from Der Spiegel:
From Punk Rocker to Mayor of ReykjavikBy Jochen BrennerThere are five minutes to go before the broadcast begins, as Jon Gnarr sits in a television studio, searching for the right formulation. "You could say that comedy is tragedy plus time," he says. "The longer ago the nightmare is, the more I have to laugh about it." He puts down his teacup, which smells of peppermint and a little vodka. "It's as if someone had thrown up on your carpeting after a long party. You smell it and you ask your friends who it was. Then Bill says it was Jon, and Jon says it was Frank. That's Iceland, Iceland after the financial crisis."
Jon Gnarr is a tall blonde guy who wears jeans and unironed shirts. He doesn't show off the power he actually holds -- over the 8,100 people who report to him, or over his annual budget of two billion Icelandic kroner (€12 million). He is the 44-year-old mayor of Reykjavík, the most important man in the city. In return, Reykjavík pays him €7,000 ($10,150) a month and provides him with a large official car.
The mayor is a punk rocker. He used to look the part, but now he keeps his hair neatly combed and parted on one side. In his younger days Gnarr, a.k.a. Johnny Punk, used to storm into a Reykjavík bookstore and tear the pictures of Sid Vicious and The Clash from the pages of German magazine Bravo to demonstrate the aesthetics of protest to the other members of his band, the "Dripping Noses." He used his music to confront society with its own ugliness. He dropped out of school, drove a taxi, worked in a mental institution, composed poetry and wrote a fictitious autobiography so violent that Icelandic publishers initially turned it down.
The book was called "The Indians," because he hated cowboys as a child. ............(more)
The complete piece is at:
http://www.spiegel.de/international/europe/0,1518,759333,00.html
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