Who will Trump's cultists blame when they finally understand they've been conned?

(Be aware: NAC is going away soon)

Donald Trump's entire "career" in and out of politics has been one long, sustained confidence trick. The owners of capital "get it," and shill with enthusiasm because they can only gain from the con man's game.

Generally speaking, when the victims of a con game realize they've been duped, they're angry. It may or may not be the con man's fault, but it's not theirs; no one likes looking in the mirror and confronting their own gullibility.

Politically, it's never been about Trump's narcissistic grifting. Rather, it's about wealth consolidating its power and enhancing its vampiric capital accumulation as the populace is distracted by the grift; and, it's about those Americans, primarily white, who've embraced Trump's con game with open arms.


When they realize they've been had, as inevitably they will, who's up to be blamed? It won't be Trump himself, as rejecting a deity is hard work, and he'll be exonerated by having been "stabbed in the back" or some such nonsense.

It won't be the con man's disappointed victims, swindled and left to founder, because the mirror's cracked by the weight of the dominant caste racism and gibberish.

I think most of us already have a suspicion about the answer to this question, and it's not a pleasant one. In a collective sense, why do humans cherish being conned? Now if you'll excuse me, I have a pitchfork to sharpen.

---

This "Never Trumper" is hilarious. She cannot countenance the grift, but on the other hand, because providing health care and other basic public services would be both unAmerican and unfair to the accumulators of capital, she just might change her mind. 

Yawn.   

Sorry, I don’t mean to make a pro or con statement about what should happen with health care. I’m saying that some version of socialized medicine exists in most European countries, and I think we would agree that they’re all democracies.

I didn’t suggest that the imposition of socialized medicine was somehow going to end our democracy. I merely said that it was going to usher in things that were irreversible that were not going to be good for our country.

A change is coming to the model village, and NA Confidential is winding down.

For several years a division of Google, Blogger hasn't ever been a particularly relevant (or efficient) communications platform from a writer's standpoint. Maybe it was okay briefly when it began back in 1999, or whenever it appeared. So was Bill Clinton, for a few minutes at least.

My only allegiance to Blogger all along has been the low cost of writing (zero), which is a good thing for a blog that has yet to earn its first penny in revenues. 

As it stands right now, the latest Blogger update has incapacitated NA Confidential by denying me the use of labels. These are important to keep things straight. Think of an old school file cabinet with infinite file folder capacity but only a finite ability to mark the folders. Soon it's chaos. Blogger already had a label limit that I never knew about because there was no reason to care for so long as processes worked.

Now they don't. The "matching suggestions" label finder is beached and inoperative, the assumption being I've exceeded my label limit, but there no longer is a pathway inside to look and see, or to make corrections, and trying to arouse interest from a human reminds me of banging my head against Yosemite. NAC is floating out on the water, without any way to repair an engine failure.

Fuck Blogger -- to death, in its entirety. 

However, I digress.

Since last November, in response to (a) incessant threats of retaliation from the hypocritical community pillars in this one-thought town, (b) the escalating time requirements of my two jobs, and (c) a very real sense of fatigue and burnout, I've been steadily reducing the blog output and refraining (for the most part) from commentary on local issues. 

In essence, I've been smothering my baby in fits and starts. Readership has plummeted. All eyes have been averted from local issues, consumed with the social media-inspired culture war at the national level. Meanwhile the arrogance, cupidity and vandalism proceed apace in this barely literate, perennially dirty little river town, and it might as well be 2004 all over again. 

You know, this used to be fun. 

Now it's like going to work at a job you detest, not because of your own motivations or interest level, but due to hideous working conditions. Blogger is making it twice as hard to do half as much, an example of inane big tech insanity that I have no interest in indulging any longer. 

All that's left is an official announcement, and while this isn't exactly it, I can't tell you how much longer I intend to post regularly here. 

The plan at present is to maintain NA Confidential as best as I can as an archive and reference resource (when the arrests begin, I need to be able to say I told you so), and to build a full-fledged WordPress-powered, stand-alone web site under a different name. I'll post there regularly, and use it as a place for my writing -- travel, beer, whatnot. Negotiations are underway with a local designer. 

I'll keep you posted. 

This saddens me, of course. And yet all things must pass, and the sheer, pervasive dumbassery of the year 2020 offers an ideal opportunity to make a clean break with the past. 

The dipshits in Nawbany win again, but don't they always? 

Look, an outsider like me doesn't climb into the ring imagining miracles. It's asking a lot to vanquish the overwhelming forces of decades-ingrained ignorance, venality, greed, corruption and inertia by summoning comic book levels of strength and firepower. 

Rather, you try to take the bout 15 rounds, looking for chances to score points, all the while conducting yourself with guile and aplomb before the cliquish big fish drown you in their insufferably small pond. 

It's gone 16 years, not 15 rounds, and the final bell is about to sound. 

I'm not yet sure what will become of the ON THE AVENUES column; either it or something similar probably will continue at the new digs. I will keep you informed about the changes to come. 15,000+ posts later, thanks very much for reading.   

(unless I change my mind, naturally)

These post-COVID ideas for cities could be scaled down for Nawbany.

It's a British publication, and in some ways these ideas are scaled for cities much larger than Nawbany. 

At the same time, the guiding principles are intelligent and applicable, and could be scaled down to fit -- if we had anyone here in a position of authority who could read and assimilate information absent an expectation of cash-stuffed envelopes. 

Bike superhighways

Garden streets

A digitally enabled high street

Multipurpose neighborhoods

Unlikely in this god-awful stupid place, but a boy can dream pro bono.

From garden streets to bike highways: four ideas for post-Covid cities – visualised, by Chris Michael, Lydia McMullan and Frank Hulley-Jones (The Guardian) 

As the pandemic wreaks havoc on existing structures, we look at some visions for post-Covid cities – and how they hold up

There is a huge, looming, unanswerable question that overshadows our cities, like an elephant squatting in the central square. Will a Covid-19 vaccine or herd immunity return us to “normal”, or will we need to redesign our cities to accommodate a world in which close proximity to other people can kill you?

After an anxious summer in the northern hemisphere, during which those of us who were able to safely do so mimicked a kind of normality with limited socialising on patios and in gardens, winter is coming – and it will test the limits of our urban design. Regardless of whether we “solve” this latest coronavirus, humanity now knows how vulnerable we are to pandemics.

Can we mitigate the effects of the next great disease before it happens? And has the colossal disruption to the way we work and travel created a renewed impetus to organise cities in a more sustainable, more pleasant way?

We asked four architecture firms to share their visions of what cities should do, now, to better design everything from offices to streets to transport – and we have analysed each one – to help inoculate our cities against a disease that is proving so difficult to inoculate against in our bodies.

ON THE AVENUES: Magic and loss.

For one who is accustomed to recording his thoughts on paper, because he has always understood in his particular case that writing is the very best way to make sense of things, it follows that once properly ordered, thoughts can make the leap from written to spoken language. 

Not before.

In short, if I cannot articulate a topic in writing, chances are I’ll do no better trying to explain it to you in conversation.

Some might say this process is bass-ackwards, given that the implications are broader than the enumerated recipe for Cincy chili or a description of what happened on a certain day in Moscow in 1999. Also involved are feelings and emotions encompassing far more complexity than the norm, which must be retrofitted in writing so I can convey them in chatter.

Naturally small talk can proceed without pre-authorization. That’s what it is: small, mostly inconsequential, and how about those Packers? An absence of forethought has fewer implications when little more than the meaningless passing of time is the goal.

But as the far too often maligned band Chicago’s keyboardist, singer and songwriter Robert Lamm once observed, “Time passes much too quickly, when we’re together laughing” (Beginnings, 1969), and later, “Forever is a long, long time – longer than we ever realize” (Forever, 1986).

“I wish I could sing it to you,” crooned Lamm during Nixon’s first term.

I’d settle for being able to write it, and now I’ll try to do so.

---

A close friend from high school died recently. In itself, while profoundly sad, this isn’t unusual. It happens in turn to all of us, and with each of us.

Every rose has its thorn, and every beginning an end. We are finite creatures. We come eventually to a conclusion. In Lamm’s 80s-era ballad, he spoke of “forever” not as the cosmic duration of his love; rather, the active element of love ends with his death or his lover’s.

Consequently, Lamm promised, “I’m going to love you the rest of my life.” Life spans are the delineation of love, and a terminus. The word “forever” then is repeated, but ignore this. It is necessary for the song’s musical arrangement to make sense, not the sentiment itself.

After all, this is a pop tune, not theology.

When I say we were close friends in high school, it’s a statement of fact. We were very tight then. And, factually, our friendship did not survive for very long after high school. Alas, it wasn’t merely the expected usual happenstance that we went our separate ways, although geographically, we surely did.

There was a rupture of some sort. It definitely was an estrangement. A point came when he left no doubt that we were no longer friends. I’d run into him here and there, at reunions and occasion visits home. He’d acknowledge me, but a stiff Arctic breeze ran through the courtesies. I cannot recall having a substantive conversation with him literally in four decades.

Happily, by all accounts he lived a vigorous and productive life in California during the past 30-odd years, both professionally and personally. A lovelier family would be hard to imagine. To me, they’re his greatest achievement. His career in the film industry was stellar. None of it comes as a surprise to me, because we all knew he was destined for great things. There was no doubt.

And yet, those decades are Lindsey Buckingham’s second-hand news to me. My high school friend chose to exclude me from his life. My affection was unrequited. In the words of the Hoosier novelist, so it goes.

It puzzled me greatly for all those years, and always will. It also hurt tremendously, because to be brutally frank I idolized him, from the moment we became friends in 1974-75 all the way to the present day, even two weeks after he was claimed by cancer, far too young.

It’s an injustice, the c-word. I’ve been in pain and anguish, mourning his passing as intensely as that of my own two parents. My eyes are wet writing this. I feel so bad for his wife and kids – and one grandchild, I think.

Obviously, there’ll be no resolution now. Lamm was right. Time passed much too quickly; the laughter stopped too soon, and forever remains a long, long time.

But I will say this.

A few years ago it occurred to me that I’d always blamed myself for committing the offense, for doing “something” – whatever the hell this really means – to prompt the estrangement. Evidently it was easier, or maybe simply less painful, to carry this burden of guilt with me than admit that maybe my hero was anything less than perfect.

So, finally I stopped blaming myself. It wasn’t easy.

Life’s a mystery, and human beings are not mathematical formulas. We all are flawed, each and every one of us. Kaka can and will occur. I have dark patches, and the black dog has been known to come around. Maybe with him, too.

I’ll always dearly love my friend, and smile when I think about the old days – good, bad or otherwise. We were a good team, while we were. I’m sure he had his reasons, and I respect them. In the end, our separation was as much his loss as it was mine, a 50-50 split.

You did good, Mikey. You absolutely rocked it. I’ll always miss you. I’ll never forget you.

Goodbye.

---

It’s funny, but for a very long time I resisted the urge to refer to myself as a writer, perhaps because we’ve grown up in a dysfunctional society that can’t fathom a person “being” something if it can’t be measured by time sheets or a tax return.

That’s bogus, of course, but it’s precisely who we are.

I’m the first to concede that four decades of purported adulthood spent writing sentences probably haven’t earned me a single year’s poverty-level American wage. Fortunately this isn’t the only way to look at it. Writing is what I do, irrespective of other considerations, and it’s been a part of what I’ve always “done.”

As far back as my package store days, stocking the famous “import door” of the walk-in cooler in the barren physical and intellectual wasteland of early 1980s downtown New Albany, I photocopied sheets at my own expense with beer prices and descriptions, and handed them to regular customers in lieu of a web site.

For the first ten years of the Public House, I wrote, edited and published the FOSSILS homebrewing club newsletter on basic sheets of paper with staples and stamps. The club was non-profit, but since our business hosted the majority of meetings and club members also were regular customers, there was a tangential and mutually beneficial relationship with revenues.

There you have it. I’m a writer.

I think and process information in terms of writing.

Most of the time I follow my muse from sheer compulsion, not in pursuit of pay. At times, the money comes. To me, it’s all good. We shouldn’t be asking people what they do for remuneration, anyway.

It’s gauche.

In closing, here’s a snippet of dialogue from Warren Beatty’s epic film Reds (1981). Beatty, as journalist/socialist John Reed, is meeting with factory workers trying to unionize when the cops arrive to break up the "unAmerican" gathering.

Cop: This is an illegal assembly.

Reed: Excuse me, Officer. These men have the legal right to assemble. That's all they're doing.

Cop: We know what the hell they doing. What the hell you doing?

Reed: Me?

Cop: You.

Reed: I write.

Cop: You write? You wrong. Get him out of here!

Let the record show I have NOT so much as implied or suggested in the slightest that the policeman is employed by the city of New Albany.

In any event, my name’s Roger, not John. 

---

Recent columns:

September 17: ON THE AVENUES: Stuck inside of Nawbany with the Flanders blues again.

September 10: ON THE AVENUES: The Weekly Wad lives on in the minds of malcontents.

September 3: ON THE AVENUES: If you really want to be my friend.

August 27: ON THE AVENUES: Structural racism, white fragility, and my old school.

"On Louisville, Breonna Taylor, and Muhammad Ali."

Photo credit: The Nation.

From one of the few sportswriters capable of mattering, talking straight.  

On Louisville, Breonna Taylor, and Muhammad Ali, by Dave Zirin (The Nation)

Louisville is hallowed ground, the birthplace of Muhammad Ali. It will now, thanks to Daniel Cameron, be also remembered as the home of an unspeakable injustice.

 ... If struggle is truly the secret of joy, then I’ll repeat: It felt like hallowed ground.

Daniel Cameron, the Kentucky Attorney General, has desecrated this hallowed ground. In his ambition to remain a Republican rising star, mentored by McConnell and beloved by Trump, he chose his career over justice and made the decision to use Breonna Taylor’s body as a stepping stone to reach even greater heights ... but to me this is less about the color of Cameron’s skin than a naked and grotesque expression of what it takes to rise in GOP circles: You protect the cops, you blame the dead, and you assert, no matter the cost, that Black lives—particularly the lives of Black women—simply do not matter. 

 For the people of Louisville, Breonna Taylor’s name will not be forgotten as surely as Muhammad Ali’s. Maybe someday people will walk Breonna Taylor Boulevard in downtown Louisville and speak her name not merely as a tragedy but as a turning point towards true justice. Daniel Cameron’s name, if remembered at all, will be thought of like the person who stole young Cassius Clay’s bicycle, which inspired the 12-year-old Clay to take up boxing. He will be the anonymous, ignofarm-near-me/">minious cudgel of immorality whose blows didn’t put the people of Louisville down for the count, but propelled them to rise off the mat.

Strong Towns: Redlining in Kansas City: What local reparations might look like.

The actual title of the article is "The Local Case for Reparations," which Lauren Fisher explains. It's about reparations for redlining, in case you're wondering.

 

On Monday, I was wringing my hands about how our morning article would go over. Within it, Chuck discusses a local strategy for investing in disinvested neighborhoods using opportunities and incentives that are often extended to large investors. Instead of wasting resources on big businesses that will take more than they give to a city, this approach would immediately, measurably uplift entire communities. Pretty much normal Strong Towns stuff. So why was I so nervous about it? The title is “The Local Case for Reparations.” I was worried about the reactions we’d receive. This piece is challenging to people with all kinds of views on reparations for slavery. It changed the way I think about the issue. Maybe it will do the same for you.

Previously:

On understanding reparations.

“It feels like planners in the U.S. sort of exist in a history vacuum. It’s important for them to look at this information and understand that a lot of city planning really involves dismantling systems like zoning and redlining.”

The Strong Towns no-gimmicks approach truly is a "third way" for the city of New Albany because it crosses political boundaries.

Black licorice, but not the Grand Funk song because, well, the lyrics have not stood the test of time.

In fact, I'm notorious for not listening to the lyrics. Consequently, the words to the old Grand Funk tune from 1972 surprised me. Yes, I'm a very slow learner. 

But you can listen to the song here if you wish. Musically, the song is strong. Lyrically? Not so much. 

Meanwhile, the New England Journal of Medicine reports that a man died from eating too much black licorice. This is neither a pun nor a joke. Here's the story from The Guardian.

 

A Massachusetts construction worker’s love of black licorice wound up costing him his life. Eating a bag and a half every day for a few weeks threw his nutrients out of balance and caused the 54-year-old man’s heart to stop, doctors reported.

A comeback for TEE?

American railroad buffs tend to be fascinated by the physical infrastructure of trains and their accessories. Going back to my Eurailpass years, the obsession with me is the act of traveling by train. 

Brussels to Barcelona in eight hours: Proposal to relaunch Trans-Europe Express (The Bulletin)

German federal transport farm-near-me/">minister Andreas Scheuer has proposed at a European transport council meeting in Brussels to relaunch the Trans-Europe Express (TEE) 2.0 network of high-speed and night trains between major western European cities.

If the plan to reinstate the rail link, abandoned in 1987, is agreed by his European counterparts, Brussels, Liège and Antwerp stations could be connected to Barcelona in around eight hours.

The farm-near-me/">minister is keen to cut travel time and make journeys more appealing between several European cities by reviving the TEE trains – a luxury service from the glory days of European rail travel from the late 1950s to the 1970s, when overnight rail travel was common ...

A belated update: Sara Martin got her headstone.

The National Jug Band Jubilee and the Kentuckiana Blues Society were successful in collecting enough funds to provide a headstone for Louisville jazz singer Sara Martin (1884-1955). The photo is from the unveiling in 2017. I mentioned this way back on July 13, 2014. Unfortunately the link to Louisville Music News is broken.

 

 

Before LeBron James, Elvis Presley, Jerry Lawler ... before Kong itself ... there was King Oliver.

The song Sweet Like This may not be the very best example of Joe "King" Oliver's work, but as a cut included on an LP called Guide to Jazz, it was my introduction to his body of work. The album was intended as accompaniment to a book of the same name, by the French jazz critic Hugues Panassié, and was released in the mid-1950s. At the age of 10, or thereabouts, I checked it out from the New Albany-Floyd County Public Library and committed it to cassette tape.

You might say that I caught up with rock and roll a bit later.

Why think back to King Oliver? Because of Sara Martin. And who was Sara Martin? Louisville Music News explains.

A Headstone For Sara Martin, at Louisville Music News

Here’s a fundraiser for all Louisville music fans – and I mean EVERYBODY - to pay attention and donate a few shekels toward: Louisville blues singer Sara Martin, noted for her early 20th Century recordings which earned her the nickname of “The Famous Moanin’ Mama” (and “The Colored Sophie Tucker”), is buried in an unmarked grave in Louisville Cemetary. The Kentuckiana Blues Society and the National Jugband Jubilee have joined forces to raise money to buy a headstone for Martin’s grave ...

Democrats? Acting more aggressively? Probably a pipe dream, but worth a post at least.

This is a slightly rosy assessment of policy options, especially in imagining there'll be a transition as we've known it; again tonight Donald Trump trolled the country about not going away peacefully. 

And all my white Republican friends were silent like tombs. I believe categorically that what we're witnessing at the present time is (a) the cancerous decay of late-stage capitalism; (b) the equally malignant pathology of decadent capital accumulation; and (c) a fanatical determination on the part of white America to remain the dominant caste, come what may.

I've no firm idea how I can help those in need, given that the bulk of you insist on identifying with the abysmal, corrupt two-party system.

But I'm open to suggestions.

Republicans will replace RBG but Democrats hold the trump cards – no, really, by David Litt (The Guardian)

Progressives should not worry about what will happen if they mimic McConnell’s constitutional hardball. Their representatives need only act with a little less restraint

... For one thing, America’s political institutions are currently biased – in many cases quite aggressively – in favor of conservatives. Restrictive voting laws make casting a ballot disproportionately difficult for lower-income, non-white and young Americans. Unprecedented gerrymandering gives Republicans a built-in advantage in the race for the House, and according to FiveThirtyEight’s Nate Silver, the Senate’s bias toward rural states makes the chamber about seven points redder than the nation as a whole. Thanks to the electoral college, two of the past five presidential elections have been won by Republicans who lost the popular vote – one reason why even before Justice Ginsburg’s death, 15 of the past 19 supreme court justices were appointed by GOP presidents.

The conservative movement, in other words, already had it pretty good. The average American disagrees with Republican orthodoxy on every major issue: healthcare, climate change, gun violence, immigration, taxes, Covid response. Yet thanks to the biases embedded in the American political process, Republicans have not just remained viable, but secured extraordinary amounts of power. We can’t know for certain who would benefit from upending the status quo that existed at the time of Justice Ginsburg’s passing – but we do know which party has the most to lose.

Friday, September 25 is the soft RE-opening for dining inside at NABC Pizzeria & Public House.

Trek to the Deck, 1999.

Think of it as a public service announcement. We did curbside at NABC on Saturday, and if I may say so myself, the Roundhouse was brilliant. Sunday was spent eating leftover pizza and bread sticks. I've emphasized one passage in bold.   

Facebook post 

Well, guess it’s that time of year again, ya know, the one where there was a pandemic & you haven’t had customers in your building for six months?!

Soft opening THIS Friday September 25th on the Pizzeria dining room side.

We will resume our regular carryout service as before meaning customers will call in an order, you’ll be quoted a pick up time only this time you’ll be required to wear a mask upon pick up.

We will continue to be a first come first serve operation with the exception of the “waiting room” being outside the building to encourage physical distancing.

DOORS OPEN at 11am THIS Friday September 25th 2020

PLEASE NOTE our hours of operation have changed for the time being:

Friday & Saturday LUNCH & dinner
11am - 9pm

Monday- Thursday dinner only
3pm - 9pm

Masks must be worn upon entry and only taken off while seated at your space please.

ALL employees will wear masks properly and continuously.

We will be very diligent about cleaning spaces especially after each use.

IF the allotted spaces fill to capacity we will get a cell phone number from you and ask that you wait outside the building.
We will call you as soon as a space is cleaned, sanitized and available!

Operating a restaurant during COVID-19 has been challenging to all of us. We are, thankfully, a popular independent, local, family owned & operated business. We all need each other to make this work.

Please be patient, kind, & respectful to one another. We are doing the best we can do under these circumstances.
Hand washing, mask wearing, & distancing is the key to all of our health.
Be safe & well during pandemic & cold&flu season

RECAP:
11-9 on the weekends Friday & Saturday

3-9 Monday-Thursday

Masks must be worn upon entry and only taken off while seated at your space please.

IF the allotted spaces fill to capacity we will get a cell phone number from you and ask that you wait outside the building.

The Real Me.

 

For a long time, I haven't wanted to think too deeply about the part my childhood played in my development. Nothing overtly horrible happened then, mind you. It's just the way those experiences shaped future consciousness. We always had enough of everything in terms of material things. But what was my brain being fed?    

I've remarked often on the pandemic's uncanny way of exposing our inner selves and amplifying what already was there. Personally, it reminds me of the places suffering from drought, where the reservoir levels drop and expose what was flooded so long ago. 

This all started when I set down to think for the first time what it meant that my father was a fervent supporter of George Wallace. Subsequently, as much as I'd love to put all this back into the box and padlock the lid, various occurrences keep triggering memories of my earlier years. Last week a very big example of this occurred when one of my closest friends in high school died. 

I'm still not able to comment intelligently about his passing, apart from acknowledging considerable grief and anguish. This reaction may make more sense if you know that we didn't have a conversation in the 40 years since; it was an estrangement at his behest, and I've no better idea today as to why it happened than I did at the time. Of all the male friends I've ever had, Mike quite might well be the only one I flat idolized. He was my hero, and he could do no wrong in high school. Now, even at the age of 60, I feel the same way in spite of it all that came between us -- whatever it was.  

I'll never know what happened, and it's a tad overwhelming, as well as a miasma compounded on a daily basis by all the rest of the bat-shit-craziness gripping the rest of you populating this failed nation.   

Clearly it's time to dispense with the narrative, 1960-1978. Perhaps I'm missing something important by closing the account, but at the same time there's enough chaos to manage without those ghosts tormenting me. 

An exhibition themed around public urinals -- in Brussels, not New Albania.

Among the innovations witnessed at Poperinge's triennial pop-up Beer and Hop Festival beer hall in 2014 was the notion of charging a one-time "piss pass" fee for using temporary loos (Euro 1.20), with heavy-duty plastic, open-air pissoirs helpfully available for the gents.

The installation pictured here was festooned with a campaign poster for one of three competing hop queen triads. They're humorously reclined amid hops, and it should be pointed out that their team placed it there for a reason -- to reach the "swing" voter.

Verily, it was all in good fun. Seeing creative teenage hop queen candidates advertising with professionally printed posters on outdoor urinating stations was precisely the sort of thing to remind us that we no longer were experiencing a New Albany state of mind.

And, as this timely article reminds us, the development of the public urinal not only goes back almost 200 years, but references social developments ranging quite far removed from the simple need to relieve oneself while following the path to the next whiskey bar.

Standing room only: Brussels exhibition tells story of public urinals, by Richard Harris (The Bulletin)

In further proof that Brussels’ cultural scene is nothing but varied, an exhibition themed around public urinals is coming to the city later this month.

After runs in Berlin and Paris, LaVallée in Molenbeek presents the exhibition Cottages: Public Toilets, Private Affairs by French photographer/videographer Marc Martin, who describes himself as “one who explores the visibility of sexual minorities and claims a freedom to express – explicit or not – a diversity of practices”.

“By confronting the notions of beauty and repulsion, of good and bad taste, I readjust the level of tolerance, including of the LGBTQI community,” he says.

And the first thing they do is cut down an enormous healthy tree.

In the final analysis, the local demolish 'n' develop cadre needn't be all that proficient at what they do. They can take down a 100-year-old tree to accommodate "luxury" townhouses with a lifespan of two decades, and it doesn't matter. 

Skill and ability is irrelevant; just learn to read the tea leaves and know exactly when to give the pay-to-play wheel a mighty heave.

Then it's out with the chain saws. 

My personal view? The in-crowd in the festering boil of a dirty river town can go ... nah, never mind. The Pavlov's Dog effect in Nawbany means that I write or say something true, and someone close to me gets an electrical shock. 

Do we even have a Tree Board? 

Redevelopment machinations and those awesomely cute townhouses coming to Vincennes Street where the demolitions just went down.

I'm still English and German. I miss that tiny slice of Finnish.

My Ancestry.com "origins" update has arrived, and not to belabor the point, but it should surprise no one, including me, that I'm 85% Germanic Europe/Northwestern Europe/England, with a little bit of Viking sprinkled in.

The estimate has come a long way since 2016 (here).

And in 2018.

Where there are wine windows, there might be beer windows.

"Wine windows" in Florence and a handful of nearby locales date to a time when nobles were granted a concession to sell their wine in sizes no larger than the aperture through which commerce was transacted. They came in handy during times of plague, and some are being used again during the COVID-19 pandemic. 

In Tuscany, Renaissance-Era Wine Windows Are Made For Social Distancing, by Sylvia Poggioli (NPR) 

At the Vivoli café, an artisanal ice cream landmark, its tiny window had long been boarded up, says Giulia Gori, daughter of the owner. "But during the lockdown, we started using it again," she says. When the Italian government allowed restaurants and cafés to take orders to go, the café started offering takeout. "The customer rings the bell, places an order and we put the ice cream cup on the sill, avoiding direct contact with the customer." It's not exactly curbside pickup, but is as close as can be approximated in a centuries-old city not designed for cars ...

SHANE'S EXCELLENT NEW WORDS: A guide to conspiracy theory slang.

Here's one that we can add to Nawbany's lexicon.

Pyro·demo·redevelopment: the coincidence wherein buildings standing in the way or redevelopment plans magically catch on fire and are bulldozed. 

I'm not saying I believe we have a plan to torch buildings so redevelopment, and the (redacted)-to-play can be hastened.

Only that there are certain coincidences, that's all. It's probably nothing, right?

From plandemic to breadcrumbs: conspiracy-theory slang (1843 Magazine by The Economist)

Those who think the world is full of intrigue and plots often have their own language

There’s nothing new about looking for answers. At a time when religion is on the retreat in many countries, people often look to alternative theories of life and the universe, particularly in periods of uncertainty. As coronavirus has spread, so have conspiracy theories: protesters gather to denounce masks, vaccines and 5g networks; social-media feeds teem with histrionic videos about murky cabals and worst of all, it has reached your family WhatsApp group. But if you’re going to argue with a conspiracy theorist, you’d better speak their language. If someone tells you to “follow the breadcrumbs”, resist the urge. When you hear someone disparaging “sheeple”, stand proudly as a member of the flock. After all, it’s much harder to refute lies if you’re ignorant too.

From 2000: Beercycling beginnings in Poperinge, with previously unpublished photos.

Concurrently with the motor coach beer tours of Europe in 1998 and 1999, I was becoming a quasi-serious bicyclist back home. It was only a matter of time until the lightbulb fired, and when it did, a few of us began planning a bike-oriented trip to Belgium in 2000. We chose three Belgian cities as hubs -- Tournai, Poperinge and Brugge -- with the aim of renting bikes, riding by day and partying at night. 

My beercycling comrades were Kevin Richards, Bob Reed, Buddy Sandbach and Kevin Lowber. We were a quartet during the Tournai stay, which included a day of guided mountain biking, monthly brewing day at the Vapeur museum brewery, and a meeting with the visiting Danish contingent of Kim, Allan and Kim (who were in Belgium for football matches). Lowber joined us in Poperinge for three days in West Flanders.

I've tidied this account from some years back and updated it in places. Most of the photos are mine, but a few are Buddy Sandbach's.

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“The (German) attack had not penetrated to the decisive heights of Cassel and the Mont des Cats, the possession of which would have compelled the (British) evacuation of the Ypres salient and the Yser position. No great strategic movement had become possible, and the Channel ports had not been reached. The second great offensive had not brought about the hoped-for decision.”

--From the official German account of the offensives on the Western Front in 1918, as quoted by John Keegan in his book, The First World War.

Our fatigued foursome arrived by train on Sunday at lunchtime in the Belgian “hop town” of Poperinge, a tidy, friendly place that had the good fortune to remain somewhat safely behind British lines throughout the Great War and thus was spared the wholesale devastation suffered only ten kilometers away in Ieper (Ypres). 

The street called Ieperstraat, which leads from the tiny train station to the center of town, was packed with shoppers, strollers and snackers. The festive atmosphere came as a complete surprise, seeing as stores and shops seldom opened on Sundays in Europe then, but we later learned it was a special annual shopping day, precisely the sort of delightful phenomenon to encourage a few midday beers.

Checking into the legendary Hotel/Restaurant Palace, we found the newly arrived Kevin Lowber carving a massive slab of beef, anxiously awaiting us in the shadow of an equally oversized bottle of red wine. He’d just come into Poperinge from Brussels. 

Biking in and around Poperinge was slated to begin on Monday, and this seemed to merit a map, strategy and tactics session. Adjourning across the hall to the hotel’s cozy world-class beer bar, we discussed the riding itinerary for the coming days.

A plan of attack quickly fell into place. Monday would take us to Ieper for a ride through the battlefield sites south and east of town. 

On Tuesday, we would meet Luc Dequidt, chief of Poperinge’s amazingly comprehensive tourist bureau, for a two-wheeled tour of local attractions, hopefully to include the tasting cafe near the St. Sixtus abbey (home of the scrumptious Westvletern Trappist ales); the brewing town of Watou; the Helleketel forest: and row after row of the tall hop trellises that take on a life of their own each three years during the town’s hop festival.

Wednesday was chosen as the day for us to assay what German military might had failed to achieve more than a century earlier: Seize the heights of Mont des Cats and Cassel. From our Poperinge base, this projected foray into France wouldn’t be altogether difficult, totaling less than 30 miles roundtrip; more importantly, it would provide a glimpse of northern French beer culture, which naturally was my ulterior motive all along.

Riding east towards Ieper on Monday, the French hills almost always could be seen rising on the horizon to the southwest, and although they aren’t particularly lofty, the default flatness of Flanders magnifies their significance. 

One can readily understand their strategic importance in wartime. There were constant reminders of combat on Monday, as our journey took us past numerous Great War monuments and cemeteries of the British Commonwealth forces, whose final resting places attest to the global scale of the First World War: Irish, Australian, Canadian and Indian soldiers, buried alongside lads from Manchester and Newcastle. The resting places of Belgian, French and German soldiers also were seen.

Monday’s lunch sag came in the center of Ieper, a town utterly devastated from 1914-1918, then painstakingly rebuilt in the years preceding the next world conflagration. 

When the second war swept through Belgium, one young Ieper native resolved to escape. He made it somehow to the then-colony of Belgian Congo, and later to South Africa, where he enlisted in the British armed forces and fought against the German occupiers until war’s end in 1945. 

After returning home he founded a restaurant and pub, sold it, then opened another, called Ter Posterie for its location opposite Ieper’s post office.

I can’t remember this man’s name, and certainly he would have no reason to remember mine, but nonetheless I met him on three different occasions, all in all, and enjoyed the long beer list, savory food and consistent hospitality at Ter Posterie, where we convened at the terrace that day in 2000 and discussed our progress. 

By 2000, active control of the business had long since passed to his daughter, but the old man still frequented the establishment, and when glimpsing an English speaker, would spin his life story for the visitor in a narrative honed over thousands of ale-side retellings. 

Sadly, during subsequent trips, Ter Posterie’s colorful founder was observed to be sadly descending into advanced dementia, and since passed way, as has Ter Posterie. Both will be remembered fondly. 

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Tuesday’s riding schedule was light, but rich in intangibles owing to the presence of Luc and his wife. We kept a leisurely pace on the country lanes radiating from Poperinge, never very far from the smell of manure and the sight of hops. It was a pub crawl on human-powered wheels: Westvleteren 12-degree Trappist at the terrace of the then-newly built tasting café opposite the abbey, through the woods and fields to the fabled “brewing village” of Watou and refreshing Witbier from the small town’s Van Eecke brewery, then south and east via wooded lanes back to Poperinge.

At the edge of the Helleketel forest there used to be a delightful small brewery and tasting café known as the Bie, which has relocated twice (to Loker, then Dentergem) during the period since we rode past in 2000 and found it closed on Tuesday. If memory serves, we got inside in 2001 and 2002.

Amazingly, yet another brewery is located near Watou, which is really no more than a collection of houses: St. Bernardus, which used to produce beer by contract for the monks of St. Sixtus under the Sixtus name. The contract was terminated, and the brewery began to brew its own line of abbey-style ales that arguably is the finest of all secular recreations.

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Wednesday proved to be the highlight of the Poperinge interlude, with the group primed for climbing the two French hills and having lunch in Cassell. 

Arriving winded at the summit of the Mont des Cats, we saw a conveniently situated Trappist monastery, which might have provided liquid incentive had it been situated a few miles north in Belgium. Unfortunately, there are no Trappist-certified breweries in France, so instead the monastery makes acclaimed cheeses and butter, some of which were destined for sampling later at our midday feast.

(As of 2011, the monastery at Mont des Cats has licensed a Trappist Ale brewed by the makers of Chimay. It does not bear the Trappist appellation because brewing does not occur at Mont des Cats.)

For beer, one must descend the Mont des Cats and proceed to the small town of St. Sylvestre Cappell, home to the brewery that produces Trois Monts, or “three mountains”: Mont des Cats and Mont Cassell (in France) and Mont Noir (in Belgium). 

Trois Monts is exemplary proof that good beer and France are not mutually exclusive, although this view continues to be held by many otherwise intelligent and discerning beer aficionados, whose Francophobia is permitted to hold sway at the expense of their taste buds.

They’re missing good things. Bieres de garde perhaps are best understood as a sort of appellation of origin, describing beers from northern France, but beyond that there are few hard and fast rules. 

Often they are made with top-fermenting yeast, but not always. Usually they are aged in a process akin to lagering. Colors and strengths range across the spectrum. Many, but not all, are bottled in 750 ml corked bottles. If there is any one characteristic that seems common among the better French bieres de garde, it is a richly complex malt character. These are beers that taste fine alone, but better when they accompany food.

Thus, having scaled the heights of the Mont des Cats and scrambled down the other side in pursuit of a restorative glass of Trois Monts, we found it in a tiny roadside café where the proprietor spoke no English but was happy to learn that we weren’t “English”, and who seemed amused by our interest in the local brew. 

Temporarily sated, our final and more formidable objective lay before us: Cassel, the town straddling the top of the hill of the same name.

A half-hour’s ride along the highway brought us to the foot of the hill, and we began the winding ascent that culminated in the town’s main square. A narrow lane took us further toward the top, ending in a wooded park with a large windmill situated to our left. I knew from previous research that this was the Grail, for located just beneath the windmill was our real reason for coming: T' Kasteel Hof.

The windmill is the highest point in Flanders, with unobstructed views far and wide even on a hazy day, and the café just below it, one that clings to the side of the steep hill, is considered one of the finest beer cafés in France. I’ve been to few others, but it would be difficult to imagine any better. 

(Admittedly, I'm several years out of practice. Craft revolution, and all.)

T’ Kasteel Hof specializes in all things local. The food is from French Flanders, as are the beers. We found seats on the patio after walking through the crowded main room, where spontaneous applause greeted our entrance; bowing in appreciation of this unexpected acknowledgement of our collective biking prowess, we were disappointed to learn that the group of senior citizens actually was applauding a speech of some sort by one of its own.

Instructed that the kitchen was being overloaded by the tour group and only cold food was available, each of us opted for a mixed cheese and pate plate. Three would have sufficed for all five beercyclists, such was the size of the portions. Three 750 ml bottles of French Bieres de Garde were shared: Hommelpap (four hop varieties, earthy and a moderate 7% abv), Kasteel (the house ale) and Pot Flamand, the latter two falling on the sweetly malty side of the flavor spectrum, as I expected.

As if a convivial atmosphere, bountiful food and delicious beer weren’t reason enough to seek out t’ Kasteel Hoff, the pub also boasts a shop for carry-out sales: Bieres de garde, local honey and jam, liqueurs, post cards and souvenirs -- more of each than any of us were able to carry, and Kevin Lowber drew the short straw in this regard: He had made the mistake of bringing his backpack, which was filled with booty gathered by the others, our rental bikes being unequipped with panniers or hauling apparatus.

With ground to cover back to Poperinge and expressing ample regrets over having to leave so soon, we lugged our booty to the bikes and debarked in a meandering northeasterly direction, enjoying the countryside and melting away the lunchtime caloric intake. The group seemed hale and hearty, except perhaps Buddy, and therein is yet another story.

On the night preceding our Cassell reconnoitering, after benedictory drinks with Luc, we’d dined as a group in the Hotel Palace’s restaurant and enjoyed several bottles of French red wine with the uniformly excellent meats, breads and pastas.

After dinner, adjourning once again to the nearby bar and seeking the inimitable service provided by Guy, the owner, Kevin Richards elected to continue drinking wine. For reasons that remain obscure to this very day, Buddy felt emboldened to undertake an impossible task, attempting to match Kevin bottle for bottle.

Knowing better from previous experiences, the remainder of the contingent nursed our Belgian ales and retired to bed early in preparation for the big day. 

For those readers who have witnessed such ill-conceived ventures in the past, it should come as no surprise that during our ascent of the two French hills, Buddy began to perceive the error of his ways, particularly during lunch, when he was overheard to remark that a nap would feel good. On the ride back to Poperinge, Buddy was flagging. For a while, it seemed that Bob (our unofficial chaplain) might have to offer last rites, but he rallied and finished the course.

A meal on the main square at Café Paix and a few ales at a pub during the evening’s televised Euro Cup soccer match capped off a long and fruitful day. Not for the first time, I asked myself why it had taken me so long to discover the joys of biking in Europe.

As a reminder, once every three years (2020's renewal has been rescheduled for 2021) Poperinge celebrates its heritage of hops with a festival that captures the attention of beer lovers throughout the world, but remains consummately local in orientation, with much of the town actively participating in the fun. 

The town welcomes visitors at all times, not only during the festival, and it is hard to overstate the many charms of the area, especially for those infatuated with Belgian beer. Poperinge is eternally relaxed and efficient. 

As has happened so many times since, it was with grudging reluctance that my friends and I group departed on Thursday morning, walking back up Ieperstraat to board the train to Brugge and travel to the final phase of a remarkable trip.