studentscarveheartsoutofcoal

The Distinct Smell of The Czech Bourgeoisie and Proletariat

2005-12-12T11:46:00.000-08:00

"What shall I compare thee too?" must have been asked by a hornily metaphorical Vaclav or Dagmar over beers, between gratifying cloud of smoke - "A sausage, my love" is probably the sincerest answer. In the world stinky competition, the public Czech is slowly pushing out Korean kimchi breath (this year triumphing the usually formidable and greatly feared "Yom Kippur Hello"), Italian vampire killers, pong of Latin American or even the inmitable Indian curry sweat, perfected, not by Indians themselves, but rather by the sordidly putrid British, who also gave us Liquor Laws and Coldplay. But while being breathed on by a Kim, Marco, Valentine, Singh or Little Timmy Innit recall but a spice, entrepreneurial wearers of the hotest czech fragrance evoke the entire meal. Meaty, pickled and fried - a well placed armpit, rendolent of onion, swine, saurkraut - makes our bohemian stomachs growl for a little gastronomical universe. This universe best discovered in Pragues many, often crowded trams, each turn bringing with it a new waft, a new brand of Klobassa, a new insight into the eating habits of our fellow citezens. Though we may not sleep with all of our neighbors, we often go to sleep with the tender flavours they have impressed upon us, and if your bath water smells as much of sulphur as mine does, the dreams are devlish indeed. The problem, many people suggest, is the lack of hygenic products for men - this may well be the case, and it is true that the many beauty stores here are almost exclusively female, the tiny mens section covered with a ghostly film of dust - but the average Czech male seem rather well soaped and scrubbed, and this does not explain the spicy feminine scent. Unique pituitary glans? A daily hazing I don't know about? I'll assume for now that Czech seduction has something in common with the much mythologized (and probably fictional) spanish mode, except with more pan-grease than crotch-fry behind the ear. I'll also wager, further, that personal scent is a competitive affair, that the peacocks and boars alike intentionaly vie to be more repulsively alluring than the next. By late night the smell has changed - putrified hops and wine on the skin overtake the ever-turning grill - which leads me to believe then, that eau de prague is a vital, vicacious insult to the enlarged liver. A man or woman who smells of sausage and pickles can be counted on - trust me.
Will anyone who reads this post tell me what people smell like where you are from? And, secondly, what smells good to you?

My Occupation, The Euro, Compare and Contrast, Mucus, Stains, Stucco II

2005-09-11T13:31:00.000-07:00

My Occupation

No more fluent in English than your average wild boar, if I'm not functionally illiterate then I'm surely grammatically disfunctional. But authority is not precision, but rather profusion, so I find myself, eyes rolled back and froth to either side of my mouth, spouting: "past participle, negative, verb, adverb which is present simple" to an audience in rapture. My divine possesion both mutually incomprehensible and communally an act of innatentive bullshit (I hear your little fingers text messaging!), we all nod sagely, having gotten (not a word, by the way) past this little hump. If I find that they are truly drifting elsewhere, I mime a lurid bodily function - especially popular was going to the doctor day ("aaahchoo!") and the awful English spelling of the word "Diarreah" or as they spell it "Diarhoeah" or some combination thereof. In short, I'm an English prostitute - but in the protestant tradition, which means that I'm chaste - I'm only paid to talk.

The Euro in 2010

Which reminds me - the greatest acrobats of the English language are Prague's many prostitutes. Because Czech people refuse, out of an obscure sense of dignity, to look at anyone or anything (more on that later) no matter unhornily innocuous you might seem, while you are checking out the bountiful plaster fruits spilling out of a facade (see "Protestant tradition"), and telling yourself crude Eve and Adam jokes, you have already been sussed out as a co-solicitor of Pragues service to Central Europe - which is, incidently, neither yogurt nor upright terds, who like their Canine donors, have been taught by some scatlogical magic to stand on their hind legs. Anyhow, when you are approached, someone calls out "hello you" - being Canadian, and as such amiable and forever strapped for good conversation topics, the Albertan parrot in me croaks in response "hello" after which I am offered "Five hundred blow jobs, yes you want" a generous offer indeed, and I have to stop the budding English teacher in myself from saying, "No, you want to say, 'Hello, would you like 500 blow jobs'" and since, though never having earned more than a short stack of dimes in my life, I now teach Business English, I am further tempted to say: "I am sorry to dissapoint you, but I am Canadian, which means, in all cultural fairness, that the next person I will have sex with will be my future wife, after a year or two of marriage, and only once or twice, through sheets, and in a fully darkened motel room in Niagra Falls with the Bachman Turner Overdrive playing. Secondly, you might be better off offering a smaller sum of what we will call, 'The Occupation', which, as you probably well know, is called downsizing, and functions as yet another E-U-P-H-E-M-I-S-M, euphemism." Instead, of course, I blush, apologize profusely, and return my eyes to a pair of stone breasts above a neon sign announcing "Live Sex Caberet". The Euro has been pushed back to 2010, which will give the Czech Koruna some time to further equalize, by which time the whoremongers of Prague, down to 168 "Occupations" a night, will congregate in seedy pubs, and tearfully recall the good old days.

Compare and Contrast

The benifit of living in a particularly beautiful city made out the most frivolous of materials, is that a handsomely-ugly man looks good against peeling walls - he fits right in - because he projects the same vital decay that the buildings shed. Wherever people have been vomiting for hundreds of years, I can't help but look my best - and, of course, my dillapidated alure is further bufetted a general european obsession with Woody Allen - the only man who has made me want to shave only the top of my head. Prague is the Woody Allen powderkeg, and here he reigns as king (second place goes to Jim Jarmusch, the single most consistently overated indie director who is not Hal Hartley, and who is not even Jewish anyhow) - stoop, pull at your hair, stutter, reference sand in the crotch or your mother, and suddenly, all those Czech girls who appreciate good old, Eastern European neurosis, misery and academic prattle are staring right at you, wondering why one of your arms is twice the thickness of the other. Woody Allen gave the handsomely-ugly a sense of hope, and lent the beautiful a sincere notion of charity. The handsomely-ugly and the inarguably-beautiful enter Annie hall segregated, and emerge, awkwardly synthetic, perfectly mixed. In much the same way, strange cities with a unique aesthetic of comical-deterioration pimp thier little Woodys to the formerly remote Janes and Sarahs of this world. In Montreal for example, beautiful girls from all parts of Canada flee adulation, titles, and pre-marital bounty to lustily mingle with the obscure boys who have watched them with intellectual longing ("Shall I compare thee to...) and who have drifted along in their wake, only to reappear before them, both stunned and bold, no longer in need of metaphors to outdo obvious beauty - but rather composing themselves up rusted stairs, in rare lights and against walls that prove a dozen attempts to cover brick - the handsomely-ugly think up deft hyperboles needed to revive, re-evoke and and lend mystery to a half-passed world that stands as a living testament to thier obscurity. Now, that was all very wordy and pretentious - and what I mean is this - I desperately require the company of beautiful women smitten by abstract art or obcure cities - they are the ones likely to delude themselves into thinking that I'm really quite beautiful too when there is food on my face and I've forgot my wallet and can't settle the bill. So, yes - the first thing you learned in University: compare and contrast. So, an open letter to every beautiful girl I have had or quite triumphantly failed at getting: you should see me here, in Prague - compared to this wall, I'm immaculately preseved - a true specimen of vigorous manhood.

Mucus

And while I am walking around applauding myself for my good luck, if I listen intently, someone is always clearing thier throat in Prague.

Stains

Which is perhaps why everything is stained.

Rains

And why I am thankful for the rain, because then the streets are naturally cleaned. The other morning, looking for milk as usual, I almost knocked over a terd standing erect at atleast 8 inches, growing like a coffee-color stalagmite from the ground. Everyone is Prague has a dog and no one even makes the least effort to pick up after them - which I have come to applaud as the particularly Czech adversion to "paying attention" which is taken to be quite rude. But when the rains come, and the terds are swept up into momentary rivers, I can only hope that the civic gesture is returned to sender.

Stucco II

God this city is beautiful - it grows on you, the and the affection really sticks the moment you cease to expect Paris or London or Rome out of it. Prague, the jewel of the Czech republic, can only be compared to itself - but sometimes, like when the rain stops after dinner and the sun pokes out sideways from the clouds, it is as if an Italian light makes the city glow, that it is as grand as London and more free than Paris. Stucco reflects nothing other than the habits of its moulders and keepers - it rather absorbs: light, girlish laughter, the clatter of heels or the soft-shuffle of blackbirds across eavestroughs. And then, moments later, it changes, the evidence falls away, the sun drops, and in this tiny city of splitered lanes, you are utterly lost again.

The New Jewish Cemetery

2005-09-07T01:04:00.000-07:00

Prague is filled with cemetaries, and near my flat, is the New Jewish Cemetery (from the late 19th and early 20th century) where Kafka is buried. It is a beautiful, overgrown site, with an elaborate funeral chapel and an imposing, if slightly deriorated wall. Supringly, I'm the only person there - and it is strange, and I guess strangely fitting, to walk alone along row after row of tombstones and crypts, most patiently awaiting legacies of doctors, buisnessmen and artists. I am always in cemeteries - and its not just a morbid fascination or even a quiet place to make out with girls equally charmed by Jewish solemnity - I like being in cemeteries because they are fields of upright poems in stone not subject to review, but, rather to rezoning laws (and this is an enormously contentious issue in Europe). In the least nauseating way, I increasingly feel like I've come to Prague, not only to avoid gainful employment, friendly service and good food elsewhere, and to oggle girls, drink cheap beer and pompously consider myself cosmopolitan, but, in the lightest sense, to retreive. Retreive what? I'm truly not sure - but the closest approximation of the sense I can put together is that I want to come to terms with my European history, or lack thereof, and what better place to do it than in the innocuous storyboard of Europe (Prague!), where, similarly, seemingly everyone else has been coming, monocle after pen after camera, for a thousand years running to do little or nothing, but to do little or nothing fancifully, with a unique cynical grace. So, in that esoterically unmentionable way, I'm in Prague to retreive a historical object I can't remember losing - not to discover, or even re-discover - and I'm unsuprised to find that everything I've come to see has turned to plastic advertising, or flaking stucco, or, as in this cemetery, warped stone tableture written in accordingly in Hebrew, German or Czech, none of which I can understand. But, I can read names, names like Karel Heinrich Cohen (Czech, German, Hebrew), covering that particularly European, Baconesque triptich of indentity negotiated between several projections of anguish, displacement, assimilation and nascent pride. The benifit of cemeteries, is that gravestones unify and encapsulate the enormous difficulty of being several things at once - and then make you, finally, at your very least, whole again, put back together in a couple lines.
The sense you get along the almost silent, ivy choked pathways, is the same you would get walking into an empty movie theatre, the impressions of first dates and daughters and fathers still pressed into the seats, overgrown with cornstalks and licorice. In this theatre the projector has frozen on a key image several moments before the credits, perpetually fixing the story both before and after an obvious, but no less mysterious ending. Same in the cemetery: time has stopped still before a catastrophe and is almost as immobile afterward. This gives the place the feeling of suspension, of time let loose from the movement of time, like an escalator that has lightly floated upward from its liquid axles. You also get the brinkmans pleasure of a chair forever poised to tip over, but fixed in swoon, because the horrific event between then and now is understood and studied by all the earthly living, but the gravestones, who are the only remaining pupils of death, are delightfully unharnessed from consequence, and unwitting of tragedy. And so the million visitors to the ancient gnarled tombstones in Josevof, and the curious hordes who cringe at the relatively recent death-camps wont find much of a reason to come here - the place has neither the lure of myth nor horror - it is a half built bridge that goes nowhere, that vaits in vain. What an obscure, lonely place of Czech tinged names, German proffessions and Hebrew blessings, a light and sad cemetery cheated of its dead.

Stucco, Breasts, Milk, Coffee and Pay Washrooms

2005-09-05T01:35:00.000-07:00

Stucco

Prague is a crumbling work of art, a dream in tattered stucco - a beautiful leper like Michelangelo's David smeared with a haphazard layer of cookie dough, sunned, rained and snowed upon for varying portions of a millenium. Everywhere you look, bits and clumps of Pragues thickly applied pastel foundation have peeled off, and the red brick underneath softly radiates like a geriatric herpes seen between holes in a once elegant, but charmingly cheap gown worn by an uncrowned princess to an imaginary ball, where the most sophisticated guests are dead drunk and encouraging thier dogs to shit on the floor. Prague is the sort stunningly awkward girl you feel like genius for loving, a constant compliment to an obscure sensibility. On the other hand, Prague is also a strikingly beautiful transvestite with the rousing breath of a thousand year old dipsomaniac who has digested the past half-century very poorly indeed.
There are cities made in stone, and cities made in stucco, the former attacked, the latter occupied, so you must forgive yourself for thinking that you are trapped in some pan-germanic fantasty (Anglo-Saxons included), dreampt up by Austrians, designed by Italians and orientalized by Jews, all of whom, of course, are now back to interchangably compliment, depress and insult themselves with the macabre end to a gloriously crappy millenium. But it is still deliriously wonderful: arcades, miniskirts, parks, miniskirts, beer, a castle. Suprisingly, you will find that many Czechs don't particularly care for the quintet of old parts we quite naturally fawn over and fondle with our wallets open and annoying digital cameras poised. The Czechs are rather proud of the sometimes gritty neighborhoods that ring the centre, the neighborhoods that they built, beautiful in thier own right, and no less outrageous, stucco heads, metal spires and elaborate balconies figuring in everywhere. Garish Catholicity, smothered by the Hussite revolution, then by communism and finally by liberalism, appears on buildings or in the ubiquitous, utterly involved make out sessions you pass every minute or two. Anyhow, the clownish response of the inner suburbs to the baroque pearl in the middle is an oddly generous gesture, and the occasional clumsyness of the bulky plaster facades only adds to thier playful, childish beauty [and god, when on the rare occasion that the sun shines!], in the same way that the economical walkups ringing Montreal's centre have an almost unintentional elegance, completely unrelated to sophistication or refinement. Because, what kills essentially Catholic cities, now riven to commerce and atheism, is refinement, because it smothers and smoothes the germ of architectural and occasional social excess, and challenges the thread of amiable quietude that runs through societies that express in the public and private arts, but never in a public and private way. Anyhow, this is all getting really quite prosy, so lets move on to Breasts, which is what I sure you all would rather read about.

Breasts

Prague is filled with beautiful, confident and witty women of every age - what they also share, and forgive me for pointing this out, is a commodious supply of busom, which, on a hot day, when slacks shrink up into mini-skirts and tops dive to navels, is a truly alarming sight, especially to those of us, amply man-breasted and bestially furred, who are perpetually on a post-freudian escape with angular art girls whom we can liken to supple musical intruments. Here, every woman from 12 onwards (I have no idea what they put into the milk here) carries, as often as not, abundant, braless cleavage, the most fetching among whom, to bashfully Hebrew eyes, in this coutry of reputed atheists, dangle Christs worst motel cot like a tranfixing pendulum undecided between thier supple mamaries. She is likely smoking and often eating a greasy sausage, and she is, apart from 1 dollar beer, the reason why 70% of the tourists here are young British men, who are reminded, in ricket-thin eastern europe, of emaciated renditions of thier mothers without pedal pushers and hair curlers.

Milk

It is seven in the morning, I clutch my stomach and make for the corner store, and there are already well-dressed fellow citizens groping feverishly for thier first beer of the day. Last nights beer a dark cloud over my early morning thirst, I search in vain, as I do most mornings, for unskimmed milk that does not come in a wood-panneled tetra pack from the 90s. Why the little old lady behind the counter can flog a good dozen variations on teen porn but no good "homo" milk might run contrary to my highly intellectual mamarian observations, but I am now beginning to see some logic in the echo-socialist lust for prepackaged goods. While we North Americans get nostalgia-tongued over "Classic Sauces" and grandmas cooking, which was awful at the time, but good in retrospect, Czechs, by extension, like thier food as old as possible - triumphantly withstanding. So a chicken sub with an expiry date of 2025 means that Frantisek has 20 safe years to get to it, and another 20 years for the half eaten sub to grow mould. As I have neglected to mention, in my particularly charming way, the level of digestive sincerity in my first week was alarmingly high, but now, my bedroom coupled in dimension and sound with the toilet, I think that I am learning by auditory example, through an effectively transparent inch of dry wall, how to eat or not eat in the same way that the keen don earphones overnight to train themselves for the abusive company of Parisians. The other night my roomate's boorish guest rambled in at four in the morning and proceeded to leisurely vomit where I desperately needed to piss. "I will never drink until I am sick, it is in an insult to myself, the beer, and the toilet upon which I do daily sit" I decreed to myself. Predictably, the Czech male left everything just as he last saw it, because mommy will come soon, and I would imagine that the banana colored sheets deranged on the couch will remain to bed the next tenants.

Coffee

Coffee, necessary as it is to the perpetuation of my crimes against the learned english language, is a horror I face daily in one of Pragues unbelivable Cafes. Prague coffee, by the most generous description, is thankfully scentless diarreah casually dumped on a thick layer of congealed, acrylic semen. Cappucinnos skip the semen, double the diarreah, and add a dollop of bubbly spittle. The sugar is tart and insoluble, the glasses ranging from ridiculous beakers to embarrasing mock jugs - as usual, I'd do better to get smashed on a couple pints of the Czech republic's fine, shockingly inexpesive beer, which, ranging from 75 cents to 1.25, is about half the price of water.

Pay Washrooms

The true suckers for opulence, the digestive dilletantes, pay to go to the washroom. It rarely costs more than 10 crowns, but I am constantly struck with the idea that I should be getting my moneys worth. For example, because a meagre #1 forever warns of the hybrid #3, perhaps I should wait here, in this revolting temple of relief, for inspiration to strike. A no-go. Prostitution is legal, but any sort of pants-down loitering is a crime, a para-masterbatory offence to the dual liberalisms of capital exchange and fluid relief. Strange part about the more lurid of the latter being that many lusty Czechs and the odd hormonally charmed tourist duo seem to be doing it for free. On every corner, in the darkened bowels of each metro station and on tram and bus the young and old alike are straddled and entwined, and the otherwise stony faces of Prague dip thier dusty tongues into one anothers boozy mouths, groping at porcine and hop unnafected buttocks, then returning to statuesque reserve, love stung hands lashing back into pockets the moment they hit the pavement. These momentary bursts of uncharacteristic passion amid the drench of solemnity and disinterested hucksterism [backdropped by beauty, beauty and more beauty, of course] convince the single man, leviticus a dark cloud over his cruder ambitions, that he should wash his hands in the river and piss against ancient walls, and where the dueling streams, one beer, and the other Austria, meet, that golden city we shall call Prague.