Gnarr (3 page)

I realized at a young age that I wasn’t cut out for everyday life at school. I still had the impression I was learning lots of useful things in the classroom because it helped me get a handle on everything I overheard
on TV or read in books, but what the teachers taught us was rarely what really mattered. This insight grew with each passing year, and when I was eleven I just refused to go on learning school stuff. I’d had enough of the one-sided pedagogy and the soulless knowledge that school wanted to impose on me.

For example, I refused point-blank to learn Danish. I could see no practical use for this language. I would much rather have learned English, but unfortunately that wasn’t taught. Or why not Norwegian? I had a sister in Norway, I could visit her and at least make myself understood.

Mathematics was another subject I wasn’t all that good at. I knew that I’d never be brilliant at it, and I found it more reasonable to concentrate on what I was good at, rather than slogging my guts out to no purpose. Also, I’ve always been allergic to repetition. If I ever have to repeat the same thing over and over, I get so panicky and anxious that I can hardly breathe. That’s also why I’ve not appeared onstage as an actor much. After the endless rehearsals, the play hangs round my neck like an albatross and I can barely force myself to play the role on stage. Even for the premiere I have to make a real effort.

So I announced at home that I wasn’t doing any more schoolwork. Instead, I’d watch TV or read. This led to lengthy discussions between me, my mother, the teachers, and the headmaster.

“If you don’t learn anything, you’ll be a nobody.
What are you going to be when you grow up? A garbage man, perhaps?” they said.

The idea was certainly tempting. Garbage men were the pirates of the modern era. They came at dawn, casually jumping onto the backs of their garbage trucks. They were free and independent. Whistling and cheerfully yelling out to one another, they swooped down on the trashcans and then, just as suddenly as they had appeared, vanished. For me, the garbage men were like heroes, and I looked up to them with admiration.

My father was a political man through and through. Politics always played a central role in our home. When visitors came, the conversation was mainly about politics. When there was something about politics on the radio or television, the volume was immediately turned up. I tried to understand what was going on, but found such issues extremely boring.

In our home, the political world was divided into two parts: Left and Right. Mom didn’t have a great deal to do with politics. She voted for Sjálfstæðisflokkurinn, the Independence Party, the largest and oldest right-wing party in Iceland, but she refused to discuss it or to talk about politics at all. Dad, as I mentioned, was a Communist. He had been a member of the Communist Party of Iceland when it still existed, and his political orientation put its stamp on every aspect of our family life. Dad was a reliable, punctual, and efficient police officer in Reykjavík, but self-confessed Communists had very limited opportunities for advancement in the police force. That’s why he remained a mere traffic cop throughout his life, while his colleagues worked their ways up the career ladder step-by-step.

He thought highly of the Soviet Union, was a
member of the Icelandic and Soviet Russian Cultural Association, and subscribed to a magazine called
Soviet News
. Whenever there were personnel changes in the Politburo of the Soviet Union, Dad was sent a framed photo of the new arrival to display at home. I remember how he passed on to Mom and me all of Brezhnev’s announcements. The only time of day we all met was the evening meal. When Brezhnev had said something worth noting, Dad took this opportunity to tell us about it. Neither Mom nor I were particularly gagging to find out what Brezhnev had said or done, but we kept quiet and nodded, looking interested.

Brezhnev was hanging on the wall in our pantry—on a photo, under glass. He looked grim, wore a kind of uniform, and was bedecked with all sorts of decorations and medals. In 1982, Yuri Andropov took over the office of Secretary General, and Dad got a photo of him too. Andropov did not look all that different from Brezhnev, except that he had fewer medals on his chest. Dad, proud and happy, wandered round the apartment with the photo and wanted to hang it up somewhere straightaway. But Mom wouldn’t hear of it. Dad continued to search for a suitable place, but Mom was adamant. Andropov wouldn’t have suited either our living room or the kitchen or the TV room, and so he ended up in the pantry next to his predecessor.

Mom and Dad subscribed to two daily newspapers: the right-wing
Morgunblaðið
and the left-liberal
Þjóðviljinn
. The pages of these newspapers accurately reflected the Cold War, as both of them commented
on the day’s events from their particular perspective. The political leaders were either gods or the spawn of the Devil.

I myself subscribed to two magazines,
Donald Duck
and
Youth
, an Icelandic Christian magazine for children and teenagers, but both appeared only once a month. I studied each issue with great care, from beginning to end, hoping to come across something interesting. And if I already knew the current issue of
Donald Duck
by heart, I also grabbed the
Soviet News
—just to provide myself with reading material—which then kept me up to speed on those wonderful brand-new tractors that had been delivered to some Soviet farm.

Thanks to Dad, the newspapers, and the constant discussions broadcast on radio and television, I developed an aversion to politics. Politics was dumb, irritating, and boring. And unfair, too: just because the United States and the Soviet Union couldn’t agree, we all lived on a powder keg. The Soviets had their nuclear missiles aimed at America, and American missiles were aimed at the Soviet Union. It was only a matter of time before nuclear war broke out. In principle, it could happen at any moment. The consequences for the world would be devastating and would wipe out all human life on Earth forever. In my youthful innocence I often thought that the world would definitely be more peaceful and beautiful if people would just leave politics alone. If they’d just drop all the political drivel and talk about other issues, such as pirates, food, or garbage men.

I was thirteen when I discovered punk. At that time it was quite difficult in Iceland to find out anything about punk. All we had was a single legal radio station that was limited to Icelandic choral and classical music. Often the pieces and their interpreters were not even identified, there was just a quick standard intro saying, “And now for a few cheerful bars from our record library.” Punk rarely, if ever, cropped up in the Icelandic media, and the music on offer was so limited that we mainly consumed it in the form of cassettes that we listened to over and over again. In the library there was
Melody Maker
—the weekly British music newspaper—and in the bookstores the German teen magazine
Bravo
.

I have no idea why
Bravo
was sold here, but I could always find articles about punk in it. Because I didn’t know any German, I had to rely on the pictures. Once I managed to get my hands on an issue with a poster of Nina Hagen, the German punk singer. I pinned the poster up on the wall of my room straightaway. Nina Hagen was my first great love: I had a hopeless crush on her. Until I heard her sing for the first time. What a disappointment! Either she mumbled in German, or suddenly started caterwauling an opera number.
Punk and opera just didn’t go together, in my view. Also, I couldn’t understand her lyrics at all. The only thing I seemed to gather from listening was that she wanted to go to Africa. And what was punk about that? Were there even any punks in Africa? Wouldn’t she have done much better in England?

It was the Sex Pistols who brought me close to punk. This mainly had to do with the fact that Johnny Rotten was a redhead just like me. I wanted to resemble him in every way. This went so far that I for a time gave myself the stage name “Jónsi Rotten,” scribbled it in all my textbooks, and daubed the walls of houses with it.

Then I came across Crass, the British punk band that promoted anarchism, and everything else was overshadowed. What this band had to say was simply true, good, and right. This was the birth of my political convictions; they advocated direct action, animal rights, and environmentalism. From then on I collected all the material and information about anarchism I could get my hands on, often thanks to older friends.

In the following years I was a regular at the district library, where I made extended forays to track down everything that was related in any way to anarchism. Among other things, I dug out a few political science textbooks, in which there was shockingly little about anarchism. Nevertheless, I wrote out all the names that were mentioned in this context: Proudhon, Kropotkin, Bakunin, Malatesta, and all the rest of them. I recorded
it all conscientiously. The specialized works on the topic were almost all in English and thus went over my head, as my language skills were only just sufficient enough to translate punk lyrics. Though
Anarchism
—
Practice and Theory
remained a closed book to me, at least I was able to locate an article here or there on Bakunin or Proudhon. The only book in Icelandic was a biography of Kropotkin, the author of
The Conquest of Bread
and a central anarchist thinker, a thick tome that I dragged home and plowed through from beginning to end. To my great disappointment, anarchism was barely even mentioned.

But I still had Crass. By this time I had also accumulated a remarkable archive of newspaper clippings, photocopies, and handwritten notes on which I kept what others had told me. One day I came across the magazine
Black Flag
, a British anarchist journal, which I used not only to improve my English, but also to establish contact by mail with anarchists abroad.

The more I learned about anarchism, the greater my certainty that I was an anarchist myself, and had always been one. Anarchy was and is for me the only way to a classless society, a mutually supportive society that respects the freedom of the individual and in which everyone can live his life freely and without external control, so long as he or she does not impinge on the freedom of others.

There was only one thing about anarchist ideology that I couldn’t subscribe to at all, and that was
violence. As a child, I myself suffered from domestic violence for years, in the form of psychological abuse from my father, and I would never agree to inflict it on others. Violence was and is the dark side of human coexistence. Anarchy and peace, that’s what I longed for. This conviction led me to the teachings of Gandhi, and from Gandhi to Tolstoy and his Christian anarchy. Then followed a short detour through Max Stirner and his individualist anarchism, but in the long run I couldn’t identify with it. The Christian anarchists were ultimately only a detour as well, since so far, despite repeated sincere attempts, I haven’t managed to believe in a God.

Anarchism and surrealism are for me two sides of the same coin. I’ve read loads of stuff about these topics over the years and also had some personal experience of them, and both have shaped me and my perspective on life and our world decisively. In art, too, surrealism and absurdism have always fascinated me—in painting, film, and comedy. Surrealism, just like anarchism, means believing unconditionally in your dreams.

There are countless species and varieties of anarchism. Anarcho-syndicalism and anarcho-feminism in particular have left a powerful imprint on me. But there’s a lot of truth in surrealism. We humans tend to want to explain, classify, and define everything. This is one of the benefits of our highly developed brains and is often used to divide the world into halves: wheat and chaff, right and wrong, black and white, positive and
negative, beginning and end. Logical, binary thinking. For most people, reality is a fact. For the Surrealists, it’s a dream.

As I said: An anarchist is someone who criticizes society from the comfort of his armchair. That’s not entirely wrong. Anyway, eventually the rebellious anarchist Jón started a family, got himself a job, and rented an apartment. I hadn’t graduated from school and so had only limited opportunities for work. Eventually, I began to try out comedy and acting, gradually got into the business, and eventually made it my profession.

As a small boy I wanted to be a circus clown. I dreamed of joining a circus troupe abroad and traveling the world. My parents and teachers were less enthusiastic about such ideas. In their view, having fun was something you kept to a minimum, not made a career out of. Comedy was at best the icing on the cake, but never the main thing in life.

My teacher said, “Jón, with all this silliness you’ll never amount to anything.” Since then, I’ve probably proved the contrary.

Without a robust sense of humor, I’d probably be in an asylum right now. Right from the start I had an insatiable appetite for any kind of comedy—on records, in television shows, and in films. In comedy I saw an opportunity, a future that no one else seemed to have noticed. I was crazy about
Fawlty Towers
and
Monty Python
, and saw every comedy I could catch at the cinema. When I was eight, I made my first joke. At school events, I was always the center of attention and seized on every opportunity to fool around. I loved puns, malapropisms, and corny witticisms. I ascertained very early on that I could go into a regular trance and really take off into flights of fancy. I was frequently told off
for this by adults. It was as if they found this kind of thing unpleasant. Is happiness something embarrassing, something we should be ashamed of? Anyway, I was always being told to stop fooling around.

As I got older, I realized that if I was going to get into comedy, I first had to be an actor. But to get to drama school, I was reminded by my teachers, I’d need to graduate from high school. And as I thought it unlikely that I’d ever have enough staying power to get as far as my high school diploma, this dream too burst like a bubble. The alternatives looked depressing: I’d struggle through life on poorly paid jobs and do the Sideshow Bob bit at weekend parties. And so it proved. When I was eighteen, at one such party I met a guy in the same situation. He was gifted, imaginative, and original, he had impressive artistic abilities, but at school he stuck out like a sore thumb. His name was Sigurjón Kjartansson. Sigurjón was a founding member of the group HAM, with Óttarr Proppé (who was later elected to the city council, standing for the Best Party) and Sigurður Björn Blöndal (now my assistant and policy adviser).