My Words Trickle Down

O hai LJ. Sorry I've been away so long. I've even failed in my stated intention to mirror the things I post up on mhuzzell.wordpress.com. I'll catch up on that at some point soon (though I'll probably back-date them, so I don't know whether that would put them in your feeds or not).

In the meantime, here's a half-formed set of musings about a film I watched a month ago, pulled from the clutter of half-formed writings that are currently languishing all over my desktop:

( I have finally (finally!) watched 'Mononoke Hime', and I have a lot of Thoughts and Feelings about it )

After an overnight drive down from chilly Massachusetts, I am back in North Carolina for a week, and oh my goodness it is lovely. Not just because the weather right now is comparable to a warm summer day in Scotland, but to be back among the trees at what must be their most beautiful time of year. I've written at (possibly excessive) length, in the past, about how much I miss being around trees all the time. It's hard to describe most of the time, but with their added aspect of seasonal beauty, it suddenly seems easier.

Autumn trees are lovely everywhere you go, of course, but in many places they're a view you come upon exceptionally: pretty little stands of trees on suburban lanes and in city parks and gardens. The UK countryside is stripped almost bare. Here, though, you can look in any direction, anywhere you go, and unless you are looking at some particular human edifice, or the ocean, you will be met by a stunningly beautiful array of orange, yellow, and dark red leaves, picked out by the dark green of loblolly pines and the light green of deciduous leaves that have not yet turned. Everywhere you look. Even in the awful awful suburbs, most of the time.

Even in the awful awful suburbs, though, there are little forest parks. The city of Raleigh has exterminated nearly all of its woodlands, but on the grounds of its newly remodeled art museum, it has put down trails and interspersed art installations among some of its remaining trees. My dad and brother and I went and walked around them yesterday. It was very pretty, although most of the installations were unremarkable -- with two exceptions. In one, the artist had painted designs inspired by European floral patterns (as usually seen in cloth) onto the pavement of the paths, and according to the sign, beneath the final obscuring coat of paint they'd written out the names of all the invasive species of plants now local to the area.

The other was more remarkable, if somewhat less thought-provoking. Named the "Cloud Chamber", it was a low hut set under a fairly open stand of trees, small and round, with nothing inside except three benches set against the white-painted walls. We entered by ducking through a small door, and upon closing it found ourselves in what seemed like total darkness, but for a pinprick of light coming in from the peak of the roof. As our eyes adjusted, though, we began to see the shadowy impressions of leaves and branches on the walls, which brightened and sharpened as our pupils dilated further. They were the branches high above, refracted down through the tiny hole like the exposure in a pinhole camera. It was, to put it simply, really, really cool.

We had not intended to go into the museum itself, but ended up going in briefly, towards the end of our visit. I hadn't been in since it was remodelled, and it was weird to see the collections of paintings and statues I'd grown up visiting and was so accustomed to seeing in their older, more traditional settings set around the new, very modern, brightly lit, open-plan museum. I was also interested to see a new collection they'd added (a "generous donation from the Hearst family"), which consisted of several artifacts of various antiquity from western and central Africa -- interested not just in the objects themselves, but in how they were displayed.

It seems customary for most American and European museums, when displaying items whose specific origin is unkown, to merely list the geographic and temporal origins of the piece. These provided this information, but on every single piece, using the same format as the info cards accompanying the modern paintings and sculptures, in the space for the artist's name they'd written 'Artist Unknown'. Explicitly displaying each piece, then, not as a cultural artifact but as a piece of art, the work of an individual, albeit an uknown one.

I was reflecting happily on this* when I turned the corner to find a display of the museum's older collection of ancient Greek and Roman statues, and saw that they had not been similarly labelled -- their info cards merely stated the name of the statue and what was known of its geographic and temporal origins. This is, of course, quite usual, as mentioned, but in a museum that was making such and effort to mark out the forgotten artists in its other collections, the double standard was jarring. Is it simply that "everyone knows" that a marble statue will have been sculpted by an artist, and thus the fact of the artist's existence, and our ignorance of their identity, need not be mentioned -- yet the artists themselves are a forgotten element in the shaping of the captured artworks we've looted from the places we've conquered? Probably so. But I can't help but think the point would've been driven further home by including the 'artist unknown' label on the pieces of murky European antiquity, and not just African.

* Though with qualifying thoughts about the veneration of 'the artist' and concepts about "what makes art art". 'Art' as 'item produced by an artist' (as opposed to, e.g., and artisan or lay person), for example. But that is another story.

I'm going to Copenhagen. I'm in London already, actually, stopped over at a friend's house en route, with another two-day stop planned in Amsterdam.

...And already, it is not turning out quite like I'd planned. My friend had to leave town at the last minute and hasn't actually been here to visit with, and plans for Amsterdam are starting to fall apart. So maybe it's a good thing I'm going in with low expectations for the climate conference/convergence itself?

Actually, reading up about the activist convergence that's planned, that is looking pretty damn awesome. Lots of really sound anarchist orgs have thrown themselves in to make the convergence pleasant and possible, with People's Kitchens and free sleeping spaces and that kind of thing. It's just the actions I don't have a lot of optimism about (nor, of course, the Conference itself).

I read a pamphlet recently decrying the emotion of 'hope', saying that the author had 'no hope' for environmentalism, and yet it was his very lack of hope that gave him the impetus and the strength to keep fighting as hard as he does. Hope, he said, is a passive and helpless emotion; like the offering of prayers to a god that doesn't exist or doesn't care, it is an abnegation of responsibility for action; it is passing the buck. In my own life, I have a superstitious injunction to myself to never look forward to anything, because with expectation there can only be disappointment. On both counts, then, I don't think that my lack of optimism for the conference(s) is merely cynicism. I am still going, after all. I will still lend a hand for The Cause; I'll still do what I can, when and where I can. I am just so very, very tired.

I'm in Brugge, on a congratulations-on-graduating holiday with my mother (who also just graduated, finished her MBA), and my little brother. Enjoying the hell out of the weather. There's been a heat wave all across Europe, which in Scotland translates to t-shirt weather (mostly) during the days, and not-so-chilly-as-usual at night. But here in Belgium, it's actually properly hot, and I don't even need a coat at night! I have been trying to buy a pair of sandals; I've lived so long in the cold that I don't even own any anymore. Still haven't acquired them though, since as usual I fail at shopping.

I'm loving the sights as well. The medieval architecture, yes, and the canals, but also the cultural elements. I have seen several fantastic beards and moustaches, so many that I am wondering if there is some sort of convention happening. We took a touristy boat ride, and the French tourist across from us in the boat had an excellent handlebar moustache, and, as though to emphasise it, wore a shirt featuring a silhouetted longhorn steer. Yesterday we passed a sex shop on the high street, and then a few doors down saw an apparently unrelated chocolate shop whose window display featured three sets of life-sized chocolate breasts.

At the Groeninge Museum, they had a special exhibition about Charles the Bold and the 15th-Century Burgundian court, where I marvelled at the ideology in the information plaques as much as at the displays and artifacts themselves. The descriptions of the extravagant clothes and jewelry were almost more anthropological than historical, describing how the nobles used extravagant displays of wealth to 'legitimise' their power. Most of the descriptions were subtly critical of the legitimacy of monarchal rule in principle, though I'm not sure I could explain precisely how. In a way it seems like that's what one should expect from any modern display of late medieval artifacts, but most that I've seen have simply celebrated the splendour.

The whole thing reminded me of a D&D campaign I've been playing lately, in which the DM is a medieval history scholar and has set our party in Eastern Europe in the same period. We are a party of nobles, and our character alignments ranged from Neutral to Lawful Good (I am playing a Paladin) -- but the whole campaign has emphasised that the life of the nobility is inherently characterised by evil acts. Our characters have been sent out on campaigns to sack towns (on Christmas Eve!) and murder whole monasteries, and thus have grown steadily more Evil until we were railroaded into becoming vampires. In our splendid clothes and shining armour. Oh yes.

Okay okay okay. I'll tell you all about it. Really, now. I've even got my wee diary full of notes, lest the events slip from my mind before I recount them. Happy now? Here goes:

On the night of 23 January, 2008, Kalea and I took the overnight National Express bus down to London. We'd both done our fair share of overnight MegaBusses, so we were positively delighted by the level of comfort in the National Express bus. The seats were a good four or five times the size of the MegaBus seats, and there were footrests and even armrests between the seats! Yeah, we started off pretty damn positive.

We met Harry at the bus station, then headed out to Seven Sisters, where we spent the morning with Jesse, breakfasting over coffee and conversation both earthily heady and high-mindedly abstract. I may have had a bit too little sleep on the bus--on all of the busses, actually--and spent the majority of the trip in a deep state of contemplation. Be warned.

Kalea and Harry and I took the tube back into central London for the afternoon, laughing at the adverts (Inseminar: a seminar for women considering artificial insemination--and advertised by the worlds ugliest babies!). We went to Tate Britain, where Harry made earnest and endearingly nerdy complaints about the Turner exhibit. We walked along the Thames, where Kalea saw a postcard happen, a double decker bus crossing in front of Big Ben in the bright sunlight. And we wandered along, generally enjoying the sunlight and the river, lamenting its imminent rise and consumtion of the city. Kalea and I bought our Eurolines passes and booked our first trip: Amsterdam.

Jesse has some friends there whom she said we could stay with, so in the morning, off we went. And we did, and it was amazing. I mean, really. We were staying at Pretoriusstraat 28, a long-standing squatted flat and, in its downstairs capacity as a café/bar, a community centre. The people there were nice, and cool, and we came away friends, but what was astounding to me was the whole culture of it. It was amazing to be in a place where you could have Anarchy in the open. Where through sheer numbers, and a few legal loopholes, the 'counterculture' can actually overwhelm the police. Where there are, maybe, more anarchists than cops.

Squatting, for instance, is as dubiously legal there as anywhere else. But unlike elsewhere, where it is done in at least nominal secrecy, in Amsterdam there is a proud tradition of squatting out in the open. On Sunday we joined some of the squatters for a 'squatting action'. A group of about 25 crusty-looking activists--apparently a dissapointingly small turnout!--gathered in a squat bar. The organisers described the legal ownership situation of the house to be squatted, emphasising that it had been empty for over a year. They seemed to know a lot about it, though our friend who'd brought us seemed unimpressed by their level of organisation. Then we all walked out to the house, along with the family who were set to move into it--complete with their two little kids and even their dog.

We milled around in front of the door while a couple of people broke the lock. They left as soon as they'd finished, high-fiving each other as they sauntered away from the scene. A few people went inside to make sure there was no 'stuff' left from the owner, while the rest of us kept up our clump in front of the door. Someone rolled a joint, and out of politeness went across the street to smoke it. About then the cops rolled up: two cars, a motorcycle, and a van lurking off in the background. The squatters formed into a solid block in front of the door, all facing the street. My Anglo-American nerves and sensibilities were all a-tingle, but actually there was almost no tension in the air; the dog was the only one who seemed stressed at all. The activists laughed and joked at the cops, comparing their common red politics (the Amsterdam police were preparing to strike over pay). When the group indoors gave word for it, the activists parted to allow two cops inside the house. Apparently this was not a legal requirement, but something that's always done so that the cops can write in their reports that they saw the house and saw that it was, in fact, empty when it was squatted. There was a lot of cooperation between the cops and squatters, which I suppose must be necessary if it's all to be done so openly.

After the cops left, the activists trickled away. We went with a small group to another squat café, which had been inhabited for so long that it had gained legal status. This was pretty much the exciting part of our trip to Amsterdam. We also went to an action where people had climbed up in some urban trees to stop them being knocked down, but the rest was spent just hanging around people, in the flat or in squat bars. Y'know, just chillin'. One day Kalea and I wandered around the city centre, and on another day I biked out on my own while she and Jan went on some sort of geeky musical odyssey, but with the exception of a few photographs we didn't really tourist it up.

Rome was another story. On our first day we went to the Vatican. The Vatican museum was incredible, amazing, beautiful. I was awed by the floors, the walls, the ceilings, all painted and gilded with too much for the eye to even take in. Kalea was impressed by the acoustics of the space, and hummed Hildegaard von Bingen compositions quietly as we walked along the corridors. There were globes in there that showed the night sky, as viewed from the outside. That is, the entire sky projected down onto a globe, not mapped out as you might normally see now-a-days, so that moving left to right you saw Gemini-Taurus-Orion, not Orion-Taurus-Gemini as you'd see in the real night sky. The ceiling of the Sistine chapel turned out not to be as impressive as everyone says it is, but the walls were amazing. They were painted and then overlaid with gold so that it looked like gold curtains stood rippling around the whole room.

We also toured St Peter's Basilica and the tombs of the popes. It was a bit strange, as irreligious as I've become, to be reminded of the fervour with which religion grips some people. We passed several people on their knees in prayer at various saint crevices. Before the tomb of John Paul II, a group of nuns and children were gathered and staring reverently. Beside them, in front of a display devoted to the Virgin Mary, a middle-aged man in an athletic jacket was kneeling upright, hands clasped in prayer, bug-eyed and quivering in his intensity. I found it strangely disquieting.

The next day we saw the Colisseum (from the outside--it cost eleven frickin' euros to go inside; everything between there and the main train station was exploitatively expensive), and the free parts of the vast complex of ruins around the Colisseum. We went into the Capitoline Museums and oohed and ahhed at the statues. There was a lot to see, but not much to tell, really. In my head I had a running monologue about Ancient Rome and the roots of 'modern civilisation', the ennabling of current political ideas, the roots of the nation-state, the mythology of democracy, and all that jazz, but it wasn't anything like coherent enough to post here.

Throughout the trip, but mostly in Rome, we were taking silly tourist photos of a little plush duck we'd found on the street in Amsterdam. It looked exactly like our friend Niko's travelling duck, Sir Koko, only much smaller and with a little bow on its neck, so we took it in. I cleaned it up, sewed its tears and washed it as best I could, and Kalea named it Kokette in honour of Sir Koko.

The day after the Colisseum, Kalea, Kokette and I had had enough of Rome, so we hopped the bus for Barcelona. Barcelona was amazing and beautiful, sunny and clean, like a breath of fresh air after Rome (and those 24 hours on the bus!) Rome was covered in graffiti, which was kind of cool (the metro trains were postively artful!), but the whole place was also kind of...grimy. Everywhere. Barcelona was an incredible contrast, with broad, gleaming streets and shining clean buildings. We spent our first afternoon wandering around, following our feet. I managed to negotiate the purchase of sandwiches, coffee, and even a ball of wool in Spanish, which pleased me since I'm generally not very confident. That night we met Kalea's friend Anna and went out for dinner and drinks with her in the Gothic district, a labyrinth of winding alleyways and really cool cafés, bars and shops, all open until quite late at night.

We spent the next night at Anna's, and the next day went to museums. Kalea went to the Picasso museum, and on a very stupid whim (not having time to see both), I went to a Dalí exhibit instead. It turned out to be interesting, but quite small. The Picasso museum, by contrast, was apparently excellent. Oh, well. All it means is that I have a good excuse to go back to Barcelona. And that's not the only reason. I left on Wednesday for home, but Kalea met up with our friend Jan from Amsterdam and spent the next few days in Can Masdeu, a squatted villa just outside the city with extensive permaculture gardens. I only got a quick tour and meet & greet before having to leave to catch my bus.

Then back to London, another brief visit with Jesse, and back to Edinburgh, thence to St Andrews. A pleasant enough journey, just long. I think I picked up a cold on the bus, though, which I've been in denial about ever since. Meanwhile, it's taken root and grown steadily worse, which is why I've taken so long to get this posted. Sorry for the delay. I have man-flu (which is apparently what it's called if you complain about your cold. Especially if you compare your sinuses to plumbing.)

Friends, Comrades. Another year gone. Another year, another year, another year, spinning on and on in the constant, subtle decay of the Earth's orbit, slowly slowly dwindling out on a scale so huge that to any being on its surface it seems infinite.

In this cosmological spirit I decided--around the time of the Autumnal Equinox, when I was buying my tickets home for the end of this year--that I ought to stay in Scotland for the Winter Solstice. My friend was planning a party, and I haven't properly celebrated a solstice in years. So I came to be in that frozen darkness, admiring the frost-sparkling ground and the intoxicated, sparkling company. Left at 7 am with a sleepy Daniel, and (at 8:46) finished watching the sun rise in magnificent, magnanimous red splendour from the window of the train, rushing off to Edinburgh to fly into those pinkening clouds.

Where, after wheeling through the new-morning-wet, Sunday-empty little grey city, trying and failing to find an open cafe and feeling a bit ridiculous dragging a floppy, wheeled duffel bag, florid inner monologue turned to panicked terror upon reading the departures screen: BD57 to Heathrow, Cancelled. A heavy Scrooge of a fog had settled over the city of London, and planes were having trouble landing; all flights either delayed or cancelled.

( How I got home. Cut for length and frustration. )

My one solace throughout all of this was my book, read openly in the hours-long queues and endless waiting in terminals: The Monkey Wrench Gang, a novel by rockstar-mountain-man eco-Anarchist Edward Abbey about a small troupe of dynamite jockeys harrying industrial "progress" in the American Southwest. I took great comfort, through all the indignity of the airport, the bag searches, the stroking and groping of the Female Security Officer, the shouting and shoving and the disorderly queues, that somewhere, somewhere out there, there might be (there are) people, flesh-and-blood-and-heart people, fighting the good fight, clawing the machine for all they're worth, getting in under the skin of the great complex organism of industry.

I thought about this a lot, because when you're alone for that long, surrounded by strangers, you have a lot of time to think. I thought about beaurocracy, and the breakdown of The System. (The trouble with Heathrow is mostly that it's poorly organised, but also that it's simply too damn big. And they want to expand that monstrosity?) Watching men and boys die at Branagh's Agincourt, I thought about war and technology and futility, the skewed priorities of men, that fierce loyalty which is so admirable and yet so damning; those poor noble fools. 'The Shawshank Redemption'? I thought about Anarchy. That great Ideal. But how are we ever to get there? I've always thought it was one of those things that people could handle just fine if they were raised in it--never bought those bullshit 'human nature' arguments claiming it's impossible--but, of course, we're not raised in it. We are born, we live, we die in the prison of the state. We are all 'institutionalised men'. And if we get out, what then? Will we die like Brooks, despairing and alone, in a brutal world of all against all, or will we gang together, supportive, and feel "the excitement only a free man can feel, a free man at the start of a long journey whose conclusion is uncertain"?

Roll on, 2008.

...is chalked onto various surfaces around St Andrews right now. Presumably by someone who lives in the same part of town as me, since it's on Queen's Gardens, Louden's Close and Lade Braes, as well as in the centre of town. I find it oddly heartwarming.

It's the second time in three days that inanimate surfaces have claimed to love me. The other was in the toilets at the Forest cafe in Edinburgh, where the floor and walls express this sentiment alongside the request that they not be defaced with graffiti or urine. I love the toilets there. They are unisex, but unlike most unisex toilets, which are simply single rooms with everything in them, this is just like a normal women's room, with two stalls and a common sink area. The Forest in general is wonderful. A colourful little bohemian paradise in the middle of a big grey city. Okay, so it's hardly grey during the Festivals, but you know what I mean. It's alternative, man. I dig that.

I just got back from Edinburgh yesterday, having spent a sadly short few days in Adam's flat bohemian shelter for vagrant students. Saw some great stuff at the Fringe, but as I have two essays to do before 1 September, and an exam on the 4th, I shall have to wait until after then to describe them.

Speaking of which, I think I may need to ban myself from recreational internet for a while. So if you see me online before the 4th, please tell me to get the fuck back to work.

Later, dudes. Standing by.

I left the house at 6 am Thursday morning. I got back to St Andrews at noon on Friday. 26 straight hours of travelling.

It actually wasn't as bad as it could've been. I had 11 hours between flights in Newark, so I managed to find a bus that would take me into Manhattan. But Manhattan itself was a bit disappointing. I tried to see the Museum of Modern Art, but it charged like $14 for admission. The Museum of Design and Architecture, across the street, advertised a main exhibit on "Subversive Knitting and Radical Lace" (or something to that effect), but they, too, had prohibitively high admission charges. So mostly I just wandered around. I was dissappointed, at first, at the lack of street musicians and such, but I realised later that it was probably because I was there so early in the morning. I did see some awesome breakdancer/acrobat/clownish-basketball-types before I left, though.

The upshot of all this is that in 26 hours, I slept about 4, most in fragments and none of them consecutive. I usually sleep okay on planes, but the movie they showed (The Pursuit of Happyness) was actually worth watching, and the woman sitting beside me was really annoying. Her voice and mannerisms forcibly reminded me of Bruce Willis' girlfriend in Pulp Fiction. When I got back I intended to pack up my room then go out in the evening. Perhaps because I was already so tired (but more likely because I spent so much time goofing around online), packing my room took until 2 am. But instead of going to sleep, I went to a bonfire. Didn't leave until 7:30 am, so I just went to breakfast in the morning. By the time I went to bed that evening, I hadn't slept for more than an hour or so at a time in 60 hours. No wonder I slept until 3:30 pm yesterday. But then I couldn't sleep last night, was up until 4 am, and slept until nearly 1 pm today. Which is not really helpful when trying to find a job.

Nor is the fact that I still have a shroud of lethargy around me. I feel like I'm underwater. Everything takes twice as long as it seems like it should. I need to snap out of this, and soon. I just realised this entry is really boring. My apologies to those of you who read it.

Rob has given me a challenge.

We went to Beatles City this morning. Saw the Tate Modern and other stuff. Rob wanted to go on a Mersey Ferry because he is a boy. 'And wanted to sing the song', he adds.

Tate Modern was very nice. It had lots of cool art inside. The upstairs was shut; culture doesn't open until the 30th. But the main bits were open. There was a section on artists fom around the world, and the other focused only on the city.

The first section was mostly paintings and weird sculptures made of bits of metal and other stuff. They had a Matisse! Well, three really, but only two were paintings. I love his nudes. They also had one of a pensive woman by the Spanish Pablo whom I also like a lot (but only sometimes)--but this one was very nice. A painting of lots of legs was good, and little drawings of people fucking trees. Two jars in a sunny corner have stuck in my mind, but are hard to describe.

The second section was mostly photos and paintings. They showed the city in varied lights and eras, from poor slums to boho culture. I liked the photos a lot. They ranged from sad to funny to those that simply made you think. There were also a few films, but these were just weird and kind of hard to grasp. The paintings were mostly just kind of dull, but one of them was quite clever and made me laugh. It was just a series of signboards painted into a little story, of how the person was an art teacher who lived seven doors down from where John Lennon used to live, and got fed up with all of the writing on walls saying how much people loved John Lennon. So the person wrote on the wall that Lennon was a wanker, and as they did so a cop drove by and asked if they weren't a bit old for that sort of thing.

So the Tate Modern is pretty cool. It's full of nice art, fun art, sad art, weird art, crap you suspect shouldn't really be called art, pretty art, ugly art, and art that makes you think (as all good art should).

What is it this year? The relatively warm weather all over the US East Coast? The less clement weather elsewhere that's clogging airports and keeping people away from their families? Too few carols on the radio and showings of "It's a Wonderful Life" on television?

Everyone I've talked to about it (and some I haven't) has said that they're "having trouble getting into the Christmas Spirit this year". I am definitely among them. Christmas lost it's 'magic' for me a good few years ago, but at least in previous years I've managed to muster some level of excitement for the holiday, but this year... nothing. It just seems like one big hassle.

I don't know. Maybe it's just that I'm still in a bad mood after an absolutely HELLISH 16-hour car journey down from Massachusetts to North Carolina with my mum, aunt, sister, brother and cousin, in a car overfilled past the gills with stuff, such that everyone had crap surrounding them, on their laps and at their feet--an uncomfortable situation exacerbated by the ridiculously obnoxious antics of my brother and cousin.

Or maybe it's that the last few Christmases have been so dissapointing in one way or another that this year I'm just not getting my hopes up.

My one bittersweet consolation is that the car ride down was SO bad that I decided it was worth the money to buy a plane ticket back up, allowing me to spend New Year's in the mountains with my friends, as I'd wanted to originally.