- excerpt on travel advice to the Netherlands from the Bureau of Consular Affairs
Albert begins a slow whine about his creaking knees, fresh out of
the train from Amsterdam,, stopping in the middle of Utrecht station's
tides of passers-by to mewl and set down his bag for a moment.
It's almost too much for me to bear. Here we have finally arrived in what is
to be our adopted city home away from home and a middle aged ache cripples him as if he’d been kicked in the balls. I make a rotten cabbage face, set
down my bag and roll a cigarette, clenching it between my digits
with unquenchable agitation before firing up the butane and touching
it to the cigarette tip. I exhale a mind suddenly dull for its lack
of curiosity. Will this be requiring immediate surgery I ask sarcastically, my
eyes begin to race around with annoyance registering the minor circus of food peddlers, discount record stores, blaring video screens and this tiring
chatter of humanity around me. Should I be concerned? Shall I
consult the phrase book for the appropriate words dealing
with emergencies like; will this require a thrombectomy? This food
disagrees with my digestive system and is planning an uprising?
I spatter these questions out to Albert who already has the Winston in
the yap, wincing from his knee pains and searching out a cafe or a
pub to dull the aches with medicinal quantities of beer.
Fuck you. He says this matter-of-factly, as though he'd just wished
gesundheit to an old lady following a sneeze.
He stares at me a moment as though I were a sort of flying, buzzing insect around his face and ears but instead of swatting, he picks up his bag again, nodding in the direction of the station cafe where a gang of stragglers putter around their little round tables, pushing cigarettes into ashtrays, glasses to
lips, weakly attempting to prop up the jowls with a feigned interest at every
item of human flotsam floating past in a vaguely intoxicated dream.
I'm going to have a beer he announces and he sets off to cross the main terminal floor to find a table to unload himself, peel off the sport jacket and pork pie hat, loosen the knot of the tie and swallow some of the local
brew. When he travels, he dresses like an old Southern Baptist
dressing for Sunday sermons. Dignity distinguishes, he often
complains.
We’ve been through all this before.
Two blurry days of it already in Amsterdam without respite. For Albert, it appears this experience of travelling to a new land is simply a baptism in beer. For the moment he is utterly disinterested in being a tourist. Who wants to be
a tourist, he bellowed rhetorically the first morning as we sniffed the air
outside Centraal Station in Amsterdam, standing there with his double bass case beside him, tourists all around him. We aren’t here to see museums and eat pannekoeken. We’re here to play music. Even if we don’t have a gig. And to play music, we need beer!
You might think such a motto was bound to have the effect of diminishing our already questionable music skills and certainly you‘d be right but the truth is those first few days in Amsterdam were simply an exorcism for Albert. There was no intention to play music. His intention was to drink.
From Schiphol to Centraal Station to the first pub we spotted across the tram, taxi and bus strangled entryway outside the station where crowds of a wide array of freaks were assembled for various causes to the only intended direction all along.
Why a pub? Why a goddamned pub when an entire city awaited us, an entirely new and different country, another continent, for crissakes? Why when just ahead of me I stared transfixed at barkers in bright orange jumpsuits preaching Jesus with megaphones and off to another side a trio consisting of a slide guitarist, a tin can drummer and vocalist were battering out a horrible rendition of Roadhouse Blues, to the right of me hordes of backpacking sheep and further to the left whilst to the left lie in wait the hungry wolves with dirt in their eyes and beneath their fingernails ready to pounce? Why when having finally arrived, standing on the precipice of every ecstatic possibility
imaginable?
Because Albert was in charge, that's why.
How many hours since we left Kennedy, he mumbles in scruffy
justification, scratching his chin. I Haven't had a proper beer, haven't been able
to sit down and enjoy a cigarette, haven't had a second of time to just sit
and absorb toxins as if they were my closest relatives and this was
a family reunion. Amsterdam's been here what, fourteen hundred,
fifteen hundred years? It isn't going anywhere while I sit having a
few quiet beers and a few smokes and get my bearings, now is it?
Well, I corrected with a degree of annoyance, finding myself chafing at this sudden subservience, they say it was settled by two Frisian fishermen. The beginning of the 14th century or the very end of the 13th century, depending on whose book you read.
Two Frisian fishermen and a dog on the Amstel River, they say.
That makes it about seven hundred years, not fourteen hundred or fifteen hundred years that it's been around. And no, I'm not worried about it disappearing while you drink yourself into an inertia of overindulgence but I am worried about where we might sleep at least.
I cringed hearing the sound of a recalcitrant spouse in my voice. Or is it your
plan to wait until you’ve had so much to drink you can barely stand and use
the stench of beer reeking from every pore as a sort of passkey into the first
inn you find? I want to drink beer as much as you do but think about it: don’t
we want a place to drop off our instruments and bags? Don’t we want to know
that for the first night at least we have a bed arranged to plunge face first into?
Albert shrugged as we marched resolutely across a road with a pack
of pedestrians and cyclists and trams and cars and buses all passing
back and forth in front of us, around us, between us as though every
step taken risked collision.
If you're bothered by it, he sneered over his shoulder as the smell
of greasy Belgian frites smothered with a dollop of mayonnaise
lingered in my nostrils. Go and find a place yourself, it doesn't
matter to me where we sleep. I just got here. There are welcoming
drinks to consume with the natives. It's tradition, in travelling.
Welcoming drinks, chat with the locals, get a lay of the land from
inside a pub before you dare venture outside.
Whilst he carried on his empty palaver and our seemingly aimless walk
continued, we were suddenly in front of a place. He opened the door and
marched in. Like a dog fearless following his master, I was close behind him.
Light is the focus of many Dutch artists. Painters as Rembrandt,
Vermeer, Jongkind, Dibbets etc. are famous for their use of light. I
was muttering this to myself like a mantra hoping beyond hope at the last
minute to achieve a stay in the proceedings, to swing wide of the
door and back out again with the sudden satori that we could've
gotten drunk just as easily in Manhattan and there was no reason to
come this far simply to try another brand of beer with so much waiting to be
discovered by us outside.
But there was no last minute stay of execution. Albert was determined.
So we went into the oldest brown café in Amsterdam, Karpershoek, walls
stained with years of tobacco smoke, maybe almost 400 years worth of
smoke and all the accompanying tales ground beneath the silver sand
tossed upon the wooden floor to make cleaning all the easier, the
floor with the sand acting as a sort of ashtray. A place, I correctly
suspected, with little to no light.
This used to be a sailor's pub back in the days when about 10% of
the Dutch adult males were sailors. So the barman tells us when
Albert asked, trying to fend off my reluctance with a local's history. We are
immediately muzzled with a few beers and take a seat as I noticed indeed, even here the pale light filtering through a window as we carried on a stunted debate on the origins of lager.
Someone overhears the debate and leans into our conversation to talk
about brandy instead. The lager conversations have long ago bored
him. It's Dutch, you know, he says proudly, rolling a cigarette with
one already tucked behind his right ear. He looks to be in his 30s,
skin glistening with the night before still clinging to him like an
influenza. He is drinking a half glass of beer, dressed in a sport
coat over a tee shirt and a pair of torn jeans. A pair of reading
glasses is perched atop his head which he'd been using before our
entry to read De Telegraaf.
Comes from the Dutch for "burnt wine," he states matter-of-factly,
flipping the rolled cigarette into his mouth, perched between his
lips and lighting it with a match scratched across the floor.
Brandewijn. You see, fermentation doesn't yield a high enough
alcohol. It needs distillation and then a boiling of the resultant
ferment, capturing the vapour which is richer in alcohol than the
liquid.
He gathers us in, sitting back in his chair which he'd pulled up to
our table without invitation, regarding our bags and instruments.
Are you here to play? Another band of gypsy musicians to assault the
already overblown air? To drown us in mediocrity?
We're here to get drunk, Albert corrects, standing to get another
round of beers noting their diminutive size and enquiring about
pint-sized glasses.
But certainly those instruments mean…
Consider us like gypsies if you wish, Albert continues across the
room whilst waiting for the beers to be poured. We'll be playing in
the streets such an improvised ruckus that people will pay us to stop playing.
It's anti music really, our protest against order. In fact, playing badly should
an underappreciated art form.
But I always considering pop music to be anti music, the stranger counters,
nodding to a patron who entered only to turn around and exit again
as though he'd just realised he'd forgotten his wallet.
Well let’s simply call it improvised music, Albert offers, unconcerned about
the technicalities of the merits or points of the debate and more enamoured
with the sound of his authoritarian voice filling his ears musically. Improvised
music is often described as a form of dialogue he continues, wherein one musician is communicating with another via instruments. It is during this
conversation that the identity is negotiated and the commonality is formed.
Our ruckus of course, is still no atavistic charm but we are prepared to accept
the curses of passers-by and their indignant stares. We have no egos to be
wounded. We are simple workmen, labourers of music with no appreciable
skill.
I'm Wim, the stranger rebuts suddenly, perhaps stumped, pulling his glasses
down over his eyes and sticking his paint-spackled hand in front of my chest.
I shake it reluctantly wondering all the places it had been, all the things it
had touched since last being washed. He wasn't filthy but he wasn't
clean either. Somewhere between junkie and alcoholic, lonely and
bored, head still reeling from the night's party stilled only
momentarily by the further investment of beer coursing through his
nervous system. You find people like this all over the world in the early opening hours of pubs. They are their own citizenry. The citizenry of drunk and desperate and struggling to regain their charm. The citizenry who are blurring their edges, hanging on by their dirty fingernails. Deluded into believing they are on some mystical path to adventure and truth. If only they or we could have seen it from the outside, far uglier even than from the inside.
Hours later none of us had moved other than shifting in our seats,
standing to walk to the toilet or to order more beer.
We were engaging ourselves in historical discussions about the settlement of Amsterdam, or Aemstelledamme, as Wim corrected pointedly. Dam on the Amstel was the original meaning - you see, the Amstel river was dammed to keep the settlement of huts on the banks of the river from flooding over at
inopportune moments. The history of this city, like the history of this country
is above all, avoiding floods.
That was the extent of our cultural immersion.
Thereafter only the tinny noise of remembrance played in the back of the
head, the hours spun a blur. Faces appeared in and out, cameos in this avant garde drinking film we were acting in. The first day spent crashing downward into a miraculous sea of debauchery, pilgrims seeking a new religion, the new holy trinity in the name of the pub, the beer and the holy obliteration.
Museums? Cultural tours? Forget it. We were not tourist landing with feathery ideals, Albert reminded. We were celebrating our arrival, defending against jet lag, conducting research and ground work. All this in a glass of beer which took an afternoon and evening of emptying to find.
*****
A day later, or perhaps it wasn't a full day, 18 or 20 hours later,
I was waking from a bench in front of the train station, my bags
tied around my ankles to prevent thieves while I slept.
As I raised my head, in the grass about 20 yards away, I saw that
Albert was fast asleep, snoring even, with the double bass like a
mistress lying beside him still in it's ominous looking white
Kolstein Uni-Air Bass Carrier. His duffel bag was underneath his
head, the strap tied around his neck. No need for a hotel room. Perhaps it was an annotation for the old tourist’s guidebook. Budget for beer, sleep in the rough. Accommodations were for loiterers. For a few early morning hours this was our land, not spat out freshly showered to hop aboard another tour bus with the nattering of semi-literate tourists. Waking on the ground, head in a vice with no concept of where or how.
And now here we have arrived in the station in Utrecht two days later having hit the rewind button and finger poised over the play button ready to set
the nihilism back in motion. This was some preview of Albert's
Europe Tour – dead of liver poisoning in the first two months.
Hospitalised with exhaustion. Accidental drowning in the Oude
Gracht.
So far, the plan was working with precision.
It was like a business, Albert had preached in New York.
We had to be serious if we wanted to be taken seriously.
He’d insisted we even go to the expense of hiring out a small recording studio to do a few demos of songs we made up as we went along, predicated on a few random notes we’d half-rehearsed in the middle of a drinking session in the flat.
It wasn’t a bad idea but unfortunately in either celebration or anxiety about recording we’d so lubricated ourselves with drink that the end result was too disappointingly shoddy to bother bringing with us to Europe. We’d not impress any local club managers with this piffle, we decided.
Clearly we had no promotional capacity other than playing. If that meant playing in parks or on bridges, if it meant open mic venues, or if it meant just knocking door to door looking for desperation to seal our fate, we weren't going to be taken very seriously, incapable of pulling ourselves out of the
first pub we came across. Not unless we stumbled across a wedding
looking for two drunks with thick tongues pasty with
drink and abilities rendered still-borne by a fog of apathy, to act
as a sort of wedding reception sideshow
Albert waved off my concerns. Called me too tense. Too future tense,
more specifically.
How can you imagine having a feel for the people if you're rushing around tsking and multi-tasking about where we'll end up playing? We haven't really learned any songs. What do you suppose we're going to play at all these magical recitals? Once we have a feel for the people, have a feel for their local drink, their local food, their language, the music on the radio, the jazz they
play in a few nightclubs, then we'll have a better grasp of where we
need to head next. This is all an experiment; we are the vanguard of
our own shadows. Calm down, have a beer.
As we entered the station café I pushed a few orange banners hanging from
the ceiling, away from my head. The entire country was done up in orange.
Orange banners, orange flags, orange t-shirts, orange bunting, orange
underwear, orange beer. This was patriotism exacerbated by the anticipation
of co-hosting the European Football Championships and what it did to a
society's subconscious. I tapped the guy next to me on the shoulder.
What's the deal with all the orange anyway, I asked impatiently, my eyes
riddled with two days of orange before the first match had even been played.
Was it always drenched in orange like this or was this some temporary
obsession?
The man turned, bristle-chinned, pipe hanging off his bottom lip and
regarded me with curiosity. He removed the pipe from his lips and
exhaled a cherry tobacco scented plume in my direction.
We are celebrating the House of Orange, not just patriotism. Orange, in the
likely event you don't already know, is in France, the warmest, temperature-
wise anyway, city in France. But that's neither here nor there. You see,
Charles the V, Holy Roman Emperor, was born in Ghent, a Belgian city
several hours south of here, and raised in the Netherlands. Part of
the booty of the Empire was the Burgundian lands which contained Orange
and the Spanish kingdom. But it's all a bit confusing to visitors with no grasp
of history, I can tell from the blank stare in your eyes.
It wasn't a blank stare, I corrected, offering to buy his beer
anyway like putting more coins in the jukebox to hear another song.
I'm mesmerised by a chance encounter with an historian. Think of all
the reading you're saving me.
Albert swayed in between us, eyeing the stranger and pulling on his
own spackled beard, days of roughage sprouting little barbed hairs,
splotchy with tobacco stains and greying whiskers. We're going to
Belgium in a few days for the Euros, he coughed, dribbling his drink
against his lips and buying the guy yet another beer. Let's hear all
about it, he barked with sudden, inappropriate enthusiasm.
Well, considering you've now given me two extra beers, I suppose I
can reveal that the Holy Roman Emperor passed on these lands to his
son, Phillip, who was Spanish. The Protestants and Calvinists
chaffed under Catholic rule and little outbreaks started happening.
One day the Calvinists went a little crazy in Brussels, destroying Catholic
statues and calling them heretical, like false icons. Spain sent troops in response, to quash the rebellion and defend Catholicism. They smashed the city and the Calvinists up, scored high marks in repression and chopped off
the heads of some big characters, thereby starting the fire of our full scale revolution for independence.
Oh, isn't that typical, Albert bellowed, drawing a few looks from
around the bar before placing his beer softly on the bar and smiling
gently. Everyone's little religious fumblings ending in mass murder.
Why can't we just get on with answering the simple question, why is
everything in Holland covered in orange? Witold and I are well
familiar with the history of human cruelty. We were looking for
inspiration not lectures.
Naturally the man who had been patiently laying the groundwork for
an elaborate reply to my single, innocent question was more than a
bit taken aback by Albert's rude directness. It was one of the
reasons Albert had so few friends to begin with, his impatience, his
lack of tact, his utter disregard for diplomacy. And why? Because,
as he explained quite often in the early days of our knowing each
other when I would ask him why he was such an opinionated asshole
sometimes and why he couldn't give people the benefit of the doubt,
time is short. Suffering fools is a full time addiction for some but
the less time I spend listening to what I'm not interested in, the more time
I can spend finding people who are saying something worth listening to.
Our time on earth is limited and I'm not going to waste it politely listening
to someone with an undisciplined sense of communication imprison me
with their lack of focus.
After a moment's pause, the man who one moment ago had been warming
up to his topic grimaced as though someone had given his nuts a
pinch. He wasn't quite certain how to approach Albert's insouciance.
Take it as a challenge, like a heckler in a crowd? Walk away in a
huff? Albert would tell me later it is how to get an instant gauge
of one's character. Throw them some confusion and observe how they dealt with it. His mind had clearly surmised, ignore it and it will go away. European pacifism at its best.
In the end, he chose to carry on as though Albert had said nothing. Besides,
there was still the matter of one and a half beers to drink and so
on the one hand, since he couldn't bring himself to turn away from
free beers, he couldn't very well turn his back and continue
drinking them, he was stuck with the choice of staying and drinking
the beers or surrendering them and walking away.
Eventually, he continued his historical narrative up to the elder Protestant
prince, William the Silent, who was assassinated ironically for talking too much about independence from Spain, He brought us through the royal family
photo album; the younger brother, Maurice of Nassau, who became the Prince
of Orange after William was killed and who carried on the fight against Spain.
He was killed in battle against Spanish Forces and his son later became King
of England.
Eventually the beers had been drained, the narrative concluded. He wiped
his lip gently with a cocktail napkin and leaned over to Albert, tapping him
gently on the forehead. I sure hope, he said, taking his coat, that you
communicate better with that bass than with those lips.
*****
Perhaps because after nearly two days of debauchery in Amsterdam Albert’s
resolve had weakened ever so slightly, this time I was able to persuade him from drinking long enough to arrange accommodation through a little B & B booking agent inside the train station and less than an hour later we were stretching our legs through the streets of Utrecht.
As we are walking Albert began to recount a story he’d read once about
Descartes’ own initial arrival in Holland four hundred years earlier after
joining the army of Prince Maurice of Orange, then at Breda. As Descartes
was, like us, walking through these streets for the first time, Albert divulged, he saw a placard in Dutch and curious as to what it meant, stopped the first
passer by and asking him to translate it into his language, French,
or into Latin. As it turns out, the first passer by was Isaac Beeckman, the head
of the Dutch College at Dort. Beeckman agreed to translate it but only if
Descartes would answer the placard once it had been translated for him. That
is, the placard itself was a challenge to the entire world to solve a certain
geometrical problem. After Beeckman translated it for him, Descartes worked
it out within a few hours, and he and Beeckman went on to become good friends.
Moral of the story, Albert ruminated, use your ignorance in one area to promote your talent in another. As neither you nor I are Descartes nor
mathematicians but musicians and are walking through the streets of Utrecht
with no tangible cognition of the language, why don't you find yourself
suddenly curious and excited at some seemingly benevolent sign in Dutch outside some music venue, and stop the first girl with a pearl earring you see, and ask her for the translation. She will no doubt notice our musical
instruments, thereby promoting further discourse, an invitation to elaborate over coffee or beer and voila, our problem of the lack of female escorts on our first night is resolved. And better still we don’t have to waste time solving any complex geometrical equations. Brilliant, isn’t it?
He isn't serious, he can’t be. He is sweating, perhaps hallucinating. It's
unbearably warm outside; the humidity is peeling layers of water out of him
beneath the bags.
Utrecht is a city with a small town feel. Een stad met het gevoel van een dorptje. In a few weeks time I will feel clever when I repeat this phrase in
Dutch night after night in a variety of pubs and cafes: It is one of the few
phrases I will learn straight away and memorise from a crumbled piece of
paper and from each person that I recite it, I will be rewarded with the
gratitude of a simple person understanding a simple observation. Like a child
in a pub making precocious comments. They are impressed. They will think I
am clever. So little is required of a tourist.
One thing you will come to know straight away is that a great deal of the
day to day experience in Utrecht or anywhere else in Holland is about the
weather. Your days are a steady diet of overcast skies, grey days, mist,
sometimes driving rain, gusting winds, damp streets and waterlogged outdoor
café seats which conspire to wear away the resolve over time.
You bend to the will of the weather. You suffer silently as people have always
done, making little comments about the weather, staring out the window at the
changing cloudscapes viewed from inside a café through a large window. And
when you're in such an environment, when you've resigned yourself to the
weather, you will no longer care about the weather's mendacity or its
sometimes cruel and disappointing nature. What you will learn to appreciate
instead is the appearance of the sun. The appearance of the sun will become an
event, a happening during which the dispositions of those around you will
visibly brighten, your step will lighten and all the burdens of daily living
seem almost magically transformed.
It was hot and sunny that first day in Utrecht and thus, without the
hindsight of weeks of unbroken cloudy hangover days to balance our
enthusiasm, it immediately became an outdoor summer concert of
faces, a circus of smiling and big horse Dutch-toothed mouths, a
shuddering orgasm of activity and all around us, the small town
Bristling with the vibrancy of unusually good weather.
*****
As we strode down the Voorstraat after crossing the Oudegracht and turning left from Neude, sweating out hangovers in stultifying heat and humidity,
beneath backpacks and dragging suitcases by the nape of the neck, I could
only hear Albert bitching and complaining behind me about my impatience
for finding taxis and because I wanted this experience to be on the ground,
inhaled, exhaled and with great exertion.
This is supposed to be my great grandparents' tongue, Albert spat
with disappointment listening to the indecipherable, gutteral utterances coming out of the mouths of passersby, sweat pouring over every stretch of skin and
darkening his shirt as he paused to shake out a Winston and lit it to his lips. It
sounds like people are vomiting all around me for crissakes. How can a
country that drinks so much beer speak a language that sounds so thirsty?
Thereafter we carried on to the B&B with only the thought of the beer we
would regale ourselves with once we’d shed our belongings and had eluded
the miserable heat.
*****
Less than an hour later we made our way back to Neude, past
the statue of the rabbit-thinker and turning from the clatter of the
Potterstraat right to Loeff Berchmakerstraat, cobbled together
sometime around 1393, where we were afforded, by turning around, the
sight of the Dom as we faced south and then gradually, making our
way up this narrow domain of cyclists and pedestrians as few cars
can comfortably pass through it, a view opening onto the corner of
Breedstraat, and beyond that, the sight of the water tower, which
had been built in the late 1890s. This little spread of land was to
become our province, our waking and intoxicated realm, our ground
zero, so to speak.
We couldn’t know it at the time but this particular café was destined to become our watering hole extraordinaire, our centre of information, gossip,
conversation, friends and in essence, our living room and front yard for
many months to come.
Perhaps it was the intriguing Oranjeboom sign hanging outside it that made Café Marktzicht impossible for us to avoid seeing refuge in that first heat-
swollen day. We couldn’t have noticed the three 17th century facades
at the corner of Loeff Berchmakerstraat which would fixate us for
hours and months not particularly for any fascination with the
restoration rather because when you sat on the terrace of Café
Marktzicht, it was impossible to avoid staring at if you weren't
engaged in some nagging conversation before you.
As the humidity remained oppressive, rather than jostling for a spot on the
café’s terrace we plunged ourselves into the quasi-cool darkness of the
interior, nearly barren save those with similar thoughts of escaping sun and
heat. One head raised when we entered, another head or two when we spoke to the barman and by the time we’d finished emphasising we were more interested in satisfying our thirst with atypical pints rather than the traditional amsterdametje half-pints we’d attracted open stares.
The Dutch are notorious busybodies, always sticking their noses in other peoples’ business whether their noses were welcomed or not so naturally
the arrival of two foreigners in an otherwise quiet, stultifying June afternoon
café would raise heads and questions. We supposed that’s just how it became
over time in a country cramped with people without much open space. You
didn’t have a choice but to take an interest in what the others around you
were doing.
Before we’d made our way halfway through our first pint, despite nearly chugging it in thirst, the first Dutchman made his way towards us tentatively, trying to overhear our conversation about our tickets to the Euro 2000 whilst simultaneously pretending to wait for the barman to deliver another beer.
That was Cees, who you could tell at first glance spent the majority of his
free time in this very same café, holding court with a fluctuating collection
of regulars who varied in shape and form from documentary producer to
builder to computer programmer to bicycle shop owner to carpenters to
ploughman and muckrakers.
Like most of the Dutch Cees was a master of English, immediately
transfixing on his first approach swooping down on us – we were unable to
take our eyes and ears away from him, a sometimes sputtering, wildly
gesticulating, maddening cacophonous force of inner-connected
phraseologies as though blown throw several horns simultaneously all in
different notes.
Almost at once the three of us were like long lost brothers – Cees
expressing shock and amazement that two Americans had travelled all the way
to Holland to watch a football tournament Americans weren’t even playing in,
was a twittering butterfly in our ears and before Albert had even mentioned his
Dutch background, Cees was in another tail spinning uproar about what are
two Americans doing here from the heat pounding down pints and talking
about football all the while hands flicking inward and outward, fingers twirling
the grips of his handlebar moustache and slapping his leg simultaneously.
Before long Henk emerged from another lonesome table, ambling up to the
bar on the pretext of change for the cigarette machine, overheard Cees and
Albert's conversation and proceeded to ante in his opinion, catching
my eye a time or two as he attempted to ejaculate himself into the
conversation. But eventually defeat slumping in his shoulders as he
could not out shout Cees, he turned to me, looking me up and down –
ugh, another tourist in the café! And then he guffawed slapping my
shoulder lightly to reassure me it was all in good fun, the hilarity
of the circumstances.
He ordered himself a beer and flicked a finger over towards me
before sliding in closer. So what are your impressions of our city
so far?
There isn't much to be fair – we’ve been drunk nearly two straight days in
Amsterdam and only just arrived in Utrecht a few hours ago.
Yes, we know all about the coffee shops stinking of skunk, the
whores flexing in front of windows in scant, alluring outfits.
Window after window of sexually sculptured bodies preening and
advertising. We know about the bicycles and the cheese, the Drum and the food automats dispensing Frinkandels. But beyond the clichés, it's pretty
much a clean slate.
What you should notice, should you venture outside of the city, is
the landscape, the moods that nature effects on trees, canals, and
shop windows…I myself am an artist. I've just been working on a
painting in which we, rather than the landscape, are the giants. I
have not drawn the horizon low on the canvas but rather only as a
sliver at the very top. Beneath it, humanity, eating, gobbling up
the landscape. Actually, I'm planning it as a triptych, wherein in
the first painting would mirror something like Ruisdael's Wheat
Fields gradually giving way in the subsequent paintings, to What
Fields?
He gave me a tap on the arm again – you see? Understand?
Yeah, I mutter ungenerously, sipping the beer quickly. The usual
patter about man destroying nature…what about nature killing man?
What about volcanoes, hurricanes, earthquakes, that sort of thing.
What has that to do with human control? I think man is often the
forgotten victim here…I sneer into the beer, tapping him on the arm
to reassure him. All in good fun, the hilarity of the circumstances,
like you said.
Uh huh, he pondered. His mind was already leaning back towards the
conversation continuing to unravel between Cees and Albert – Albert was in
mid-explanation of how we'd gotten here, our intention to stay here
– for the time being anyway until we headed back out for Belgium to
watch the football matches whose tickets we'd purchased via the
internet months before.
The café was getting more crowded. So what do you know of Dutch
painting, then, Henk returned to me, decided to ask, returning his attention to
me, stammering for a topical venue, clearly uninterested in football.
The Golden Age, I recited dutifully. Great artistic production
brought on by the capitalism awoken by the bourgeois power after the
war with Spain…that's about it and even that I only just read on the
train here from Amsterdam. He pretended to listen for a moment but it was clear his question was meant more as a precursor for his own tiresome ramble rather than the prelude to an answer.
Well you see, he began to pontificate, going back to the idea behind
my painting, the inverse of the earlier Dutch enchantment with their
newly formed homeland following that war, the celebration of the
landscape in 17th century enthusiasm, I am remarking not only on as
social commentary about destruction of the environment but also the
effect of the population explosion in Holland on the landscape. We
have very little space here and yet we revere space so fully. Space
and shapes and object – tangible things. All of it, like the
landscape, is slipping away. I envision one day we will be nothing
but a series of high rises all across the land, housed much in the
same way of the high rise containers of pigs or chickens to conserve
precious space…
He went on in this vein for quite a spell. I felt myself fading in
and out of focus, drinking faster, smoking more; simple distractions
that helped keep me rooted in front of him, a smile frozen on my
face, nodding and hmmmming where appropriate.
You never know quite what to do in these situations, utterly
trapped. I couldn't very well break off and stick my head back into
the Albert and Cees' conversation without appearing rude. I couldn't
make the excuse that I had to leave, as Albert was still there. I
wanted to just squirm and mumble enough! with verve, to make him
stop in some way. I was powerless to change the course of the
conversation or the converser. People who appeared far more
interesting butted in and out of the human barrier beside the bar,
only to disappear again once they'd retrieved a drink. Lucky people
who could escape.
…..once artists were out from under the rock of the wealthy and powerful,
like the Church, they were free to cater to the wider tastes of the growing
middle class, Henk continued self-indulgently without bothering to notice
whether or not I was still listening, and even though there was a guild
in place to attempt to limit the amount of painters and paintings
and to each have their niche, well, even then actually, by guild
definition, even house painters were considered painters simply
because they used a brush – can you believe that!
Henk was barely drawing a breath by then. I'd already bought him two
beers and one still stood full on the bar so busy he was with
talking and filling my ears with the sound of his voice. I stared at
the lines in his face, along his brow, in the corners of the eyes
when he smiled, wondered where they derived from more, a life of
tobacco smoke and beer or the years of holidays getting burnt
beneath the sun of Portugal or Spain.
Beyond Henk, I could see the café filled to capacity, conversations
everywhere, laughter erupting in pockets all around the room, Drum
smoke forming a bluish haze overhead. I tried imagining what an
equivalent café here in Utrecht might have seemed like in the 17th century.
On the outside of the café was carved 1678 in the edifice. The name,
Marktzicht, meant Market View in deference to the open air fabric market
which had been given its charter all the way back in 1597 for the linen
weaver's guild to hold a twice per year linen market. It had grown in that
time to a weekly open air market not only of fabrics, the largest in Holland,
but as a rag market in general, a place to wander with a head full of Friday
night, mystifying yet comforting.
The façade of Markzicht was dominated by the large ground floor window,
opening to the terrace in warm weather, overlooking the small square and
outside, even with the light beginning to fade slightly, you could see the
streetscape outside. And such a source of entertainment for punters sat on the
terrace sipping Duvel or the regular groups of workers at tables near that front
window, fascinated by every little weird nuance of life moving through.
They commented on the parking jobs of women who might nearly reverse
into other cars, chuckled over someone struggling with a large package, amused themselves with the sight of kafirs wandering starry-eyed from the
coffee shop on the corner, waving their mobile phones and stinking of weed.
Beneath their idle gazes no act was too minute to merit attention and
Comment and nothing escaped their greedy observations
So were painters back then knocking back beers and talking about
their new found source of wealth, the middle classes, gibbering on
about their theories of the future of their art? Were they worried
the Spanish would fight back again, seize Dutch independence, reduce
them back to decorating church organs in the name of The Reformed
Church?
As it turned out, Henk corrected, it was the war with France that
killed off the art market in the 17th century. The economy was
Diverted to the war effort, art became a luxury, not a necessity and of
course, after a half century of paintings being produced en masse, the
market was already glutted to begin with…by the mid 17th century or so,
Utrecht's art market, in fact all over Holland, the art market was already in
decline.
Eventually, Cees had begun to lose himself, having already spent
the better part of four hours drinking beer prior to our arrival,
he announced his departure loudly but regretfully, intervening between Henk
and I to shake my hand, twitching in my face, demanding Albert and I
return here the following evening to watch a football match on the bar telly in
“special guest“ seats.
Once Cees was gone we made our excuses, our own heads swollen with heat
and alcohol, escaping back out into the street, back out to find a different
reality.
Eventually it could become a disaster of solitude, of stunted
conversations, drunken poetic waxing which have meaning only in the
embryo of the brain and die still borne once they are uttered aloud,
in public. In search of a confidante, a brother in calculated misery
and introspection, you realize instead that you are merely
drunk, getting in people's pointless and meandering conversations,
infused with the pettiness that comes in a small town of gossips
where everyone knows each others' business and exploits it to the
fullest...it is then you realize you've missed the transitional
phase of the evening when the prematurely drunk have already
returned to their beds and the nocturnal gibberish that follows is
all a temporary illusion in which every utterance is forgotten almost the moment it is spoken. You tour the bubble of cafe life along Loeff Berchmaker and Voorstraat with the same lack of success, the curse of learning a language only so you can realize no one has anything of interest to say and it was
better off being incomprehensible and mysterious. It is within that
bubble you realize that you are still a stranger, still the outsider
attempting to assimilate a lifetime of experiences in matter of
ragged months. But that would be much later.
That's what it's like crawling from bar to bar, a moving picture
with changing backgrounds yet inside, fantastically enough, similar
scenes were being played out everywhere. Not just all along Utrecht,
but all along Amsterdam, Den Haag, Rotterdam, Eindhoven, Maastricht,
in every mind bending corner. It was incomprehensible to ponder the
amount of beer being consumed in Holland at that very hour.
*****
We didn't have long. As we’d explained to our new comrades in Café Marktzicht, part of the rationale behind stopping off first
in Amsterdam and then Utrecht before we'd departed for the Belgian
phase of the European Championships was to scale the rather
difficult proposition of deciphering
A.) if we liked the place well enough, if Albert's historical links
were important enough, to choose Holland as the beginning point once
the championships were over and
B.) if so, then attempting to find articulation of our music would
become the next point, whether there were sufficient venues,
sufficient interest by those venues and sufficient motivation on our
own part for staying.
And of course, to do it all under the thumb of beer, the lifeblood of our adventure.
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