A drawing of the Björk interview at Skandia Cinema

Above is Jenny Soep’s “paper memory” of the Björk interview. (Click here for PDF of original—this 500-wide image is too small. Several family members are upset that the image doesn’t look like me. I think the effect is just fine. The hands are pretty good, as is the nose.) Below are things I learned about Björk during our interview, and a description of the night that followed our talk.

• After ten years in New York, she is not sure what she thinks of the city.

• London is where she shops for records.

• Many of her songs are modal.

• Many of her songs are also written in the Lydian scale, which is apparently unintentional.

• When it’s necessary, Mark Bell can add that extra five percent of “below-the-belt sexy chocolate” to a song.

•  She has not seen the episode of “Space Ghost” she participated in. Thom Yorke told her it was OK to do the show, so she went and recorded her parts. This is all she knows about her role in the TV classique (which was recently pulled from YouTube).

• New York is for heels, London is for trainers and Iceland is for boots.

• Moomins treat each other fairly and live as equals, but there is something dark in their world. It may be the comet headed for Moomin valley.

• Along with Alex Ross, Tyondai Braxton and David Longstreth, she will be doing another DJ gig in Brooklyn soon. The theme of the evening will be “hand claps.” Previous themes included “spring” (for which Ross mashed up Stravinsky and Bieber) and “bass lines.” I told Björk that “Army of Me” felt like a “sandworm” bass line. For a moment, I thought I had totally fucked up by telling her this. I may have fucked up, or maybe Björk just spent an awfully long time considering a response. She is very polite.

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After the talk, we both received champagne and flower bouquets. (It was charitable of the Polar Prize to include me in the diva ritual.) The champagne was not confusing, as an object, but a bouquet of flowers? Unless you’re headed straight home to a table and a vase, what to do? I am a flower loon—an inclination inherited not from my English gardening mother but my American floraphilic dad—and can’t stand the idea of throwing out a bouquet of anything, even spray-painted bodega costume flowers. Bjork, headed off to swim “300 laps in a tiny pool,” said she often gives bouquets to hotel staff members because they probably deserve them and are also likely to have a place to put them. But I was going to someone’s house. Bingo! House gift problem solved. (Actual opera singers must end up with a compost heap on opening night. I thought about that for way too long. I should have been thinking about sustainability or something.)

And then, finally! Sweden acted all Swedish. The party was filled with tall, tan, attractive blonde people. JUST LIKE EVERYBODY ALWAYS EXPECTS TO BE TOLD. And décolletage is super popular here. Boobs a-rambling all over jah apartment.