Notes from the Dark Continent

Selections from the Chovanec European Trip Journal

Day 2

After a full-night’s sleep in Paris, jetlaggingly unaware of the endless all-night chatter in the cheesy wicker-chair cafes below us, we marched up Blvd Saint Michel and talked about all the cities we’ve been to in the rest of the world that aspired to be Paris in the good old days of Modernism, making their own muggy, palm-treed, sand-caked versions slightly closer to the equator. Everything from the quickly diminishing grandeur of Massachusetts Ave (which goes from the Carnegie Library to a Z burger in under twenty blocks), to the Diana and Angel de la Independencia (looking embarrassingly anachronistic with their arms outstretched among the glass skyscrapers on Paseo de la Reforma), to Talat Harb Square or Nijmeh Square, perhaps the most earnest of all Haussman rip-offs (Hell Cairo even had its own heavy-handed urban planner in the form of Ali Pasha Mubarek).  Which makes it extra weird to be in the actual city that pioneered all of these global mansard roofs, and lion statues and brass lampposts, and decorative use of stolen obelisks. Jarring really, the first of many times on our European vacation where we found ourself remarking on how Disneyland it all seemed, but that only lasts a few minutes until you get over yourself and start to enjoy urban beauty without blemish or facade, the uninterrupted bliss of matching newspaper kiosks and balcony window boxes and well-dressed parents waiting for their perfectly adorable children in front of perfectly dream-like lycees. As lively as it all seemed, we spent most of the day in thrall of death, going down into the catacombs and staring at the bones of 6-million dead Parisians, dug up from cemeteries in the early 19th century when the city was so saturated with death that if you stomped on a paving stone anywhere near Les Halles (formerly Cimetière des Innocents) it would cause blood to spurt up through the cracks. Lots of wonderfully macabre advice written on headstones to make visitors properly reverent - c’est une impiété que d’insulter aux morts — which has been promptly ignored through the years, from the buttoned up beethoven concerts, to the illicit occult revivalist seances, to the resistance fighters who used it as a cache, to our now proud selfie generation, making sure to gets Robespierre’s femur in the shot with us. But apparently the whole city is a sort of cemetery, real-life priced out of the arrondissements with 90% of the metropolitan population living outside of the Boulevard Périphérique, so it’s as hard to imagine the left-bank as a hardscrap artists enclave as it is to imagine the west village as one, blablabla, you know this rant. At least Paris provides the infrastructure to mourn its literary past, you can still buy edition Gallimard novels in the many intimidating bookstores, pay your respects to the French national myth at the Pantheon, feel like someone is having an interesting conversation about the mirror stage somewhere nearby at the Sorbonne, and best of all visit  the wonderful Montparnasse cemetery, where they will hand you a laminated map of graves, like a hollywood star map but for people we actually care about. Susan Sontag shares the shade of the same tree as Proudhon, Man Ray’s gravestone says something cryptic in a script that looks like it was carved into wet concrete with a stick, Brancusi is entombed in an ironically flat block. Although we couldn’t find Cesar Vallejo, fate made up for it by the man standing at Julio Cortazar’s grave, asking us a few pointed questions to evaluate our literary chops before revealing that he was a close friend of both Julio and Carol. I became suddenly shy so we’ll never know why he chose to leave a box of fresh strawberries strewn over their grave.  

Day 5

Paid our respects to the Paris Commune in the Pere LaChaise cemetery before wandering around artist lofts for the Belleville open studios. Everyone had their tourist-hatred guards down so spoke to us freely about the evils of gentrification, all the fro-yo places opening up in this once-bastion of the world’s fiercest working class, and we even got to meet a crusty old soixante-huitard who muttered something to us about terrorism from the corner of her anarcho-syndicaliste lending library. None of this working-class solidarity, however, prevented us from getting laughed out of a bar after gauged for a whiskey; apparently a double means a quadruple when it’s each according to their means. How dare those Americans order whiskey, don’t they know we’re drinking all this table wine to defend our cliches?   

Day 9

You’d first think it would be a blessing to be stranded in Beaune, the Beauty and the Beast section of the theme-park called France, with its grand cru vineyards still plowed by horse (zee tracteurs mayk zee soil too compressed), its centuries of accrued wealth and privilege and preciousness, its walled-city street plan which we toured on bike like in all my daydreams from high school French class (baguette in the front basket). But when a train strike protesting the new work law leaves you with the prospect of slurping snotty tourist escargot until you go broke in a matter of days, of being slowly pummeled to emotional death by the indifference of the French people, we started to panic. In a good-cop/bad-cop routine we would come to perfect in front of ticket offices all over the continent, we made it onto the only train going to Lyon that day, sharing our cabin with a Canadian doctor with tear-away pants and his wife who were dropping a cool grand on each meal as they toured the wine business of Burgundy, hoping to bring back some tricks for their own Cote d’Ontario. We talked about how wine was perhaps, and still is, the ultimate global monopoly-rent commodity, in so many words, how fascinating it was to drink a bottle of wine whose jibberish french label we now understood (family name, village it comes from, the type of grape and even the specific field it was taken from), how inefficient and downright medieval they divvy up the plots based on hereditary claims and precise heritage methods of cultivation, but nonetheless fit into the logic of scarcity and luxury brands, how global wine marketing and distribution in some ways reflects the original absurdities which were first developed in these very villages. Then the car fell silent when they said that silly Justin Trudeau needed to stop playing dress-up and how Stephen Harper actually got a lot done for the country. I guess they were fair in assuming not many leftists vacation in Burgundy.         

Day 13

Speaking of global luxury commodities, today we went on a truffle hunt! Not being able to help ourselves from asking a million questions as the truffle hunter (not disappointing us by dressing the part with his overalls, plaid, and pageboy cap (family photos inside their house revealed his preferred casual wear is actually neon polo shirts)) poked around with his trusty dog “guarde piu, guarde piu” and kept the dog from gobbling them up selfishly when he found them. Does the humidity of the soil promote the growth of other forms of edible fungi? Does the limited ability to store fresh truffle expose you to more of the ups-and-downs of market prices versus if you were able to invest in producing truffle oil? How do the spores germinate from underground? What’s your cat’s name and can we pet it? We had to cut short drinking wine with them in their house which was soaked to its foundation with the smell of freshly cooked truffle to make it to our dinner in another village in Piedmont, ah yes Piedmont, land of subtle pleasures and sophisticated tastes. The majority of Italian immigration to the United States in the 20th century was from Napoli south so that’s why all of our impressions of Italian culture and cuisine are reduced to red sauce and mobsters (see Gramsci), and why we were so surprised to be eating so much Vitello Tonnato (a dish of cold, sliced veal covered with a creamy, mayonnaise-like sauce that has been flavored with tuna.), Carne Cruda (Italian Steak Tartarre) and hazelnuts on everything (not a drop of tomato sauce to be seen anywhere). Of all the endless dinners we had in Europe, from the exquisite to the excruciating, our record was that night at Da Maria, clocking in at 3 hours and 15 minutes, where the waiter used the English he learnt in the early 80s to pressure us into taking extra portions of Russian salad, where at times we felt like maybe had somehow turned invisible for surely the waiter would have noticed by now that we finished our bruschetta 45 minutes ago, and finally done (able to fully digest the salmon and ravioli and piles of cheese between courses) when we went to pay and had the required espresso post-dinner at the bar (far nicer than the espresso bar at all of the truck stops where people try to enjoy a cup before hitting the road between teddy bears and jugs of window-washing fluid), and Nora refused a cup because she said she wouldn’t be able to sleep, he gummy-tooth offered to make her a cup of Caffè d'orzo. Sorry we said, what’s that, and there right at the bar he pulled out the dusty dictionary he had learnt English in the 80’s from and looked up Orzo. “dees issa zee caffe mayda froma Bare-lee” “huh?” “Bare-ley”  “ohhhhh, barley coffee” “yessa, no caffeine, but itta taste like aqua sporca, dirty awater.”     

Day 15

Met up with a couple from Dublin for a cooking class, following la maestra around the markets as she lectured us about the names of vegetables in the Bolognese dialect, showed us a $150 bottle of olive oil grown in a mountainous micro-climate outside of Milan in a willy wonka-esque drogheria, and pontificated about the relative merits of the cheeses and cured meats from each respective town in the region. Learnt how to make pasta by hand, and Tiramisu under a time crunch.

Day 16

In just a few hours we drove from pasta slurping, pinko-commie “occupiamo tutti”, shiny shoe Italian cliche Bologna, past fair Verona (where we did not, unfortunately, lay our scene) up into the mountains. To our surprise, when we got out of the car, every single person was speaking German. In America, if you drive 15 hours you’d be lucky to get to somewhere where they pronounce pecan differently. But there we were, pretzels hanging from sticks, Alpine chalets, sausages, and onion-domed churches. A town which only Mussolini made Italian, otherwise so thoroughly Austrian that dudes where those little yodeling caps un-ironcially. The history behind all of this was very complicated, hard to Wikipedia in an afternoon. Even the individual restaurants have a history longer than an American history textbook. Vögele, for instance, was headquarters to clandestine military strategizing during two world wars, also world famous veal. In America you’re looking so closely for the historical narrative that you’ll savor the remainders of a turner hall (19th century gymnastics clubhouses used by german immigrants to Texas) , now a shoe store, that you find behind the strip mall. In almost-Austria Bolzano, the 400-year-old building nicknamed by Goethe that was bombed by Allies and now has the name of a Partisan martyrs which also serves the regional specialty which is called casolet in the local italian dialect, but weinerschnitzel in german, and then you have to remember the local dining moeurs lest you get stuck waiting long after the lunch rush, all this culture and history is like like trying to eat an 8 course meal as an after dinner mint. I wish we had a loudmouth guide who could explain the intricacies of Tyrolian pseudo-autonomy or the iconography of the befreiungsausschuss Sudtirol (separatist terrorist organization from the 70s) and its subtle invocation of national socialism. We went to a museum devoted entirely to the caveman ötzi and were actually blown away — what he last ate, his fucking bronze axe, his shrivelled chicken skin corpse chilling in a meat freezer as seen through a creepy gawking porthole. Was he a shaman, a warrior, if he had been found back in the days of Berthold Auerbach would ötzi have rather than edelweiss have become the symbol of noble Teutonic purity? The ur-man or whatever those eugenics loving idiots called it. But there is something clean and clear and unspoilt about mountain life up here. I can understand people would want to fetishize and protect it. Up here on the mountain at Wagner’s farm (no joke, that’s his name) with its perfect st. bernard puppy and wafting pine breeze and farm animals like the cows he let us watch as they calmly let themselves get milked and Wagner let me ask him questions about the local milk business (someone should reward us a certificate or a merit badge in the economics of European agricultural after this trip) he jostled around the octopus suction thingy, it’s all so precious. Turns out from questions we couldn’t help but ask, Sudtirol really has worked hard to keep out globalization. While self-righteous Paris is actually chockablock full of Starbucks and Pizza Huts, Bolzano launched an outright attack on the first foot locker that tried to come in a few years ago, and I don’t think you could get a cup of filtered coffee in the whole of the Dolomites if you tried. Gothic lettering, silly hats, dishes so local they change by town, and a passion for hiking. But it was a little creepy, I mean this is exactly the Sound of Music culture which was so idealized by the world’s most notorious Austrian and his party.  What is the line between resisting the banality of generic global culture and celebrating and preserving your little spot on the planet in harmony with its own environment and history, and on the other hand just being xenophobic and reactionary like the long string of Alpine culture’s staunchest defenders. What if, like every single other place in Europe, some well-meaning North African immigrant comes and tries to open a Shwarma joint? How could you go on defending Kneudel and weinerschnitzel (most times I’ve maybe ever written weinerschnitzel) without sounding like a dick? It’s hard for us to say, we are not much in a place to judge since we’ve grown up fed on a pure diet of simulacrum. I kept thinking we’d lean up against some building and it would fall over from being a fake facade, revealing all the Disney employees on their lunch break behind it, their lederhosen unhooked from their shoulders as they ate their french fries while watching teen mom dubbed into German.

Day 20

We headed into the into the confusing suburbs of Siena in our zippy Fiat, specifically engineered for the levels of centrifugal force that one experiences in an Italian roundabout at the base of a walled hilltop Tuscan city, trying hard not to die at the hands of a vespa or three-wheeled truck (surely better than being a Medici funded mercenary trying to lay siege to it a few centuries ago). We were there for some event which got each of the 17 historical neighborhoods to show its colors, mainly in the form of silk scarves worn by the men which were garish enough to make Liberace blush. We tried to listen to our waiter at the tourist-trap Osteria speak over the din of a mansplaining retiree to tell us about how all the walled towns in the region have competitions like this, Siena’s is a horse-race around the tightly packed central square, but others do a crossbow tournament and in Moltepuciano they roll wine casks. Based on a fountain on the next block, I asked the waiter if this restaurant was in Turtle territory. He sneered, “no! Noi siamo pantera!”. On our way out of town we saw teenagers dressed in orange and purple heading in the dragon-neighborhood ball. In fact, there were lots of other kids dressed up for a night of drinking and clubbing and a high school function like this was just some normal boring town and not a storybook fantasyland on a hill.

Day 22

Although you can see everything from the hippodrome, to the tomb of Rafael, to the greatest hits of Fascist rationalism, we came all the way to Rome with our hearts set on one ruin in particular: the frieze of a sturgeon used to measure the prescribed length of fish which could be legally caught and sold in the medieval fish market which we learnt about while researching the historic depletion of sturgeon stock on the Po river. We looked under scaffolding, we peered through columns, we turned over every flagstone and wooden door in the Jewish Ghetto, we asked an adorable man in a three-piece suit and two archeological preservationists listening to music on headphones as they dusted off a triumphal arch with paintbrushes, but our beloved sturgeon statue was nowhere to be found. We had to settle for the colosseum instead.            

Day 28

Very successful day. Left early enough (it’s Sunday) that the Ramblas weren’t yet overrun with sunburned Brits and Spanish bachelorette parties, and looked at all the beautiful architecture of the ‘29 Expo (Mies Van Der Rohe pavilion, moorish bull fighting arena turned into a mall, and the stadium meant to host the leftist alternative to the ‘36 Berlin Olympics)  before ducking into a bar for bocadillos and several cups of vermouth (sounds cooler in spanish when they change the voiceless dental fricative for the Laminal denti-alveolar, #linguisticsnerd) which, coupled with our last pair of Gauloises bought while waiting for our laundry to dry on Blvd Hausman, made us, well me at least, happily day drunk while sifting through second-hand book stalls in El Raval to find my very own copy of señas de identidad (if you’re into mid-century leftist cultural defeat like I am, this will make a handsome addition to your collection) . This town takes its architecture very seriously, what with all the Gaudi (who I don’t think made much of anything outside of Barcelona) and the enlightenment-era rationalism of the grid-plan of Barceloneta (although now undecipherable below the 1000’s of beach-partiers slurping down burnt saucers of Paella), and all the world-class public art (you practically trip over things made by Gehry and Lichtenstein), and the amazing commitment to modernism in the sprawling Eixample, and at the same time the commitment to being decrepit and edgy in places like El Raval, with halal meat markets, abandoned lots, and every balcony festooned with the requisite catalan flag, drying laundry, and succulents in a pot, it’s enough to give you and whatever city you go to bat for an inferiority complex. It feels too cool for school except that the locals are having kind of an embarrassing temper tantrum about being tooo popular with global tourism (there is that monopoly rent for you, back with a vengeance) and everyone is screaming at the city’s new left wing mayor to do something about all of the tourists, you know, something beyond making more of all of the passive aggressive graffiti we saw. A local cool-kids newspaper informed us that the city on that very day was under siege by the world’s new largest cruiseship, 60,000 more visitors to a city stretched to the breaking point, where you can walk throughout the entire old city without seeing a single person who actually lives there. But this too-cool newspaper also informed its readers that this cruise ship was, worst of all, mainly made up of North Americans, GASP!, and at that moment I had had enough. Every spring, Austinites prepare for SXSW like a hurricane is coming, but you don’t see us tossing our white-dreads back and get down-right xenophobic about all of the foreigners crowding you out of your local gastronomic peruvian tasting menu spot. Get a grip Barcelona, this has been going on since before your dad was listening to Aerolineas Federales. I mean, look at the French, they’ve have found a way to deal, you know by just being utterly unhelpful or enthused at anything an outsider might say to endear themselves to you, like even when you know who’s won the Gallimard for the last four years, or pronounce the shit out of the word “croissant”, or wear your painfully unsuitable custom-made boots just to look even slightly up to their aesthetic standards….

There’s actually a great passage in señas de identidad about all of the Germans and English in the ‘63, flooding into the city in cavalcades just like the barcelonans has fled in 38,” coming to watch bullfights and eat manzanilla, bask in the sun like lizards, eat pizza and hot-dogs in brand-new cafeterias christened with names like Westminster, Orly, Saint-Trop, Whiskey Club, Old England and others; to finally initiate the Spanish people in the indispensable exercise of learning the values of industry and money-making, converting in a single-blow, by virtue of your proverbial radicalism, into a fertile hotbed of social climbers and fresh sausage.” But we were just as guilty as everyone else, excited to find a place for dinner without any English in the air, and getting excited at seeing real-life prostitutes on Plaça de les Caramelles.

Day 30

Bizarre twigged out night of sleep, took a nice Chilean man’s taxi ride through the maze of the Barri Gothic — past British kids who had just decided on who was going to hook up with who off of Plaça George Orwell. Flew 1000 miles in the wrong direction awaiting our fate at the hands of airline bureaucracy, but it was still such a reminder standing there in the airport of the city I called home for two years, how a shining spread of poğaça and those grose minced meat sticks look at the counter of Simit Sarayi, just how vapid news articles in a Turkish newspaper are (three killed when bus goes off the road outside of Sivas, Melek gets hair extensions!, how to best be forgiven by Allah during the holidays), how people in offices crowd around computers when a problem arises like all that is required is for more people to be looking at the screen, where all the places they hang Ataturk portraits are. It was textbook bittersweet to be there, as frustrating as it may have been to actually go into the city. Another stupid fucking terrorist attack in just the few hours we were there, if being surrounded by a sea of neoliberal housing block oblivion wasn’t enough of a warning. Blood drained by the ticket office, zombie sweat-dazed and unable to read any of my new Turgut Uyar poetry, reduced to staring blankly at 8 hours of movies from the back of a chair, too tired to realize just how bad Hotel Transylvania 2 was, we landed back in America. Familiar bureaucratic procedures, friendly faces, and instant dinner awaited us.