weickgenant | blog

In the Wall Street Journal Europe’s “Weekend” section a couple weekends back, an exposition of hyperlocal Italian cuisine:

My road to Ceglie started in Rome, at Agustarello (Via Giovanni Branca 100; 39-06-574-65-85), an unassuming space with a pervasive scent of roasting peppers in the middle of the Testaccio neighborhood. “A place for many,” reads the menu, “but not for all.” Serving Roman specialties since 1957, the restaurant comes highly recommended by local experts, but the catchphrase on the menu serves as warning to anyone with the nerve to try Testaccino cuisine. Nerve salad, in fact, is on the menu. So is cow tail alla cacciatora, as well as appetizers, including pecorino cheese with peppered bruschetta, that refer to the city’s traditions and change according to the season.

Just for fun, a few photos, all taken within 15 minutes’ walk of my house, i.e., smack in downtown Amsterdam.

The boys from Glasgow can play.

Last night under a stage doused in royal blue. Paradiso stacked to the rafters with a crowd of all ages. Mogwai never have much to say to the audience. “We’re Mogwai. We’re from Glasgow. Thanks for coming” is the most we got. Mogwai are a mostly instrumental band. Words serve little purpose.

Just a few thoughts about the band after last night’s show. Not about the show so much: about the band. Because I absolutely adore a group of musicians who take no prisoners.

A Mogwai performance is like a Mondriaan canvas: an art synthesized. A theory put into obstinate practice. The fragmented geometry of an aesthetic. If modern electrified music substituted the spatial volume of a multi-member orchestra with the elemental volume of amplification, post rock spliced the DNA of composition into the molecular insistence of the single passage; the power of the individual note, obstinately replicating itself. The transduction of sound wave into electric pulse, the fragmentation of that pulse into digital code. That essential constructive simplicity regaining complexity through myriad sonic manipulations. Volumes loud enough to shatter bone, played clean enough to tease, provoke and then sooth the mind, drawing you into an uncomfortable trance broken occasionally by pixelated visions of dystopia projected in widescreen above the band.

It would be easy for a band like Mogwai to fall into the same clichés that haunt post-rock performers, clichés after all they helped create: the ten-minute cathartic buildup, the striving sense of epic, the stoic devotion to blistering volume and pedal-gazing detachment from the audience. The boys from Glasgow transcend the clichés. Their set was centered around songs from their most recent album, “Hardcore will never die, but you will.” It was new and classic at the same time. By the time they closed out the show with their old standby “Mogwai Fear Satan,” you just didn’t want them to leave.

You did wish, however, that you’d brought along a set of earplugs.

Because the boys from Glasgow are loud.

Rome is the first stop on a multipolar journey across the landscape of South Italian cuisine, for a story I’m putting together. Here are a couple afternoons’ worth of casual snaps.

Looking for some Amsterdam-based travel story ideas today, decided to take a wander through the De Baarsjes neighborhood.

People who yearn after “La Dolce Vita” often come to exasperation, upon moving to / visiting Italy, when they find that there are two sides to the coin (and I have witnessed a number of these aha moments in my day): the laidback, cafe-sidewalk lifestyle in many ways grows out of a necessary impetus to positively deal with time spent unexpectedly waiting.

When you walk up to a rural train station and a small hand-printed notice at the entrance warns of a “vertenza sindacale” that may or may not cause the cancellation of any or all scheduled train departures, it’s a good bet yours will be cancelled - or “suppressed” in the jargon of the ferroviari. Otranto’s station only departs one way in the evening in September - Maglie, distant half of the 40-odd kilometers between the seaside town and Lecce - and sure enough, ours was cancelled. Part of a day in which we spent four hours in train station purgatory and three in our stated destination. So we waited for the next, and last, daily departure, at 6:09 p.m.

I decided it would be a great opportunity for a few snaps on the newly acquired Olympus P1. As a good friend of mine would say, this ain’t my first rodeo.

Music lifts over the Oudegracht.

The interplay between bell-and-amplified piano and the medieval city walls creates a gothic rotophony of nostalgia on a painterly background of fast-moving clouds in fading late-summer light. Every candle shimmers with a memory of the city’s past. Every laugh twinkles in timeless consonance with centuries of brick and a moment of musical etherea. In the city’s clearings, bodies stop and sit, heads turn, time sits on its haunches as this magical, droning shimmer flies on the wings of the breeze through the Utrecht night.

Via my friend @defrel I discover the tune being played was Canto Ostinato by Simeon ten Holt.

The canals never stop flowing. Locks to let the water through. Streams of tourists with their first eyes out of Central Station gazing at the crooked buildings of the city built on sand. Amber-glazed windows in the direct gaze of the unsetting summer sun. Couples sitting on stoops grilling meat- not many people here have a backyard.

The summer in full bloom, and I’m living at the head of Amsterdam’s grachtengordel (canal ring) for the next two weeks. At the block next to ours, I’ve counted four of the city’s famous coffeeshops. Every glazed-eyed American that steps out of them looks with amazement at a sight I’ve internalized and become immune to. An overflowing of Golden Age glory. Astride canals that never sleep.

Sifting through old travel photos, came across this, from December 2008. Was a surreal moment for me. The setting: Devil’s Lake, Wisconsin. A lake near Baraboo, WI, the town where I was born. The figure in the photo is my lovely life companion. This visit was the first time I had been on home soil in about 15 years.

Had to do without mine for about a month. So very happy to have my fingers back on her keyboard. What a great writing tool this is.