kiss

SOME THINGS ARE ALMOST SPECTRAL. You don’t see the full embodiment of reality, it’s sort of hazy, silhouettes, even auras, I’d dare say. What I can report back is that we were en route to the north coast via Tartu, the second largest city of Estonia, situated in the southeast central of the country, and hub of rail and bus links. Within the bus station, which had taken on an almost Turkish bazaar kind of atmosphere, with spice markets, et cetera, one of my companions, which might have been my older brother, climbed to the second floor of the building, which opened up on an inner atrium and leapt backwards with his arms outstretched into the blue air. This terrified me, but he landed softly on a couch, laughing to himself, as if nothing was amiss and it would all turn out like that. The people around us might as well have been made out of neon or electricity. There was a brisk trade in turmeric, ginger, and garlic.

Then, whoosh, I woke up.

It was clearly morning now, and along the inside of my bedframe, I realized there was a young woman lying opposite me, face to face with me. She had very thick dark hair and white loose pajamas, she had distinct features, that were not too feminine, but somehow even more attractive because they didn’t align with the norm. Her gray eyes opened, milky blue green gray in the light. Mornings are already light at eight now, maybe even at seven. I felt a kind of euphoria and agony entwined and realized, she was stroking me down there. “Shh,” she said. “Shh. Shh. Shh.” That was all she said. “I see you,” she said. “I see you, I see you, I see.” After that we kissed. It was loving, long, lingering. But who was she and how did she wind up in my bed?

Later I walked the frozen town trying to determine the identity of the mystery visitor from the morning. The sidewalks and streets were deathhard with ice and snow powdered on top, and more helpings of snow drifted down slowly, February lazily, the same as it always was. The snow toppled its way down from the rooftops, through tree branches, tumbling. Who was she? Then I remembered. It was Mai! It must have been Mai. That was her hair, those were her features. Maybe it was just a illusion, an astral projection, maybe a hologram? Projecting, projecting. The mind beams her against the wall and she comes to life, alive, fully in the flesh.

“Shh,” she says. “Shh. Shh. Shh.”

a lift to the city

MIHKEL RAUD gave me a lift to the city. It was in one of those old-fashioned Volkswagen Beetles, beige exterior, red interior, remarkably clean. I couldn’t tell if he was just being friendly or had gone into the taxi or Bolt driver business, and I wasn’t really sure why I had got in the car to begin with, as I had no plans to go to the city. He wore his flat cap and looked the part of a driver, parked the Beetle on one of the lower levels of the Viru Keskus parking garage. Mihkel Raud hopped out and wished me a good day.

There I was, back in the city. A lot had changed since I was away. Tallinn looked sort of like Manhattan, but in the 1950s or 1960s. Brick buildings, iron railings, snow-covered cars, trash cans. Why did I feel like I was in Little Shop of Horrors or Rear Window? Tarja came walking by in a nice pink dress and waved to me. “But what are you doing here?” she said. “What brings you to town?” Her black hair was done up, she eyed me with her usual sparkling curiosity. “Well,” she said. “I need to get some shopping done. My children are hungry.” And she left.

At the end of the street, I noticed Esmeralda. Young Esmeralda Kask. I hadn’t seen her in ages. She looked quite beautiful in her dress, her chestnut hair was pulled back. There was something about those blue pearls of eyes, the slope of her cheeks. There was no one as beautiful as Esmeralda Kask. Not in this world. Something strange was happening though. She was leading a flock of sheep. When had Esmeralda become a shepherd? Or was she a shepherdess? I was too old for her, but I loved her anyway. Such loves are non-negotiable.

Just then my mother emerged from a store, clutching her grandmother’s pearls. “You, young lady,” she called out to Esmeralda. “What do you plan to do with all of those sheep?” Esmeralda blinked a few times. “I am going to sheer them,” said Esmeralda. “It’s been such a cold winter. I am going to make myself a warm coat.” “That sounds like a lovely idea,” my mother said and waved. Their interaction brought a tear to my eye. For Esmeralda Kask was what the Estonians would call a silmarõõm, my one true love. The tear swelled and rolled down my ice cold cheek.

hollow road

HOLLOW ROAD was a shady road. If you followed it from one end to the other, it would carry you from the Village Green to Cedar Street. It was called Hollow Road because it ran the length of a hollow. Atlantic coastal deciduous trees rose up on both sides, tall, towering oaks, cedars, and maples. In all seasons, the hillsides were covered with their colorful rotting leaves. About halfway down on the left, as you traveled the road toward Cedar Street, there was an old cemetery where the original British settler families like the Conklins and Bayles were entombed behind iron gates and beneath Victorian angels. But I never went up in there.

On this day, I walked on ahead, gingerly, freely. It was late spring, early summer, or the onset of fall. The sun shone through the leaves into the darkness of the hollow and as I exited this kind of natural tunnel, I found myself at the foot of Suffolk Avenue. On the right hand side though, I could see that several newer houses had been constructed since I went away, in a style someone might call Scandinavian contemporary. Such buildings would not be out of place on the other side of the ocean. In fact, the more I observed them, the more I began to realize that this part of Hollow Road matched Hariduse Street, which means Education Street. At least the houses looked like the kinds that one found at the start of Hariduse Street, just before the old Airplane Factory. But this was not Estonia. This was Long Island. I was sure of it. The trees were proof. Estonia didn’t have these trees.

The houses were deserted. I didn’t see one trampoline in a yard or car in a driveway. They were made of wood with yellow corrugated metal roofs. All of the trees around them had been cut down, the underbrush removed. The land had been ploughed through and reshaped and covered with fresh green sod from the sod farms out east. It was just too vacant and peculiar. I walked up one of the gravel driveways and found myself at the door of one of these Scandinavian contemporary houses on Hollow Road. The door was ajar and so I went in.

There was almost no furniture in the house. A table, a couch. But someone was living here. On the table, I saw piles of chocolate wrappers from Ghirardelli and other big name manufacturers. On the walls hung the glinting paintings of the Austrian symbolist painter Gustav Klimt. I stood there in that unlit room admiring the Klimt paintings when a woman walked in and startled me. “Who are you? What are you doing here in my house?” she said.

She was younger than me and she had raven black hair. This was pulled up in a messy braid. She wore a white jacket. Her eyes were light and remarkable but not threatening. I told her quickly that I had used to live in the neighborhood, how I can discovered the strange houses, how I had decided to look inside, how my curiosity had got the best of me. She told me that she was a translator, a chocolate translator, and how she was responsible for translating all of Ghirardelli’s packaging and marketing materials into other languages. But how did she come to acquire the Klimt paintings? Weren’t they worth millions? They were beautiful pieces.

“Yes, I also like them very much,” she said. At that moment, I began to feel a familiar, wavy sea-like sensation. It was like the floor was being pulled out from beneath me. She just stood there, staring at me. She had very light, soft skin. It was like milk. She looked too familiar. Who was she? The maritime sensation continued. “Well,” the woman said. Her voice tinkled like faint, far off music. “What now?”

bonds

LINDA HAD TO GO to Pakistan and she left me in charge of her house. This was a three-storey Scandinavian style mansion full of personal libraries and well-stoked fireplaces where staircases rolled and ascended. It stood at the top of the hill overlooking a foggy harbor that in winter was frozen over and packed with ice. It was here that she slept in a grand canopy bed.

Before she had left, Linda had shown me the place, including a stack of green, government-issued bonds, made out to her and members of her family, with the instruction to guard them with my life. She was a tawny, vivacious Estonian woman with two very thrilling gray eyes. In the old black-and-white photos of Linda on the shelves, the ones taken during her youth in the faraway 1980s, I had detected a superficial beauty, a kind of dewy, youthful innocence that was somehow neutral, asexual and unappealing to me. But over the years, through the kicks and betrayals of time, her puissance sexuelle had grown only more abundant and her pull had bloomed. Imagine the sun, that glowing hot orange globe, sizzling and radiating heat and fire.

That was Linda.

Next my friends came over and made themselves at home. Toomas was an older sort with thick orange-yellow hair, some dark-rimmed glasses. He was also a career criminal and immediately looked for ways to rip poor Linda off. Markus was younger with a thin mustache and tended to go along with whatever Toomas dreamed up. His idea was to rewrite the government-issued bonds in our own names, but only a handful of them. These he would pocket and later cash in, and Linda and her prestigious family would be a little less richer, but so what. They would never notice. Beneath a lamp at an old desk, Toomas went to work with his forgery. Neatly and precisely he amended them with some ink and a pen knife while firewood crackled in the hearth. I watched him slumped over in concentration in the blue light of a February afternoon. By the time Linda got back, Toomas had already departed, the revised bonds tucked neatly in his pocket. Markus drove. They both imagined themselves to be rich.

I was left behind to clean up. In the waste bin, I found the shreds of the bonds that had been altered and tossed them in the fireplace. Then I rearranged the library, which contained volumes of artwork by Miro, Modigliani, Kangilaski, and others, so that the money stash place would be obscured and Linda might never go to look for the bonds again. It was snowing when her car pulled up, and I went out to greet her. The snow was tumbling down, collecting on the white birches, making them look all fuzzy. Linda got out of the car and leaped into my arms, wrapping her legs around my waist. “Well,” she said to me, making me blush. “How was it? At least you didn’t burn the house down.” I tried to tell her the truth, that my friends were thieves, and that I was one too, but I just couldn’t. It didn’t feel good to keep such secrets.

virginia

IN VIRGINIA there was an old hotel, somewhere off the Jefferson Davis Highway, that had at one point been a Ramada or Days Inn, but had since been abandoned and reincorporated into the surrounding swamp and jungle. In the front of the white cinderblock structure, there had been a fountain and series of small pools that had once been part of an ornate hotel garden.

According to Takashi Riken, the Japanese mountaineer, this man-made stream was now a prime fishing spot. He brought us down into the Ramada swamp lands to catch bass, trout, and, if we got lucky, catfish. Stig, the Estonian nightclub performer, came along too. There we sat at the edge of what had once been an outdoor terrace at this abandoned Virginia Ramada Inn, waiting for a fish to bite. While Riken was hooking some of the bait, it fell from his hand and into the stream waters, which were so clear that you could see straight through. I dove in and recovered the bait and we continued to place it on our fish hooks and wait for the fish.

It was then that I saw it, a 12-foot-long green serpent, entering the stream at one side. It moved slowly, turning at almost perfectly geometric 90 degree angles, its two unconcerned black eyes looking straight ahead. “Takashi-san,” I said, tugging at the line. Riken looked down at me with his sunburned, craggy face and said, “What is it now?” “Snake,” I said. “There’s a snake in the water!” Riken sighed loudly. “Oh, don’t be such a pussy, you know that most snakes here are completely … ” He trailed off as he saw it. That weathered face of his made no further movement. “Stig,” he called out to our fellow fisherman. His rod was cast down stream. “Stig?”

“What?” he called back. “Stig, we need to leave now.” “Why?” “There’s a snake.” “On a plane?” came the reply, but then Stig also stopped moving and speaking because he saw it. We sprinted off through ankle-deep water in what had been the parking lot. We ran with our fishing poles in hand. The last thing I recall seeing is that green snake, slithering toward a sunset with the reeds all around it. A second, smaller, darker snake joined it and I felt that, no matter where I went or what I did, I could never depend on nature to be a trustworthy friend.

kristi kangilaski’s ‘however it feels’ at rüki galerii

THE TEMPERATURE has remained below freezing this winter, but artist and illustrator Kristi Kangilaski has brought some warm tropical colors to Viljandi with her new exhibition, “However It Feels.” The exhibition opened on 15 January at the Rüki Gallery on Tartu Street and will last until the end of February.

Kangilaski was born in 1982, the same year that Brezhnev died, though before his death which means that, in all likelihood, she is not the reincarnation of Leonid Brezhnev. In fact, it’s the opposite: our Kangilaski is no fat, hairy Communist. Rather, she’s a tall, charming woman who at some point tattooed the words “left” and “right” on her wrists so that she wouldn’t forget which was which. With her hat and long dark coat, this Estonian Academy of Arts-educated artist resembles Mary Poppins from a distance. Her well-marked, magical hands never rest.

When she is not at work as the Viljandi city artist, Kangilaski has created a whole exhibition-full of acrylic paintings. She works at home, somewhere between the bedroom and kitchen, and her warehouse is a corner in her daughter’s room. She uses acrylic paints because she likes to work quickly and acrylic paints dry quickly. “I’m an impatient, restless person,” she says. The paintings emerged according to how she happened to feel. She had no certain plans or preconceptions. Slowly, the collection assembled itself. Almost all of the paintings were undertaken in 2025 — one of them was even finished this January.

At the opening, wine and grapes were served.

At the exhibition, a visitor encounters images of people, horses, elephants, black cats, crocodiles, birds, and bears. In part, the atmosphere is playful and childlike. When I arrived to the gallery the second time to view the exhibition, an entire art school class was there and some little boys even hid themselves beneath the gallery couch and still wouldn’t come out, even when I tried to join them there.

Yet, as another viewer remarked to me, there are also more serious themes. The painting “Black Cat” depicts a mother’s difficult daily life, and “Crocodile” shows a woman seated at a table, with a man’s shadow in back, and that fearsome creature behind them. There is also “Fire Heads,” two red heads in opposition, which brings to mind an argument.

The style is interesting. I was reminded of Picasso and Modigliano’s primitivism as well as Viljandi’s own Paul Kondas, the godfather of naïve art. But Kangilaski herself can’t say exactly what style it is or what inspired it. “I’m especially inspired by different arrangements or compositions that happen appear before me,” she says. “And I have always loved colors,” she adds. “Inspiration is drawn from everything around me.”

Kangilaski agrees that the current colorful exhibition does leave one feeling as if they’re in the jungle. And in the jungle, one can experience all kinds of emotions. The artist has even considered bringing some palm trees to the gallery next time she has an exhibition and I have agreed in principle to help her move them. When she is not out looking for palm trees in Estonia, Kangilaski paints on. As an illustrator, she is just about to begin a new book project.

An Estonian version of this review appears this month in the Estonian magazine Edasi.

coldplay

COLDPLAY WERE BOOKED to perform at the Viljandi Folk Music Festival. And not only just perform, but to headline it, with their concert scheduled for the festival’s last evening. I’m not sure whose brilliant idea this was, but I suppose that after NÖEP performed in the same slot in 2025, the door was wide open for the likes of Coldplay and their “Adventure of a Lifetime.”

I was in the press office as usual right before they went on, but an older amber-haired woman, whom I understood was my wife, was there with me. She was a steadfast supporter of the band and had bought Parachutes after “Yellow” started getting played on MTV. But she wanted more than just to see Coldplay play Viljandi. She wanted me to make love to her during the concert. This seemed to be physically impossible: where would we find a proper spot? Her solution was an old ironing board. “See, I’ll just put my elbows here, like this,” she demonstrated to me during a break in their sets. “And then, when they play ‘Yellow’ and it peaks you can take me from behind.” “You’re crazy,” I told her. “I’m not having sex with you during a Coldplay concert!”

While we discussed the matter, Chris Martin led the crowd in a singalong of one of their blasé, forgettable songs. Not from the earlier catalogue, some album track from 2015 or so. The entire band, including Martin, wore those rain ponchos that are so popular at Folk, and it was raining. The band reclined on an old beige couch, plucking their instruments, tapping their drums, while Martin held up an umbrella and sang. Visually, it was stunning, but the music still didn’t find its way into my heart. Meantime my wife was demanding that I help her to climax during “Yellow.” I felt alone there standing next to that ironing board. “Please,” she whispered.

***

While all of this was happening, Klaudia was waiting for me on a beach. She was wearing a red swimsuit that highlighted her ample bust and the salt from the sea had teased her hair into a bouquet of sunshine. She was wearing sunglasses and saying, “You are going to have to choose, you know. You are going to have to choose between her and me. You must choose between her and me.” I could see myself reflected in Klaudia’s sunglasses, which meant that I was on the beach even though I was at the festival. “Which of us two will you choose now? Which one?” Grains of sand were in my eyes, grains of time, the sky above was pastel blue.

***

I guess I caught the rest of Coldplay’s performance. I remember Chris Martin took his shirt off, only to reveal his body had been tattooed in Celtic symbols. Before the encore, he also came over to me on the side of the stage and asked me how they had done. I told him it had been a wonderful show. Later, The Who came on, as a special mystery guest, and began to warm up the crowd. Keith Moon told me that if I wanted to hear their set better, it would make sense to go up one of the towers on the edge of the stage. That way my ears wouldn’t bleed when they were done serving up Maximum R&B. Up the steps I went. When I got to the third floor of the stage tower, I found myself in a room full of Estonian women dressed in traditional costume, with red headscarves. One of them was a younger, dark haired woman whose name was Mai. I knew Mai from the streets of Viljandi. We had shopped at the same Konsum.

“What’s wrong with you?” Mai said. Her gray eyes peered out at me from beneath the red scarf. “You look as if you’ve just seen a ghost.” “Two women are after me,” I said. I felt an outlaw bandit or robin hood. Always on the run from women and ironing boards. Then, glancing down at her in her red skirt, I asked, “Can I hug you?” “Muidugi!” she said. “Of course, you can!” “You mean you’re not afraid of me?” Mai just embraced me, warmly, softly. She was a robust, loving country woman. She helped take the pain away. “Why should I be afraid of you?” she said. “Besides, it’s not my fault I’m so sexy and young!”

After that, I think we kept on hugging. I held onto Mai like she was flotsam from the Titanic. The Who played their set.

a friendly reminder

A friendly reminder: almost all of my North! stories are the product of what I call dream fiction. That is, I use what I can remember from dreams and create narratives from the material. I started this project in 2020, during the pandemic, and I have found it’s interesting to chart how the news of the world impacts my subconscious. During the pandemic, I dreamt of vaccines. As you can see here, I dreamt of Ghislaine and Epstein. I have always been a huge a fan of Jefferson Airplane. In fact, I think they might be my favorite group of all time, and so from time to time, band members surface in my dreams in unusual ways, as Jorma Kaukonen did in the previous story. Grace Slick, for example, turned up as a character in “The Return of Dulcinea” (January 2023). Charlie Watts has also turned up this way, as has Paul McCartney.

It’s interesting to me that it’s hard for some people to understand what I have been doing. Not only am I mapping my own subconscious, I am also providing a reflection of the world and how it filters through one person’s mind over time. These stories earn no money and garner limited attention. I have found this to be a very fulfilling artistic project. What else is there?

the keys to ghislaine maxwell’s apartment

“HERE,” HE SAID. “If you need a place to stay for a while, you can go to Ghislaine Maxwell’s apartment in Peconic City.” My father placed the set of keys into my hands and told me the address, which was 9 Nantucket Avenue, and drove me to the station. The trip out to Peconic City wasn’t long. He told me that the house was located next to a money broker. Atlantic Union, I believe. When I got out into the station, I turned left, as I had been instructed and found myself in a kind of shanty town made up of small shacks set up inside the building. “It’s not much,” I recalled my father telling me, “but no one will look for you there.” Was this “Nantucket Avenue?” I walked by the shanty town, where indigent women were out selling flowers and other things. I asked an old flower seller how to get to Nantucket Avenue, and she told me I had to go outside the building, through the station’s back entrance, and turn right.

I checked my possessions. A single gym bag full of clothes, my phone, my wallet, a paperback. I walked through the central atrium of the station and out the back entrance, just as instructed, and walked down a sidewalk to the right until I saw a series of modern homes set back from the road with green lawns, even in winter. Down one of these lawns, a whole parade of media figures and cameramen came in my direction, one woman speaking loudly in those clipped, made-for-broadcast tones about the plight of Ghislaine. At that moment, I wondered how my father had even had come to possess Ghislaine Maxwell’s keys or why he had sent me there.

Even at a distance, I could read the words “Nantucket Avenue” on one of the houses, all of which had peaked roofs and were built to incorporate Puritan architectural elements, a sort of House of Seven Gables for the big money age. Did my father really think this was a good place for someone like me to hide out? In front of one of the houses, someone had strung up some effigies of Jeffrey Epstein and Donald Trump, except had given them vampire fangs that dripped red blood. “Death to the Rich,” a sign read. Some yellow-toothed vagrants stood around the Epstein and Trump vampire effigies, panhandling, hoping to get a dime out of me.

The interior of the house was dull and contemporary and all of the walls were covered with large photographs of Ghislaine and Epstein vacationing in the Caribbean, wearing bleached white shirts that were so bright they made your eyes ache, khakis as crisp as morning toast, blue jeans that were so blue, they looked as if they had only been worn once and then tossed away. Epstein’s gray hair was always that unruly mop, trimmed to a desired, specified length. Ghislaine looked like she had once starred in a 1990s Bond film, perhaps as the sexy villainess who gets killed in the end. One picture though made my heart sink. It showed Epstein, Ghislaine, and British diplomat Peter Mandelson clustered around the deck of a yacht as Jorma Kaukonen played guitar. They were on the sea somewhere, drenched in a pink orange sunset.

Jorma was in on it too? Later, when the revelations came out, Jorma Kaukonen, the white-bearded, Finnish Hemingway-looking ex-lead guitarist of seminal San Franciscan psychedelic rock group Jefferson Airplane, who had transitioned into the rough-and-tumble bar room blues act Hot Tuna in the 1970s, denied all wrongdoing. Instead, he said that Epstein had been a fan of Hot Tuna, and that he had performed for him and his guests on occasion and was always well paid. “I’m just a blues musician,” Jorma said. “Simple as that.” When asked what Epstein’s favorite Hot Tuna song was, Jorma acknowledged that it was “Hesitation Blues.” “Epstein made me play it two times during every set,” Jorma had said in a beachside interview. “It started to annoy me.”

In the interview, Jorma wore his white fisherman’s sweater and seemed at ease in his skin. He had his glasses on and his arms were at his sides and he seemed to be hiding nothing. It was hard to believe that he had ever been anything other than a minstrel to the evil rich.

alonette, lisanna, and tomás

Alonette, Lisanna, and Tomás, in that order.

I WAS HAPPY TO CATCH the most recent loft concert at Tomás del Real’s house in Viljandi this past Saturday. He calls these intimate musical events the Viljandi Home Sessions, or VHS. This one was VHS Volume 5. I have been to every single session. The last session, about two weeks before Christmas, featured Lonitseera band members Kaisa Kuslapuu and Kristin Kaha doing renditions of obscure Estonian holiday songs. That was undoubtedly the most unique and chaotic session, as there was a dog present and the electricity went out. In my opinion, they undersold themselves. Kaisa’s keyboard playing was fun and unorthodox, her singing is always great, and Kristin has some alarming and impossible notes stored away in her vault of a mouth. There were certainly a few “holy shit” moments. But, in true Estonian fashion, when I complimented them on their performance they sort of shrugged and said, “Eh, it was okay.”

This session had more of the cuddly folkie feel that Tomás was probably going for when he dreamed it up. No dogs or babies were present, and no electrical outages occurred. A fox did visit Tomás on the day of the session, maybe to provide him with some luck. A singer songwriter from Chile, Tomás has lived in Viljandi for some years now. He opened with some of his songs, including a new one, “Algún día,” which I felt innovated on the material he recorded for Principios de Declaración and Notas Rotas. I wouldn’t say it was better, but there were some changes and melodies in there that surprised me. Some new landscapes emerging from familiar terrain. Then came Lisanna Kuningas, who played three of her own songs on the guitar. Lisanna is also the keyboard player for Araukaaria, and did a wonderful session with the band’s singer and guitarist Pepi Prieto in November. These were really fun and enjoyable.

And then there was Anett Tamm, performing songs from her 2025 album Compass under her artist name Alonette. I personally found the melodies to be interesting. Every time I thought I knew where a song was going, she turned it around and went sailing off in another direction. I’m a taller, larger person, and when I am at these sessions, I like to lie in the floor in the back. It’s just more comfortable for me. There’s a nice strobe light employed, and so when I look at the ceiling back there, as the performers play, it’s almost as if I am staring up at the stars as they shoot over me. Because of this effect, while listening to Alonette, I had the sensation that I was drifting through space. Her songs have an amorphous quality to them, they expand and contract, and so I started to feel like I was watching the aurora borealis. At one point, I looked over at Tomás as if to say, “She is great, isn’t she?” Tomás just nodded as if to say, “I know.”

Thanks for the music and thanks for the photos Tomi Palsa.