“So where in the US are you from?”

“Virginia.”

“Okay, Virginia … is that in the East or the West?”

“East.”

“On the coast?”

“Yeah. Right next to DC. I grew up close to DC.”

“Ah yes, okay.”

I was at the Saturday CouchSurfing meetup that I went to almost every week in Amsterdam, talking to Pol Ewen, a French traveler studying urban agriculture throughout Europe. I had had this particular conversation about a million times before, and was pretty used to the pattern.

“Virginia … Isn’t that where the Constitution was written?” I was taken aback by the question. This was not part of the standard pattern. Has our cultural globalism become so overblown that any Frenchman knows the minutiae of our founding?

“It was written in Pennsylvania, but a lot of the people who wrote it were from Virginia.”

“Ah yes yes, like ehh, Thomas Jefferson.”

“Yeah, Thomas Jefferson,” I said, both proud and slightly disconcerted. “He also founded the University of Virginia.”

“Ah yes. And ehh … John Jay.”

I looked at him blankly. “John Adams?”

“Yes John Adams, but also John Jay.”

I didn’t remember any John Jay from my history lessons. But it was loud in the bar and he had an accent, so I thought perhaps I had misheard. I tried to think of who he might mean. “James Madison?”

“Yes James Madison,” he said, laughing, “but also John Jay! He wrote the Federalist Papers.”

I was rapidly getting out of my depth, but I wasn’t about to let this frog school me on my own nation’s history. “I thought Alexander Hamilton wrote the Federalist Papers.”

“Yes he wrote them, but also John Jay. And Alexander Hamilton became president, yes?”

“Uhhh,” I said uncertainly, acutely aware of the fact that I’ve never been totally clear on which of the founding fathers were president and which weren’t.

“But John Jay, he was the, ehh, the loser in all of this. He wrote some of the Federalist Papers but he didn’t become president.”

There was a pause.

“I think you’re making this up. I’ve never heard of John Jay!”

“No, it is true! One of my English classes, it was on American and British history from 1750 to the present day.”

“We’re going to look this up. And if you’re right I owe you a beer.”

“Okay, it’s a deal.” He tapped a fellow CouchSurfer on the shoulder and asked to borrow his iPhone. A few minutes later he held the phone up triumphantly.

“John Jay was an American statesman, patriot, diplomat, a Founding Father of the United States, and the first Chief Justice of the United States!” he read triumphantly.

“Let me see that!” He handed me the phone. “Well I’ll be damned,” I said. “I’m so embarrassed!”

“Ahhh, don’t be embarrassed,” he said graciously. “You knew about the Federalist Papers, and not many people know that.”

“Oh, well, thank you, it’s an honor to be complimented by such a preeminent scholar of American history,” I said, silently thanking Dylan for her ridiculous obsession with Alexander Hamilton and the Federalist Papers. “What kind of beer do you want?”

My strangest experience at Ars Electronica was not related to any particular artwork.

Part of Ars is a festival for animated shorts, which of course I loved. On the second day of the festival, it was pouring with rain all day, so instead of trying to run from building to building we just stayed in the animation theater watching shorts for six hours straight. It was fabulous; the animations were strange and funny and gorgeous and heartbreaking. (There was one in particular about a broken robot left to rust in the rain that made me tear up a little, and Hans made SO MUCH fun of me. I can’t help it, for some reason anthropomorphized robots just get to me!)

After we left I was flipping through the animation program to see if there were any we had missed that I still really wanted to see, and the name Caldera caught my eye. My professor for the animation class I took at Hampshire last fall was working on a movie called Caldera; I wondered if it was the same one. I read the description, and sure enough it was! What a cool coincidence — I made a note that I had to go back and see it when it was playing. (Incidentally, the film is breathtakingly beautiful. I saw it a few days later and it utterly blew my mind.)

The next night, we went to a sound installation called Heavylistening, which turned out to be super pretentious. It consisted of six or seven cars outfitted with crazy huge sub-woofers, making extremely low, loud sounds. And that was pretty much it. It was cool at first because you could feel the bass in your chest and it made everything you said sound weird, but once the novelty of that wore off it got pretty old. Anyway, we were standing around discussing whether or not we were allowed to get inside the cars when I saw this guy staring at me really intensely. He looked familiar.

“I know you,” he said, squinting at me uncertainly. Over the rumbling of the cars his voice sounded oddly robotic, as though he were talking through a fan. I squinted uncertainly back at him.

“Yeah,” I said, trying to place him.

“You were my student,” he said.

“Oh my god, yeah! Hi!” It was Chris Bishop, my animation professor from Hampshire. He was at Ars because Caldera won the Prix Award of Distinction for Animation/Film/VFX. I didn’t realize it at the time, but this is a pretty big-deal award: past honorary mentions (not winners) have included WALL-E and Avatar. He introduced me to his friend Evan Viera, the co-writer/creator/producer behind Caldera, and we talked about how crazy it was to bump into each other. Then he said, “Your final project had the dog and the butterfly, right?”

“It was a ladybug, but yeah!” I said. “I can’t believe you remember that!” His friend chimed in, “Oh yeah, I saw that. That was cute.” We talked for a while about the Pioneer Valley and Linz and the festival and Caldera, and then I went back to my friends. Hans shook his head at me. “I cannot believe that of the four of us, the American is the one who runs into someone she knows.” I laughed. “You’re just jealous because I’m more popular than you.”

One of the goofier moments of Ars came when we (me and my car buddies, the People of the Internet) discovered this game called Freqtric Drums. It consisted of a small wooden circle with four metal handles. Two people hold the handles, and when they touch it makes a musical sound. The tone is changed by holding different handles or more than one, and the type of sound is changed by knocking on the wood. This may sound idiotically simple but it produced really funny results. More:

(The video is in German — to get English subtitles, click the annotations button: the speech bubble in the lower right corner.)

I saw a lot of really incredible things at Ars Electronica, but the one that has stuck with me the most (and one of the few pieces that’s actually somewhat possible to explain) is a work called Deus Cantando. Simply put, it’s a piano that recites a speech on environmentalism. The artists recorded the speech (delivered by a human) and then analyzed the recording as a piece of music, breaking down each word into a complex series of musical notes. The piano is controlled by a computer and reproduces the speech by playing the notes. The result is eerie and surreal and amazing. The work is presented in a dark room with a screen behind the piano providing subtitles for the speech.

At first, the notes sound like jangly nonsense, but when you read the words the “music” suddenly resolves itself into speech like a picture coming into focus. It’s a truly strange experience. We watched it three times in a row. By the third time, I could close my eyes and still kind of make out some of the words. It reminded me of a dream I have sometimes in which someone is talking to me and I know that they were saying words but I can’t understand them at all. I could hear the rhythm and intonation of speech, but the meaning was mostly lost.

When I climbed into a car older than me with people I didn’t really know at 8 am on a gray August morning in Amsterdam, I wasn’t quite sure what to expect.

Read more

Guest post by Arjen Vrielink. Post requirements: 500 words, 3 pictures, 2 Dutch idioms (explained in Notes).

On the way back the car almost broke down. The way back: when your longing to be home finally transforms into an achievable possibility, a realistic future. In our case, you also feel a bit sad because you realize that the present, this moment, this trip, will soon belong to history.

Our case. Us. We; that is, a polydactyl Latvian, a Paladin of the Evil Empire, a clueless youth from the US and A and me and my modest self. On our way back from the Ars Electronica festival in Linz, the birthplace of national socialism.

Some several months earlier, I was ordered by The Paladin to join him at the festival. As I am a weakling, I humbly obeyed. Moreover, The Paladin is a very insecure person. He needs people like me to constantly praise him, confirm his idiot beliefs and order food for him (he only speaks an ununderstandable dialect of Dutch). It’s easy to see why I love The Paladin.

What The Paladin didn’t tell me before is that the two aforementioned characters would be joining us in his machine of destruction and terror. I am a very sensitive person who has difficulty relating to people so you can imagine my anxiety. I was terrified. Luckily for me they seemed to eat from The Paladin’s hand.

At the first stop along Autobahn nr 3 it turned out that Sixtoes was on a strict meat-only diet. This worried me. The Youth was playing the intellectual by reading a book. This worried me as well. How was I to survive 6 days serving The Paladin while being sandwiched by Agression and Literature?

I ordered coffee for me and The Paladin. Sixtoes and Youth joined our table (tremble in fear!) and surprisingly seemed to enjoy our company. Well, one’s dead is someone else’s bread. People relieved themselves, I stayed. Finished my coffee. Enjoyed my coffee.

Back on track. I balanced between saying just enough to keep up with the expectations of social animals and thinking of opening the door and jumping out. Youth, Sixtoes and The Paladin somehow seemed to have found each other in their natural habitat and started to connect. The pressure. The Pressure! I could not give the pipe to Martin. Not now. That would mean certain failure. Again.

Ultimately, I made some seemingly casual remarks. Hollow laughter. Saved!

After 10 horrendous hours of pretense, four near-death experiences and desperately keeping up the excellent reputation of the Dutch, we arrived at our destination. Sleep was calling. The Paladin descended into loud snoring. I resorted to lucid dreams.

Next day, the festival started. It was good.

Would I recommend Ars Electronica to you? Yes, I would. But I would really much more like to recommend you to travel. Go meet crazy people. Be amazed by the ties that bind us. Us. We. Humans. Let life feed you. Be a participant and observer at the same time. You are not alone. There are stories everywhere.

Share your passions.

**NOTES**

• One’s dead is someone else’s bread (de een zijn dood is de ander zijn brood): some people benefit from the misfortune of others

• Give the pipe to Martin (de pijp aan Maarten geven): give up, quit, drop the axe (het bijltje er bij neergooien).

HELLO I AM STILL ALIVE. After months of blog neglect, I am going to try to update a bit more regularly for a while. A lot of things happened in Amsterdam but I’m not going to tell you about most of them because I’m a bad blogger. Instead I will mostly be posting conversations and musings that I’ve written/have been writing in my head for months but haven’t gotten around to posting.

However, one thing I’m going to write about in more depth is a trip I took at the very end of my stay in Amsterdam, to a truly amazing art festival in Linz called Ars Electronica. To kick that off I have a guest post (my first guest post! It’s like I have a real blog) from the hilarious and talented Mr. Arjen Vrielink, one of the three people with whom I drove to the festival. He agreed to write for me if I gave him some sort of assignment, so I told him it had to be 500 words long, have at least three pictures, include at least two Dutch idioms (with explanations), and be about what he took away from Ars Electronica. The result totally blew me away. So look for that tomorrow!

And then finally, if I keep up with my blogging ambitions, I will tell you guys a bit about my week in Barcelona after I left Amsterdam, and my new life in MARRAKESH! A lot has changed in a short time. I only hope I can keep up!

So I have the house to myself. You know what that means…

Mikhael Paskalev - I spy from André Chocron on Vimeo.