This picture was taken in Utrecht, Netherlands, of me and my friend Bob. I don't look that happy, do I?
[This is a back-post, added at the date the picture was taken but in fact added 2014-05-14. I post this picture mostly because it is the picture which shows me at my maximum weight..]
Dateline: Amsterdam
I woke up wide awake at 4am. Still struggling with time-change related biochemistry, probably. I had that somewhat obnoxious “hook” from the currently popular Jennifer Lopez song looping through my head – a tenor-saxophony sort of sound, da-da-DA-da, da-da-DA-da ad infinitum. I guess there could be worse. But one could hope for better, too.
The selection of television channels at this hotel (Hotel Vijaya) is eurotrocious.
There’s the darts channel. All darts, all the time. Like watching golf, but more boring.
There’re channels with infomercials 24/7 in both english and german, each with dutch subtitles. An attractive blendery thingy, for example, that I really, really wanted to buy immediately – it seemed to offer a simple solution to most of my core issues. Fortunately, I can’t dial euro-900 numbers from my room.
There’s CNN, which is fine is small doses, but gets old fast unless I interleave it with a sufficient amount of anything else. And CNBC, which is occasionally great, except when it segues into infomercials.
Raiuno, an italian-language channel, with a seemingly never-ending parade of 2nd tier celebrity interviews and news about the pope’s health.
A french/swiss channel, with it’s inevitable feel of cultural pomposity – but I probably have spent more time looking at that channel than most of the others, partly because the picture is clearer, but also, I rationalize, to provide me some practice with the admittedly “rusty” language-skills. A nice artist was being profiled yesterday morning – Ming, I think was his name, Chinese-French. Amazing, giant, sloppy black / white / grey busts of old men, children, whoever. Sufficiently impressive to make me want to look him up sometime – hence this note.
The spanish channel, TVE, with its never-ending stream of light news and bad acting and second-rate issues analysis (I learned that spain will be the first country to be voting a referendum on the european constitution, however – probably the only guaranteed “yes” out of the 10 countries where it’s being put to vote). And, regrettably, I’ve got that darn mexican-based prejudice against the ceceo (the pronunciation of “soft c” and “z” as english unvoiced “th” – common to madrileño and more northern castilian dialects – hence “socios” -> /sothios/) – this sort unconscious sociolinguistic red flag that pops up in my head when I hear it, screaming “snob,” is hard to overcome – hopefully once I’m in spain and have spent some time there, I’ll get over that. But on a positive side, I did catch some comedy that made me laugh out loud, the other night. Little sight gags and such, including a bit with a man trying to explain to his boss that he’d found a certain unmentionable body-part in an office trash can, that was quite humorous.
There are a ziljoen (=zillion? … I just made that up, parallel to nederlans “miljoen”) dutch channels of course. I have limited patience for them, not because I don’t understand them (everybody knows I can sit and watch television in languages I don’t understand for hours) but because they all have such a limited repertoire of commercials that they get repetitive fast.
I caught some profoundly derivative but fascinating dutch rap music videos, however. All that gang-sign, inner-city american posturing, body language, movement, eminemesque but translated into dutch. The group was called THC (hmm go figure) and appeared to be several young men of morrocan descent (common immigrant group, here). One piece on social prejudice, blatent buy-in to victim-based culture, but full of legitimate complaints all the same – the dutch white middle-class turning away, ignoring, fearing, etc. Another, happier bit, with dancing girls in morrocanish costume, looked like it was filmed in morroco as well. And apropos morroco, Bob and I went to an exhibit on morrocan history yesterday at the Nieuwe Kerk, the books with their arabic calligraphy were incredible, some of the roman- and punic-era artifacts fascinating, the decorative materials (intricately ornate doors, blankets, etc.) were less interesting to me, however.
So that’s a partial review of my hotel’s television selections.
I have an entrepreneurial vision to make a t-shirt memorializing my visit to Amsterdam, and – specifically – my stay on the periphery of the famous red light district (which I found singularly tawdry and uninspiring): the shirt will say “museum of chastity / Amsterdam” – with an appropriately unsexy logo(?). If, as I discussed with Jay some months back, Las Vegas is Hell under Disney administration, then Amsterdam is Hell under the left wing of the democratic party, or perhaps a tribe moderate anarcho-syndicalist college drop outs with a weakness for public spending?
Not that I have anything against Hell – I’m much in the need of familiarizing myself with its geography, customs and mores, given my inevitable long-term prospects, as a “faith-based atheist.” Besides… most (but not all) of the people I’ve met who are going to Heaven get on my nerves. Perhaps righteousness is only fun for the people on the “right” side of it.
Dateline: Amsterdam
My friend Bob is here in nederland, of course, for an audition to be part of a workshop with a famous choir director named Eric Ericsson (sp?), incl. Nederlans Kamerkoor (sp? I think). So Friday night, I met up with him in Utrecht about 5 pm, at the Pieterkerk. Only minutes before, I had passed a small shop selling t-shirts and comic books (and snottily named Piet Snot – not hard to figure out), and had seen a shirt that said "Wie is de Bob". This seemed so ridiculously relevant that I bought a size XL immediately, and was in the process of putting it on when I saw Bob at the end of the street attempting to decipher a historical marker. I gave it to him as a gift.
After dinner at an "african" restaurant in a weird warehouse-bunker thingy under the streets of touristic Utrecht, Bob and I went to the kamerkoor concert at the Pieterkerk. The music was thematically tied by being Iberian in langauge (if not composer) with some old bits and new bits in the first half, and a rather interminable, repetitive new composition for the second half, based on a civil war poem by Miguel Hernandez. First, a Golden Age sacred piece in Latin, then some more popular spiritual pieces in castilian – these latter by Guerrero and reminding me of some verse I'd just read in Persiles. The piece I liked best was a short contemporary composition by Joost Kleppe set to some verse by… I think it was a Brazilian poet. The performers themselves were amazingly good, and the acoustics in the 11th c. church were incredible.
We met some of the other conductors who will be auditioning for this workshop, including a coterie of Florida State University alums. I was odd-man-out when it came to the "shop talk" of these choral conductors, but I made my way as I often do by providing some comic relief and occasional snippits of hopefully insightful historical commentary. After the concert, it turned out Joost Kleppe was actually in attendance, and as the conductors introduced themselves and then I presented myself as "not the conductor", this Joost even commented something to the effect that I was a "spare" – a la Monty Python. All good light fun.
In total there were 5 of us on the train back to Amsterdam on friday night – Bob and myself, then three others (and forgive me if I'd rather leave them anonymous than get their names wrong). The one guy's audition was Saturday morning, so when we all had lunch at the Beurs van Berlage cafe yesterday morning, he was already done – but Bob and the others audition today (Sunday). We met the last of the FSU coterie, Jose, too, yesterday morning. Oh… turns out their auditions are all in the Beurs van Berlage building – just a few doors away from the Beursplein and the cafe entrance, actually. So that's what Bob's doing right now (more or less).
We all went out to dinner at an Indonesian restaurant last night, all very clubby with so many choralists (is that what they're called?) I just stuck to my sidekick role. I've been around Bob enough, over the years, to be able to at least follow some of the shop talk, if not really "understand" it. I can fake it successfully – as I do with so many things.
