they're on to us, andre!

It was always a secret fantasy of mine to snatch someone else's papers during an exam and run out screaming, "Andre, Andre, I've got the secret papers!" That said and not done, I can't believe I just received a recruitment message from the FBI on MySpace.com. I've got a sharp eye for fraudulent profiles and sites, and this profile screams "I am a professional trying desperately to look respectable on an amazingly sketchy social networking site." Perhaps the FBI is really following up on its self-stated goal #10 to "upgrade technology to successfully perform the FBI's mission." But why would they be recruiting Cal students? Surely 90% of other top campuses would be less actively, vehemently, driven-from-the-depths-of-its-soul opposed to the current political and law enforcement regime than Cal. The American government never ceases to inspire wonder in me.

Still embrassed to be American in Europe,
Special Agent 103309

exotic america

It seemed absurd to me when Euge once commented earnestly during our trip to California that "America is so exotic." There seemed nothing more pedestrian to me, nothing more appropriate to measure all else by, than America. This came not from closed-mindedness so much as my perspective as an American. My entire life has been a constant process of plucking myself out of the familiar and 'normal' and diving into environments that would challenge me to understand them and incorporate myself into them and them into me. Swapping schools and neighborhoods around San Fran and cutting ties with each, discovering the concept of race in Jackson Hole, WY, racing 3,000 miles away to the East Coast, discovering a different world and my own heart just across the bay in Berkeley, and then fleeing another 3,000 miles to a tiny country to which few Americans ever think to move and which speaks the 48th most 'common' language in the world (can you even name 47 langauges?), ony to find myself there too... myself whole, a condition on which I had almost given up hope. Perhaps it was leaving North America, perhaps it was moving to Belgium, perhaps it was finding myself, perhaps it was finding Europeans and their perspectives... but something about coming here finally showed me that America is as exotic a study as a traveller could ever hope to discover.

And now I have this little addiction to browsing the used bookstore De Slegte in Antwerpen and picking up dirt-cheap American photography books I could only dream of affording in the US: Richard Misrach's gorgeous and now nostalgic Golden Gate (which is destined eventually for the library of another Berkeley lover), David Plowden's Imprints (a Yalie, no less... my awe of Yale and its graduates just keeps growing), and today a book I had never heard of before, Kate Schermerhorn's America's Idea of a Good Time.

Not surprisingly, her photos in a way show the sort of America we think of when we think of stereotypical images of America... they do not show the America in which I grew up, neighborhoods where shop owners had their brains blown out, communities that only came together to see the implosion of infamous highrise projects, and Ivy League towers beyond whose protective and exclusive bounds your roommate might have bottles broken over his head on his way home. But also an America of art museums and concert halls, splendid ethnic cuisine, Claes Oldenburg sculptures, icy national parks, desert national parks, empty trains, dark library stacks, fiesty biking communities, modernist wreckages, artists' studios in former toy factories, candlelit rituals, and towers and more towers and bells and the wind. None of these parts of America bear any relation to each other, not even in my arbitrary rhetorical division and juxtaposition of them, except that they avoid coming close to the gaudy, ironic, beautiful, bizarre, sad, and hilarious scenes that Schermerhorn protrays with some technique and lots of keen eye. Elements of her captured scenes most distant from my own life pop out at me from each page in their startling familiarity. So even to me, the scenes in her book are also America... and they are an America so exotic and alluring and filled with a way of life I no longer know that I cannot seem to stop finding myself in them.

007

It's clear that I was fated to have the phone number 624-5*0*0*7* at 65 Edgewood last year. Thanks to Tom for luring me into spending a couple of minutes answering questions that mostly had nothing to do with me. Admittedly, I have a penchant for saving beautiful women, but I would have preferred to kick Mr.-Smith ass as Neo.

You scored as James Bond, Agent 007.
James Bond is MI6's best agent, a suave, sophisticated super-spy with charm, cunning, and a license to kill. He doesn't care about rules or regulations and is somewhat amoral. He does care about saving humanity though, as well as the beautiful women who fill his world. Bond has expensive tastes, a wide knowledge of many subjects, and is usually armed with a clever gadget and an appropriate one-liner.

James Bond, Agent 007 88% Batman, the Dark Knight 83% Captain Jack Sparrow 75% Lara Croft 75% Neo, the "One" 71% Indiana Jones 67% El Zorro 58% The Terminator 54% William Wallace 38% Maximus 38% The Amazing Spider-Man 29%

the bells' angels

Ultra-modern and abstract renovations to the shared courtyard of the Museum Mechelen and Royal Carillon School are almost complete. Blue nighttime lighting has been added to the arcade adjoining the courtyard and mini-carillon tower.

Me: "What do you think of the new blue lighting?"
Geert: "It's great. All it needs is a whore."

Other news of interest: Luc and Twan form the badass duo "The Bell's Angels."

Belgian sex life (only just) above average.

But seriously...the sobering answer to the importance of the poppy, although sadly I still haven't found any seeds to grow.

Also soberingly, cars were torched in several cities including one on the Graaf Van Egmontstraat last night. Really makes you wonder about those instances of "VENDETTA" graffitied across a couple of boarded-up walls.

mmmmm

Côte d'Or milk chocolate spread on fresh tigrebrood (which has irregular bands of sugar coating on top)... sooooo good it bowled me over. All for just a couple of euros, and beat the neuhaus fondant pure chocolate spread by a kilometer. Ohhhhhh man.

grrr

It was one of those days. You know, those days when everything goes wrong. I would have been better off staying in bed, where I belonged, since I've been sick. And no shoulder to cry on. Although if I had a shoulder, I'd probably punch it instead... grrrrrr!!!

My landlord's kooky and perfectly adorable. Her son apparently went to live with some 15-year-old Goth girlfriend and her family when he was 18, borrowed money from the YMCA, and expected his parents to foot the bill. The judge said no way jose. He's now working at Del Haize. I need to figure out where it is and do a little shopping.

public art

After picking up the package with my organ shoes (finally!!) from the BAEF office, I wandered to the European Parliament. The first building I encountered was an old one in the midst of a half-flooded construction site; much like the ISM's former dining hall building, it was magnificent and decaying, its elaborately carved ceiling exposed to the elements and covered with white deposits. Around it, a massive complex of sleek, cold, well-maintained modernity towered.

Behind the EU complex, I found a park in which stood a curious four-foot-wide slab of graffiti-covered concrete, standing perhaps eleven feet tall. I stopped to wonder at what it was doing amidst the angles and curves of a monument of glass... and realized it must be a section of the Berlin Wall. Sure enough, it was from the Potsdamer Platz. Its 1989 dismantlement allowed the formation of ... on May 1, 2004--what precisely, I couldn't decipher from the Dutch, French, and German captions. I remember watching the news as the wall came down, not realizing its significance as an uncomprehending six-year-old, but knowing that something bad was being joyfully destroyed. To see a piece of the wall for the first time, only five days before the sixteenth anniversary of its dismantlement, was moving, for I had enough of a sense of what it stood for to be stunned by it.

Closeups of graffiti on the Berlin Wall.

Considering how many stares I get in Mechelen for dressing a little offbeat, I wonder how the little town of Putte reacts to the annual Body Art Festival. I mean, maybe Putte is much more open-minded than Mechelen, if anybody lives there at all.

In other news, Dendermonde calls itself De Ros Beiaardsted. Only in Belgium. =)

hanging the bell

Interesting bell expression from personals ad: "Hallo, ik ben dat hier eens aan het proberen, ben niet van plan om alles hier aan de klok te hangen, maar kan altijd wel iets moois van komen"

livejournal

Who would have imagined that after a long period of indifference, I'd be getting so into blogging that I now have my third blog at LiveJournal? I'm also real down wit da RSS. Maybe it's a Mac thing.

all saints

I stayed up nearly all night pessimistically working my ass off only to discover when I finally [mostly] finished this afternoon that the post office had been closed for the past two days for All Saints' Day. My dear België, a true kenner of leisure time to the dismay of stomme Amerikanen like me, considers it a national holiday. Fortunately, most of the Soros can be submitted online, but I don't know what they'll make of my CD postmarked November 2. To add injury to insult, my bike fell on my foot as I tried to step away from it to read the hastily printed sign on the door of De Post.

Too tired to feel remorse, I biked to Carrefour and Del Haize to see if I could erase my woes by shopping, but Carrefour was lifeless save kids running wheezy model cars around the empty lot, and Del Haize was nowhere to be found. Magnetized to the canals as usual, I biked north on the east side of the Dijle, a less frequent route for me. Despite or because of the holiday, I encountered only one human being along the way: a man trying to gather up his spilled belongings--way too many to have possibly fit on that bike--perhaps all his worldly possessions. The Dijle looked different, and the wind of the unusually cold but sunny afternoon felt smoother and cleaner than I have almost ever known it. As I reached my favorite underpass, I realized that my beloved "hanging gardens" were nearly submerged in water. The Dijle had risen and swelled over 1/3 of its normal width! I barely noticed any rain in the past 24 hours, but perhaps it fell elsewhere or while I was oblivious at my computer. The sight was stunning, beautiful, exhilarating, and surreal, especially after an exhausting night. Without my iPod, the silence was gorgeous as well.

Too weary to continue, I decided to cross the canal via the highway overpass, half expecting to be run over in the process. Instead, I discovered a spacious bike lane, and not a single car or bike interrupted my tranquility.

"Belgium, you spoil me!" I accused the wind, and as I coasted down the bicycle off-ramp, "What did I do to deserve you, Mechelen?" As I passed the hanging gardens again, birds alighted on each post and twittered nonsense replies.

For dinner, I cooked Signaporean noodles from my new Dutch Chinese cookbook, and severely regret only cooking one serving.