Blackbird

There's a few questions life throws at you that you never get to answer. Questions like "If you fall off a really high building, are you dead before you hit the ground?", "How long would I survive on the North Pole" and " "Do I look fat in a rubber suit?". Questions like these, at least if you're lucky, never get answered beyond a doubt (although if I can guess: yes, probably less then a day and yés) and that's the way the world is supposed to be.

And yet since last week I can answer one of these questions, namely: how long does it take to capture a bird. The answer? The better part of an afternoon, with help.

Last week I was walking through the east side of Amsterdam with my friends Merel (not the Merely one listed to the left, at the time I think she was feeding mineral water to a cat that is not hers...) and Sarah and we were having a lovely afternoon. We had spent some time dissing 1980's pop music, people asking you to join charities on the street and Merel's addiction of doing so (doing good things is so 1999) and some annoying Christian girls who were trying to persuade people to give their life to Jesus.

The normal stuff.

And then we walked past some birds and my, otherwise beloved friend, Merel noticed something was wrong with one of them. Apparently, something to do with his paw. I shrugged and was ready to move on (birds die, women make less money then men and untalented people make hitsingles, it's nature) but Merel had decided that this bird needed to be rescued.

Why we had to save it was never really made clear to neither Sarah nor me. But we love her and so we fully cooperated in Mission Blackbird (actually it wasn't a blackbird, it was a meerkoet but I don't know the English word for that and I honestly don't care). First we looked up the telephone number of the Animal Ambulance (I did not make this up and yes we have too much money in this country) who then told us that, yes, they were willing to come pick up a wounded bird but we had to catch it first.

How do you catch it? Merel asked.

Throw a blanket over them and they'll get calm.

And so, armed with one of Sarah's towels and a box we went to capture a bird. A bird that did not really want to be captured. And a bird that, despite a hurt leg (paw? foot?) managed to get around quite well while Merel and Sarah chased it and I tried to stand as far away from them as possible without them hating me. On the plus side, I did help by explaining the situation to the people that were crowding the bridge wondering what the hell was going on.

Soon two girls, who dressed like 19 but were most likely 15 or something, decided to help with the bird-catching (or better said the bird-not-catching) while I was sent out to get bread for the animal. When I returned with my hamburger the bird had managed to get into the water and as a way of 'catching it' the two girls were waving the towel at it from the side.

Sarah and I were ready to give up and abandon the towels and we were about to convince Merel to do the same when this woman (who was either a performance artist, a junkie or both) emerged and asked if we needed her to go into the water to catch the bird. Amsterdam canal water, I should add, is pretty much black and the swans who swim in it gray. Merel would later describe the woman as "very nice" while Sarah and I preferred "a total lunatic".

Before one of us could tell her "Yes please" or the far more appropriate "Are you mental?" the woman was already taking off her shoes and socks and walked into the water to catch the bird, who, if my mind reading skills are still ok, was thinking "what the f---". After a few tries she did manage to catch the bird but the box was to small and it escaped, swimming to the other side of the bridge.

Which would have been the right moment to actually give up.

But noooooooo. Armed with a new bigger box Sarah and I were send out to get (there's three stores in her own neighborhood she can no longer visit) the two girls and Merel chased the bird to the other side of the bridge where the hunt started yet again. And to my sruprise, this time succesful.

We caught a f-ing bird.

The animal ambulance people managed to show up three hours later and when they took the bird out of the box we had kept it in they looked at us like we were 10 year olds. "Did you three rescue this birdie?". When one of the women (who looked like she was a founding member of the Green Party) examnined the bird she told us probably nothing was wrong with it, but they'd send it to the bird shelter anyway.

Saving those who did not need saviour. I felt like one of those Christian girls singing in the mall.

Damned if you do, damned if you don't

My before mentioned friend who recently moved to a student building in the Northern part of Amsterdam (see below) has been complaining that ever since he moved in, he's hardly met any of the other people living in his hallway. This also means that he has had no problems with loud music or an overcrowded kitchen but he likes to have people around him a lot.

You guessed well, he's not from Amsterdam.

A chance to really get to know his fellow hall-mates came this week when a meeting was organized to discuss who should clean the kitchen and what should be done about the recent discovery of bugs living there (ladies, my friend's single and there's cochroaches in his kitchen! e-mail address available on request). When he arrived at the meeting it turned out that only four other people (of 14 people living in the same hallway in total) had showed up. Seven people were just not home, and two people were in, but refused to leave their rooms.

Right.

As said the meetings main focus was the state of the kitchen, but one of the guys present managed to change the subject pretty quickly to how he used to have an XTC addiction. He had been clean for more than a year now, he told them, but was considering picking it up again. Personally, that would have been the moment for me to wonder if he had been the only one who had seen the bugs. Another guy present threw in his drugs story, explaining that whenever he smoked pot he had to throw up. Thankfully I do not believe he actually demonstrated it, but I think we can safely assume that can't be more than two weeks away.

The conclusion of the meeting was that everybody was going to cook together the next day as some kind of team building. I told my friend he should probably stay away from drinks arranged by the XTC guy. You know. Just in case.

Meanwhile, on the other side of town (yeah, for the movie version of this blog I'm getting Sarah Jessica Parker to do the voice over) a new person moved into the appartment above mine. That in itself is not that surprising, that place has been illegally subrented since I moved in and every three months new people (usually non-Dutch women) take over the place. This one, however, has the most disgusting taste in music.

Trance.

*shiver*

Now, I understand people liking music. Obviously. I also understand people liking music that is not specifically meant to be listened to as much as to be felt. Barely. I even understand people liking music I hate. Sort of. And I understand why people go to clubs, listen to insanely loud music and have their ears ruined...

OK, I don't get that, but it doesn't bother me, so: go in peace and use condoms.

What I don't understand is why Satan's Little Helper upstairs has to play this crap from 8 in the morning until 9 at night (when she leaves the house for what, I can only assume, must be some quiet time) at a volume level that would make Pete Townshend frown.

Conclusion: you can buy up a big house in the middle of nowhere, put all your friends there and make the house rules that include paragrahs on kitchen cleaning, cocroach killing and music (both style and volume) or else you're fucked.

Dear Bruce Springsteen (2)

Hi Bruce,

I think I might as well be as open about this as I can be: our music maker, music listener relationship is in deep trouble. I'm sorry to shock you but I do mean deep trouble. I think we're not yet in the unsafable 'Tom-DeLay's-career' trouble yet, but I'm afraid we are definetly heading into 'Oprah-without-make-up' county.

You see, I thought this thing we had was clearly a win-win situation for the both of us. You sing about how crappy your life used to be, or about how your father doesn't understand you, or how you're confused or something like that and I sing along as loud and out of tune as I can. Occasionally, with my curtains closed, I even might have thrown in some sad airguitar moves (although honestly, is there any other kind than sad ones?).

So, we were having fun.

But lately I fear we've been growing apart. It started with your album Devils & Dust. Although there were some pretty darn good tunes on there a lot of the songs were completely lost on me. And with "a lot of the songs" I am, of course, talking about "Reno" (or as I like to call it "prostitute song nr. 1"), with the completely unnecessary sentence "Two hundred dollars straight in, Two-fifty up the ass" (enjoy that mental image friends!).

Now comes the news that you are to release a Pete Seeger tribute album. Personally, I am not a big folk fan - I can barely stand Bob Dylan when he's not plugged into something - but you performed this album together with a new 17 piece band so I was getting quite interested in this new work of yours, especially when the news came that you were going to do a gig in Amsterdam in a few weeks. But then the ticket price was revealed.

75 bucks for one frigging ticket? Are you out of your mind?? I could have expected this from Rod fucking Stewart, but didn't we all agree that you were the working class man's hero? Granted I'm not that working class to begin with, and I occasionally giggle like a girl but darn it I'm a Springsteen nut and I don't have a lot of money.

So I did some soul searching (and with soul searching I mean watching Dr. Phil bash some fat people) and I've come up with the following solution: I will not go out on saturday to get a completely overpriced ticket, you will do that tour and I will then read fantastic reviews and curse myself for not going after all. After that you will get into the studio, call your E Street Band budies, make an album that is at least half as good as The River and do a big tour with normal priced tickets, and I will then try to be present and scream "Bruuuuuuuuuuuce" at you at an annoyingly high volume.

Deal?

love, boris

PS. You're Italian-American, right? Could you call some maffia buddies of yours and get rid of James Blunt? Grazie!