(Having a place to live is a privilege. Being able to buy a home, even more so. Owning one as nice as this, ten times more than that. Everything that I describe below, especially the parts that sound like complaints, I do with the understanding that we are astonishingly fortunate people.)
Let’s start with the names, cause they’ll certainly be the first thing you notice. The row houses along Reinwardtstraat in east Amsterdam were built in 2003 (practically yesterday, in European time) and are architecturally unremarkable. But some Y2K-era architect decided they could heighten the street’s curb appeal with… names, installed in different fonts and colors, one per building. It’s super corny, and it limited my enthusiasm for the Reinwardtstraat apartment when we first saw it.
The opposite of curb appeal.
Still, once we got past the front door, we warmed to the place almost immediately. It’s over 100 square meters1, compared to the 582 we’ve been working and living in for the last two years. It’s in the Dapperbuurt neighborhood, half a block from an outdoor market à la “Notting Hill,” and only one block further from a gorgeous park. It’s half the distance to my work and a three-minute walk to train and tram stops, effectively making most places in the city much more accessible.
We’d barely begun our home-browsing process when our realtor sent this listing. It checked all of our boxes, but we kept our expectations realistic: in this crazy market, stories of placing dozens of unsuccessful offers over many months are routine. “We’ll find the perfect place,” I had assured Kiki, “and then somebody will buy it before us. Then we’ll find another perfect place, and we’ll lose that one too. But at SOME point, we’ll find the perfect place and get it.”
Yeah, no. This was the second house we visited, the first offer we placed, and after two days of roller-coaster haggling, it was ours. Imagine waking up early one morning, packing your lunch, applying sunscreen, and setting out for a long, zen day of fishing… only to pull a giant flopping marlin into the boat on your first cast. You’d probably scream like we did.
Identiy the midpoint of the intersection. You have half a second.
My previous blog post detailed the Sisyphean ordeal of passing the theory exam to get my Dutch driver’s license—navigating a terribly-written, horribly-translated textbook and website to pass an exam with questions so arbitrary or unfair that they sometimes read like absurdist literature.
It was all so patently ridiculous that I figured the practical portion of the process—where I actually drove a car—would be simple by comparison. The free trial lesson at my neighborhood traffic school didn’t dissuade me of this notion: I hopped in a nice Audi SUV with a cheerful instructor who navigated me around the neighborhood, kindly pointed out my mistakes, and identified the old habits I’d need to unlearn. It was an encouraging first session.
My friends, this is what we call a “bait and switch.”
I can claim to be a hipster about a few different, mostly very un-hipsterish things. I was friendly with Adriene Mishler back when she was running free yoga classes in the lobby of Salvage Vanguard Theater. I actually wrote a blog post in 2010 recommending Ben Rector, a full twelve years before he collaborated with Snoop Dogg (really).
But my favorite “knew ‘em before they were big” example is Kristin Moore, a painter whom I met at the East Austin Studio Tour five years ago. Something about her little Instagrammy square panels grabbed me, and I bought one in 2018. A few months later I bought a second one that I mailed to Kiki, so she could visit Waffle House whenever she wanted. Reuniting the siblings was a special treat upon moving to Amsterdam.
They’re always arguing in the back seat, though.
Now, I don’t know anything about art—although, to quote “The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel,” nobody knows anything about art. Kristin’s Artist Statement does a much better job than me at describing what her work is “really about.” But besides evoking wanderlust and so forth, the visual juxtapositions of endless soaring skies over vanilla retail buildings—all of it, both majestic and mundane, rendered in painstaking detail—feels supremely American. Which means that, now that I live abroad, I appreciate it even more. And quite apart from “stirring the soul” or whatever art is supposed to do, it’s also just super well-made—have you ever tried blending acrylics?
When I got to the Netherlands I had to learn many important new skills: speaking Dutch, biking through rush-hour traffic in pouring rain, making my own tortillas. What I did not need to learn was how to drive. Like any native Texan, I’ve been doing that since I was 16, and anyway owning a car in Amsterdam is an active inconvenience. Still, we rent or borrow cars now and then for errands and day trips; and so I needed to exchange my US license for a Dutch rijbewijs.
Sadly this was not a simple swap at the government office. I had to go through the entire process, starting with passing the driving theory exam. Thus did I make the acquaintance of the CBR—Centraal Bureau Rijvaardigheidsbewijzen1, or Central Driver’s License Bureau—which held the keys, pun intended, to my driving privileges. I’d heard that the process for getting a license was onerous, but they offer the test in English, and I’ve got 27 years of driving experience. How bad could it possibly be?
It’s the most unqualified success among the goals I gave myself upon moving to Europe. My courthouse book is an eternal work in progress; my painting hobby is advancing glacially; the improv career is, like so many other things, limited by COVID. But (thanks largely to that very same pandemic) my plan to read more has been a grand slam. In the before times, I’d be lucky to finish three books a year, ticking through 10-20 pages per night as I drifted off to sleep. Last year I finished 37 books1, just over three books a month.
Within my first weeks in The Netherlands, I’d already stopped noticing how many darn bikes there are. After a few months I was used to the gorgeous view along the Amstel River next to our apartment. I’m in one of the great cities of the Western world, surrounded by history and architecture, with Stolpersteins underfoot and buildings around every corner that would stop you in your tracks if you saw them in Austin.1. And yet, now it’s just home.
Here’s an experiment: take a look at my typical route to work—which I bike once a week or so, sometimes for a meeting, usually just for a change of scenery—and drop the Google Maps street-view guy anywhere along it. Within a couple of tries you’ll probably land on some beautiful sight. That’s my goddamn commute! I hate that I’m getting used to it.
Of course, once in awhile something catches your eye. (Aldi is a supermarket.)
December 14th and 15th are the anniversary of my Big Move.2 Every day, the last few weeks leading up to it, has included a whole lot of “one-year-ago” moments: turning in my badge at Apple, visiting the Blanton Museum, taking my final courthouse road trip, marking the days off my big countdown wall calendar, staying at the Driskill Hotel, and selling my car almost literally on the way to the airport. The first weeks in Amsterdam weren’t a bit as eventful, thanks to lockdown, but after literal years of a long-distance relationship, being with Kiki almost 24-7 was just what the doctor ordered.
Time passed; the lockdown ended; I got a job; I began to explore and learn the city. On September 15th, my nine-month Amsterversary, I was the cool substitute teacher for Improv 101 at Boom Chicago. It was my first improv class in precisely 18 months and two days—the previous class was a free intro for Merlin Works, and if you had told me on that night when and where my next one would be, I’d have been utterly mindboggled. The improv has picked up since then, with occasional shows and coaching gigs (and, weirdly, hosting videos for an elevator company). Most exciting was the return of Pints & PowerPoints, which emerged on the Boom Chicago stage in November, TWENTY MONTHS after its last appearance back in Austin.
And our slow makeover of the apartment continues. I wish I’d done a video tour of the place when I arrived, cause it’s almost unrecognizable now. Recently installed: a set of light-blocking curtains that make it possible to watch TV in the daytime. Still delayed: our fancy new bed, which was delivered after a two-month wait only for the delivery guys to realize the bedframe wouldn’t fit up the stairs.
Fuck.
Of course there was the weather. As I gripped my sword and stared stonily into the middle distance, the cold returned, and with it another lockdown. It’s not gray and rainy ALL the time, but the days are short as hell—on the winter solstice, we get seven hours and 41 minutes—and when the sun comes out it stays low in the sky to the south, stubbornly hiding behind buildings and providing little warmth regardless.
But that comes with the territory—literally. The things I enjoy about Amsterdam greatly outnumber the things I don’t. Every day I feel a bit more integrated, a bit more comfortable, a bit more Dutch. My Duolingo streak is over 1,200 days. I do typically European things like buy bread at the bakery, use two-button toilets with comically small sinks, bike through freezing rain like it’s no big deal, and walk out of the doctor’s office without paying anything.3
The pandemic gave all of our lives a slower pace, with free evenings greatly outnumbering busy ones, but the Big Move has made my life slower still. On a recent Friday night I found myself lounging on the couch, sipping whiskey and reading my Kindle, with Percy purring on my lap, watching planes inbound to Schiphol through the window. Three years ago, such a quiet night would have felt like an unusual luxury. Now, it’s just life; and life is good.
I never noticed that they are speaking Dutch phonetically.
It’s not accurate to say that The Netherlands has two Christmases. December 25th is still Christmas (Kerstfeest in Dutch) and a good number of kids still expect presents from de Kerstman (literally “the Christmas-man”), who looks like an American would expect. Normal Christmas stuff, in other words.
But… *Yoda voice* …there is another.
Here’s the deal, as best as I can make it out: back in the 4th century in present-day Turkey, St. Nicholas was a real person renowned for his generosity. Fast-forward a few centuries, and Christian children in various places were getting presents on Nicholas’s feast day, December 6th. Fast-forward a few more centuries, and Martin Luther encouraged people to give the kids gifts on Christmas instead, cause Jesus > saints, amiright?
But all he succeeded in doing was to create more holiday gift-giving fellows. All across Europe, like a bunch of Spider-Men popping out of the multi-verse, new Santa characters evolved with their own back stories and traditions.
Oh, Martin, what… have… you… done
In Nederland and Belgium the local version is called Sinterklaas. He’s still from Turkey. His holiday is still December 6th1. Instead of arriving from the North Pole on Christmas Eve via flying sleigh, he arrives from Spain (Spain?!) in mid-November via steamboat. Instead of a bunch of toy-making elves, he has an awfully, terribly racist helper character2 He rides a horse named Amerigo to get around. Instead of candy in stockings, it’s candy in shoes. And so on.
“But they dress completely differently!”
—My downstairs neighbor, when I told her about my confusion between the two white-bearded Christmas men
The craziness does not end with the Turk-on-a-steamboat business, because like all Santas, Sinterklaas delegates the actual gift-giving to regular folks like you and me. And Sinterklaas—the holiday—is a pro-level Secret Santa. Once you’ve been randomly assigned your recipient (mine was Kiki’s sister Mima) then you’re tasked with three labors:
The present
The wrapping, which is called a surprise3 and is meant to reflect the interests or personality of the recipient
A poem about the other person that they read before opening the present
The gift itself was easy enough: Mima got a nice pepper mill. For the surprise, Mima got a giant ball of yarn; lucky for me, there are literally dozens of online tutorials to be found, and the directions for this one were simple enough. The poem was also pretty straight-forward, though it reads a bit like an 80s rap.
My name is Sinterklaas and I’m here to say / My horse Amerigo eats a lot of hay
My Sinterklaas-giver was Kiki’s mom Kien; she gave me a nice book about Dutch water infrastructure, a charming poem, and a surprise of a little doll riding Air Force One like a cowboy on a horse. Kiki got socks and a scented candle hidden inside an honest-to-god gingerbread house.
All in all it was a successful Sinterklaas, even if it was over Zoom (such a common way of gathering these days that I almost forgot to mention it). Now, God and COVID willing, we begin prepping for a trip back to the USA, where our Christmas traditions are COMPLETELY NORMAL.
I just saw “Last Night in Soho,” Edgar Wright’s new movie about a young London girl who forms a psychic bond with her counterpart from 50 years ago and quickly gets in over her head. THIS WILL NOT BECOME A MOVIE-REVIEW BLOG, but lo and behold, I formulated some disjointed thoughts about this one too.
No big spoilers.
As a director, Edgar Wright has an idiosyncratic visual vocabulary that’s immediately recognizable, like Wes Anderson without all the twee. One of his favorite toys is the smash cut, which is a natural fit for horror movies; really it’s a surprise he’s never directed one before. (Oh, you want a jump-scare? Hell, Edgar’s been filming jump-pouring-pints-of-beer for almost 20 years.) And like Jordan Peele, he’s not so far removed from his comedy roots that he won’t sprinkle some jokes throughout the script.
This movie shows Wright’s advancing maturity, not least in that it centers on female characters with agency (new territory for him!) and thus easily passes the Bechdel Test (perhaps his first film to *ever* do that?). His so-called Cornetto Trilogy films are ageing much better than the other bro comedies of the mid-aughts, but are still fundamentally about guys being dudes. In contrast “Last Night in Soho” attempts to be really about something—the fearful lives of women navigating the patriarchy; the crippling effects of mental illness—though it all feels a bit unfocused, especially at the end (see below).
While all movie reviews are subjective, I will state one objective fact: this film is gorgeous. The director of photography is Chung-hoon Chung, whom I was surprised to learn was also DP for “Oldboy” way back in 2003.1 The screen is soaking in dreamy reds and blues that reminded me (both visually and thematically) of “Eyes Wide Shut,” and you could have a decent moviegoing experience watching the thing on mute. I mean just look at that poster! It’s a visual love story to the swinging 60s that doesn’t ignore what was awful about them. Heck, what was awful about them is the PLOT OF THE MOVIE.
Horror movies aren’t historically the place to extend your acting chops, but many recent actors haven’t gotten that memo—see Florence Pugh in “Midsommar” and Lupita Nyong’o in “Us.”2 Thomasin McKenzie and Anya Taylor-Joy didn’t punch the camera in the face quite that hard, but they do a great job portraying two sides of the same demented time-traveling coin.
It gets messy in the third act, as Edgar Wright movies often do.3 At one point the protagonist seems so deep in the horror-movie shit that you assume the film is at its climax, but… it keeps going. The actual climax, with its big reveal, follows the rhythm of the equivalent scene “Hot Fuzz” so closely that it’s hard not to think of it as comedic. And just like in “Baby Driver,” the final scene is so cheerfully tidy (including, literally, a giant bow!) that I wondered if we were meant to think it was a fantasy.
But it’s a good dang movie, stylish and scary and well worth overlooking a few lumps and bumps.
While writing down my long list of pros and cons for moving to The Netherlands, I never thought to include “Seeing movies early” in the pro column. In fact I don’t know when or why it became the norm for blockbusters to debut in other countries before the US. I can’t get HBO, but I was able to see both “Dune” and “No Time to Die” over a month before my American friends get the chance. I thought I’d flaunt my new-movie privilege by writing a tiny review for each.
(And yes, the theaters are open; at the door you display a QR code certifying your vaccination status, and in you go. Sorry for flaunting my functional-government privilege, too.)
No Time to Die
We saw the new James Bond at Theater Tuschinski, which at least one outlet has called the most beautiful cinema in the world. Half a dozen signs around the lobby included the iffy hashtag #NoTimeForSpoilers—for good reason!—and I won’t be squawking here. But I will be warning you about the goddamn runtime: TWO HOURS AND FORTY-THREE MINUTES, easily the longest of the Bond films. (What ever happened to 90-minute movies, huh?) Be sure to use the bathroom.
This review isn’t nearly so long, so I’ll cut to the chase and say I liked it. That was no guarantee; I’m convinced people like the idea of James Bond movies more than the movies themselves. Much like Star Trek, the concept is often more appealing than the execution. I didn’t even see the last one, “Spectre,” which put me at a mild disadvantage knowing what was going on in this one. Fortunately, Bond films are NOT subtle about identifying the bad guys.
And that’s perfectly fine. Nothing wrong with going to a Bond movie expecting a charmingly passé number of hallmarks: theme-song-music-video opening credits, world-spanning postcard locations, scarred villain with a secret lair and a truly bizarre number of machine-gun henchmen. “No Time to Die” hits em all. Its most subversive move is introducing Lashana Lynch as a Black female 00 agent, which is really only “subversive” to MAGA snowflakes.
Daniel Craig has said this is his last outing in the tuxedo. It’s no controversy to call Craig the most self-serious of the James Bonds—that’s certainly thanks to his acting, which would have a certain ruggedness even if he were bottle-feeding a baby raccoon1. But I’d say the larger issue is the steady slide of all blockbuster movies towards a detached stony-faced seriousness—no matter how silly the characters and locales onscreen—which was previously the exclusive domain of Batman. This doesn’t always work; when Bond finally gives us a quippy one-liner, darn near the end of the movie, it feels like a huge relief. But ever since the end of the Cold War (ever since Goldeneye, by the Bond calendar), the premise of a white man fucking and killing his way around the world in the name of “freedom” has felt increasingly icky. A pinch of gravitas seems appropriate, and Daniel Craig can summon a wheelbarrow’s worth.
Dune
Speaking of icky premises, how about a white messiah bringing spiritual leadership to the unwashed masses living in the untamed desert? Cause that’s the unexaggerated proposition of “Dune,” a 1965 sci-fi epic novel that is such a direct influence on “Star Wars” that you feel like George Lucas should have shared royalties. But whereas “Star Wars” is a svelte missile of storytelling, “Dune” and its sequels are famously sprawling and complex—think “Game of Thrones” in space—and, despite two previous adaptations and one infamous near-miss, have frequently been called “unfilmable.”
I was terrified for “Dune” precisely because it looked so good; I thought frequently of the 2005 “Hitchhiker’s Guide” adaptation, which ticked every box you could hope for in adapting the beloved book, yet turned out devastatingly mediocre. Likewise, everything about “Dune” looked just about perfect, from the cast and director on down the line. But, given Hollywood history, it was entirely possible that it just wouldn’t work.
Well, it works. By limiting itself to the first half of the book, “Dune” manages to be a tolerable length—at 2h35m, somehow SHORTER than “No Time to Die”—and less of a confusing rat’s nest of characters and plot lines. (No joke: for the 1984 David Lynch adaptation, they handed out a double-sided cheat sheet to help audiences follow along.) The production design is exquisite, particularly the costuming. You could still be completely mystified by the plot (you might yet be!) but still greatly enjoy the look of the movie. The cinematography demands to be seen in a proper movie theater, though your local COVID situation might demand otherwise.
And yet… I cringed visibly multiple times throughout.
Most or all of the cringing was thanks to the 56-year-old source material. There’s no such thing as a good white-messiah narrative, no matter how many times the white messiah (Timothée Chalamet) pouts about it. Similarly, the idea that the cishet patriarchy will be well in place over 8,000 years in the future is suuuuper depressing, no matter how much the cishet women are shown to be scheming behind the scenes. This adaptation does an okay job at granting some much-needed agency to the oppressed native people2, but like your awkward uncle at Thanksgiving dinner holding forth about “what the Arabs think,” I feel like this isn’t necessarily a white man’s story to tell. Or anyone’s story. The time to tell it might be past.
I really am trying to recommend the movie! What it’s good at, it’s VERY good at. I’ll be seeing it again. But the more I think about the asterisk on my recommendation, the bigger the asterisk gets. I’m very interested to hear what people of color think about the whole thing.
Yesterday we made the sudden, awful decision to let our cat Suitcase cross the rainbow bridge. As we speak, she and Lola are giving each other a single, friendly sniff and then napping on opposite ends of the great Ikea couch in the sky.
She showed up unannounced at my friend Ryan’s apartment complex back around the beginning of 2013. I declined multiple suggestions that I adopt her before agreeing to house her for a weekend while Ryan was out of town. Well, that did the trick.
She went without a proper name for a surprising amount of time. For a good long while her name was Cat, because when she had her 4am meowing concerts, only yelling “CAT!!!” would shut her up. Even when I adopted a second cat—only to discover after agreeing that the cat’s name was also Cat—they quickly became Cat 1 and Cat 2. Finally at the end of 2016, when Billy Kissa visited from Greece, she (the cat) slept on top of Billy’s suitcase the entire week. Billy flatly declared that Suitcase was her name; Billy was right. (Cat 2 was eventually named Sabado, which is a different story.)
She was extremely low-maintenance, even training herself to poop outside instead of needing a litter box. Her flop game was strong. She was approximately 70% fur with a possibly-illegal amount of floof between her toes. She successfully trained me to leave the faucet dripping while I brushed my teeth so she could drink from it. (I explained to her how wasteful this was and spent $50 on a pet fountain, but she was undeterred.)
Letting go of the cats was, no surprise, one of the hardest things about my move to Amsterdam. What made it a LOT easier was Cortney and Jonathan, who became amazing foster parents to Suitcase, and—at the last minute—Sabado as well. They fell madly in love, and when I made the call that it was best for the cats to remain in Texas, they were only too happy to drop the “foster” from their titles. I’m sad that they had to handle the hardest part themselves, and that Kiki and I could only say goodbye over the phone, standing outside Mike’s Theater in Amsterdam after a Coach Rookard show. But seeing her cuddled up against Jonathan in the Zoom window, feeling loved and comforted, was a great comfort to us, too.
