Across from Centraal Station in Antwerp, diamond shops are lined up to prey on people who reasoned that the centre of the world diamond trade would be a logical place to buy one. In the square outside, workers from a company called Big Wheel Events are piecing together a giant Ferris wheel. The next day, a van pulls up to decorate it with fake jungle vines and gorillas. I left town before seeing the thing in its final form.
Was it circus-related? Leaving Rotterdam, I passed a circus that had sprung up suddenly in a public square. A woman was teaching small children to spin plates, and silks and trapezes had been set up. Since Vienna, posters for circuses have been everywhere. I think circuses went into abeyance for a bit; the old sort of circus was wholesome enough when the other option for a Saturday with the kids was to check out a hanging, but things changed, and there was a pause while freaks and animals were written out of the program.
Circuses are interesting, partly because they come up a lot when I ask people for career advice. But you seem not to be able to just run away and join one anymore; there are circus colleges, and no room for the self-taught. (Even though my routine on the silks has been widely praised as 'unexpected' and 'startling', my auditions always end the same way: 'no, thanks', 'this is a shoe store', and so on.)
I stayed in a comfortable hotel that's also Antwerp's ugliest building. It's across the square from the train station, which is one of its most stunning -- dating from a time when the cathedrals were long-finished but the impulse to put up monumental public buildings hadn't quite wound down. From my room's window, you have a view mostly of ragged lines of modern windmills off to the north. Over the old, low-built city, they look very spindly and alien -- turning patiently, red lights winking at night in spooky synchronicity.
Economic leadership in this part of the world passed from Ghent to Antwerp to Amsterdam. But Antwerp has become a major port again, and it can also boast of being one of Europe's most under-construction cities. Its sloping cobblestone squares are all ripped up, its monuments are covered in scaffolding. Like charming old houses, beautiful old cities are maintenance nightmares. In Toronto, when something starts to look a bit shabby, we blow it up and build condos. When those get run down, we blow them up and build more. The way to live the Futurist maxim about every generation building its own city is to have shady developers and nothing much worth preserving. (Technically, I guess crappy old buildings are usually taken apart these days, not blown up, but I think that's a shame. Buildings should be blown up, it should be a public spectacle, and it should be set to music. And not the 1812 Overture every time, either, people should get creative with it.)
It's hard not to get a little blasé about European cathedrals. Antwerp's is an awesomely weighty mass of rock that took centuries to build. It has a vault you could train helicopter pilots in, exquisite marble crypts, a floor of half-effaced tombstones, and paintings by famous old masters. Still, after you've wandered through a dozen major churches in a short time, you feel a bit like haggling over the ticket. Six euros? Listen, I've come from Sicily, where they have just as much stuff, it's baroque, and it's free. Yes, I see the Last Judgement altar screens, but I've seen ones twice as weird and four times as violent. These are just pictures of alarmed naked people. Could be anything. I know about the Rubens, but I prefer skinny Jesus. And you look around and give it a seven.
The Museum Plantin-Moretus, though, is a fantastic place, the home of a 16th century printing magnate, exactly as it would have been hundreds of years ago if there had been thousands of Belgian schoolchildren running through it. Walls of carved black wood, early printing presses, rooms of early printed books, and portrait walls full of pale faces in huge ruffs looking down sourly on crowds of noisy children. It feels strange that such a place is open to the general public at all. The general public is awful; I know, I'm part of it. If not watched carefully, I'd be in there all the time, sniffling and getting Cheeto powder on the books.
Also, Antwerp has the longest traffic lights in the world. I'm sure the cathedral grew perceptibly while I was waiting to cross over to it.
From Antwerp to Ghent is just an hour or so by train. Ghent's a really beautiful city that was the economic centre of the region before Antwerp did to it what Amsterdam did to Antwerp. Bands of tourists rove around its centre, canal tours motor by, and on a sunny Saturday afternoon the brick river banks are crowded as though for some big event that's forgotten to happen.
Noises of Ghent
Buskers with guitars and accordions. Someone who needed the practice practicing violin in a building over the canal. A woman singing Happy Birthday to a little girl riding in the box of a cargo bike. Somewhere in a crowded square, inexplicable bagpipes interspersed with even more inexplicable applause. Guides with loudspeakers on canal boats fading in and out (on the wall of a canal that goes through a residential area, someone's set up a banner that says "Canal Tour Noise Pollution"). On the long walk from the station, my wheeled backpack ka-chunking over cobblestones. You'd like to slip into town quietly, and this is like having a personal herald who sings an endless song about what a noisy idiot you are.
On the even longer walk to the Guislan Museum, something is playing Yankee Doodle in a tinny, off-key way, like a music box that's resisted a lot of understandable attempts to smash it. This thing was mobile; it followed me from the last canal to the museum, about five minutes, pausing every twenty seconds just long enough for you to hope it won't start again. I kept stopping and scanning the street behind me, and never figured out what it was. It started to feel personal ("am I Yankee Doodle, here?"). It was only passing the gates of the hospital that made it give up. Even then, it prowled around near the entrance for a while.
A cheap hotel (another Ibis) with doors that go ka-chunk throughout the night, rushing water in the walls whenever someone flushes a toilet, and acoustics like a state-of-the-art concert hall. There's a family on the floor who seems to be raising their children entirely in hallways. Sad, because hallway children grow up with all kinds of problems, like difficulty dealing with the breadth dimension and a conditioned fear of having shoes thrown at them.
This Guislain Museum is in an old (but operating) psychiatric hospital with exhibits split across two floors on opposite sides of a red-brick courtyard; you follow Flemish signs you don't understand, hoping not to walk into a ward. There's an unsparing museum about the history of psychiatry, which is not a nice history (highlights: a cage-bed, bath restraints for hydrotherapy, shackles, rooms of devices like Dalek prototypes, an old ECT machine called the Psychotron II) and a lot of art galleries where artists have been invited to explore to concept of anxiety. Student filmmakers, too, had a go, and pretty much all came up with black and white films with lots of juddery camera work and off-camera dialogue.
The plan for this part of Belgium had been to go an see some WWI battlefields, but these are very hard to get to without a car; and the tour I tried to take turned out, when I stupidly contacted them only a couple of weeks in advance, to be full. So I left it, thinking I'd see if I felt energetic enough on the day for a bike rental or a painful public transit trip, and, well, ha ha.
Was it circus-related? Leaving Rotterdam, I passed a circus that had sprung up suddenly in a public square. A woman was teaching small children to spin plates, and silks and trapezes had been set up. Since Vienna, posters for circuses have been everywhere. I think circuses went into abeyance for a bit; the old sort of circus was wholesome enough when the other option for a Saturday with the kids was to check out a hanging, but things changed, and there was a pause while freaks and animals were written out of the program.
Circuses are interesting, partly because they come up a lot when I ask people for career advice. But you seem not to be able to just run away and join one anymore; there are circus colleges, and no room for the self-taught. (Even though my routine on the silks has been widely praised as 'unexpected' and 'startling', my auditions always end the same way: 'no, thanks', 'this is a shoe store', and so on.)
I stayed in a comfortable hotel that's also Antwerp's ugliest building. It's across the square from the train station, which is one of its most stunning -- dating from a time when the cathedrals were long-finished but the impulse to put up monumental public buildings hadn't quite wound down. From my room's window, you have a view mostly of ragged lines of modern windmills off to the north. Over the old, low-built city, they look very spindly and alien -- turning patiently, red lights winking at night in spooky synchronicity.
Economic leadership in this part of the world passed from Ghent to Antwerp to Amsterdam. But Antwerp has become a major port again, and it can also boast of being one of Europe's most under-construction cities. Its sloping cobblestone squares are all ripped up, its monuments are covered in scaffolding. Like charming old houses, beautiful old cities are maintenance nightmares. In Toronto, when something starts to look a bit shabby, we blow it up and build condos. When those get run down, we blow them up and build more. The way to live the Futurist maxim about every generation building its own city is to have shady developers and nothing much worth preserving. (Technically, I guess crappy old buildings are usually taken apart these days, not blown up, but I think that's a shame. Buildings should be blown up, it should be a public spectacle, and it should be set to music. And not the 1812 Overture every time, either, people should get creative with it.)
It's hard not to get a little blasé about European cathedrals. Antwerp's is an awesomely weighty mass of rock that took centuries to build. It has a vault you could train helicopter pilots in, exquisite marble crypts, a floor of half-effaced tombstones, and paintings by famous old masters. Still, after you've wandered through a dozen major churches in a short time, you feel a bit like haggling over the ticket. Six euros? Listen, I've come from Sicily, where they have just as much stuff, it's baroque, and it's free. Yes, I see the Last Judgement altar screens, but I've seen ones twice as weird and four times as violent. These are just pictures of alarmed naked people. Could be anything. I know about the Rubens, but I prefer skinny Jesus. And you look around and give it a seven.
The Museum Plantin-Moretus, though, is a fantastic place, the home of a 16th century printing magnate, exactly as it would have been hundreds of years ago if there had been thousands of Belgian schoolchildren running through it. Walls of carved black wood, early printing presses, rooms of early printed books, and portrait walls full of pale faces in huge ruffs looking down sourly on crowds of noisy children. It feels strange that such a place is open to the general public at all. The general public is awful; I know, I'm part of it. If not watched carefully, I'd be in there all the time, sniffling and getting Cheeto powder on the books.
Also, Antwerp has the longest traffic lights in the world. I'm sure the cathedral grew perceptibly while I was waiting to cross over to it.
From Antwerp to Ghent is just an hour or so by train. Ghent's a really beautiful city that was the economic centre of the region before Antwerp did to it what Amsterdam did to Antwerp. Bands of tourists rove around its centre, canal tours motor by, and on a sunny Saturday afternoon the brick river banks are crowded as though for some big event that's forgotten to happen.
Noises of Ghent
Buskers with guitars and accordions. Someone who needed the practice practicing violin in a building over the canal. A woman singing Happy Birthday to a little girl riding in the box of a cargo bike. Somewhere in a crowded square, inexplicable bagpipes interspersed with even more inexplicable applause. Guides with loudspeakers on canal boats fading in and out (on the wall of a canal that goes through a residential area, someone's set up a banner that says "Canal Tour Noise Pollution"). On the long walk from the station, my wheeled backpack ka-chunking over cobblestones. You'd like to slip into town quietly, and this is like having a personal herald who sings an endless song about what a noisy idiot you are.
On the even longer walk to the Guislan Museum, something is playing Yankee Doodle in a tinny, off-key way, like a music box that's resisted a lot of understandable attempts to smash it. This thing was mobile; it followed me from the last canal to the museum, about five minutes, pausing every twenty seconds just long enough for you to hope it won't start again. I kept stopping and scanning the street behind me, and never figured out what it was. It started to feel personal ("am I Yankee Doodle, here?"). It was only passing the gates of the hospital that made it give up. Even then, it prowled around near the entrance for a while.
A cheap hotel (another Ibis) with doors that go ka-chunk throughout the night, rushing water in the walls whenever someone flushes a toilet, and acoustics like a state-of-the-art concert hall. There's a family on the floor who seems to be raising their children entirely in hallways. Sad, because hallway children grow up with all kinds of problems, like difficulty dealing with the breadth dimension and a conditioned fear of having shoes thrown at them.
______
This Guislain Museum is in an old (but operating) psychiatric hospital with exhibits split across two floors on opposite sides of a red-brick courtyard; you follow Flemish signs you don't understand, hoping not to walk into a ward. There's an unsparing museum about the history of psychiatry, which is not a nice history (highlights: a cage-bed, bath restraints for hydrotherapy, shackles, rooms of devices like Dalek prototypes, an old ECT machine called the Psychotron II) and a lot of art galleries where artists have been invited to explore to concept of anxiety. Student filmmakers, too, had a go, and pretty much all came up with black and white films with lots of juddery camera work and off-camera dialogue.
The plan for this part of Belgium had been to go an see some WWI battlefields, but these are very hard to get to without a car; and the tour I tried to take turned out, when I stupidly contacted them only a couple of weeks in advance, to be full. So I left it, thinking I'd see if I felt energetic enough on the day for a bike rental or a painful public transit trip, and, well, ha ha.
