Soulwax – "E Talking" (2004)

It’s not you

It’s the E talking

I spent the last night of my recent stay in Ghent, Belgium, doing laundry.

I was surprised that my Ghent hotel – a large, modern Marriott – didn’t have a laundry room.  But the concierge told me there was a place called Wasbar – a combination laundromat, hair salon, and bar/café – just a few blocks away.

The staffers at Wasbar were very young and very chill.  They showed me how to use the high-tech but tiny front-loading washing machines.  One I got my machine going, I ordered a beer and took a seat where I could keep an eye on my duds.

It didn’t take too long for the washing machine to finish washing my clothes.  The dryer was a different story.

Maybe I chose the wrong setting – the controls were labeled in French and Dutch, both of which were Greek to me – but my clothes weren’t appreciably drier after an hour in the machine than they had been when I first took them out of the washer.

Wasbar closed at 9:00 pm, but the charming young woman in charge of the place told me not to worry.  “Stay as long as you want,” she said.  I was welcome to stay and let my clothes dry while she and the rest of the Wasbar staff mopped the floors and restocked the pantry and bar with food and drink.

About this time, I noticed a couple of young women sitting in the street just outside of Wasbar:

Can you read their sign?  Here’s what it says:

In Belgium there is [sic] more than 1600 types of beer!!!  To taste them all, we need at least 5000 €!!!  We also accept coins.

As I watched them, a couple of wobbly drunks sat down to chat with them.  One of them took his shoe off and gesticulated with it as he spoke with one of the young women:

A few moments later, a dressed-for-success type on a bicycle stopped, pulled two bottles of beer out of her backpack, opened them, and handed them to the two young lovelies:

Do you see the propeller beanie that our benefactress is wearing?  A beanie like that is given to every new Google employee on his or her first day at work.  Google employees are called “Googlers,” and new Google employees are called “Nooglers”:

By the time 10:00 pm rolled around, my clothes were still nowhere near dry.  The Wasbar employees had finished their work by then, but were all sitting outside drinking beer.  I apologized to the manager for still being there, and promised to leave shortly, but she was unconcerned.  “There’s no hurry,” she said.  “We’re not in a rush to leave.”

“Don’t you get tired of each other after working together all day?” I asked the group.  ‘Don’t you want to get away from here and go home?”

They laughed and assured me that they were all friends who enjoyed each other’s company.  They were such sweet kids – young and innocent and apparently without a care in the world.

My laundry was far from dry when I finally left at 10:30 and walked back to my hotel, where a group of business travelers were drinking in the lobby bar and watching a darts competition on TV:

The night before, those TVs were tuned to the semifinal World Cup match between France and Belgium.  The France took care of business and the Belgians didn’t. 

This is how one Belgian newspaper had to say about the loss the next morning:

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Soulwax was an electronic dance music group from Ghent.  The music video for “E Talking” – which is  a single from their 2004 album, Any Minute Now – depicts various drug-addled clubgoers, and indicates the drug each of them is on. 

There’s one drug for each letter of the alphabet: 

A – acid

B – barbiturates

C – cocaine

D – DMT

E – ecstasy

F – “fizzies” (methadone)

G – GHB

H – heroin

 I – “ice” (methamphetamine)

J  – “jumbos” (crack)

K – ketamine

L – lithium

M – mushrooms

N – nitrous oxide

O – opium

P – PCP

Q – Quaaludes

R – Rohypnol

S – steroids

T – tetracycline

U – uppers

V – Viagra

W – whiskey

X – XTC

Y – “yayo” (cocaine) 

Z – Zoloft

Click here to listen to “E Talking”:

Click on the link below to buy the song from Amazon:

Gabriel Ríos – "Broad Daylight" (2005)

‘Cause this here be going on 

Until it’s not . . .

And then a little more

The Belgian city of Bruges – which is probably the best-preserved medieval city in all of Europe – is a place that I’ve wanted to visit for years.  

According to one travel writer, “If you set out to design a fairy-tale medieval town, it would be hard to improve on central Bruges.”

The Belfry of Bruges

The medieval belfry (bell tower) of Bruges is the city’s most famous building.  It’s featured prominently in the 2008 movie titled In Bruges:

Longfellow wrote a poem titled “The Belfry of Bruges,” which begins with these lines:

In the market-place of Bruges stands the belfry old and brown;

Thrice consumed and thrice rebuilded, still it watches o'er the town.

The belfry was seriously damaged by fires in 1280, 1493, and 1741 – hence the “Thrice consumed and thrice rebuilded” line.

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When I went to Bruges last month, I wasn’t disappointed – far from it.  But I don’t understand why the nearby city of Ghent doesn’t get a little more love.  

Like Bruges, Ghent has plenty of centuries-old canals, churches, cobbled streets, and distinctive step-gabled buildings.  

It has a belfry, too.  The belfry of Ghent (which was built between 1313 and 1380) is about 25 feet taller than the belfry of Bruges.

The Belfry of Ghent

What Ghent doesn’t have are the crowds of tourists that can overwhelm Bruges on a summer’s day.

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In early July, the days in Ghent are well over 16 hours long.  It doesn’t really get dark until around 11:00 pm.

Like Bruges, Ghent is full of buildings with stepped gables, the oldest of which date from the 12th and 13th centuries.  Here are a few examples:

The combination of step-gabled buildings, canals, and twilight skies is impossibly picturesque:

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I don’t think Bruges has anything like Ghent’s enormous Gravensteen castle, which dates back to 1180:

And Bruges doesn’t have anything like the Ghent Festival, an outdoor music and theatre festival that attracts some two million visitors to Ghent every July.

The Ghent Festival kicked off the day after my group was scheduled to leave the city and return to the U.S.  Construction crews were racing to complete dozens of outdoor stages and beer gardens while we were there.

Every Belgian brewery that I had ever heard of and a number of those I hadn’t heard of were represented at the festival.  The event’s organizers had arranged for hundreds of these urinals to be placed on the streets:

I realize that these urinals do relatively little to shield passers-by from the sight of men emptying their bladders.  But otherwise hundreds of thousands of beer-sodden young men would have been indiscriminately peeing everywhere – much like male dogs.

I’m not sure where all the beer-sodden young female festival-goers were supposed to go.

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In the next 2 or 3 lines, I’ll tell you about my last night in Ghent.  (SPOILER ALERT: I did my laundry.)

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Gabriel Ríos was born in Puerto Rico, but moved to Ghent when he was 17 to study painting.  He subsequently pivoted from art to music and quickly became a big deal on the local music scene.

“Broad Daylight” was a single from Ríos’s first album, Ghostboy, which was released in 2005.  

Click here to listen to “Broad Daylight.”

Click on the link below to buy the song from Amazon.