Amsterdam: Tulips and Weed

Here is how my trip started: I was at the Gare du Nord train station, waiting for the train in a transparent plastic cubicle with equally impatient fellow passengers. Some read, some called, some chatted. One man, dressed in a dark blue dress shirt and jeans, took out his cell phone, and wiped it on his jeans, apparently dissatisfied with the smudges on the screen, then repeated the same task over and over until he stopped, either because he had to leave for his train or he was satisfied, or maybe both.

Outside of my enclosed cocoon where I was reading, people swarmed. Amidst the collisions of a thousand little rushed hurricanes, even-keeled, placid soldiers strode, gripping machine guns, wary. The police were also present; they, too, were unconcerned. One group of three—they always traveled in groups of three—carried and ate their lunch with them.

Finally it came time for me to board the train and leave my safe cocoon. I wasn’t just leaving that pacific cubicle, but I was also leaving the familiar confines of Paris. I neither speak nor understand Dutch, and although I’d been assured that knowledge of Dutch was not necessary, I was nevertheless nervous, because I was leaving a place that I’ve steadily understood more and more and exchanging it for a new place. Engaging with something new is, for me, both exciting and nervous and I always feel it burning right in my chest, right in the middle, between the lungs. I had that feeling that day.

****

This train trip was fortunately not afflicted by the troubles of the last one to Provence. My place was open, I sat down, and that was relieving.

The train made several stops between Paris and Amsterdam. It stopped several times in Brussels which is, as far as I can tell, a more modern, industrial city than Paris, with several highrises and skyscrapers near the train station.

After Belgium, the train rocketed into the Netherlands, stopping in Antwerp and the Hague. It was there that the scenery began to change and become, to my eyes, definitively different than France. The famous old windmills sprouted up from the countryside all of a sudden, and they were quickly joined by their modern descendants, those steel windmills harvesting the wind. The land was flat, almost like the Midwest, but instead of resolving itself into a single point, the horizon abruptly stopped close to the eye.

I alternated between reading, editing writing and making calls during the entirely uneventful trip.

Then I arrived in Amsterdam.

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Amsterdam is commonly compared to Las Vegas. This seems like a fairly good comparison if you’ve never actually been to Amsterdam, because the reality is, however many weed-selling coffee shops, sex stores or general debauched parties there are, Amsterdam is not a company town, as Las Vegas is. It, unlike Vegas, is a central part of its nation’s political and cultural life, making those comparisons with Las Vegas somewhat overstated.

But not completely wide of the mark, either. Both cities promote disorder while retaining order. Obviously the casinos are some of the most tightly controlled entities in the world, which has probably penetrated the popular consciousness by now. Amsterdam is orderly, but not in the same way Vegas is.

Amsterdam’s order is primarily a function of its layout. While I walked the city, I entertained the possibility that the whole expanse had been first conceived of by some grand designer, who traced out perfectly straight lines to do a geometer proud, then went out and built the city based on that design immediately. And now, it must survive untouched from that master designer. There are no real side streets, nor do streets meander in lazy turns; instead, each street takes the dictum that “the shortest distance between any two points is a line” quite literally and thrusts straight to where it’s going.

Furthermore, public cleanliness is quite good, considering the number and variety of drugs and parties available. Open-air urinals stand as sentinels in the more riotous areas, and regiments of washers driving soap trucks patrol the streets. The only kind of dirtiness that seems to be tolerated is graffiti—there was a ton of it near the building where I lived.

The city’s streets are clogged by bikes, and yet they are well ordered, much more so than in Paris. They are allotted a lane, but oftentimes, it is graduated above the street and below the sidewalk, like the fairway in a golf course. The bikes of Amsterdam, while numerous, all appear old and used, as if the entire city subsisted by hand-me-downs. None of them were mountain bikes; instead, all were of the long wide handlebar variety.

The buildings of the city are mostly old, but there are a few modern buildings intersperse the historical ones. The houses are all rowhouses, but they share the streets’ obsession with the cult of the unornamented line; the windowsills are simply that, with no decoration whatsoever. In the central city, all the buildings are small, with the except of the spires of the churches and train station, with dominate the view.

Of the larger buildings, they are beautiful but spare. One church that I saw eschewed flying buttresses or other ornamentation, favoring simply the appearance of being carved out of one piece of rock. It had a statue, of a very stern saint whose visage projected his doubt of our moral scruples. Those were all old in the center city, where I spent most of my time. But when I stood on the bridges—which, lit or unlit by lights, are another concession on Amsterdam’s part for decoration—and looked out towards the end of the city, I could see that Amsterdam, like Paris, has banished its squat drab office buildings to the periphery of the city.

The spare beauty of Amsterdam’s architecture is matched by Dutch interior design. Sawyer, a friend from high school who I stayed with, mentioned this fact first and it’s true: the Dutch leave their curtains open, so you can gaze upon their interior design. Presumably it’s because they’re proud of it, and justifiably so. Their style of interior design is the one IKEA magazines try to sell. Their walls and floors are all of the same color, with modernist furniture twisted in strange unexpected shapes and with a single painting or photograph dominating each wall. The simplicity of taste on display is incredibly effective. The restaurants show similar skill at interior decoration, rendering useless one of my criteria—judging the interior design—of finding a restaurant.

The place where I stayed brought all of these trends together. It was a new apartment building that resembled the vision of an especially aesthetically-attuned dictator for a compound containing a barracks. The buildings looked like Lego blocks planted in the landscape, which, denuded of plants, resembled some post-apocalyptic moonscape. There was a tile walkway linking the various buildings together, and its tiles, rather than the comforting regular squares or triangles of home, were a gray, black and white mismash of vaguely trapezoidal shapes. Once inside the building, I was confronted by a red-and-purple combination whose only virtue was that it was not the lime green-and-blue combination next door. The rooms themselves were arranged in a long line, with a wooden floor underneath. Above the rooms, another floor and another wooden walkway leaned into empty space. The formation resembled Alcatraz or some other prison.

Wow—that sounds very unpleasant. And although I heard complaints about the heating and various other broken aspects of the system in the apartment building, I found it to be fairly all right. Then again, I don’t have to live there.

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Most Americans either have their awareness of or visit Amsterdam because of pot. It’s very, very legal in Amsterdam, as I’m sure you’re aware. At least part of the reason that I visited was for pot—the other was to hang out with my high school friend, Sawyer Jacobs. So of course I smoked a lot.

We—me, Sawyer, his roommate, Greg Rees—spent a lot of time sitting around, speaking randomly, surfing the internet, waiting for someone to propose the obvious: “Why don’t you roll a J?” And boom, there you go.

It was during those sitting around sessions that I met some of the other people in the apartment building of Funenpark.

The first and outrageous was John Henry, a name that sounds like it was drawn straight out of a folk tale of some legend. He isn’t a legend, but he’s certainly a character. He was a kid seized by quick movements and quick outbursts (“Man, Fuck You” drawled out like an operatic aria, sent at some irritant whose chief sin was disagreement with him). He dealt in extreme opinions about various pieces of art, whether literature, hip-hop or otherwise in reductionist terms like: “It’s great” etc., or “It’s awful” etc. He rarely resorted to evidence to back-up these claims. He told outrageous stories, of threesomes won and expensive reform boarding schools attended. Whether or not they were true—for he told them with such insistent bombast that I always doubted them—he impressed himself on people’s conversations and memories out of sheer will. He was a character strictly by willing himself to be that way.

But it was clear he was searching for approval, of the sort that notoriety brings. He would burst into the room with a Kramer-esque entrance and immediately attempt to dominate it, seeking insistently to get people to agree with his arguments. He continually played this one Arabic hip-hop artist who was competent at best, trying to convince the room that this artist was a true genius (with the subtext being that he was brilliant enough to comprehend it), which was clearly a lost cause, but he continued on. He succeeded in winning at least a small slice of approval as a certified character. His efforts were quite entertaining at the least, and his stories, whether true or false, had those lewd, melodramatic details that make for such great gossip.

Now I personally am agnostic as to their veracity, because I never saw any of these stories in action, and their cumulative effect raised doubts. But on Friday, John Henry (incidentally always referred to by both names, never one or the other) offered Greg an immeasurably tempting deal. Apparently John Henry had had a threesome with two girls with whom he was friends the night before, and he thought that there was a chance of a foursome with Greg involved. It’d be pretty impressive if he truly were able to pull it off, as well as a clear opportunity that Greg had to take up—this was the consensus of the room. So he went off Friday night while we debated his chances. Turned out that it was a no, and John Henry went and had another threesome. Our reaction was impressed and confounded—no matter how many times you see a bizarre human being get the girls, it remains a mystery the next time it happens.

As for the other people living in the apartment building that I met, none were as consistently fanciful as John Henry. They were all nice, well-adjusted people engaged in various projects. Some took their studies seriously. All took weed more seriously. One, Pierre, was making a contraption for delivering hits from stained glass whose description I once remembered but now slips my mind but struck me at the time as brilliantly ornate. The purpose of this contraption was to win the “Cannabis Cup,” a festival held in Amsterdam yearly to celebrate pot (obviously).

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Speaking of Amsterdam’s warm embrace of pot, it’s clear that Amsterdam knows which side the bread is buttered on. Amsterdam is a touristy city, it makes a lot of money off of that, and it caters to tourists, by and large. Signs diligently point out the major attractions, for example. Its various attractions—museums, tulips, pot—are proudly displayed for public consumption. Meanwhile, the Dutch—constantly a subject of complaint of the various Americans I met—have affected the detached professional manner of the Smile and “Thanks for Coming” without much sincerity behind it. They seem very detached to the casual observer, although this is probably a false picture.

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I can’t take Dutch, the language, seriously. I’m sure it’s a beautiful language once the speaker settles into its nuances, but, on the surface, it feels like the strange cousin of the rest of the continent’s language. ‘J’s, vowels, ‘k’s and all the rest collide and form a funny-looking agglomeration which bears only a passing resemblance to other Romance languages. My French, English and Latin knowledge barely helped for comprehension, unless the word was directly lifted from one of those languages. Otherwise, the language appeared to me as large strung-together chains of goofy-looking words.

This might seem like an awfully weak reed to rest a case on my not taking a language seriously, but there’s more. The rhythms of the sentences are exactly the same as English, only with gibberish (to my ears) substituted. Even more strangely, the Dutch “Ja” (Yes) is pronounced exactly the same as “Yeah,” which made me double-take a few times. So it sounds very strange to hear it floating through the air, while other languages, even ones I’m unfamiliar with, sound totally unique.

Actually my real reason for not taking Dutch seriously is that the Dutch seem to be kind of ambivalent about their own language. Everyone speaks English—I never had a problem with interacting with Dutch people as a language barrier—and lots of Dutch people patronize English bookstores. There’s even a Waterstone’s (the British equivalent to Barnes & Noble) sitting right in the middle of Amsterdam, serving Americans and Dutch almost equally when I stopped in.

I therefore get the impression, what with the ease that I conducted myself in English, that Dutch is somewhat fading, despite its omnipresence on official billboards and the like. That’s kind of sad—I hate to see an entire language fade into somnolence—but perhaps inevitable in a globalized world.

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The Van Gogh museum of Amsterdam is one of my new favorite museums.

Situated on a commons (the American term seems appropriate, as it was merely a flat expanse of grass), the Van Gogh museum was typically Dutch in architecture. Its modernity was expressed in a few bold lines, and the interior features more of the Dutch fingerprint: all gleaming white walls and a twisting staircase offset to the side.

The museum, devoted to Vincent van Gogh, works for two reasons. The first is that it takes a genius as its raison d’etre. But that is merely a good point to start from; it needs a good execution. That leads me to my second reason, that its extensive collection (200 paintings and 500 drawings of Van Gogh’s, plus several of his contemporary’s) allows the museum to put Van Gogh in context.

There are several introductory pieces which establish that the time Van Gogh worked in was one tottering between old and new. There are a few of those dreary neoclassical works, a few interesting Impressionist works, and some intriguing Japanese prints that show the array of different influences on Van Gogh’s work.

Then, of course, there’s his work, of which they have much. The extensive holdings gathered together allows one to really get a sense of the artist’s oeuvre and, more importantly, development. It’s clear from going through the museum that Van Gogh went through several distinct periods, and that he never stopped experimenting. That was the lesson I drew from the museum: it took Van Gogh a ton of practice and a ton of experimentation to come up with the precise alchemy necessary to create a masterpiece. That Van Gogh’s life did not end well is probably more a fault of his personality than his artistic method, which was sound.

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The Rembrandt museum, on the other hand, was a disappointment. The museum is housed in Rembrandt’s house. I should have known from the narrow rowhouse that it was unlikely to contain many works, but I didn’t make that connection and blithely went in. It only afforded me thirty minute’s entertainment.

While it was nice to see Rembrandt’s house re-created in such exact detail, the still, unused furniture and fixtures did not convey what kind of life and artistic context Rembrandt inhabited as well as the Van Gogh museum did. Furthermore, the paucity of their holdings made it impossible to get a sense of Rembrandt as an artist. So the museum could not seize the imagination with neither of Rembrandt the man nor Rembrandt the artist, and hence it failed.

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Once when I got high, I became very phlegm-y. Actually that was multiple times, that I got phlegm-y. But this specific time, phlegm surged out of my tongue like an opened fire hydrant. I kept on having to spit it out, which is neither the giddy experience nor the pacific experience that is being high at its best. I must have spat out my phlegm twenty different times. Unfortunately, I’m not a very good spitter—my saliva tends to dribble rather than rocket out—and this lack of skill was compounded by being high.

So, uh, legal weed: not all sweetness and light. You might get phlegm-y.

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On Thursday, we went to the Amsterdam Film Festival to see a movie called Fay Grim.

The Film Festival was held in a theatre/café that was even more aggressively avant-garde than the rest of Amsterdam. People milled about drinking while pounding electric ambience music flooded the room. Artsy looping videos played on a set of five TVs in the background. One video that was projected onto a bare wall featured people wiggling their tongues very quickly. And, one piece of art that I’ll come back to and we didn’t notice until later, featured an open toilet, with a black man laying in front of it, preposterously large dick extending from his supine body to the toilet bowl.

The movie, by director/writer Hal Hartley, was a fun farce that was successfully leavened by some serious interludes. Apparently it was a sequel, something that we never knew and didn’t really deter my enjoyment of the film. The movie is a send-up of spy films, with everyone chasing after the MacGuffin left behind by a (possibly-dead) fugitive. There are an absurd number of double-crosses and reverses that parody the typical spy movie. But the movie knows that there are serious issues out there and it addresses them in an interestingly allegorical way. It suggests that the ridiculousness of the game is a result from playing it in the first place, that it is an inherent part of the system. Anyway, there are some weaknesses with the ending, but overall it was an entertaining film.

The director was present to take questions, leading to an amusing Q&A session. The Dutch peppered him with highly intellectual questions, to which he (mostly) responded with typical American modesty about intellectualism. Here’s what I mean. One guy asked him (paraphrasing), “In film analysis books, most theorists agree that the straight on shot enhances credibility. Your film has all tilted shots. Did you do that on purpose?” Hal Hartley, with a bemused smile, responded, “I don’t read those books.” Most of his responses were in that flavor (except not as sarcastic): vague artsy quotations that, like vague athlete quotations, speak in the blandest, most general truths in order to be anti-elitist. The one area, revealingly, that he mentioned the specific fruits of analysis, were his historical inquiries (there are a number of historical references in the film) with the aid (like an athlete, giving credit to the team) of several smart Harvard professors, as he apparently taught at Harvard for a while. Of all the European moments I’ve had, I thought that conversation most typified the difference in the status of intellectuals, as the audience proffered earnest theoretical questions, rejected by American modest anti-elitism.

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On Saturday, we drank at a bar called Romero’s nearby. It was a Surinamese bar. The Surinamese, amongst others, are a large part of the immigrants which have begun to populate Holland. Like other EU countries, immigration is at the root of a lot of problems in Holland.

The bar was quiet throughout the night. Soccer was watched but not cheered. Drinks were drunk but not raucously. The bar was sparsely populated, those drinkers hunched over talking in quiet tones. It was perhaps the quietest bar I’ve been in. I hope that it’s not representative of the Surinamese population in general, because it was vaguely depressed.

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On Thursday, after the movies, we ended up at a bar, which referred to itself as “The Last Wateringhole.” In most of its decorations, it was remarkably consistent with actual Americana: dead cow skull with horns, the right posters, all that stuff. But one aspect grated: that is correct, the reappearance of the Confederate flag, which was painted in the shape of a cowboy hat, upon which the name of the bar was emblazoned.

I could launch into a rant here, but it’s clear they, the Europeans, just don’t know what they’re imbibing (or perhaps they do) here, and so I tend to place a good chunk of the blame of the misappropriation on our shoulders (although some caveat emptor would seem to apply on the European’s part).

I think the appropriations from Americana are some of the most revealing aspects of European culture. I was walking around Amsterdam on Thursday, and I heard a man say, “Shit” loudly. I immediately looked to see what the source of the exclamation was—he was Dutch, and I knew it because he was speaking Dutch into a cell phone. Since then, I heard a lot of Dutch say “shit” or “fuck.” Those are two appropriations among many. “Cool” is cool everywhere. I went into a bagel store (I missed bagels, OK?), called, “Tony’s New York Bagels,” and ordered a bagel. All of the bagel names were translated into Dutch, except for “Everything.” Everything, cool, shit, fuck: all of these are the colloquialisms of excitement, of big dreams and big reversals. That’s what I think Europeans think of Americans: ours is the language of everything, of rampant excess.

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Returning to that black puppet man with the big dick. It’s another example of very casual racism on the part of Europeans (I think, at least. That thing was so weird, Lord knows what it’s “meant” to convey). In the Netherlands, Christmas comes with good old St. Nick…and his black slave elves. There’s a brand of toothpaste in Germany with a black dude with sparkling white teeth, who apparently what you can expect if you use the toothpaste.

This has been a topic of discussion in both Paris and Amsterdam, so it’s definitely one that seizes people as worth hashing out. These conversations have proceeded in a remarkably similar way: immediately, an opposition is created between casual racism and overtly oppressive racism (say, lynching or Jim Crow). After this dialectic is created, it becomes clear that Europe falls in the former category, that it is preferable to the US’s racism and that, while somewhat annoying, is not that awful.

I think the casual racism exemplified by the Dutch slave-elves is destructive and damaging, if not as pernicious as the lynching-and-Jim Crow version. The academic consensus is that homogenous nations are more likely to be socialist nations; diverse nations are more likely to skew to the right. Just think about the most socialist group of countries in the world: the Scandinavian countries. That’s a pretty homogenous group of countries right there. The reason for this is that it’s much easier to conceive of helping people who are like you. If you consider a black man or a Muslim woman to be not like yourself, then you won’t be likely to want to help that person.
A lot of metaphors get trotted out to describe the state’s relationship to the people: some suggest a contract, others suggest a company. There’s nothing necessarily wrong with that, but I want to suggest another analogy for the nation (that is to say, not just the people or the state, but the nation as an idea): that of a family. A well-functioning family helps each other out, and it pulls together to achieve its goals. Now, I might trod over Tolstoy’s dictum (“Every happy family is the same; all unhappy families are unhappy for different reasons.”), but when a family excludes a potential member, when it ceases pulling for the same goals, when it loses or never forges fraternal bonds, that is when discord and despair afflicts the family.

Racism, whether of a casual or overtly oppressive variety, sends the message that you—the target—are not a part of the family and that we aren’t pulling for you, and we certainly won’t consider aiding you. If I’m just a member of the race who’s Santa’s merry slave elves, I’m at best a junior member. It’s exclusionary. That’s why the casual racism of Europe is distressing, that they are so free with their insults.

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Walking down the streets of Amsterdam is great, except when the wind kicks up. The straight streets of Amsterdam act as a natural wind tunnel, and the full force of the wind roars down the street. My hair was permanently tousled as an effect, and I could feel each individual root of hair at the base of my scalp afterwards.

It also rained quite a bit throughout the trip. Occasionally it was a light drizzle, but too often great torrents of rain fell. The wind whipped about, carrying the rain in discrete sheets and sending them into people’s faces.

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Amsterdam at night is quite beautiful. The bridges are all lit up, and the Christmas decorations also glow. The water turns glassy black, and the wind sends an infinitude of little ripples crashing against each other. The lights of the restaurants and bridges reflect in that black glass. It is cold but beautiful.

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Amsterdam has that reputation of a wild place to party. And yeah, I engaged a little bit. But I felt like I was really offstage of the wilder stuff: all those rumored threesomes, those ecstasy parties, those crack parties, all while I hung out and chatted. So I guess, on an intellectual level, I could say, damn, what a crazy place. But I don’t think what I did was all that crazy or excessive.

Between legal prostitution and legal drugs, Amsterdam is probably the most socially liberal city in the world. And yet, there doesn’t seem to be the major breakdown of public order that conservatives in the US like to predict. No, everyone seems to get along just fine.

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I am back in Paris right now, back at home. I am back where I understand all the street signs and the conversations. I am back where I know my way around. Coming back home always leads to a reappraisal of the virtues of home.