Two Points Make a Line
Helsinki Dérive, Part Eight
Wednesday. We fly back tomorrow morning. I started feeling quite worn down last night, was overheated and achy throughout the night, lots of water and 400mg of Ibuprofen has me functional on our last day in Helsinki.
On one hand, I feel that I’ve completed a dérive cycle with the previous seven installments; on the other hand, I’m still drifting, especially in this strange state of “I’m probably ill, but damned if I admit it… pass me the Tylenol, honey?” Once upon a time I used to fly a lot of red eyes between Oregon and Texas, and I’d stumbled on a “cocktail” of ibuprofen and bourbon to knock me out for the flight. Probably quite awful for your body, but I’m sorely tempted to revive that in the air tomorrow.
On our previous visit to Helsinki, we visited the Laterna Magica bookstore and gallery the day before we headed back. Nancy signed up for a collage workshop then, probably a unique experience (for an American) of cutting and pasting amongst a group of Finns. I had a fantastic chat with Tapio, one of the owners, who regaled us with tales of Dead Moon (yes, the odds of hearing about Portland’s punk legends in Helsinki are greater than zero) as well as other rock and metal figures. We found out after we left that the gentleman was the original vocalist of Finntroll, a band that Nancy turned me onto (“Hey, it’s a metal band that’s inspired by traditional Finnish Humppa—they should like fun!”).
Twice in a row doesn’t make for a tradition, but two points make a line, and we returned to Laterna Magica to peruse their walls of books and to appreciate the gallery exhibition. Eira and Tapio purchased an existing bookstore nine years ago (“Before the war, before the pandemic,” Eira ruefully recollects) and started turning it into an art space, poster shop, collage workshop, and a music venue. Tapio, Finntrollpappa, designs the posters for the gallery exhibits when he’s not working the technical stuff at the local children’s theater.
While Nancy scans the vintage (and some antique) periodicals and ephemera, I discover a copy of the Isten heavy metal fanzine omnibus: 800+ pages and 3 kilograms of Finnish metal devotion that Svart Records released in 2014. To say that it’s out of print is an understatement; a casual Google search shows that I’ve found a true relic of the genre. At 6.6 lbs and at 50 Euros, it’s not the kind of literal lodestone I care to carry back, but I spend a good part of our shop visit flipping through its pages in the military history nook (I look up and see a biography of Michael Wittmann under the Jane’s aircraft directory of 1969).
According to the book, the “final” issue of Isten existed in only 500 physical copies, so it’s tempting to view that publication as a true “insider” publication. The first three issues were in Finnish, but the roster of headbangers from the mid-80’s transcends language. Before the fracturing into the current scattershot of sub-genres, back then “heavy metal” was a solid, alloyed slab, and you can start to see the cracks develop into black, death, etc. as the issues progress, with bands that even a normie like myself recognizes (it feels odd to see articles and interviews with Entombed whose singer, L.G. Petrov, recently passed away; the Reaper comes for all, but in these pages they remain immortal).
I mention to Eira about my JP Ahonen/Belzebubs encounter, and we trade tales of our respective hard rock and heavy metal escapades—my encounter with Bruce Dickinson of Iron Maiden at a fencing tournament in Port Arthur, Texas, her hosting Bruce when he was in town to promote his autobiography. She’s decorated a few plastic sculptures in the music section with genre-appropriate corpse paint. Black metal is something that sits far in both of our rear view mirrors, but we can still chuckle at the tropes while expressing dismay at the Norwegian arsonists.
Nancy, Eira, and I commiserate as we bid farewell: our apprehension as to whether we can continue traveling abroad, her story of her friend from Costa Rica who fears the ICE in New York City. Apparently Tampere is a lovely city to live in, and the prospects for an AI-obsessed cloud engineer are probably better than your average migrant. Relocating to Finland? I might as well be flying to the moon, but I’m reminded of John F Kennedy who vowed to go into space, not because it’s easy, but because it is hard. “We’ll be back,” is our benediction as we leave the store, intended less as a promise and more like an aspiration.