Have You Been Selling Your Fanny?

It’s been a while since I’ve had the experience of going to a school and knowing not a single one of the students. Even going to college, I knew a handful of people going to Tulane, yet there wasn’t a single problem with me getting to know the students at the conservatory. In fact, in nearly every class, students came up to me and started to introduce themselves. For the first few days, I wondered how I had stuck out as such a sore thumb, when I soon realized that the conservatory is both small, and that all students have a predetermined set of classes for each year at the school, and most students must have recognized that they’d never seen me in one of their classes. I was very very excited to start my first week at the conservatory (the glass building on the right).

But the friendliness is enchanting: every person I’ve met at the conservatory seems genuinely interested in maintaining a positive relationship with all the people around them, and regularly musicians ask to meet up for jams and to hang out. The first day I was there, there was an Israeli student present in the lecture and we talked for a little while, and I giddily tried to use all the Hebrew that I know, which got me in with all the Israeli clan at the school. Certain small, yet distinguishably present, groups of students from the same country form these tight knit bands, that although not exclusive, are very strong. The Israelis, the Latvians, the Icelanders…

The class that struck me most had a great introductory guest artist lecture attached to it. This semester, I’m taking a class called Advanced Rhythm, which solely focuses on the Indian Solcattu system, a method of examining all the possibilities of the segmentation of a beat. Each segment has a syllable associated with it that depends on how many segments are represented per beat. One way of describing one is the 16^th note, which seperates the beat into four equal segments, and in this system is represented by the symbols Ta-Ke-Di-Mi. There’s seperations of 5 (quintuplets, Ta-Ke-Ghi-Na-Ton), 3 (triplets, Ta-Ki-Te), and so on and so forth. Then these different patterns can be laid on top of other patterns to get complicated polyrhythmic or polypulse combinations.

This class had a guest artist come in to the conservatory to do 3 lectures, which progressively got more complicated. B.C. Manjunath, a Mridangam virtuoso, talked about the various possibilites of Solcattu and how the oral tradition of Indian Music passed on such rich and intricate sounds.

While going to the school, Sean was still in Germany. Coincidentally, not having someone around for the first few days of school was beneficial towards me getting acquainted to my schedule and getting situated, so that when he came back on Wednesday, I was settled in as comfortably as I could be. 

The next day was my Thursday schedule, a day of class that starts at 11 am and goes all the way until 6 pm. Upon coming back to the Funenpark, my apartment building, I was trapped, along with 3 others, in the elevator after it jolted several times. While I spent 45 minutes locked in an elevator with a girl who was starting to go into hysterics and two musicians with dark senses of humor who were coyly making remarks to the aforementioned girl, I tried to get an idea of what Sean and I were to do that night. That night we went down to a lovely Thai place, Sawadee Ka, and topped off the evening with Gluhwein, a spiced hot wine popular in many parts of Europe during the winter, sitting on the balcony overlooking the Leidseplein, one of the centers of night life in the city of Amsterdam.

Friday, I went to an ensemble and the moment it ended biked to meet up with Sean, where we travelled to the museumplein, which houses our next stop: the Van Gogh museum. We first stopped at a cafe in the plein and I had this goat cheese panini, as it was described in the menu. When it arrived, I was presented with a large hot slab of warm goat cheese, roasted vegetables and fresh bread. As the picture showed, it was delectable. 

We made our way to the museum and I took in some of the most beautiful art I’ve ever seen. Though parts of the museum were under construction, there were too many beautiful Van Gogh prints and occasional masterpieces by some other painters, including some by Monet, which were just fantastic. The textures and detail in each print were exquisite and unmatched, and where still life can be just so bland from most artists, Van Gogh’s were unbelievable.

We departed the museum 3 hours later and made our way to the Museum of Optical Illusions, which Sean had read about, and was located on the 6th story of a book store (which included Schindler’s Lift…). The 2 euro entrance fee was the most worthwhile fee I’d paid the entire trip, with the interior of the museum containing original MC Escher prints and some mind-boggling images. There was a certain levity in the museum’s presentation that indicated some sense of humor and humility, and made for the most pleasant experience. Included in the museum was a room that had these foam black shapes laid out on a table with several photos of various formations that the pieces could be arranged to on the walls…I think. The thing was, is that Sean and I were unable to get close to matching anything that was up, and nothing in the museum had any description, so if you couldn’t figure it out, you were at a loss.

Afterwards, we went to the movies and saw a film called Tyrannosaur, actor Paddy Considine’s feature film directorial debut. It was unfortunately a mess in response to the direction, with truly poor sequencing causing some of the most disjointed and uneven filmmaking I’ve seen in a long time, though there were extremely strong performances in the two leads, who were actors that I’ve never heard of. In the film, an old social outcast widower living somewhere in Britain angrily threatens a group of rude youngsters at a bar and in running away meets a woman who owns a shop whom he befriends. The film tackles some social taboos pretty face on, and there are some strong moments and monologues, as well as great scriptwriting, but its all detracted by the shitty direction and the misuse of film score.

The end of the movie signaled the end of our night, as early the next morning we were en route to Bruges.

Vere Are Your Papers?

The next morning (Saturday), though Sean and I planned on an early start to get to as many museums as possible, we were so tired from our 3 AM wind down, we didn't get out of the apartment until 1130.

Our first planned stop was the Hamburger Banhof, a contemporary art museum, which Google informed us was off a certain subway stop (let's just say Station "A"). We arrived quickly, getting out of the subway at 1145, though we had trouble finding the street to turn onto. My poor preparation skills left us with no map and just a few directions I had written us and we walked aimlessly around a certain street looking for the right turn. We stopped into a restaurant and struggled in a broken English conversation where she could not understand where we were trying to go.

A few minutes more aimless walking happened to lead us to the right street, on which we walked down to the address Google gave us, seeing no museum in sight. With no internet connection or physical map telling us where the museum was we found ourselves surrounded by embassies that all happened to be closed (Note to self: Make sure I don't need asylum on a Saturday). We stopped at a bus stop, scouring the map for the location of the museum, where a man who only spoke Spanish and German longingly tried to help us get to our destination. He first tried to speak to us in Spanish when I volunteered Sean (who I had assumed knew Spanish as he said he used in Peru a few years earlier) to translate. Sean was trying to communicate in his broken Spanish when the bus came and the man got onto the bus and put his hands against the glass as it drove away.

We had all but given up hope, but luck would have us run into a very lavish hotel. The elephant-sized, sliding, automatic glass door opened up to reveal a hotel designed for very wealthy tourists, and we were greeted by a bellboy who spoke perfect English and were directed to the Hamburger Bahnhof, which was several kilometers away from where we were staying. For wasting a lot of our time, I picked up a taxi to the museum and we were greeted with a plethora of fantastic exhibits, some great ones, and others that were a little pretentious (one that sticks out in my mind was this recreation of a repair shop that was bland and rather lame). But the best exhibit was a video of the inside of a box. The box was a long rectangular box (a little over a meter if I remember correctly), in which the interior had been carefully designed to resemble a hallway with a few doors, though it wasn’t too specifically detailed in order to exhibit the next few qualities. The box was taken around a forest, and the natural entrance of light changed the appearance of the hallway which the perspective of the video precisely and exclusively showed.

Another fantastic exhibit in the Hamburger Bahnhof was one entitled CLOUD CITIES by Tomas Saraceno, which consisted of several large balloons made of a hard plastic. Each bubble was elevated and represented various facets of life, with some of them having ladders allowing patrons to climb all over the orbs. One specifically looked like a bubble on the ground, with another on top (similar in shape to the “butt-bubble” kids used to blow by blowing a bubble, keeping it in tact and blowing another bubble with the remaining, attached flat gum). The bottom bubble was pressurized and lined with a reflective floor, which many individuals sat and relaxed on, and the top layer had individuals swimming around on their bellies like fish. It embodied the quality of serenity and was just a delightful exhibit.

We took the train over to meet my cousin Raquel for a quick soup and sandwich, and she gave us a quaint walking tour of the area, showing us everything she knew about. One in particular was a small holocaust memorial in the middle of a small park, that was represented by a table with two stone chairs, one being overturned and lay on the ground. Like the stumbling stones, small gold stones laid at the residences of Jews taken out of their homes during Nazi Germany, it was just another beautiful and humbling reminder that the government took so much care to exhibit.

Which brings about another interesting point about Germany. The German government, in its hopes of making Jews feel the most comfortable, have German police officers at every site that would have Jews present: the synagogues, restaurants, museums… This special treatment puts the Jews of Berlin/Germany between a rock and a hard place – it’s nice that the government respects the community and that they can assuredly be safe (anti-semitism isn’t non-existent in Germany), but at the same time, German citizens begin to look at the Jews as getting government resources that should be utilized for other projects and that all Jewish facilities are exclusive and that Germany’s non-Jewish citizens are not allowed inside. How can Germany expect the Jews to get back on track if they never can be accepted as normal German citizens?

That night, Raquel took us to several bars, all of which were fantastic and fascinating. The first of which was a hole on the wall inside what appeared to be an abandoned building. The stairwell entrance led to a bouncer’s kiosk that obscured a door leading to a room packed to the brim with patrons. The DJ was spinning 50’s American Pop, Rock and Motown, and it was here I noticed the most identifiably German personality quirk. Constantly I felt a little uneasy as I felt that I was being stared at, thinking that girls/guys/bartenders/old ladies/train conductors were trying to pick me up. Upon asking my cousin’s German friend, I was informed that its just something Germans do; they’ll match eyes with strangers for no reason other than its just common practice.

We then ended up at a smokey bar (which has tarnished my Kashmir sweater) which not only was packed to brim (all 4 rooms!), but the DJ here was spinning the typical European electronic music. We trekked home and that ended our Saturday night.

Sunday, Raquel’s friend invited us to a 10 am party/get together and we met them in East Berlin to travel to the location. I was shocked and awe-struck to find the communist architecture still so prevalent, with plenty of graffiti abound, and we arrived at the party site. Here, a bouncer and two of his friends were huddled around a fire in a barrel, where we stood waiting to find out why we couldn’t get in. One of the bouncer’s friends, who obviously had partying since early Saturday, kept taunting me, asking me if I know how to dance and attempting to make me keel over. We never got into the party, and walked to the Berlin Wall.

Now, I don’t know what made me think this, but I expected a 40 foot wall; a dark, sun-obscuring, metallic, turret-covered wall. Instead, I was greeted by an 8 foot wall, where I blurted out, “That’s it!?!?” and all my companions looked around uncomfortable at my outburst. Once getting past the size of the structure, I started to understand how it was still beyond daunting, with a long stretch of the wall still extending to the Russian checkpoint. From there, we rushed back to the apartment and I got ready to leave Berlin.

What really struck me most about the city of Berlin, was that, even after these few decades of integrated boundries, the East/West divide was highly prevalent. Westerners, who grew up in a society showered with the riches of the Western World, still had stigmas and stereotypes about those in the other half. The architecture was still drastically different, the price of food in each half different, the dialect a tad different. Raquel’s friend told me much about the attitudes of the west, that “they expected the two worlds to join together, but the west felt threatened, in that all of their wealth was taken and redistributed to the east, where people were so used to poverty and hand downs, that they expected it as if it were a normal part of life.” What could have been done? Why is this city the way it still is? What’s the future going to be for this city? 23 years seems like so long, but at the same time, it obviously hasn’t been enough.

Post 1 (1/17/12)

What is there to say about Amsterdam? There’s the historical perspective, which I’ll expand on here, but that’s not something that you need to understand what it’s like to be here. It’s an entity unto itself, separate from Europe culturally and geographically, due to its isolated position in the center of the coast of the Netherlands, but its got enough culturally interesting aspects to be autonomous in relation to Europe’s needs. There’s no shortage of tourists coming in daily, as elicited by the constant crowds at Amsterdam Centraal Station, and the infrastructure keeps up well. The Amsterdamians have their own flavor as a people, and the city’s infrastructure is the result of cautious planning and intelligent design, even if it confuses the average traveler.

Amsterdam started out as a fishing village in the late 12^th century. Its strategic position on the coast allows it to make for perfect trading conditions and its weather, even in its earliest days, was more palatable than that of other port cities in Northern Europe (such as Oslo or those in Germany or Poland). Though not the political capital- Den Haag is- it still has a tremendous amount of influence over the decisions of the Netherlands government, being an important city to maintain.

But I’m no expert on Amsterdam from an academic viewpoint. I’ve barely been here a week, but I have had so much thrown at me. From the first day I arrived, I’ve been challenged by the layout of the city and getting acquainted to living in Europe. On Monday, January 9, I arrived in Schiphol Airport, the international airport in the Netherlands, to find that my bags were lost, possibly somewhere in England. My 1130 am arrival lost its convenience in relation to getting started on my program, as I spent half an hour waiting for the baggage belt and another whole hour waiting in line to file the paperwork to begin the search for my belongings (one thing I’ve learned about Europe so far is the endless opportunities for bureaucracy are taken advantage of).

Arriving at the Funenpark (my place of residency, come visit!), I sat down and spoke with my program coordinators, who had thrown together the orientation for the first week, who then took 4 other students and me around the Funenpark area, showcasing the nearby Albert Hijn locale (the Dutch supermarket chain) and a few other important shops. Here, I met the first of the few students who arrived this early for IES, half of us goingto the Conservatorium Van Amsterdam (the building on the right in the picture above) and the other going to the Garreit Reichtveld Academie, both of which are branches of the University van Amsterdam.

After our brief walking tour, we had a quick policy meeting, where I and I assume most everyone else felt like a walking zombie, lilting and torn apart by exhaustion. The meeting concluded with pizza, which happened to be just as bad as I remembered pizza being in the Netherlands, and I couldn’t bring myself to store some of the pizza in my refrigerator. And so ended the first night.

The rest of the week brought various other events to the table. Much of the time was spent in additional IES policy meetings, talking to us about how we should orient ourselves with the city, keep ourselves safe, utilize the IES resources, sign up for

classes, etc. We were taken twice to the UvA cafeteria by IES, for convenience and cost purposes, and were taken to buy necessities from bikes to cell phones. Tuesday, the conservatory students were taken to the conservatory in order to meet with the heads of our department and discuss our class curriculum. Expecting the typical American system, where we’re told of the requirements and then given a list of classes followed by explanations of why we can’t take certain ones, I was greeted with a formal meeting, with coffee, tea and mugs on a plate in the middle of a conference room and a formal introduction to each member of the administration. 60 year old, Dutch Ethan Gordon gave us a quick rundown on how our department would work and they turned to each of us and asked us about our goals. What were we interested in? Where did we see ourselves? That was their criteria for placing us in classes, entitling us to taking things that I never dreamed possible: Herbie Hancock/Wayne Shorter ensembles, classes on Advanced Rhythm (Indian solkatu) and personalized technique and Jazz lessons.

Despite having much information thrown at us and mandatory meetings, there was always time for us to do something interesting each day. Tuesday afternoon, I was let free at 4 pm and found time to grab my first beer at a pub with one of the Peters in our program. From there we meandered around, finding the Blue Note cd shop, a record shop that wsas littered with more Jazz recordings than you could shake a stick at. Wednesday afternoon, IES provided us with a boat tour to see the city from a trip around its canals.

Thursday, we were taken to Utrecht, a town southeast of Amsterdam, which housed many different artists over the years as well as renowned architect and designer Gerrit Rietveld, who is well known for his chair designs as well as the Rietveld-Schroeder house, an innovative, yet charmingly quaint dwelling designed by the two Utrecht neighbors. We were given a tour of the Utrecht Central Museum, which contained artwork that was almost too eclectic, from classical European portraiture of aristocracy and Jesus-based thematic artwork to modern art pieces. The museum’s cafeteria was packed with a group of elder tourists, so we were unable to eat at it’s eatery. We walked towards the Rietveld-Schroeder house and found a small bakery, where our group of 13 Americans must have overwhelmed the two bakers who must have expected another quiet day in a small Utrecht neighborhood.

That night, I met back up with Sean. Sean had come in on Wednesday for a two week stay here in Europe, including Amsterdam, Berlin and Brussels. Wednesday, we went to a small Jazz bar Casablanca to see a band that started out playing straight ahead jazz and culminated in poppy, RnB/Carribean/Rock originals with random trumpet solos. And when I arrived back from Utrecht, we got tapas with our friend Emma and split from her afterwards for a beer.

It’s incredible to experience the non-American attitude towards alcohol all over. People use it at parties, as we saw later in Berlin, not as a way to forget the night’s events, but rather to get a nice buzz and find a friendly atmosphere. There have not been any drunk jerks roaming the streets anywhere that I’ve seen, and alcohol is regularly featured in restaurants and eateries, from the snack bar that sells Heineken in the Conservatory to the wine sold in the Amsterdam Public Library’s Café.

That next morning, Sean and I left Amsterdam early in the morning to get on a train to Berlin. Our 6 hour train ride was more than pleasant, and we arrived in Berlin at 2 and had our stuff with us, and needed to kill 3 hours, so we found a coffee shop that my cousin recommended. Sean and I sat and observed the hipster atmosphere, with Ben Gibbard on the speakers above us, strange art and decour, and plenty to drink. That night, we got drinks with my cousin, who we were staying with for the weekend, and the jet lag from Monday still hadn’t worn off, so I couldn’t muster up the energy to stay out late.