I’ve been reading The Best American Science Writing 2006, edited by the excellent Atul Gawande. This particular anthology includes a number of hot-button social topics: “What Makes People Gay?” and “Is God An Accident?” appear alongside articles about cloning and longevity treatments. Fitting reading, I guess, while en route to the very-liberal Netherlands.
There’s also a fascinating article about cochlear implants—hearing devices for the deaf—and what researchers are doing to improve music perception. Michael Chorost recalls the frustration of hearing Ravel’s Boléro with only eight channels of auditory resolution:
The flutes and soprano saxophones sounded as though someone had clapped pillows over them. The oboes and violins had become groans. It was like walking color-blind through a Paul Klee exhibit.
For some reason I’m reminded of the time I walked outside without my contact lenses on, into a courtyard of my apartment complex. I’m severely nearsighted, and I got an instant headache when my eyes tried frantically to focus on something, anything, with every possible subject so far away. But it was bizarrely beautiful too, like walking through an Impressionist painting, thick brushstrokes of leaves and sunlight shifting with the breeze.
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Anne Frank and her family lived in the secret annex of 263 Prinsengracht for two years, never venturing outside, until an anonymous phone call brought the German Security Police to them on August 4, 1944. Today a line forms around the corner for the museum; tendrils of chatter float in the damp air, words in Dutch, French, various accents of English. The carillon in a nearby tower plays uncertain melodies, as though the bells were asking awkward questions of each other. Students practicing, probably.
Museums, especially ones of recent history, always surprise me with what resonates most. It’s the unexpected little things that punch me in the gut. Here it’s a typed letter by Bep Voskuijl, ordering correspondence courses for the Franks. The view of trees out the darkened windows. And the footage of an interview with Otto Frank, the only member of the family to survive the concentration camps, saying how startling it was to read the diary for the first time, how different the voice in her writing was from the Anne he had known as his daughter.
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I’ll admit to playing favorites: Amsterdam is my European city of choice, hands down. Not that I’ve seen that many others, of course. But I’m a sucker for walkable places, where cars have to thread their way past trams and bicycles and floods of pedestrians, where there’s the murmur of conversation more than the whoosh of movement. When I was here last December, on a 23-hour layover from Berlin, I put my luggage in an airport locker and meandered around town late into the night.
Narrow, quiet cobblestone alleys lead onto open plazas teeming with people. Canals nestle alongside rows of ever-so-slightly-crooked buildings, their distinctive architecture still graceful centuries later. There are Argentinian steakhouses, Irish pubs, “Chinees & Indisch” restaurants, porcelain shops, sleek and adventurous clothing boutiques. The so-called alternative culture thrives here too: youth hostels, coffeeshops and smartshops, activist collectives, abandoned buildings turned into art galleries and performance spaces. (Several well-known venues began as squats.) To the naive visitor it seems that the past and the present, in all their respective complexities, live quite amiably here as neighbors. The reality, I’m sure, is much thornier than that.
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Dutch remains impenetrable to me, which is odd given that it’s closely related to English—hot cocoa is warme chocolademelk—and its other relative, German, I don’t find nearly as tricky. Fortunately, Dutch people seem to be bilingual at a minimum, and fluent to boot. At Paradiso, cracking jokes in between songs actually gets laughs. And the focus of the audience…I swear that people listen differently on this side of the Atlantic. The songs that get the biggest response are a completely different set from the American crowd-pleasers. It’s not to say one’s better or worse. But there’s a long history of taking music very seriously in Europe, and you sense it when you’re on stage.