Fooling Around
Friendship and Playful Freedom
This blog is a celebration of the power of fooling around, having fun, and friendship born from different styles coming together.
Tonight, I erupted in laughter. I was trying to explain something to my namesake friend Tania, and on a million levels, she understood me! The deep chortling was a “Laughter is the best Medicine” moment for me, truly cathartic. In the apothecary of friendship for Tania and Tanya, our signature product is our quick-witted humor. When things seem bleak for us, we can reference a joke, recall a poem, and find a narrative arc to outwit darkness.
Tania is my black humor poet out on the town.
Tanya & Tania
In Reykjavik, Iceland, where we both moved during the pandemic, we are distinct. Tania wears bold lips and beautifully sculpted lashes framing her technicolor blue eyes. I prefer an au naturel style, and trust my Lebanese lashes to protect me from the intense gale force winds of Reyjavik, where she and I both stand out as dark-haired women under 5 feet 5 inches in stature, but infinitely visible in a sea of Viking descendants. We are both filmmakers. We are both each other’s namesakes. We are both at home, and in exile, in this island nation.
Our toolkit in our creative fooling around is finding a way in and out of a story. When I cried on her shoulder on the cusp of the New Year, from my frustration at being misunderstood at the end of my marriage, she knew exactly the power of a comforting hug and a joke that would seal the deal. I see her. She sees me. Together, we laugh and cry, two expatriates on a rock in the mid-Atlantic, Iceland, a land we chose to give our children freedom and creative play during the early months of 2020 (pandemic move).
Count On Me: It Gets Better
And I adore that with her compatriots from Mexico in Los Angeles and Mexico City, my Tania is also a Punk. With Ileana Rodriguez “Reclu”, and Amanda Escalante “Amandititita” my Tania is part of a fabulous trio called “Señoras Punk” and if you are fluent in Spanish, you can laugh and cry with them on their podcast, brought to audiences straight from Spotify Studios. I love their taglines, and, as a documentary filmmaker, I’m partial to this one:
“porque nada es más punk que la realidad”
(because nothing is more punk than the truth)
PODCAST MAGIC HERE👇:
Three’s Company, Too
Tania and Tanya have a third power force of fun, a sparkling local friend who laughs loudly with us, explaining Icelandic culture.
Quietly helping Ukrainian refugees through her local business community in the capital region of Iceland, our friend brilliantly balances career and family and motherhood while dazzling Mikhail Barishnikov and not even knowing she met him. Through her advocacy as a model, she changed the look of high fashion with her movement, called Alda, meaning “wave” in Icelandic. Because of our friend and her tribe of fashion models, more diversity is now seen in women of all sizes, races and ages on the catwalk. Alda is a force of nature — models whose goal is to use their resources in the fashion community to empower women and change the perception of beauty.
We three in our way, Inga, Tania and Tanya, search for colors and codes to create pleasure in our friendship.
Black Humor
Icelandic people’s sense of humor can be dark, like their winters. Hugleikur Dagsson is a modern comedian from Iceland. His satirical comics are full of black humor and poke fun at the family values of his native island nation. The Swiss on the other hand are not known much for their black humor. Switzerland is best known for higher mountains than Iceland’s, finer chocolate over recent centuries, and a deliberate studied neutrality that keeps their banks open, rather than roller coaster collapsing in a new industrial economy such as Iceland’s did in 2008 after complicated derivate lending tied the local kronur of Iceland to the distant yen of Japan — both volcano nations, born of fire.
Pure Play = Civilization
In the very academic tome “Homo Ludens: A Study of the Play-Element in Culture,” the Dutch historian Johan Huizinga does not immediately trigger giggling emojis, but I love his declaration: “genuine, pure play is one of the main bases of civilization.”
From 1979 to 2012, Swiss artists Peter Fischli (b. 1952) and David Weiss (1946–2012) collaborated on a body of work that is a playful meditation on how we perceive everyday life.
WORK TITLE: “Mr. and Mrs. Einstein Shortly after the Conception of their Son, the Genius Albert”
My personal favorite for the inside music joke is Mick Jagger and Brian Jones Going Home Satisfied after Composing “I Can’t Get No Satisfaction.”
In Italy one year, at the Museo di arte moderna e contemporanea di Trento e Rovereto, (the Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art in the Italian town of Rovereto), I found myself genuinely on vacation after I gave a work talk in Istanbul. In Trento, Italy, I was blessed to see the Fischli Weiss collaboration called “HOW TO WORK BETTER” which is inspired by ordinary motivational posters.
HOW TO WORK BETTER
(1991)
Luigi Vegini
Through the curation of Michael Hulett, of The Hulett Collection, I learned recently of a wonderful photographer, Luigi Vegini. His intimate portraits of his daughter capture joy and play and transformation.
“Lend your ears to music, open your eyes to painting, and… stop thinking! Just ask yourself whether the work has enabled you to ‘walk about’ into a hitherto unknown world. If the answer is yes, what more do you want?”
Wassily Kandinsky, Russian Artist (1866–1944)
Friendship is Where You Want to Be
Friends are the family we choose, with the games we enjoy most, and the laughter we seek. The power of play with friends is the feeling of belonging and finding your tribe.
Friendship is more than a top ten list, but lists are fun. Here is mine today.
Friendship is…
- Standing together in awe beneath a night sky of aurora borealis.
- Laughter and collaboration during the best of times.
3. Hugs and tears during the worst storms.
4. Weaving a new story from unraveled threads of a broken marriage.
5. Going to a coffee shop without seven weeks advance planning.
6. Watering a plant when your friend has a sudden trip out of town.
7. Traveling for a milestone birthday.
8. Going for a run at the beach at sunset.
9. Riding a mountain bike in memory of a lost friend.
10. A phone call out of the blue.
These may be humble acts of art, love, and life on their own, but taken together, and together is what friends and collaborators do, these actions light up our world.
Here’s to love and life and friendship. Here’s to creative collaborations. May we always find ways to fool around.
