A Night at the Carousel

I was going to leave this city for a bit during the break in between the two summer semesters. I really wanted to drink some Albariño in Galicia with the Percebes (Gooseneck Barnacles) that are ungodly expensive everywhere, but worth trying once in life I guess. I did some calculations with where I stand financially and realized I probably couldn’t even afford the Percebes, much less all the vacation expenses required to get to the north and sleep somewhere involved in the pilgrimage. I guess in the end I couldn’t justify the fact that I am still paying rent for my room in Minneapolis, the studio my band practices in, the apartment I have here in Lisbon, and then a hotel room in northwestern Spain as well. There has to be a limit to the impoverished American decadence I believe. So instead of heading for gastronomic heights I opted to further my academic goals by hitting the beaches of Cascais (while reading about the introduction of rock & roll in Portugal as well as the best Portuguese punk, post-punk, metal, and new-wave albums that are completely impossible to get even here). This neglect of national cultural history is maddening to me. Have they never heard of reissues?!!? Jesus Christ, I’m not going to spend 150 Euro for an original 45 of Aqui d’el Rock! Who’s with me? So in order to do my primary research of this time period I will need to start robbing banks. Wouldn’t that be a great new take on the outlaw? “No, I’m not mugging you to get my heroin fix, I just need to get some LPs so I can finish my dissertation.”

After the beach I went with some flatmates to see (in the Lisbon version of movies in the park) “Roxie Hart”, which I realized after a few minutes must have been what the musical film “Chicago” was based on. I gleaned some new old-timey vocabulary from the film at least—when the prisoner Roxie Hart (played by Ginger Rogers) is sent food from the glitzy Chicago hotel called The Ritz, she says “ooh they even sent alligator pears” which are never shown, but from the Spanish (instead of Portuguese for some reason) subtitles that translated these as “aguacates” I realized that this was the name for avocados back in the day. From now on I will only refer to avocados as alligator pears. So the night isn’t a complete loss. I also love the fact that during the fight scene in the female prison between Roxie Hart and 2-Gun Gertie Baxter was highlighted by some grip that caught a lively cat fight. They actually laid the sounds of two alley cats fighting over the main prison fight seen. How delightfully un-p.c.

On our way back we saw some live Portuguese neo-funk band playing in the Praça de Figueiros. Everyone who was left in Lisbon (most natives split in August) was gathered to watch this brilliant (purposeful?) confusion of genres. I was finally convinced that no matter where/when a band plays throughout the world there will always be one dude who will let loose in all drunken splendor. The video I post here is the Lisbon version of this internationally loved/despised character. Although I didn’t get it on tape, for one entire song he did a fascist salute/ Nazi high kick soldier dance that would make John Cleese jealous. Absolutely Fabulous. I love Lisbon. Why should I leave this haven of freaks for some overpriced parasitic delicacy?

A New Low In Getting High

A couple minutes from my apartment I got a nice terrazzo bar overlooking the Tagus that I like to go to on the weekend to get a coffee and read a bit. Today isn’t a weekend but I did just finish the first semester so I went for a bit to relax and some guy came up to me and really excitedly starts speaking Ukranian to me. Now I’m obviously an American since I’m drinking a latte at midday so I didn’t know what made him think I could understand his language since Americans are monoglots primarily (although some I would consider without any proper language since they haven’t yet figured out their mother tongue—what would that be called, semglots? Nonlingual?) Anyway, I was confused because I at first thought he was speaking Portuguese to me in some weird accent and I didn’t understand any of it. So I asked him in Portuguese to repeat what he said and then he realized that I wasn’t his long lost Ukranian friend and that he had mistaken me for. So I guess I look a bit Eastern. I can add that to my list. I’ve already been told by several Germans here that I look like their grandfather or great uncle when they were young. A few have told me they will send me pictures to prove it. This is a little disconcerting for me because given the age of these people that would place me as a late-twenties/early-thirties male in Germany during the late 30s/early 40s--not exactly the look I’m trying to pull off.

Yesterday we had a big feast pot-luck during the last day of classes and so the day before I decided to make Guacamole since apparently no one in this continent has any clue about Mexican/Caribbean cuisine. So I decided I would go to the terrace with my computer and while Betty and I prepared our dishes we could watch the 2nd episode of the current Project Runway. Unfortunately I couldn’t hear shit because at the same time the 75 year-old owner of the house decided to do some couch repair (read: random over-zealous hammering) right next to us. So I watched it but was often confused as to what was happening because when he wasn’t hammering his old ball chain would be yelling at him about everything from leaving the stove on to his stupidity in clinging to the antiquated communist party line in Portugal. I wanted to say something like, “would you fucking shut up so I can watch this show” but since I’m a visitor I kept quiet. Afterward a group of us went to see the new Batman (O cavalheiro das travas) since it just arrived and somehow I had convinced a group of ten Europeans to see a Hollywood action/fantasy film with me. Whenever I have an idea to do anything I usually end up with a large group along since if you invite one person in the house you really need to invite everyone if you don’t want dirty looks and cold shoulders for the rest of the week. I don’t mind of course since I love travelling in small communities, but when I went to the movie my French buddy talked through the whole thing. I’m used to this because my sister likes to go to movies more for the purpose of catching up than actually watching whatever is displayed before us, much to the dismay of those around us. Gerald was more interested in commenting about the ridiculousness of every scene which made it even harder to understand the film due mostly to the fact that, although it was subtitled, I can’t help but read the words at the bottom of the screen even if it’s an English-language film. So the following commentary maybe a bit confused since I may not have captured some of the subtleties intended by the author.

I thought the film in itself was an interesting abstraction of the grey areas of morality and heroism and it’s opposite. The most brilliant introduction to the latter in any film ever was the self-conscious Joker stuttering uncomfortably in a room of mob heads. With the pencil trick he displays the spectrum of schizophrenia and composure, false nerves and controlled chaos. Throughout a lot of the movie I couldn’t help but sympathize with what he was saying. The heroes (or anti-heroes?), however, were all plagued with questions of control vs. liberty. O cavalheiro became big brother to find the Joker, his commissioner buddy decided to bury history to further the hopes of humanity, every cop dismissed prisoner rights in an instant, and Gotham clandestinely colluded to extradite an international outlaw without a second thought. So Morgan Freeman took the high road, Dent took the low road, and a mass of floating civilians and prisoners took the middle. What does that tell us except that, in this day in age, there is no correct path. All humanity is deluged with multi-faceted unanswerable dilemmas that leave us politically paralyzed and socially stagnant in the face of the pseudo-threats that face us today. There are none of the black and white heroes of old in this movie, because the present era has left us with a broken compass and a moral map that looks like the streets of Alfama. After the fall of 19th century humanism, and the subsequent political rift amongst fascism, communism, and capitalist democracy, we have discovered that we can’t trust anyone, and no one is going to save us from ourselves. So even our superheroes are confused as how to deal with a society in which corruption has affected all levels of the body politic and any leadership that is at all human will sooner or later fall into the same trap. So do we target the whole system or just the free radicals that are rotting the system like a virus? The joker seemed sort of like the latter with designs on the former. What does this movie mean politically to Europeans as opposed to Americans? This I would like to discuss.

Unfortunately, I couldn’t really talk this stuff over with most of my friends here because geopolitics seems to evoke exaggerated yawns amongst many Europeans. The European youth today must seem pretty disappointing when seen through the eyes of the older generations that lost limbs, lives, loves, and basically gave up everything for wars fought mostly over political ideology. Even when seen through their parent’s generation who were often indulgent, self-righteous Eurohippies, the kids today lack a cause for which to get high. These disenchanted digital boys of the 21st century represent the culmination of all the blood and toil, as well as death and destruction, of the generations before. And they don’t give a flying fuck about anything. That’s why I think the Batman movie has an interesting chronological movement as a metaphor for the 20th/21st century. The movie starts with heroes wrapping up the last vestiges of organized crime and tyrants, but then (when the joker is let out of the box), as soon as control is slipping from the fingers of the heroic they desperately grasp at methods that are morally questionable and their paranoia (combined with the quick-thinking, quick-acting trait of the superhero) ends up causing more problems than if they had done nothing at all. In the end, all of their efforts, all of their politicking and policing, big brother vigilance, lies, and preaching end in complete destruction of Gotham with no end in sight to the violence and no hero to save them, but rather some vague concept of “more than heroism” which seems to me to be somehow intimately tied with “more than villainous”. As Mick Jagger said, “cause saints and sinners are quite the same”. I think that the 20th century, if considered at all by the youth of today, is perceived this way which leads one to question why have any beliefs at all. And this is very evident in Europe today, a society in which almost everyone calls themselves Catholic but don’t really believe in anything more than some superficial idea of an indeterminable God, and in which the many socialist and communist parties that run the levels of government here aren’t that readily distinguishable from the rest of the more “central” political parties. Family as well has little impact on their daily lives, and so all the prior institutions Europe had held dear are of little import to kids today. So is this the answer then--we just all pop some prozac, turn up the ipod and let the joker be wild? I wonder what Heath Ledger was thinking the night he fell asleep for the last time. He may have had the answer.

10 Gallon Ascots

On Saturday I planned to head south for the weekend to the Algarve, in the hopes of visiting a series of beaches and crashing at the nicest for the night. This was the plan anyway. It was a plan that required getting up early and getting a rental car. The French flatmate Gerald, a student of Tourism in a University in Montpellier, was in charge of arranging the car rental. So we got a bit late and headed across town to the Praça de Comercio to get the car. Unfortunately there was no car rental agency anywhere near this plaza and so we spent a couple hours searching for the Hertz building without an address, but rather a general “feeling” of where it was based on the map he had seen. About an hour and a half into the search I really felt the need to say, “In the university courses on tourism, don’t any of the lessons include something like, ‘if you want to find a place you are looking for, you should know the address’, because I think they should add that if not”. These words were literally burning like acid on my tongue for the rest of the hour, but as satisfied as I would have felt had I said that, I knew he already felt stupid about this mess and delay, and as much as possible I am trying to not just say what I want to say, but try and think about what I would want said to me if I were the one who screwed up. So I said something like, “It’s only a couple of hours delay. It’s not a big deal”. But God that hurt to carry this perfect assault in my brain and not let it out. Two hours later we discovered that the rental agency was actually all the away across town.





So we left Lisbon in the afternoon and still managed to hit 4 beaches before we set up tent in a beach outside the town of Aljezur. We set up tent in the dark on a huge empty beach and opened a bunch of wines and gingha (which is a Protuguese cherry liqueur) and made sandwiches of Iberian ham, camembert, and baguette. The gingha I tend to like, but this brand was disgustingly sweet so I threw it out. We hit three beaches the next day, which is fine and dandy, but they all seemed more or less the same to me. The best was Odeceixe (pictured above) if you are ever in the area. For lunch, I tried combining canned tuna and camembert on baguette with pickled vegetables and it actually turned out pretty well. Its a bit franco-morrocan (á la La Belle Vie), and balanced in texture and taste, but that all depends on the raw materials. I would love to hear Dana’s wine recommendation for my new plate. I drank a Sagres beer with it, which is basically one of the four beer choices in Portugal: Sagres, Super Bock, Cintra, and Sagres Bohemia. The first three are all basically Portuguese Nascar beer, the fourth (as the name implies) is a bit darker and you typically drink it with a clove cigarette, black beret, and Camus. The microbrew is just starting to catch on in the more advanced areas of cosmopolitan Europe. This is another oddity for me since Belgium monks (as I’m sure myriad other people across Europe) had been making the best microbrews for generations. But you do not go into a bar in Portugal and ask what’s on tap. You go in and ask for a size and a form: uma garrafa (bottle), chope or presão (draught), caneca (pint), etc. Asking for a brand (there is usually Super Bock or Sagres—exactly the same beer) is typically seen as a waste of the bartender’s time and is often received with a roll of the eyes. Everybody in the United States is making their own beer and have some favorite brand that can be the most obscure beer you’d ever heard of and yet someone in the group will be like, “yeah its good, but its nothing compared to the Surly version of (insert I.P.A, Maibock, etc. here) they did in 2006.” People are following beer in the states like sports fanatics follow stats or hipsters follow b-side reissues of bands that existed for a week in 1978. I can’t quite tell which culture I find more livable, the depressingly streamlined disinterested Orwellian Lisbon, or the fanatically individualized retroshock multi-leveled irony culture of Minneapolis. Someone please help me sort this out.

Minus Something

I’m finding it hard to cope now that Estelle Getty (from NY Times obituary: When Blanche complained that her life was an open book, Sophia witheringly replied: “Your life is an open blouse.”) is dead and with her a part of my youth, also I am currently high on anti-inflammatories, Portuguese Penicillian, and Paracetamol right now (cause it turns out I've got strep throat yet again). I think I just had it less than a year ago and it is awful. Strep throat seems like a misnomer because, although the throat is what hurts the most, there is not a single part on the body that doesn’t hurt when the bacteria build up enough. I guess I did it to myself. I allowed these little monsters multiply in my body because I didn’t want to deal with the bureaucracy involved in a visit to a Portuguese clinic. After several days of no sleep and night sweats alternating with shivers from some physically imagined freeze, I decided that as glamorous as Scarlett Fever sounded I would rather enjoy the rest of my time here instead of becoming the suffering non-artist locked away in reclusion. I spent most of my past two days in solitude listening to “Saturday Night Fry” a radio program hosted by Stephen Fry and Hugh Lorry that my friend Ryan gave me a couple of years ago and I never had the attention to follow completely. Today everywhere I went I saw Hugh Lorry’s face on all the billboards advertising Schweppe’s Tonic saying “Para mim, é claro”. I wasn’t sure if this was a hallucination or not, but I know none of this was here before. My entire diet for the last two days has been entirely composed of valerian tea with lemon ginger and honey with an occasional chocolate covered almond (I also tried my hand at making miso, but found making dashi was difficult when you can’t find dried sardines—Betty suggested I try making Dashi out of bacalhau which I found laughable). Anyway, I think I will get my appetite back when I can swallow. This process shouldn’t take long as I received a penicillin shot in the ass from some sadistic Hong Kongolesen (sp?) nurse before I left the Hospital Inglês in Campo de Orique. I went to this hospital because I assumed things would be a bit more efficient, and it was—I had a needle in me by the time it normally takes me to buy a loaf of bread at Pingo Doce. This was not the only difference I noticed. Not only were there no pigeons allowed in this hospital, it was also the most pristine, blindingly white and sterile environment I’ve ever been in. It was as if I was in some Howard Hughes dream set in the future (my future, not his). I’m so used to seeing dirt and decay everywhere; maybe I was starting to become a hypochondriac as well (I swear the pigeons intentionally cough in my face every chance they get). This is rather disconcerting as I’ve never been troubled by grime, anyone who has ever been to my apartment in Minneapolis can attest to this. The doctor didn’t give me one of those cue tip lab exams where they shove it as far down your throat as possible until you gag and then shove some more. He just put a tongue depressor in my mouth, looked into my ears with one of those ear canal-looking machines, then went to feel my glands and noticed they were bruised on the outside due to the swelling and decided I needed some meds fast. The nurse told me to take down my drawers and stabbed me with authority (and I believe some pent-up rage) and while massaging in the liquid and slowly pressing down the plunger she continuously asked “oooh, sid I hert you?”

So one of the worst weeks I’ve had in awile has followed the best show I’ve ever seen (Leonard Cohen), which I’ll try to upload some clips for your enjoyment. I can count on less than two hands the people who know about this blog and I know less than 10% care anything about Leonard Cohen so you can just skip this part, which will be brief. The genius Cohen at 76, who hasn’t been on tour for 15 years, was as agile as he was in his 20s and his voice has the same vitality and tonality as ever. He played every song I love, and a few I’d never heard of. Sadly though, he did not play my favorite, “Famous Blue Raincoat”. Maybe that was for the best though, it was a song I only heard him play a couple times and once I learned it on the guitar I no longer wanted to hear because I liked the way I did it and I thought if I heard his version again it would affect the way I played it. So its always remained somewhat of a simulacra of sorts.
I guess there is not much more to tell since, except for a wretched presentation I had to do half-dead in class on the chronology of Rap in Portugal, I really haven’t been outside my room very often. Just an interior experience of vague restlessness in a decomposing body without energy, an intellectual itch that was at times sublime, at times unbearable. Like a chicken pox of the soul. Like Pessoa’s desasossego, you know where to scratch, but you have no clue how to reach it.

Europe Gone Fat

Just an update: I talked with my French friend about Pinon today and he said he isn’t a midget and he never was, he just sort of looks a bit like one. So that clears things up for me. But the no subtitles thing is still confusing for me. I mean how many languages do these people know? This is certainly not a challenge one would encounter watching a movie in Block E.



So all the Italians in the apartment and the ones that come to visit whenever we make a “special” dinner (which seems to happen to frequently to be termed special), call me Rocco. My nickname is based on their idea that I look like the doppelganger for Italian porn star Rocco Sifreddi (pictured here). They actually fed me lines and filmed me doing a Rocco impersonation (which to me just seemed like an Italian impersonation of Hugh Hefner (who I know was not a porn star per se (I’m just referring to the robe and self-confident swagger))). It was an Italian commercial that was banned by the Vatican after two weeks of being aired because of the double-entendres used throughout.

Today I finally got some new shoes to replace my broken boots. I got them at Zara for next to nothing and while I was trying them on an old Asian lady approached me and asked if I would do her the favor of trying on a bunch of clothes for her. Well me, I got a heart for “the kindness of strangers” bit ever since I saw “A Street Car Named Desire” so I agreed. It turns out her son is the same exact size and so everytime I came out to show her the outfit on me she would either be very excited or shake her head in disgust. It was kind of like some Avant-Garde version of “Pretty Woman” I guess. So that ate up the better part of the hour and I still hadn’t picked out my shoes, but had a meeting to get to across town within a half an hour and still had to find a shirt to replace the extremely dirty and sweaty one I was wearing. So after I picked out the shoes I went to the young men’s area. This is embarrassing in the United States but due to my odd size many times I can’t find clothes that fit “men”. I figured that would be different in Portugal since, being a part of Europe, people tend to be about my height, and seemingly, my other proportions as well. None of the pants in the men’s section are ever below the European equivalent of 30 waist and rarely seem to be less than 32. My conclusion: (kind of like Screaming Jay Hawkin’s song “Africa Gone Funky”) Europe gone fat. I don’t know if it’s the prevalence of new international fast food chains or the extremely oily diet is catching up to them finally as the shift of peoples from rural to urban environments, and then the shift of the same from industrial sector jobs to the service industry has led to an inability to burn off all these extra calories from the fats they consume daily. Maybe its a little of both. I have noticed that most of the flatmates and Erasmus students I have met have no idea how to cook and say that their parents rarely cook that often either from scratch. This is especially interesting to me as I have noticed the slow food movement catching fire over the last couple of decades in the U.S. has produced the exact opposite effect. Whereas families in Europe are getting busier and both parents typically work long hours (and so opt for quick boxed/canned meals/fast food/delivery), in the U.S. the generations that grew up in Alice Water’s America have opted for a deeper connection with the food they consume and want to be involved in every part of its production. The slow food movement (being directly opposed to fast food by definition) leads one to eat slower, savor the food more, and typically get more nutrients per calorie, which I think has led to a (slightly or partly) slimmer America. What is odd is that this movement started in Italy and has forever been seen as primarily European. The whole attitude goes beyond food consumption and often affects every part of one’s daily life. Typically this means walking or biking instead of driving and blah, blah, blah, blah. Sorry for the tangent, but anyway my argument concludes with the fact that I’m pissed because once again I have to go to the children’s clothing section to buy pants and shirts.

This leads me to my final Andy Rooneyish complaint: So all these Portuguese are lethargic from the food and then tend to be sluggish at work and inefficient (leading me to wait forever in line wherever I go), well then, how do they remain competitive and make up for this lost “fat” time? Driving like maniacs. I already described this a bit so I will only add one more note. Though the Portuguese doesn’t always drive 60 on urban housing streets, they tend to drive faster if someone is trying to get across the street a block up ahead of them. They also change lanes according to how far you’ve crossed the street. This maniacal urge to bear down on a pedestrian cannot be good for their nerves, nor their blood pressure. Portugal, you are heading for a heart attack.

Mad World

I went tonight to the Cinemateca Portuguesa to see a film by Ermanno Olmi “La leggenda del Santo Bevitore”. Olmi was a favorite neorealist filmmaker of mine and I had never seen this film which I assumed would be subtitled in Portuguese. It was not. The film is about redemption, the wheel of fortune, and sacrifice as seen through a bum who is lent 200 Franc with the understanding he would in turn offer it to Santa Teresa during mass which he can never quite make it to because of his early morning drinking habits and a whole cadre of bad influences. Actually the worst influence is the one that keeps turning up throughout the movie played by the midget from “Amelie” and “City of Lost Children”, Dominique Pinon, who oddly enough in this picture didn’t play a midget. This really confused me because, although it seems a non-midget might be able to stretch his method acting prep to portray a midget, a midget can’t really play a non-midget role due to obvious reasons. So either I’ve always been confused, and Pinon was never a midget after all, or he just did a bang-up job of acting like a non-midget. It seems akin to asking a comatose actor to play Hamlet. How does he do it if he is in a coma? I think the answer is probably the Stanislavsky method.

Also, as I told you before I still haven’t received a phone call or a text yet. Well that’s not true anymore since my friend Molly did send me a “What’s grosser than gross” joke through text last night. Well in the theatre I didn’t bother turning my phone off because, well, it seemed ridiculously hopeful to be so haughty and liked as to need to turn my phone off. So when a half hour into the film I got a text and everyone turned around to look at me I severely blushed but didn’t want to disturb the other viewers any further by lighting up my phone and the sound that accompanies turning it off. I mean really what were the odds I would get yet another text before the film ended. I guess after all they were really good because an hour later I got another text. I still did not turn off my phone and luckily that was the last of angry stares due to my phone for the night. One of the texts was an advert I discovered later.

Finally, before I forget I must briefly comment on this David Lynch experience I had this weekend. After seeing Bonny Prince Billy perform for THREE hours on Saturday night I ran into a couple americanas. One was dressed in mall bangs a la small town Midwestern America circa 1984 and head-to-toe outfit to match. I thought this was either brilliant or severely anachronistic. I think I came to conclude the latter after we chatted a bit. Anyway, my flatmates met up with us in Bairro Alto (the main indie bar/ everything bar area) and we wandered for miles to find a bar that was still open past 5. We stumbled into a Fado bar by Restauradores. When we walked in and ordered a couple bottles of wine everything seemed normal except that they were playing Prince in a Fado bar. After are drinks were served the whole room turned red and varied stringed instrumentalists came out of nowhere and our server started singing Fado. The most beautiful I think I’ve heard since Amelia Rodriguez. After three songs the color of the room changed and everything turned back to normal. After about twenty minutes the same thing happened, but this time it was some drunk who walked off the street that started singing in red with these phantom guitarists (they literally just appeared and disappeared- I mean there was like ten people in the bar besides us so its not like I wouldn’t have noticed them before. Well after he finished another guy started up, sang two songs, and then the white colors came back and everyone was ushered out the door. I seriously was not drunk or anything else. It really happened just like that. Seriously.

Salt Fare-North Sea

I am used to bacchanalia, but this last meal I had on my weekly Monday night Lisboa restaurant tour was easily the most ridiculous--most faithful to the roman vomitorium--gluttony I have ever experienced. After class I went home and though I was completely exhausted I decided to go with my brit friend Betty and her Manchester friend Tony to get a drink in Bairro Alto and then off to the Tim Burtonesque new Lisbon fashion designer (highlighted yesterday in the New York Times), Storytailors clothes shop. It was architecturally stunning and the clothes truly belonged somewhere in between the Brothers Grimm darkside graphically and formally seemed to reside amongst a bridge between the early 19th century literary Romantics, Victorian aesthetic, and the haute coulture of Gotham City. Afterwards we drank the best Sangria I’ve ever had, spiked with cinnamon and mint. I split from them to head to my Monday night restaurant pick. I only eat out once a week because even though I am here on a $3200 scholarship, in Euros that converts to about fifteen Euro. The restaurant had a very cheap prix fix meal that sort of blended concepts of Old Country Buffet with really haut Portuguese cuisine and an all you can drink menu that included as many bottles of good red/white wine you want as well as however many decanters of Ruby Port, Portuguese Grappa, and an amazingly delicious Almond Liqueur you wish to imbibe before you presumably make it home. Included are pictures of a few of the courses which started with appetizers from a bar that contained over 70 different selections of Portuguese apps, then the main dish is served (it was bacalhua portuguesa which I again found too salty), then the cheese course (with a selection of 12 different Portuguese cheeses), then the fruit plate, then the assorted nuts and dried fruits (which accompanied the 3 decanters of digestives.)

Today a few schoolmates and I went to the beach. It was a perfect day and I knew I would fall asleep as soon as I got there so I went to the pharmacy to get some high SPF sun block and it was 21 Euro ($33). This is what the meal above had cost me, what the ticket to see Leonard Cohen is also going for, and is equivalent to 10 bottles of Portuguese wine (literally). This country has its priorities all out of whack. More tomorrow on the subject.

Sleepwalk

I used to think that Nick Drake’s songs were only appropriate on drab fall/winter nights, but as my Itunes rambled through the library, I realized they are also perfect for lazy Lisbon summer afternoons. You should try it some time. When the sun hits that midday malaise and the tram rumbles down the tiny rua, the tattered Portuguese flag flows lazily in the wind, and the faded green flat across the street recalls all sorts of ephemeral images rife with melancholic reminiscences of a youth of aimless summers in rural Minnesota; the soft vocals and hollow tones, yet genius attack of Drake’s guitar and the meandering Wurlitzer bring some sort of meaning and design to these final vestiges of the mind’s seemingly random selection of the long-term memory: throwing gummi bears at cop cars when I was 7, throwing an apple at Darlene Haag’s mouth when she was spouting off about some stupid trash, closing my eyes while biking into things. Its all sort of an old-skool Country Time lemonade commercial with scattered events coming back sporadically.

Anyway, the tram almost killed me yesterday. I don’t walk the streets with an Ipod because I need all my faculties in order to not die here. So to better understand this you should know that the tram actually runs somewhat quietly on a two way street the size of about one car. The sidewalk fits about two people and sometimes barely one. As I was walking up the hill to my flat, another person was walking down it to go to the city center. I was stepping off the curb to let the other person pass when I felt something behind me and looked back with one foot heading to the street where the tracks are; and about a foot behind me the tram was zooming up the hill. Defying some feat of gravity I somehow pulled my whole body back on the sidewalk as it flew past me. I usually tend to look before I step into the street but I didn’t for some reason this time and nearly got squashed. Now I look every time. The cars fly down this street as well going 40 or 50 miles an hour around corners that are completely blind and I am amazed I haven’t seen a crash yet. When the tram comes up the hill the cars have to back all the way up the hill to let it pass and they usually go the same speed in reverse. Its all fairly baffling to me so far.

I’ve been pretty sick with a cold all week and not being able to sleep because I can’t breathe I haven’t been able to get any better. There were some pills some former resident left behind in the medicine cabinet that are for “gripe e constipação”. I wasn’t about to take one of these as, though I have some flu-like symptoms, I certainly didn’t like the other half of the remedy which I assumed would open my bowels as well. Then in class today my teacher ask me what I had and I said “o gripe” and pointed to my head and throat. And she replied “ahh…constipado”, and I was like…”uh, no”. Like didn’t she just see my point to my head and not my intestines? Well anyway as you probably already guessed (I was a bit slower on the uptake from no sleep), constipado refers to a constipation of the nasal cavity. So I took the pills at home and so far I haven’t crapped myself.

I guess I should also speak a little bit about my flatmates from time to time. I’ll speak first of the most compelling figure of the lot, Duncan. He is an artist (of the painted sort) and has been living here for quite a long time but has not yet picked up any Portuguese. He got hit by a car on the same street where I almost was hit by the tram. He is sort of vampiric and therefore I mostly see him at night after we’ve both had a few drinks and he usually looks blurry like the photo here. Whenever I try reading wine labels to learn about the grapes used, place of origin, winemaker, etc. he tends to do a quicker translation for me stating “it says shut up and drink it!” He seems to be very fond of Hunter S. Thompson and Keith Richards and has many travel stories that show he more than just studies their biographies and work, but also puts some of this knowledge into practice. Right now he is working on a painting that is a one-eyed dog and his owner. When I asked him if the viewer can only see one eye, or if the dog actually only has one eye, he told me that the dog only has one eye, but you can’t see that its missing because all of his hair covers the missing eye. And so I of course asked if anyone else knew that he only had one eye then. He told me, “the owner knows, and I know, and of course the dog knows, but it doesn’t bother him.” The picture below is not the dog he painted but instead the bitch of a dog that keeps me up every night barking at god knows what from his balcony. If anyone comes to visit me please bring a gun. I am sure customs will be fine with it once you explain the purpose. After the dog gets it, I’m going to the main plaza to shoot all these crazy kamikaze pigeons as well. One shouldn’t have to constantly duck rats with wings every time he goes to the park.

PERSONALITY CRISIS

I’m down to one pair of shoes, and they are staring to hurt. I guess that will keep me off the streets for a bit. My depression-era coal miner boots broke one night while playing an impromptu game of soccer with a piece of the sidewalk that had become dislodged. Half of the sole came off and for the rest of the night it just flopped like a flipper every step I took. On the same street the next afternoon I saw a gang of what are know as the cocaleiros (dealers of coke—I kind of live in a bad neighborhood I guess) doing the same with a very large rat. They couldn’t kick it of course since it was very alive. Rather they sort of chased it between players trying to get it into a small box on either side. When the game was done they stepped on it to (I assume) continue playing the more traditional version of soccer with it. This thing was massive too. I think its teeth were bigger than mine. I declined to join this time. “Not my cup of tea” I said in Portuguese but I guess that doesn’t translate in Portuguese as they all gave me a questioning look. Not that I had anything better to do, but well…not my cup of tea. I truly regret not filming this because it would’ve made an excellent video for this post and my camera actually takes pretty decent videos. My camera is brilliant and my phone (for 20 euros) is incomprehensible but I know if I could figure it out it would be far better than my U.S. one. This is not a problem though since, while everyone in my apartment is texting, calling, and playing Grand Theft Auto on their phones, I have not received a single phone call or text since I got it. Nor have I sent any texts out since all four contacts in my phone live with me and I am constantly with them it seems. This lack of contact can get somewhat upsetting this day in age when the cell phone makes for a great Linus blanket of security when one is in a group but the only one who is not in a conversation. Sending a text message, or even faking sending a text message, says “I too am an intriguing person engaged in profound discussion.”, “I do not need to discuss politics with you, because I am otherwise engaged,” etc. Nevertheless, faking a text message is not an option when everyone around you knows that 1. You don’t know how to use your phone, and 2. Even if you did, who would you be texting except for someone who is, at present, sitting directly opposite you?

I recently had one of the most lucid dreams of my life in which I was standing outside my old high school and, appropriately, talking with a friend who I have hardly seen since high school. We were chatting and from somewhere the song “Personality Crisis” by the New York Dolls was playing in the background and we were discussing the current trends in rock & roll bands revisiting old sounds. We came to the conclusion that the retro sound was accelerating at such a rate and so predictably that after music culture blitzed through the 50s, 60s, 70, 80, and now grunge, brit-pop, it has now become possible to pick up on the next sound with a mathematical equation based on release dates of major albums during the second half of the 90s/ first half of the ots 2000. I woke up to my flatmate knocking on my door and realized I was supposed to be in class at the moment.

F-I-R-E-I-N-L-I-S-B-O-A

To the few people reading this, I’m sure you were waiting with baited breath the next entry. And for that I do apologize. I don’t think I’ll be writing on the weekends because, oddly enough, those are the days in which I have precious little time. We learned the subjunctive in class today and had five pages of homework which took about 5 minutes to do. This is not the lifestyle to which I am accustomed. I had no idea there were so many hours in a day when you don’t have to work, you get up at 7:30 in the morning and school takes a total of 3 hours. I’m trying to figure out what to do with the rest of the hours, and though I know I’ve much to do to prepare for the fall, I just really can’t bring myself to stay out of the streets and work on it. I am currently listening to Dylan’s “To Ramona” which I may be able to see live this weekend as he is playing on the cheap in Lisbon this Saturday. I’ve never seen Dylan because he was always a bit too expensive and my uncle Steve said he’s kind of crap live. And if Steve doesn’t enjoy a folk show I highly doubt I will. I am being called to the kitchen to help prepare the third jantar enorme in a row. These dinners are comprised of a sort of international iron chef competition in which every country in Europe is present throwing down knives and trash talking in a mash of Portu-Españo-Italo-Franco-English. Although mostly the jibes are tossed in Portuguese, necessity is the mother of linguistic invention and I’m sure Saussere would be thoroughly horrified if he were invited, but I’m no fan of dead French linguists so we decided to let him rest in peace. So I will leave this for now to participate in what I hope to be the last of these for a bit because my palette is a bit fatigued at the moment. I be back for a bit because I cook fast-like.

So it was Friday that the flatmates and I gathered together a bit of picnic to eat at the miradouro by the Igreja de Graça, where the view of the city was out of this world, but the company we inadvertently kept (pictured at right, I never got the gentleman’s name, but I got a good shot of his belly and that shit-ass grin he always carried with him) was most certainly full of the illicit bounty produced mainly in South America and more than a touch of Noah’s fermented grapes. He helped us out a bit by opening a bottle à la frances (pushing the cork down with an asqueroso finger instead of pulling it up with a corkscrew that we continuously yelled was available as he was in the process). Needless to say we left that bottle to be enjoyed by him and his paisanos. As we were leaving (due mostly to the aforementioned gentleman’s constant amorous attention of Betty (the brit on the left of the picture here—to her right is Gerald, another flatmate in the Casa Marvão), he whispered to me menacingly in Portuguese “we’ll see you soon”, which we most certainly did. We walked about a mile to another miradouro overlooking the Tagus River. After about an hour into the second attempt at a picnic Betty’s new friend found us mid-jantar and proceeded to ask for a bit of everything we had. He then threatened Gerald with a knife and we decided it was high time to ask the gentleman to kindly get lost. There were no shortage of athletic men in our group so it was not a case of fear that we let him disturb us for so long but rather the distasteful scene of beating up a drunk loser while the sun set upon a scenic Lisboa. I told our friend that he had overstayed his welcome and his inebriation (coupled with a complete lack of any sense of taste or geometry in his choice of attire) was unacceptable and putting us off our meal. He left forthwith and has only reappeared yesterday night as Betty was out alone getting cash to pay her tuition the next day. He of course didn’t notice her as his memory of that night had no doubt faded a bit. I’m sure he regaled his friends later that eve of the many witticisms he had entertained with only to be inhospitably rejected from the group of foreign rogues. But whatever, this is my side of the story.

Saturday was spent mostly on the Capirica beach (and travelling there and back which took about two hours each way even though it lies only a few miles outside of the city). We took a metro, trolley, ferry, and then a bus to get to it. The beach was at high tide and mostly packed so we had to relax on the rocks. The German flatmate had the sense to bring strawberries. They were delicious. The waves made for good surfing, but as none of us had a surfboard we opted to just dive in and out amongst the crashing olas. We missed the final ferry and got back a bit late for the first of the international iron chef competitions, but still made a good showing nevertheless. On Sunday in Lisbon everything is closed so that day was spent for the most part over lazy meals and homework, and of course another bacchanal for the jantar. The final picture is from one of these nights in which I was offered by a vendor at some bar a tiara that lit up by battery for 2 euro. I of course accepted as I've never had an electric crown but ended up getting very confused by the math involved in exchanging 2 euros. As I only had a 10 euro note he gave me six, took the ten to get change and then told me the bartender would not give him change at which point I took the ten (which was somehow now two fives) and tried also, and was also denied. I gave him back his six and told him nevermind but he was a persistent lad and gave me back the ten and long story long-somehow I ended up with the ten and the crown, but much money was exchanged in the interim. I guess maybe he gave up or I did. Whatever the case, it will remain a mystery to me. But now I have a sparkling new tiara in case Portugal is ever again in desperate need for a return of the desejado rei Sebastiao.

No Inicio-Part II

My day to day has been considerably better although last night I couldn't sleep because of some dog a floor above me across the street and a motorcyclist who constantly went up and down this tiny street I live on with his engine full blast. What a fucking retard. Anyway, I'm in class with my French friend and flatmate Gerald, because I switched to a higher level which still seems a bit slow and redundant for me, but I know I need to get the basics back down again in order to produce the language. We are reading these tiny texts to check for comprehension and I'm used to reading novels or large socio-historic studies in Portuguese and resuming them in English so it is kind of hard for me to show that I can read Saramago in the original Portuguese when I have a hard time saying "I can read Saramago in the original Portuguese" and I understand why they don't believe me. Its just the different modalities of the language are so far out of whack for me since I take in enormous amounts of written and spoken Portuguese yet never am forced to produce it myself. Oddly enough, I am living example of how this can be a problem that seems an illogical one at first. Also I am almost getting over the jet lag still so my mind is a bit slow. I'm going to see the castelo de Sao Jorge this afternoon. It dates back to 1147 as a Portuguese posession and is actually older as a moorish one and the fortifications are pre-Roman!! This castle is only a 5 minute walk and it literally towers above my apartment so I should see it before I do anything else. Also there is a simulator of the 1755 earthquake that hit and destroyed most of Lisbon which sounds pretty rad.

No inicio

Things haven't been starting quite swimmingly I would say. I've spent most of the last 72 hours awake and most of that time in line waiting for something. Once I arrive to the front of these lines (with an average wait of about an hour) I notice no one is in line behind me. I've eaten two meals that have both left me sickly. The first night I went to a place called Bar Pinochio because it was packed with locals, yet I stupidly didn't order what it seemed every other table was eating (a bucket of peeled, seasoned shrimp-48 Euro). I opted instead for a dish that was listed as the house specialty which was bife au picapau and which consisted of maybe two steaks cut into large pieces and served in a pool of grease and charred garlic. The side it came with was a bucket of potato chips. On the second day, I write as I still have a bag sitting next to me for my vomit. I don't care to recall the name of this dive but I do remember the Caldo Verde soup was decent. Then I had a plate of “Bacalhau ao Portugues” which is like a grilled or roasted salt cod served with boiled potatoes and some chopped garlic and parsley. Now I must admit, I rarely if ever have been able to make salt cod into anything but a white mass that resembles more of a salt lick than a piece of fish. Nevertheless, I never tried to sell this fish flavored salt. For dessert I had a dish that would translate as camel drool but tasted nothing like that animal's drool and in fact seemed a bit more like a cross between tiramisu and flan.

Lo tho, I must admit that where the food has failed me twice I have been never so visually entertained or mystified. Today I saw two cops cruising in front of me on segues (or segways?) I would love to be chased by these cops by the way. I would start running in circles around them on uneven surfaces and see if they could follow me, I would stop suddenly then start walking, then run a bit, then sort of saunter awhile. The two cops parked their vehicles in front of this salt lick restaurant I was at and proceeded to get a bit lit for a half hour then returned to their beat, which I guess included smoking cigarettes a block down and hitting on teenage girls.

The beggars are very extreme here and seem to be very desperate and almost in competition. When I was taking the subway home from class a man entered the subway car singing and I noticed he had a walking stick and his eyes were fused shut. I think that seemed so extraordinary to me not because I have never run into someone with this malady, but if I had I would have never seen it because usually anyone with eye problems in the Unite States will wear sunglasses which could be seen as vain or considerate. Eye problems make my skin crawl because I have very weird eye issues and flinch if anyone or anything gets near them. Seeing the results of eye damage has the same effect on me. Anyway, not to be outdone the next beggar came in singing a jaunty tune as well. He also had a walking stick and, much to my continued unease he was missing one eye and had the other fused shut. The missing eye was just a mash of skin and empty space. But on top on this he carried in one hand a stick and under the other arm an alms container that he couldn't hold because he was missing his right hand! Those who had given the last guy all their change seemed to have a look of disbelief that there would be a needier cause. Like the last guy had cheated them by coming through ahead of the other. My closest encounter with a beggar was at the salt lick cafe where I was sitting reading a Gyles Brandreth novel and left half the salt cod on the plate in disgust. The adolescent girl who wasn't totally begging (she was selling band aids) came up to me and ask me if I was going to eat that in Portuguese. I didn't think I heard her right because in my world beggars don't ask for food, they ask for money--and if you offer them food they get offended. So she asked me again this question that I haven't been asked by anyone since I was in a junior high cafeteria, and when I ascertained that I had understood her correctly the first time, I (like any Minnesota protestant bleeding heart liberal) nearly tripped over every word to emphatically say the only word she needed to here--sim (yes). She grabbed the whole filet off my plate and immediately scarfed it down while walking away with her band aids. I wanted to chase her down with water as I realized that she would shortly be in dire need of it, but saw that I of course was already out. I only had a few bites of the fish and I am still drinking liters of water to slowly erode the layers of salt crystals that formed in my mouth hours later. I hope I didn't inadvertently kill her with this fish.

Anyway, I apologize for being such a prissy epicurean snob in this first entry, but I guess I had expectations that relied forever on memories of Portugal that had more to do with the people I had food and wine with at the time than the food itself. Over time those sense memories became something beyond mere images, smells, tastes, and Portugal reached a place in my mind as spotless and perfect and ephemeral as a long lost love, or a dream of the innocence of youth. Now I'm here and my love is very far away, and if I am to sacrifice being near my darling palomita to better my language skills, at least I should get a nice piece of fish now and then. Não é?