knees staring out at the empty blue western horizon.

It was an iceberg -- the mournful sigh of an iceberg breaking in half and collapsing just one hundred yards off our shore.

Kristinemut saloon, inside. PHOTO BY Brandon Stetser

3. There's no thoughtful way to evaluate any place after only seventy-two hours and I've been worrying about trying to do something like that almost all day. The only clear thing in Nuuk is the contrast, the disjunction. In Nuuk, you can spend an entire day working your way through the byzantine process of purchasing fuel for your camp grill but you can purchase a razor scooter in pretty much any store of any kind anywhere; in Nuuk you can shop for Danish furniture and clothing, drink lattees, hit up The Store That Sells Apple Products and also head around the corner for freshly slaughtered humpback whale and seal -- flippers separated/hacked off, cracked bone and dripping marrow protruding -- in the market that makes The Store That Sells Apple Products smell like dead fish; in Nuuk the weather swings back and forth by a factor of 20 degrees almost hourly; it's not out of the question that the entire city will lose power for an hour or two and when it does everyone just goes outside and smokes cigarettes and waits; high school kids play Diablo 3 in the Internet cafe above Barista cafe; the grocery stores are enormous and beautiful but if you need a pharmacy you'll have to wait until they finish moving it from Wherever It Was to Wherever It May End Up. Here the fog is low and oppressive, here if you want a gun you can pretty much just go ahead and buy a gun, here if you want to lay on a rock and watch the rise and collapse of icebergs in the Davis Strait you can just do that too.

But at the Kristinemut saloon -- and also at the Pub Mutten, and the Godthaab Bryghus, pretty much anywhere alcohol and locals and fisherman mix, where fistfights are common place and the narrative of a given night seems to shift in jagged and arbitrary ways -- Nuuk feels like an entirely different place from the one described above. Like it is always teetering on the edge of brief, simple violence; like sexuality and (omitted) are the common currency; like the forces at work here are elemental and complex, unforgiving and disinterested. Like a frontier town at the edge of the world, hoping never to be found.

Be sure to check the work of Brandon Stetser in TSO Photoblog here:
Iceland: http://www.flickr.com/photos/77398914@N04/sets/72157630655606208
Greenland: http://www.flickr.com/photos/77398914@N04/sets/72157630669848262
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