06.27.04

Quirky Canada Has Own Currency, Laws

I have bilingual plumbing. The faucets in the kitchen read 'C' and 'H', for 'cold' and 'hot', while the faucets in the bathroom read 'F' and 'C', for 'froid' and 'chaud'. This means that I burn myself twice each day, once while doing the dishes, and once while brushing my teeth. There is a metaphor in there, but Montreal is too nice a city, and the summer is too beautiful a season, for me to draw it out. Red hands are the price I pay for freedom.

I arrived in Montreal two Sundays ago, crossing the border late at night, unshaven, sweaty, with my old car packed to the rafters with luggage. The border guard stared hard and then waved me through, and soon I was crossing the Champlain bridge towards the beautiful night skyline of the city, the dark mountain looming in the background. Fifteen hours later, I was in an airplane bound for Poland. It was a strange way to arrive in a country - no time to settle in, no celebratory dish of poutine, no chance to even open all the bills I had hurriedly thrown into a paper sack on my way out of the house in Vermont. But it made for a happy arrival a week later. My first big-city apartment, with the bright happy lights of the XXX ADULTE pornography store underneath it calling out "welcome home, stranger!"

I've written in the past about a charming tendency for things in Canada to default to an individual size. Go to a restaurant with friends and you automatically get separate checks. Rent an apartment and you will find that it has its own separate entrance and street number, even if it means having to climb three floors up an outdoor metal staircase. Mailmen must have legs like stovepipes here; I can't even begin to imagine how people avoid breaking limbs in the wintertime.

My own apartment (a sublet) is on the second floor of a building in a gentrifying Greek neighborhood, with a Jewish neighborhood just a few blocks away. Fresh bagels and rotating meat are available to me 24 hours a day. Climbing up into the apartment, I can see directly over the frosted glass of XXX ADULTE into the "new arrivals" section, which is the height of convenience. I can also see the small TV where the bored clerk and his assistant watch non-pornographic movies all day. They are in a film noir period right now.

The porno store is a little bit of an abberation - the neighborhood is more geared towards restaurants and tiny grocery stores. The Greeks won some kind of a soccer game just two days ago and there has not been a moment of peace since. Every few hours they wake up from their alcoholic stupor, realize yet again what a stunning victory they won, pile into their cars, and drive along the avenue with their horns blazing, big Greek flags waving out the car windows. This causes the waiter in the restaurant downstairs to rush out into the road and wave his even larger Greek flag, which drives the Greek drivers completely insane and turns the stacatto honking into one long, ear-splitting wail. If Greece ends up playing Israel in some final elimination round, my life here will become pure hell.

Canada is in the grip of election fever, insofar as Canada can be said to be in the grip of any fever not related to hockey. The city is covered with durable, defaced posters for the Bloc Québecois (Un Parti Propre Au Québec), the Parti Conservateur (Vous N'Avez Rien A Perdre) the Equipe Martin (Nous Sommes Vraiment Desolés) and the NDP (Ne Nous Oubliez Pas). I realize there are probably profound currents at work here, but I can't get past the fact that the main political parties are called "Conservative" and "Liberal". This aversion to euphemism is entirely un-American, which may be why the Canadians are indulging in it. Reliable sources tell me the Liberal party currently holds power in Canada, but lately they have been sweating a bit as the Conservatives make a strong showing. Today's papers have the race dead even, and tomorrow is Election Day.

It seems that the ruling Liberals (I love saying that) have antagonized the country by mixing corruption with incompetence, which is a terrible mistake. Voters like their corruption clever and diabolical, and they like their incompetence well-intentioned and honest. Political parties can pick one, but people get upset when they try to get away with both. There is nothing Iraq- or even Monica-worthy in the scandals that have hurt the Liberal party, but by the standards of Canadian politics the situation is serious. And the press has been scandalized by what it calls the unprecedentedly vicious tone of the campaign, though to an outsider, it looks about as divisive as a runoff for the East Poultney Board of Selectmen.

I must keep reminding myself that I am a guest and a stranger here, and that following Canadian political life requires lowering one's excitement threshold. The front page article in the Globe and Mail just a week before the election covered Conservative leader Stephen Harper's daring decision to throw out a baseball at the Toronto Blue Jays game (the other candidates were invited, but feared the metaphorical dynamite of a missed or underpowered throw). He made the throw; and tomorrow we'll see if he can swing the election.

It's like a whole other country up here.

I wish I were so clever, but the title of the post is adapted from an old Onion article, mirrored here

06.19.04

Amsterdam Tomorrow

If you live in or near Amsterdam and want to split a herring sandwich or olliebollen tomorrow morning, send me an email message. I have a five hour layover at Schiphol, and intend to go roam the city from nine until half past noon or so.

06.19.04

On Darfur

Nicholas Kristof may be the journalist I admire most. He travels the world to gather material about stories that no one else in the mainstream American press will touch, and his reporting is always rigorous, sympathetic, and principled. He even keeps a low-key weblog, so he can follow up on stories and answer reader questions. Recently, Kristof has been writing a series of columns about the genocide now taking place in the Sudan. The articles are hard reading, but perhaps if enough of us read and act on them, our government can be persuaded to apply the minimal resources it would take to stop this shit.

06.10.04

Lille

Great Britain is a deceptively small country; it's very easy to get distracted and find that you've overshot it altogether, which is how I found myself standing near a petrochemical plant in Calais just a few hours after boarding a train in Sheffield, a city that I thought was safely removed from the southern coast.

The French have done everything in their power to encourage their British neighbors to stay away. An entire two-mile strip along the coast has been carefully devastated, as if to say "turn back, nothing but industrial wasteland from here to the Urals". Ferry passengers disembark onto a giant concrete apron surrounded by derricks, and only a twenty minute ride on the shuttle bus reveals that you have arrived in a cool little city, with LEGO-like towers and a tolerable downtown.

The Brits seem completely undaunted by this ruse. A large number of them are drawn to the ferry by some complex and advantageous tax loophoole that involves buying massive quantities of beer (and let's be honest, do you need an excuse?). Large South Asian families are also well-represented, seduced by the thought of taking group photographs of themselves backlit against a grubby ferry window. Still other visitors are day-trippers who just seem to enjoy the shopping in Calais, or perhaps what attracts them is the opportunity to taste food that does not contain mechanically separated meat.

Since I was in northern France, it seemed like a good time to go see the big Rubens exhibition at the Palais des Beaux Arts in Lille that I had heard about some months ago. Rubens is one of my personal heroes - a phenomenal painter who lived a happy and full life, got extremely rich from his art, served as an unofficial diplomat under cover of his art-related travels, had two beautiful wives, and died old and universally respected. Working in a profession in which people are liable to walk up to you painting on the street and say "you have to suffer", it's good to keep someone like Rubens fixed firmly in your mind. Misery and squalor in service of artistic inspiration are Romantic inventions that he would have found amusing, in between lavish state dinners and extremely frequent and satisfying bouts of marital sex.

Every public space in England south of King's Cross had been plastered with posters for "Lille! European city of culture, 2004". Lille is the capital of French Flanders (bon-diddly-jour!), tucked up next to Belgium, in that sweet spot where the beer is magnificent, but people can still understand and laugh at a Belgian joke. The train from Calais to Lille is a wonderful, rickety old box that stops at villages with names like Aiscqx and Wijrijenbovhen, and clatters through field after wide green field in between. Most of these green fields have seen some hideous fighting in the past hundred years - the train runs near Arras, site of a 1940 British tank battle, and the trenches of the first world war ran in a line paralleling the coast, just to the west of Lille. Lille had been occupied during both world wars, and bombed heavily in the second, so I had been careful to apply my life philosophy ("minimize expectations") before the visit. After all, I was fresh from the equally industrial city of Sheffield, which even without dual German invasions was closer in aesthetics to Detroit than to Chartres or Venice.

To my happy astonishment, Lille turned out to be a charming city, full of historic buildings and in the summer weather strangely reminiscent of Marseille - slightly seedy, busy, filled with Moroccan and Tunisian merchants. I had occasion to wonder again at the omnipresent kebab stands; the cylinder of rotating meat that transcends cultures, languages, borders, infesting every city center in Europe; an object of dubious nutritive value that could serve as the symbol of the European Union. I checked in to the Hotel Monte Carlo, in tribute to my aleatory travel plans, and found the usual long cylinder pillow, a nice view of Lilleois rooftops, and free in-room pornography (hardcore after midnight!). I was travelling in style.

Somewhere between Warsaw and London I had acquired a knack for bringing full, glorious summer with me everywhere I went; I have vivid memories of people in Sheffield stopping and staring up at the sky, mouths open, marveling at the strange blue expanse they knew only from books; watching my fair-skinned friend turn scarlet over the course of a single beer at an outdoor table. Lille was no exception; it was bright, hot, relentlessly sunny. The central square of the city had been turned into a remarkable art installation, something called the suspended forest. This was a canopy of eerily lifelike leaves held up by wires about fifteen feet above the pavement, with fake papier mâché trunks pointing up into the sky far above. Public art in France is bimodal: it tends to either fail horribly (who can forget giant inflatable robots at the World Cup?) or succeed with flair, and the inverted forest fell right into the second category. I sat for a while under the real shade from ersatz trees, drinking little, tiny six dollar beers.

The Rubens exhibition was being held in the Palais des Beaux Arts, which is one of those stately and imposing Belle Epoque edifices that the French could knock out in their sleep back in the late 19th century. Its many staircases were sprinkled with anarchists, basking in the sun like rattlesnakes. Inside, the museum was packed full: every senior citizen in France had apparently been given instructions to attend the exhibition on pain of losing his pension. Reinforcements had even been called in from abroad; there were Dutch seniors, Belgian seniors, even a large contingent of the kind of big-haired British ladies who I would have sworn never set foot outside the United Kingdom.

All the viewers had picked up the little audio guide that is now ubiquitous in European museums, giving the impression of a roomful of people on the phone with a very chatty and somewhat bossy friend. Fortunately, age and the stunting effect of a wartime childhood combined to keep the average height in the room low, and I could see the top halves of many of the paintings. It certainly helped that Rubens had not been squeamish about painting on a gigantic scale. When you have an entire studio full of assistants and sub-painters to take care of things like carpets, skies, and large expanses of fabric or dimpled belly, you can be fearless about square footage.

Rubens is best known these days for painting fat women and cherubs, which is accurate but leaves out his greatest talent, which was for dynamic composition and the use of color. You can see this most clearly in the little preparatory cartoons and sketches he did for his major paintings, creating an entire little world with just a few brushstrokes. Three hundred years before Marvel comics, Rubens was throwing around jumbles of bodies in contorted, muscly poses, all painted with a beautiful feel for color, and he got his pictures effortlessly right on the first try. He can be excused the occasional superheavyweight Venus or an excessive use of cherubim.

The paintings I like best are ones Rubens did purely for his own use; a quick portrait of a parrot, or some little head studies for use in later paintings. The Lille exhibition even had a nice collection of drawings, which are humbling and unbelievable. The man makes it look effortless.

Fired up by the art show, but also stir-crazy from spending two hours packed into a room with hundreds of people, I wandered out into the city to see what else I might find. There was a large map of Lille posted by the old tourist bureau with a large star outline marked "citadel", just north of the Old City. It looked worth exploring.

The citadel turned out to be the real article, a beautiful old fort built under Louis XIV as part of a chain of fortifications to protect against the Dutch threat, back when that was a problem. Given the recent progress in relations with Holland, I was somewhat surprised to see that the citadel was still serving strong as a base for the 43rd Regiment.

No army in Europe can resist the temptations of a citadel. With a thousand years of continual warfare, most European cities have acquired one or more of these solid, eye-catching historic fortifications, usually in the most prominent and visualy attractive part of the city. And rather than to throw this open to crowds of eager tourists, armies will do anything they can to be allowed to continue using the structures for parading around and whatever else it is European armies do to fill their days. This is certainly the case in Poland, where the Warsaw citadel remains an active army base (because it has been so effective at protecting Warsaw in the past), and it was the case in Lille, where I got turned back by two bemused and very insistent guards when I tried to take a walk through the four-hundred-year-old ruin.

Readers of this site will know that I am a staunch Francophile, and that I have been steadfast in defending the honor of the French armed forces in the face of jingoistic attacks by people who play fast and loose with European history. I hated the France-bashing that preceded the Iraq war and the smug ignorance it represented. Over the life of this blog, I've done what I can to cheerlead for France, and promote harmony and mutual understanding. But I have to draw the line at citadels.

At some point in the past fifty years, a President of the Republic should have stood up to his General Staff and said: "Right - with the most powerful army in Europe, you stood idle and let Germany rearm in explicit contravention of a treaty signed with you just a dozen years before. And then you did nothing when Germany began an unprovoked war with Poland, preferring to dig in to your fortifications rather than strike the weakly defended German industrial heartland with your ninety seven combat divisions. When the decisive attack finally came, almost a year after the start of hostilities, you disintegrated with stunning celerity. Your greatest living war hero completely discredited his country serving as the leader of a collaborationist rump wartime state, and your conduct during and after the war was ambiguous at best. You brought shame upon your country in Algeria and Indochina. You conducted nuclear tests in the South Pacific way after that had gone completely out of style.

You sank a fucking Greenpeace ship.

NO CITADELS FOR YOU!"

But it never happened, so now France has not only irritating little affectations of power like the aircraft carrier Charles de Gaulle or the Force de Frappe, but its armed forces occupy vast tracts of lovely real estate that would much better serve as a museum, historical park or just plain recreational site.

Still, outrage is remarkably hard to sustain in Lille in May, particularly when dinnertime finds you in a Moroccan restaurant, ladling vegetables onto couscous from an enormous tureen and eating giant hunks of meat from a platter. If 17th century citadels are what it takes to protect this fantastic restaurant culture, then it's a sacrifice I'm willing to make. The last thing we need is Dutch invaders pouring over the border to impose their culinary yoke of flensjes, hagelslag, and roast ooievaar.

06.02.04

Moving to Montreal

I am moving to Montreal next week, where kind people have helped me find a wonderful apartment to sublet for the summer. I'll be working remotely, painting, and of course writing for you about our little-understood and fascinating neighbors to the north. Think Margaret Mead goes to Canada.

05.31.04

Schrödinger's Car

It used to be that New England was a zippy place to get around by train. White River Junction, now a moribund little town near Dartmouth College on the Connecticut River, saw fifty trains a day headed in all directions - south to Connecticut and New York, southeast to Boston, northwest to Montreal, northeast into the posh hotels of the White Mountains. The railroad here died like it did everywhere else in the fifties and sixties, helped along by bad policy, rising prosperity and the new interstate highway system, so that nowadays White River Junction sees just one train a day; the Vermonter, a state-subsidized Amtrak wreck that takes thirteen hours to creep down to Washington.

There's a second Vermont-New York train further west, running up the Hudson valley past Albany and then turning east on a spur into Rutland (or Crack City, as the ex and I used to call it, in a vain attempt to add excitement). The track here, like all over New England, has been torn up by years of freight traffic and there are few places the train can really stretch out and reach its maximum speed of 60 mph. There is a Krispy Kreme outlet at Penn Station that helps ease some of the sting of covering 220 miles in six hours; as you eat your crullers you can fantasize about the New York -> Boston -> Montreal high speed rail line, maybe even with tilting carriages that will bring the route speed up to 90 or 110 mph. Meanwhile the French have saved up all the money they didn't spend defending freedom to build themselves a real high speed rail system, and they can shuttle around their country at 300 kph, laughing at us, drinking regional wines grown on American root stock from the skulls of American children.

I like trains in principle. You embark at point A, disembark at point B, and are pretty much a helpless bag of bones in between, your decision-making potential left untaxed, so you can zone out and plan major life changes. But I had spent the best part of the last three weeks on trains, trains of all stripes: the London-Sheffield express that looked like it had been hosed down with mud; a salaciously bouncy slow train from Waterloo Station to Dover; various expensive shuttle trains to the several far-flung London airports; a windy box rattler local from Calais to Lille; assorted even more expensive trams and light railways; a smoky but impressively quick Intercity service from Krakow to Poland. All my life decisions were made, all my books had been read, my donuts were eaten; the laptop held no joys for me. I wasn't relishing my return home (the set of reality show called I Live With My Ex!), but on the plus side home meant clean socks, friendly cats, and the possibility of sleep while reclining at more than ten degrees from the vertical.

I had taken off from London almost two days before, seated by a window in a 777 that took off and then flew level at six thousand feet for the best part of an hour. We had skimmed just under the bottoms of row after row of fat cumulus clouds on a gorgeous day, enjoying the most beautiful view I had ever seen. There was all of Kent and the countryside spread out below, with a Holstein pattern of light and dark overlaid on top of the more regular grid of hedgerows. Far on the left I could see London in three-quarters view, spiking out of the Thames delta in its haphazard way, a skyscraper here, Canary Wharf there, a tiny Westminster and then the Millenium Dome, looking just like a pinned-down aspirin tablet. There was not a hint of haze, just the palette of greens that seem only to exist in England, and the endless enormous puff clouds right outside the window.

The plane flew all the way out over Land's End before making a turn onto the great circle route to America, and then there was no sight of land until the descent into some God-awful murky, turbulent miasma that had smothered New York. It was beastly hot in the arrival hall, which was packed with passengers. Only there, standing in thr hour-long queue for customs (welcome to America. Now SWEAT!) did it occur to me how ridiculous it was to attempt a ninety minute connection between an airport and a departing train. I wasn't in Europe anymore.

So several hours later I found myself sitting in Jason Kottke's apartment next to a very orange, very hot cat, watching a documentary about Robert McNamara, deeply grateful to be in a country that had figured out you can make hot and cold water go through the same faucet. The next day, I conveyed myself and my ridiculous profusion of suitcases onto the Rutland train, and now as the train wheezed its way up the Hudson, I began to wonder what chance I had of finding my car.

I had left for Europe in circumstances that may be described as "precipitate", parking by the rail station without a thought for how long I could keep my car there. Now as the train inched along I had plenty of time to agonize over the intimidating signs in each Amtrak lot - you can leave your vehicle for a maximum of TEN DAYS, and then it will be towed away - followed by the larcenous fee schedule for towing and storage. Looking at the matter scientifically, my gold Saturn existed in a quantum superposition of states, partially towed and partially untowed, with the uncertainty in its position increasing daily (being a Saturn, there wasn't much uncertainty about its momentum). Somewhere in the complicated equation describing my car there was even the infinitesimal probability that, in my absence, MTV had come along and pimped my ride.

In an infinity of universes, I showed up on the platform to find my car gone, and in another infinity of universes, I found the car right where I had left it. Thankfully, my own worldline veered into a universe where the car was safe and sound. The real shocker was the discovery that I hadn't lost my keys - I could feel the wavefunction collapse as I reached into my pocket. All that remained to do was to drive home and try to manufacture an interest in computers in time for work the next day, having spent three weeks doing nothing but oil painting.