Europe Travels 2005
Part 1: London, Bruegge and Amsterdam
8/12
Well, my first European blog entry. It's gonna be lame right now because I can't upload pictures until later. It's the first day and we're on a plane all day. The trip to London is like eight hours long, so we got to watch some movies. My best impression of Doug Benson (http://www.bobanddavid.com/doug.asp?artId=192) follows:
Fever Pitch
Two-hours of baseball would have been less boring than this. I never thought I'd say that about anything. I am amazed by Jimmy Fallon's acting, it reminds me that while he can be funny, he can also display emotions ranging all the way from giggling to just-about-to-giggle. I can't wait to never see it again!
Madagascar
The plot may have been predictable, but Cedric the Entertainer and Andy Richter still managed to be pretty funny. Probably. I didn't watch it; I was busy trying to sleep.
My parents managed to nod off, but Jon and I more or less stayed up reading and listening to music. I stayed up partly out of interest in what I was reaidng and partly out of a restless curiosity as to how this trip would turn out. I haven't been on a family vacation for years, and now to get together again, with me living in Seattle and Jon in New York to act as though we are still a tight family unit. The strange thing is, we are. More so now than we were before, when we lived together. The years of being apart have begun to bend our selves back toward each other so that we each will it seperately, especially now that the we are making a trip so firmly in the shadow of the end of all of these vacations, and the long walk of the bier, the snowy funeral home in Ohio still crisp in out minds from late December. Jon has changed since then, I can sense it in how easy he is around dad. There is a quality of mercy that has established itself in him.
***
My theme song for riding the plane across the Atlantic has got to be "Blood Bleeds" by the Helio Sequence. The light synth pads that structure the song are as airy, weightless and comforting as the design concepts pursued uniformly by every airport and airplane I've been in, with the happy exception of the Phoenix airport. They had flat ceilings made out of varnished wood and even deerhornes on the wall, or at least did last time I was there in the mid-ninties. I can't describe the surprise of getting off an airplane and walking into a low-ceilinged building with ranching motifs. They must have changed it; I can't believe any airport would display bones now.
With the time-change and the red-eye flight we arrived at ten in the morning. This means we've all be up for like twenty hours already and have a full day ahead. Walking out, the security people were so impressed with my beard and cropped head that they wanted to get a look at everything I was taking with me! I've never had such curious fans. We check into a small hotel downtown near the with adorable if somewhat constrictive stairways and walk out to see Buckingham Palace and the changing of the guard. We just missed the changing so instead we got to see a dissarayed gaggle of guards in traditional hats, lazily walking back with the music stands, the tall fur of their hats swaying in the August heat. It wasn't an impressive display, but the hats sure were. I wonder if they have stables near Buckingham Palace where the hats have their own stalls and hay, and get fed better than most hats do. After they get old, they take them out to fields with a bunch of other huge furry hats where they can run free for a few years before they die. We walked across the crowded square to the parks nearby. The wind had picked up and I got some photographs of a field where many identical canvas park chairs were placed in rows. The wind was moving the canvas in the empty chairs so that it was visible when looking at the many chairs as broad ripples, punctuated by the occasinal sedient Londoner. After that we walked around trying to keep each other awake. London is an old-fashioned, expensive place, full of buildings which look more like buildings from Beatles albums that any city I've been in before. It is amazingly free of tall buildings, and the feeling of openness gives the illusion we are not actually in the center of one of the world's largest cities. It makes me wonder what it must be like in Calcutta, or Brazil, where the single-level slums stretch for miles in every direction. We decide to nap at about five thirty, until dinner. Then sweet, long sleep.
8/13
We went out to see the Tate museum early today. The Tate (www.tate.org.uk) is a old power station converted into a contemporary gallery. The center is hollow, built around the large factory floor still fitted out with impossibly huge hooks. What they needed hooks that large to lift is beyond me. The center is a broad and wide open floor of architecture models and prints, with the rest of the museum raised along the sides. Across the Thames from the museum is the old White Tower where the King of England used to serve, as well as a modern skyscraper, apparently very new, which looks like a vibrator pointing heavenwards. Jon and Laura are eager to see the Modern galleries, but I just walk around with Neven for a few minutes, then he is off to see something on the fourth floor. I wander first into a room rigged with metal sculptures high up near the lights. The shadows cast by them create the structure; a labyritnth of shadows rending the room into a curious syntax. Some of the shadows the metal characters create curious effects. I wonder at the words I've written here and if they operate in the same way. I have been calling my parents by their first names, because I feel childish calling them mom and dad when I'm writing. But I don't often refer to them by the first names when talking to them. It's not one or the other; I don't feel comfortable with either. For now I'll go back to mom and dad, there plenty of time in the trip to make up my mind about something this simple.
I was eventually drawn to Pierre Alechinsky's work. I hadn't heard of him before, and I found his strange drawings to be overly intimate for the Modernist they hinted at him being, too crude for the pre-modern. He playful box-like mechanical structures seemed like cubist wildflowers in black and white, or stalagmites underneath a city train.
Afterwards we saw the Globe Theatre, lookng just as I thought it would along the side of a busy causeway of bikers and bike riders, across the street from a Starbucks and a bank. We didn't get to see a play there, but we did chat up an older guy who said that he had seen thirty-something Shakespeare plays, some of them seven times each. This was a pretty interesting start to the conversation until, alakayday, he launched into a long soliloquey as to why he payed what he payed the IRS for his property taxes (clue: there's a loophole). Oh, I am fortune's fool! We ate lunch in a bar and I got fried shrimp. It was to be the finest fare I had in England. I'm not trying to rap England for caustic cuisine; it was possibly the best bar food I've ever had. The beer is good too. I've been drinking Kronenberg 1664, and my fear of drinking warm beer has been allayed. Its not so bad, especially with the pilsners. We also found a black ship that is apparently very old and famous and currently closed for business, a lifesized cutout of pirates and the grafitti: "what are you looking at?"
I hope we get to see a play while we are here. Apparently the playhouse is always showing Shakespeare and supports itself entirely on its productions. The last time I've seen a Shakespeare play has been, not counting an absurd but hilarious drum-circle rendition of King Lear some hippies put on in Colorado Springs, since I attended to Shakespeare in the park series with my parents, sneaking rum in my coke, the smell of starch from my mothers laundery, the twilight of Kentucky, sweltering.
Nick at the Tate theme:
"At the Hop" by Devendra Banhart
8/14 & 15
Doing this blog is more difficult than I thought it would be. One can never get enough computer time. They have radically different electrical plugs than America here, which I didn't know about, so I always have to find an adapter and there are so many different international plugs there are occasionally as many as three adapters strung together, and my computer is running on faulty batteries.
The days have gone slowly, functionally. We all meet downstairs and eat the hotel breakfast. The pretty Slovakian girl, who I've found is named Petra, serves us runny eggs if we want them, and we all drink coffee and eat yogurt while we talk about what will do that day before splitting up or proceeding together. My mother has the most suggestions, she even wants to join me to travel to the London Library to view the historical text archives, and join my brother at all the art museums. She seems to be inexhaustible. All talk is turned toward where will be going and seeing, and thankfully not toward why we are here and what we cannot see again. I don't want to broach the topic, but I've been wondering about it myself, if my Grandmother would have enjoyed these things, if she was ever here herself. Maybe I will ask my Mother about these things. Then again, maybe not. Why are we here after all, thousands of miles from home? Why am I writing this at all? Was it to honor, to remember, to forget? I want to say a little of all of these. My Grandmother would be proud of Jon's abilities as an artist, which she never saw blooming in the years when her mind was still sound and she wasn't so forgetful. She would love to see us here walking among the galleries filled with great artists, themselves cemetaries of sorts, to honor the impulse that drew her continually into that upper room in her house with an unworking television and easel, the natural light from above and the surreptitious awareness of cats, the thin plant she always kept to one side, and the colors seperated one by one.
We are in a bubble here, while London life moves all around us. Petra knows what I mean, she is in a sort of bubble too, saving up money so she move back home to solvency. What led her here, I wonder? Her English isn't good enough for me to ask, and she's the only person I've met on London so far. It is easier to live like this, detached from daily concern and see the improbable pattern of cause and effect like spokes following each other around some hub that we are forever thrust away from by some kind of gravity. A map of the world has everything to do with the taste of a lime; the shape of tuperware has everything to do with Japanese whaling boats; my spending two weeks in Europe with my family and writing this now has everything to do with a man contemplating the pleasantness of a few more cigarettes and glasses of scotch before driving home along the snowy Ohio streets near Christmas time.
On the second morning I check my email and find that I've been offered a job as a travel writer. I tell my parents over breakfast and we make a toast with orange juice. I don't think I'll take it, but its a promising start to my new job search in Chicago. In the afternoon we find a Beatles store. It does have everything beatles. Next to it is a competing, or complementing, if you like, Elvis store which has a few things Elvis. The woman who owns the Elvismart was friendly and said she was going to Memphis for the first time in a few weeks to visit Graceland. She was excited. She assumed I had been there since I was from Kentucky and I decided it was easier to go along with it. I wished her luck and bought a lighter. A few doors down from the Elvis store is the Sherlock Holmes store which was full of silly expensive crap.
***
The Tower of London looms next to the Thames, wizened and crumbling whilst the vibrator-shaped skyscraper continues being built up nearby. I wore a jacket with my usual t-shirt and jeans for the occasion. It seemed appropriate somehow. We walked around the castle to the front gate and got in a line for a tour. The crowds were pleasantly free of infants and groups, and we were quickly on our way with a royal guard who quickly proved to be a loud, mildly vulgar older man apparently unafraid and even quite fond of describing the more horrific happenings of the castle in graphic detail, much to our amusement. I'm afraid we missed quite a lot of the castle ground from inattention simply because his stand-up routine was so well honed it was often more interesting than the grounds themselves. After the tour we all split up. I walked a long rampart along the East Tower, which I found to be the most appealing to the eye, decked out in a sylian green and containing the bedchamber of several of late Kings. Up above I looked out over the crowds milling on the courtyards, the supernumerary crows, and among them my mother. She looked a bit lost, as though she were looking for one of us, but didn't know where to look. A faint and unexplainable panic ran through the back of my mind. I wondered whether or not I should walk down to speak with her, but I remained up above, scanning the castle walls. Eventually I went down. My father had met with her first and we soon found Jon waiting by the exit, ready to leave.
Nick Walking the Regal Grounds Theme:
"Nightime/Anytime" by the Constantines
The Black Crowes might also be a good choice of music for today. There is a legend that if the (black) crowes leave the tower's grounds, then the English empire will fall...so of course there would be an army of crows with their wings clipped so they could never leave. They must get fed amply; they are the largest crows I have ever seen in my life: small dog size, and they even have some sort of furniture on parts of the grounds for them so sit on.
8/16 & 17
We took a train up to Oxford in the afternoon. Getting in late, we walked around the town to find a restaurant, trying to reign in my father who always wants to find a better restaurant. We settled on a Chinese joint across the street from a movie theatre and ate well and cheap. We headed straight back and went to sleep. Just the walk between downtown Oxford and our hotel was a good walk, which was welcome after being in a train all day. The town seemed very pretty in the evening, the sort of place one dreams of living out their old age. The buildings are mostly older, brick with wild verdure creeping up their sides, walls with flowers sprouting our form them, busses and motorcycles buzzing around the winding roads. Our hotel is kind of a dump. Everything smells wierd and the beds are uncomfortable, but it doesn't keep us from sleeping well. The next day we go into the city. My father seems more enamoured with the town than the rest of us and it occurs to me that perhaps he suggested this leg of the trip. It occurs to me that the slide shows I had seen years before showed off parts of this town from a trip my father and mother took shortly after they were married in the mid-seventies, so that was the last time they had been here. My father steers toward some of the older buildings, some of them must be nearly unchanged since when they were here before I was born. Are they thinking about their marriage? Are the dreams they had of their children hidden in he crannies here, to be revisited and held up against the wreckage of twenty five years that is myself? I'll never know, but if there were, they did not dampen my fathers spirits. We walked through the hall of Rhodes scholars and I realized he must have dreamed of his son being welcome here, but had no right to expect it. We walked together and commented on the mosaic featuring President Clinton. I didn't realize that Rhodes scholarships were created to honor American, British and German students who excelled categorically, in order to foster peace between the nations. He points out that Richard Celeste, former Director of the Peace Corps and current president of my Alma Mater was a Rhodes Scholar. My brother and mother have gone on to the garden's the didn't care to join us inside the Rhodes rotunda. My father was as excited in the Rhodes rotunda as I have saw him on the trip, I think. There is something about the recognition of intellectual greatness that stirs him, and I think he must have been insatiable at an earlier age, a chronic studier. We draw apart somewhat on this point. I see this place as a nexus of powerful minds, not necesarily brilliant ones. I am a true son of himself and my mother, the pedant and the art history major. I have Isaac Newton on one shoulder and Devendra Banhart on the other. In our differences I feel like we are closer to an understanding. He knows that I distrust the collusion of money and politics in grand universities like this one, and I know he distrusts the romantic notions of artists concerning the nobility of the "unwashed masses." We spend the rest of the day walking around Oxford, seeing the gardens and the midieval playhouse with sculpted visages surrounding it. Downtown we see the filming of some kind of BBC detective show, and we all spend hours in the University bookstore, my brother showing me books of visual artists that I've never heard of and me looking through broad beautiful books of architectural drawings. We bother scoff at the Banko pamphlets and we both already know what's inside.
Eventually we all split up to wander around campus. I imagine myy mother and father went back to the gardens, and I don't know where Jon went. I needed a break from all the tours, so I found a beer garden with an old tree in the middle of it, opening up to an alleyway that looked ancient. I had brought my book along, Oscar Wilde's Picture of Dorian Grey and read it with a couple of a wheat beers.
The Stone Faces of Oxford Theme:
Bridges & Baloons by Joanna Newsom
8/18-19
We arrive in Brugge just as the rain begins. My mom is back on a winning streak with the hotels she's picked ou. This one is an ancient old building just over the river from downtown. Black water runs through the canal alongside us, so that we can see the hotel's breakfast tables through a window only a foot or so above water line. Other tourists are puttering around the rough cobbled street. A statue of Jan Van Eyck stares at the channel that leads away from the city toward the coast in the north. They should have let the poor statue look at the street; the women here are typically beautiful. We ate an amazing dinner at a French restaurant nearby. I had a glazed beef with bernaise sauce. Amazing. We retired after dinner, and I took a walk to smoke cigarettes on the old streets, running under covered doorways when the rain began to come heavily and hoping noone would emerge from their homes at an inoportune moment to find me on their doorstep. The next day the rains continued to come down heavily. We took a cab to the biggest local gallery that featured Dutch portraitures and a weak smattering of contemporary art. Jan Van Eyck's work present was amazing, really good portraits that make you curious about the people. Most of the others were kinda stilted; perhaps it was the rain waking the melankolik in me; people watching was more interesting. "Either you can't see the paintings through the people, which is awful, or you can't see the people through the paintings, which is worse"-Oscar Wilde
Brugge is beautiful in an old-worldy way. It's what I wish germany would look like. We only spent an evening and a morning there, which is just as well because the town is really expensive, its pretty much just restaurants, Flemish art galleries and designer clothing stores. The downtown has this castle/townhall with a clock in the middle that looks medeival and all green & gold when lit up at night in front of a huge cobble-stone square with a statue in the middle, where all the restaurants around the rim of it have broad tents in front so people can sit outside and drink beer and sing drunkenly in German despite the rain. Really beautiful city. Not much else to say other than that.
Nick Watching Statues Watching Bruegge Theme:
"Panda" by Dungen.
Who might be singing in Flemish. Or not.
8/20-22
Before we pull in to Amsterdam I see tons of modern electricity-generating windmills on the horizon. Sweet progress!
I smoked no pot in Amsterdam. It was tempting, what with everyone I asked about the city telling me that the pot would make me immobile, and mobility is for suckers. They do love to get high in Amsterdam though, I saw way more older folks getting stoned and more younger folks getting stoned, more folks really than I have ever seen getting stoned getting stoned. They were everywhere, it was like half the city-the half we were in-was going through a serious drug phase in their lives right as we got there. I turned a corner and saw a small gaggle of 50-70's-ish women in a blunt huddle in the middle of the sidewalk. Damn. Also saw a "The Doors" psych-rock tribute bar/coffee shop, and a buncha shrines to...guess who...Bob Marley! Unfortunately, even in the doors and bob sites they were playing only Paul Oakenfold, or something else that sounds exactly like it. They seemed to be playing trance or techno or whatever everywhere, so the novelty of knowing you were in a bar full of stoned people was kinda downplayed by the sad homogeneity of the scene. Oh well. People were having a lot of fun, at least.
OK to be fair to Amsterdam I think if I'd been here with some friends or something I would have enjoyed it more, there are definitely lots of distractions here that are not of the worst kind. Apparently the worst kind of distractions are dancing in the neon glow on the east side of the "old church." My fifteen year old self would have been loving this place, but being a geezer and all, I was ready to relax, so I was not that excited when I realized Amsterdam is possibly the last great refuge of the rave scene. I guess thats what happens when you get a collision of the self-destructive expression of middle-class boredom we call spring break in America (which apparently in Europe is simply called Amsterdam) and the disco-revival flair for dressing like a space-pimp that I thought was only in weird magazine ads...bring them together, add about twenty landfill loads of trash thrown all over the place and you have one very special place!
I'm not kidding about the trash, this was the most surprising thing. Trash was thrown everywhere, and gathered into little hills all over the sidewalks. People would just throw bags of trash out in front of their homes, so every once and a while you pass mountains of trash bags on the side of the road. Besides that it was just ubiquitous, so much so that I got hit on the legs a few times from buses driving past and spraying plastic bottles and cans out at you the way they might splash water out of a puddle if it was raining.
The canals and the crooked older dutch buildings that lined them were very cool, with all types of old wierd roofs and every building has a hook on their front gable so they can hoist furniture up in through their windows. Apparently the houses are so slim that is the only way to get yr couches in. Also many of the streets were lined with canals, in turn filled with boats full of people partying and laying around, just drifting downstream. This one guy fitted out a Cadillac shell over some kind of boat that he drives around the canals, so it looks like he's driving a car. Someone else put a train car on a barge and cruises that around.
The stuff I saw in Amsterdam was pretty cool though; the Anne Frank museum and the botanical gardens. The AF house showed you were they lived a little about why, and who helped them and everything. For those not in the know, AF's dad owned the place they were hiding in. It was a jam & pepper factory. His former workers hid him and his family and were eventually arrested when someone told the Germans they were up there. You can still see the pictures Anne cut out from magazines and put all over her walls in her former room. The coolest thing though was this big room at the end of the tour where cover first-amendment topics in little 5-minute presentations and then allow everyone in the room to vote on whether to side with anti-descrimintation or anti-free speech. Mostly people sided with free-speech, on topics such as should religious zealots who preach hatred be allowed to run web sites; should skinheads in Germany be allowed to hold demonstrations outside of Jewish temples, etc. The only one which sided with anti-discrimination was whether or not to ban rowdy soccer fans from yelling racial epithets at games. The footage from that was really shocking, and showed huge throngs of people chanting "[black soccer player] is a monkey's prick" and "right on Hamas/give the Jews the gas!" which was really fucked up because you see footage that's really recent and you see hundreds of people yelling this crazy shit. Well, you won't see that kind of things in Kentucky and people think of us being some sort of hotbed of intolerance. I've heard more over-the-top racist comments from bar folk here ("sometimes we play spot the white bloke in a crowd. Sometimes you can't can you? Can you?", this guy said to me out of the blue while we were talking about the changing of the guard) then I ever have in KY. Of course people are unlikely to bring that sort of thing up to a stranger in KY even if they believe it. Even in Amsterdam I saw a few of the unlikely skinheads, and the AF museum showed a huge swastika someone painted on the statue of Anne in front of the museum a few years ago. Its really sad that kind of thing going on in a place with this kind of history. On the other hand its been amazing to hear people from so many different cultures, African, Romanian, etc etc all together converged here. Amsterdam kind of reminded me of New York in that way. In your face, nazi-douche-bags!
Also the botanical gardens kick much ass. They had a bunch of green houses with different biospheres with plants all-together from all different rain-forests brought together in one huge rain-forest room and all different deserts etc, so you have these impossible landscapes that are very cool to look at. I wonder if the nazi's would hate this kind of inter-special relating. Probably. The best part was this airy catwalk that you could take a steep set of stairs to. The greenhouses were big enough to have huge trees in them, so you could get up on these walks and kinda walk through the foliage of trees way off the ground. I missed the tropical museum but it sounds amazing; some sort of place a Dutch council created in the 1920's to show its citizens what all it's colonies were like.
My theme songs for Amsterdam was Viva Ultra by Palace. "It's better that way, so it's this way that we start our day...." and Oscar by Tosca.
Part 2: Paris
8/23 & 24
We got to Paris by train, arriving early afternoon. As a young man traveling, I was singled out by police again, who motioned me forward, and then as I nodded and began moving on, they began shouting as if I had disobeyed them in an effort to detain me apparently. As soon as they saw I was with my parents and brother, they let me go on. We took a cab to the central Paris and booked into our hotel for the night. It was a small place, with winding stairs that took you up to the rooms or down to the tiny indoor garden area where they served food. They had an internet connection downstairs so I was able to get online and type in a few of these entries. An older lady watched over the place who seemed to be in a bad mood. My brother and I were sharing a bed, so we sat up awhile watching television and standing out on our tiny balcony looking over the city. It was raining so we kept the door cracked to let the rain help us sleep. We found France's MTV and saw a Yeahyeahyeahs video and an Arcade Fire video. Tres cool. I was more excited about being in Paris than any other place we had planned on visiting. The history has always fascinated me, and personas that haunt the town's culture: Picasso, Baudillaire, Rimbaud, Matisse, Derrida, Rodin. I wanted to visited the catacombs, churches, and museums, but also the rock bars, seedy restaurants, crumbling ghetto suburbs, grafitti splashed lots and textile bazaars. I wanted to see it all, and get some sense that I had walked away from Paris having run my fingers over it until I found its pulse. I knew also that these would be the last days of spending leaisurely hours with my family. When again would I walk down the rue Montmartre with my brother, drinking coffee and wondering out loud. I wanted more than anything some newer closure from this trip. I knew I would get neither Paris' pulse nor the end of my Grandmother there. But I could try. Before her paintings, many copys of Magrittes, sat in stacks collecting bands of dust while she fidgeted and stammered in the Alzheimer wing of a nursing home, she was clear-eyed, walking up into the sunlight of her little studio, spreading the tubes of paint across a coffee table and performing the abolution of a brush over an unfinished world.
She was a woman of old-world tastes, who was often sad, but meaning at every oppurtunity to overcome that sadness. She went into real-estate and enjoyed it. People came to her, she could act and the acting made her life seem more real, more well-scripted. She was sad and often alone, in her condo with her old records, dusty books which seemed more for ornamentation than reading, nice couches and foldaways for visiting sons and daughters, grandsons and granddaughters, nieces and nephews. The picture books and the gossiping neighbors.
We got up the next day early and walked to the Louvre. It was about twenty minutes from our hotel, still wet from rain. Paris is a taller city than london, and greyer. The roads are laid out in a grid in central Paris, with characteristic green copper roofs, billowed out like sheets in the wind. They must have been amazing to see before oxidation took place. When we get to the Louvre it is crowded already, we take the escalator down into the lobby which is below the main courtyard beneath the glass pyramid and split up. It is so large we all want to see different periods. Jon goes to the ninteenth century paintings, Laura goes to the Rennaissance with my father, who I later see walking in one of the great halls, where huge paintings of men on muscley horses with banners are laid out three high, paintings all the way up to the thirty foot high ceilings. I go to the ancient antiquities and see the Sarcophogie. It reminds me of Charles Olson's poetry, grand and decayed, fragments implying some object beyond the ken of my knowing. The entropy of history works like this; what is lost makes the incomplete remainder grander than what it could possibly have been in our imagination, and what is old seems simpler; more wholesome and yet more barbaric, like an archetype hazily remembered in a dream. Did Picasso love this section more than the others? I walk into a slim room and find dozens of animal mummies: dogs, cats, alligators, a cow. Musical intruments line the other wall. The only one that stands out to memory is a small Oud like instrument with two strings which probably was played upright. I imagine it sounded dusty even in its best days.
I eventually made my way to the Da Vinci section. His works stood out to me, even amongst his contemporaries as having strong compositions. His portraits of the saints evinced the struggle of his figures. It was not an otherwordly struggle, with eyes toward God, bodies lit by heavens light, but darker portraits, eyes forward past the viewer, the struggle to be strong in a landscape of obstacles evident in the faces. I registered these as being more secular than the poius works which were being painted by his contemporaries and perhaps this was part of the appeal. The Mona Lisa was in the center of a large room, with a large crowd in front of it. Guards stood by the front of the crowd, telling people to keep moving, don't linger too long. I was able to sneak in between school groups and see it from a few feet away for about half a minute. It was smaller than I thought it would be, in a simple frame, but besides that was exactly as I would have thought. It was like shaking a celebrities hand; exhilarating and curious.
Laura and I walked through the long Rennaisance wing into the great hall where Neven was perusing, men on horses, military tragedies, Grecian lore, and we all went to find Jon in the lobby and get dinner. Jon was getting impatient and not talking much. We all needed food. We walked around the outside of the Louvre a bit, and I have never in recent memory seen a building so large as that. It keeps going for blocks. It seems like a good four or five city blocks long, much of it not open to the public. We walk back toward the hotel and find a restaurant on the way. It is recently opened and the waiters are, at least for me, prototypically French. A smaller, stubbly Roberto Benini-looking one comes over and shows us the menu. He seems very at home waiting like this, I can see him ready to make an ironic remark but none of us speak French well enough to give him the chance. We get some red wine and order quickly, clink three glasses of wine and a water glass and toast. I can't remember what to. To Paris? To my Grandmother? I do remember the food being very good, and we came back to this restaurant a couple nights later and got the same waiter, who seemed to be fond of us.
When we got back to the hotel I logged on and checked email. The lounge had American newspapers as well, so I could follow the news. It never affects me much and mostly drives me mad, but I compulsively reach for the editorials and global political columns, reading up on the latest tragedy in Iraq or Iran. I decided to let them wait until moring, and instead tried to link up my feelings about Paris to images and soundscapes, and wrote this:
Paris is the land of stringed evening lights, pearls of clamouring sound caves reaching into themselves, sloughing off the grid imposed by the dead. Rain water shines over the black brick that winds through the black brine of water with high light embankments to seperate them, all of this in a puddle, and the voices of people, like the light cattle of their faces, scatter and are from everywhere it seems like, it seems everywhere in the world. The fluted north African curl of a vowel from a woman in a doorway, the stabbing middle eastern staccato of a man in the back of Mercedes cab, and lazy English curling off a tourists tongue into a cellphone; French for grief, French for exclaiming itself to its own green roofs, its own astonished mouths and weary eyes. The tailored coats are met by tinderbox-eyes. I am squirming on the bottom of centuries; is, was a land the begged digressions I was happy to commit. Admiring the tattered suitcoat of the man who rented tiny but sturdy sailing ships to children clustered near the fountains between the Louvre and the Arc de Triumphe. The streets twist like a sheet of smoke, the yellow and blue of olde and new, churches and banks, litter and furniture stores and grafitti everywhere, asking to get lost in its exhaustive description of itself. It was a voice fragmented over the river that becomes almost distinguishable; opalescent pearls of light.
As I sat working on this I was approached by our new night manager at the hotel. He was a young, bright eyed Nepalese man who seemed to be interested in talking. "What do you think of Paris?" he asked, and I told him I was enjoying myself, but hadn't met many people yet. He introduced himself as Gagan, and agreed that people are difficult to meet, even unfriendly here, but "in America people are friendly, very up-front. They say they like this about you or that they don't like that but they are very open about their feelings," and with a serious questioning look, "What do you think about that?" Of course I didn't know what to think of that, but I could see he liked to converse, that is to say, not simply to talk but to be engaged in conversation, so I took him up on it and we ended up talking for several hours. He had some funny stories about America. I was surprised to find he had been to Kentucky. In Louisville he had met a girl who he thought was beautiful and so he went up and tried to talk to her, ask her what she recomend he do in town, since he was a foreigner and all. She was a waitress and invited him to come see her so she could give him some food. "She worked at hoo-tars," he told me, "I did not know what was hoo-tars, so I tell my American friends, 'let's go to hoo-tars' and they all started laughing at me!" We talked about American girls, who he seemed very impressed by, and quite a few other things. I asked him about Nepal but he didn't want to talk about it very much. Finally around three in the morning I apologized and told him I had to sleep. He looked dissapointed but I told him we'd talk some other night. I've rarely met someone so clearly in the wrong line of work.
Parisian Rain on Nick's Shoes Theme:
Coco Rosie's Saint Angel, from Maison de mon Reve.
8/25 & 26
Another day, another museum. Today we visited the
8/27
8/28
As we drove to the Chaz de Gaulle airport, our cab driver, who seemed to be middle eastern, pointed at the suburbs we passed and said they were full of "thieves," and that they should "burn them down and start over!"
8/12
Well, my first European blog entry. It's gonna be lame right now because I can't upload pictures until later. It's the first day and we're on a plane all day. The trip to London is like eight hours long, so we got to watch some movies. My best impression of Doug Benson (http://www.bobanddavid.com/doug.asp?artId=192) follows:
Fever Pitch
Two-hours of baseball would have been less boring than this. I never thought I'd say that about anything. I am amazed by Jimmy Fallon's acting, it reminds me that while he can be funny, he can also display emotions ranging all the way from giggling to just-about-to-giggle. I can't wait to never see it again!
Madagascar
The plot may have been predictable, but Cedric the Entertainer and Andy Richter still managed to be pretty funny. Probably. I didn't watch it; I was busy trying to sleep.
My parents managed to nod off, but Jon and I more or less stayed up reading and listening to music. I stayed up partly out of interest in what I was reaidng and partly out of a restless curiosity as to how this trip would turn out. I haven't been on a family vacation for years, and now to get together again, with me living in Seattle and Jon in New York to act as though we are still a tight family unit. The strange thing is, we are. More so now than we were before, when we lived together. The years of being apart have begun to bend our selves back toward each other so that we each will it seperately, especially now that the we are making a trip so firmly in the shadow of the end of all of these vacations, and the long walk of the bier, the snowy funeral home in Ohio still crisp in out minds from late December. Jon has changed since then, I can sense it in how easy he is around dad. There is a quality of mercy that has established itself in him.
***
My theme song for riding the plane across the Atlantic has got to be "Blood Bleeds" by the Helio Sequence. The light synth pads that structure the song are as airy, weightless and comforting as the design concepts pursued uniformly by every airport and airplane I've been in, with the happy exception of the Phoenix airport. They had flat ceilings made out of varnished wood and even deerhornes on the wall, or at least did last time I was there in the mid-ninties. I can't describe the surprise of getting off an airplane and walking into a low-ceilinged building with ranching motifs. They must have changed it; I can't believe any airport would display bones now.
With the time-change and the red-eye flight we arrived at ten in the morning. This means we've all be up for like twenty hours already and have a full day ahead. Walking out, the security people were so impressed with my beard and cropped head that they wanted to get a look at everything I was taking with me! I've never had such curious fans. We check into a small hotel downtown near the with adorable if somewhat constrictive stairways and walk out to see Buckingham Palace and the changing of the guard. We just missed the changing so instead we got to see a dissarayed gaggle of guards in traditional hats, lazily walking back with the music stands, the tall fur of their hats swaying in the August heat. It wasn't an impressive display, but the hats sure were. I wonder if they have stables near Buckingham Palace where the hats have their own stalls and hay, and get fed better than most hats do. After they get old, they take them out to fields with a bunch of other huge furry hats where they can run free for a few years before they die. We walked across the crowded square to the parks nearby. The wind had picked up and I got some photographs of a field where many identical canvas park chairs were placed in rows. The wind was moving the canvas in the empty chairs so that it was visible when looking at the many chairs as broad ripples, punctuated by the occasinal sedient Londoner. After that we walked around trying to keep each other awake. London is an old-fashioned, expensive place, full of buildings which look more like buildings from Beatles albums that any city I've been in before. It is amazingly free of tall buildings, and the feeling of openness gives the illusion we are not actually in the center of one of the world's largest cities. It makes me wonder what it must be like in Calcutta, or Brazil, where the single-level slums stretch for miles in every direction. We decide to nap at about five thirty, until dinner. Then sweet, long sleep.
8/13
We went out to see the Tate museum early today. The Tate (www.tate.org.uk) is a old power station converted into a contemporary gallery. The center is hollow, built around the large factory floor still fitted out with impossibly huge hooks. What they needed hooks that large to lift is beyond me. The center is a broad and wide open floor of architecture models and prints, with the rest of the museum raised along the sides. Across the Thames from the museum is the old White Tower where the King of England used to serve, as well as a modern skyscraper, apparently very new, which looks like a vibrator pointing heavenwards. Jon and Laura are eager to see the Modern galleries, but I just walk around with Neven for a few minutes, then he is off to see something on the fourth floor. I wander first into a room rigged with metal sculptures high up near the lights. The shadows cast by them create the structure; a labyritnth of shadows rending the room into a curious syntax. Some of the shadows the metal characters create curious effects. I wonder at the words I've written here and if they operate in the same way. I have been calling my parents by their first names, because I feel childish calling them mom and dad when I'm writing. But I don't often refer to them by the first names when talking to them. It's not one or the other; I don't feel comfortable with either. For now I'll go back to mom and dad, there plenty of time in the trip to make up my mind about something this simple.
I was eventually drawn to Pierre Alechinsky's work. I hadn't heard of him before, and I found his strange drawings to be overly intimate for the Modernist they hinted at him being, too crude for the pre-modern. He playful box-like mechanical structures seemed like cubist wildflowers in black and white, or stalagmites underneath a city train.
Afterwards we saw the Globe Theatre, lookng just as I thought it would along the side of a busy causeway of bikers and bike riders, across the street from a Starbucks and a bank. We didn't get to see a play there, but we did chat up an older guy who said that he had seen thirty-something Shakespeare plays, some of them seven times each. This was a pretty interesting start to the conversation until, alakayday, he launched into a long soliloquey as to why he payed what he payed the IRS for his property taxes (clue: there's a loophole). Oh, I am fortune's fool! We ate lunch in a bar and I got fried shrimp. It was to be the finest fare I had in England. I'm not trying to rap England for caustic cuisine; it was possibly the best bar food I've ever had. The beer is good too. I've been drinking Kronenberg 1664, and my fear of drinking warm beer has been allayed. Its not so bad, especially with the pilsners. We also found a black ship that is apparently very old and famous and currently closed for business, a lifesized cutout of pirates and the grafitti: "what are you looking at?"
I hope we get to see a play while we are here. Apparently the playhouse is always showing Shakespeare and supports itself entirely on its productions. The last time I've seen a Shakespeare play has been, not counting an absurd but hilarious drum-circle rendition of King Lear some hippies put on in Colorado Springs, since I attended to Shakespeare in the park series with my parents, sneaking rum in my coke, the smell of starch from my mothers laundery, the twilight of Kentucky, sweltering.
Nick at the Tate theme:
"At the Hop" by Devendra Banhart
8/14 & 15
Doing this blog is more difficult than I thought it would be. One can never get enough computer time. They have radically different electrical plugs than America here, which I didn't know about, so I always have to find an adapter and there are so many different international plugs there are occasionally as many as three adapters strung together, and my computer is running on faulty batteries.
The days have gone slowly, functionally. We all meet downstairs and eat the hotel breakfast. The pretty Slovakian girl, who I've found is named Petra, serves us runny eggs if we want them, and we all drink coffee and eat yogurt while we talk about what will do that day before splitting up or proceeding together. My mother has the most suggestions, she even wants to join me to travel to the London Library to view the historical text archives, and join my brother at all the art museums. She seems to be inexhaustible. All talk is turned toward where will be going and seeing, and thankfully not toward why we are here and what we cannot see again. I don't want to broach the topic, but I've been wondering about it myself, if my Grandmother would have enjoyed these things, if she was ever here herself. Maybe I will ask my Mother about these things. Then again, maybe not. Why are we here after all, thousands of miles from home? Why am I writing this at all? Was it to honor, to remember, to forget? I want to say a little of all of these. My Grandmother would be proud of Jon's abilities as an artist, which she never saw blooming in the years when her mind was still sound and she wasn't so forgetful. She would love to see us here walking among the galleries filled with great artists, themselves cemetaries of sorts, to honor the impulse that drew her continually into that upper room in her house with an unworking television and easel, the natural light from above and the surreptitious awareness of cats, the thin plant she always kept to one side, and the colors seperated one by one.
We are in a bubble here, while London life moves all around us. Petra knows what I mean, she is in a sort of bubble too, saving up money so she move back home to solvency. What led her here, I wonder? Her English isn't good enough for me to ask, and she's the only person I've met on London so far. It is easier to live like this, detached from daily concern and see the improbable pattern of cause and effect like spokes following each other around some hub that we are forever thrust away from by some kind of gravity. A map of the world has everything to do with the taste of a lime; the shape of tuperware has everything to do with Japanese whaling boats; my spending two weeks in Europe with my family and writing this now has everything to do with a man contemplating the pleasantness of a few more cigarettes and glasses of scotch before driving home along the snowy Ohio streets near Christmas time.
On the second morning I check my email and find that I've been offered a job as a travel writer. I tell my parents over breakfast and we make a toast with orange juice. I don't think I'll take it, but its a promising start to my new job search in Chicago. In the afternoon we find a Beatles store. It does have everything beatles. Next to it is a competing, or complementing, if you like, Elvis store which has a few things Elvis. The woman who owns the Elvismart was friendly and said she was going to Memphis for the first time in a few weeks to visit Graceland. She was excited. She assumed I had been there since I was from Kentucky and I decided it was easier to go along with it. I wished her luck and bought a lighter. A few doors down from the Elvis store is the Sherlock Holmes store which was full of silly expensive crap.
***
The Tower of London looms next to the Thames, wizened and crumbling whilst the vibrator-shaped skyscraper continues being built up nearby. I wore a jacket with my usual t-shirt and jeans for the occasion. It seemed appropriate somehow. We walked around the castle to the front gate and got in a line for a tour. The crowds were pleasantly free of infants and groups, and we were quickly on our way with a royal guard who quickly proved to be a loud, mildly vulgar older man apparently unafraid and even quite fond of describing the more horrific happenings of the castle in graphic detail, much to our amusement. I'm afraid we missed quite a lot of the castle ground from inattention simply because his stand-up routine was so well honed it was often more interesting than the grounds themselves. After the tour we all split up. I walked a long rampart along the East Tower, which I found to be the most appealing to the eye, decked out in a sylian green and containing the bedchamber of several of late Kings. Up above I looked out over the crowds milling on the courtyards, the supernumerary crows, and among them my mother. She looked a bit lost, as though she were looking for one of us, but didn't know where to look. A faint and unexplainable panic ran through the back of my mind. I wondered whether or not I should walk down to speak with her, but I remained up above, scanning the castle walls. Eventually I went down. My father had met with her first and we soon found Jon waiting by the exit, ready to leave.
Nick Walking the Regal Grounds Theme:
"Nightime/Anytime" by the Constantines
The Black Crowes might also be a good choice of music for today. There is a legend that if the (black) crowes leave the tower's grounds, then the English empire will fall...so of course there would be an army of crows with their wings clipped so they could never leave. They must get fed amply; they are the largest crows I have ever seen in my life: small dog size, and they even have some sort of furniture on parts of the grounds for them so sit on.
8/16 & 17
We took a train up to Oxford in the afternoon. Getting in late, we walked around the town to find a restaurant, trying to reign in my father who always wants to find a better restaurant. We settled on a Chinese joint across the street from a movie theatre and ate well and cheap. We headed straight back and went to sleep. Just the walk between downtown Oxford and our hotel was a good walk, which was welcome after being in a train all day. The town seemed very pretty in the evening, the sort of place one dreams of living out their old age. The buildings are mostly older, brick with wild verdure creeping up their sides, walls with flowers sprouting our form them, busses and motorcycles buzzing around the winding roads. Our hotel is kind of a dump. Everything smells wierd and the beds are uncomfortable, but it doesn't keep us from sleeping well. The next day we go into the city. My father seems more enamoured with the town than the rest of us and it occurs to me that perhaps he suggested this leg of the trip. It occurs to me that the slide shows I had seen years before showed off parts of this town from a trip my father and mother took shortly after they were married in the mid-seventies, so that was the last time they had been here. My father steers toward some of the older buildings, some of them must be nearly unchanged since when they were here before I was born. Are they thinking about their marriage? Are the dreams they had of their children hidden in he crannies here, to be revisited and held up against the wreckage of twenty five years that is myself? I'll never know, but if there were, they did not dampen my fathers spirits. We walked through the hall of Rhodes scholars and I realized he must have dreamed of his son being welcome here, but had no right to expect it. We walked together and commented on the mosaic featuring President Clinton. I didn't realize that Rhodes scholarships were created to honor American, British and German students who excelled categorically, in order to foster peace between the nations. He points out that Richard Celeste, former Director of the Peace Corps and current president of my Alma Mater was a Rhodes Scholar. My brother and mother have gone on to the garden's the didn't care to join us inside the Rhodes rotunda. My father was as excited in the Rhodes rotunda as I have saw him on the trip, I think. There is something about the recognition of intellectual greatness that stirs him, and I think he must have been insatiable at an earlier age, a chronic studier. We draw apart somewhat on this point. I see this place as a nexus of powerful minds, not necesarily brilliant ones. I am a true son of himself and my mother, the pedant and the art history major. I have Isaac Newton on one shoulder and Devendra Banhart on the other. In our differences I feel like we are closer to an understanding. He knows that I distrust the collusion of money and politics in grand universities like this one, and I know he distrusts the romantic notions of artists concerning the nobility of the "unwashed masses." We spend the rest of the day walking around Oxford, seeing the gardens and the midieval playhouse with sculpted visages surrounding it. Downtown we see the filming of some kind of BBC detective show, and we all spend hours in the University bookstore, my brother showing me books of visual artists that I've never heard of and me looking through broad beautiful books of architectural drawings. We bother scoff at the Banko pamphlets and we both already know what's inside.
Eventually we all split up to wander around campus. I imagine myy mother and father went back to the gardens, and I don't know where Jon went. I needed a break from all the tours, so I found a beer garden with an old tree in the middle of it, opening up to an alleyway that looked ancient. I had brought my book along, Oscar Wilde's Picture of Dorian Grey and read it with a couple of a wheat beers.
The Stone Faces of Oxford Theme:
Bridges & Baloons by Joanna Newsom
8/18-19
We arrive in Brugge just as the rain begins. My mom is back on a winning streak with the hotels she's picked ou. This one is an ancient old building just over the river from downtown. Black water runs through the canal alongside us, so that we can see the hotel's breakfast tables through a window only a foot or so above water line. Other tourists are puttering around the rough cobbled street. A statue of Jan Van Eyck stares at the channel that leads away from the city toward the coast in the north. They should have let the poor statue look at the street; the women here are typically beautiful. We ate an amazing dinner at a French restaurant nearby. I had a glazed beef with bernaise sauce. Amazing. We retired after dinner, and I took a walk to smoke cigarettes on the old streets, running under covered doorways when the rain began to come heavily and hoping noone would emerge from their homes at an inoportune moment to find me on their doorstep. The next day the rains continued to come down heavily. We took a cab to the biggest local gallery that featured Dutch portraitures and a weak smattering of contemporary art. Jan Van Eyck's work present was amazing, really good portraits that make you curious about the people. Most of the others were kinda stilted; perhaps it was the rain waking the melankolik in me; people watching was more interesting. "Either you can't see the paintings through the people, which is awful, or you can't see the people through the paintings, which is worse"-Oscar Wilde
Brugge is beautiful in an old-worldy way. It's what I wish germany would look like. We only spent an evening and a morning there, which is just as well because the town is really expensive, its pretty much just restaurants, Flemish art galleries and designer clothing stores. The downtown has this castle/townhall with a clock in the middle that looks medeival and all green & gold when lit up at night in front of a huge cobble-stone square with a statue in the middle, where all the restaurants around the rim of it have broad tents in front so people can sit outside and drink beer and sing drunkenly in German despite the rain. Really beautiful city. Not much else to say other than that.
Nick Watching Statues Watching Bruegge Theme:
"Panda" by Dungen.
Who might be singing in Flemish. Or not.
8/20-22
Before we pull in to Amsterdam I see tons of modern electricity-generating windmills on the horizon. Sweet progress!
I smoked no pot in Amsterdam. It was tempting, what with everyone I asked about the city telling me that the pot would make me immobile, and mobility is for suckers. They do love to get high in Amsterdam though, I saw way more older folks getting stoned and more younger folks getting stoned, more folks really than I have ever seen getting stoned getting stoned. They were everywhere, it was like half the city-the half we were in-was going through a serious drug phase in their lives right as we got there. I turned a corner and saw a small gaggle of 50-70's-ish women in a blunt huddle in the middle of the sidewalk. Damn. Also saw a "The Doors" psych-rock tribute bar/coffee shop, and a buncha shrines to...guess who...Bob Marley! Unfortunately, even in the doors and bob sites they were playing only Paul Oakenfold, or something else that sounds exactly like it. They seemed to be playing trance or techno or whatever everywhere, so the novelty of knowing you were in a bar full of stoned people was kinda downplayed by the sad homogeneity of the scene. Oh well. People were having a lot of fun, at least.
OK to be fair to Amsterdam I think if I'd been here with some friends or something I would have enjoyed it more, there are definitely lots of distractions here that are not of the worst kind. Apparently the worst kind of distractions are dancing in the neon glow on the east side of the "old church." My fifteen year old self would have been loving this place, but being a geezer and all, I was ready to relax, so I was not that excited when I realized Amsterdam is possibly the last great refuge of the rave scene. I guess thats what happens when you get a collision of the self-destructive expression of middle-class boredom we call spring break in America (which apparently in Europe is simply called Amsterdam) and the disco-revival flair for dressing like a space-pimp that I thought was only in weird magazine ads...bring them together, add about twenty landfill loads of trash thrown all over the place and you have one very special place!
I'm not kidding about the trash, this was the most surprising thing. Trash was thrown everywhere, and gathered into little hills all over the sidewalks. People would just throw bags of trash out in front of their homes, so every once and a while you pass mountains of trash bags on the side of the road. Besides that it was just ubiquitous, so much so that I got hit on the legs a few times from buses driving past and spraying plastic bottles and cans out at you the way they might splash water out of a puddle if it was raining.
The canals and the crooked older dutch buildings that lined them were very cool, with all types of old wierd roofs and every building has a hook on their front gable so they can hoist furniture up in through their windows. Apparently the houses are so slim that is the only way to get yr couches in. Also many of the streets were lined with canals, in turn filled with boats full of people partying and laying around, just drifting downstream. This one guy fitted out a Cadillac shell over some kind of boat that he drives around the canals, so it looks like he's driving a car. Someone else put a train car on a barge and cruises that around.
The stuff I saw in Amsterdam was pretty cool though; the Anne Frank museum and the botanical gardens. The AF house showed you were they lived a little about why, and who helped them and everything. For those not in the know, AF's dad owned the place they were hiding in. It was a jam & pepper factory. His former workers hid him and his family and were eventually arrested when someone told the Germans they were up there. You can still see the pictures Anne cut out from magazines and put all over her walls in her former room. The coolest thing though was this big room at the end of the tour where cover first-amendment topics in little 5-minute presentations and then allow everyone in the room to vote on whether to side with anti-descrimintation or anti-free speech. Mostly people sided with free-speech, on topics such as should religious zealots who preach hatred be allowed to run web sites; should skinheads in Germany be allowed to hold demonstrations outside of Jewish temples, etc. The only one which sided with anti-discrimination was whether or not to ban rowdy soccer fans from yelling racial epithets at games. The footage from that was really shocking, and showed huge throngs of people chanting "[black soccer player] is a monkey's prick" and "right on Hamas/give the Jews the gas!" which was really fucked up because you see footage that's really recent and you see hundreds of people yelling this crazy shit. Well, you won't see that kind of things in Kentucky and people think of us being some sort of hotbed of intolerance. I've heard more over-the-top racist comments from bar folk here ("sometimes we play spot the white bloke in a crowd. Sometimes you can't can you? Can you?", this guy said to me out of the blue while we were talking about the changing of the guard) then I ever have in KY. Of course people are unlikely to bring that sort of thing up to a stranger in KY even if they believe it. Even in Amsterdam I saw a few of the unlikely skinheads, and the AF museum showed a huge swastika someone painted on the statue of Anne in front of the museum a few years ago. Its really sad that kind of thing going on in a place with this kind of history. On the other hand its been amazing to hear people from so many different cultures, African, Romanian, etc etc all together converged here. Amsterdam kind of reminded me of New York in that way. In your face, nazi-douche-bags!
Also the botanical gardens kick much ass. They had a bunch of green houses with different biospheres with plants all-together from all different rain-forests brought together in one huge rain-forest room and all different deserts etc, so you have these impossible landscapes that are very cool to look at. I wonder if the nazi's would hate this kind of inter-special relating. Probably. The best part was this airy catwalk that you could take a steep set of stairs to. The greenhouses were big enough to have huge trees in them, so you could get up on these walks and kinda walk through the foliage of trees way off the ground. I missed the tropical museum but it sounds amazing; some sort of place a Dutch council created in the 1920's to show its citizens what all it's colonies were like.
My theme songs for Amsterdam was Viva Ultra by Palace. "It's better that way, so it's this way that we start our day...." and Oscar by Tosca.
Part 2: Paris
8/23 & 24
We got to Paris by train, arriving early afternoon. As a young man traveling, I was singled out by police again, who motioned me forward, and then as I nodded and began moving on, they began shouting as if I had disobeyed them in an effort to detain me apparently. As soon as they saw I was with my parents and brother, they let me go on. We took a cab to the central Paris and booked into our hotel for the night. It was a small place, with winding stairs that took you up to the rooms or down to the tiny indoor garden area where they served food. They had an internet connection downstairs so I was able to get online and type in a few of these entries. An older lady watched over the place who seemed to be in a bad mood. My brother and I were sharing a bed, so we sat up awhile watching television and standing out on our tiny balcony looking over the city. It was raining so we kept the door cracked to let the rain help us sleep. We found France's MTV and saw a Yeahyeahyeahs video and an Arcade Fire video. Tres cool. I was more excited about being in Paris than any other place we had planned on visiting. The history has always fascinated me, and personas that haunt the town's culture: Picasso, Baudillaire, Rimbaud, Matisse, Derrida, Rodin. I wanted to visited the catacombs, churches, and museums, but also the rock bars, seedy restaurants, crumbling ghetto suburbs, grafitti splashed lots and textile bazaars. I wanted to see it all, and get some sense that I had walked away from Paris having run my fingers over it until I found its pulse. I knew also that these would be the last days of spending leaisurely hours with my family. When again would I walk down the rue Montmartre with my brother, drinking coffee and wondering out loud. I wanted more than anything some newer closure from this trip. I knew I would get neither Paris' pulse nor the end of my Grandmother there. But I could try. Before her paintings, many copys of Magrittes, sat in stacks collecting bands of dust while she fidgeted and stammered in the Alzheimer wing of a nursing home, she was clear-eyed, walking up into the sunlight of her little studio, spreading the tubes of paint across a coffee table and performing the abolution of a brush over an unfinished world.
She was a woman of old-world tastes, who was often sad, but meaning at every oppurtunity to overcome that sadness. She went into real-estate and enjoyed it. People came to her, she could act and the acting made her life seem more real, more well-scripted. She was sad and often alone, in her condo with her old records, dusty books which seemed more for ornamentation than reading, nice couches and foldaways for visiting sons and daughters, grandsons and granddaughters, nieces and nephews. The picture books and the gossiping neighbors.
We got up the next day early and walked to the Louvre. It was about twenty minutes from our hotel, still wet from rain. Paris is a taller city than london, and greyer. The roads are laid out in a grid in central Paris, with characteristic green copper roofs, billowed out like sheets in the wind. They must have been amazing to see before oxidation took place. When we get to the Louvre it is crowded already, we take the escalator down into the lobby which is below the main courtyard beneath the glass pyramid and split up. It is so large we all want to see different periods. Jon goes to the ninteenth century paintings, Laura goes to the Rennaissance with my father, who I later see walking in one of the great halls, where huge paintings of men on muscley horses with banners are laid out three high, paintings all the way up to the thirty foot high ceilings. I go to the ancient antiquities and see the Sarcophogie. It reminds me of Charles Olson's poetry, grand and decayed, fragments implying some object beyond the ken of my knowing. The entropy of history works like this; what is lost makes the incomplete remainder grander than what it could possibly have been in our imagination, and what is old seems simpler; more wholesome and yet more barbaric, like an archetype hazily remembered in a dream. Did Picasso love this section more than the others? I walk into a slim room and find dozens of animal mummies: dogs, cats, alligators, a cow. Musical intruments line the other wall. The only one that stands out to memory is a small Oud like instrument with two strings which probably was played upright. I imagine it sounded dusty even in its best days.
I eventually made my way to the Da Vinci section. His works stood out to me, even amongst his contemporaries as having strong compositions. His portraits of the saints evinced the struggle of his figures. It was not an otherwordly struggle, with eyes toward God, bodies lit by heavens light, but darker portraits, eyes forward past the viewer, the struggle to be strong in a landscape of obstacles evident in the faces. I registered these as being more secular than the poius works which were being painted by his contemporaries and perhaps this was part of the appeal. The Mona Lisa was in the center of a large room, with a large crowd in front of it. Guards stood by the front of the crowd, telling people to keep moving, don't linger too long. I was able to sneak in between school groups and see it from a few feet away for about half a minute. It was smaller than I thought it would be, in a simple frame, but besides that was exactly as I would have thought. It was like shaking a celebrities hand; exhilarating and curious.
Laura and I walked through the long Rennaisance wing into the great hall where Neven was perusing, men on horses, military tragedies, Grecian lore, and we all went to find Jon in the lobby and get dinner. Jon was getting impatient and not talking much. We all needed food. We walked around the outside of the Louvre a bit, and I have never in recent memory seen a building so large as that. It keeps going for blocks. It seems like a good four or five city blocks long, much of it not open to the public. We walk back toward the hotel and find a restaurant on the way. It is recently opened and the waiters are, at least for me, prototypically French. A smaller, stubbly Roberto Benini-looking one comes over and shows us the menu. He seems very at home waiting like this, I can see him ready to make an ironic remark but none of us speak French well enough to give him the chance. We get some red wine and order quickly, clink three glasses of wine and a water glass and toast. I can't remember what to. To Paris? To my Grandmother? I do remember the food being very good, and we came back to this restaurant a couple nights later and got the same waiter, who seemed to be fond of us.
When we got back to the hotel I logged on and checked email. The lounge had American newspapers as well, so I could follow the news. It never affects me much and mostly drives me mad, but I compulsively reach for the editorials and global political columns, reading up on the latest tragedy in Iraq or Iran. I decided to let them wait until moring, and instead tried to link up my feelings about Paris to images and soundscapes, and wrote this:
Paris is the land of stringed evening lights, pearls of clamouring sound caves reaching into themselves, sloughing off the grid imposed by the dead. Rain water shines over the black brick that winds through the black brine of water with high light embankments to seperate them, all of this in a puddle, and the voices of people, like the light cattle of their faces, scatter and are from everywhere it seems like, it seems everywhere in the world. The fluted north African curl of a vowel from a woman in a doorway, the stabbing middle eastern staccato of a man in the back of Mercedes cab, and lazy English curling off a tourists tongue into a cellphone; French for grief, French for exclaiming itself to its own green roofs, its own astonished mouths and weary eyes. The tailored coats are met by tinderbox-eyes. I am squirming on the bottom of centuries; is, was a land the begged digressions I was happy to commit. Admiring the tattered suitcoat of the man who rented tiny but sturdy sailing ships to children clustered near the fountains between the Louvre and the Arc de Triumphe. The streets twist like a sheet of smoke, the yellow and blue of olde and new, churches and banks, litter and furniture stores and grafitti everywhere, asking to get lost in its exhaustive description of itself. It was a voice fragmented over the river that becomes almost distinguishable; opalescent pearls of light.
As I sat working on this I was approached by our new night manager at the hotel. He was a young, bright eyed Nepalese man who seemed to be interested in talking. "What do you think of Paris?" he asked, and I told him I was enjoying myself, but hadn't met many people yet. He introduced himself as Gagan, and agreed that people are difficult to meet, even unfriendly here, but "in America people are friendly, very up-front. They say they like this about you or that they don't like that but they are very open about their feelings," and with a serious questioning look, "What do you think about that?" Of course I didn't know what to think of that, but I could see he liked to converse, that is to say, not simply to talk but to be engaged in conversation, so I took him up on it and we ended up talking for several hours. He had some funny stories about America. I was surprised to find he had been to Kentucky. In Louisville he had met a girl who he thought was beautiful and so he went up and tried to talk to her, ask her what she recomend he do in town, since he was a foreigner and all. She was a waitress and invited him to come see her so she could give him some food. "She worked at hoo-tars," he told me, "I did not know what was hoo-tars, so I tell my American friends, 'let's go to hoo-tars' and they all started laughing at me!" We talked about American girls, who he seemed very impressed by, and quite a few other things. I asked him about Nepal but he didn't want to talk about it very much. Finally around three in the morning I apologized and told him I had to sleep. He looked dissapointed but I told him we'd talk some other night. I've rarely met someone so clearly in the wrong line of work.
Parisian Rain on Nick's Shoes Theme:
Coco Rosie's Saint Angel, from Maison de mon Reve.
8/25 & 26
Another day, another museum. Today we visited the
8/27
8/28
As we drove to the Chaz de Gaulle airport, our cab driver, who seemed to be middle eastern, pointed at the suburbs we passed and said they were full of "thieves," and that they should "burn them down and start over!"
posted by Nick Gardner at 2:37 PM
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