I've been meaning to put something up for a week or two now. Let's see.
I went to the "soirée rheto," a danse put on by the last-year students at my school to raise money for the trip to Hungary in May. I went. It was okay. I was there early, thinking to jelp set up, but there wasn't really much to do. This means, however, that I got to see how the night got rolling. The French term for a nightclub is "boite de nuit," litterally a "nightbox" (of even more litterally still, a "box of night," but that would be a bad translation). I should have taken pictures, but I didn't think to bring my camera. The place wasn't terribly big, it was a small room with a stage on one end. There was a DJ with his mixing tables and speakers up on the stage, they put a big light setup in the middle of the floor, and there were two raised platforms on the floor. There was a definate filling pattern in the club; it filled from te outside in. That is to say, people started hanging out towards the edges of the room, and as more and more people showed up, peopel pushed to the center. As the night rolled on, people got more and more joyous, both from alcohol and the atmoshpere in general. I got to really seeing why it's called a "box" in French. It ended up really having the feeling of being a box, with all the people crammed in it, it's like JRR Tolkein wrote when Bilbo said that there were a 'gross;' and I paraphrase: "'One gross, if I may permit myself to say.' Of course, he wasn't permitted, and instantly everyone felt like parcels in a package, and that they were there only to fill up spaces until that number 144 was reached." The difference is that the geusts at Bilbo's long-expected party felt offended at that idea when they were acctually very confortable in a spacious outdoor setting, and everybody here felt great when they actually were all packed in like parcels in a package, crammed into a flat rate box iin order to shave some bucks off of the shipping cost. I don't really know what to make of this setting. The lights are all dimmed, you've got the randomly flashing stage lights, people are drinking, people are lurching around the floor kind of to the rhythm of the music, which is blasting and not very good. All the four hours I was there, the music was an endless medly of techno and techno remixes of songs on the radio; all "THDN. THDN. THDN. THDN." type stuff, just that pounding beat that's meant to be felt, not heard. I don't like that. A few things kept going through my mind. One was that I would really like to hear some Disco. I don't care, put on YMCA, or even the Hustle, Disco Duck, whatever, but I wanted something other than "THDN. THDN. THDN. THDN." and Disco was it. Of course, HEatwave is the best Disco out there, but I would have taken whatever at that point. Another thing that kept running through my head was clips of Miyazaki films, especially "Kiki's Delivery Service." I think I know why; almost all of Miyazaki's films have at least one flying sequence in them, and I really felt like flying then. I was in a cramped, hot, smoky, dim room, and I kept thinking about Kiki soaring over the woods on her broomstick, or the opening credits sequence which cleverly has Jiji turning on the radio to cue the credits' music, and I think it was more or less a reaction to mild claustrophobia. The vast expanses and cool, fresh night air that Kiki experienced were something that I was rather lacking. But mostly, I got the impression that it was just a social orgy. Everybody was there, and I dunno. It was weird. It's like everybody is trying have social intercourse with everybody else at the same time. I found it, as you can probably tell, a bit distasteful. It's the idea, I think, that you're just supposed to go nuts, to obliterate realite in the pressence of everybody else, the alcohol, and the music that's loud enough to drown out your thoughts. I can understand the "escapist partying" mentality that the aforementioned Heatwave wrote a lot of songs about better now. It's kind of like a person goes in every direction at the same time during one of these things, he or she just lets go of the control he or she usually exerts on him or herself and "lets loose." I find this idea vaguely distasteful. It's just that I like to relax by focusing myself very intensely on something, by really trying for something. Usually, it's a video game, or a game of some sort. I LOVE competition. I don't care so much if I win or not, but it's that sense of fighting, of competing, that I adore. That's kind of the opposite of what people do at this type of "soirée." They kind of explode, go nuts, loose themselves in the crowd and the music. I prefer to focus in on something and channel my forces into that thing. all the same, I can understand that it's kind of the same thing in that, in the end, it's an obliteration of reality. I replace reality with a competition that's almost certainly 100% artificial, a game in which those competing have absolutely no reason to be fighting one another, and whose outcome changes nothing. It's just a bit of an unreal reality that those participating in choose to believe in in order to block out the boredom of the real world. The people at the soirée obliterated reality by ceasing to care, by letting themselves get carried away by the mass of humanity surrounding them and by all jumping around to the same thought-impeding music in a ritual of institutionalized communalism. Nevertheless, I like what I do better, because I think you can actualyl learn things from games, even video games, and that games are helpful for patterning your brain to think instead of just drifting through creation. So I stayed at the soirée for about four hours, and then I left. I'm glad to have gone because it gave me a glimpse at something I was not familiar with, but I'm also glad I didn't have to spend an aditional four hours there, which was acutally my original plan. Transportation aranged itself so that I was able to go home a bit earlier, and I am glad for that. It was staring to wear a bit. I want to further stipulate that, while my tone was admittedly a bit hostile, I hold nothing against the practice of soirées and partying, I myself would just rather do something else. I know that there are perfectly reasonable people who enjoy such events, and so much the better for them. I just can't figure it out.
Also, there was another school event, the Carnaval (intentionally using French spelling). It's like the Ralley (whose theme was the US before and during the War Between the States? Remember that?) that happened earlier in the year, but less rigorous. There were fewer things to prepare adn less total preparation time. The theme for this year's Carnaval was "the Circus and Magic." The costumes are the truly important thing here. Each team had to have at least one acrobat, contortionist, ringmaster, juggler, animal tamer, and five exotic animals. I was the lion. IT was the first time I'd had my hair gelled and the first time I got made up. The kid who did my makeup told in the middle of doing it that it was the first time he'd ever done makeup. That wasn't too reassuring. Nevertheless, he did a good job. All in all, I didn't really like either the sensation of getting made up or having my hair gelled. It was kind of wierd to have all these people (there was one on my hair, one on my face) close up to me and touching my face while I lay there with my eyes closed. It was just a bit unconfortable, especially with the make-up kid saying stuff like' "Huh!" and "well now..." and "Uh...that'll do." As for the hair, that's easy. The thing is, I have a good bit of hair right now. Really, a fair bit. And I really like it when I shake my head and I fell all my hair fly around it. When it's gelled, my hair doesn't flop around like that, and it feels really wrong. It's just like, "No...wait...Something's wrong...Oh...Dang..." You have to remember that I'm shaking my head all the time that I'm saying that. It's just that my hair is not supposed to do what it does when it's gelled. They want to be free! Each team had to put on a circus number, giving all costumed people stage time. So there had to be a juggling act, acrobatics, etc. One of the requirements was that it had to be performed with "circumstantial music," whic was indended to be recorded on a CD. My team played live music, trumpet and accordion. I transcribed adn arranged a bit of passing music from Super Mario RPG (it was the "slope" theme, for those interested) for Trumpet and Accordion, and we did a pretty decent job of it. WE didn't have as much time to work it up as we'd planned because the accordionist had a motor scooter accident and was briefly hospitalized, but he's fine. so we had a couple wrong notes, but we made it out alright. I got some compliments on my trumpet playing; one kid told me, "Kevin, you play the trumpet like a god!" Ha ha! Thanks, kid, but I know it's not true. One thing is that I'm used to high school productions with much higher production values. For Carnaval, the students are given instructions and preparation time, but basically nothing else. The result is that there are ten bad circus acts that I was getting kind of tired of seeing by the end of it. I couldn;t help but reflect on how Central would have put on a much better circus show jsut becaseu theater is more important there than here. And you know what? I like it better at Central! I like trying to do things right. It's impossible to do things right here with our ten-twelve hours total of preparation time and abscence of instruction. It's just a difference in priority. Still, I like the American priorities better. Fight to keep the performing arts in US schools! It's really great! Seriously! It's much better in the US with performing arts programs than it is here without them! Especially when they're as good as Central's Band or theater programs! Seriously! I miss the band. I miss Smash Bros. I miss it so much. I heard the first minute or two of "March of the Gladiators" about five hundred times, by the way. It was a popular selection for "circumstantial music." It's actually liek a real march, with a B-section and a trio, people just only ever hear the opening statement. Still, I don't think it would be bad for a band to actually play it. If I'm ever a band director, I'll keep it in mind. After the bad circus acts (my team was no exception), there was teh traditional Teacher's Play and Senior's Play. The secondary level comprises six different scholastic grades, which are subsequently divide into three categories; youngest, middle, and oldest. So, the Senior Play had both fifth- and sixth-year students in it. The Teacher's Play and the Senior Play are mutually derisive, in that they are the arenae in which the Teachers and the Seniors avenge themselves on one another. In the Senior Play, the students impersonate the Teachers and make fun of them, and in the Teacher's play, the Teachers make fun of the Senior Students. That was interesting to watch. I thought both of them were of fairly good quality. The students framed their play as a "Marchin Safari" (remember, Marchin is the name of my school), taking a good look at all the different species of student and teacher. They were able to hack some pretty convincing resemblances at times. The teachers framed their peice as a tour of the new educational facility that was really more like a resort. So, in taking a tour of the campus to introduce the new students, they were able to make fun of some people. One common complaint is that the Teacher's Play made more fun of the Teachers than the Students this year. The Students wanted to get in on the action, too.
At the Ralley, there was another soirée-type deal, except it ws in the Gym, up on the stage. This made it really easy to watch. I actually found it really interesting to sit and watch, I have no clue why. But there was this ridiculously loud music and a bunch of people white-jumping on the stage, and I actually found it somewhat intriguing. I can't say for the life of me why. It was interesting to listen to the music; there were a few numbers that were semi-remixed cuts of other things; I say "semi" remixed becaues they were really just segments of a particular song with Techno "THDN. THDN. THDN. THDN." in between. They did this with "Smells Like Teen Spirit" (though it was not Nirvana performing it) and something else, I forget what exactly. It was also interesting to see hte correlation between the music and the periods of more and less intense jumping. Given long enough, it would proabably be possible to figure out an algorythm t ofairly accurately estimate when the jumping would be most copius in a given tune. I was just waiting for people to jump with just the right rythm to make the stage resonate and collapse. I kind of wanted to see that. Didn't happen, though. Oh yeah, somebody brought a case or two (or five, I dunno) of beer to this school funciton, which is forbidden ('cause it's school), so they shut the place down early. Guess that's more or less universal.
A couple of trips are comming up very shortly! I look forward to reporting them to you! Until then, This is KSG, signing off for tonight. HEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEWACK~!
Barely squeaking another one in before the month's close. I have now to tell you about my gallivanting about Europe, first to Germany and then to the Netherlands. Well, here goes.
So my dad knows this German guy, Paul Moeller. A month or two ago, he told me, "Hey, you're right next to Germany, you should go visit Paul and Moni!" I said, "Yeah, sure, I have some vacation time in February, let's do it." And so it was done. I left for Germany the thirteenth, and returned the sixteenth, so that makes four days I spent in the care of the Moellers. I had a bit of trouble finding decent travel arrangements, but due largely to the considerable help of my host father Xavier, I was able to figure out how to get to Mannhiem, where Paul and Mino Moeller live, by train. I have discovered that I have a bit of an irrational fear of having gotten on the wrong train. Not a fear of getting on the wrong train, I'm fine; I look at the postings three of four times, I double-check it against what I have on my prrof-of-purchase printout, I'm all cool, but once the train actually starts moving, I get nervous that I, somehow, in spite of all my precautions, managed to make a mistake and get on teh wrong train. This has happened to me a few times, and becasue I was using the German rail service and not the Belgian rail service, that was another variable that helped to shake my confidence and make me nervous. It should be noted that, once I have used a train line at least once, my fear of having gotten on the wrong train is practically eliminated for that one particular line. But still, I find this a bit strange. So, anyways, after clearing the hurdle of getting to Mannhiem Hbf, there was the hurdle of meeting up with Paul, who was supposed to meet me near the main entrance/exit of the station. During my train ride (which was about six hours long, all told), I had the oppourtunity to realize that we hadn't agreed on any specific mechanism to make sure that we didn't miss each other at the station. Granted, Paul and I had previously met, but that was when the Moellers visited us in Champaign 12 or 13 years ago. I didn't remember what Paul looked like, and I simply no longer look like I did 12 or 13 years ago. Fortunately, we had some kind of ESP or something going on, and we managed to run into each other fairly easily. That was a big relief. So he told me, "Well, we don't have terribly much time, so do want to spend the rest of the day sightseeing, or did you have other plans?" I had absolutely no plans at all. Sightseeing sounded good to me. So he said, "Well, you'll want to go to Heidleberg, right? All the americans want to go to Heidleberg. If you don't go to Heidleberg, you'll be refused re-entry into the States." so we went to Heidleburg. The first thing we saw in the vicinity was an ancient templ/amphitheater, in which people had previously been live sacrifices. It nowadays serves as a theater for less grisly performances of the theatrical variety. There were some joggers there, running up and down the steps. The most important thing is that it was old, really old. That was cool. So then, on to Heidleberg. WE walked aroudn the town a bit, but the main attraction is the castle. There's a huge castle on a hill in Heidleberg. Paul said it wasn't built for military purposes, it was just built by the local regent to be impressive. It worked. The first time we got a good angle and Paul said, "look, there's the castle there," I was pretty well impressed. The thing was very impressive and imposing. A big castle, looming down from a hill, can do that to a body. We walked all the way up the hill and looked around it, and it was great. Alas, I realized on the train that I hadn't brought my camera with me, so I don't have any pictures of anything. Paul, on the other hand, took a lot of pictures with his cell phone. He was taking pictures all the time. I just don't have any of them. Sorry. So the castle was good. WE explored it for a little while, and then walked all the way back down, and then headed back to Mannhiem. This is wher eI saw Paul's wife, Moni, whom I've already mentioned a few times, for the first time since the aforementioned visit 12 or 13 years ago. The Moellers said that they hadn't used their English since that visit, but it was remarkably good nevertheless. Moni complained about how her English wan;t good and she struggled to find soem words a few times, but it was never really a problem. Noe, there wer etwo other Germans livign in the house; a woman whom I understand to have been a live-in maid of sorts, and Uncle Manfreid. These two spoke no English, so communication with them was more difficult. Anyway, Moni had a good time telling me about myself when she'd visited, and a good time was had by all. Moni's memory of the event was remarkably accurate; she remembered the fort out back, that they went to Hobby Lobby, and the rooms of the upstairs hallway in the correct order. I was impressed by that. Oh! And that first night there, I ate a balina, a German jelly donut, and what JFK erroneously claimed himself to be whin he, with his Boston accent, failed to correctly pronounce the word "Berliner." But that about wraps it up for Day 1. Day 2, things got interesting. Now, this was the week before Lent began, which is Carnaval, and includes Mardi Gras on Tuesday. Day 2 was Sunday, and the start of endless parades. Paul and I went to see a parade for about two hours by my estimation. Maybe it was only one. But, as Mannheim is close to the Rhin, there were many floats shaped like boats. The people on them threw lots of candy, which was consequently harvested by the crowd. I amassed a good two pocketfulls, which are still in my suitcase. From the parade, we proceeded to a museum. Paul had previously asked me what types of things I would be interested in, and "musuems" was one I mentioned. So we headed off to a musuem of Mannhiem. A large part of it was closed for renovation and will be open in two years, but that didn't stop us from having a lot to see. There was one room with a bunch of lighted boxes comparable only to exit signs, except with artists' names on them instead of "EXIT." If the box wasn't illuminated, that meant that the Museum didn't posses and work by that artist at that time. There were a few names in particular that cought my attention; namely, "Duchamp," "Piciaba," "Arp," and "Tzara," all of whom were Dadas. There was a lot of other good stuff there, too, but I took one look at those and said, "We've gotta find whatever they;ve got by Duchamp." So we wandered all around the open parts of the museum, and didn't find it. It must have been in the closed part. The open part was the "modern art" section, so I'm kind of surprised that they didn't have any Dada stuff, because Dada is like the origin of all art that is nowadays considered "modern." I don;t think they had anything from before 1950 or whereabouts in the section I saw, so it could be that it's just not "new" enough to make the grade. They had Pollock's name lit up, too, but I didn't see anything of his, either. weird. whatever. That's too bad, but ther ewas still lots of good stuff to see. I think my favortie peice of the day was one "Hullabaloo" by Ozlem Gunyol and Mustafa Kunt. It was a monolithic black pillar situated perhaps some fifteen feet from a bench on which the spectator was intended to sit. There was one large speaker in the monolith, and multitudes of smaller speakers. Upon the bench sat a small KORG electric keybord: pressing any key on the keybord started the performance. The speakers in the monolith played music; at first, it sounded perfectly normal, some classical or late baroque orchestral peice. Before too long, somethign started to sound off, and it just got more and more off the longer you listened to it. Eventually, it got back to "normal" and finished up. I later learned that those were all 200-some national anthems playing at the same time. Those guys had some similar ideas with a peice called "Ceaseless Doodle," which was the outlines of all national borders superimposed into a huge, tangled blob, and a peice that was every national flag silk-screened on top of each other, producing a black rectangle with some errant colors to the sides. There was this other guy who put TVs in a lot of his stuff; they were showin stuff on them, too, they weren't just blank TVs. That was kind of neat. They had a Henri Moore sculpture there, the "Warrior with Sheild." And there was a lot of miscellany that I really enjoyed looking at. I had a blast there. It was really great. After the Museum, we went to see the Palace at Mannheim, which has been transformed into a university. Paul told me that the only palace in Europe bigger than the one at MAnnhiem is Versailles. I beleive it. That thing was huge. It was build by the same guy (I think I've identified him as some "Karl-Theodore") who built the castle at Heibleberg, and was, Paul tells me, one of four habitations this man had, of the Castle and three Palaces. Mannheim was his winter palace. and it's frickin HUGE! I cannot beleive that one man would build such an immense structure for himself. Himself. And he had like nine square kilometers of grounds. I cannot beleive all of that. You can explain it to me, you can show it to me, but even after having seen it with my own eyes, I can't actually beleive that one guy would construct all this ridiculous stuff for himself. I just have a hard time imagining the Feudal structure, with a few lords having access to practically unlimited money and slave labor in the form of serfs. The reason that the man had so much land aroudn his palace was to keep the riff-raff, which is to say all the peasants, or everybody that payed for the palace, out. Peasants have no place in a palace. I'm glad that the eople of Mannhiem were able ot find some utilitarian purpose for a symbol of feudal tyranny. And that about wraps it up for day 2. Day 3, not terribly much happened. It was a monday, and we learned that all the museums were closed on Mondays, so we just took a walk in the town. At one point, Paul said, "well, are you interested in reading? Would you like to go to a book store?" I said, "Sure, I like books," and so we sent to Paul's favorite Bookstore. I looked around a bit; it was a lot like Borders, and just like every time I'm in Borders, I gravitated towards their comics display. I knew that "Megatokyo" is published in German, so I looked for that, but I didn't see it. They did have a lot of manga, though. That was the grand majorty of stuff on sale there, manga. So that ended up being a nostalgia trip, looking through a big rack of comics almost entirely manga. They had all teh good old series, Cardcaptor Sakura, Negima, Gunslinger Girl, Spiral: The Bonds of Reasoning, stuff like that. One of the ones I was mroe surprised to see was "Calvin und Hobbes." They had a couple Calvin and Hobbes books in German. It was really interesting to see those and they reminded me of what a genius Watterson was. The really interesteing thing is thta the German didn't at all stop me from appreciating these comics, because I know them all already. I jsut needed to be shown the comic in order to know what it was. I know all the words, just present me with the images and I'll remember how it goes. I'm one of those kids who read Calvin and Hobbes over and over and over again when I was Calvin's age, when tolerance for repetition is highest, and I just know all the stuff. Man, Watterson is such a genius. so anyway, day 4, final day there, my train left at 12:30, so we didn't have any time to do any sightseeing. I got up, ate, and was escorted to the station by the live-in-maid-lady. Communication was, as mentioned earlier, difficult, but we managed to get to the right train. We got to the station way too early, though, so we ended up waiting like a couple hours for it to get there, but all was well, for a while at least. Some of you may have heard of the train crash between Hal and Brussels; that happened on the 15th, the day before I went back to Belgium. On the 16th, there was a semi-spontaneous strike of rail workers, so the train that typically went from Aachen in Germany to Liege in Belgium wasn't running on the 16th. I was able to take a bus into a Belgian town near the border and then take the train from there to Liege, and all was cool, but it was more of an adventure than I would have liked. While trying to get to Liege, I formed part of a temporary "travelers alliance" alogn with an Afghan man and two students, I think, who were caught in the same trap. Without theire help and support, especially of the student, who actualyl kind of knew what they were doing, I do not think I would have been able to make such a relatively smooth return. That you, guys. I have no clue what your names might be, but that's not important. You helped me out.
Now, it's tomorrow already, this took me longer than expected, and I have to watch some anime, so I'm going to stop now and talk to you about Amsterdam later, maybe even tommorow, but I'm not sure. Until then, don't blow you stack.