The Filter^

Finnish Education

Wall Street Journal:

Yet by one international measure, Finnish teenagers are among the smartest in the world.

And Finnally...

Sorry for the wait (it must have been simply excruciating), but my review of La Boheme at the Finnish National Opera is now online on the review site here.

Finland and Estonia

I've been racking my brains trying to think of something interesting to say about the Finnish economy for our ongoing Finnlter^ series, and have finally realised: Finland is interesting, not necessarily for what it is, but also for what it is not. Curiously, the relative moribund nature of Finland is a powerful reminder of the effect of comparative economic systems. According to Mart Laar*:

In 1939, it was hard to find two more similar countries as Finland and Estonia. We were very similar in language, culture, and living standards. Our economies were more or less the same. Then in 1940, Estonia was occupied by the Soviet Union and Finland successfully protected its independence. Look at what happened in this context during these fifty years and then you can understand how terrible the communist system really is. And it’s not only in the economy. This is in all fields of life—the social structure, cultural standards, education, healthcare, or whatever. When you compare those two countries, which were exactly the same in 1939[,] in 1989, then you will find what communism really means, and how bad it is. Our economy, our nature, and our environment was [sic] destroyed

The use of Finland and Estonia as a natural experiment has also been made by Robert Higgs, in his series of "Experiments in Political Economy" for the Independent Review. His conclusion**:

The conclusion:

their economic and social differences grew so large that no informed person could honestly dispute the pernicious effect that communist rule had on occupied Estonia.

* Laar, Mart. 2006. Exporting Hope: An Interview with Mart Laar. Religion and Liberty: A Journal of
** Higgs,Robert "Results of Still Another Experiment in Political Economy" The Independent Review Volume 12 Number 1 Summer 2007) Religion, Economics, and Culture 16 (fall):3,12–13. p.12

An interview with Oskari Juurikkala

Oskari Juurikkala was born in Finland. He studied Law at London School of Economics, and in 2006-07 was a research fellow at the Institute of Economic Affairs, UK. He is currently working as a legal counsel of Magnus Minerals Ltd, Finland; an analyst at hedge fund Hopeahelmi Investment Ltd, Finland; and editor of Kultainfo.com (www.kultainfo.com). The interview was conducted by email in January 2008.

AJE: Where did you study prior to coming to the LSE?

OJ: I studied economics at the Helsinki School of Economics, Finland

Many non-US/UK countries pride themselves on having somewhat distinct "schools" of economics. To what extent do you think that Finland lends itself to a distinct blend of economic analysis?

That's a really interesting question, Anthony. On the positive side, Finnish people have a reputation for being honest and straightforward (which I think is broadly true), and this is a good grounding for economics. There are some good professors teaching, for example, neo-institutional economics, law and economics, and behavioural economics and finance.

But on the negative side, Finns can be rather too shy to challenge conventional wisdom. That is a challenge in economics, because I think that mainstream econ has major defects hidden under the camouflage of maths and stats. Thus economics teaching here tends to be too standard, too US-style.

As one of the better lights once pointed out, this may not be a wise strategy for Finnish business schools, because if you try to copy top US-schools, you inevitable (given lack of resources) end up being a second-class case with nothing to stand out for. In contrast, by being more original and innovative - multidisciplinary - we could be on the forefront of novel discoveries and breakthroughs in economics, despite our small numbers. The potential is there. This is the normal lesson in business strategy and I think it applies to economic research too.

Given that you have a background in Law, what is it about the discipline of economics that makes you interested in a cross-disciplinary approach?

Economics is a really broad subject. Almost all human phenomena have an 'economic' aspect. It shouldn't be seen as the only aspect (as can happen with people like Gary Becker), but it's always there. When you use economics correctly, it brings clarity and rigor to our analysis of all kinds of social issues.

It does need complements, though, which is why I firmly believe in the importance of a cross-disciplinary approach to economics.

undefined or psychological economics is a great development. I don't mean just people like Kahneman, but also Robert Frank and Bruno Frey, who are writing interesting stuff about economics, morality and human motivation. Their discoveries challenge the very foundations of mainstream microeconomics.

Then I'd like to see more work on philosophy and economics. The Acton Institute (www.acton.org) is doing good work in this direction, but we need more. I mean basic questions about life and man: what is happiness? why do we do things? If money can't buy love, why are we so obsessed about economic growth?

There are some people asking these questions - think about Amartya Sen - but it's not mainstream, and lots of questions are unanswered (I don't think Sen has really gotten to the heart of the matter either). It should be mainstream. Philosophy should be the starting point of thinking about economics, and not some esoteric add-on for the bookworms.

At the Institute of Economic Affairs you were part of the "IEA Empowerment Through Savings Programme". Can you tell us a little about the background to that project, and what your role was?

The idea of the project was firstly to take a comprehensive, global look at pension systems and alternatives. One of the limits most discussion around pension reform is that it tends to be narrowly focused on the specifics of each country. This lends itself to tunnel-vision, where you only examine the obvious problems but fail to think outside the box.

In pensions this is a crucial problems, because old-age security is such a complex issue. It is not just a fiscal issue. It is not just an economic issue. It also relates to tax policy, sociological issues, cultural issues, national history, public choice issues and so on.

So the project wanted to look at the big picture. But secondly it sought a global vision understood in geographic terms. We examined a wide range of countries - UK, US, EU, Chile, Eastern Europe, India, China, Singapore - in order to get a better grasp of (1) the broader alternatives available to countries like the UK, and (2) the challenges facing the different approaches.

I think this was crucial, because you can learn so much by studying different kinds of concrete policies and their outcomes. In economically less developed countries, there is presently a push towards Western-style state pension schemes, but little understanding of the problems that they have created or are creating here.

The project was headed by Nick Silver, who is an actuarial consultant. I was the lead researcher in the project. We also had lots of other contributors of articles and analysis.

In an article [http://www.mercatornet.com/articles/poor_countries_need_freedom_and_children/] you've said that "Overpopulation is a myth, and a silly myth at that". What do you think the main danger of people believing that the world is overpopulated is?

Well, I think there are lots of dangers associated with the overpopulation myth. The main one is cultural. If you believe that the world is getting overpopulated, you will be more inclined to supporting policies that favour small families and even no families. You will more likely behave that way too on a personal level. Of course, having a large family requires lots of sacrifices, and these people need a lot of support. It seems to me that ultimately he overpopulation myth is an excuse for pseudo-feminist and anti-family
ideologies.

(I say 'pseudo-feminist', because feminism is totally contra femininity, opposed to the real dignity of women as women. It wants to measure women on a masculine scale and ends up degrading true
femininity.)

But apart from the cultural side, the overpopulation myth appears to be destructive economically too. Artificial or forced reduction in population size causes challenges economically and socially, as we see is the case with pension systems. It is also bad for economic development, as Julian Simon has persistently argued.

In fact, one of the things we realised in our research, is that families and extended families are the main source of old-age security and social security in economically less developed countries. What's more, it works. There are even theoretical studies by economists showing that families better avoid the typical information and agency problems that pervade both public and private pension and insurance arrangements. Families and other informal types of association are also more flexible and thus capable of reacting to difficult circumstances. True, these people would be even better off if they could combine family-based security with savings and formal pensions. But if you build the latter to the detriment of the family, you are creating problems.

Funnily enough, you often hear these conspiracy theories about how top investment banks and the oil industry are deliberately trying to stop LDCs from developing economically, so they would be easier to control and exploit materially. (You've probably heard this too.)

Earlier I would have brushed it off as Marxist propaganda, but I've been coming to different views now. Even Julian Simon wrote about these things in his classic "The Ultimate Resource" (http://www.juliansimon.com/writings/Ultimate_Resource/). He clearly was no Marxist! I haven't studied the arguments carefully, but I don't rule out the possibility any more.

This takes my thoughts to another topical issue (if you can bare with me). If you look at what's going on right now in financial markets, with the deepening credit and derivatives crisis, you see a total
double standard.

The people who created the mess are trying to hide the truth as long as possible - and they're using our money (including pounds and euros) to bail out the bad guys. I wonder if Bernanke, King and Trichet are
all puppets of much more powerful sources.

That sort of speculation naturally raises the question: Who's running the show? I don't know. But it's not all accidental. Did you read the news about how Goldman Sachs made a fortune with the "subprime
crisis". It was no surprise for them. I think they played too well for it to be just good luck, especially when you consider how deep they were in the same game just a while earlier.

You have two articles available through the Mises Institute [http://www.mises.org/articles.aspx?AuthorId=309]; "Old-age Security Without the State" and "Making Kids Worthless: Social Security's Contribution to the Fertility Crisis, and "Pensions, Fertility and Families"  [http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=1044351] was published in the December 2007 of Economic Affairs. What are the most important lessons about this research?

Some of the ideas are related to what we were just discussing. Namely that the family (and extended family) is and should be the natural, primary source of social and old-age security in a free society. This
doesn't mean that it's the only source, and certainly people should be free to save, invest etc. in order to get other sources of financial security too. But the state should not force them to do much or anything, and it should keep out as far as possible.

That's precisely the argument in "Making Kids Worthless": when you study the facts, it's clear that state-run and tax-financed pension systems have created a big problem, they have undermined families and encouraged low fertility rates. This is well supported by both economic theory and empirical evidence.

What are your plans for the future?

Right now I'm involved in a number of related projects which may give rise to something interesting.

I've started working as analyst for a precious metals fund in Finland, called Hopeahelmi Investment Ltd. We invest in gold, silver and the mining sector, with a view to profiting from the rising prices of precious metals.

A closely related project is Kultainfo.com (http://www.kultainfo.com), which stands for "Gold Info" in Finnish. We launched the site just a moment ago, but it's already becoming the leading information source in Finland on gold, silver and precious metals investing.

Our purpose is to inform people about this market, to share news and analysis. But it's not just about trading, it's about the macro economy, the banks, monetary policy, economic history - everything related to gold and silver, and that covers a whole lot more than many people realise.

In my "spare time" I'm also setting up a small macroeconomic consultancy, called Ansgar Economics
(http://www.ansgar-economics.com). "Ansgar" means "spear of God", although I chose the name because it's the same as Oskar, and Saint Ansgar (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ansgar) is thus my patron saint. Anyway, the idea of Ansgar Economics is to provide "big picture" analysis and training on macroeconomics in our unstable and changing world.
 
thanks!!

Thank you!

The Finnlter is Still Here...

A boring post to say that there are plenty of Finnlter posts to come from me, to add to those by James, but that I'm rather thwarted by a lack of internet access thanks to Virgin Media. Reports to come on Helsinki, La Boheme at the Finnish National Opera, and hopefully Susanna Maalki conducting Messiaen at the Royal Academy of Music.

More soon - nakemiin!

Magic, Finland and the Hare.

The miller had a great gift for imitating the animals of the forest. He would make a game of it, and the youngsters would compete to see who could be the first to guess which animal he was mimicking. One minute he would become a hare, and then the next a lemming or a bear. Sometimes he would flap his long arms like a night owl, or start howling like a wolf, pointing his nose at the sky and letting out such a heart-rending wail that the terrified youngsters would huddle together for comfort.

Arto Paasilinna, The Howling Miller

I think too often we are a little bit squeamish about the magical. We feel too old for it as if our adult minds have moved onto more serious matters; we are quick to dismiss it as childish and not deserving of our attention. Henry Perowne’s objections to magical realism in Ian McEwan’s novel Saturday: “the recourse of an insufficient imagination, a dereliction of duty, a childish evasion of the difficulties and wonders of the real, of the demanding re-enactment of the plausible” are, I think, what a lot of us might actually feel. There is an awkwardness there – another adult has produced these works, well are they quite… Those words Perowne uses: “insufficient”, “dereliction”, “evasion” are all about deficiency. To accept magic in the way that a child might, is to be somehow mentally deficient. Like another of McEwan’s characters, Charles Darke in the novel The Child in Time, we have an image of an adult escaping from the real world to live as a child. It’s just not proper. It’s unseemly.

And the above passage from Finnish novelist Arto Paasilinna’s novel The Howling Miller explores just that. We (and the villagers in the book) are reasonably comfortable with this man’s impressions of animals for children, but when he begins wildly howling in the night, things become another matter. Notice how it is phrased: ‘one minute he would become a hare’. It is the kind of phrasing we use all the time about impressionists, but if we think about it for a moment it is more than metaphor. The miller becomes a hare because he is hare-like, but then, he is acting like a hare.

Consider that most famous of hares, Albrecht Dürer’s watercolour A Young Hare (1502):

When we look at the image above, we say ‘that is a hare’. We might go on to say ‘that is a watercolour of a hare’, or even ‘that is an extraordinary likeness to a hare’, but our primary response is that it is a hare. Of course it isn’t, it is simply a mass of assembled pigments upon paper, but our mind allows it to become a hare for us. We would not even say that the picture is hare-like, for that would do discredit to the magic that Dürer has woven with his brush. In the same way, the miller is not hare-like, his impression is such that he is for a moment a hare.

Consider then, E. M. Cioran:

Let me live the life of every species, wildly and un-self-consciously, let me try out the entire spectrum of nature; let me change gracefully, discreetly, as if it were the most natural procedure. How I would search the nests and caves, wander the deserted mountains and the sea, the hills and the plains. Only a cosmic adventure of this kind, a series of metamorphoses in the plant and animal realms, would reawaken in me the desire to become Man again. If the difference between Man and animal lies in the fact that the animal can only be an animal whereas man can also be not-man – that is, something other than himself – then I am not-man.

E.M. Cioran, from ‘Not to be a Man Anymore’, Pe culmile disperării

I hear uncomfortable shuffling at the back. Wants to live the life of every species? What’s his game? Wants to be not-man? Calls himself a philosopher? We’ve met his type before. Mostly on public transport. It’s not normal, is it?

Well that’s just the point: it is. Or rather, what Cioran is suggesting there is that to understand the state of normal human existence we must first attempt to understand what it is to be states other than that. We must accept the magical in order to really see what our present state is. To truly understand life as a man, we must first understand what it is to live as a hare.

Which rather neatly brings us to Finland, or rather to a very lovely book about Finland, again written by Arto Paasilinna. Interesting, in Cioran’s essay ‘Not to be a Man Anymore’, is the sense of dropping out of everyday life to pursue these existential ends. It’s a wild fantasy we might have, to one day disappear from the modern world and adopt an altogether more primitive means of existence. We probably doubt we will ever do it, but this is exactly the plot of Paasilinna’s novel The Year of the Hare.

One night, Vatanen, a hugely successful journalist and his photographer are driving along a country road back towards Helsinki. The car hits a hare. Vatanen goes after the animal into the woods, and the novel begins.

For all this talk of magic that I have made so far in this post, what is striking about this story (apart from the very last four paragraphs of the book) is that actually none of this is magical at all. It is purely the story (however improbable) of a man who abandons the journey back to his former life – his wife, his job, his boat, his means of living – to look after an injured hare in the woods. It merely seems magical because it is so distant from our everyday points of reference.

Which is rather the point. Vatanen feels lost within the modern world so he drops out of it into the wilderness. Throughout the book there is a struggle, at times an ecological one, but more generally a personal one between the modern urban Finland and the wild, untamed expanses of it:

There was an old meadow, full of wild flowers, and a brook murmuring beyond it. Vatanten put the hare down by the brook, stripped off and took a cold dip. A tight shoal of tiny fish, swimming upstream, took fright at the slightest movement, invariably forgetting their fear the next moment.
Vatanen’s thoughts turned to his wife in Helsinki. He began to feel depressed.

In order to escape his past life, Vatanen must learn to live as a hare; as indeed the hare begins to live as a man. For sections of the book they are both on the run, seeking out food and survival. Things that would seem commonplace to modern, urban man, such as the presence of a raven, suddenly become predators to him – the raven almost starving him by daily ransacking his food store. It is an unsentimental book in some ways, and by no means sets out to suggest that this rustic existence is less stressful than Vatanen’s former life, but it is a gently very funny book too – it’s quite wonderful just how innately amusing the circumstances of walking into a bank, or a hotel, or a restaurant, or a taxi rank and happening to have with you a hare, can be.

It is by its nature magical. It’s unexpected. It’s that sense of phantasmagoria that so obsessed Walter Benjamin; the unexpected collision of two disparate worlds in one moment forming a new kind of poetic truth.

Which is more or less how I came by this book. You see, I’ve been thinking about hares for ages, and yet had it not been being asked to write something on Finnish literature, I am certain that I would never have come by Paasilinna. Suddenly upon finding this book, I realised that a lot of things made sense.

The poet William Cowper kept hares. One of the loveliest essays of the eighteenth century is a piece by him titled ‘Epitaph on a Hare’ published in the Gentleman’s Magazine in June, 1784. It details how he came to care for three such animals: Puss, Tiney, and Bess “notwithstanding the two female appellatives, I must inform you that they were all males”. It is a strange piece of writing. One that I am instantly drawn to, but save for taking it as instructions for the care of domesticated wild animals, not one I can see a way of doing much with. As with Vatanen’s hare, between Cowper and Puss we see a strong bond of understanding develop between the animal and its rescuer:

Puss grew presently familiar, would leap into my lap, raise himself upon his hinder feet, and bite the hair from my temples.  He would suffer me to take him up and to carry him about in my arms, and has more than once fallen asleep upon my knee.  He was ill three days, during which time I nursed him, kept him apart from his fellows that they might not molest him (for, like many, other wild animals, they persecute one of their own species that is sick), and by constant care and trying him with a variety of herbs, restored him to perfect health.  No creature could be more grateful than my patient after his recovery; a sentiment which he most significantly expressed, by licking my hand, first the back of it, then the palm, then every finger separately, then between all the fingers, as if anxious to leave no part of it unsaluted; a ceremony which he never performed but once again upon a similar occasion. Finding him extremely tractable, I made it my custom to carry him always after breakfast into the garden, where he hid himself generally under the leaves of a cucumber vine, sleeping or chewing the cud til evening; in the leaves also of that vine he found a favourite repast.  I had not long habituated him to the taste of liberty, before he began to be impatient for the return of the time when he might enjoy it.  He would invite me to the garden by drumming upon my knee, and by a look of expression, as it was not possible to misinterpret.  If this rhetoric did not immediately succeed, he would take the skirt of my coat between his teeth, and pull at it with all his force.

Cowper had to formulate for himself the diet of the hare suggesting: “Sow-thistle, dent-de-lion, and lettuce”, “white sand […] I suppose as a digestive”, “green corn […] both blade and stalk”, straw, oats and occasionally aromatic herbs. For Cowper, the separation of time makes it quite unsurprising to us that he should know what to feed his hares, but in The Year of the Hare, this act demonstrates the stark separation between modern man and the natural world.

Vatanen takes the animal to the warden of the South Savo Game Preservation Office, in order to find out what hares actually eat. He is told:

‘Feed it early clover. You’ll find a lot of that almost anywhere now. And for drinking, give it pure water; no point in forcing milk on it. Besides clover, fresh grass may do, and barley aftermath… bonnet grass it likes, and meadow vetchling. In fact, it likes all the vetches, and alsike is something it likes too. In the winter you’d best give it cambium of deciduous trees, and deep-frozen bilberry twigs as well, if you’re keeping it in town.’
‘What sort of a plant is meadow vetchling? I don’t know it.’

That he doesn't know what any of these plants are marks a huge chasm in our world; the false means by which man is able to live on a planet sustained by organisms he is generally ignorant about, is, when we really consider it, a rather disturbing truth. We might be unlikely to be placed in a situation in which we need to look after an injured hare, but our ignorance of these matters is on a level startling. It would be easy to dismiss A Year of the Hare as silly nonsense, a child’s story of a man going off to live with an animal. Within the book itself the account of his journey is met by scepticism by a scientist, and the way that the book is written; a series of very short ‘adventures’ tricks us into this false conclusion that this is merely kid’s stuff. Not the kind of thing we should attend to with our serious, sophisticated brains. The ending – an ending that takes flight from the rest of the book and is purely fantastical – is surely proof of that itself. We could easily dismiss this book as “a childish evasion of the difficulties and wonders of the real, of the demanding re-enactment of the plausible”, but really it is our own base ignorance – our lack of understanding of what it is to live as a hare, our caution at not wanting to appear silly or feeble-minded – it is that that keeps us only as children.

The Filter is in Finland!

It's a rainy day in Helsinki today following heavy snow yesterday in Tampere further north. It seems that here, as in many scandinavian metropoles, the weather is either crisp and white or dull and grey. Unfortunately it's the latter today, and most likely tomorrow.

The 'CultureSmart' guide to Finland, by the same author as Teach Yourself Finnish, Terttu Lenny (I think that's right), provided some genuinely fascinating insights into Finnish culture when I read it over Christmas. One of the most interesting aspects was the role of 'silence' in the Finnish pysche. Often, in conversation with Finns in London over the past few months, I've tried to fill silences in the conversation, as one would feel obliged to to avoid embarassment. But the Finns treasure silence, especially in conversation - they often wait ten or fifteen seconds before responding to a question, as if questions should be dignified with considered thought.

Anthony mentioned the conductor Sakari Oramo in his post below, and on the train to Helsinki this morning I was gazing from the window at the snow-covered countryside listening to Oramo's recording of Sibelius's Fourth Symphony (City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra/Erato). The Fourth is Sibelius at his most introspective and eluisive; often said to represent Sibelius 'drawing' rather than 'painting' with his orchestra. It baffled players when it was first performed early in the 20th century - perhaps in part because of its litany of silences and pauses.

The Finns are, indeed, a very friendly bunch. The receptionist at my hotel in Tampere congratulated me on my Finnish this morning; 'you speak Finnish very well' she said in perfect English - but I'd rehearsed by gambit for twenty minutes in front of the bathroom mirror. And when I climbed into an oversize taxi last night, the driver exclaimed, 'ah, an Englishman - I have been wanting to practise my English for some time now', before launching into a journey-long conversation. 

The fine, Finnish work of Osmo Tapio Räihälä

I've previously mentioned "Barlinnie Nine", an opera about Everton legend Duncan Ferguson. Considering our special attention to Finnish culture, I thought it'd be worth a second look. The composer, Osmo Tapio Räihälä, is a known Evertonian and although on first glance cultural purists might  wince at the thought of this being his most well-known work, I urge patience. Although I've not seen the opera - and am in no position to judge it on it's merits as a piece of art music - I completely support the subject matter being presented in this manner. It might not get football fans into opera halls, but it should illuminate the theatre, drama and legitimacy of both popular sport and Duncan Ferguson in particular.

From the program note:

Barlinnie Nine was started in 1998 and finished in late 1999. Räihälä took part in a composers' workshop with the Stavanger Symphony Orchestra in Norway and wrote this 13 minutes long composition for the occasion. After some misinformation by the organizers, the piece was not finished until only after the workshop's programme was chosen and thus the composition remained unperformed. The newly organized first performance was given by the Finnish Radio Symphony Orchestra in April 2005, under the baton of conductor Sakari Oramo.

Barlinnie Nine is a tribute to the Everton striker Duncan Ferguson and Räihälä describes the work as "an apotheosis for under-achieving". Several promising motifs are started but never fulfilled. These include some direct quotations (the Z-Cars theme and Abide With Me) but also "supporter chants" that are written by Räihälä himself.

Notice the dates. As the "apotheosis for under-achieving" premiered Duncan scored the winner against Manchester United, 10 years since he'd done so previously, to which The Telegraph had screamed "That Dixie Melody". The composer muses:

It was like an alcoholic hitting the bottle again… there I was describing Duncan as a failure in Finland, and thousands of miles away at Everton he rises like a phoenix from the ashes to score against Manchester United.

As I said back then:

There can be no doubt that Duncan Ferguson is a unique giant of modern football – an anachronism that modernity can’t control – and a fitting protagonist for an operatic exploit.

Kolme Dokumenttielokuva Suomalainen

That's 'Three Finnish Films'. But strictly speaking, this piece covers two Finnish films and one British film about a Finn. Starting with the latter: Christopher Nupen's two-part portrait of the composer Jean Sibelius at the Barbican in mid-November, titled Jean Sibelius. It seemed strange of Nupen to preface the piece with the recital of a glowing review to bolster his efforts, having just illustrated how Sibelius, now acknowledged as a great composer, was derided by small-minded critics. But still, the film somehow lets you under Sibelius's skin, and is as beautiful a portrait of the Finnish rural landscape as it is of the composer. Perhaps a touch more about the composer's health and financial worries and their role, if any, in his 'great silence' would have been welcome. Performances from the Swedish Radio Orchestra under Vladimir Ashkenazy were gripping, but like the rest of the audio-visual experience, they would doutbless suffer without the surround-sound of a cinema.

To the Ciné Lumière in South Kensington two weeks later for No Man is an Island (Ei kukaan ole saari), Sonja Linden's glimpse into the world of her father Krister. He appears to live alone on an island waiting for death and taking frequent phone calls from his wife - was this a genuine dialogue or an imagined one with a wife long deceased? No matter, the strength of this film is in the subtle magnificence of its subject matter - a man living a primitive, earthbound existence, now enjoying a perhaps reluctant relationship with process, necessity, nature and a cat. A film that throws contemporary existence into a whole world of questioning trouble, and rightly so.

Back to the Ciné Lumière a week after that for The Skiers (Hiiktajat), a short by John Webster focussing on the Veteran soldier-skiers of the 'Winter War', who still meet to compete once a year. (This preceded The Great Communist Bank Robbery that Anthony has reviewed in full on our sister site). Like Nupen's film, the footage of snow-driven Finnish forests is aesthetically and emotionally beautiful, seasoned with equally touching silences (the role of silence in Finnish conversation, music, film and life in general is prominent). And is it possible to make this landscape seem anything but ravishingly attractive? I'll have a look out for some ugly scenes by the Tampere train sheds next week... 

Merry Christmas from The Filter^

---

On behalf of Steve, Andrew, Matthew, James, Thomas and myself - Merry Christmas. Of course Finland is a famous holiday destination this time of year, especially the "Christmas City" of Turku. According to this site:

The Declaration of Christmas Peace has been a tradition in Finland from the Middle Ages every year, except in 1939 due to the war. The declaration takes place on the Old Great Square of Turku, Finland's official Christmas City and former capital, at noon on Christmas Eve. It is broadcast on Finnish radio and television.

Tom of Finland

In 1939, as the Soviet Union invaded Finland, no one could have imagined how this event would fundamentally contribute to the portrayal of the gay man across Europe and America for the rest of the twentieth century. Yet this moment in history, or rather Finland’s subsequent deal made with Nazi Germany in Operation Barbarossa, was to have such an impact on the developing mind of a young commercial illustrator in Helsinki, that it should surely appear (at least as a footnote) in any history of homosexuality written about the last 100 years.

“All my early sexual experiences were with German soldiers,” the artist Touko Laaksonen was to say in 1991, “no one made a uniform like the Germans.” These words obviously carry an awkward resonance, not least for Laaksonen himself; and though it may seem at first a somewhat flippant argument, a reductive view of the true horrors of Nazi atrocities across Europe, what Laaksonen states there is a firebrand moment, something that was to massively shape the way in which we view gay men today.

We should start with a little about Laaksonen and why he matters to you, whatever your sexuality, whether you have heard of him or not.

No matter how you look at it, Touko Laaksonen is not a household name. Yet the importance of this Finnish illustrator can not be underestimated: “if one had to list the dozen or so most influential gay male visual artists of the last three decades,” Thomas Waugh wrote in Out/Lines, his 2002 history of gay graphical art, “one would have to include him among the likes of General Idea, Gilbert and George, Keith Haring, David Hockney, Robert Mapplethorpe, Pierre and Gilles, Andy Warhol and Bruce Weber.” And yet, as I’ve already suggested, it is quite possible that you have not heard of Laaksonen at all. This is partly because for the main part of his career, Laaksonen published his pictures under the rather grand nom de plume, ‘Tom of Finland’, and in certain houses, that is a household name. Yet whilst we have almost certainly heard of Hockney, no matter what our sexuality is, it is the nature of Laaksonen’s art that means he has not reached widespread appeal.

Laaksonen, to put it bluntly, is Finland’s most famous pornographer. His illustrations – mostly monochrome, linear drawings (though early and later work makes use of pastel to a greater extent) – depict men of astonishing physical proportions engaged in extremely graphic sexual acts. It is probably fair to say that whereas with Hockney one might seek out his art on purely aesthetic grounds, with Laaksonen, there is usually a need to be drawn to the subject-matter of his work before you know of his existence. Whilst Hockney might creep a swimming pool scene into the quiet clip-frames of ‘cultured’ heterosexual suburbia – a curled up sausage-dog, even perhaps a daring, innocent male nude hanging on the bathroom wall – it is probably fair to say that there are disappointingly few heterosexual people with a Laaksonen print hanging above their fireplaces. One might even wish to argue that what I am writing about here is not even ‘art’ at all. Yet this distinction between Hockney and Laaksonen, to which we might apply those bulky, broadly useless terms: “high” and “low” art, does perhaps explain something of why Laaksonen has had so much influence.

His work was produced at a time before the decriminalization both of hardcore pornography and homosexuality (it was to remain illegal in Finland until 1971, classed as a mental illness until 1981, and illegal to ‘promote’ homosexuality until 1999). Laaksonen’s pictures first appeared in the American ‘physique’ magazines of the 1950s. Between the photographs of oiled bodybuilders in semi-modest posing pouches, (in order – you must understand – to present what might be achieved from lifting weights and wholesome living), these magazines printed suggestive illustrations of ‘all-male’ men. Parallels can be drawn between this work and the genre of heterosexual ‘Cheesecake’ art or GGA in America of the same period. They are outwardly ‘innocent’ images, merely representations of the male, muscular physique; yet they tread that curious line between the everyday innocence demanded by censorship and the total depravity that might occur should a woman’s step onto a bus be cut short by a sudden gust of wind beneath her skirts. The art of both plays upon the idea that sex is always lurking beneath the surface of daily life; the most mundane occupation is always waiting to be subverted into sexually charged possibility. It is the denial that censorship creates that makes this art powerful. The forbidden representation often becomes the subject for the work itself, playing with situations where sex should be inappropriate for the very reason that censorship demands that all sex in art is inappropriate.

Beneath the surface publication of Laaksonen’s drawings of muscular lumberjacks submitted to Physique Pictorial, he was also producing hardcore underground storybooks. It is these that must be considered to have had the greatest impact on gay culture. For years before the decriminalization of homosexuality, pornography such as this was one of few representations of gay life available – certainly one of few that presented the homosexual man in a positive light. Of course, Laaksonen was not the only artist of this nature at work during this period, but by 1960 he had become the main illustrator for Physique Pictorial, and in part because he was the most visible of the underground artists, it is his art that has best endured.

Though heavily based in fantasy, for many years it was only this underground pornography that offered a real sense of what it was to be gay. The main function of the storybooks is clearly to titillate, but because of this peculiar position, it should not be underestimated quite what a formative role these images were to have on the attitudes of the men who read them. Films, art, novels – a role that all art plays which is perhaps not always immediately acknowledged, is the means it has to develop the personalities of its consumers. In 1959 a man might watch Cary Grant at his local picturehouse and acquire from his performance the mannerisms of a suave and stylish lover. He might do so on a conscious level; practicing at home before the mirror the deft ease of removing a matchbook from his pocket, or he might merely repeat a line from the film without thinking one evening at a dance. He might simply begin to carry himself in the same way that his film idol does. This kind of emulation occurs all of the time, and of course we might turn to Cary Grant no matter what our sexuality. It is no doubt a survival instinct – we seek to acquire the skills of others around us that we perceive to be useful to us. As a gay man in 1960s America then, the sources for emulation specific to your sexuality might be restricted to underground pornography. To state the case far too simply: Tom of Finland taught a generation of homosexual men how to be gay.

Urgh. There… I’ve said it. Of course that’s not true. It’s far more complicated than that, but as a crass oversimplification it might convey something of the influence that this single man had on the ‘gay aesthetic’ of the twentieth century. His contribution was fundamental, both in the way that gay men saw themselves, and in how heterosexual people saw them. One does not have to be aware of Laaksonen to have been influenced by him. Without his artwork so many cultural stereotypes that you do know would not now exist. I would argue that if it were not for Laaksonen, we would not have had The Village People; cartoons in the Daily Mail would not use the moustachioed, leather-hatted figure as a shorthand with which to peddle homophobia; so many jokes, so much comedy would probably not exist; but most importantly if it were not for Laaksonen it would no doubt be a far less life-affirming experience to be open about your sexuality in the modern world.

And in turn, a lot of this might be traced back to the Soviet Union’s invasion of Finland in 1939. We need at this juncture to be open and frank about what we mean by fetishism. To put things plainly, I would say that what I mean in this instance is the extension, or redirection, of sexual desire into inanimate objects (or facets) not necessarily directly connected with sex. For Laaksonen, his fetish was uniforms; in particular it was leather boots. It does not take a great deal of enquiry or cod-psychology to understand why this might have been the case. Laaksonen was the son of school teachers; respectable middle-class figures. He grew up in a society where expression of his sexual desires could result in two years imprisonment and as a result there is a certain level of repression through his formative years. The positive images of masculinity – the thing that he was naturally drawn to – came in the form of the woodsmen and labourers that he saw growing up, who he began drawing at the age of ten. These men could not have been more different from the figures of either himself or his father, and the thing that united them was the footwear of their labour. Aged ten, he begged his parents to buy him a pair of these boots, the connection already made between these objects and the men who he admired. He secretly wore the boots to bed until one night he was caught by his mother. Only a country like Finland could have produced this man; it was the stark dichotomy between his respectable home life and the proximity to the wildness of the forester that no doubt so shaped his image of the world. He was both close to these men who worked near his home, and yet in terms of who he was, could not be further removed for them.

The arrival of German troops in Finland was to crystallize his attraction to leather boots and also result in his fetishisation of uniforms. In 1939, aged 19 Laaksonen was living away from home for the first time, studying art in Helsinki. The arrival of these new men coincided with his first homosexual encounters. We might notice in ourselves certain recurring facets in the people we are attracted to that develop from our first sexual experiences. Teenage crushes might continue to be pursued in developing forms throughout our adult life. For Laaksonen, the first men he was to have sex with were all in Nazi uniform.

There is understandably much unease about this fact amongst admirers of Laaksonen’s work. Many of his early works feature men in Nazi uniform and in later life he was at pains to distance himself from these images, of which very few still survive. Yet the danger is that we try to deny the influence that the Nazi uniform had upon his aesthetic sense. The German presence in Finland in the 1940s must to an extent have seemed to be a salvation from the Soviet Union, though by no means an easy alliance. Germany acted as the country’s rescuer and this is undeniably a theme that runs through much of Laaksonen’s stories. Yet the moral dimension of Nazism is not what his art fetishises at all; it is merely the material culture of it. Obviously the two cannot be wholly seperated, and so it is understandable that he adapted his reference points to be directed at a more general image of the uniform. Despite this, almost all of his imagery may be traced back to the same genesis; the peaked caps, the highly polished black leather belts, the epaulettes and jodhpurs worn by so many of his characters, might all be considered to be merely adaptations of the uniform of the Wehrmacht.

The form in which this aesthetic most confidently settled was in the character of Kake who appeared in a series of twenty-six storybooks from 1968 onwards. Kake, “a sort of Johnny Appleseed” figure as Dian Hanson describes him in the introduction to the Taschen collection of Laaksonen’s work, developed various aspects of the uniform fetish in the form of a leather biker. The look that was styled perhaps most obviously on Marlon Brando in the film The Wild One, was an already existing image that had been adopted by many demobbed servicemen after the second world war. It resounds with various aspects of military style, and yet ventures also a freedom, a dangerous lawlessness that was found outside of army life. Though other artists occasionally toyed with this image, it was Laaksonen who most resolutely claimed the leather biker as a gay icon, finding that it chimed with the rebellion of expressing homosexuality as well as offering a homocentric cultural group.

Kake’s first appearance in a story titled ‘The Intruder’ is an interesting example of this lawlessness. The opening frame depicts Kake dressed all in leather, spying on a young man changing in his bedroom. In the next scene once the man is in bed masturbating beneath the covers to a heterosexual porn magazine, Kake breaks into the room through the open window. The following frames depict Kake subjecting the somewhat reluctant straight man to a series of sexual acts, which only finally he begins to enjoy. Our hero here is presumably the eponymous Kake, and clearly the morality of what is essentially a rape is a rather dark one. The straight man is apparently ‘liberated’ from his mistaken ways with the magazine (now conspicuously discarded on the bedroom floor) and finally returns Kake’s passionate kiss affirming his repressed homosexual desire. Yet the act is not without consequence; the man’s father enters the room surprising the couple four scenes from the end; Kake attempts to flee, but halfway out of the window the father closes the window on him with his legs still inside the room. In the final scene the father proceeds to sodomise the trapped intruder, in front of his delighted, masturbating son.

On its basest level it conveys the same message of almost all of Laaksonen’s stories, his fantasy that deep-down all men are homosexual, even that most taboo of possibilities, a man’s father; at the same time it stands as a near-direct parallel for Finland’s invasion by the Soviet Union and its subsequent rescue by the ‘Fatherland’; but most importantly it depicts a savage political satire on the repression of homosexual men. ‘The Intruder’ appeared the year before the Stonewall riots, and the image of Kake is firmly based in that spirit of rebellion, redressing the image of the homosexual as the underdog. Laaksonen’s early work depicts much more effeminate figures, but Kake’s strength is his sexuality. In part, ‘The Intruder’ satirises the corruption of those who wished to repress gay men; we might be uneasy with Kake’s forced advances on the son, but the father’s response is an equal act (added to which is the implication of incest which serves to undermine the received image of the family unit as a secure moral foundation), but the story does not seek to rest blame on any party. Actually what all of Laaksonen’s stories promote is the sense of equality, everyone ends up enjoying the sex in his pictures and no figure ultimately dominates. In the 1984 storybook ‘Postal Rape’ we find a jack-booted and jodhpured Kake now clearly much older and sporting a moustache – a look very like that of Freddie Mercury whose image owed a great debt to Laaksonen’s drawings. It is also a rather sweet aspect of the Kake stories that the character ages alongside his original readers. In ‘Postal Rape’ Kake punishes his postman for creasing a piece of mail. There is a joke, of course, on the envelope’s legend: DO NOT BEND, and the story develops as a series of consequences to this one erring act. Yet the outcome is that retaliation only breeds further reprisals, and that as such, sex is not about the dominance of one person over another, as such roles break down until everyone is doing something to someone else.

There are clear precedents in this kind of storytelling in the sexual comedies of the eighteenth century, in the novels of Fielding, Cleland and Defoe; but whereas those works served to portray a certain liberation in the role of women, Laaksonen’s storybooks defined the emerging image of the newly-legal gay man. There are many chickens and many eggs in all of this; how much did this underground pornography serve to represent the already existing promiscuous gay and leather subculture, and how much did it act in the invention of it?

What is clear however, is that Laaksonen’s art is an important representation of gay men that contributed to the changing attitudes to homosexuality in the twentieth century. Even amongst other underground pornography from the 1950s and 60s there is a tendency to present the homosexual as somehow less-than-male. The aesthetic conventions served to feminise the gay man, often presenting him as a ‘fairy’ or a ‘queen’. Laaksonen responded by focusing on the facets that defined masculinity, exaggerating them, and elevating the figure of the gay man to heroic proportions. The message of this, to the many men who furtively turned to his artwork, was that homosexuality was not a deficiency but something that could be hypermasculine, something even enviable.

Since his death in 1991 his work has been represented by the Tom of Finland Foundation, which seeks to promote the cultural merits of erotic art and healthier, more tolerant attitudes about sexuality.

Poor Soul, poor Girl!

Poor Soul, poor Girl!

(A Debutante)

I cannot imagine anything nicer
Than to be struck by lightning and killed suddenly crossing a field
As if somebody cared.
Nobody cares whether I am alive or dead.

The above poem, ‘Poor Soul, poor Girl!’ by the English poet Stevie Smith, imagines the voice of a young woman confronting mortality and her place in the world. It is a short poem. It is somewhat absurd (such nihilistic thoughts placed in the mind of a young girl – more than that, a debutante; a girl on the brink of all that the world has to offer, a figure that represents youthfulness and life itself, wishing to be struck down dead in an instant, imagining that such an act would prove compassion, or interest, or something – well if nothing else, it’s somewhat unexpected). It is nonetheless poignant. It is sad. It is also an awkward poem, strangely informal; the metre of the long second line, followed by the short third, and the colloquial term ‘nicer’, all contribute in producing a sense of the girl’s innocence of speech. Her thoughts are there: ‘Nobody cares’ – these are the somewhat trite sentiments of a girl not yet fully developed in the psychology of adulthood, and yet contemplating the matter of her ‘soul’ as each of us surely must at one time or another.

It is a poem that comes to mind as I read the work of Edith Södergran – a figure who in turn wrestled with mortality at a surprisingly young age – and mentioning Smith here at all, is merely a means of getting around to some poetry from Finland, by way of Hull.

Södergran was born in St Petersburg in 1892. Her early years were spent between schooling in Russia and holidaying in Raivola, Finland, where the family relocated permanently after the death of her father from tuberculosis. The shadow of this disease, which Edith herself was diagnosed with as a teenager, hung heavily upon her working life. All of the five volumes of poetry published in her lifetime, were written in just the four years before her death, as she fought against her declining health. Her work, often ambiguous, always wrestling with the difficult questions is surprising stuff; and for the apparent similarities between her and the figure in Smith’s poem, there is so much more in Södergran. Her poems are short, and often somewhat frightening constructions. A good translation comes from Gounil Brown’s collection of her poems (Zena, 1990). Here, the poem ‘I saw a Tree’ gives an interesting insight into the young woman confronting the apparent injustice of the world:

I saw a tree that was taller than any
        others
and full of unattainable cones;
I saw a great church with open doors
and all who came out were pale and strong
and ready to die;
I saw a woman who smiling held the dice
and threw it once for happiness,
and saw that she lost –

Around these things was drawn a circle
that no creature shall cross.

As with Smith’s poem, it is the economy of expression here that is most moving; the final line, ‘that no creature shall cross’ is so binding. We are told that this is the way of the world; health, happiness – these things are not guaranteed and may be lost with the roll of dice – and yet despite its pathos, the poem does not rail against the injustice as Smith’s debutante might, it is coldly accepting. The figures leaving the church are ‘pale and strong / and ready to die’; it is a haunting image, the juxtaposition of the words ‘pale and strong’ place the figures already in the midst of death and yet held up by what we presume to be faith.

What Södergran’s poetry confronts is the uneasy inevitability of death, written by a woman painfully aware from her teenage years of her shortening days; and as a result there is only ever acceptance, as here in the poem ‘The Moon’:

How strangely wonderful are all things dead
and calmly silent:
a dead leaf and a dead person
and the moon’s disc –
[…]
that the moon’s course around the earth is
        the path of death –
and the moon weaves her magical web that
        flowers cherish
and the moon spins her fairy net around
        all that lives –  […]

With time comes death, and Södergran’s poetry serves to remind us that living is the course of dying. On midsummer’s day in 1923, in the Finnish town of Raivola, Södergran succumbed to her illness and died aged 31. She has fared well since then, her writing translated into all of the world’s major languages and is she is often held up as the premier female Scandinavian modernist poet.

Hodgson's Finnish-ed

Englishman Roy Hodgson has resigned as head coach of Finland. He's had an eclectic career that's seen him coach in Denmark, England, Italy, Norway, Switzerland, Sweden, and the United Arab Emirates - but his failure at Blackburn (despite taking them into the UEFA cup in his first season) severely damaged his reputation at home. Finland didn't have a bad Euro 2008 qualification, losing out to Portugal and Poland in Group A. They beat Belgium 2-0 at home, and had a fantastic 3-1 win in Poland. Former Liverpool striker Jari Litmanen scored twice in that game, he still has a mullet.

The Cream of Finland in England

The Filter will touch down in Tampere on 10 January en-route to Helsinki as part of Finland Filtered. But this week, the Tampere Philharmonic Orchestra is in England. It gave a remarkable performance of music by the great Finnish symphonist Jean Sibelius in London on Wednesday night, in this, the 50th year since both Sibelius's death and Finland's attainment of independence. Click here to read the review. 

One astounding aspect of Finnish cultural life is that the country produces a staggering number of talented musicians per-capita. The population of Finland is five million (two million less than London), and yet British, American and European orchestras are regularly conducted by Finnish conductors - Berglund, Mälkki, Oramo, Salonen, Saraste, Segerstam, Vänskä to name but a few active in Great Britain alone.

The latter, Osmo Vänskä, is Chief Conductor of the Lahti Symphony Orchestra in Finland and Music Director of the Minnesota Orchestra in the USA; a fine Finnish musician. He also conducts the London Philharmonic Orchestra, my current employer, tomorrow at the Royal Festival Hall: Leonidas Kavakos plays the Nielsen concerto, and there's Bax and Rachmaninov on offer too. Call 00871 663 2583 for tickets.  

Finland Filtered^

Finland, Finland, Finland. Over the next fortnight The Filter^ is going to look ahead to 2008 with a series of posts looking at all things Finnish. You've been warned.