Reykjavík Grapevine - 14.08.2015, Qupperneq 21

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21The Reykjavík GrapevineIssue 12 — 2015
Discordant harmonies
Discordant intersections. That’s the ver-
batim translation of an Icelandic term
curiously popular among the country’s
city planners and in news reports around
the turn of the century. If my internet
doesn’t fail me, in English the thing is
better known as an interchange: when
intersecting roads lie, one over a bridge
across the other, with all the slip lanes
and grade separations needed to make
as smooth as possible whatever left and
right turns a driver might fancy. Smooth
in the sense that going through the ideal
interchange one driver never has to halt
for another—never has to acknowledge
other drivers’ existence, noticing them
only as this vague abstraction surround-
ing him or her: traffic.
Variants include, I now learn, the
roundabout interchange—a well-known
favourite in Iceland's suburban munici-
palities—the cloverleaf interchange, the
stack interchange, the cloverstack inter-
change, and the turbine interchange, not
to mention the diverging windmill, the
divided volleyball and the full diamond
varieties. From above they all look like
intricate mandalas or swastikas. (Eu-
rope’s first interchange opened for traffic
in Schkeuditz, Germany, in 1936, which
seems worth mentioning just to slander
these engineering marvels, yet unfair
and irrelevant enough to keep within
parentheses.)
In any case, Icelandic reporters re-
ferred to all the variants by one term:
“mislæg gatnamót.” The question posed
by planners was always: how about we
add one? The eventual answer was in-
variably: let’s.
The term’s history up until now
is short but, let’s say, fascinating?
Bear with me.
The rise and fall
of the interchange
Through the print media archives of
timarit.is, we learn that the term “mis-
læg gatnamót” made its first modest
appearance in print—thereby entering
the Icelandic vocabulary—in 1983. It ap-
pears one time the following year, never
in 1985, once in 1986, two times in 1987,
and a vigorous nine times in 1988—only
to drop below half of that while the Ber-
lin Wall was coming down and the Soviet
Union disintegrating: five, six, five. In
1992, then, the term seems determined to
succeed, making twelve appearances, as-
cending to seventeen in 1993 and a stag-
gering forty-two in 1994.
Throughout the latter half of the 90s,
the term's appearances remain rather
steady, until the year 2000, when "mislæg
gatnamót” makes a huge leap, from 34 to
95 instances in a single year. The word
stays at around 100 appearances per
year throughout most of this century’s
first decade—until, that is, 2009. Follow-
ing the example of the króna, "mislæg
gatnamót" falls from grace even more
drastically than it rose: from 2008’s 105
instances in print, the term crashes to a
negligible 19 appearances the year after.
It hasn’t recovered since.
In other words, post-2008, such con-
struction projects have not been in vogue.
Interchanges are a boom thing, commu-
nal conspicuous consumption. Luxury
goods. City planners and engineers may
disagree and point to some marginal util-
ity value these mandalas have. Nonethe-
less, I would contend that this is not why
they were built.
Conspicuous
construction
The difference between a Hermès hand-
bag and any ordinary backpack is not that
you can stuff more things in the former,
or that it lasts longer. You buy the Her-
mès to signal your participation in a cer-
tain storyline. That goes for secondhand
clothing, too, although, if you do buy
secondhand by choice rather than neces-
sity, you’d probably call it “vintage”—and
you wouldn’t be engaging in “recycling”
as much as “upcycling,” a term coined to
imprint the same classist differentiation
on used used consumer items as the term
“expat” (you roaming, free spirits of the
West) did on migrants (poor bastards).
In any case, the story you tell yourself
and others may be one of an environmen-
tally conscious aesthete, who appreciates
“life’s true joys” over and above well-
marketed luxury. It may even be a true
story, so to speak—it’s a story nonetheless.
Back to the point: which narrative
does a small society, a country populated
by just over 300,000 people, enter by
cramming its inner city and suburban ar-
eas full of, practically speaking, superflu-
ous, intricate multi-level interchanges?
The same, I reckon, as when its people
stand in line overnight for those colorful,
edible circular objects assumed to be pas-
try: the world of every story on TV, ever.
The mirage of The Real
As a child, I lived in various places around
Iceland. Súðavík was one—a village of
250 inhabitants at the time. Núpur by
Dýrafjörður was another —a boarding
school back then, two mountain cross-
ings away from the nearest supermarket.
Wherever my parents roamed for work,
dragging me with them, one thing re-
mained stable: TV. And whatever series
or film was on TV, certain things were
shared by most of them: tall buildings,
busy people, fast-food franchises and
heavy traffic passing through multi-level
interchanges. Whereas life felt mostly
like waiting, TV provided the answer to
what we were all waiting for: city life.
The cities these shows were filmed in
probably varied: Seattle, NYC and Wash-
ington all exist on TV. Even Munich was
there. Oh, and Dallas made a signifi-
cant contribution. Most often, though,
it was probably LA, home of the eternal
traffic jam.
Sitting in a car and cursing the insane
traffic while taking the wrong turn be-
cause you have to read the signs to realise
which right turn will take you to the left
became a token, in our collective televi-
sioned mind, of having arrived. There. In
the actual world, the one on TV. As op-
posed to its waiting room, our homes.
The relief
The same goes for fast food franchises.
Whether it’s McDonald’s, inaugurated
in 1993, as Prime Minister Davíð Odds-
son took a bite of the first joint’s first
burger served in the country, in front
of—appropriately—several TV cameras,
or this month’s opening of Iceland’s first
of a planned 16 Dunkin’ Donuts outlets:
we know reality when it hits us, because
we’ve seen it on TV. In that sense, every
bite taken of the less-than-nutritious
foodstuffs these places serve is a bite
of reality, announcing our always long-
awaited arrival.
McDonald’s left in 2009, explaining
that doing business in Iceland didn’t re-
ally pay off. Reality is a fleeting thing—
you must keep biting and chewing if you
don’t want to find yourself back in the
waiting room. Which is why those of us
brought up by TV feel some sense of relief
at the arrival of Dunkin’ Donuts (which
people born and raised in stabler house-
holds with a firmer grasp on reality may
not). Sure, other franchises operate in the
country. Neither KFC nor Taco Bell are
as trustworthy and stable signals of be-
ing-in-the-world, i.e. TV-land, as Dunkin’
Donalds and McDonut’s.
Put your money where
your mouth is and vote
with your feet
Things have changed, however, since
McDonald’s came and went. Most impor-
tantly in this context, a notable number
of city-dwellers in other countries have
come to the conclusion that their Los
Angeles or Munich is itself nothing but
a waiting room—that The Real awaits
them in a place like Iceland.
The perceived mix of the rugged
and the cute, i.e. the culture of no man-
ners and the relative moral purity of the
powerless and irrelevant, has become a
highly marketable asset in its own right.
I’m guessing here, but this might have to
do with the ongoing change in the way
we use media: an arctic fox swimming
in a handmade pool next to a lone moun-
tain’s waterfall, surrounded by a lava field
under a dramatic cloudy sky, has a higher
Instagram value than TV’s beloved high-
ways and intersections, or anything in-
volving the NYPD.
Whatever the underlying reasons
might be, the consequence is confusion:
during the late 20th century we all sub-
scribed to the American dream, which to
our best knowledge was all about getting
stuck in traffic, waiting to sink your teeth
into a donut or a burger. And now you’re
all over here, in order to immerse your-
selves in what? That other deaf, dumb
and blind thing, what’s the word... na-
ture?
“Wait a minute,” our collective sub-
conscious goes, “you mean reality isn't an
imported good?”
If it is not, if reality was over here all
along, do you think imports might hurt
it? Exterminate it? That bland taste of
baked, sugar-coated dust, is it the taste
of nothing? And if we keep consuming it,
will it eventually take over?
What do multi-level highway interchanges, cheeseburg-
ers and donuts have in common? No, this is not about the
police.
Words Haukur Már Helgason
Illustration Baldur Helgason
R e a l i t y B i t e s