In the beginning...

I recently read an article from Adbusters about the state of the hipster union. I found it pretty engaging and damning. I most especially am interested in what led to all of this, because although hipster was always a derogatory word, the evolution of the contemporary hipster is a curious phenomenon. At what point did this subculture become so numerous and so enthralled in popular culture and the products pushed by mega-corporations like American Apparel? I think it was a reaction to the late-90s early 2000s desire to be into only the most obscure cultural production. A lot of this article was foreign to me as I have been quite disconnected from the internet’s sizeable contribution to the morphing of this generation since I don’t have internet at home and therefore spend very little time (5 minutes /day) connected with the virtual side of this world. I think this may be where everything went dreadfully wrong as well (not that there was anything all that useful being created/destroyed in the non-virtual world). The article mentions the marketing side of the reworked Barthian fashion semiotic, but ignores the more damaging element which is causing our society to slip into a new barbarity. The anonymity the internet provides allows for a great social mask and shows what this generation is capable of, especially in regards to the filching of the name. I’ve seen friends verbally chewed alive by faceless online slander, much of it done in the guise of lazy gossip by hipster chatters/bloggers. This is akin (though admittedly a bit more harmless) to the kind of shit that went on behind closed doors during the Spanish Civil War, Nazi Germany, Stalin’s Russia, or McCarthy’s America—you settle a score with a neighbor by anonymously denouncing him as a red/Jew/dissident, etc. Cowardly and vicious, but very effective, the new hipster may have evolved in a curiously ugly and vapid cultural manner, but is often caught displaying a real stagnation or even degradation of the spirit.

My Blue Heaven

It’s my last Saturday here and I’m starting to grow a bit melancholic at the prospect of having to leave. Since I’ve been indoors for awhile packing and tying up ends, I decided to take a casual stroll through the city for a bit and then, for one of the first times since I arrived, I started to recognize the beauty of Lisboa behind its dirty façade.

I went to Rossio and did a 360, this route I take every day is like a ravine amongst a full-circle wall of buildings creeping up the hills complete with windows and dirty pastels. The occasionally ominous Castelo de São Jorge at the peak of the eastern wall, the Elevador de Santa Justa bolting up next to the ruins of the Convento de Carmo to the west. I pass through Martim Moniz (the metro stop that I use every day but couldn’t get the name right for three weeks) and the pathway by the Asian Mall where all the bums sleep and the familiar air of dehydrating urine makes me a bit misty-eyed. I pass by the elderly overweight tranny who has half her face paralyzed by a stroke (but according to my local grocer “was pretty hot in the first years after the dictatorship”) and she waves a coy hello. She actually saved me from going hungry one night when I went to the grocer with 20 cents to my name to buy a bola (a small ball of fresh baked bread for 17 cents). Since he had sold the last bag to tranny, he told me I could ask her, and she handed me one and said I looked too skinny and sickly.

There is a unique sound to the street here: the former dissidents who now have remained bitter and drunk for 30+ years that chatter in the square and feed the birds, the church bells each with their own tones and rhythms, the odd mufferless car, the click-clack of these two meter high billboards that constantly cycle through 3 different poster ads, and the pigeons, so many pigeons.

I spent so many afternoons reading on the beach in Estoril, a small villa outside Lisbon where Ian Fleming took notes on Yugoslav spy Darko Papov at the Estoril Casino to write his greatest work Casino Royale. It also housed the exiled Spanish Monarchy after the Second Republic was founded, a few years before the country exploded into a brutal Civil War. The castle beach was my favorite. Somehow, I never got a tan. I think my skin rejects the sun’s rays as an aesthetic choice.

I drifted often through Bairro Alto with my flatmates. Filled every night with drunks and fado or jazz spilling out of the bars, it was kind of like a slightly classier version of the warehouse district. There always seemed to be a puddle of puke every few blocks that added some color to the monochrome neighborhood and made you wonder who could vomit in such quantities.

During the mornings and early afternoon I would be in class at the Universidade de Lisboa. Many of the rooms had an inexplicable odor of wet dog hair. I wouldn’t say it was a very pretty campus. Every building was a sort of torn-up dirty white. Nevertheless, I did learn to speak Portuguese with near fluency in a very short time which I attribute to the underpaid genius of the teaching staff. During the final exams, my friend Harry didn’t let me down. He came in for two days with his arm in a sling that was signed all over in Chinese and Portuguese. All the signatures were done with the same pen and seemed to be in the same handwriting. The final day his arm had healed I guess because he didn’t need the sling anymore. I think he stole that idea from the John Candy movie “Spies Like Us”. He also kept belching loudly throughout the exam for some reason. I couldn’t stop laughing and had a hard time concentrating on my own test.

In between all this I would either wander through Lisbon or laze around at Casa Marvao. This house I’ve lived in is a bit filthy. It used to be a brothel for nearly a century and the bidets are still functional. After that it became a nursing home and I think for fifteen years now it has been slowly destroyed by Erasmus students and termites. My room is filled with graffiti in several different languages, most of it consisting of lame quotes that I guess were meant to be inspirational.

So that is my Lisbon, my blurry heaven, a bit tedious, a bit beautiful, a bit mind-bending, a bit ancient, nearly modern, still waiting impatiently for the return of D. Sebastiao, still doce, ainda abafada, abalizada, abarrotada, repleta, ocupada, brava, abobalhada, abrasada, alastrada chateada, cansada, alheia, vermelha, verdejante, ambigua, amena, amortecida, miserável, louvável, arraigada, atemorizadora, ativa, manuelina, gótica, avariada, aziaga, baldia, calda, campestre, bagunçada, barulhenta, cariativa, arregada, bêbada, coitada, colorida, congestionada, seria, simples, contradictoria, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera.

Help!

Friday night we met Aurora, the Italian Linguistic Anthropology professor, for dinner in Bairro Alto. I had duck a la orange, which was perfect, and we shared a few pitchers of the house wine and clam apps. The night was quite odd. Mario, the only Asian from our class who joined us, asked if we wanted to join him afterward at a Karaoke bar in my neighborhood (Martim Moniz) with a few friends. A few of us agreed and I went alone with Mario to catch the metro to MM. En route he started to make some phone calls in Cantonese and over the course of our journey I discovered that we weren’t going to a Karaoke bar, but rather a rented room in the Asian district of the Socorro freguesia that specialized in private Karaoke in Chinese. First he told me that the “bar” was about a half hour walk from the metro stop (it was literally 30 feet away), and that it wasn’t a bar per se, but a room, and that there were no songs in English, and the phone calls he was making was to see if he could invite a few extra people. He tells me then that he plays in a band and I say, “like what, rock & roll?” And he doesn’t understand. He then asks me if there are any American musicians that are famous and before nearly fainting I say “have you ever heard of Elvis?” Negative. “How about the Beatles?” (I realized after a sober pause that they weren’t American but decided not to correct myself) Again, no. Then, as my head began to reel out of control, I asked him to please tell me the American bands he has heard of. He mentions the Backstreet Boys. My heart is palpitating and the Largo de Chiado is spinning around me as I try to digest all of this new information about my friend Mario. I am a bit speechless.

We get to Martim Moniz and he starts to walk to the Karaoke “bar” when I ask him, “shouldn’t we wait for the others?” Apparently he only asked his group if I could come and then Aurora pulls up with her boyfriend who also speaks Cantonese. He tells them they can come after all and when we arrive to the Karaoke spot 30 seconds later. We pass two Asian massage parlors going up one flight of stairs. Mario took the elevator. We meet him and walk in to see 7 Asian girls and one Asian guy singing (Sinatra’s version--obviously in English) “My Way”. So this is already three lies Mario has told me in the span of one hour. Most of the girls have some sort of headband with either leopard, cat, or Minnie Mouse ears attached and are dancing on the couch while singing a pretty accurate version of “My Way”. They immediately hand me the microphone because they said I looked like a young Sinatra. I, of course, immediately do the Sid Vicious version and they loved it and asked me to do another. I look at the table and am astonished that everyone is drinking canned tea. No drugs, no alcohol, no cigarettes, just tea and dried fruits. I guess Karaoke was originally a fairly healthy event, and upon being exported to America it took on the format as another way to express oneself as a decadent, out-of-tune, lush.

The Asian girls sang two songs reading from a series of subtitles in characters I found incomprehensible. Then they asked me to pick a song. The only one I immediately recognized was “Hotel California”, which apparently is completely out of my range. You see, when I do Karaoke, I usually do songs I can perform spot on, like Rolling Stones songs, but this Eagles song (although I knew it backwards and forwards—enough to ignore all the misspellings and incorrect words written on the screen) was a real challenge for my vocal chords. I wasn’t asked to do another song for a few hours and so I tried to see if I could decipher this language as the characters flashed before my eyes repeated in front of images that I imagined were conveying the meaning of the song. I realized later when I was finally asked to do another song that the images had nothing to do with the lyrics. I did “Unchained Melody” and the whole time the video that accompanied the Righteous Brothers masterpiece was filled with skiers wiping out. I thought about it for awhile and still haven’t been able to make the connection. Immediately after, I guess as a masochistic novelty act for those present, I was forced to do “Venus”. I didn’t know how the verses of this song go, and I still don’t. Then I was forced to do “Let it Be”, and I told Mario then that this was a Beatles song, which caused some confusion in the room. Halfway through this song they finally took the microphone away from me and gave it to Aurora and her squeeze to finish. Apparently there is no room for artistic interpretation in China, even for artists they don’t know of. Or perhaps I was off key, but that is unlikely.

On Saturday I went to the beach with Josue and his Dutch/Portuguese friend Pinto. Josue had just got back from a trip to Rotterdam to go to his grandmother’s funeral. On the day Pinto came to visit him he was already on his way out of Lisbon. So for one week, we had a replacement Dutch. If this place were the setting of a sitcom that I was watching, I think I would have figured that the actor playing Josue was in a contract negotiation or rehab and so the producers had to find someone to take his place. As soon as Josue got back a couple days later Pinto has to leave. So anyway, Pinto Leite (his name in Brazilian Portuguese means Dick Milk) told me his niece might come to visit us before he goes. And I told him he seemed young to be an uncle, and he replied that she is his aunt. And I paused to consider the math involved in the incestuous relationship that would result in a person being your aunt and niece at the same time. And so I asked him, “so let me get this straight…your brother had sex with your grandmother and the child they had was your aunt and niece?” He told me that this wasn’t the case, but rather she is his father’s sister’s child, and I was still confused and stuck on incest and asked, “so your father had a child with his sister?” And he said, “what’s wrong with you? My father’s sister married another guy and had a child, my niece”. So then I realized he had his terms mixed up and I told him he meant that she was his cousin and we agreed that that was what his relationship to her was. Apparently in Dutch cousin is translated with two genders and is the same word as niece for a girl, and nephew for a guy. I guessed he liked the way I thought anyway and we got along well after that, so I told him the meaning of the word chrononecroincestiofilia.

Lowest Common Dominator

Assunto: A little bit about my classmates so you may have an idea of what my everyday life is like since I spend most of my day here with these people. My professor is named Pedro and he reminds me a lot of Al Pacino. He is the most intense professor I have ever had, and he sometimes gets exhausted and a bit hoarse by the end of each day. When I arrive in the morning he looks like Pacino at the beginning of “A Dog Day Afternoon” and by the end of class he looks a bit like Pacino near the end of the same movie. He is an ex-professional soccer player and now creates dictionaries and also just finished an everyman’s guide to the new orthographical rules for international Portuguese.

The two people who sit next to me are Chanti (pictured at top (right of Maria the Basque)) and Tarantino. They are both from Goa. The former is a Portuguese/English professor in Goa who is wishing to formalize her grammar a bit more. She is constantly yelling things to me in archaic English across Tarantino, translating words I already understood in Portuguese into an old English which means very little to me. It’s like having a 17th century British dictionary with Turrets at arms reach every day. For instance, today, when I was half-asleep, because it’s Friday, I wasn’t even listening to the professor who was talking about older rural houses outside Lisbon and she just yells “fag” at me. I, of course, am used to these outbursts by now, but was still a bit taken aback by this particular word as it has a different connotation in modern English than it does in her English. I said, in English, “WHAT?!!” And then she described to me the stockpiles of logs and sticks that were used as fodder for building fires insides one’s country home. I said, “uh yeah…we just call that a woodpile now.” Then I started to daze again and she yelled at me “hut”. And I look at her with complete disinterest, as I swear this happens twenty times a day and I’m a bit fed up with it all. Then the professor, as a language professor should do, describes to me the word we are looking for in Portuguese and I said, “fireplace.” And then Chanti says, “but isn’t hut also used?”, and I reply, “no, no one has ever, ever, ever used hut to describe a fireplace.” So she spells it out and the word she was trying to say was hearth, which the professor confused for heart…another 20 minute digression and we were back to me saying “no one uses hearth anymore, like I said 20 minutes ago, it’s a fireplace.” I wish I would have written down all these Ye Olde Englysh words she would be spitting out because it would make for a good proposal to the Anglophone countries or the U.N. to send Goa some updated dictionaries. I remember some words: savories, gripe ointment, dutch oven (which made me laugh), starboard, and fortnight. There are many, many more.

Tarantino (who is in no way related to Quentin Tarantino) bathes every day in Brut 33 or Old Spice, I can’t tell which it is, but I feel by the end of the day that I have been huffing rubber cement for hours. My head actually gets a bit spinny and I see some stars. Otherwise, he is a nice enough guy and is very charming when he is wearing his black cowboy hat which I still haven’t been able to fully comprehend. He wears it with the rope tied tightly under the chin.

Harry is a trip. The picture on the right is Harry with our Professor. He wears a different color of frames for his glasses everyday and he is constantly cheating in the most obvious ways. I don’t think the Chinese have really perfected this art yet, gun powder yes, extracting brine yes, making noodles yes, etc., but not cheating. He is the basis of my Chinaman speaking Portuguese impersonation and I feel almost like a method actor studying him most days in class. He’ll just sigh deeply and then “hhoooooooo….muuuiiiitttto trabaaaalhhooo.” When I told the professor that I would be presenting on Portuguese Rock & Roll, he asked the professor, “hhooooooooo…o que é lock en lor?” which means “what is lock en lor”. I realized I really had my work cut out for me when he said that especially because, this day in age, that is a very hard question to answer.

The video below is from today, when we got in a heated debate (in Portuguese of course) about whether it is possible to make popcorn with cell phones. I think the video proves this is just another international urban legend.

Fitter happier

Last night Betty, Manu, and I went to the restaurant up the road about 30 meters that tortured me every day the last two weeks once the grill started up around 7. At this hour every evening wafted into my room the odor of grilled ribs from Extremadura pigs, the purest example of the porcine family, they are fed solely on acorns and wild black truffles that they smell and dig up. Since I had no functional credit cards, and thus no money, I was starving a bit and the hedonism of the aforementioned restaurant was painfully acute. I could hear every clink of glass, every gulp of Alentejo tinto (a wine region just a few miles to the south of Lisbon known for its thoroughly quaffable reds), every piece of meat being ripped from the bone by unworthy teeth and indifferent palette. Anyway, I finally made it up that hill in a triumphant surge to plant the Minneapolis flag on this uncharted territory. When we got there I discovered they weren’t serving the entrecostos on this night so I had to get a kabob of the same meat. It was a delirious moment when I finally tasted the flesh of this exquisite beast.




When I finished the meal Betty noticed I was wearing my broken down coal miner boots with the soles coming apart from the toe to mid-foot and asked me if I "would please throw those away". I started flapping my boot in her face and did my best interpretation of a Portuguese Skank (the very vulgar sock puppet) and told her where she could shove her high ideals and such with the disconnected sole flapping up and down to mimic talking. Before I knew it I had a relatively large group of 3 to 6 year-olds around me enjoying this crude Portuguese puppet show. They laughed at some jokes I thought they would be too young to get, but then my Portuguese is still a little simple so maybe that’s why it was a little too easy for them to understand. When the show was over the kids went back to their seats but the youngest one sitting next to me kept looking under the table to see if the shoe was saying anything to himself. He got out his toy cars when he realized that the shoe had fallen asleep. I took some pictures of him because I thought he was a real adorable chap, but for some reason every shot I took his eyes would go all funny. I’ve included them here because I thought it very odd that a normal kid would turn into Thom Yorke only when photographed. I imagine this is problematic when its time for family pictures…

Late Night, Maudlin Street

So before I forget, this Portuguese movie I saw on Friday was brilliant. It’s a 1964 documentary by Fernando Lopes. It’s about a Portuguese champion boxer named Belarmino Fragoso and, the way it was shot it almost seems more of a tragic drama than a documentary. I'm pretty sure Scorsese took some notes from this film to make Raging Bull. I’ve always been a huge fan of boxing movies. Some favorites you must see: “Requiem for a Heavyweight”, “On The Waterfront”, “Raging Bull”, “Rocco E I Soui Fratelli”, “Rocky”, etc. This may be a new favorite in this genre for me.










We watched it at a mutual friend’s (Pedro) pad, who is paying nearly half of what I am and yet has a beautiful art deco apartment, completely spotless with wood floors, ceilings, and a great view over Alfama. As we watched the movie I sat next to the window so I could occasionally glance at the half moon shining over the old Moorish labyrinth as the smell of smoked ribs and grilled sardines wafted in with the sounds of some beautiful Fadista voice singing of the torturous melancholic longing of a husband seafarer lost somewhere in ultramarine conquests. The word for this is saudade, and it is a distinctly tragic Portuguese sentiment, perhaps why so many people here still dress in so much black (I mean besides the fact that black is the new black (as it always was and always shall be.))


Belarmino was a boxer (that looked a lot like Jack Kerouac) who shoulda been a contender. He went from a shoeshine boy to an amateur pugilist to a Portuguese champ in short work and never saw much of the money he won because he had a third grade education and all of his managers grifted him. He ended up touching up pictures for a living when he was too old to box. In all the interviews he was amazingly profound while talking in the most brutish street Portugese and whistling at literally every woman who passed by. The film has the prettiest camera shots of the neighborhoods I haunt filmed back in the 60s, and the smokey jazz club shots have a real “Lamotta’s” feel to it. I swear I found the secret of the Scorsese sphinx.


Last night I had a dream that I was walking toward a restaurant where Bobby & Steve’s should be on Washington Ave. for my birthday with my friends Ehsan and Ryan. Natasha was conspicuously absent since, although I had known it was her birthday, I hadn’t written her due to the fact that, instead of just saying “hey, happy birthday” I wanted to compose a well-crafted tribute to all of her brilliant/neurotic qualities. So I put it off, and then off some more, then my internet went beserker, then it was ridiculously late and I found I couldn’t put into words what I had to say anyway. So I sent an apologetic happy belated birthday email to her and was haunted with different dreams that same night. The only one I remember was this one where Ehsan, Ryan, and I walk by two guys that I immediately recognize as important restaurant figures in the Minneapolis scene: Tim McKee, and Steven Brown (which I’m sure never hang out). We talked for a bit and then, as we proceeded, we ran into two other famous people who Ryan immediately identified as Keith Haring (who is dead) and Woody Harrelson. I told Ryan that he was correct that they were famous, but he had wrongly identified them. The man he thought was Keith Haring I said was Keith Harrington (I don’t know who that is) and the guy he thought was Woody Harrelson was actually Luke Wilson. I realized after I woke up that the first guy was Mike Ditka, and the other guy was Matthew McConaughey. So when I said this to Ryan I immediately woke up as if my subconscious was so revolted by my lack of knowledge of pop cultural references that it was like “Fuck it, if you don’t even know the names of these people how am I supposed to teach you the lesson about the distractions of the ego and the city and the importance of friends”…or whatever problem it was trying to resolve. And so I went back to sleep and I think for the rest of the night my subconscious sort of treated me in a real infantile manner because all I could remember when I awoke were images of like Mickey Mouse and Ronald McDonald, etc. So anyway…sorry Natasha. I am paying the price now for my carelessness, day and night.

Perfect Day

There is an Asian girl in my class and she is the first person I’ve ever seen with a purplish skin tone. I can’t decide if she is more lavender or like choking-person purple, but she is definitely within that palette. Which is weird, I always heard them referred to as yellow, and although yellow and purple are obviously good matches (I believe these are still the Viking’s colors), I don’t think most Asians are anywhere near yellow, and some are purple. So chew on that a bit…

I am greatly disturbed about the European eating habits as displayed by my flatmates. Gerald, the French who says Third Eye Blind is a punk band, is accustomed to eating most nights a pasta which he tops with shredded Emmenthal cheese and large amounts of catsup. Duncan, the English artist, I’ve never seen eat. I think he gets most of his nutrients/calories from beer and whiskey. In fact the only evidence I have that he has ever cooked anything is the story of when he put a frozen pizza in the oven and then fell asleep for a bit. Somebody else woke up when the smoke was pouring out of the veranda and now the charred remnants of the still circular food is nailed to the wall, and I always mistake it for a clock when I’m running late for school. The other English person is a young lass named Betty, she is a vegetarian, so I don’t pay attention to what she eats. Manuela, the Italian and only one who regularly speaks Portuguese with me, is a pretty good cook. She says "all good Italian food will have one or all of the three Ps: Pesto, Tomato, and Cream." I only count one P. The only thing that bugs me about her cooking is the fact that, instead of using fresh tomatoes, she always uses this gross bottled tomato sauce. So if she is cooking with the P-food that is tomato, I pppass. Mintu, the Finnish girl who likes to surf and roll her eyes at nearly everything, seems to have a pretty healthy diet of fruit, soup, salads, pancakes, or pizza—the pizza she makes from scratch (cooking the dough first in a frying pan—which made Manuela nearly pass out. Katia, who would have made a great femme fatale in a Bond movie, I haven’t seen in two weeks so I don’t really know. Josue, the Dutch with the Scarlett Johansson doppelganger girlfriend who visited for two weeks, just tried cooking a frozen foods filet of salmon wrapped in puff pastry by taking it directly out of the freezer and putting into a smoking skillet. This didn’t come off well.

Anyway, last night I did some research on the music scene of the night and ended up going to a band that was part Sonic Youth, part Nick Cave, and part Einturzen Neubauten (I’m sure that is spelled wrong) at the Braça de Prato. It was nearly impossible to find since its hidden away in some industrial wasteland and used to be where the dictator Salazar constructed and stored munitions and sometimes interrogated and tortured dissidents (so it had a real chilling feel to it when we finally found it). I went with Betty, the English vegetarian. Anyway we went to Bairro Alto after that and had a bunch of Mojitos and all the international dudes (does anyone remember international night at the Loring Park Café? Bairro Alto is like that every night past 11 p.m.--always packed with a bunch of sweaty, swarthy, obnoxious, drunk dudes--the ratio of men to woman is 99:1) were hitting on her while I sort of scratched at the ground with my foot for about an hour. Then some group of other internationals wanted to take a bunch of pictures with me. I guess they thought I was a celebrity...I couldn't understand what they were saying since they didn’t speak Portuguese and their English was intolerable. Of course I was in some wicked duds since I had a Keenan Duffy Bowie dress shirt, my CC Club tie (2 generations of Arnolds have been kicked out of this exclusive club on 26th and Lyndale--3 decades apart), and this new black and grey argyle sweater vest with skulls and crossbones sewn into the grey diamonds--so maybe they wanted to see some true American style.

Today I finished my homework early and was inspired by the song “Perfect Day” by Lou Reed, so Betty and Manuela and I are going to make some white sangria and tosta mista (this is fancy talk for a melted ham & cheese), and go to the Parque Florestal de Monsanto (this has nothing to do with the company Monsanto)-basically cause we are all without money and this seems like the cheapest solution for a lazy Lisbon Sunday.

The video included here has nothing to do with anything I wrote about in the text above. Its a little bit of Fado and some guitar work I need to fit into my repertoire.

Souvlaki Space Station

So if Pawlenty becomes VP does that mean we get to pick a new guv’ner?

I just got my hair cut today. It looks pretty fit everyone agreed. Normally I get my hair cut by Jen Hughes who travels across the country giving lectures on new styles for Juut and Aveda. Only the most extreme metrosexuals in the cities get their hair cut by her because her fee starts at $100. I, of course, do not fit into that category, and wouldn’t dream of paying that much for a haircut. We worked out a deal years ago when I was still schlepping wine that would get me a cut for three bottles which cost me next to nothing back then. Now I have to pay retail, like a sucker. Even still, it’s a pretty good price for her services. But today I spent 5 euro for an Indian dude in Freguesia Socorro to cut my hair. It was the fastest cut of my life. I’m used to about two hours, and this cut took 10 minutes. While my barber was watching the Olympic ceremonies, the entire time he whacked away at my pompadour and shag with alacrity and precision. The scariest moment was when he took out the straight edge and, as he glanced now again at the areas he was cutting, I kept having visions of the opening scene of “Un chiên andalou” by Buñuel in which the director himself slices open a woman’s eye while the scene is montaged with a skinny cloud cutting across a waxing moon. He slipped the blade across my forehead, ears, neck, spinal cord and cheeks. Not a drop of blood. I was pretty impressed. So score 1 more for the Portuguese service sector, albeit not at the hands of a Portuguese.

So everyone from the prior semester has left the country. Pictured right is my former class. The only people that are left are the two Asian kids on the left of the photo. I still don’t know either of their names even though we have become good friends. I think I need to be able to spell out a name in my head in order to remember it, and I can’t even start spelling their names. Every trick I’ve been accustomed to using in Minneapolis when I forget someone’s name doesn’t seem to work on them. Apparently they don’t like saying their own names. So this guy (he's the one with his thumbs up (which I guess still means "heeeyyyy, all's cool...")--his squeeze is in red next to him, they're a couple from Macau) I think has some weird ideas on the nature of relationships in the United States. I don’t know which American TV programs he is watching, but he seems to think that American men always hug and one guy should always put his arm around the other and sort of slacken himself a bit when they are talking to each other or others. Sometimes he puts his whole arm around my shoulder and sometimes he puts his hand on the back of my neck. No matter what its very awkward, and since he doesn’t speak English, and I can’t understand a word of his Portuguese nor he mine, I don’t know how to explain this concept to him except by slowy shifting myself away from him when we are hanging out. I have lots of Asians in my class and now I can do a super-wicked Asian Portuguese accent that I hope I can remember when I get back because people die laughing when I do it. Well, not the Asians yet, but I’ve been careful not to do it around them because I really don’t think they would get it, or maybe would even be offended. ‘Twas all in good fun. This other Chinese guy who sits next to me in class who’s name is Henry, but calls himself Harry—“Is Harry, you know like Harry Potter”, is an extreme close-talker and always gets my attention by doing this fluttering movement on my shoulder which I find a bit disconcerting since I’ve only known very coquettish girls to do that. Harry and I are involved in many scholarly projects together since we sit right next to each other. Today he suggested to me (as we were walking a foot behind the professor during the coffee break) in very clear and loud Portuguese that, instead of doing the writing assignment we had been assigned for the weekend, he will just copy it directly out of the book he has with all the answers. I am looking directly at the Professor who just looks back at me as Harry is saying this and gives me this look and wry smile as if to say, “Yeah I know ridiculous, right?” while at the same time saying “this is a very standard practice for a guy like Harry.” I tried to insinuate that maybe this wasn’t really the point of the assignment, but he wouldn’t have any of that and then immediately left to go see the opening Olympic ceremonies instead of returning to class. So I guess that assignment is taken care of.

On a final note, I recently came to the realization that if the gods are practicing a slow food movement, this could explain the amount of beaches there are in Portugal. If one considers the fact that typically, the longer it takes to cook most of the foods that are really worth eating (as opposed to a micro waved wiener) the better they are, then the beach scene is the divine equivalent to a demi-glace. As they lather themselves with oil and bake for years under the perfect convection oven, they are making themselves into an exquisite human confit. As they smoke cigarette after cigarette while sunbathing they are also basically smoking themselves inside out (although I imagine the gods prefer the non-additive brands like American Spirits to reduce their exposure to harmful chemicals). The ocean provides the right salinity and seasoning to effectively cure the flesh at a glacial pace. And the Caparinhas, Caparões, Margaritas, and Mojitos we drink are a very efficient pickling method. I couldn't be the first who's picked up on this...

Brother, Can You Spare a Dime, or Life on Mars

I was swimming in the Atlantic today and forgot I had a 5-euro note in my back pocket. The waves weren’t crashing like the final scene on Point Break or anything, but they were certainly strong enough to whisk away, in a final symbolic cruel and cold European manner, the little that is keeping me afloat in a city that I often feel is completely backwards.



I can’t get a good meal in this town, because I can’t really afford to get one. Of the few restaurants that I have visited, on the whole, I could say I can cook better and faster than probably most or all of the kitchen. The service is almost always slow, impatient, and lacking in knowledge of their own nation’s food and wine. This típico restaurant scene can serve as a metonym for the entire service sector of Portugal. And of all the goods a country produces (be it in the agriculture, industry, or service sector), services seem like they should be the lowest on the learning curve and the most readably adaptable to any nation. The United States now depends mostly on the service sector for growth of its GDP, and we’ve got that shit down, at times to a fault. Portugal, likewise relies heavily on its services for its own GDP (for instance, tourism is huge here right now.) However, I have not yet received anything near acceptable service from any place I go to except for the two small grocery shops near my flat. The taxi drivers are cranky (which is typical anywhere), the bus drivers seem suicidal, the mid-size grocery clerks homicidal, the barristas are deaf mutes, the servers are currently (as always) on a smoke break, the bartenders, well they’re o.k. (but who wouldn’t be when you have constant access to an infinite array of alcohol?), the lifeguards (when they aren’t hitting on skinny blonde internationals) read the newspaper or take a nap, the doctors give you about five minutes then say, “how bout you just tell me which drugs you want”, the professors are brilliant, cultured, and hilarious (and of course are the lowest paid of any of these), and the black market, its alive and well (mid-day on the busiest street in my neighborhood some dude apologized after turning around and running straight into me and spilling half the bag of heroin (or coke?), he just couldn’t wait to dip into, on my t-shirt—I imagine this happens often.)


All of this makes me wonder how our dollar is trailing so weak in comparison to the currency of Portugal, the Euro. Although I understand most of the economics behind the multi-national Euro compared with the sub-prime loan, war debt, no longer internationally desirable, crushed Washingtons, I still can’t help but be at a loss when I feel like some impoverished immigrant in a country the size of Mississippi (and with an economy that seems to match.) That is why the following article in the New York Times yesterday made me spin a bit as I saw myself on the flipside of this new role reversal of Prospero and Caliban (I know this might be stretching the metaphor a bit far.) The following article looks at the pound/euro strength and its aftermath in our beloved Big Apple.

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From the NY Times August 3rd 2008 (About Brits in New York): “Back home they’re just run-of-the-mill cubicle people,” Ms. Farsad added, “but here, they’re like three parts Kimora Simmons and two parts Oasis, circa 1995.”


This summer, New York is awash with visitors from abroad, who are expected to top last summer’s record number, tourism officials say. Thanks in part to home currencies that are holding strong against the dollar, even middle-class vacationers from Hamburg, Yokohama or Perth can afford to scoop up New York style — the clothes, the hot restaurants, the nightclubs — at bargain prices.


But for New Yorkers trapped on the other side of the currency imbalance, it’s easy to feel ambivalent about the invasion. An infusion of foreign money is welcome in a city faced with a wobbly economy and a possible budget gap in the billions. But even some locals who consider themselves cosmopolitan and internationalist confess to feeling envy, not to mention territorialism, in watching a outsiders treat their city like a Wal-Mart of hip.


Their party is raging just as the hangover has started to set in for Americans. Frictions do arise — especially in a summer of looming recession, where many locals do not feel rich enough or secure enough to travel abroad themselves. (And let’s not even get into their weeks of summer vacation).


“It’s Psych 101 — jealousy,” said Randi Ungar, 30, an online advertising sales manager who lives on the Upper West Side. “I’m jealous that I can’t go to Italy and buy 12 Prada bags, but they can come here and buy 18 of them.”


Steven Schoenfeld, a 45-year-old investment manager who lives near Lincoln Center, said that he welcomes the influx of visitors, in theory, as a boost to the local economy, but “sometimes you feel like it’s going to become a situation where they stop and take picture: ‘Look at that endangered species — a native New Yorker, with a briefcase, going to work.’ ”


Polly Blitzer, a former magazine beauty editor who now runs a beauty Web site, said she believes that a turf war is going on this summer between free-spending Europeans and locals over the chic bistros, spas, boutiques and department stores that she, a native New Yorker, used to consider her playground.


Manhattanites without Bergdorf budgets often find themselves working overtime — figuratively and literally — to keep up with their visiting friends from Europe or Asia.


Jessica S. Le, an executive assistant at an investment banking firm who lives on the Lower East Side, said she recently started moonlighting as a dog-walker, in part to earn extra income she needs to see friends from abroad, who are dining at WD-50 or Suba, or drinking at Thor.
These friends from Europe and Asia “come over and play in New York like it’s Candyland,” she said in an e-mail message.



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Well my friends, I am not in Candyland. I am the thimble in a Monopoly game, and I just landed on the hoteled Park Ave. space. And though I must pay the ridiculous rent, I can’t help but feel I am somehow stuck in a Crackland version of Park Ave. As my 5-euro note slips into the fierce Atlantic currents, so go I.

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.