Reykjavík Grapevine - 11.09.2009, Qupperneq 12

12
The Reykjavík Grapevine
Issue 14 — 2009
MEDIEVAL MANUSCRIPTS – EDDAS AND SAGAS
The Ancient Vellums on Display
ICELAND :: FILM – Berlin – Copenhagen – Reykjavík
Icelandic Filmmaking 1904-2008
A LOOK INTO NATURE
The Story of the Icelandic Museum of Natural History
EXHIBITIONS - GUIDED TOURS
CAFETERIA - CULTURE SHOP
The Culture House – Þjóðmenningarhúsið
National Centre for Cultural Heritage
Hverfi sgata 15 · 101 Reykjavík (City Centre)
Tel: 545 1400 · www.thjodmenning.is
Open daily between 11 am and 5 pm
Free guided tour of THE MEDIEVAL MANU-
SCRIPTS exhibition Mon and Fri at 3:30 pm.
Kaffismiðja Íslands is Reykjavík’s Mecca
for coffee enthusiasts. September 16–19,
they will be bringing home the cream of
the international crop as they co-host the
Nordic Barista Championships.
Coffee shop, training centre and
roastery, Kaffismiðja Íslands is the work
of two eminent coffee professionals,
Ingibjörg Jóna Sigurðardóttir and Sonja
Björk Grant. Ingibjörg is a 2-time national
barista champion and world finalist.
Sonja’s credits would fill the rest of this
article: co-founder of the world barista
championships, international judge,
Icelandic barista coach…the list goes on.
So we’ll move on.
“I wanted a job in a pet shop. I have
often thought that if I had gotten one,
I would still be there, with a parrot on
my shoulder," she tells me. Instead
of hanging out with parrots, Sonja is
running around her own coffee shop,
bright red oven mitten on one hand and a
plate of cinnamon rolls in the other, a knot
of carrot red hair bouncing merrily on the
side of her head.
At Kaffismiðja, Sonja is going back to
basics and getting her hands dirty with the
coffee. With their groovy pink roaster the
Kaffismiðja ladies can try out new things
in small batches, roasting a kilogram of
beans at a time if they so wish. “It is so
much fun to experiment!” she says.
Opened at the beginning of the year,
word of mouth has quickly established a
faithful following. At nine in the morning
the place is packed with regulars, most of
whom the guru greets like old friends.
“All these coffee nerds have been
hiding in their closets. Now they’ve come
out, come here and started talking,”
Sonja says about the community growing
around the shop.
“A couple of months ago, I made the
last shot of the Kenyan bean we had. There
were ten people in the room who wanted
to buy that shot! Nothing like that has
ever happened to me,” Sonja smiles. The
Kenyan supply sold out months ago, yet
the staff still receives regular enquiries.
In mid-September the Kaffismiðja
ladies and their co-conspirators will stage
an invasion as 100 extra coffee-geeks come
to town for the Nordic Barista cup. The
Reykjavík Art Museum—Hafnarhúsið—
serves as venue for the event, which is
open to the public on Saturday 18th—and
with three world-champion baristas in
town, the coffee should be decent.
Daily cafe duties, evening roasting
sessions and organising the barista cup
keep Sonja busy from dawn till dusk. I
can't help but wonder what all this must
do for her caffeine intake:
“I don’t drink that much coffee,” Sonja
says, “maybe ten cups a day.”
Passion For The Bean
Kaffismidja Íslands will compete at the Nordic Barista Cup
Sari Peltonen really loves kaffismiðja Íslands. The rest of us like it pretty well, too.
Interview | Nordic Barista Cup Opinion | Catharine Fulton
Dear douchebags with no
regard for the physical
wellbeing of those around
them:
You may not remember me, but
we’ve met before. You slammed into me
at full force while you were determined
to get from point A to point B no matter
the obstacles in your way at [insert any
Reykjavík establishment or street name
here] on [any date]. I wish I could say
it’s nice to be in contact with you again,
but our primary meetings have not left
positive impressions on me and have
caused many aches and pains and, on
occasion, mild bruising.
I write you today, not simply to
express the physical hurt I have
experienced on account of your flap-
happy elbows and linebacker-esque
shoulder actions—which, all in all, are
inexplicable and entirely uncalled for—
but also to express concern for you and
your obvious lack of awareness of your
immediate surroundings or physical
motions. Why else would a highly
functioning human being willingly push
and collide with their peers in public
places and at otherwise upbeat social
settings?
I fear you may be living with a
slightly malfunctioning hippocampus
or cerebellum, responsible for your
spatial navigation and sensory
perception, coordination and motor
control, respectively. Alternately, I saw
an episode of House once in which a
young girl had a case of CIPA so she
could throw herself off the balcony
in the fictional hospital’s atrium and
not feel a thing. It turned out she also
had some massive worm living in her
intestine that House removed surgically
without administering an anaesthetic,
ya know, because she can’t feel
anything. Maybe you have that? Not
the massive intestinal worm. Maybe
your inability to feel is the reason you
forcefully knock into people in crowds
and on the street. Do you just not feel
it? If so, you should definitely get that
checked out when you go look into that
brain thing.
I’m worried about you, man. If you
continue to violently push into people
you’re not going to make any new
friends and you may even be relegated
to a sad existence of solitude, settling
for body-checking door frames
from time to time just for the sake of
maintaining what you construe to be
normalcy. But it’s not normal. And it’s
not very nice.
Please stop.
Your friend,
Everybody who’s sick of being pushed
and knocked by asshats like yourself.
kaffismiðja Islands in located at the
corner of Frakkastigur and Kárastigur.
Open Monday through Friday 8.30 to
5pm, weekends from 9am to 4pm.
www.kaffismidja.is
Nordic Barista Cup 16.9 - 19.9.
www.nordicbaristacup.com
When push
comes to shove
SARI PELTONEN
JULIA STAPLES
HAUkUR S MAGNÚSSON
News | Fashion Weak
Apparently, something called Iceland
Fashion Week was supposed to
happen in Reykjanesbær last weekend.
Apparently, a bunch of participating
designers and their entourage got trés
pissed off when they arrived upon the
site and realised the ‘catwalk’ they were
meant to display their designs upon
wasn’t ‘up to standard,’ or ‘as previously
agreed upon,’ or what have you.
Apparently, most of them pulled out
of the show at the last minute, opting
instead to throw their own ‘Rebel
Fashion Show’ at NASA that same night.
Apparently, a shitstorm flew over
Iceland last weekend. A fashion
shitstorm. Lots has been written about
this mess thus far, most of it on-line.
Many people want to have their say. We
read the press releases, the blogs, the
on-line news reports. While at least one
of the designers that dropped out seems
to have done so merely because she was
unhappy with her accommodations and
the purported age of her whale watching
vessel, many of the claims seem to have
merit.
A fellow named Andrew Lockhart,
apparently involved with organising the
thing along with fashion pariah Kolbrún
Aðalsteinsdóttir, called our office to
speak his piece, and distance himself
from the whole mess, as it were. We
conducted an interview with the man,
and he told us his side of the story. He
gave some interesting quotes, and we
may well use them at some point. When
and if we cover the whole debacle.
Now. A running theme through all the
blog entries seems to be: “Don’t let this
happen again. Don’t let young designers
from all over the world pay their way to
Iceland to participate in an unorganised
mess of a fashion week.”
So, young designers from all over
the world, be forewarned: Make sure
to check the credentials of whoever
you’re paying money to participate in
their events in the future. Just because
an event has the word fashion in its title
doesn’t mean it is fashionable. Or valid.
If you think this all sounds like it
would make for an interesting story,
well, that’s because it would. It’s way
interesting, as all tragedies are.
As far as we can tell, something blew
up in someone’s face, and someone has
an awful lot of ‘splaining to do. But we’ll
be darned if we participate in this whole
mess, at least for the time being. We
weren’t there (‘Iceland Fashion Week’
forgot to invite us to their event), and
every single account of the thing we’ve
received seems heavily biased. So for
now, you’ll have to rely on Google for
your Icelandic Fashion Week Scandal
stories.
We’ll maybe report something when
folks calm down.
Why We Aren’t Really Covering That Whole “Iceland
Fashion Week Fiasco” Now But Might At Some Point
Some people at the office were sceptical about tackling such a
thorny issue as the Kárahnjúkar dam, but everyone was happy with
the result. I had read a tiny piece in Fréttablaðið about a farmer on
the east coast who was complaining about the dust that blew down
from the dam. I decided to go all John Steinbeck with a piece called
the Grapes of Vaði (the farmer’s farm is called vað). Robert and I
did the story while Hörður and Hörður flew east to get the picture.
Turned out the man had never even been to Reykjavík. This was an
important story, as it came at a time when the Kárahnjúkar debate
was just petering out. VG
I had interviewed Björk earlier in the summer, but her people kept
us waiting for pictures. This may have been for the story to coincide
with the release of the Medúlla album. In any case, the interview
went really well. It was one of the first times a major artist took a
stand in favour of piracy, and was quoted a lot. VG
Perhaps my favourite cover, and one of our best issues. Kristinn
Hrafnsson wrote a great piece from the NATO base in Afghanistan.
Also, Haukur Már Helgason did a really fun piece on whaling with a
sword. They should make T-shirts of that cover. VG
Grapevine 101
#12 - Issue 6 - 2004
#13 - Issue 7 - 2004
#14 - Issue 8 - 2004