You go, dentures!
» Saturday, October 30, 2004

Some guy on the radio is telling me that he and some unspecified others are not going to sit in silence, they're not going to live in fear. How long is that song going to infest the airwaves? I find it unsettling when the bagpipes kick in and it becomes clear that this is some Anglo-Saxon call to battle, but to battle what? Silence and fear? What does it mean to battle silence and fear? Where? To what end? To whose benefit, aside from filling the trenchcoat pockets of that singer? Do I battle silence whenever I order a beer or phone out for Thai food? Do I battle fear when I steal someone's place in a queue? If that guy's not going to make it clear, I'm just going to fight my battles wherever I can.

I can't even remember when that song came out. It must have appeared somewhere around '89-'91, when pop music really became infected by that messianic strain of power ballad, with Elton John professing his Belief In Love and Michael Jackson using a lot of dry ice to perform his Earth Song. Remember when protest songs protested something specific? When singers took a few syllables out of their verses to drop some choice names or places? I wonder if it's possible to trace the mutation of the pop protest song into the Affirmation Song? If I had to pick a watershed ("Oooh, I think I'll take that nice watershed with the recling chairs and the rotating jets") for the shift from genuine protest to airy encouragement, I'd vote for Band Aid. You know something's wrong when the short answer to "Do They Know It's Christmas" is "Yes, Mr. Geldof und Freunden, European colonial powers not only fractured a number of self-organized African societies into unstable but politically malleably nation-states, they also introduced traditional Christian holidays, so yeah, they know it's Christmas, you condescending gang of fucks". Neal Ascheron mentions in a recent article in the New York Review of Books that we seem to need the horror and degradation of Africa to fuel our ever-diminishing stores of shock and compassion. We don't need to take action; we just need its resonant call. As for the American version of Band Aid, "We Are The World" was probably guilty of pushing Michael Jackson over into the abyss of insanity.

Now Lisa Stansfield is telling me that she's been around the world and she, she, she can't find her baby. Worse, it's a live performance and people are applauding. Who applauds that kind of crap? Why not go out and applaud road pylons or sun-faded For Sale notices on hardware store windows? Why not applaud a snappy tweed skirt and matching blouse? Why not go wild with hooting and cheering for a set of dentures in a ditch?

Right then. I'm off to find some false teeth I can really put my faith in.

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when it matters
» Wednesday, October 27, 2004

Last night I discovered what British people do when they want leisurely passage to their European vacations. They take a ferry, land in Belgium/France/Holland, and proceed to buy up all the booze that Europe can produce. How is it that continental Europe has any alcohol to spare for its own cafes and bars? Why aren't the brasseries and Gasthauser deserted and dry? At the Zeebrugge docks I watched Brit car after Brit car open its trunk to reveal the cases of Stella or hard spirits. And once onboard they didn't stop, buying massive amounts on the Pride of Bruges. Britain: drinking Europe dry.

Labels: travel

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from the heart of the Meuse Valley come exhausted Canadians
» Tuesday, October 26, 2004

It's nice to be sitting around in the old section of Brussels, because we just spent several days in what has to be the ugliest shit that Western Europe has to offer. Certainly, there are parts of Eastern Europe that look like huge industrial middens with cities plopped on top of them, but the Meuse Valley offers some serious competition. It's a thirty kilometre-long fart, the rancid body gasses of capitalism exhaling all the way to Huy from the back end of Liege. I can't recall, offhand, ever seeing so many nuclear reactors jockeying for space with chemical dye factories and whatnot. I'll tell you all about it when I get home in five days. Five days! Five days. A quick trip through England and then it's home for me. And you will all get to look at my photographs, the online version of the family vacation slide show.

Until then, content yourself with the fact that western Austrians translate 'backyard' as 'backside,' so if you're quick you can get there soon and have a glass of fresh apple juice from someone's backside. I sure did.

Labels: travel

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austria, I rename thee
» Tuesday, October 19, 2004

Austria, let me dip into your history and rename you Curse of Austria. I spent a week in your Alps, respecting your strange high-altitude customs and walking-stick ways, and nothing went right. Every morning came with a dismaying message, a customs issue, a sick/lazyass interpreter, an inacessible laundromat three towns away, a dialect of German so frightening that the rest of the continent dropped it circa 1500, an expert who consulted brochures during his interview, a heavy fog that descended from the clouds just as we reached the helicopter - and worst of all, utterly bloodless interviewees, survivors of an avalanche that took away their homes and families, from whose voices and eyes no emotion ever slipped. How did I emerge alive? Why am I not dead right now, a crushed mush of pulp under a downed helicopter (we went up a couple of days later), a bit of goo in a crinkled Saab, a weeping wounded mess in a Rankweil gasthaus downing Mohren Brau and pissing off the locals (not dead but good as)? How did I survive and escape to sweet civilized smokestacked Stuttgart? Oh full-day rush hour, oh jammed autobahnkreutz, oh Japanese businessmen and efficient business Englishspeak, I missed you, even you I missed, oh yes.

Labels: travel

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a rundown
» Saturday, October 16, 2004

Highly idiosyncratic summary of where I've been and what I've seen:

Long-legged flies tasting tablecloths in Triberg, Germany. The houseflies here have longer legs and it unnerves me.

A run of Playmobil-looking sculptures along the highways between Lyon and Marseilles. Bright elves engaged in acrobatics for our amusement. What for?

Graded clouds sloping into valleys in Vorarlberg. They look like gigantic arrows pointing at hotels and bars.

Citroens and Mercedes trucks plugging along mountain roads.

A roomful of helicopter pilots in heavy red coveralls drinking espressos at a helicopter hangar high up in the Alps.

My time's up.

Labels: travel

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wenn ich 'Kultur' höre
» Thursday, October 14, 2004

TALKING WITH THE TEUTONS

Here's a conversation I had with a Swiss border guard yesterday:

Guard: "Guten Tag. Longgermanword, bitte schön".
Palinode: "Bitte nochmal?"
Guard: "Longgermanword and Evenlongerone, bitte".
Palinode: "Sprechen Sie Englisch?"
Guard: (without missing a beat)"Sprechen Sie Deutsch?"

(A pause in which you can feel the international tensions build. A long line of cars stretches out behind our rented Saab into the Schwarzwald mist. Ahead, the steel and concrete public works of Switzerland wait patiently for my long-dead bureaucratic German to sit up at its desk and produce the correct terms.)

Palinode: "Paßkarte?"
Guard: "Bitte schön".

(Then my German sits up straight and starts pulling the right files. I explain who we are, where we're going and why, discovering in the process that the phrase 'Direkttransit' transcends languages and produces the desired 'please proceed' gesture, that lazy twirling finger indicating the Autobahn and the whole of Austria. We drive off, having satisfied the Swiss customs people that we can be trusted to drive through their country and into Austria without causing any trouble or poisoning the Bodensee or anything like that. On our way through St. Gallen we stop briefly to poison the Bodensee.)

ON BEING FOREIGN

Since I began travelling for a living I've been to a number of places around the world, but Germany and Austria are the only places in which I've felt like a foreigner. People stare at us with curiosity and sometimes hostility, dogs single us out for barking, shopkeepers refuse to understand my German. At first I thought that my Deutsch was far worse than I'd imagined, but after a few halting and friendly conversations with various folks, I realized that some people here aren't interested in understanding me. It's as simple as that. They hear the foreign tones in my voice (or the Turkish cast of my skin?) and their faces shut down.

Worse than that is the low-grade paranoia that these places engender. In Holland we were treated with courtesy, in France with apathy, but in Germany we were watched. No kidding. One Sunday morning we went out filming in a neighbourhood of Ludwigshafen (right across the Rhein from Mannheim) and a middle-aged man in a leather jacket kept an eye on us, affecting a casual air that failed to convince after ninety minutes. Yes, for an entire Sunday morning this anonymous German citizen had nothing better to do than stand on street corners and pretend that he wasn't following us around. There must be a German word for this. "The pleasure derived from pretending to be a secret policeman around foreign film crews". Stupid self-appointed self-policing freaks. I took pictures of him whenever he glanced at us.

Maybe he was a secret policeman. On sleepy Sunday duty.

Labels: travel

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for some
» Saturday, October 09, 2004

For some, love comes suddenly and dies instantly. For others, internet access behaves like that.

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things to see in europe if you're me
» Thursday, October 07, 2004

Chickens furtively crossing the road in the tiny 900 year old town of Ouiwekirk. They peek out from behind shrubs and take off over the brick-paved streets. Once they're safely on the other side they look disappointed.

Windmills. Endless freaking fields of windmills.

Naked (topless) ladies on the beaches of southern France. I didn't stop to investigate, but you know, I saw naked ladies.

A Turkish man in a city in Northern France, shouting insults at me and Greg because he thought we were Dutch. He shook his finger at us as we drove by while his friends pointed at our Netherlands license plate.

Frejus, southern France: Set behind a modern metal bookshelf in a town hall office, an old wooden door inlaid with iron. We open the door and find ourselves in an annex built in the thirteenth century, with a spiral staircase leading to the roof.

A blackberry bush growing by Roman ruins. We pick a few. I learn and instantly forget the French word for blackberry.

The remains of a gigantic concrete dam set in the mountains of Provence. Chunks of pink concrete the size of station wagons are scattered for miles along the dry riverbed. Pieces of iron rebar half an inch thick bend out in spaghetti-like curves from the concrete chunks. A huge rusted bolt sticks out from the ground as if it's got some purpose in being there.

A crowd, a swarm of people massing in front of a pizzeria in Cannes, waiting for the glassy-eyed doorman to snap into life and usher people inside. TV industry execs, lost documentarians, brittle-boned models with eggshell faces, shift their weight back and forth. According to those who know, this is the best pizza to be had in southern France. Amazingly, we get a seat on the patio in ten minutes. Every twenty minutes someone gets hit by a motorcycle, screams obscenities in any one of a dozen languages, then keeps on walking. The pizza's nothing special.

That's all I've seen over the last couple of weeks. The rest of the time I've kept my eyes clamped shut for fear of meeting the eyes of Europeans, whose basilisk gaze will turn your heart to brittle glass. No, really, it's true.

Labels: travel

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it's true
» Friday, October 01, 2004

when they say that French waiters are rude. Tonight I had a guy who decided not to understand my serviceable French, not to understand my mush-mouthed and idiosyncratic English, and instead chose to hector us over our choice of bun and switch our salads back and forth until not even we could decide if the 'Salade Marina' had the shrimp. Whatever salad I ordered turned out to be draped in bacon and cream cheese.

The good thing about dealing with crap waiters and foodstuffs that always, always contain internal organs is that I'm doing it in the south of France. And damn, is it ever nice here. It's disorienting to go in less than 48 hours from the near-frigid winds blowing off the Oosterschelde to an off-season resort with a seaside view, but it's, you know, the good kind of disorientation. I'm not going to tell you about the first hotel we checked into, with its standard of service that would make a barracks inviting, but I will tell you that I found an old contact lens in the BUNK bed in which I spent one comatose night by the A8 motorway between Fréjus and Cannes.

Labels: travel

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