#made conceptualization go on a walk with me and also made it eat a muffin :) new dad unlockedJGKDKFGK

[euclydya]

becoming the next Maggie* the way I'm forcing everyone in our system into my found family

[artmutt]

Amsterdam, Part 1

Our flight into Amsterdam’s Schiphol Airport arrived just before dawn, resulting in a beautiful sunrise at the airport. Then we jumped in a taxi into the city, and ended up at our hotel before 8 a.m. It was much too early to check in, so I shifted some things from my day bag to my suitcase, and vice versa, and we went out to explore the city.

It was still very early, and we were groggy from the flight, Our hotel was about a block away from the Rijksmuseum, and the Museumplein (a big open area near the major museums) was quiet and beautiful, with nobody around, except a couple of food vendors getting ready for the day’s activities. After a nice stroll through the area, we decided we desperately needed a real breakfast, and lots of very strong coffee.

Luckily, we found Blushing, an adorable little cafe just off the Museumplein, where they were serving really terrific food and a variety of coffee beverages. Europe has adapted to the new food sensitivities that people have these days, so that even in a country as obsessed with cheese and milk products as the Netherlands, we were able to get coffee with almond and soy milk. Blushing’s version of Eggs Benedict was made with smoked salmon instead of Canadian bacon, and eliminated the Hollandaise sauce, and replaced the English muffin with spelt bread. So no dairy for my lactose-intolerant partner, and no gluten for yours truly: perfect. The walls were adorned with celebrity photos (all drinking coffee, of course), and it’s hard to argue with the sentiment that “A yawn is a silent scream for coffee.”

There are three major museums in the area. Besides the Rijksmuseum, there is the Van Gogh Museum, and we had pre-bought tickets for that on Sunday morning. The third is the Stedelijk Museum, which is the museum of modern art in Amsterdam. That was where we headed, after we were sufficiently caffeinated to actually focus our eyes.

The Stedelijk originally began in an older building, repurposed as a museum, but some years back, they added a new wing to the building, fondly referred to as “the bathtub” by locals because, well, that’s what it looks like. I’ve seen a couple of amazing shows at the museum, which has strong holdings of early Modern art by artists like Kasimir Malevich, and Piet Mondrian. At the moment, because of some remodeling going on (this becomes a motif for the visit), most of the permanent collection is kind of jammed willy-nilly into a crowded space. It does keep important work available, but this jammed presentation doesn’t encourage prolonged or contemplative looking.

Luckily, the current temporary exhibit of work by the Atlas Group, which is to say Lebanese artist Walid Raad, was well worth seeing, and it was given the kind of space needed for careful contemplation. It’s also very diverse work, politically vibrant and conceptually engaged. There were multiple rooms, each with very very different work, ranging from photography to painting to large-scale sculpture. A full-blown consideration of such thematically and technically diverse work would require an extended essay, so I’ll provide three photos, and let you go looking for better discourse on the Stedelijk website. I’ll just say that the exhibit, which spread across seven rooms, included “Sweet Talk,” one of the most stunning video pieces I’ve seen in a long time, in which buildings being demolished (basically imploded), through the use of mirroring, reversals, and loops, became a huge kaleidoscopic abstraction that was both horrific and beautiful at the same time. We sat and stared at this for a very long time because it was completely mesmerizing. While sitting we also had time to contemplate the myth of “progress,” the double-talk that delays any serious effort toward peace in the Middle East, and the whole conflicted notion of what “Modernism” is.

Of course, I can say that now. At the time, the jet lag was really kicking in, and I was rapidly heading toward incoherence. I had planned to have lunch at the Stedelijk’s cafe, only to find it was closed for renovation (like I said, a motif). So we fled to the nearby Keyser Brasserie, where I made the mistake of ordering a couple of Dutch classics, only to discover that neither of them were really what I wanted to eat at that moment.

I had also failed to pack any good walking shoes, and after walking around on cobblestoned streets in my dress shoes, my feet were screaming. So we popped into a shoe store, and I picked up some black high-topped leather sneakers, which totally saved me for the rest of the trip. A bit pricey, sure, but no more pricey than if I’d bought the same thing at Nordstrom in Chicago. And besides, we all need a good souvenir of any trip.

We went for an afternoon stroll through the Vondelpark, one of several large city parks. It was a lovely fall afternoon, and there were a lot of people out and about. My partner was expecting a lot of drugs, and there was certainly the occasional note of marijuana in the air, but for the most part it was a very civilized location, with lots of college-age kids on bikes or roller skates or scooters, and a lot of families with strollers or toddlers in tow. In point of fact, my partner saw less drug-use now than he had seen in the 1970s, before marijuana was legal. Just goes to show...

The neighborhood near our hotel turned out to be one of the fancier shopping areas in the city. This is where all the high-end clothing stores had their outlet stores. This turned out to be a very good thing, because there was very little else in the area besides high-end retail, so during the day the area was buzzing with wealthy shoppers and dropped-jaw tourists (the prices were pretty intense), but once these places closed, the streets were empty, so the neighborhood was very quiet in the late evenings. if we’d been in an area filled with bars or clubs, (like the area just across the canal from us), things would have been hopping until 2 a.m. or later.

My favorite among these places was the Hermés shop. Yes, I’m a fan of their stuff: I wear their cologne, and for many years had a treasured orange scarf from there that I wore until it fell apart. I also recognize how insanely overpriced their merchandise is. But they do have a certain je ne sais qua that I admire. Their Amsterdam outlet is constructed out of glass bricks, consequently, at night, it is illuminated from the inside, and presents a glowing presence on the street that makes all the other buildings look boring.

After a meal of Indonesian food (that merits a separate post), we got to bed early, and more or less collapsed until morning.