Good morning all.
I had tried, or I should say, I am still trying and writing and researching and conversing and attempting to construct a narrative that somehow casts the activities of my European vacations and the months between as myth and metaphor, a microcosm of the improvisational information architecture, anomalies of sociology, and decline of western civilization in the first decade of the 21st century. Given the pretentious mess that promises to be, this chapter of my pop-music autobiography may be the closest thing to a straight narrative of my week’s sojourn in Brussels and Paris, 11-19 November 2006, I might extract from that unwieldy text. This chapter and the one that will follow shortly after (a second volume that picks up where this leaves off, mid-January 2007 through my week in England and the beginning of spring—’the fall of Icarus’ and ‘the winter of our discontent,’ as it were) are sourced differently from their predecessors—rather than being a current account of my state of mind and music library, its contents are more dependent on found materials from burned CDs in glove boxes, radio-surfing in Paris (ironic then that this entire mix is in the English language), jazz concerts in Brussels, and one track I’m especially sure will raise eyebrows, from my father’s library during my monthly transcontinental flights to Los Angeles—the aural residues of those aimless but purposeful travels. And though the words and instrumentation are not the more literal musical avatars through which I usually stage my drama, they are perhaps more authentic because they were present at the moments they here represent.
And while the plastic manifest is prepared for those who elect to receive them, those 19 have already been digitally replicated, in their precise order, compressed in a single 128 kbps mp3 file exceeding 79 minutes in length, given the title Every day is a song for a holiday. The cover will be this picture from that overcast Thursday, at the Bourse, where I caught the 95 back to Watermael-Boitsfort:
On Sunday night Ky Vinh and I, over dinner of mussels (though a Vietnamese preparation) and beer at his father’s restaurant in Ixelles, discussed how English as a language is more communicative and transactional than French, which is more expressive, and how as a result of this structural difference, the Anglophonic literary arts tend to emphasize purpose and plot—the totality of the composition—while their Francophonic counterparts are more concerned with diction and meter—the raw materials and their relationships—and so perhaps I perceive this chapter’s weaknesses based on my Anglophone mores. Regardless of whether this theory withstands academic rigor, I will say that the ‘culture of bread’ that exists in Francophone countries, the innately and unequivocally high standard for comestibles—with its attention to raw materials and their relationships—sadly has no equivalent in the United States. The rotisseried chicken I would eat in the United States was purchased in black plastic trays with mass-produced side dishes; on my first morning in Brussels, I joined Ky Vinh and his mother for their weekly tradition of rotisserie chicken and accompanied him to the market on the Ixelles pond to procure it (and stop for a coffee and speculoos beforehand).
He took my Lonely Planet phrasebook for a spin, or rather, he dared me to—he sent me to buy two tomatoes and celery, and later, a baguette (which I did meekly) while he bought a fruit tart at the patisserie adjacent. And while the bird, enormous by European standards, was succulent and the skin roasted golden, the baby potatoes that accompanied the dish had been roasting in a tray beneath the rotisserie in the drippings from the chickens above, the vegetables and fresh meats before my eyes which had been seemingly gamma-corrected for the pornographic standards of American grocery consumers, and the sun’s play with the pond and the majestic houses that stared it down on that cool morning defy my grasp of English adjectives to sufficiently describe them. After twelve hours’ delay arriving to Brussels from Washington, via Chicago, via London, my vacation had taken a decidedly auspicious turn.
The next day in Paris promised rain; we loaded up on diesel and made for A1. I continued to skim my phrasebook, uttering every road sign in a futile attempt to develop a passable French accent. And it seemed natural that in my anticipation of Paris, we should play the soundtrack to the film that pretty much defined the city in this decade: (Le Fabeleux destin d’)Amélie (Poulain). “My cousin plays the piano,” Ky Vinh says as he cues up the fourth track of the CD. “I ask her to play this whenever I visit.”
I spent that Monday in Paris with him and returned Friday morning via train—he met me at the Louvre after work, after the three-hour drive from Brussels, after I’d spent the day as a proper tourist, starting all manner of conversations with “parlais vous Anglais?” Restaurants advertised beaujolais nouveau on their signboards; I had the assiette du beaujolais, he had the roasted chicken. The disadvantageous exchange rate for Americans is seemingly weaponized by fountain drinks—a Coca Cola runs 3€, a 330 ml bottle on a London Underground platform £1.50. We stayed the night at Hotel Ribera in the 16ème Arrondissement after a dead-end search for a decent jazz club.
Two years ago, in the idle months before our inter- and transcontinental migrations, we took a break from our usual discussions of clustering algorithms—he played “Mr. Jones” on a borrowed acoustic guitar, I tanked up with whiskey and cognac and sang, poorly, foregoing the second and singing the third verse straightaway before Ky Vinh acceded to provide vocals as he strummed. He maintained an interest in jazz that intensified since we last met—taking saxophone lessons, collecting the recordings of John Coltrane, scouring YouTube for Thelonious Monk performances. We went to Sounds, his favored jazz bar in Brussels, twice in my week there.
He proposed a sovereign nation whose primary criterion for entry was physical beauty, where the beautiful ingenues of the oppressive governments of Asia, Africa, and especially Eastern Europe would migrate freely as a stepping stone to their desired first-world destinations—either a Schengen country or the United States. The city-state’s immigration board would essentially be a panel of judges akin to a beauty pageant, except actually invested with political force by the state. Tax revenues would be generated through the traffic of ogling tourists and wealthy jetsetters hoping to parlay their fortune and nationality into acquiring a trophy bride.
At Sounds, a striking blonde took residence at the table closest to the stage, nursing a decanter of red wine. Hands folded, tucked underneath her chin, which swayed independently of her shoulders, which remained still. Ky Vinh observed her, observed me observing her, and confirmed vocally what we’d both concluded the moment she passed our table and remained in our peripheral visions: she is granted citizenship, even a government appointment if she so desires. I appointed her the “minister of war,” and Ky Vinh asked the reason. “What you propose is Troy inhabited solely by Helens. You’re going to need a good minister of war.”
On Wednesday night, we opted for Muziek Publique’s program: Tricycle, a contemporary Flemish trio, instrumentation of accordion, bass, and saxophone, playing at the Moliere. And although we were disappointed to find the Moliere an auditorium-style theatre rather than a smoky bar, and Tricycle’s repertoire wasn’t as much jazz as an interpretation of European folk songs with jazz influences, the trio and their auxiliary players were nonetheless entertaining masters of their craft, to the point that I was compelled to spend 15€ to buy their latest CD, “King Size” (and blow my cover when asked to wait for the change or pay with smaller bills). The recorded version of “Belly Button” ends with the sound of a dog barking, also the sound of the Praha room, the spare bedroom of Indi’s house, in the late mornings when her neighbor’s dog howls its discontent most violently. Nouvelle Vague earned their spot during another late-morning waking, hungover on Shing’s sofa the second day of this year. After a breakfast of pho, we went to Acres of Books where I bought my copy of Geek Love.
I woke up first, Saturday at Hotel Ribera, and had a shower before waking Ky Vinh. Our itinerary for the day was Musée d’Orsay and the Basilique du Sacre Cœur; a boat ride on the Seine in the afternoon, time permitting (it didn’t permit). Cleaned up and heading north toward Montmartre and the basilica with a parking ticket and a little late for a croissant, the Andrews Sisters on the radio had put themselves on a loop in our heads—working for the Yankee dollar, indeed. Driving back south towards d’Orsay, he asked me what I thought the disc jockey was saying. “¿Habla qui?” is what it sounded like to me, as I eyed the sidewalks for parking. He said, “That’s ‘Art Blakey’ with a French accent.”
He talked about the thrill of jam sessions in live jazz performance (except drum solos, which didn’t impress him much). My appreciation is not usually for the inherent creativity of improvisation but the recapitulation of the song’s motifs when they’re over.
We bought sandwiches near the Sorbonne and took lunch at the Jardin du Luxembourg (and the fellow in red standing to the left of the palm tree would have been blocking my view of the pond had I been present when the accompanying picture was taken), took our seats facing the pond as 2° 20′ east rotated away from the sun and the branches of the trees seemingly planted in sand appeared at once gilded and frayed in autumnal twilight. It was not only a moment, we both knew while it was still present, we would look upon nostalgically in our future, but as we observed a father help his toddler son pilot a model sailboat on the pond we faced, a moment wherein we recognized the moments in our respective futures for which we would feel nostalgia in a later future still. I realized that I’d learned to recognize the hallmarks of those occasions because they were merely occasions—rare memorable moments of our experience that we knew to savor now that we knew their infrequency.
On Thursday night, after I’d spent the day roving with my camera at the Musée royaux des Beaux-Arts, Grand Place, and the Mannekin Pis, we opted to take in a movie, and I joined him to return overdue CDs and suggested The High Priestess of Soul and The Black Saint and the Sinner Lady (the latter an unintentional counterpoint to my association of A Love Supreme with Tokyo) for his next set—we played the former on the way to the theater. We watched Perfume: The Story of a Murderer, a German-financed film about French perfumers, speaking in English, shown that night with French and Dutch subtitles—the adaptation of a novel about a fatally ambitious perfumer with no scent of his own. (Then again, watching jazz performance in Brussels seemed equally knotted with global history: Belgian performers working in an American musical idiom with the saxophone—a musical instrument of Belgian heritage.) I sipped a can of Hoegaarden during the film, and in the theater, as in Ky Vinh’s car (where I also sipped beer), there were no cup holders—a design decision surely driven by the aforementioned culture of bread, because what sad souls keep a liter of cola nearby any chair they’re bound to spend a few idle moments? Ky Vinh noted that a point from the novel that doesn’t adapt well into the film is how his lack of an olfactory trail aided in his abilities as a murderer (which served his career as a perfumer)—a biological disproportion that predisposes him to professional excellence, as it were. The plot lacked (by my value system), though the production values are superb.
Driving from the theater: Listen, I implored. The vocals seemed to be in a different time signature than the music, just as she starts singing “I’m going back home, I tell y’I'm going back home now”—the piano dares us to imagine that it is indeed being played by the same woman who is providing the vocals, as much as it thanks us for paying attention. Heading back to Brussels on Saturday night, after a stop at the ridiculous Publicis Drugstore on Champs-Elysées to pick up Coke and water (I picked the bottle of St. Georges simply for the design, which alerted me to the typographic harmony of Optima and Gill Sans and later made an appearance in Indi’s redesigned résumé), The Roots came on the CD player as we slogged through traffic towards the Paris peripherique on my last night in town—he pointed out the sonic burst of a needle dropping on vinyl at the beginning of “Star” on Sunday morning and I’d been attuned to the opening seconds of the track since. As we attempted to leave the city (Porte de la Chappelle to the A1 was closed that night), we switched to the radio where I identified the song just ending as a Madeleine Peyroux single. After a week of road trips, we both tired of the CDs we kept in the car—Charlotte Gainsbourg’s new single made the playlist as the sodium lights lining the highway median indicated we were back in Belgium.
This is part of a longer (yes, longer, like a book, you know what that is) travelogue which I’ve tentatively named “The Fall of Icarus,” after the myth, after the painting by Pieter Brueghel in the collection of the Musée royaux des Beaux-Arts, after the subject of the William Carlos Williams poem named for the venue, after the Henri Matisse cutout in the collection of the National Gallery here, reproduced as a wool rug and adorning the floor between my bedroom closets. In considering the myth of Icarus and the people who are my Dædalus and my King Minos and the context that is my Labyrinth, in considering Brueghel’s landscape and Matisse’s reduction, in considering the measures of flailing melody of improvised jazz, in considering the normalization of geographic and emotional straying as a means to security as defined by capitalist societies, in considering the literal act of human beings taking flight—on jetliners and hang gliders and other winged innovations—I’ve come to understand that the greater achievement may not have been in engineering for the land-bound human race the ability of flight but the means of safe landing. Traveling is but the measured solo, a jam session in a live performance, and the return to routine that follows is the recapitulation, the revisitation informed by the improvisation that preceded it.
During my stay, as my experience of Paris in autumn had revealed a metropolis free in the awareness of its twilight, I began to wonder what would follow New York and Hong Kong as the 21st century’s global cities, as they had followed Paris and London of the 19th century. Dubai and Shanghai? Ky Vinh argued that unlike their predecessors, they exist in the context of governments that place restrictions on intellectual movement, with which I agreed. But, looking back at that argument, would that necessarily halt their ascendancy? The architecture of the 20th century favored the heights of finance—banking, insurance, and the singular pursuit of monetary wealth. Perhaps intellectual freedom and its artisanal manifestations would not be the defining characteristics of the 21st century’s defining cities, rather, the bastard form of capitalism to which the 20th century had given rise.
I received a copy of The Cruise as a birthday gift and proceeded to share it with friends of similar tastes or in similar straits on my travels to Los Angeles in November and December. The subject of the documentary observed about New York (while narrating a double-decker bus tour of the city): “When you are sitting in the middle of midtown Manhattan, you are sitting amongst a 20th-century invention, a city that grew up at an explosion, as an explosion, it is an explosion, an experiment, a system of test tubes, gurgling, boiling, out of control, radioactive atoms swirling. Civilization has never looked like this before. This is ludicrousness, and this can not last.”
And what of the rebellious intellectuals who conglomerated in coffee shops and theatres, who provided global cities with cultural capital to match their fiduciary wealth, their venues now annexed by the same machine that threatens their existence? “The State does not give power (pouvoir) to the intellectuals or conceptual innovators; on the contrary, it makes them a strictly dependent organ with an autonomy that is only imagined yet is sufficient to divest those whose job it becomes simply to reproduce or implement of all of their power (puissance).” I had been reading “1227: Treatise on Nomadology:—The War Machine,” the chapter in Deleuze-Guattari’s A Thousand Plateaus in spare moments on my vacation in preparation for a meeting of my fledgling book club on the Sunday night I was due to return to the States.
Ky Vinh said as he drove me to the airport on Sunday morning, apropos nothing, “I don’t think you’ll be happy working in a regular job.” I returned to work on Monday, at the end of my improvisation, at the end of my solo, thrust back into the routines and motifs, back to security as defined by capitalist societies, back to the state apparatus. I’d read about nomadic war machines and the myth of Icarus and watched jazz performance as intellectual exercises, and as I’ve been tailoring this abridged version of my travelogue, it seems I’ve even vacationed as an intellectual exercise.
And though the words and instrumentation of this chapter are not the more literal musical avatars through which I usually stage my drama, this text may vouch that they are perhaps more authentic. And as I’ve come to realize there is a difference between intellectual exercises and learning, between expanding one’s range of metaphors and enhancing one’s ability to live, between communication and expression, I’ve come to realize that’s worthwhile, even admirable.
(Three thousand words, and I haven’t said a thing about the waffles or frites.)
