Eur-ODD-yssey, 2005
October 20, 2005
Well, I'm in The Hague, Den Haag, 's-Gravenhage.
Getting here was fairly uneventful, although I was stuck on a 'plane with a bunch of failed abortions. Who, WHO I ask you, doesn't know how to open a toilet door on an airplane? I ask you. And most of them were fERRiners ... so they must have taken a plane at some point in their miserable little lives.
My seatmates were uncommunicative, which suited me just fine. It meant that I didn't have to make an extravagant display of plugging myself into my earphones.
But I had to keep telling people how to get into the toilet. That's the problem with a bulkhead seat: your fellow travellers tend to view you as nothing more than a lazy flight attendant.
And what's the deal with airplane movies these days? Aren't they supposed to be bland, innocuous fare such as is played for Mennonite youth groups in Little Bullpucky, Saskatchewan? I had "Mr. and Mrs. Smith" and "The Matrix" -- at least three-score cop killings between them. And yet they still bothered to overdub "Goddamn" with "Gosh darn."
Anyway, that's all I want to say about the plane, except that it was an old "Canadian" plane, which brought back memories of the days when stewardesses were remotely attractive. Air Canada insists on purchasing the "Broom Hilda" line of air hostess.
Four hour lay-over in Heathrow with some of the dregs of the world traveling community that day. Someone once said that "the English are an ugly people" and they must have based this unfair assertion on time they spent in Terminal 1.
Hey, I'm not being negative. I'm having a hell of a time here. Enjoyed every minute of the travel. However, if I never have to see the pasty, whey-faced, ginormous great suet puddings I saw in Terminal 1 EVER AGAIN I will be a better man.
So, obviously, at that point I needed a drink. So I thought a pint would be in order. So I went to the pub. So I looked at their taps. Not a damn British beer there. Stella, Hoegaarden, Grolsch, Murphy's, Boddington's. Well, Boddington's is British, but as a man once said "Boddington's is shite" (actually, that was probably me).
I ordered a Murphy's. A much better tipple than Guinness.
The bartender informed me that it was not even 7:00am.
"Yeah," I said, "but i haven't slept in days."
A mother steered her children away from me as I sat there drinking my pint, smoking a "borrowed" Silk Cut, and reading Tom King's "Green Grass, Running Water" (hell of a book).
I knew I was back in the UK for one very good reason: the muzak. In North America, muzak is your grandparents' favourite songs run through Lloyd-Weber's synthesizer. In the UK it is dance / techno / whatever. Thank God. I'm not yet ready for Geritol, so why should I have to listen to John Denver as interpreted by Yanni's retarded half-sister?
Then Schipol airport ... I came down the terminal at a trot, looking for signs that I was in the Netherlands, looking for the Dutch experience; the doors opened; I walked through and saw ... Murphy's Pub.
October 21, 2005
Please sir, can I have some more?
It really is a shame that we have to cook our food.
I'm stuffed. Jeez. As I type this I realize that I have eaten more in the past few days than I usually do in a week. Food, glorious food.
I won't write about the airport food because the best I could write is that it was execrable.
I did pick up Hawkin's Cheezies at YVR for Iain. In London I picked up two bags of crisps (potato chips) for him as well: Sweet Thai Chicken flavour and Oven Roasted Chicken and Thyme flavour. Jeez, I love those crazy Brits and their crisps.
Anyway.
Oh yeah! There was a Pret-a-Manger in the airport so I picked up a 'sharp cheddar cheese and pickle' sandwich. Oh the memories! When I get to London I will be going hog wild.
I made my way from Schipol to The Hague, where I met up with Iain after minor trials and tribulations, not least of which was having Iain tell me (on a bad phone line) to take the number 17 tram to Fredrick Hendriklaan and I heard him say Freyburgmarianplatz. But I got there in the end.
Immediately, we went to the UN so I could see some of the trials at the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia. Slobodan had the day off so I couldn't make faces at him, but I got to sit in on one sentencing hearing (string the buggers up ...) and I met all the characters from the "Adventures in Trial Support" cartoons and I stood on the balcony and smoked Pall Malls with them! Super cool.
Then it was off to Schevenigen beach and back into the Hague. Belgian beer and Italian pizza, with a 'salad' of anchovies, tuna, slices of gorgonzola (GOD! So so so so good) mozarella, tomatoes and other things that I ate in my foggy jetlagged state so I've forgotten what they are. With a final stop off for Dutch ice cream.
Oh the ice cream! I have dreamt about it since my last visit in 1995. 10 years! God, has it really been 10 years? I remember it tasting like iced whipped cream. Turns out it is made from whipped cream.
Turbulent sleep fraught with bowel pains and odd dreams. One of my co-workers (KB) saved the world from the Russians in a plot vaguely reminiscent of Tom Clancy's 'Red Storm Rising.'
Idle thought: I wish I had written a novel during the Cold War in which NATO started a war ...
Anyway, today was great. Tea and a small stroopwaffel, another quick (and fruitless) trip to ICTY before heading off to Amsterdam.
Dutch hot dogs.
I got the culture thing out of the way with Van Gogh (Van H-aw-fkghh) before finding my way to a 150-year-old tobacconist shop (the shop was 150 years old, not the tobacconist) to get some fine Sumatran cigars for an after-dinner smoke).
The sheer volume of Van Gogh's work at the museum is boggling. He never sold anything so the family held onto the majority of the collection and gave it to the State.
Chips and mayonnaise.
Begijnhof and meandering through the streets and the throngs of stoned tourists.
A ride up a ferris wheel
And then an absolutely fascinating house -- back when it was slightly less than advisable to be a Catholic in the Netherlands, a family built a church on the top floors of their house (our Lady of the Atttic). Beautiful, light, airy, with views of Amsterdam from the top windows: garrets and steeples, an artist's studio across the way, a kitchen just below, decrepit roofs and dripping gutters.
A quick detour through the red light district and a stop at a liquor store with 184 proof Absinthe. 92% alcohol. With wormwood.
Then beer and jenever gin in a dark bar "In de Wildman" with old Dutch men smoking cigars and thumping the tables.
Back to the Hague, a quick stop at an old Amsterdam phone box with a bust of Stalin inside and then food.
Raw beef sandwiches, veal croquette sandwiches, deep fried curried chicken rolls and chicken satay covered in a thick sweet peanut sauce.
The raw beef was FANTASTIC. With a creamy texture like sushi and a taste of the finest smoothest beef. Not at all overpowering. Not with all the onions on it at any rate.
The shop was designed to make drunks and stoners feel all edgy and paranoid. I loved it. It is one of Iain’s regular stop.
Ice cream.
Later, more beer at a brewhouse on the harbour. A light blonde beer and an Autumn Bok. Maxi has driven up from Dusseldorf so I smoked her Lucky Strikes and gesticulated wildly as I described the adventures so far.
Then I ate salted herring while watching the boats in the harbour jockey for position. Not cooked, just brined in the salt. Again, the creamy texture and the taste of the fish were gorgeous.
[It strikes me that this is not the best travelogue because everything is a bit too fresh. I usually try to be a bit more judicious in my writing. Oh well.]
Raw food. It might kill me, but I love it. Now the Huns and their habit of eating raw meat is more understandable. Their habit of keeping it between their saddle and the horse is not.
Deep fried mussels. More ice cream. And home. Got to get to sleep, but I am pumped.
Oh, and I am sleeping on the floor in the bathroom.
I was woken up last night by a child crying. Supposedly he's been crying every night for years. I feel bad for him, but I'm now happy that my host peed over the balcony onto their patio furniture one night long ago.
October 25, 2005
Well, the feasting continues.
But here I am on a French keyboard that does not use qwerty, but uses azert … so typing is slow.
Menu from day 2 in the Netherlands:
Upon waking: tea and stroopwaffel
Breakfast: oysters, salted herring, schilerlocke (smoked shark belly), and a glass of truly horrid white wine
Brunch: coffee and apple strudel;
A real stroopwaffel (essentially two crepes with syrup in between) in Delft
Lunch: A bucket of AWESOME mussels in Rotterdam Markt
Coffee at Hoek van Holland
Dinner in a windmill:
Appetizer: sweet spicy olives; smoked ribeye slices;
Dinner: casserol of lamb
Dessert: Forest fruit bavarois with raspberry and strawberry sherbet
Snack: soft serve ice cream
Overall, I like the Hague: a manageable city, if a bit slow.
Damn it, I have a lot to write, but this keyboard is doing my head in.
October 26, 2005
Bah, humbug. I tried zriting this post in french to see if the keyboqrd zould be qny better but thqt just mqde it woese. So you zill hqve to suffer through this just like me. When I cqn, I zill try to renember zhere the qpprpriqte keys qre, but i tend to forget.
I hqve q slight heqd cold. The pollution in Pqris irritqted my sinuses pqst qll hope of continued sqnity qnd noz i qm on the verge of fqinting.
This bites. Iùll try qgqin lqter.
October 26, 2005
As my friend here says, the most difficult thing about living in Holland – apart from the Dutch – is the inability to be alone. Crowded doesn’t begin to cover it. It teems. The Dutch are greedy in that they want every forn of transportation they can get. The have trains, buses, bicycles, scooters, motorcycles and trams. But they also want their cars. The roads are CROWDED; and in a country where public transit goes absolutely everyzhere, that is just greedy.
So fair warning to you hippy green types who think that transit is the solution to the car problem.
The M.C. Escher museun surprised me (even more than the fact that he is from the Hague). Around town are murals and sculptures by him – even in the post office. His early woodcuts are fabulous, but art is boring to read about, so I’m going to stop.
Delft – gargoyles, spiral staricases, churches, canals, moss and markets.
Rotterdam is a city. ‘Nuff said.
And the beaches are riddled with bunkers.
October 26, 2005
(WRITTEN 3 DAYS EARLIER, ON THE THALYS TRAIN TO PARIS)
Damnation.
The hellish Dutch. Think I’ll write to the Queen.
So I got to the train station to find my international train rerouted due to track works. It went through Utrecht instead of Den Haag. Couldn’t someone have told us?
I wasn’t so irritated as those people zho had travelled to Den Haag fron Utrecht in order to catch a train that ended up going through their home town. But it meant that I missed going through Antzerp, missed the Cathdral, missed the bird market, and – most importantly – missed out on some horse_milk ice cream that is sold just behind the cathedral.
Yet, qs the wise Ho-tei would say: zhen life throws you q screzbqll (god this keyboqrd is q pqin in the qss), enjoy getting screzed.
No mqtter, I put the time to good use – I qte pannekoek and little sugqred medammion cqkes.
Then I went to the Meermano museum to check out their collection of illuminated manuscripts. Thqt killed some time qnd tzo of the pqges zere frighteningly bequtiful. I would say thqt they look as though they were pqinted yesterdqy, but no one would have hqd the qbility to do something so intricqte, so bequtiful yesterdqy. It needs time – èàà (oops, 700) years to look that new.
Contrqst thqt to impressionist pqintings which hqve fqded considerqbly since they zere pqinted (they look nothing like they did when new) qnd will fqde to grey over the next two hundred yeqrs.
So tqke your Monet qnd shove it. Thereùs q reqson why I like the Middle Qges. I screwed those pqges into my eyebqlls in hopes thqt they will sustqin me qs I die.
So, qnywqy, I lost ny seqt on the trqin due to the qfore,entioned proble,s. So I the seqt I qm in is only good to Brussels but I figure the bqr cqr will sustqin me beyond thqt.
Goddqm, is this qt qll comprehensible?
October 27, 2005
Macabre Sports or How Mrs. Cecil Cholmondley Lost Her Lorgnettes
Wherein the AUTHOR
noted not merely for the ILLUSTRIOUSNESS
of his birth
but by his sheer audacity in speaking of it
VISITS
divers TOMBS of sundry nature
wherein are contained
the corporeal remains
of other ILLUSTRIOUS personages,
paupers, and
DEMOCRATS
Thanatourism. It has something going for it. In cities that are too lively, too crowded, too much ‘with us,’ and that seethe with the stink of humanity, a graveyard is often the place to be.
The pollution of Paris has corrupted my brain. I feel tightness under my eyes and an ever-widening vise in my frontal lobes.
O tempora! O mores!
On the train to Paris, I drank one beer for each country I passed through. The presence of a bar car enlivens the prospect of any journey. I shot the breeze with Claudia, a French-Chilean architect of some little renown and even more Sapphic tendencies. Nice to know that I haven’t lost my touch for attracting unrepentent lesbians.
But once we managed to swill the minor detail of our doomed romance down our gullets with cheap wine and strong beer we managed to learn quite a lot from each other. I won’t divulge the details herein; it suffices to write merely that the miles ate away at each other and we bid each other a fond farewell as the trains brakes squealed into the station.
A rendez-vous under a sign, a trip to a brasserie, magret de canard, and the joys of sleeping to the sound of midnight Ramadan carousing in the streets of the 17th Arrondisement.
And death.
Homage paid to some of the great and mighty tucked up in St. Denis: Charles Martel, Clovis, Childebert, Catherine de Medicis. The hearts and innards of the kings of France – in old tobacco tins in an Ikea bookshelf. The infant Louis. And a perfunctory nod to Marie Antoinette because, after all, it takes a great deal of work to screw things up so badly.
Really, it was all about the Merovingians for me. The rest did their best, I suppose, but it’s not like they really matter.
And the Pantheon. A miserable little place: cold, like Washington D.C., I suppose, without the overblown sleaze. Really, I could care less about the Cult of syphilitic ‘Great Men’ that passes for French history but there were a few notables who deserved a bended knee and bowed head: Voltaire, Hugo, and Dumas.
Entering the sunlight once again from the Pantheon I could see across 3 Arrondisements to the Eiffel Tower as it teased the rain clouds.
And the Catacombs of Paris, just metres below one of the most bustling and lively places on Earth. The Ville des Morts, with endless kilometres of tight, winding tunnels and long, straight boulevards. The walls beside me were five feet high and (de?)composed of innumerable skulls and the ends of long bones, arranged in patterns and pictures. Behind these walls: heaped rib bones, arms, legs, pelvises and shoulder blades; in shards and whole, shovelled in and left to await the Resurrection of the Dead.
Close air, even with the few ventilation gaps in the stonework and the candle to draw it.
Somewhere between 5 and 6 million bodies inhabit the City of the Dead. Chamber after chamber of bones brought by cart and wheelbarrow from the cemeteries of the city. Among them, the dead of the Revolution, the victims of the Terror, saints and sinners, all wheeled down and dumped in a jumble of bone dust and rot.
Somewhere in this well-ordered grab bag that does not respect ability or art: Colbert, Scaramouche ... and Rabelais, who, I think, would approve.
And the exit – like the entrance – a narrow circular staircase of stone.
Into that passage my lord and I entered,
To find again the world of light.
And, immediately, cold and tired, we set out to indulge in the pleasures of life.
Oh, I could write as well of foie gras and entrecote du boeuf, of cocktails and the Arc de Triomphe, of the rambling walks through the streets, of riding bicycles across town through mad traffic, of the endless nibbling on pastries and sweets, of the flutes of champagne, of the glasses of biere, of tearing off hunks or banette and wrapping them around Rocquefort and chevre, and, of course, about dinners with friends, the convivial tinkle of amusing chatter, wine, and loaded cutlery poised futilely in front of lips ... but why?
It is merely life.
I managed a few other things as I ambled about Paris, snorting deeply due to the air pollution, and eating jambon cru on baguettes. I made my pilgrimage to Mariage Freres tea shop and purchased a fine tin of SFTGFOP 1 Darjeeling tea with camellia flowers.
I wandered through the Place des Vosges. At least I think it was the Place des Vosges. My knee pain had migrated to my upper right buttock and I had to take a breather by this pretty little fountain.
But, notwithstanding the pains, trials and tribulations of a psycho tea-swilling camera wielder, I managed to wander all over, across a half-dozen Arrondisements and into every little nook and cranny I’ve missed over the years, including Shakespeare & Company, the premier English-language bookstore, alternative lifestyle hangout, poseur pick-up joint in Paris.
And of course, although Paris is Paris, and tourism is an art, Paris has little for me but good friends and fun times. Sitting in street-side cafes, or, more likely, in small flats with endless bottles of booze, eating food off of plate balanced on our laps, with the sound of some pirate jazz techno lounge band on the hi-fi, the smell of American tobacco in the air, the cool Paris breeze tempered by the hot kitchen scents, the convivial tinkle of glasses being filled and the laughter of pretty women reverberating in our guts.
October 28, 2005
The Death of Innocence
-or-
Whence Came the Petit-four?
Travel time.
PARIS
Paris Orly (Sud) to Madrid. I don´t want to go to Madrid. This thought is burning in my fevered brain. But that´s the way my travel plans have worked out.
Been quite ill for a day or two. `I feel a bit light-headed, maybe you should drive´ The airport air conditioning helped – drier and fewer heavy particles in the air.
But the waiting time is deadly. The brutal ticking of the clock. Plane time is a nightmare of immobility. Damn, I wish I had booked the night train instead.
In a train you can see the movement of time and distance. You feel it more directly.
In a plane you always wait. The wait time accumulates like the drips of Chinese water torture:
Wait to get to the airport. Wait to check in. Wait to go through security. Wait until the plane is ready to board. Wait for the pre-boarders to load. Wait in queue to have your ticket checked. Wait to get onto the aircraft. Wait until the person in front of you has put his bags up and has taken his seat. Wait for other passengers to arrive. Wait for the plane to move. Wait as the plane moves to the runway. Wait until the plane begins to taxi.
Wait until you land.
Wait for plane to slow. Wait until plane gets to the gate. Wait for the ´fasten seat belt´ light to click off. Wait for doors to open. Wait as passengers ahead of you debark. Wait for your bags to appears.
Then, and only then, do you really begin to move.
With other forms of travel, the movement is the thing. You can feel like a traveller. Even small planes have that sense … when you feel every bump and can open a window for the breeze. A large airplane, though, is an iron maiden.
And now the runway, and now the taxiing. I hope not to die in EasyJet´s orange and grey livery.
But the Pyrenees look marvelous from above:
MADRID
Atocha station has a jungle in it. Quite a nice jungle, but it definitely ups the humidity.
My connections have gone well. A good transit system, if a bit of a warren to get through.
I have managed to book a slightly earlier train. To do so I had to upgrade to first class. I managed to scoop a 25% discount on that, though, as I have an international connection, so it only ended up costing me €25 more. But for that €25 I got access to the club lounge, with all the booze and food that such luxury affords.
Legado de Yuste beer … tasty.
ENROUTE: La Mancha
I could get used to travelling club class. A fine meal, a few belts of Cardhu, an International Herald Tribune to read.
I feel remarkably better. I think I managed to sweat my fever out in the lounge and the quiet train ride has helped me. Well, quite quiet. A few hyper-obese businessmen (shirt buttons straining over remarkably round bellies) insist on bellowing into cell phones. Why do so many Spanish people have awful voices?
Unfortunately, it is night. I cannot see La Mancha as I rocket through. How many Don Quixotes am I missing? How many haggard Rocinantes? Where is Sancho Panza? The train glides through the blackness and I think I´ll order another Scotch.
SEVILLE
Late night in tapas bar. Former prostitute bar that has recently become a ´retro´bar, merely by closing shop one day and reopening the next.
3 AM. Tom poses an interesting question: In London, years ago, Bronnie was the least serious drinker of the bunch of us. Yet she would think nothing of bringing two bottles of wine home and making an evening of it. So … if she was the least serious drinker, how much were the rest of us drinking?
My shirt is soaked through. Must to bed. But first, a Pernod in the one bar still open between here and home.
October 29, 2005
From darkness to light.
I have plenty of black and white film, but I cannot use it here. The vibrancy, the colour of Andalucia plays across me in a great wash of joy. If Paris is a thin beauty swaying along a gravel path with a cigarette hanging off her fingernails, Seville is a group of schoolchildren running riot in a playground.
Paris managed to be all that Paris can be, but something desperately bleak followed me through its streets.
And I looked, and behold a pale horse: and his name that sat on him was Death, and hell followed with him.
Not Paris´s fault (but the audacity of charging €4 for a small bottle of Coca-Cola is staggering), and not the fault of any of my friends there. I had a good time, but the fever that sliced through my veins and the overall monochrome of the place smeared me across its face.
And to then emerge in Seville!
I can hardly believe this place: city buses barrelling down streets so narrow that I have to duck to avoid getting clobbered by the side mirror; every woman more stylish and beautiful than the one before; lopsided streets, sidewalks, buildings, people.
The Alcazar. It is exactly how I would design my own house, given a few dozen acres.
This place makes me whistle jaunty little tunes as I amble along.
October 29, 2005
I don´t know how many of you are fans of Frederico Garcia Lorca
Playing her parchment moon
Precosia comes
along a watery path of laurels and crystal lights.
but Andalucia makes sense when you see it through his words.
I am afraid of being, on this shore,
a branchless trunk, and what I most regret
is having no flower, pulp, or clay
for the worm of my despair.
November 2, 2005
The Seville night is warm, the streets bustling at 2AM, 3AM, all hours. People have a favourite bar and sit outside it all night drinking.
Tom’s place is neat the Alameda de Hercules, where people gather with bags of booze and drink with their friends.
First night was spent at an old monastery, listening to electronica while Eraserhead played above the old altar. Not exactly the greatest bit of art the world has ever seen, but cold beer, hot night.
We wandered in a broken garden on the banks of the river, climbed over a fence onto a concrete overhead walkway overgrown with rotting vegetation. The old Moorish tower gleamed in the city night.
Back to meet friends at a bar.
Sleeping in, marble floors, white walls. City noises of construction, transsexual prostitutes fighting. High ceilings, wooden shutters keeping the Andalucian sun at bay.
Seville bright, full of bold Lego colours
Cathedral insanely complex in scope. Supposedly they decided to build a cathedral of such immensity that future generations would consider them mad. I don’t think they were mad, but they certainly were drunk.
Gaudiness and the gold of the Americas built this place.
The church tower is like a ziggurat turned in on itself. No stairs, just a long ramp to get to the top. And the tremendous gothic roofs. Courtyards with Seville orange trees all glowing in the Autumn afternoon sun, vivid and emblazoned on my memory like a technicolour dream.
---
The Real Alcazar … this is how I would design my own home if I had a few dozen acres to spare. Open, bright, patios, courtyards, colours, DESIGN, fountains, pools, birdsong deafening in the gardens.
While prowling around the back corridors and empty patios I stumbled across an older Spanish gentleman taking his siesta in the afternoon heat. I love this picture not only for the sense of the subject but the immensity of the shuttered windows. Look at the sheer sense of space!
In Alameda de Hercules. Dirt. Dirt. Dirt. Dirt. Drunks. Potheads. Ancient statues of Hercules and Julius Caesar.
My kind of town. Decayed beauty.
Flies. Endless flies around my face, my arms.
Bums giving parking advice.
Took off to Roman city remains at Italica. Vile countryside. Piles of dirt, scrubby ground, hastily constructed buildings that sag and lean.
The Roman amphitheatre and old roads were perfectly peaceful. Cool breeze coming in over the trees and stones. A young couple taking wedding photos …
—-
Seville is a city of dirty, seedy little alleys, but with strong flashes of colour, of light, of wit. It is Truman Capote, perhaps: disreputable, but you would never miss one of its parties.
---
Paris is stone, Seville is dirt. God, I just want to sink my feet into some green grass.
---
Sitting at a bar in a Cordoba park and allowing the flies to settle on me. Drinking beer and listening to Christian evangelicals sing songs as they dance in a big circle.
The Cordoba Mestiqa is best experienced at the M.C. Escher museum in The Hague. That doesn’t replace the real thing, but the experience of the patterns was best captured by Escher. Life doesn’t hold a candle to the idea. No, not right. It is vivid in life; however, it achieves a sort of Platonic Ideal in Escher.
Just read a letter written by Christopher Columbus.
Columbus was wrong in some fairly big ways.
November 2, 2005
Last night in Seville.
Went to a bar that Fatima’s family has owned since 1670. ‘El Rinconcillo’
Old bottles, pre-revolutionary vodka, a row of Canadian Club bottles that I haven’t seen since the 1970s. High ceilings, walls stacked to rafters with wine and booze.
Old men, sculptable faces. Bartender was weedy little man, looked a bit like a congenital idiot. Piece of chalk behind ear, wrote sums on the bar.
We had various platters of cured ham; old man with whippet-thin blade held a leg up by the trotter and sliced off paper thin wafers of ham. Old Manchego cheese. Glasses of wine and beer. Sausages each with a glowing white blob of fat just off-centre. The greasy, meaty taste: rich, like melting butter freshly made.
Tapas are often greasy, fried things: whole little fish battered and fried. Croquettes of ham and cheese. We went to another place for more … refined … tapas. Partridge pate, foie, etc. etc.
Ended up in a ramshackle bar. Flamenco singers, faces contorted, hands clawing at the air, AI AI AI AI AI AI AIIIIIIIII!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! I DIIIIIIIIIIEEEEEEEEEEEEEEE eeeeeeee … God, I love that. When get home, must put on all my Camaron de la Isla.
November 2, 2005
Travel again.
Different from last time in Europe. It has taken me a while to realize that I can just grab a cab to go places instead of spending hours trying to figure out which bus to take.
But trains and planes. What the hell has happened to us? What is with the proliferation of ‘classes’ in the travel industry? Good God. What ever happened to 1st class, 2nd class, 3rd class? Certainly they are somewhat derogative, but they made sense.
Now. Now, we have ‘marketable’ names. Which of these is more expensive:
Club class
Express class
Hospitality class
World class
Traveller class
Priority class
Traveller class
Arrange in order of status, please.
November 3, 2005
Just stood in the forecourt of the British Museum as the sun poked through the rainclouds and the fresh-mown grass smells wafted across the lawn. The slight hint of roasting chestnuts from just beyond the gates. Standing beside a monstrous pillar.
Great public buildings. Grand entrances. We don't do them anymore, probably due to the lack of space. An entrance has to be planned.
St. Peter's in Rome was magnificent before Mussolini got his hands on a bulldozer. The great plaza designed by Michelangelo was an enormous open space hemmed in by a medieval town. A visiot had to walk through endless tiny streets and winding paths and suddenly found himself in the largest square on Earth, with St. Peter's Basilica rising above him. Mussolini bulldozed a great avenue leading to the square so you see it from miles away and you lose the sense of awe and space.
The British Museum ... the reading room is now open to the public and that is slightly sad because there was a certain cachet when you needed an EXCUSE to go in and you could sit in the chair where Marx wrote Das Kapital. Oh well.
So, in London I am.
The first two hours in town saw me hit the Lamb and Flag for a pint of Courage (20p more than previously -- used to be the last pub in Central London with a pint of Courage less than £2) and another pub for a pint of Pride.
Then the Pillars of Hercules for a pint of Theakston's Old Peculiar.
My old hang outs. I have been running around for the past 48 hours, trying to get it all. Pork buns from the Kowloon restaurant. Cheese and Onion pasties from Greggs. Endless pints of Pride. Bags of crisps. Pizza.
Despite my initial misgivings on arrival, it is good to get back to the Old Town. The Big Smoke. The REAL Big Smoke.
London is the sort of place that just cannot not exist. Like those literary figures who take on a life of their own, far beyond the books they inhabit: Sherlock Holmes, Don Quixote, D'Artagnan, even Harry Potter; these figures HAD to exist. They sprung from the page fully-formed. Likewise, London. This city is iconic and has a life far beyond that of any other city. It just is. Like the City Everlasting, the Restaurant at the End of the Universe, the Unseeing Eye, London is, and the world cannot exist without it.
So, I got to Mullins & Westley (Segars and Snuff) only to discover that they no longer made their own cigarettes!!!
Mambo has been replaced by Paul Frank.
My jazz store is now an Oddbins.
But the astrology bookshop where I purchased all my demonology research materials is still there on Neal St., and the proprietress remembers me.
The Cadenheads whiskey shop still has a few decades to run on its lease. (NOTE TO LK: They have a bottle of 18-year Glentauchers-Glenlivet cask strength for at mere £75.70. Want it?????
Actually, that reminds me of something, but I will post this and then continue in a new one just so I don't lose my work.
November 3, 2005
Spending money is a funny thing for me:
I agonize for months over purchasing a $1200 camera that I could REALLY use (I have seriously hit the wall with my existing cameras and the next step is the Rebel XT 350), but it seems perfectly natural for me to consider purchasing a $350 umbrella here in London.
At my feet is a bottle of Green Spot Irish whiskey that I picked up at Cadenhead's this afternoon. £30. Now I realize that this is a $75 bottle of whiskey. SURE, it is rare. SURE, it will taste like fresh clotted cream and Tiptree's Little Scarlet Presernces on a warm scone. SURE, it will count as Duty Free ... but ... but ...
Oh hell, but what? Maybe I should buy the umbrella. AND a shooting stick. After all, how many times in your life do you get the opportunity to own a real, solid, personal umbrella, and a highly utilitarian shooting stick? Of course, there goes next month's rent
And, my friend Torbjorn has, by merest coincidence, become addicted to the SAME sweet vermouth that I came to the UK to buy: Carpano. So I can gt a bottle of that.
Oops, over the duty free limit, and that doesn't count the £75 bottle of Glentauchers.
Ah, it's only money.
November 3, 2005
What is this country coming to?
Laddism reigns supreme (and frequent readers of this blog know my opinions on THAT!), hooliganism is more acceptable than good manners, the government is trying to legislate evil out of existence instead of tackling it, and I just saw a London Transport advert that read:
'From 29 October 2005, our new bendy buses will run on route 38 ...'
BENDY BUSES!!!!! Bendy buses. Holy high rolling mother of God, is this the intellectual level of Londoners? Bendy buses???
Every one else in the whole wide world has managed to come up with an articulate, ADULT name for these. Hell, even in North America, where the average intellectual age of bus riders is 6 and 7/8ths they are referred to as articulated buses.
But Londoners won't understand anything but 'Bendy buses'.
Lord love a duck.
This is what's wrong with this country. NOBODY expects adult behaviour, adult discourse, adult manners, adult thought. We're all meant to drool vacuously at television, newspapers, magazines and adverts with the brain activity of Mr. Blobby on really good weed.
November 3, 2005
OK ... this endless stream of posts must be getting boring, but this is the problem with using Internet cafes. Especially ones where you pay by the hour, in advance.
£1 for 1 hour. How times have changed.
Anyway, so I've been running around buying books that I cannot get back in Canada, booze that I cannot get back in Canada, shaving soap that I cannot ... you get the picture. But I have also managed a few cultural activities as well.
Let me tell you what I miss about London: picking up the Time Out guide at the beginning of the week and spending a good hour with my feet up, circling everything that I want to see that week. Museum exhibits. Art exhibits. Music.
I miss the CHOICE of art galleries. I miss the sheer number of exhibitions. I miss the variety that comes with the cultural life.
In Vancouver, as a theatre fellow once said, 'it is hard to work in the arts because you are always competing with God;' that is true, but it is an excuse for the intellectual incuriousness of Canadians, particulary British Columbians. We see art and culture as effete attempts by pansies and bicycle-seat-sniffers to turn our children into swishy limp-wrists. So, we ignore it and pretend that we are too busy skiing, surfing, hiking, biking, etc. to support the arts.
But, hell, even if Vancouver could support the arts, it would never produce a space like my favourite wing of the British Museum. The early Near East sculpture always take my breath away.
The cherubim in the Museum. Remember Valentine’s Day? All those darling little baby faced cherubs piercing your heart with an arrow? Delivering candy-coated messages of love?
Well, this is what a cherub actually looks like. Forget your putrid renaissance attempts to soften the blow … if this fellow were going to deliver a Valentine’s message it would be on the working end of a crossbow bolt that would send your heart, half your rib cage, and a serious section of spine right through your lover’s frontal lobes.
I love this fellow. The museum has four.
Notice how from this angle he has five legs. This is the artist’s attempt to capture him from two angles: head on he appears to have two legs, from the side he has four.
Gilgamesh, the ancient cities of Ur and Bablyon, the early days of civilization … who can compete?
So yesterday I went to see how the National Portrait Gallery had been rehung (well done) and I saw the new 13th century acquisitions at the National Gallery (gorgeous and mediocre, respectively).
Today, I got a chance to see a new Lawrence of Arabia special exhibit at the Imperial War Museum, and I took the opportunity to see the permanent Holocaust exhibit that has opened since I left. I'd recommend the first and I would mandate the second.
And it is Autumn, my favourite time of year with chilly gusts of wind, sproadic showers, carpets of leaves, warm days, cool evenings, and the smells of roasting chestnuts, caramel peanuts, and diesel buses.
My friends live in Little Venice, so there are canals, canal boats, barges, leafy streets, and dingy flyovers.
I get to every one of my old pubs I can (The Old Bell, Fleet St.; Lamb and Flag, Covent Garden; Queen and two Coachmen, Cheshire Cheese, etc. etc. etc., drink as much as I can, curse the tourists, flag down buses, and act like the local I once was.
And, in Leicester Square, I paused at the spot where once I saw (hallucinated?) Leviathon rising over the city.
As it turned out, the right arm was a tree branch and lamppost superimposed, and the body was the shadow of one building on the other, but images are potent things.
So, I am in London, again, and I want both to never leave and to run home as fast as I can.
I want London, but I don't want LONDON.
I want to live in it, but not live in it.
I want what I cannot have.
November 4, 2005
The impulse to spend runs amok. A gorgeous reproduction of a Persian nobleman in bas relief can be mine for £175. Sigh. It seems so cheap. 175. It would look fantastic on top of one of my living room bookcases. But. But.
What happened to the days when one could just go to Nineveh, Persepolis, or anywhere and plunder?
The British Museum has not lost its charm.
But, in the end, isn't it all a bit much? All those cases? All that dead air?
It makes me think about my addiction to mediaeval art and architecture. And to church bells: not tinny individual bells (though those have charms of their own), but fleets of bells, sails billowing in the wind and gliding across the rough waves of the rooftops.
Oh ye mortal engines, whose rude throats
Th'immortal Jove's dread clamours counterfeit!
So, a word about cathedrals, about Saint-Chapelle, about flying buttresses and stone lacework:
There is something disheartening about visiting these cathedrals as though they were museums: vast empty halls with artistic corners and immensely high ceilings. Endless hordes of flash-snapping tourists trying to capture the immensity and the detail through their viewfinders or camera phones.
As museum pieces, these cathedrals are like dessicated corpses behind glass: fascinating, evocative, but decrepit, raped, and degraded. A cathedral, a church, from any age—but particularly the delicate Gothic era—needs to be illuminated, full of song, plainchant, music, prayers. Without the human element around which they were constructed they are as cavernous as a derelict train station and nearly as depressing. Cold and hollow.
A Gothic cathedral is the fullest expression of religion. It is the capturing in stone and glass of nature itself, and it is built to loft the songs and prayers of the Faithful into the heavens. It is the soldifying, the calcification of human faith.
Gothic. Everyone who stands at one of these cathedrals is drawn to it, but without necessarily being able to explain why. There is such immensity, such complexity, that they don't know where to begin.
Begin everywhere and anywhere. Wherever takes your fancy. Like following a Moebius strip, or the lines of a spider web, an examination of the detail leads to a method and a final view of the whole.
It is prayer taken form.
Ah, this is crap. I can't easily explain this. Go and see. Observe, but observe with simplicity. You will begin small and little by little be drawn into the entirety.
Generally, architecture is only now beginning again to teach us. Good architecture redeems itself by making what SHOULD have been there actually appear. This is a hard concept to try to explain given that we are all so used to living in boxes without character, crammed with furniture.
Religious architecture has always (almost – not during much of the later 20th century) tried to be redemptive. Churches are beautiful everywhere, not just in the 'great' cities of the world. They were built to be milestones along the Roman roads and the pilgrim trails of Civilization.
So why, now, when we visit them, do we no longer feel that they are ours? No one is closing the doors to us, but, nonetheless, we feel removed from them?
To me, these massive cathedrals are like beautiful young country girls, still radiant in their first days amid the bright lights of the city to which they have been drawn. Unfortunately, too often they share the fate of these girls. What hideous works of beauty.
But they don't have to be that way. These colossal bulwarks were erected to stand against indolence.
In the cool shadows of a church is an atmosphere of studiousness, of timelessness, where music and bells give rhythm to the day. Where heroism, honour, love, devotion are tangible, not mythical.
In them, I feel the balance of nature's chaotic splendour (stone ivy climbing delicate trees) combined with the best strivings of Man: The monstrous trees and waterfalls of nature, the foreboding cliffs and dizzying sky. But also the menhir, the totem pole, the ziggurat, the Mount Meru.
Ah, what pathetic dribblings. This can't work. Photographs of monuments and moments are mute. They do not capture the planes as they slide across each other, the flickers at the periphery of our vision, the roundness of our perception, the way a mote of dust in a beam's light distracts us and leads us to the Virgin's smile.
In the chapel I saw the Virgin holding the Son of God and it seemed to me, in a very warm moment, that every child of every woman is a Son of God.
It seems to be that modern man no longer takes account of the thought of generations. It is difficult for us to think today. It is difficult to address the world not with primitive intuition, but with tradition, with acquired power, with a greedily accumulated treasurehouse of thought. To view the world as a narrative – a great cyclical poem, an epic, a mantra, a chant, a tremendous funereal wail, an elegy – all these and more.
To stand not in ignorant awe and wonder, but in communion: in communion with both the living and the dead.
November 5, 2005
And. Home.
Well, it is certainly swell to once more have a place to myself: my own bed, my own kitchen.
But, most of all, the greatest, most comfortable feeling in the world is to have my own bathroom again.
Gods above and devils below, I love my bathroom.
November 7, 2005
And it is done.
I’ve cut my jetlag in half and then half again. Hopefully, another good night’s sleep will put paid to it.
Funny thing about this trip – I was acutely aware of how little it affected me. I was supposed to come back refreshed and invigorated, but I am really just cruising along at exactly the same level I was at before I left.
I suppose I am a touch more at peace inside, despite the best efforts of my colleagues.
Funny thing about travel … it changes over the years. Money has something to do with it: instead of spending hours trying to navigate from point-to-point on buses that don’t come or don’t go, I now tend to just hop in a taxicab. It usually costs only a few dollars and I’m where I want to be within minutes.
So, too, has the sense of travel changed. As the years have passed, I decreasingly feel the sense of ‘foreignness’ that I once felt: not so much a bemused alien as an amused bystander.
But what does get magnified are those tedious little details of travel. I’ve encountered them so often now that they are not obstacles, but unnecessary speedbumps on a deserted road. I have less patience with them because I know just how pointless they really are.
Of course, so too in my job do I get the same feeling of annoyance with the sleeping policemen of bureaucracy. People are rarely malevolent, they just don’t want to be arsed.
Was it worth it? Of course. Do I need to go back any time soon? No. I think a trip through the lower Americas is in order.
But how often does one get the chance to be a dog of war? As I walked away from Paris, the city rose in flames. I felt something more than Man, less than God.