American Woman Stay Away From Me!

Posted by Matthew Crouch at 17:51

In Brussels this time of year it seems every other public square, and there are a lot in this city, has some sort of fair like party going on. With this strange summer’s European heat wave weather making for some warm if not hot nights, street life here has taken on, by folks here taking their typical layers of Belgian styled clothing off, an almost beach like appearance. Although thankfully I haven’t had the misfortune of spotting any camel toe despite the prevalence of tourists with fanny packs. Without the normal layers of discreet unkempt styles normally seen on these streets, we here have had to get used to seeing each other in ways we’re not used to with fashion limitations that typical weather here has on us, being for the moment gone.

Being something of an immigrant myself I happen to live between two neighborhoods with large Arabic-Belgian communities. Indeed when I first arrived here it took me awhile to get used to seeing my neighbors especially women dressed with various veils. I was pretty easily shocked I guess especially when passing a group of women with a few having their entire faces covered. My first instinct was these women should not have to do that because here that isn’t required of women and I felt this priggish idea that they shouldn’t wear such things. Eventually though I got used to it and then it became interesting to try and see when walking around town here doing my errands or just commuting on foot how many different kind or styles of covering I would see in a short walk. At first a veil was a veil and a veil was always a shock. I somehow thought that there was a monoculture like uniformity of conformity to the veil but then I began to see within the women who choose to wear such coverings a whole spectrum range of diversity. Eventually I could even distinguish some hints of cultural origin to what fabric was worn which way.

Some days I even feel like I live in a modern day Byzantium where East and West meet in a city between two lands and then I have to remind myself that this is Brussels and this is just one of Europe’s cultural crossroads. Now I even see a certain dignity these veils afford. Like a good coat covers much, ones wealth or lack of it is concealed making these women equal in their own way.

Just when I think I have become acclimated to the complexities of life here something unexpected jolts me. I was bicycling past the square at the end of my street on my way home through whatever summer’s festival was going on there. These summer festivals designed by some strange politix that think their administration can liven up the city center by putting up stacks of concert electronic amplification with a temporary stage with racks of disco like lighting in what is essentially an outdoor room about the same size as a school gymnasium. I mean the natural acoustics of these old squares made public gatherings of manageable size crowds in one square possible all in the days before electricity. So once the cars are gone and the people free to move about musicians with instruments can play and be heard without electronic amplification. But nooo the city has to put up amplification to such a degree suitable for an outdoor football field for a gathering. Consequently nobody would go near the stage where the speaker stacks were and the effect was to drive most of the people from the suburbs for who these events cater to anyways (to lure them into the city) screaming back home to the relative peace and quiet of the ‘burbs.

So I passed such an event after the sound and light extravaganza had been turned off mercifully for us neighbors at the reasonable hour of eleven at night. Then people could re-gather and talk and hear each other. The accordion players returned and unintentional summer life resumed all on its own on the square. That was when something caught my eye that just about knocked me off my bike. It is hard to explain the magic you get in Brussels that makes all of its many hassles completely worthwhile. The center for the most part is still an assemblage of pre-automotive urban town planning or perhaps lack of it. The streets are often impossibly narrow in places never designed for nothing more than animal based transportation. Sidewalks are nowadays more an oversized curb- there are more pedestrians anyways than cars so people tend to walk between the passing cars right in the streets. Most of the houses and houses with street level shops or cafes are quite narrow especially where there are older buildings. When living within a building not more than nine feet wide often times I feel penned in tomb like and I have to remind myself that if this room weren’t so narrow like all my neighbors buildings then I’d have to drive to the baker for a loaf of bread. As it is the baker is just down the street within a minutes walk of the front door here. What this sort of proportion provides is a unique intimacy with strangers an intimacy that is at once close and open and simultaneously most definite in assuring boundaries. I might not have a personal space of a meters wide radius around my body like I would when walking the broad unused sidewalks in the Midwest but I learned fast how to keep a psychic space when brushing past strangers here.

So I was bicycling through such a summer nighttime crowd (victim of the heat wave fashion necessity myself, shirtless in cut-offs and sandals) weaving my path home when I looked up and into the eyes of a young woman sitting, more like perched elegantly, on a bench with an adoring young man sitting quietly in the shadow of her remarkable presence. I can’t begin to describe this woman’s appearance for she was beautifully draped beneath fabric that seemed to fall from the crown of her head. Only her beautiful dark eyes were revealed. I felt a shock by her presence and though I thought I was by now used to the mysteries of the veil this time it was like seeing someone dressed as such for the first time. From underneath the fabric I could see the outline of a nose and cheeks but the eyes were majestic. I did one of those unintentional neck breaking double takes which caught her eye and for a moment we looked into each others eyes. There is nothing I can articulate in written words to describe what I saw in those eyes or in the whole of her discrete elegant presence. For what must have been a split second time stopped and beauty and life were felt for the gift they are.

Those eyes enhanced with makeup in a way Vogue magazine could not ever emulate! For Vogue magazine will never be able to sell the idea that when it comes to beauty its what you don’t see rather than what you see. I couldn’t help but lock my eyes with her eyes at that moment and the beauty I saw framed by black fabric is etched permanently on my minds eye. Of course she looked down relinquishing the spell she had over me with a certain uncommon poise and grace and the fellow with her regained the prize of her attention, what a life we havehere! Such freedom of expression in so many ways from so many different influences!

After spending this unusually hot summer enduring the fashions the weather spawned, the Britney Spears fashion influences that make you want to curse MTV for hawking its wares and sense of eroticism abroad. I mean Britney is fine when she’s confined to yr TV I suppose because you can always change the channel to get her to leave the room. But when middle-aged mothers and their daughters begin carrying off discount store imitations of Ms Spears with fleshy midriffs seeming to flap with the breeze. I don’t know I begin to think we here in the west might benefit from quite a bit more cultural exchange with the near east.

Freedom of expression
Freedom of religion
Freedom from religion
Free speech
With these things we must try to get along.

In the mean time those haunting kind eyes will look into my soul for the rest of my life. What a privilege and gift that moment was!
Still I can’t stop humming that Guess Who/Lenny Kravitz song!

American Woman
Stay away from me!
I don’t need your war machines
I don’t need your ghetto scenes!
American Woman
Stay away from me...

 

Bottom of the retail food chain/roadkill people/smashing pumpkins tribute

Posted by Matthew Crouch at 19:05

For BJ wherever he is along that roadside

Its hard to put your faith even when you are an atheist into an American band but I did somewhat with this now defunct band the Smashing Pumpkins. I actually don’t like as much of their music as I should to be writing that. I certainly haven't listened to all their songs. I would like to though but I'm not going to go out and invest in their retirement by buying all their albums. They were a prolific band those Smashing Pumpkins. What do I know about them? Not much.

Their name is odd but it brings back memories of life in a nameless suburb for which America is now chock full of. Memories of the nineteen seventies before disco, when the cancers of strip mall-ing where still tolerable in most places, those Smashing Pumpkins brings back feelings of white aluminium sided tacky homes with hints of colonial architecture to them. Green Lawn chemical trucks on search and destroy missions against brown August lawns despite the water shortages, persistent heat wave and damage to the local water table. Parked neatly in front of these almost cardboard like homes large sleek American cars before they fell to the Trojan horse of the small seemingly affordable Japanese car that we always called death traps but didn’t know why. Back when the original VW Beetle still roamed the roads in all their oddity. When there was actually a manufacturer of cars called the AMC (American Motors Corp) who made a car called a Gremlin. I'd kill for one of those. Or a Pacer built for fat people or so we thought.... Back then the radio still hummed with the sounds of Jefferson Aeroplane/Starship with Grace Slick belting out rock anthems with an appealing devilish sound. They'll always be Jefferson Aeroplane to me because I once saw in this series of books, a 20th century retrospective, in the school library, on the sixties, with a particularly arty poster of them. And didn't like Grace Slick or Jefferson Starship start a record company with Grace's daughter or daughters father called Smashing Pumpkin Records. I wonder if they spawned this band that I don’t really know yet adore?

I do though remember working diligently in the autumn in late October on carving the perfect face in a brilliant orange orb of a pumpkin. And that its ridges and curves would always thwart my designs for its face and something altogether unwanted or unexpected would emerge from my hands stiffened by fighting with a dull carving knife to extract its face. A face it seemed the pumpkin tried to extract from me. All the while looming in the back of my mind was knowing that a bunch of teenager boys were going to roam the neighbourhood in a pack while I was out Trick-or-Treating searching for the lonely pumpkin younger children cherished to leave smashed on the pavement - smashing their sense of life in a endless nameless suburb. A feeling that would return again and again. And what exactly does this band with its sinister name have to do with Hallowe'en? This band who lost at least one member to the American denial of the need for safe recreational drugs or maybe that was just hearsay. I sorta wish I knew this band. Their first song I remember liking was 1979. I remember '79. The songs beautiful abstract melancholia allows me to fill in the blanks with a sense of my own memories from back then. Memories of my brother driving me to school in his old, permanently being restored, never got restored, Mercury Cougar. Listening to Aerosmith’s Toys in the Attic (get this ON 8-TRACK!!!) in the mornings sitting in traffic while not talking to each other. Sitting in those brown vinyl bucket seats down low in the car next to my brother is the closest I ever got to him and it makes sense we didn’t talk.

I remember asking my co-worker Aaron to steal that new (Mellon Collie and the Infinite Sadness) CD so we could just drive around in his mom’s Chevy Cavalier listening to it. Aaron my good friend always off being fabulous. He never did steal that CD for me though we stole others from our retail job. We never listened to it in his car as I wanted him to with me as he always had band practice everynite after work. I did steal Melancholy and the Infinite Sadness though. At first I had a hard time getting past the guitars. Aaron kept telling me they had other music like their video of antique science fiction with the “Man in the Moon” references. That old cinematic image still harping at my soul since i first saw it as a kid. That image is a part of my subconscious I swear as is their reproduction video of it with amazing beauty. The band ruled. To bad I got fired for stealing before I could have stolen other CDs of their music. I remember Aaron used to leave every nite with like ten CDs rattling on him in every pocket as we’d pass through the electronic checkpoint. That miserable checkpoint. I never used to steal from work before they had those. But then it was such an insult to me when they installed them and forced us to use them as customers that I felt it MANDATORY to steal from where I worked. Anything everyday. And it felt good. It made up for the miserable corporates who'd literally "come down" the corporate ladder like from some Metropolis above us where the sun shined to check up on us. Or from the miserable yuppy customers with their diet cappucinos and cheesecake breaks.

The same guys in ties and jackets and BMWs parked at odd angles outside who used to as kids SMASH MY PUMPKINS mercilessly not respecting the life that came to them with their burning candles inside at nite. Maybe that is why i couldn’t get a job after getting fired for stealing. And then when I did it was for five dollars and hour working from 8pm to 8am four consecutive nights a week at an all nite video store. Where at four in the morning guys would check out like eight hours worth of heteroanal videos due back within 24 hours. And I would think at least they'll be indoors and off the streets either watching their stuff or sleeping to it playing on their TVs VCR and this way the streets were safer. Not that I care about safe streets. But sitting alone in a video store on a nameless street at four in the morning I sorta gave it a thought then. Fearing the nite I saw a guy come in and come toward me to blow my brains out for the twenty in change in the cash drawer and all the videos he could carry. But I quit that job fearing he might get me there. Then i escaped to health food retail, from all nite videos, from seven days a week books, music, art and coffee, from a 24-7 photocopy shop all on the same vague multi-lane (the one without crosswalks) intersection near the hospital i was born at. In the Midwest. In Ohio. Alongside an eight-lane road with lights and miles of retail shopping pits. The only interesting places - the all nite ones and then only after midnite. How many strip malls can one endure? How many parking lots and various shops inside with their little enchantments? How many days on end showing up for work in hot weather, cold weather? Snow. Drought. Rain. Or astonishingly beautiful and heavy storms. When what was going on outside overhead made me feel alive and sensual like nothing else I knew: To give that moment up for a time clock commitment. which I was not surprisingly always late for.

So this is all like my life as the Smashing Pumpkins. Certain songs release these feelings somehow magically. Their song The Boy reminding me of my lover being new in my life. Reminding me of those feelings of being brought to life not by an amazing storm but by someone all too like myself. Or their images of blurry neon enhanced retail realities. Smirking at those around them. Knowing full well first hand the retail life people like us were born into to serve with all our being. So we could buy their music making their lives richer. So we could work our retail counters so their corporations would get richer while we barely made it by. Watching day after day from behind retail. Watching each day slide into a traffic lit sunset at the end of a too wide road flanked by tarred over horizon lines under bright advertising lites. where the heat waves broke the horizon line of an immense man made ugliness. At least no matter what side those Smashing Pumpkins are on in this retail hell equation their songs seem to speak of knowing this vast, vast endless retail trap. And though they occasionally to me communicate a glamour in those retail dregs its a welcome glamour when your stuck without any glamour. When you see wealth come up next to you and slip away without any concern for your well-being. When you see all the money and merchandize pass through your own hands for a pittance in pay to schlep it and you know your car won’t start after work at midnite and if it does, will it start to get you back at work by 8 am the next day. And does your company care they don’t pay you enough to navigate the roads and parking lots and neighbourhoods to get yourself to work. When they don’t care to provide health care. When there is no public transport that is worth its wait. Why go to work? When there is no welfare. When you are depressed with this lot and cannot move outta bed because the site of your car, the eight-lane roads, the heat or the cold, or the interminable parking lots is just not inspiration enough to inhale another auto exhaust breath of air. When the light above is dirty brown and the life below synthetic in most every way. This is when I feel like the rodent road kill destined life that emerges alongside certain roads near rivers and woods. Although I too drive the cars that kill and have killed road kill. Felt the car ride over a squealing victim. Felt tears over what I had done all while cows meat from a burger chain digested in my belly. While driving back to work to kiss the time clock to participate in meaningless retail realities. What is this America we've made? It couldn’t be uglier to look at or endure in its reality.

At least when I hear certain Smashing Pumpkin songs played at random on the radio I know someone somewhere has seen this Beast that has spread across the US devastating the lives of those trapped in it. Are they singing to wake up their listeners? Are they singing to keep them asleep? Are they singing because they too are trapped in these retail chains that were laid down for us before we were born? When I feel their music I don’t know. I do know they were one of the few roaming band of musicians in those days not too long ago who knew of this side of the retail realities of life deep within this Beast here in the Midwest. Along side state route 40 the old National road that crosses the nation. In places along it from where I’ve been there are many lanes. Many parking lots, chain linked fences, weeds, traffic lites. Retail hells with many victims trapped inside to their respective corporate whims. Neon lites. Flourescent lite. Sodium orange streetlights. Light pollution. in essence anything unnatural being the rule. Lives with machines who count the money for you with connection to electronic lines guaging other peoples realities. People coming and going and no one noticing you so that if or when some bright soul does it terrifies you and before you feel relief at a kind and unfamiliar face they’ve gone. This is why I don’t work. I can’t bring myself to it. Retail is nowhere you want to be at any time for any reason. It’s more dangerous than Heroin and much, much more addictive. whether you are stuck buying the Cds or stuck shelving and selling them (or stuck making them) it’s a dangerous addiction. And the scariest thing of all when you stand along side route 40 in Columbus, Ohio on a hot summer day and look east, then west its strip malls and parking lots flanking eight lanes of road to nowhere for as far as you can see or care to drive. I don’t know if it’s like that all the way to either side of the nation on that road. Fast food. Records. Books. Clothes. Gas. Car Repair. Mufflers. Autos. New and used. Thrift stores. Fry Pits. Neon. Fluorescence. Tarmac. And big, big sky that although omnipresent overhead no one much notices. Such a flat useless existance. I can’t shop. I can’t work. It’s all too traumatic. It may not be that way straight across the nation but there are enough deviations and cross streets continuing the retail monotony - hell we’re even exporting it to unwitting lands. It’s the cancer of planet Earth.

At least when I hear the Smashing Pumpkins sing I feel they have been there and seen this Beast for what it is. Maybe from their privileged position but they seem to sing of its abstract images with a sense of knowing. And if you’re stuck in it and its feels like death at least you know there is a song in there too and although maybe someone else is capitalising on that, its all you’ve got to hold onto when your there in that quagmire of banality in the Midwest of the US that spreads out in all directions.

Originally written as an email to BJ in Ohio from Belgium

Sent: Wednesday, July 28, 1999 00:00
Subject: bottom of the retail food chain/roadkill people/smashing pumpkins tribute
Revised Thursday August 28, 2003 18:38

 

Doomed by Doma - Patriot Matt on Losing My U.S. Citizenship

Posted by Matthew Crouch at 21:10

Thank you America for your brilliant constitution that the present day guardians of have deemed neccessary to not extend its rights and guarantees to the citizens it protects with samesex partners from other nations. Thank you DOMA for keeping my partner of over eleven and half years barred from your great nation. It is for this reason that i have exiled myself to my partners homeland of Belgium a place on a continent i never intended to live. From my dislocated vantage point i see the backside of America for what it really is a once great experiment in democracy that has been usurped by the perpetual legalistic maneuvering of corporate greed. A nation that will trample on any life American or not in its unquenchable thirst for the oil that lubricates its machinations of profit.

 

Yankee Go Home

Posted by Matthew Crouch at 18:45

It's Wednesday afternoon and now the sun is out and the sky is clear, this weather is psychotique. There was a movie i once wanted to rent way back in my dollville days in the midwest. something like the Natural History of Parkinglots. Or maybe it was or should have been titled the Unnatural History of Parkinglots. Either way that was my American Life. This American's Life Trapped within the Unnatural Ecology of Parkinglots. Parkinglots connected to multilane roads, tarmac aligned to the transcontinental compass points, flanked by powerlines, all night flourescent glow stores set back from the road behind the ubiquitous parkinglot. Sodium street lights towering over the roads edge. The smell of diesel mixed with the sour smell of nicotine in the air. Signs displaying the trappings and vices of unrestrained relentless capitalism on its death eating march. Not a tree in sight. Grass only growing along the forgotten chainlink fences between unconnected parkinglots. Aging cracked cement for a seldom used sidewalk - all under the brownish haze of fuel exhaust competing with the oxygen level of the atmosphere. This is the infrastructure of home i remember and do not miss. Not that we dont have this way of life imported over here! We most certainly do! (Thank you Mr. Marshall Plan). It's just there is also a pre-automotive urban fabric more predominate than the automotive infrastructure so its possible to actually escape to some degree these sorta roads to nowhere.
Not that standing at a payphone along such a nowhere street under an old neon sign to the "No-tell Motel" on a hot and hazy, humid summer day, shirtless in jeans, feet stinking in their shoes, doesnt have a certain sexy street appeal at least to some passers-by. Thats the me there in l'Amerique du Nord i remember even if stuck on such a nameless broad street headed west with nowhere to go and no way to get there anyways.
It was on such a european version of this kinda street that i was bicycling my way to swimteam practice. Me on my twenty year old sturdy dutch bicycle american ex-pat when get this! a big black SUV with windows up who cannot navigate such a wide vehicle on narrow european traffic lanes runs me off the road!!! and the f*cking SUV had VIRGINIA state license plates!!! on streets here you can bike as fast as cars with all the red lights stopping traffic. So big black imperialist SUV drives me off the road not once, not twice but three times... i guess their windows were up "for security reasons" because Amerikkka is after all AT WAR! Against what? Oh yeh Terrorism. i forgot. Big black Japanese SUV with STATE OF VIRGINIA license plates careening down a Brussels street heading toward the EU quarter! Definately from the George W jr and daddys Uncle Tom's administration Cabin-et. You know the one i mean featuring Auntie Condoleeza just so we dont think the oil corporations in the White House are white supremists or anything. By the third time i was run off the road by the big black SUV with state of VIRGINIA license plates i was yelling "F*CK YOU! YANKEE TAKE YOU AND YR WAR OIL FUELED SUV BACK HOME!!!!"
What a picture - two americans abroad strangers to each other one in a big gas guzzling (and do you know the price of petrol on this continent!!!) SUV obliviously running another american on a slightly more ecological vehicle off the road. Image a nameless heavily traffic'd narrow euro street with a SUV with what i guess is a republikkkan, working for the corporate economic colonialism of the bush family regime's administration, cluelessly driving next to a bicycling free thinking left leaning unemployed fellow american ex-pat who is waiting on a Belgian work-permit.
So it seems papa bush already bought baby bush another four year lease in that infamous mansionette at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue. And just when you thought the rest of the world could'nt hate the Americans anymore than they already do! well then just stay tuned for the next term!

 

dollville

Posted by Matthew Crouch at 15:46

Its wednesday afternoon - its a low white sky day. The solid white layer is starting to separte into clouds allowing for some direct sunlight.
I just got an email from a friend back home describing a massive midwestern storm causing the morning there where he is in Dollville, USA to be blackened by thunderclouds. Cool morning! What a great way to start a day! That is one consolation to a life played out in the midwest. Midwestern thunderstorms!!!!
The last great storm i recall was back in '97 when bart and i had the fortune of living in our friends old wooden american turn of the last century house...
i was making us a pot of tea and then this summer storm broke - the house had a wrap around front porch so we took our tea and sat out there and the storm was the wildest heavy storm i have been in since.
As a kid school trained us to go to the basement for tornado warnings except i always thought it funny because school didnt have a basement.
Back then when i was at my grandmothers when a storm came thru she always took her cigarettes and me outside and not to the basement. When she was alive she also lived in one of those turn of the century wooden american houses. Going to the porch for a storm that frightened me but then i came to admire her for it. Over her house used to be the biggest black walnut trees.
When a storm passed by she would drag me to the back porch to watch it smoke a cigarette and we'd sit in metal chairs...
The weather here is nothing like that. The houses here are nothing like those great old houses with front and back porches, under big trees with cellar doors outside the house. The wood floors of the porches painted gray while all the other wood was painted stark white. The windows were tall single glazed with a few large panes of glass. The kinda glass that was slightly wavy distorting the images seen looked thru them. Porches the size of a small room but big enough to actually use, not decorator attachments from tract housing suburbia. Its nostalgic of me i know but those were great houses not very big but big enough.
Here Belgian houses are made of brick and concrete. the weather is damp and the damp gets in the bricks so there is always this smell in the air. its not a bad smell its just a smell i have no past associations with. so its a smell that remains foreign to me reminds me a constant reminder of my not belonging here altho i live with it everyday.
These brick houses are like echo chambers and even the smallest noise within a room can be a bit loud or harsh. Back in those wooden house sounds are muted in a softer way but you can hear everything in those houses from any room!
We'd visit grandma twice a month. When we would leave she would stand in front of a window and watch us drive away. The windows were tall and verticle unlike the horizontle windows you see today. I can still see the dark green shade pulled half way down with her standing under it. Her with her breast cancer lump the size of an apple which she'd refuse to get surgery for.
My dad (WWII vet) told me that she told him to vote Democrat because that way when he'd die he'd have a dollar in his pocket with the Republicans that pocket would be picked clean. it is for that reason i vote like she and my dad.
That house of hers was sold in the late seventies not surprizingly after she succumbed to her cancer. The big trees torn down along with the back garage that was more like a barn. The white painted over in a sick yellow color. The back porch built in with small windows and tho that's how the house is now that is not how i remember the place at all.
I see the old windows, the old wood painted white. The old trees standing tall over the one and half storey frame house. When grandma stood in a window she would take up only one quarter of its size.
Thats how i see her now - standing thru that tall four paned sash window. Me looking out the back window of an old long sleek blue FORD station wagon.
Grandma trapped alone in her old age and her old house. Me trapped alone in the back seat of a "family" car just above the fuel tank which i could always hear sloshing around. Separated by endless roads, powerlines, store signs, street lights, past woodlands passing into farmland giving way to stripmalling and parkinglots. Trapped in the consumerism of the automotive retail age.
Not uncommon to these here southern low lands of northern europe the clouds have reattached to a permanent white layer filtering the afternoons sunlight into a white haze. Its a stark kinda bright light that reminds me where i am and how far away from a place that was once home, a place that is no longer there.