Prog Gold

…about the housepainters, at least. The foreman just brought me a big bouquet of roses and apologised for this morning’s inconvenience. Bless. It’s very nice to know they’re not all assholes.

ZCN Totaalvervoer Rotterdam, on the other hand, can rot in hell.

I’d better warn you, I’m in a very, very bad mood this morning; it’s a bloody good job I don’t have access to weapons.

I had hoped that after the fiasco that was yesterday this morning would be better. Yesterday was awful; first the hospital car didn’t turn up at all for my cardiologyappointment/dialysis session and I had to make my own way via bus, ferry and tram across town from North to South Amsterdam and the hospital. Despite Amsterdam’s excellent public transport it’s still an hour’s tiring slog away.

I was particularly anxious to get there on time, because the cardiology tests are the only results I’m waiting for to get the go-ahead from the surgeon and a tentative date for a kidney transplant at the end of the summer. Not crucially important or anything, oh no. I was already late for an appointment I’d already had to rearrange three times over the past three months because of taxi non-appearance or ridiculous lateness.

I ‘d been so worried about the taxi company’s (ZCN Vervoerscentrale Rotterdam since you ask) previous unreliability I actually called them 30 minutes before the cab was due to check that transport was in fact arranged. Although I’d got the nurses to book it, I didn’t trust the taxi people one bit based on their dire past performance. I was right not to.

The dispatcher said yes, it’s all booked for 12.30 to be at the hospital by 1.20, geen probleme, the taxi’s on it’s way. Except it wasn’t.

12.30 came and went… then 12.40… then 12 .45… I’m getting panicky, it’s 45 minutes across town through mad afternoon traffic. Where the hell is this taxi? They’re cutting it more than a bit fine… I rang the dispatcher again to see what was happening. After waiting another 5 minutes through the ridiculous automated phone menu I’m told ‘What taxi? It’s not on my list. I know nothing.’

But I checked with you 45 minutes ago! You said it was booked! You lied! ‘It’s not on my list. I know nothing. Bye!’

I thought I had become accustomed and had learned to deal philosophically with crappy Dutch employees who can’t do their jobs competently, who can never be fired and know it, and who have no inkling or even the faintest glimmer of understanding even the concept of customer service. I’ve grown used to the ‘Customers? Who they? We run this company for us employees’ state of mind that’s so prevalent in Dutch business and public services. But flat-out, blatant lies have thankfully been relatively rare so far.

The reason I get so steamed is that the taxi service’s constant unreliability adds around 2 hours unnecessary transport time to each end of an already onerous 4 hour dialysis session three times a week. That doesn’t do a lot for my equanimity. It also means I can’t do anything at all on a dialysis day, even though it’s only a half day, because I can’t plan for their unreliability. It’s not as though it’s free, either.

I’d had more than enough of bloody, ass-covering Dutch employees at this point. You’re lying to me now? I don’t think so. I rang back and gave the dispatcher a full-bore blast of the concentrated bile that’s been building up in my roiling gut for months, as I’ve stood fuming in the rain outside the hospital, waiting hopelessly over and over again for my missing taxi home.

It felt good. But it didn’t get me my taxi.

I got there, in the end, but very tired and very late. By the time I got out of cardiology (the usual dull, unsmiling, mechanical Dutch experience these things usually are) it was dialysis time. I’d had nothing to eat all day and no time for even a coffee beforehand. Pissed off, knackered, hungry and with only a pack of fruit pastilles for sustenance, I felt the session would never end.

It wasn’t helped by the fact I’d been assigned the most annoying nurse, the one who thinks it’s her life’s work to to teach the foreigner Dutch even though I’ve asked her not to, and who refuses to communicate in English even though she’s perfectly able. It wasn’t helped either by the unnamed idiot who kept ringing my mobile, across the room in my jacket pocket, which I couldn’t reach because of being tethered to the machine by the big IV line in my jugular.

Argh! Even if I could’ve answered the damned thing it would have been pointless: anyone likely to ring me on my mobile should know by now that there’s no mobile phone coverage in the dialysis department. Who the hell was it calling?

My mood hadn’t improved by the time dialysis finished. When I finally got home, exhausted, pissed off, very hungry and with only a cold ham sandwich on crappy, dry Dutch bread to look forward to for dinner, I found that, as is depressingly usual when interesting bloggable stuff happens, not long after I set off for the hospital yesterday yet another cabinet minister had resigned and I was yet again elsewhere, out of internet and radio range.

Some days you just want to kick something.

I’d hoped that this morning would’ve been better but I got up to hear that racist prick Geert ‘Needs his roots done’ Wilders on the radio, crowing that he’s made big gains in the EU elections and now the housepainters who’re doing the outside of our houses are in and out to get through to the rear without knocking or even so much as a bye-your-leave.

I know I agreed with the foreman yesterday morning that they could come through to get access today, but I had no idea it would mean a constant stream of workmen in painty boots through my living room and kitchen from 7.30 am till lunchtime who’d keep leaving the inside door open, even though I’ve asked them several times to close it in case one of the cats (who’ve never really been in the Big Outside) were to get out and get themselves run over.

It really is a good job I have no weapons to hand. If one of the cats got out or I got any more pissed off, I think I’d go postal.

Certainly is in ours - one of those gorgeously gold and blue and green Amsterdam spring days that make the heart sing.

If you can’t physically be here to enjoy it, why not enjoy Amsterdam virtually and take a stroll along the Prinsengracht here. Won’t you be my neighbour?

And they don’t do things that much differently there either. Another fascinating recent google find I came across recently is this this Flickr gallery of 1930’s colour photographs of Amsterdam by colour wizard Bernard Eilers:

Amsterdam, Dam Square, Bijenkorf, 1937, Bernard Eiler

From the Stadsarchief Amsterdam:

Bernard F. Eilers (1878-1951) [...] was held in high regard as an art photographer both in and outside the Netherlands. He owed his greatest successes to his photographs of Amsterdam, that exude much atmosphere and make one think of a painting by Breitner or Witsen. His free work is pictorial and seems to belong in the nineteenth rather than the twentieth century. In his photographs, Eilers achieved exceptionally high quality by his practically unequalled mastery of the means offered by modern photographic techniques. His photographs paint a nostalgic picture of the Netherlands in years gone by.

Yet Depression Amsterdam as portrayed by Eilers, particularly when neon-lit, didn’t really look that different at all: other than a bit of rebuilding, some insertion of technology and a few cosmetic and stylistic updates central Amsterdam looks more or less now the same as it did then. Now, this shop is a Tie Rack, but it looks almost the same, if not so chic.

Corner Spui and Kalverstraat, Now a Tierack

That may be why as my taxidriver navigates the concentric rings of Amsterdam’s architectural history, shortcutting through the Golden Age to skirt the Belle Epoque and cruise down the tidy boulevards of the Amsterdam School to the dialysis unit by the ill-matched, half-empty yet prizewinning skyscrapers on Amsterdam’s southern outskirts, that I find it so easy to imagine the tramp of jackboots, the bark of Nazi officers and the avid expressions of their Dutch enablers, as they scoured the grachten and sanitised the belle epoque suburbs of unwanted aliens, jews and dissidents.

At the hospital I see any number of very old Dutch people, people in their eighties and nineties, who’d've been adults then. As I look at those sharp-nosed, heavy-jawed faces can’t help but wonder, was it you?

That’s what one criminology professor says in an interview (Dutch). Henk van de Bunt, who last year co-wrote a report on the growing of marijuana in the Netherlands and the growing interest organised crime has in it, says continuing foreing pressure as well as this growing criminalisation of softdrugs that will lead to the end of the Dutch tolerance for it. The problem is that while buying and selling softdrugs is tolerated (not legal, just not actively prosecuted), growing it and selling it wholesale isn’t. And while growing weed once was done by amateur and homegrowers, organised crime has gotten increasingly involved with it. It’s this creeping criminalisation that will be the death of the coffeeshop, according to van de Bunt.

Now there have always been predictions about the end of tolerance as long as this policy has existed, but this time this prediction might be more accurate than usual. In the past decade the Dutch police has become much more aggressive in combatting the growing marijuana, which has driven out the amateurs and hobbyists as they can’t take the risks anymore. Meanwhile political pressure, both on council and national level to limit tolerance has increased as well. A few weeks ago for example two councils near border with Belgium decided to close down all coffeeshops in their cities because of troubles caused by drugs tourism, while the current government has pledged to forbid coffeeshops from opening near schools.

This is all part of an unspoken campaign to end tolerance of softdrugs not be explicitely ending it, but by making it so unworkable that it has to be ended. By going after the homegrowers the police has encouraged the spread of organised crime into the cannabis trade, which makes the case for ending tolerance that much easier. You can’t argue that ending tolerance will drive the trade udnerground if much of it already is in the hands of the mob anyway. The other prong of this campaign is to put more and more “reasonable” restrictions and demands on coffeeshops, to make it harder to open one or keep one open, death by a thousand cuts. To completely end tolerance has not yet been politically viable, but the van de Bunt is right to think it’s not that far off anymore, thanks to this silent campaign.

A better solution would be to legalise softdrugs completely, both retail and wholesale and make the growth of them a state monopoly. Chances of that happening are not so good though…

(Crossposted from Wis[s]e Words.)

Sorry about the terse posting lately; despite the avalanche of fast breaking political news I’ve been more than a little self absorbed, because I’m waiting to hear the results of blood tests. As long time readers will know I’ve been quite ill for a long time and I need a kidney transplant. These tests will show whether I can absorb the anti-rejection drugs or not. If not (which is a distinct possibility given my medical history) there’s no transplant, so as you can imagine the results are pretty crucial. I’m stressing a bit.

I lie. I’m stressing a lot.

That this is going on against a background of spiralling global economic political and social chaos and a general feeling that it’s all spinning horribly out of control is not helping, dammit. What do you mean, solipsistic? Of course the whole world’s naturally arranged around my own personal affairs…

We’ve been lucky so far with the credit crunch but we’re no more secure than anyone else, and because of my health we’re a little more insecure than most. At the moment the economic crisis is not an immediate threat (one of the upsides of bank mergers is the need to merge IT systems) though of course that could change at any moment; however, I think we’re as well prepared as anyone can hope to be. Which is to say not really.

What it’s actually boiling down to for me on a personal level right now, as it is for so many others, is insomnia and rabid anxiety. Sitting in the dark, wondering with sick dread what will happen next -will our health insurance company fold? What about the mortgage? What about the bank - shall I take out all the loose cash and hide it? Shit - what if the hospital has its funds in Iceland? But most of all, like every parent ever, I worry about my kids. What will happen to them? No generation can hope to know the future they bequeath to their kids; they can only do their best and hope, but we’ve done much, much less than our best and the future we’re giving our kids is potentially no future at all.

Because the future is here already. We’re in it now. This is it. We made it, aren’t you proud? Every trope of dystopian speculative fiction, every grimy Ridley Scott image and mad Gilliam fantasy is coming true - just look around. Political balkanisation, religious schism-driven conflicts, financial fractures, mass debt peonage and slavery, permanent war and the emergence of an an ultra rich, oppressive global elite - it’s all there. We’re using fiction as a handbook, not as entertainment.

It comes as no surprise that many of the foremost proponents of waterboarding are ‘24′ fans; neither is it surprising that wingnuts are into transhumanism or that they love Arnie in The Terminator; nor is it a coincidence that Joe Haldeman’s ‘The Forever War’ is about to made into a movie. Art reflects life and vice versa, egg, chicken, chicken, egg…. Such are the trite observations one’s led into at 3am.

But I know all this meandering is just so much displacement; what I’m really worried about is dying. Not the actual dying itself - it’s a wonder I’m still here as it is, having so very nearly shuttled off this mortal coil so many times before through cancer and heart failure and what have you. I take a licking but I keep on ticking, but even I’ll have to go at some point. (The doctors writing ‘terminal kidney failure’ on all my test forms might also have given me a clue.)

No: what I’m concerned about is not death itself but how long will it be, and when and where. I want some certainty; what happens if I do this or what happens if I do that? A person needs to make plans. However, trying to pin down Dutch doctors is like nailing jelly to a wall. No-one will make a decision, everything’s by consensus, no one’s ever definite about anything. There are no guarantees about anything, I know, but I would like some sense of the odds, at least.

It boils down to this: if I don’t have a transplant, I’ll die, either slowly as a prisoner of dialysis machines or more quickly of kidney failure if I can’t have dialysis (which is also a possibility given my medical history). Even a transplant itself, should it be possible, is not a miracle cure; were I to survive big surgery again and the kidney not be rejected, it would nevertheless mean a short lifetime of strict adherence to medical protocols and a rigid treatment regime, and the ever-present possibility of infection and/or rejection at any point thereafter, this in addition to potentially fatal preexisting conditions. So if I do have a transplant I’ll die, just less soon and with more hassle.

Not a good place to be in a world falling apart, if indeed that’s what’s happening, though it’s certainly how it looks from the perspective of a cold and dark autumnal early morning.

But at least I do have choices. For the moment all my medical care, prescriptions, surgery and hospital costs are all covered by insurance that’s still reasonably priced. For a sick woman I’m probably one of the most privileged there is; I have access to clean water, adequate food, power and good medical care. Millions don’t, even in what passes for the developed world; looked at rationally I haven’t really got anything to complain about.

Also, this being Holland I have the option, should I wish it, to make the choice to leave the world at a time and by a method of my own choosing. That’s something that gives me an enormous amount of comfort. But sufficient unto the day is the evil thereof; it’s not a consideration yet. But until I get those test results, or at least some certainty of sorts, I’ll be awake at 3am again and again, and millions of others with me. They need certainty too, if for different reasons.

Edited slightly 18/10 for grammatical sense and speeling. Any remaining mistakes just go to show my illiteracy.

On Riazat Butt’s Guardian post on responding to vocal bigots:

CritKing

Aug 27 08, 12:25pm (about 20 hours ago)

fight fire with fire I say…

the other day I was out on my race bike training in Amsterdam (CK is a top bike racer) and a group of moroccan teenagars called me a poofter, probably something to do with tight lycra.

As CK is also quite a ladies man I stopped, and asked the ringleader how many women he had been to bed with, also adding, “besides your sisters and cousins”.

That shut him up.

Especially for Martin, here’s Amsterdam comedian Hans Teeuwen with the Nostradamus Song:

He looks alright!

This makes up for all the ugly American tourists who make England and Amsterdam hell in the summer with their arrogance and incessant self-absorption:

This summer, New York is awash with visitors from abroad, who are expected to top last summer’s record number, tourism officials say. Thanks in part to home currencies that are holding strong against the dollar, even middle-class vacationers from Hamburg, Yokohama or Perth can afford to scoop up New York style — the clothes, the hot restaurants, the nightclubs — at bargain prices.

But for New Yorkers trapped on the other side of the currency imbalance, it’s easy to feel ambivalent about the invasion. An infusion of foreign money is welcome in a city faced with a wobbly economy and a possible budget gap in the billions. But even some locals who consider themselves cosmopolitan and internationalist confess to feeling envy, not to mention territorialism, in watching a outsiders treat their city like a Wal-Mart of hip.

Their party is raging just as the hangover has started to set in for Americans. Frictions do arise — especially in a summer of looming recession, where many locals do not feel rich enough or secure enough to travel abroad themselves. (And let’s not even get into their weeks of summer vacation).

“It’s Psych 101 — jealousy,” said Randi Ungar, 30, an online advertising sales manager who lives on the Upper West Side. “I’m jealous that I can’t go to Italy and buy 12 Prada bags, but they can come here and buy 18 of them.”

Oh the poor loves, how they suffer!

Steven Schoenfeld, a 45-year-old investment manager who lives near Lincoln Center, said that he welcomes the influx of visitors, in theory, as a boost to the local economy, but “sometimes you feel like it’s going to become a situation where they stop and take picture: ‘Look at that endangered species — a native New Yorker, with a briefcase, going to work.’ ”

Polly Blitzer, a former magazine beauty editor who now runs a beauty Web site, said she believes that a turf war is going on this summer between free-spending Europeans and locals over the chic bistros, spas, boutiques and department stores that she, a native New Yorker, used to consider her playground.

She said the point was driven home to her on a recent trip to Bergdorf Goodman to help her fiancé select a pair of shoes to go with his tuxedo for their wedding.

Wearing the sort of outfit that usually acts as a siren for department store salespeople — a Tory Burch shift dress and Jimmy Choo slingback heels — she instead found herself waiting behind a European couple in sneakers and bike shorts who “had made such massive purchases that we couldn’t get anyone to give us the time of day for our size 11 ½ Ferragamo party slippers,” recalled Ms. Blitzer, 32.

The Europeans, she said, “brought over bags and bags of shoes” while the salesman wrapped their orders and chatted them up about restaurants and travel. “I didn’t want to do the ahem-I’m-sitting-here thing, but we had to sit there for 5 or 10 minutes while these big spenders small-talked.”

She was always used to first-class service, she said, adding, “But now, there’s an ultra-first.”

Don’t like it up em, do they….

Manhattanites without Bergdorf budgets often find themselves working overtime — figuratively and literally — to keep up with their visiting friends from Europe or Asia.

Jessica S. Le, an executive assistant at an investment banking firm who lives on the Lower East Side, said she recently started moonlighting as a dog-walker, in part to earn extra income she needs to see friends from abroad, who are dining at WD-50 or Suba, or drinking at Thor.

These friends from Europe and Asia “come over and play in New York like it’s Candyland,” she said in an e-mail message.

Does she mean playing in Candyland like the midwestern hicks who stand blocking the Amsterdam pavements, smoking dope and blowing it on passers-by - or maybe she means like the West Coast stoners getting so wasted in coffee shops they can barely walk, let alone ride their tourist’s bikes in a straight line let alone on the right side of the road.

Or does she mean more like the East Coast hipsters who drawl so loudly to each other on the tram about their Mummy&Daddy-funded writing/directing/painting/whatever gigs, pleading poverty while wearing head-to-toe Prada and staying in a posh apartment in Oud-Zuid?

Whatever. Serve ‘em right to be poor and treated like dirt by us Yurpeens for a while. Maybe they’ll show a little more empathy in future.

More handlebar-eye views of Amsterdam, again unashamedly stolen from Amsterdamized, here doing the loop from Oud West through the Grachten and then via the Rijksmuseum to the park. All on a lovely summer’s day, and all set to mellow music. Enjoy, especially if you’re desk-bound in the heat.