A LONG WAY FROM MANY PLACES

The Sometimes Dismal Universality of Everything

“Where’s the Burger King sign?”

“By the spire.”

“Which one?”

When Ann and I go grocery shopping together I push the cart. We have a list. When I look back behind me, I frequently find she’s nowhere to be seen. My little magpie has flown, utterly enchanted in a magical land of shiny objects. Something similar happens when we’re disoriented tourists. I tend to march off in the wrong direction heading for the correct landmark. When I pause to look back, see where Ann is, I often find myself alone. The Dutch must have a word for “compass” because Holland was a sea-faring country to be reckoned with in Western Europe back when colonialism and imperialism were hip. They must. Tripping over cobblestones in Amsterdam, feeling groovy, we agreed that should we somehow become separated, a pre-planned rendezvous by the rubber duck store or the cheese shop was pointless. There’s too many of them and their display windows are all yellow anyway, they look the same. You know, those two ubiquitous retailers should merge and hawk duck-shaped cheeses; serious kitsch, fromage; wooden tulips as a sideline.

Our first morning in Amsterdam, a tad too grotty after a night flight (possibly my favourite Led Zeppelin song), Ann and I passed through a shopping concourse in the train station, hurrying in the wrong direction, seeking the tram platforms only to find the waterfront and ferries. I noticed a store that seemed to sell New York Yankees caps exclusively. Not one in the display window was the team’s proper base navy colour. The abominations covered the entire visual spectrum. I hate the Yankees. Filter: I do not care for the American League’s New York baseball club.

Now cursed with unintentional awareness, I was dismayed to see the narrow streets of central Amsterdam teeming with ersatz Yankees baseball caps. I stopped counting. Distant second place was a three-way tie between the Boston Red Sox, Los Angeles Dodgers and, oddly, Oakland’s A’s. I clocked one sad sack midwestern Generation Zed frat boy wearing a St. Louis Cardinals cap with the foil 59-50 sticker still on the factory-flat brim like some sort of “playa” badge. Dear me; I assumed he’d get rolled later that night while staggering around the Red Light District, bent over and vomiting into the canal.

Because I’m a twentieth century boy and I know just what the fax is and I still do the rock, when I can get it, I couldn’t help but notice all the AC/DC t-shirts out and about. Four of the band’s albums are downstairs in the Crooked 9’s CD library; none of them have ever been spun front to back. Stuck in selfie-taking pedestrian traffic on a Herengracht canal bridge I managed to read the back of one fellow’s black concert merch. The Power Up tour had descended upon the Johan Cruyff Arena (home pitch of AFC Ajax) just the night before. Had I known, I might’ve been tempted although, like other local attractions, I should’ve purchased advance tickets from Canada. Conversely, I can’t imagine Anne Frank Haus and Van Gogh Museum ticket scalpers. The Rolling Stones have branded Earth (and Mars) better than Coca-Cola, McDonald’s, Hard Rock Café and sludgy Starbucks. I didn’t look the other way while the planet got licked, I joined the tribe, got the uniform, contributed to the pop art infestation. Whatever your opinion of Jagger as a performer, a singer, a writer-composer or a dusty and dated cultural icon, you must concede him his business and marketing acumen. Every bullshit business school there ever was should grant him an honourary MBA. The music tee that really struck a chord with me was worn by a young woman. Nirvana. She was too young to grieve Cobain’s Hemingway departure, but I gathered she would’ve if she could’ve; she wore it well.

Our short-term rental, a one-bedroom efficiency apartment with compact dining and sitting areas, the suggestion of a galley kitchen and Frans Hals on the wall was located inside central Amsterdam’s Southern Canal Ring. Ann and I were tourists in a tourist zone. While we walked around trying to work out where locals may go, I noticed numerous TE HUUR signs posted. I thought maybe Te Huur was a real estate company, like Re/Max, but there were too many properties available. FOR RENT – took a while. Apparently, Amsterdam, like Edmonton, like most of the rich world, hasn’t worn covid-19’s fallout particularly well or uniformly. 

Amid the ubiquity of wooden tulip kitsch, round Heineken signs and the brands and logos we’ve all seen, stands the bloody-minded universal constant: the Irish pub. The two we favoured weren’t quite as ersatz as maroon Yankees caps; Ireland is a member of the European Union and its diaspora is free to move about the continent. The long-established pub spaces were beaten up, scratched, scarred, heavily abused and devoid of pretension, remotely authentic enough.

Dan Murphy’s (an Australian brewery and brand) Irish Bar is on Leidseplein, a public plaza. The space, should you be habitually trotting off in the wrong direction, was dominated by a rooftop Burger King sign, big enough to eclipse the intermittent sun, a landmark. After a day tripping train ride out of the city or tripping over cobblestones in it, Ann and I liked to sit outside with our backs to the bar beneath Murphy’s awning and watch the people and the rain, rainy day people. 

I thought Amsterdam rain smelled different from Edmonton’s, maybe because of weather off the North Sea, maybe only because I imagined it did. Travel does that: different scenes, different atmosphere. And a different conversation as Ann and I review what really played out as a brand new day and make plans for the morrow, another one just like it; the items of concern we share about the everyday, looming nits to pick on the home front, become cards shuffled to the bottom of the deck. 

Should an Irish drinking establishment even bother with food, there will be a toastie on the menu. At home in the Crooked 9 that’s a grilled ham and cheese sandwich, a quick mealtime bite because some obligation is pressing. In a foreign Irish pub with a kitchen no cleaner than the men’s toilet, a toastie seems a delicacy. Must be the pattern of the scorch marks on the bread – they’re different.

Another Irish pub we kept returning to was beside a Pathe movie theatre, near the outdoor tulip market. I believe its name was TV Satellite Sports. The earthy bulbs for sale nearby were brighter than the two expat barmen who had the run of the place. Refills were hard to come by and empty glasses were apparently glued to the bar. The chattier of the pair had very short hair and grey teeth. He was a virulent anti-papist who harboured a similar loathing of Britain’s Royal Family. Ann and I were utterly charmed by his rants (but not his spittle), especially after we realized all he thought he knew derived from Netflix dramatizations. Ironically, his mate bore a strong physical resemblance to the Spare. The eerie doppelganger stuff that didn’t stop there, no, this good natured fellow proved as harmlessly thick.

Early one afternoon I asked Prince Harry where the joint’s jukebox was because Ann and I had been chatting through twenty minutes of “Dancing in the Dark”, a good song, possibly a great one (the original 45 picture sleeve defined Springsteen’s oeuvre, a rockstar in cool clothing regular people don’t know where to buy, leaping about in an unfinished, cinderblock garage; that’s me sometimes in front of a mirror), but not as repeat-worthy as Celine Dion’s cover of “You Shook Me All Night Long”. It proved a difficult question. Eventually the three of us established the music came from a Spotify playlist programmed into TV Satellite Sports’s house cellphone. The pub was as empty as the broken commode in the men’s room. I wondered if Prince Harry might have a moment to take requests, play a couple of songs for Ann and me. There was this Canadian band we both really liked … called The Muster Point Project …

Now, our “One Country” Benelux Eurail pass could have taken Ann and me anywhere in the Low Countries, an impractical dream. But everywhere we went, Haarlem, Utrecht and in Belgium, Antwerp and Bruges, we saw Irish pubs.

“It’s a fecking fairy tale place, innit?”

We had to wonder if In Bruges, a sly, small buddy film about Irish hitmen making themselves temporarily scarce, was a blessing or a curse for the city’s council and tourism bureau. It really does present as a crime-free magical kingdom, a Brothers Grimm place of Walt Disney wet dreams. Ann and I spent a night there and would’ve spent two if our holiday wasn’t winding down and had we known better. Our impromptu bed and breakfast booking was, some questionable décor decisions aside, plastic flowers strewn about, a conveniently located, intimate operation which we managed to check into after a couple of wrong door knocks and a detour into the courtyard of some imposing red brick, God-fearing seminary that didn’t even rate a call-out on the complimentary tourist map.

The cafés ringing the astonishing circular Markt of course thrive on the tourist influx. One of them almost saw Ann and me coming. Hungry, we were seduced by a sandwich board on the cobblestones by a flowerpot outside an iron terrasse railing advertising steak et frites for an unbelievably reasonable price. The menus we were presented told a different story of many euros more. I mentioned the special to the waiter. Ah! A second menu was reluctantly produced. I had Flemish stew, possibly made with real phlegm.

We met a Parisian couple over breakfast, about our ages although a bit more stylish in dress; my Stones tongue t-shirt didn’t rate. The ice took a while to crack. Eventually the four of us got around to discussing the European parliament and the off-putting D-Day (June 6 – our Amsterdam apartment was two doors down from a polling place and, coincidently, an Italian diplomatic office) election results. Germany, Italy and France had swung to the populist right. The shock was enough to prompt French President Macron to call a snap election (still playing out in a confusing mess). Monsieur said he was afraid these times we live in were evocative of the thirties, an era Churchill described succinctly as The Gathering Storm (in some 600 pages). The four of us were just one generation removed from what legendary journalist Studs Terkel called “The Good War” and not ill-informed about current affairs and twentieth century history. A collective memory, a hive mentality persists. The new bad guys (almost the same as the old bad guys) have it too, like a fever. 

The ice really melted when our companions learned Ann and I were Canadian. Together we pissed all over the United States, Republicans mainly. (Here I must confess to a lack of filtration. A Greek restauranteur with long grey hair, kinky, greasy, interrupted us one Amsterdam evening while Ann and I were reading his menu. He asked, innocently enough, if we were American. I told him to fuck off.) Ann and I were duly diligent, forthcoming over breakfast in Bruges, embarrassed enough to admit that Canada is lurching in the same direction. These Parisians hated Parisian waiters; they weren’t thrilled about their city’s Olympic summer either. We would’ve enjoyed sharing another meal with them.

The street our B&B was on hop-scotched names. I spent half an hour pinpointing its approximate location on our map. Ann and I spent most of our second day in Bruges slowly working our way back toward the train station. We took our time, stopping at a site, for sight or a bite. We managed this because Ann held our map upside down. What’s the draw of magnetic north anyway? If we’d only hit upon this reverse orienteering technique in Haarlem and Utrecht, let alone Amsterdam.

After each spending a euro to use the train station’s toilets we sat together waiting for an express to Brussels. We agreed we wished we had a little more time, but we hadn’t wasted what we had.

“Would you want to come back here?”

I said, “Yeah, it’s different. Man, it’s different, the same but different. What a wonderful day. Maybe, if we go overseas again, next time we arrive from Ireland? There’s a fecking ferry.”       

Dispatches from the Crooked 9 has been your most unreliable, unbalanced and inaccurate alternative source of everything since 2013. My companion site www.megeoff.com is awake and alive. Watch and listen to some of the songs I co-wrote with The Muster Point Project or buy 5 KG, the complete EP. Of course, you can still purchase my latest book Of Course You Did in your preferred format from your preferred e-retailer. 

A LONG WAY FROM MANY PLACES

Tap Dancing

Like too many other people I’ve been the victim of credit card fraud. I’m aware of at least one of the warning signs now. A transaction for a dollar or two on your statement, innocuous enough and anyway, you can’t recall the circumstances. That’s usually the douchebags ensuring the validity of your number before the big hit. After that, you’re at the mercy of your provider.

When Ann and I returned home from Amsterdam (and environs) I reviewed my credit card history. I suffered heart palpitations when I saw the litany of miniscule charges. Breathe. The memory of the way we’d lived for the past weeks was still fresh. Over there, you don’t sing for your supper or a service, you tap. You tap for trams. You tap for public toilets. You tap like you’re a hybrid of “Mister Bojangles”, Leo Sayer and Sammy Davis Jr.

Ann and I spent paper euros just twice. An emergency situation each occasion. The DUTY PAID seal on a package of cigarettes sold within the European Union is also imprinted with the retail price. There’s no room for a merchant to chisel an extra euro or two. A credit card company’s tap fee erases his margin, maybe even costs him. He needs you to buy something else to make the transaction worth his while, a lighter, a Bob Marley tin for pot storage (I watched the recent estate authorized hagiography on the flight over and unlike Bohemian Rhapsody or Rocket Man, I couldn’t suspend my disbelief – the character on screen was an actor portraying Marley, nothing more), a set of windmill salt and pepper shakers. Something else, anything else. We understood; there’s nothing criminal about requiring and desiring a modest profit.

Medieval cities are not paragons of urban planning. Amsterdam was Diana Ross sans the Supremes, upside down, inside out. Our first few days there Ann and I walked round and round. Right was left, east was north. The landmarks kept rotating. One Sunday afternoon we found ourselves in the Red Light District. I’ve no idea how. The bars were open but the neon LIVE FUCKING sign switches hadn’t been flicked, too early, too soon – I’m familiar with this problem. No window shopping on the side streets, all the red curtains were drawn.

One morning while poring over a sideways city map over a second cup of coffee, I had a directional epiphany. Knowledge came knocking, tap, tap, tap. I suddenly understood the lay of the (low) land. Look at the touchless symbol on your credit card. It’s brilliant graphic design, a dot emitting increasingly larger electromagnetic waves in one direction. I visualized Amsterdam Centraal, the train station which backs onto the Het IJ, the waterfront, as the dot. The five curving canals, each one added for defensive purposes as the city grew larger, each fed from the channel behind the station on one side and the Amstel River on the other, are the pulses. The trouble with canals of course is that you can choose to cross that bridge when you get to it, or not. Either way, left and right will pose dilemmas.

He said, You must be joking, son. Where did you get those shoes?

The rich world was inadvertently half-prepared for the covid-19 lockdowns. A home office wasn’t just a branch of the British government. We were shopping online for consumer goods and groceries. We were streaming our entertainment through devices that provide astonishing audio and visual clarity. We rarely saw our neighbours anyway. These Amazon Prime times make us all forget that one of the most powerful retail marketing tools is a well-designed, enticing display window; they have the limited reach of billboards in that you have to be there, but you can’t tap your credit card against a giant sign.

Ann and I spent our time in Amsterdam just being. We tried to live as if we really did live there. We went to the grocery store daily; we bought what we’d need for the next twelve or sixteen hours. Our walk took us over two canals. On the gently arched bridge of one was a kiosk that sold bad coffee, “American” hot dogs and chocolate in all its forms. We also had to pass an Adidas store, and didn’t I clock a pair of blue suede shoes with crepe soles twice a day, back and forth.

Our main grocer was Albert Heijn, purveyor of Heineken, Amstel, milk, coffee, cheese, meats, fruit, bread and pastries. When I first saw the pale blue sign with sans serif white type, I was reminded of an Alberta Treasury Branch outlet (since rebranded in green as Servus Credit Union), same shape, same simplistic utilitarian design. Albert Heijn’s main competitor is JUMBO (pillowy, childish font on a harsh yellow field); Ann and I stumbled upon one on Keizersgracht, our canal straat, though we were never able to find it was again. Anyway, Ann had an Albert Heijn “bonus” card which shaved a few euros off every order.

Our first encounter with Albert Heijn was mildly disconcerting, discombobulating. We brought our basket of groceries to the sole human cashier. She asked us if we were paying cash. We said no. She pointed to the array of scanners. Ann and I hate self-checkouts. I hate those machines so much I’d rather stand in line to deal with a human being and I hate standing in line. Also, I’m not overly fond of other people. Another employee helped us through the process and issued Ann said bonus card. We quickly learned exiting the store was mission impossible without first scanning our receipt at the locked, automated turnstile. Had I already crumpled it up? Was it in the bottom of one of our bags? Just Like the train station. Just like the tram. Just like anything in Amsterdam: you've got to tap to get in or out. We adapted because we had to, so much so that I even went shopping at Albert Heijn all by myself once. This is the essence of living. And to and fro, I kept looking at those shoes. They were sure fine looking, man, something else. 

Our despicable species is the healthiest and wealthiest it’s ever been in all of our recorded history. Most days don’t feel like that whether you read legitimate news media or scan social media. Every petty hobby activist has a gripe. Partisanship. Sectarianism. But, you know, if we all adopted a Carl Perkins-Elvis blue suede shoes sensibility – lay off them, don’t step on mine and I won’t step on yours – our world would tilt into Jackie DeShannon territory, become an even better place for you and me. Let it be, let it rock.

Ann said, “Just buy them.” 

When it comes to spending money on stuff for myself, I’m thrifty to the point of cheap. You don’t need things you don’t need; it’s wrong to want; that’s the way I was raised: make do, save your money for a rainy day. But I’d already been extravagant. I’d found two Rolling Stones albums I already owned in a very cool record shop near Amsterdam Centraal. You must understand they were Japanese SACD editions, different, beyond enhanced, and, besides, only nine euros each. Almost free. Velvet Records is on the No. 2 tram route, our transit lifeline to a destination which seemed just a tad too far to walk over crooked cobbles in the wrong direction. You board the car through the rear WELKOM door tapping either a timed pre-paid ticket or your credit card. You exit up front, but will miss your stop if you don’t remember to tap out.  

Ann said, “Just buy them.”

It rains in Amsterdam. It rains a lot. There are more rainy days and Mondays behind me than there are ahead. I know this and it’s not an alternative fact. Well, didn’t I just break down and buy those blue suede Adidas Spezials, some sort of indoor court shoe that will never be worn for their intended purpose. Tried them on and then tapped my credit card while Ann held my hand. It ain’t no sin to be alive and stepping out in a pair of snazzy sneakers a hundred times the cost of an immaculate public toilet with a floor to ceiling door.                                                                                 

Dispatches from the Crooked 9 has been your most unreliable, unbalanced and inaccurate alternative source of everything since 2013. My companion site www.megeoff.com is awake and alive. Watch and listen to some of the songs I co-wrote with The Muster Point Project or buy 5 KG, the complete EP. Of course, you can still purchase my latest book Of Course You Did in your preferred format from your preferred e-retailer. 

A LONG WAY FROM MANY PLACES

On the Trail of Frans Hals

The dashing young man in our apartment is giving Ann and me a knowing look. We’re sitting at the dining table, sipping our coffee and poring over a map of central Amsterdam. The windows are open. The cobbled courtyard three storeys below us invites with its benches and wicker chairs, mossy statuary, an elaborate stone Cupid fountain, all shaded by jungle-lush greenery (there’s even a palm tree) and the cast shadows of tall, skinny buildings whose erection dates from centuries ago. The humid air smells good, smells real, not at all like “fresh scent” laundry detergent or a dangling rear-view mirror car deodorizer. The young man on the wall seems to say to us, “Oh, you two.” Or he could be apologizing for his militia companion, his foil, the straight man just to his right: “He’s all right once you get to know him.”

I realize these dandies are an enlarged detail from a portrait. I can surmise the original oil painting was photographed and digitized before a portion was ink-jetted on to a substrate intended to suggest an artist’s canvas. The reproduction is generations beyond the original medium. But these guys hanging on our short-term rental wall are alive. Still, somehow. Who painted this? 

Our apartment is located in Amsterdam’s Southern Canal Belt. Our street or straat is Keizersgracht (Emperor’s Canal). The building’s black front door is three stone steps below the narrow, cobbled sidewalk. The stairs up to our unit are single-file only, wide enough for a man and his suitcase. The steps themselves accommodate half your foot, so balls up and the arch of your foot monkey gripping the risers’ edges going down. Across the one-way street, cobbled, back lane width, is a stately row of elm trees and then, if you’re not careful, a drop into a moored boat or green water as the railing is tripwire height. Our building and/or the extraordinarily efficient company that owns and manages it is called Dutch Masters. Ann and I had booked two weeks in the Frans Hals suite.

My knowledge of fine art is spotty. Throughout my life I’ve made something of an effort to learn more about the artists or movements that have captivated my attention. Still there are just two non-fiction works that have resonated with me, both about modern art. Robert Hughes, Time magazine’s art critic, wrote Culture of Complaint which posited that the merit of any work has been sublimated by, is secondary to, whatever hip or fashionable message of the day it is attempting to convey. This criticism is easily applied to all of the arts. The other is Tom Wolfe’s The Painted Word which gleefully skinned the pretension surrounding the industry with lots of exclamation points!! As for the Dutch Masters …

A print of Van Gogh’s “Sunflowers” hung on the dining room wall of the house I grew up in. As a boy I valued my set of Buffalo felt markers which came in a tin adorned with Rembrandt’s “The Night Watch” – a set of 24. I’m familiar with Vermeer, not for his fetching milkmaids and such, but because the letters in his surname are a boon to crossword constructors although he’ll never rate with Brian Eno and Yoko Ono.

Like his slightly younger contemporaries Rembrandt and Vermeer, Hals (1582-1666) painted his portraits during the Dutch Golden Age. Cancel culture has since rendered the Dutch Golden Age problematic because imperialism, colonial expansion and exploitation, not to mention the slave trade, are evil – fair enough. Hals was something of a democrat, a standout, amid this era. His subjects were people beyond the fringe of proper society: actors, musicians, local drunks and eccentrics, militiamen, street urchins with mugs of beer. A pose he favoured was his subject seated sideways on a chair, a crooked arm thrown casually over the back, as if the viewer had tapped the fellow on the shoulder. We’ve all seen those impossibly stiff portraits from the early days of photography, poses held, maintained for impossibly long exposures. Hals was somehow able to paint candid shots with a Kodak Instamatic 124. Real life in real time. That’s the only modern analogy I can come up with.

The Rijksmuseum, provided Ann and I set off in the proper direction upon leaving our apartment, was a short, scenic walk away. Ann had bought tickets for the Hals exhibition there just the day before. Ann and I are interested but reluctant tourists. We don’t like scheduled commitments on holiday. Travel is leisure, we dislike working at it. Timed museum entries are annoying. We understand that people, especially hordes of tourists, require herding, but not us. The nearby Van Gogh Museum on Museumplein, well, we should’ve booked that last April or May. Same with the Anne Frank Haus.

Waiting for Hals, we killed time on a park bench outside the Rijksmuseum. We faced a traffic island, a smallish one populated with purple globes of allium. It was a very busy circle of controlled yet wanton chaos. There were buses and trams, cars and trucks and those peculiar three-wheeled Mr Bean vehicles. There were scooters, motorcycles, Mopeds and bicycles with baskets or barrows, some of them with too many wheels. Needing to cross this swirling river of metal were hundreds of tourists, not knowing where to look or step, walk or wait. God help me, I silently prayed for a pile up, carnage the likes of which I’ve never seen. Ann was expecting much the same but not hoping for it like I was. This was the second time on our trip when I realized that if God exists, I’m ticketed for Hell come Judgment Day.

The Anne Frank Haus is on Prinsengracht (Prince’s Canal), across the calm water from the Tulip Museum, in a neighbourhood called Jordaan and around the corner from Westermarkt, a public square in the shadow yet another church. The queue to go inside is well regulated, the immediate area is kept clear. Casual passers-by without advance, timed tickets can at least gaze upon a building housing a beautiful and ugly history. It looked exactly the same as the one Ann and I were staying in, but, you know, the big, important stuff, whatever it may be, is usually surprisingly modest. My reflex was to touch my heart because industrialized mass murder is an abstract, the hiding place of an individual victim is not. Now I must make a confession. I had another thought. There’s that darkly comic scene in Mordecai Richler’s novel Solomon Gursky Was Here where the protagonist attends a wretchedly produced and performed play about Anne Frank. Desperate for its denouement, he tips off the stage Nazis: “She’s in the attic!”

The atmosphere inside the Rijksmuseum was close, almost stifling. Humid air, too many bodies, limited ventilation. It doesn’t take long for a modest quest of enlightenment to become something of an ordeal. We were caught up in a well-behaved mob, fully comprehending we were part of the problem. Touring the Hals exhibition, I was aware of sad irony: visitors, just steps away from masterpieces more than four hundred-years-old, tended to view the works through the lenses of their cell phones. Ann had a different vision. She led me over to one of Hals’s portraits. She said, “That’s Keith (Richards)!” And by God, there he was, sixties Carnaby Street dress, contemporary Keith with receding, thinning hair, a Disney franchise pirate goatee, that seen-it-all glint in his eye that you can almost hear like a smoker’s chuckling wheeze.

A desire to learn or piqued curiosity self-perpetuates. Bullet point facts acquire colour and context. Ephemera are reaped. There were a couple of instances on our trip when I was almost convinced Ann and I were somehow, inadvertently, searching for Frans Hals. One morning over coffee Ann suggested we were on some kind of accidental pilgrimage. The coincidences rang as fated, obvious. Our port of entry in Netherlands, and, indeed, the entire European Union was Amsterdam’s Schiphol Airport. Visa stamps in our passports, we’d carte blanche to roam the continent. Ride the rails; transients with Eurail passes. Travel inside the EU is seamless.

The first train trip we took from Amsterdam Centraal was a short one. We arrived in Haarlem, closer to the North Sea, well inside of an hour. Haarlem, we learned, was where Hals spent most of his life, did all of his work. Grote Markt, the river (Spaarne) city’s central plaza, wasn’t far from the station. The public gathering place is, of course, dominated by a titanic church, Grote Kerk. The surrounding buildings don’t quite measure up, but they all reach for the sky in their own astonishing way. A tourist must always pause to look up. There are cobblestones, there are canals. Bikes to beware of. It is postcard Amsterdam scaled down.

Haarlem was designated a city around 1245. The trouble with medieval towns is that there are no straight streets. Ann’s and my internal compasses are spinning tops; I still need a fraction of a moment to differentiate left from right. When we wander in foreign places I try to orientate our location to a landmark. But sometimes there’s no bell tower or steeple in the sky to be seen, blind alleys with high walls. I point in a circle to indicate the direction we want. There are navigational tools at hand, but Ann and I know cell phone Siri is just like anyone, everybody else, doesn’t know what she’s talking about half the time. “Which way’s the train station?” “Uh.” “We came from that direction.” “No, I’m pretty sure it was that one.”

We became acquainted with the builder, a genuine craftsman, original materials and modern tools, who was renovating the building next to ours in Amsterdam. We could tell he loved his work. The three of us would chat by the canal most mornings when he was starting his day and we were smoking the day’s first cigarettes; Ann and I even got to know his painting crew. One morning I facetiously complained to him how confusing Amsterdam is and how confusing Haarlem was, off kilter places. He retorted that the North American cities he’d visited, laid out on grid systems with numbered streets and avenues had mystified to him. I said, “It’s good to know it works both ways.”

Our longest train trip was to Antwerp which we now knew to be the birthplace of Frans Hals. There was no stopping at the Belgian border, no inspections, no checks. Our friend Yves, whom we last saw in London in 2019 (a pub on the Tottenham Court Road) and the reason for our journey, lives about an hour’s drive outside the international illicit drug trade’s preferred European port and also the Continent’s second largest after Rotterdam. We’d arranged to spend the afternoon together before Ann and I travelled on to Bruges to spend the night and the next day. Yves met us at Antwerp’s airy and spectacular Beaux-Arts Central Station, the grandest utilitarian public building I’ve ever seen or set foot in my entire life. I promised Yves I wouldn’t gawk and pause to take pictures everywhere we went.

Immediately outside the station we took a café table in the middle of a broad, cobbled boulevard. I ordered a litre of De Konnig, the legendary local amber brew on Yves’s recommendation (God bless Antwerp, amid the typical infrastructure buried beneath a city, a beer pipeline runs from the brewery to its bottling facility some three kilometres distant). Ann had Coca-Cola from a glass bottle and Yves had a coffee as it was still before noon. He pulled a package of Marlboro Reds from his puffy jacket, a “giga” pack of 51 for the insanely low price of 18 euros; it was about the size of an assault rifle ammunition clip. I knew this because Ann and I had been taken aback by the very visible blue uniformed security patrols at Schiphol who positively bristle with black automatic weapons.

I told Yves I was anxious to see the Diamond District before doing other touristy stuff. He shrugged and said, “It’s just around the corner. We’ll pass it on the way to the carpark. There’s nothing to see. All the business is conducted behind closed doors.” Fortunately, I didn’t reveal my motivation was Diamonds Are Forever because I’d forgotten that the film’s European location was actually Amsterdam. It was possible Ann and I had already unknowingly crossed the “Skinny Bridge” not quite lost, but completely turned around (We had indeed; we jet-lagged dozed through the DVD once we were home). Antwerp’s Diamond District is a curvy row of shabby storefronts obscured by corrugated metal grilles. Some of the window displays were appealing if you’re into that stuff: smash and grab.

The postcard place isn’t far, but Yves has to drive as if we’re in a Chuck Berry song, turn and double back. Antwerp’s core streets have been jury-rigged for modern times. We arrive at another Grote Markt, three or four times the size of Haarlem’s; if this is Wednesday, it must be Belgium. City Hall is what I picture when I infrequently imagine the legislature of an EU national government. The imposing row of guildhouses to its right remind me that the lone economics class I took in university didn’t cover sixteenth century trade and commerce although, for some obscure reason, I’m aware of the seventeenth century tulip bulb market bubble bursting in 1637 and I’m pretty sure that neither Netherlands nor Belgium existed as I recognize them on my desk globe today back then. Ann’s and my ability to travel from time to time is a humbling gift because beyond the seen sights we’re constantly reminded of how little we know about these times and the past. Other people. And they’re not always Hell.

After the three of us, post-walkabout - having paused before Muze, a legendary jazz club, had sat in a café overlooking Antwerp’s Grote Market for an hour or more, enjoying the company, the food and the beverages, Yves drove us back to Central Station. Took a while, he got lost; some of the signs and storefronts seemed overly familiar on the second pass. My verbal filter was on, turned up to 11 and I was careful not to let him see me grinning like a maniac. But Frans Hals would’ve seen me framed in the passenger window. Anyway, Ann and I were in no rush.

Dispatches from the Crooked 9 has been your most unreliable, unbalanced and inaccurate alternative source of everything since 2013. My companion site www.megeoff.com is awake and alive. Watch and listen to some of the songs I co-wrote with The Muster Point Project or buy 5 KG, the complete EP. Of course, you can still purchase my latest book Of Course You Did in your preferred format from your preferred e-retailer.

A FAN’S NOTES

Baseball Statistics Integrate

Some days I’m prepared to coherently argue, unlike a crazed conspiracy theorist, that the game of baseball is entirely responsible for the creation and study of statistics, their recording and analysis, their application in the real world beyond sport; the advent of datamining, social media algorithms and ultimately educating AI. Then again, there was Herod’s census and the Domesday Book, but still …

The morning newspaper is a slog, a drag, like most of my past jobs. International and domestic hard news and political news is unfailingly grim. The business and finance pages are as confusing as one of my former boss’s jargon-juiced malapropped memos. Even the sports section, where you usually find the best writing because everybody already knows the score, is dreary now because you’ve finally figured out, to quote the elegant, elegiac poetry of Mick Jagger about something else, “It doesn’t fuckin’ matter!”

But that extraneous stuff, the halo around the reality of daily living and family and friends, can be awfully sticky: the red Montreal Canadiens sweater, Never a Dull Moment, Len Deighton novels and that utterly brilliant scene in The Wire when McNulty and Bunk work out a fatal bullet’s trajectory in an empty apartment, their extensive dialogue consisting solely of the word “fuck” or variations thereof.

For reasons I’ll briefly explain, baseball has stuck with me like, well, pine tar. The sporting press was a constant in our home during my Montreal childhood. My big brother was a voracious consumer of Sport, Sports Illustrated and The Sporting News. I ransacked his bedroom for back issues when he wasn’t home. When the Expos arrived in 1969, it was beyond a miracle that, my God, Bob Gibson, Roberto Clemente, Willie Mays and Henry Aaron would play the game in our town. Montreal had some significant history too. Jackie Robinson spent a season with the AAA Royals before busting through Major League Baseball’s (MLB) colour barrier with the Brooklyn Dodgers in 1947.

Baseball sounded great on a.m. radio, better than the Top 40 Countdown. It reads well, both in poetry and prose. It films well for highlights and Hollywood. I was decent enough to play one season of intercity ball; good field, no hit. My current go-to fashion accessory is a navy blue, twentieth century retro St. Louis Cardinals road cap, the intertwined StL emblem is fire engine-red. I bought a new glove about ten years ago, an Easton to replace my beloved Wilson Bobby (not Barry) Bonds model which somehow became a casualty in one of my divorces.

A few seasons ago MLB declared the Negro Leagues to be “major” leagues. Well, gee, they would’ve been given segregated baseball’s oil and water talent pools. The Negro Leagues existed between 1920 and 1948. There were about half a dozen of them, small loops on low budgets (Robinson played for the Kansas City Monarchs before joining the Royals). Late last month MLB announced that Negro Leagues stats would be incorporated into “the record book.” A change has come to the lists. New names long overdue. Satchel Paige isn’t just a black and white Life magazine portrait and aged sage of homilies any longer. Josh Gibson, whose career .372 batting average surpasses Ty Cobb’s .367, gets his overdue due. And what about Homestead (Pittsburgh essentially) Grays first baseman, Buck Leonard, who hit clean up behind Gibson? 

The record book used to be tactile, weighty: The Baseball Encyclopedia and, later, Total Baseball. Everything’s online now, digital stats tend not to bow bookcase shelves. Those books were as big and heavy as the brass-clasped volumes of family scripture; their content equally ripe for misinterpretation and argument too. But it’s only right that gospel be changed, expanded and updated. We learn as we live. You have to look back in order to see the better days ahead.

I’m a cynical man. But MLB’s decision to finally recognize rival segregated statistics didn’t strike me as patronizing or pandering. Pandering is orchestrated Pride and cancer nights. Patronizing is shilling Pride and cancer merchandise, rainbow or pink caps and jerseys. A wrong has been righted, finally. Granted, it’s not Pope Francis confessing to the Catholic Church really fucking things up these past two thousand years. And MLB is certainly guilty of lucrative surface atonement, teams playing games clad in throwback Negro Leagues uniforms.

I believe MLB missed an earlier chance for apology and atonement back in 2005. That’s when the Expos began National League play as the Washington Nationals. The District of Columbia (DC) had lost the American League Senators twice, emigres first to Minnesota and then to Texas. The Montreal Expos withering during their last couple of sad seasons were Philip Roth’s Port Rupert Mundys, homeless. The Expos had their last at-bats in San Juan, Puerto Rico as broke and busted wards of MLB. Very fucked. During the Second World War the Homestead Grays began to play increasingly larger portions of their home schedule in DC, dodging dwindling crowds, chasing money. You see where I’m going here. You see where MLB could’ve gone twenty years ago.                                         

Dispatches from the Crooked 9 has been your most unreliable, unbalanced and inaccurate alternative source of everything since 2013. My companion site www.megeoff.com is awake and alive. Watch and listen to some of the songs I co-wrote with The Muster Point Project or buy 5 KG, the complete EP. Of course, you can still purchase my latest book Of Course You Did in your preferred format from your preferred e-retailer.