Words/Worten

Things that I have been asked to define in my time here:

Cheese grater--"Does it mean to melt on top of something?" "No, it's like a metal plate with sharp edges that shreds the cheese." Well, how would you define "cheese grater"? Think about it (and let me know).

Soap operas: "Dutch television is really bad" says I. "Why, how do you mean it is bad? Bad in what way?" "You know, it's like all soap operas, repetitive, over-acted, unnecessarily dramatic and poorly lit." The two Dutch people exchange a glance, realize that by some bizarre chance they have heard a phrase in English that they don't know, and ask: "What is a soap opera?" Suddenly, I realize that "soap opera" is a really strange phrase and I have no idea from whence it came. Why would an opera involve soap? Can soap ever really be operatic? And so forth. I try to describe soap operas, but every word I use seems to confuse them further. Finally, Susannah says "I don't know, but what would be the difference between 'soap opera' and 'soaps?'" So it was less a Dutch-American cultural conflict, and more a British-American cultural conflict. Even after this was cleared up Leonard still looked a little concerned about my evaluation of the quality of Dutch television. But seriously, it's apparently from the same time period as The Cosby Show and The Golden Girls, but minus the sharp incisive wit of a black man in bad sweaters and an old woman who has become a dehydrated version of herself.

Club Ethnography

Whenever I'm bored at clubs (i.e. sober and married, thus defeating both of the primary purposes of being at a club) I have a couple of fall-back games I like to play. The first is: Who's On Drugs? with bonus points if the drug can be named (not counting alcohol, that's just cheating). The second is the Everybody Wants to Get Laid game, in which you try to pick out the people most likely to go home with other people that evening. This is a good time to examine the mating rituals of the human animal: the hair flipping, lip touching, hips turned toward the other person, the casual touching--and those are the subtle gestures. In the Netherlands, I discovered a fun new game: How Many People In This Room Are Fifteen Inches Taller Than I Am? Answer from Paradiso the other night: twelve. And I'd never before fully appreciated how much more exciting clubs are when smoking is allowed: dodging lit cigarettes just adds a certain je ne sais quoi to the evening. (Should there be an "s" on the end of quoi? I can't spell in French at all.)

Small Consolations

I may be missing a sweet basketball game tonight, but at least I have Cannalope Haze to ease the pain.

So I got lost again today. And, actually, it was before I stumbled upon a coffeeshop I had been looking for for days, so that's not the reason. Come to think of it, I have gotten lost everytime I try to find this coffeshop (Grey Area, and I think the aforementioned 32 flavors song might really be more applicable to their product than to a clothing line). I blame it on the fact that every corner in the city looks the same and looks like a right angle. But it is an illusion: you are actually just making your way at great length and in expanding circles to the outside of the city. Round Heineken sign, crooked townhouse, cafe, flower stand, bikes, more bikes, canal, repeat. The other day I managed to go in exactly the wrong direction and ended up at a park on the other side of the city. And I keep finding things, in my wanderings, but there's no way I'd be able to get back to them. When I walked into the park, I thought, aha! So this is where Sarphati park is. Unfortunately, there's not a chance I'd be able to get back there. For all I know, things in Amsterdam move in the night. Perhaps they exist on some quantum level where there is only a certain probability they will be in any one place at any one time.

I've been trying to figure out what bothers me about these people. Is it the first two sentences? "Dinner was the usual affair on Thursday night in Apartment 9F in an elegant prewar on Lower Fifth Avenue. There was shredded cabbage with fruit-scrap vinegar; mashed parsnips and yellow carrots with local butter and fresh thyme; a terrific frittata; then homemade yogurt with honey and thyme tea, eaten under the greenish flickering light cast by two beeswax candles and a fluorescent bulb." Or is it this: "Isabella Beavan, age 2, staggered around the neo-Modern furniture — the Eames chairs, the brown velvet couch, the Lucite lamps and the steel cafe table upon which dinner was set — her silhouette greatly amplified by her organic cotton diapers in their enormous boiled-wool, snap-front cover." No, it could be this: "she did describe, in loving detail, a serious shopping binge that predated No Impact...It included two pairs of calf-high Chloe boots...and added up to two weeks’ salary."

You have chairs worth five thousand dollars and boots worth a week's salary: I'm going to stay sceptical about the "No Impact" fruit-scrap vinegar for a moment here.


The thing is, it's not like I disagree with these people politically or ecologically. I think it is a good idea to reduce our urban impact, especially as an increasing percentage of the population lives in urban areas. I think some of their "rules" are a little--or a lot--arbitrary: no carbon emissions for one year? So they refuse to take public transportation and won't ride elevators: imagine the categorical imperative applied to that one. I think part of it is the nouveau-Puritanism of a certain segment on the left. I understand the moral imperative towards being a vegan, for example, but sometimes I wished my vegan friends would also see that it is an immense privilege to be able to refuse food. The point is to live as simply--and as sanely--as possible, not to claim a position of moral purity. It's ultimately a dodge, a way around admitting that none of us are untainted. Living in developed countries is somewhat akin to Original Sin: we are thrown into a world where we are forced to sin against the Earth and to cause suffering to other living creatures. I'd like to see this realization of human imperfectibility greeted (on our side of the political spectrum) with a lot less self-righteousness and a lot more laughter.

I can understand dutch cartoons!

Yes, my fluency continues to astonish me (sarcasm alert). Even if, just for example, I couldn't remember how to say, "Are you open?" to the tabak-winkel-vrouw (tobacco store lady). Guess what it is? You'll never guess. "Bent u open?" No wonder I couldn't remember it.

Crooks and Liars has been a favorite site of mine for a long time, especially since I don't have cable and they graciously post clips from the Daily Show all the time. There are some great clips today, including Barbara Boxer waving the gavel at James Inhofe and saying "You don't make the rules anymore. Elections have consequences." I can think of some other uses for that gavel, most of them involving Joe Lieberman in one painful way or another.

Dufflers!?!

So, I've been planning for a while now to buy Harry Potter books in Dutch when I got here. I opened one up at the bookshop and found that they had changed all the names. Harry was still Harry, but the Dursleys had become the Dufflers, and Mr. Dursley's first name was now Otto, and Malfoy was something like Malicious. And Hogwart's wasn't Hogwarts! I can't remember what it was called, because I slammed the book shut in exasperation.

Was it necessary to change the names? Did they all mean something really obscene in Dutch? Would leaving the names make the Dutch children feel that they were alone in an Anglophone world?

**So, I brought this up with a Dutch friend, and he said, "But you had to translate it so that the names gave the same impression that they do in English, because of the sounds. So Dumbledore, you know, had to be something that had the same sound-impression as Dumbledore does in English." Here's the thing, though: English and Dutch are on the same branch of languages, and the contain pretty much the same sounds, barring the throat-clearing G that they have here. So how does the sound of Dumbledore, or Hogwart's, not translate? I think this is one of those mysteries that only native speakers can truly understand.**

32 Flavors

It's a lovely snowy day outside, huge chunky powder flakes falling. It would be great snow for skiing, except this country doesn't have more than a couple hundred feet change in elevation in the whole country. Some Dutch people, needled by my sizeist American attitude toward their "mountains" have tried to point out that some of them are as much as seven hundred feet above sea level. I'm pretty sure the change in elevation between my house at the beach and the UCSC campus was more than 700 feet. But, you know, they have socialized health care and pensions, a good school system, legalized soft drugs and prostitution, and we have big fucking mountains. So that works out, then.

There is a chain of clothing stores here that are using the lyrics from Ani Di Franco's "32 Flavors" as an ad campaign for skimpy clothing (i.e. "I'm a sinner/I'm a saint/I do not feel ashamed/I'm your hell/I'm your dream/I'm nothing in between") and I can't help but think that this might not have been what Ani had in mind.

Finally, how great is it that this kid in Alaska makes a "Bong Hits 4 Jesus" sign, gets suspended for it, sues his school, and finds that groups on the religious right are backing him? Truth, still and always stranger than fiction.

Notes on the Netherlands, Channel-Surfing Edition

In my world travels, which have, admittedly, been limited to Western Europe (and that is the world, no?) I have never seen such blithe bicycling skills. First of all, extremely fashionable and well-dressed people bicycle around, which never happens in the U.S., where everything but a car is For Poor People. So here you'll routinely see women in stiletto heels and three hundred euro jeans talking on a cell phone while pedaling themselves around. The Dutch have also clearly figured out the load tolerances of bicycles, which means they know how many children, dogs, friends, and groceries their bicycle will hold. Quite a few, as it turns out.

It does help that this country is flat as a pancake (which is, of course, from a Dutch word: pannenkoeken).

I spent some time last night watching television, and here's what I found out. The Dutch all speak English: half of the channels are in English with Dutch subtitles. Dutch TV is no better than, and in many cases is much worse than, American TV (no, you say, it's not possible. But I assure you, it is). The laugh track is still alive and well in the Netherlands. So far a personal favorite is Tansen met de Stars: On Ijs. Dancing with the Stars, on ice! How awesome is that?
There is a game show--I am not making this up--that is entirely about grammar and spelling. Contestants have to pick out which word in a sentence is incorrect, and then they move into a bonus round where they have to decide if a word is misspelled. I can't see this catching on in the U.S.

Damn, Europeans play such great soccer. It's a beautiful game to watch over here.

So now there's a guy interviewing a porn star (on location, that is, at the house where porn is being filmed). V. average looking Dutch guy (dressed), Spanish porn star (completely nude, and there is clearly not a prohibition on full frontal male nudity here) discussing how to talk dirty in a porn movie. Okay, next channel.

Gender roles still somewhat intact, here: happy housewives using marvelous cleaning products. Then again, this is probably made by an American P.R. firm.

CNN: Valerie Plame. Can I confess something here? I find this whole Plame/Libby thing, along with the U.S. attorney thing, completely fucking boring. For one thing, the Plame thing has gone on for literally years at this point. Of course The Administration leaked her name. Of course they didn't give a shit that she was undercover. Of course they did it for political retribution. They have lied about everything all the time from day one. They are power-hungry, corrupt, motherfucking liars. Let's focus: over three thousand Americans, and tens of thousands of Iraqis, are dead because of these people and for no other reason. That they leaked the name of a C.I.A. agent, while inexcusable, is not surprising. And furthermore, the mainstream media swallowed it all like a ten dollar whore. Excessive attention now does not excuse your inept credulity then.

On the same lines: Alberto Gonzales has sought ways to subvert, overturn, destroy, denigrate, piss on, everything our country was founded upon and that which we should hold most sacred. He has used the Constitution of the United States to wipe Bush's ass. He has routinely broken the law because he and The Administration think that they are above the law. He is a snivelling little pissant. And again, we're surprised that they fired people who weren't "loyal to the President"? I'm surprised they haven't suspended elections and started rounding up the opposition. There's the whole state of Alaska, just sitting there, looking oh-so-much like Siberia. Jesus, people, wake up. I've said it before, I'll say it again: we're now stuck in a national version of Weekend at Bernie's, everyone running around propping up the dead rotting corpse of our democracy and pretending it's alive and well.

So, back to porn. Now, this is something you wouldn't see on American TV: the average Dutch guy gets to fuck the porn star. And they're showing it. I think slapping a woman's breasts from side to side while fucking her is kind of rude, frankly. But he seems to be having a fine time.

Sweet. Entourage is on.

An Actually Good Idea

Here's what the netroots left should do: raise money for injured, disabled and recovering vets of the Iraq war. I'm sick of this "you don't support the troops" bullshit--let's disprove it.