While the USA is stumbling down the road arm-in-arm with the likes of Haiti, Chad, and Ethiopia in its economic brainlessness, I have a little issue of my own that trumps all global meltowns: my Mont Blanc pen has been sent to Vienna for repair, and it’s not due to return for a month. Some people might think a writing instrument’s sanitarium visit — I mean, come on, doesn’t everyone want to be sent to Vienna for repair? — pales by comparison to the world’s going to hell, but let me point something important to you all. When the banks close, and the computers shut down, and gas runs out, and the ocean’s rise from global warming (thanks Kevin Costner for your visionary “Waterworld”), and people return to fighting wars with swords and spears, my blog will continue with the use of the simple pen and sheets of tanned animal hide.
Of course, each blog post will be sent around the world by rolling up the hide, putting it in a bottle, corking the top, and throwing it into the sea.
I remember Sanka instant coffee as a child. I didn’t drink the stuff—I was just a kid. But I watched my grandmother measure teaspoons of this chocolate-colored pebbles, like bits of stone found in the playground. Hot water melted Sanka into a watery brown soup. I don’t even want to try and tell you what that looked like.
I once dipped the end of my finger into the “aromatic crystals” and collected a dozen or so on my skin. They looked like black stars on a vanilla midnight. I touched my tongue to the crystals, thinking they DID look like chocolate. The bitter flavor that struck my senses stays with me today.
A while later, I tasted Sanka’s steamy soup, in a restaurant when I needed something to keep me awake while on the road. This was equally an act of meeting demons head on. I spit the demon back into the cup, and ordered double chocolate cake and a large Coke.
In the dusty, mud-road days before internet, I didn’t think much about needing to keep in touch while on safari. But when the web went down on Friday, I was pissed that I couldn’t listen to NPR, or watch the Obama-McPalin debate, or be able to call people in the States. So I did the next best thing: I stopped worrying and picked up a book.
I’d never had “backstage passes” before, so the Coldplay concert was an oddity by that measure: here I was, walking the corridors of superstardom rock’n'roll, where the roadies hung out emailing their friends back wherevertheylive, and stage managers moving through like rhinos on the warpath. And then there was Sarah, so British, so cute, leading us through the tumult and into the catering room, clouded with food mists and a cornucopia of aromas. This was also the first stadium concert I’d attended since the late ’90s, when the Rolling Stones played Wisconsin U (or was that last Chicago concert Page & Plant playing Zeppelin songs? Can’t remember, and sort of glad for that).The Czech crowd was large, young, and anxious. The O2 Arena (named for O2, the Euro telecommunications giant) is BIG, but very modern, and new. Lots of beer/food stalls, plenty of bathrooms, and a nice “press” entrance that Chris & I slipped through once we got our cool stick-on passes. The idea was to have dinner with Sarah, Chris’s girlfriend who works the catering operation for the tour, and then see the show in the stands with all those other people … the non-VIPs.
We had no chance to meet the band before the show, as they get into that band-only mindset before each show. I do hear that the lads are proper English boys, who are terribly polite to all the road crew (“Can I bother you for more orange juice?”, “Is there any tea?”), and make the on-the-road experience as easy as possible for everyone. Case in point: the buses that the road crew travel from city to city (Prague one night; Budapest the next; Vienna on the third) are completely decked out for sleeping, comfort, eating, entertainment, and easy transport. A computer hard-drive has dozens of HD movies available to play on the flat screen TVs; beer, wine and spirits are there for the wanting; munchies galore; music and dancing; strip monopoly and rooftop jacuzzies (okay, these last two are imaginative).So Sarah collected us outside the press entrance. We went into the bowels of O2 areana, met a bunch of the crew, then went into the dining room. There we had a sheet of the day’s menu from which to choose: steak & roasted potatoes; grilled perch over rocket salad; a vegetarian dish; and something else. There were starters laid out buffet style, and fruit and pastries for dessert. I had the perch.
After we ate, and sat around shooting the breeze before “showtime”, I noticed one of the crew with a t-shirt that said “All access All the Time. Don’t Even Ask.” Now that dude was important. We made our way up to the main floor with our tickets; there was a bit of confusion in the translation between the Czech guard watching the main floor “corral” area and us trying to get close to the stage. Eventually, we figure out what he was trying to say. Here’s a rough translation: “What the fuck you want to stand with all these people for? The ticket’s you got are right next to the stage, you dumb shits.”
Me and Chris went outside, in through the turnstiles, and down to our seats. They were next to the stage on the right side, at the front end. I could have jumped the barrier and stood on stage. Chris and I took seats that weren’t ours, but we had a plan: if anyway came to “claim” the seats, we were going to flash our VIP backstage passes and shove our thumbs at the intruders: “Hit the road, Czesky! We’re with the BAND.” Fortunately, no one tried to kick us out.
We were surrounded by gorgeous Czech teenage girls. Let me tell you about Czech girls: this country is filled with Little Miss Universes. Unfortunately, they’re all young enough to be my daughter, but then I’m only window shopping, right? Anyway, as the band … Coldplay … came on stage, the crowd went crazy and the party began.
Funny that I don’t really know any of the songs; I recognize them, but then the voice sort of sounds like a half-dozen other bands. You don’t get that feeling in concert though, when the spectacle, the crowd, the vibes, and the beer are all working together.
The light show centered around these giant balloons that dropped from behind the stage and over the crowd. They revolved as they projected video feeds from the inside — live feeds of the band members playing guitar, jambing the drums, singing — and had colors and other weird, psychedelic images going on as well. Very dramatic and graphic and all that.
So then me and Chris ran out for beers a few times. Two-fifty for a beer at a concert is a steal. So since when has America decided that the concessionaires would set the price for food & liquor at all sporting, concert, and fair events? In Prague, if you charge too much, there will be riots. Now that’s democracy in action, no?
I was “surprised” at how good Coldplay was, actually. I’d given up on rock & roll bands since the mid 1990s when record labels sought bands based on how closely they came to sound like the previously “best-selling” band that, of course, didn’t last, couldn’t write decent lyrics, and only were signed because the boys “fit the suit.”
Coldplay is in fact made up of quality musicians who not only play well together, but LIKE TO ENTERTAIN their audience, give a good show, and leave people with the feeling that what they had just seen was a memory worth holding.
When you read Kurt Vonnegut’s “Slaughterhouse 5″ you come away with the idea that Dresden was firebombed by the Allies (WWII) out of existence. A bit of retaliation for all that Hitler had done to civilians in the countries he had declared war against. Of course, killing civilians is a war crime, but since the Allies won the war, “to the winners go the spoils” as the saying goes … “and we’ll wash all OUR murdering under the rug” out of expediency to put the world back together. Of course, that only begat contemporary Western war crimes against … oh, forget the history, shan’t we?!!!
Dresden has a bit of its Old Town (Altstadt) intact, namely a few churches and state buildings along the Elbe River. This part of town is quite pretty, and has all the European flair found in the non-bombed out cities across the continent. Across the river (and basically all compass points reaching from Alstadt) you’ll find modern buildings like you see all over America: glass & concrete-fab structures that have all the appeal of chewing gum scraped from the bottom of a shoe.
When I traveled through Berlin, I had hoped to see those German Aryan metal-head punkers, but never came across them. I guess they’ve all moved to Dresden. Some freaky looking boys and girls who seem to base this look on a way of life, not just typical “rage against the machine” bullshit that you outgrow after nine months. Fucking losers. Good visual entertainment, though.
Germany being what it is, and me being a gourmand, I found a little tavern and ordered saurerbraten mit dumplings, und steamed vegetables, und unten gewaschen ihm mit zwei heffeweissen (dunkel) biers. Wundervoll! The pork tasted like it was roasted over a campfire, the dumplings were moist and tender (I’m going to look for dumpling recipes and become a dumpling cooking king!). The beer went down like water.
Then I went over to the Czech embassy and got the paperwork going for my long-term visa. Piece of cake. And SPEAKING OF CAKE (or in this case, strudel), I stopped for coffee and a sort of poppy-seed & honey strudel concoction. Yum! I’m glad I walked about five miles today. Worked off all those calories.
Dresden is also a shopping city, especially for Czechs, as it’s just across the border. There are duty free shops, giant malls (with wickedly cheep cheese and wine shops), sidewalk markets, etcetera. I picked up jeans, 2 shirts, 2 turtlenecks for $75. Also got a couple art pieces, which may turn out to be the nucleus of a collection that tracks where I’ve been/lived. Kitsche stuff but nice.
September 23, 2008 at 12:37 am · Filed under The Prague Blog
Backstage passed at the O2 arena, Prague, for the Brit pop-rock band Coldplay. Hardly knew of them, but must say they are fabulous musicians and did put on one hell of a show. Lots more details, and vids to be uploaded on youtube. But must get to sleep (1.34am) cuz I have a train to Dresden at 6.25am.Here’s me having a romp on one of the crew buses.
September 19, 2008 at 11:20 pm · Filed under The Prague Blog
Like any city, Prague invites its neighborhoods to hold street festivals. Being an ancient town (Praha laid its foundation in Roman times, but has really been a continuous “city” since 900), Prague has many squares, those places where farmers and traders gathered to sell their produce and goods, where folk gathered for Church (every square has its church; the two terms are virtually joined at the hip), where slaves where sold, where the pious burned the heritics at the stake, and where tyrants met death at the end of a rope or the chop of an ax. Oh! What fun times those must have been!Anyway…
Namesti Miru, site of a large square in front of a big church, has weekly fairs now that autumn has settled in. I wouldn’t exactly liken this weekend’s fair akin to Germany’s Octoberfest, but it’s close. The sausages sizzle on the grill; wine merchants have steel vats from which they poor a concoction that tastes like a mix between wine and beer; and there is straight wine, but mulled or something, which gives it a sweetened, easy drinking, just-plain-good-stuff taste.
There are other boothes that have tradition foods, such as the pastry that is wound around a steel cylinder then hot-coal baked till brown, and sprinkled with sugar. Remember the finger ring suckers? Or wax lips?
This pastry you can wear on your wrist as a bangle, for you to nibble on while walking through the aisles between the booths selling candy, home-knitted scarves and socks, beeswax candles, costume jewelery, draught horns, leather products, breads and (more) pastries, and lots of farmer’s cheeses.
I happened to be at Nam Miru this evening, and the crowd was thick. The food lines (sausages and potato pancakes and meat-or-fruit-filled pastries) were long; everyone had a glass of wine in one hand, with a backup bottle tucked in a backpack. All I could think was, “These Czech’s know how to throw a party!”
Music is played, cigarettes are smoked, drunken teens are pulled from the crowd by cops.
As America’s financial institutions become nationalized — striking a pose that resembles socialism, at least for BIG BUSINESS (but don’t you all wait for help with your mortgage, car payment, or in-the-shitter retirement fund) — you might like to know that most people in Prague don’t have America on their minds. This is not odd to me, but will sound odd to lots of American’s because they honestly believe the rest of the world watches what they do. Well, perhaps governments watch America’s failing economy, and I’m sure bankers and investors know the score. But the people — both average and above average — could not care less about America’s fate. Their fate is not tied to how America succeeds or fails in policy, freedoms, or economic growth. While I think these people are a bit wrong (but only a bit), I understand their blindness of the big country across the Atlantic. They have families, they work, they play and travel.
Why bother pointing this out?
Because it needs to be written and said that, on the whole, the tug of America’s influence is never as great as what Americans think. America’s radio programs (listened by me through the interweb) speak about the world “watching America for what’s going to happen next.” The truth is far different, actually.
Last week I wore shorts on a romp around Hradcany Castle. The sun beat with intensity reserved for July. Dust came up behind the tromping tourists (Italians in too tight jeans; Americans in busting-beyond-the-waistband bodies; Brits in frump or footy tees). The royal falcons perched regally in the raptor sanctuary.This morning the air breathes at a frigid 39 degrees. And it’s raining.
I thought I might as well get a library card while in Prague. The Czech National Library has a pretty good collection, at 6 million volumes (purchasing an additional 80k per year), as their website shows. The national library is housed in an old Jesuit college built in 1556 (220 years before the signing of USA’s Declaration of Independence), itself built upon the ruins of an old Dominican monastery founded in the 11th Century. I mention these historical factoids not because I’m so enamored of history (I am), but because I walked around this building for at least 20 minutes before I saw a book.
From the outside, the Klementinum looks like so many other old buildings found in Prague: brown stone stacked like wedding cakes up to ten stories, looking like a bank vault or military headquarters. Of course, being the former Jesuit college, I might have guessed. Now, my point today was to go and read in the Reading Room, a room with tables and chairs lined in the center, surrounded by book cases, in a high-ceilinged room, with a full wall of floor-to-ceiling windows. You’ll recognize this description if you’ve visited NYC Pub Library, or perhaps the LOC in DC (famously captured in “All the President’s Men”). I thought the reading room would be a good place for me to hang out in the future, during down times between classes.
I was wrong.
Firstly, you can’t take a backpack into the reading room. Backpacks and coats must be checked into storage. Any books you take into the reading room must be listed on a piece of paper, and upon your exit will be examined against said books. In short, the security taken to ensure no old, musty books are kited from the building (not that anyone can FIND books there!) prevents the casual reader (me) from wanting to bother. Why do I want to have to pull out pens, notebooks & books – my laptop – just to sit in a big white-washed room for an hour or two?
If NY or Chicago placed these restrictions on visitors, those libraries would be empty. Not that the Czech’s shouldn’t want to preserve and protect their collection, but there are many more modern ways of handling security than making visitors jump through such precautionary hoops. Odd though, walking through a library and not seeing any books. They must store them in the back, and upon finding them in the old card catalogues (yeah, these line the halls), attendents must fetch them from the interior somewhere.
This reminds me of a story by Jorge Luis Borges, “The Library of Babel”, a library that is hundreds of stories high, thousands of interconnecting rooms holding all the known information about the world past, present and (predictably so) the future, in books with identical covers, all 410 pages long. Millions upon millions of volumes exist in this libary, and the codebook for what they contain, and where specific titles are located, has been lost. The allegory of THE UNIVERSE in all its combinations is obvious; so too is the idea of gathered information whose understanding is lost if its knowledge cannot be found and substantiated in THE BOOK. Furthermore, the sentences “It suffices that a book be possible for it to exist. Only the impossible is excluded.” is a nod toward all philosophers who used reasoning to prove the existence of God.
While the USA is stumbling down the road arm-in-arm with the likes of Haiti, Chad, and Ethiopia in its economic brainlessness, I have a little issue of my own that trumps all global meltowns: my Mont Blanc pen has been sent to Vienna for repair, and it’s not due to return for a month. Some people might think a writing instrument’s sanitarium visit — I mean, come on, doesn’t everyone want to be sent to Vienna for repair? — pales by comparison to the world’s going to hell, but let me point something important to you all. When the banks close, and the computers shut down, and gas runs out, and the ocean’s rise from global warming (thanks Kevin Costner for your visionary “Waterworld”), and people return to fighting wars with swords and spears, my blog will continue with the use of the simple pen and sheets of tanned animal hide.
Now, down the road a gray-haired ways, I bought a jar of Nescafé instant espresso. I have to be honest here: the advertising sold me on this one, which is something to say against my usual “I buy nothing based on advertising!” code of honor. Hell, it’s hard enough wearing Nike shoes without putting tape across swoosh. But this coffee, the photo had me by the colors: small cup, creamy topping, a wee-whisp of aromatic vapor rising from the foam. I guess all the tea I’ve been drinking hasn’t satisfied the taste I’d been craving.
After we ate, and sat around shooting the breeze before “showtime”, I noticed one of the crew with a t-shirt that said “All access All the Time. Don’t Even Ask.” Now that dude was important. We made our way up to the main floor with our tickets; there was a bit of confusion in the translation between the Czech guard watching the main floor “corral” area and us trying to get close to the stage. Eventually, we figure out what he was trying to say. Here’s a rough translation: “What the fuck you want to stand with all these people for? The ticket’s you got are right next to the stage, you dumb shits.”
After the show, we hit the tour bus for an apré-concert beer, then jumped in Chris’s VW cruiser van for a harrowing ride back to my Suchdol apartment using his i-Phone GPS guide. At one point we found ourself riding on tram rails up by Hradcany Castle. But all was good. We made it safely into the arms of a Canadian whiskey nightcap.
When I traveled through Berlin, I had hoped to see those German Aryan metal-head punkers, but never came across them. I guess they’ve all moved to Dresden. Some freaky looking boys and girls who seem to base this look on a way of life, not just typical “rage against the machine” bullshit that you outgrow after nine months. Fucking losers. Good visual entertainment, though.
Germany being what it is, and me being a gourmand, I found a little tavern and ordered saurerbraten mit dumplings, und steamed vegetables, und unten gewaschen ihm mit zwei heffeweissen (dunkel) biers. Wundervoll! The pork tasted like it was roasted over a campfire, the dumplings were moist and tender (I’m going to look for dumpling recipes and become a dumpling cooking king!). The beer went down like water.
Namesti Miru, site of a large square in front of a big church, has weekly fairs now that autumn has settled in. I wouldn’t exactly liken this weekend’s fair akin to Germany’s Octoberfest, but it’s close. The sausages sizzle on the grill; wine merchants have steel vats from which they poor a concoction that tastes like a mix between wine and beer; and there is straight wine, but mulled or something, which gives it a sweetened, easy drinking, just-plain-good-stuff taste.
This pastry you can wear on your wrist as a bangle, for you to nibble on while walking through the aisles between the booths selling candy, home-knitted scarves and socks, beeswax candles, costume jewelery, draught horns, leather products, breads and (more) pastries, and lots of farmer’s cheeses.
