Swiss Christmas

This is an old piece that I originally sent out as an e-mail the last time I was visiting my family at the end of November, 2007 in Switzerland. Seeing as part of my purpose on this blog is to preserve memories and stories, I thought that this might be a good place to start.

So here I am in Switzerland, y'all, and jetlagged all to hell. So I figure, what better way to celebrate the misery of waking up at 3.15 in the morning after going to bed at 11.45 night, than by taking it out on all of you? Feel free to delete this before reading further, as there's no real purpose to any of this. I'm just going to ramble through various observations that I've made since getting here.

First off: the Swiss are getting tacky. Now, don't get me wrong, the Swiss have always been a little bit tacky. Secretly so, even closeted-ly so, but tacky nonetheless. There is a tradition of wearing little in the way of color in this country except for black, white, grey and, for the truly daring, brown (never to be overdone, however). I have decided that this is, in part, to alleviate any risk that the Swiss might normally run of hitting upon a truly heinous fashion phenomenon. After all, once you've been neutral for 700 years, France is not going to act as your fag hag and let you know, "Girl, that outfit you're wearing is just not it". Let us note that, due to the fact that the Swiss do not tend to design their own eye wear, glasses have slipped through the rather wide mesh of this couture safety net, resulting in some rather unfortunate protuberances on the brows of various Swiss citizens, particularly (strangely enough) upon those of recently post-menopausal-aged women. (This is the same demographic which appears to have a penchant for dying their hair an extremely dark shade of maraschino cherry red.)

But Swiss tackiness has been hovering on the radar screen for years. Every now and then, one has always been able to catch a glimpse of a mullet/rat-tail (or the exceedingly impressive rat-mullet combo) that would put your average NASCAR attendee to shame. Or see through the neighbor's window their new chartreuse kitchen tiles, inharmoniously juxtaposed with their lavender exterior wall and diarrhea brown roof shingles. So none of this is really news to me. No, this is different. The Swiss are having a giant, Hallmark-style tacky coming out party. I have seen houses with Christmas lights on the outside (appalling), ads on TV for Christmas sales (nothing goes on sale in this country for any reason, ever), and an attempt at a Christmas lights display on the Bahnhofstrasse in downtown Zurich.

This is where things get really distressing. Imagine a country which has for about 500 years had an unofficial dress code of monochromaticism. Now imagine these people banding together (in true Swiss fashion there's no single person in charge, so it's very difficult to assign blame) and discussing with one another "is it possible to put together a Christmas lights display out of black and white and grey?" It turns out that, no, it's not. Black and grey lighting were beyond the reach of even Swiss innovation (for this year, at least). However, white remained a definite possibility. So what have the Swiss done? Imagine, essentially, a giant extension chord strung down the middle of the street, with a string of fucking fluorescent tube lights hanging down from said extension chord perpendicular to the ground. A single string, I might add - God forbid the Swiss abuse the earth for this debacle, along with our sense of aesthetics. So at this point in the evenings, once the lights are on, the Bahnhofstrasse has essentially all of the charm and ambiance of my high school gym in China with the roof ripped off and pigeons shitting on the floor. Let us also discuss - I think that my high school gym had MORE fluorescent lights than the entire Bahnhofstrasse combined. In my opinion, if you're going to do something heinous, really do it. I mean, at least be double-fisting with your fluorescent tube lights. Like, for example, the 80's. The 80's were heinous, but damn it, that decade collectively went for it. Or Kraft Mac & Cheese. So awful it flips a u-ee and becomes kind of delicious. This is a half-assed attempt at an atrocity, and it should not be allowed.

This said, there are things which are still very much the same here. I went candle dipping yesterday in the Bürkliplatz, and it was a complete blast from my past. Every year they set up a pavilion in the Platz, and set up giant vats of beeswax. You pick up some wicks at the front door, and you go into the back and start dipping candles. I was recently crushed to find out that my mother thinks it's the most God-awful, boring activity ever (this from a librarian) but maybe if you grow up with it, it doesn't seem so bad. And as I was looking around the pavilion yesterday, I was really struck by the fact that the age range in the place was from about 1 year old to one intrepid-looking older woman who had to be a LEAST a couple years older than Jesus. I mean, really, older than dirt. But there she was with her grandchildren, or great grandchildren, or whatever they were, and teaching them about dipping candles, and everyone was having a grand old time. I can't think of many activities sponsored by the city of Boston that bring together quite that age-range of people, all excited to be somewhere and doing something so anachronistic.

Also still around (maybe even more than when I was growing up) are the heisse Maroni - chestnuts that are steamed until the shells crack open, and the put in a very hot wok-like contraption so that the shell blackens and the exterior of the nut caramelizes. For all that another of the newfangled Swiss forays into tackiness seems to involve rather inexpert attempts at Christmas-themed candies, this does not seem to have inhibited the production and consumption of one of the best roadside culinary traditions anywhere.

Today I'm going to haul my jetlagged self down to the candle dipping pavilion again - it's a very forgiving activity for a mind unable to reliably focus itself on much of anything. Yesterday whilst dipping I caught sight of a roughly 10-year-old boy with one of those mullets I discussed above. There was also an elderly woman alternating between dipping her candles and knitting a pair of socks, apparently for herself, as she would occasionally hike up her skirt and pull the sock onto her foot, admiring it there for a few brief seconds before removing it and continuing on her merry purl-stitching way. I hope fervently for more such examples today.

The popping of a virtual cherry

As the title of this posting should indicate to anyone who has stumbled upon it, I have never blogged before. I'm not entirely sure how I feel about the process. But here I am, starting up a blog, despite my somewhat unformulated qualms.

Nor, I hasten to assure everyone who might someday happen across this blog, do I think that my title for this first post is particularly original. In fact, the very fact that many people have probably made this kind of comment about their first blog attempt seemed to make it a logical candidate for first entry title. I'm blending into the blogosphere (a sphere of which I have never partaken, even as a casual viewer, let alone as an active participant).

I think that this blog will probably address my day-to-day life, but not (please, God, don't let it become) in the manner of how bad the traffic was on my way to work; who most recently slept with whom; and whether or not the shirt that I just found on the sale rack at the Gap will still look cute next winter, or if I should pawn it in return for sexual favors now while some other dube might still be duped into thinking that it has some sort of lasting fashion value.

What I'm really hoping to accomplish with this blog is to compile thoughts, ideas, observations about the world and interactions between disciplines as I see them - not necessarily as they actually are, but as I perceive them, and thus how they currently affect my life. Also, to write down my remembrances of growing up and college - there are just so many good ones, and I might as well record them now while I remember them.

So I might talk about fashion (usually pejoratively) one day. And politics (often speculatively) the next day. And travel (always longingly) the day after that. But I think - knowing full well that predictions have a habit moving slightly off their pre-laid track and meandering off in directions that the prophet never intended or foresaw - that the common thread throughout most of my postings will be music. My music of the day, of the week, of the month.

At this point in my life, music is the ongoing thread through everything I do. Educating myself and steeping myself in music are what I have worked at for my entire collegiate career, not to mention my grade school years. Lately I've been having doubts as to whether or not I want to be a performer. And that, ultimately, is what this blog is about. Life, yes, and the interactions in life, but also how I want to personally interact with life, and in what medium I want to say what I have to say to the world (as though that's not a pretentious enough statement - but hey, at least I'm honest). All of those interactions - how politics and international business and finance and fashion and aesthetics and cultural norms and social trends play off of and feed and inhibit one another - end up effecting the music world. And so really I want this blog to organize my thoughts so that slowly, slowly, I can start to determine more and more clearly where my priorities are in life, and whether or not this dream that I had of being a performer one day is still the dream that I want to pursue. On the way there I will undoubtedly ramble, and my thoughts will, without question, become distracted on their way to my final ideological destination (whatever that might be), but I'm OK with that. After all, it's my blog. So I can do what I want! But for anyone who happens across this experiment, welcome to the ramblings of a third culture kid. I hope you enjoy.