Dead London

Despite my recent infatuation with cemeteries ( I visited two in Paris…three if you count the one for cats and dogs), London’s Highgate is by far the best graveyard I have seen. And by best, I mean spookiest. This is the graveyard that is said to have inspired “Dracula”and I can believe it. Toppled gravestones and mossy angels peer out of the undergrowth while crows caw ominously from the treetops. It probably helps that I visited it on a damp and foggy day too (although D and L who came with me and got drenched might beg to differ…)

Highgate was built in the Victorian era as the jewel in the crown of a ring of nine “cities of the dead” circling London. They were designed to cope with the overflow of bodies from a population explosion and a cholera epidemic, and Highgate was the chic-est, most expensive address of the lot. But over time, the lavish crypts and lush gardens cemetery fell onto hard times – the cemetery was bombed in the war and never repaired, and the company managing it finally went bankrupt in the 1960s leaving the 17 hectare property to revert to nature – unmanaged, unsupervised, the trees overgrew the graves and it turned into a kind of green, jungly no-mans land, behind a high brick wall in the London suburbs. Vandals broke in, damaging the graves and climbing into the elaborate crypts. Pigeons, owls and bats took others. It sounds a wild, lawless place. It must have been amazing. But in the 1970s a local community group took over and they now run the cemetery with an iron fist; so much so that the only way to visit is on one of their (ambitiously priced) guided tours. But I took the bait …and I’m glad I did.

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This is the Egyptian Avenue, a creepy tunnel of carved, faux-pharaonic crypts. Below are more of the graves scattered around.

Part of the inspiration for the tour had come from our recent obsession (D’s and mine) with the British TV show “Most Haunted” in which a Tv crew spends the night in a different haunted mansion each week, trying to make contact with spirits on nightvision camera. Here is D impersonating the face of the host Yvette Fielding as she hears a strange knock coming from the grave …. (she really does look like that).

But my main interest was in the intriguing myth of a “‘Highgate Vampire”. In the 1970s a number of foxes were found dead in the graveyard, from no known cause. Sightings of strange figures started to be seen by those visiting relatives graves. A whisper started. Soon, two of the country’s top spiritualists had revealed the existence of a “Highgate Vampire”and were competing to find and kill it. When a vampire hunt was announced for Friday 13th hordes of vampire-hunters converged on the cemetery, climbing the locked gates with hammers and stakes in hand, and wreaked havoc. Acording to wikipedia’s article on “the Highgate Vampire’:

Some months later, on 1 August 1970 (Lammas Day), the charred and headless remains of a woman’s body were found not far away. The police suspected that it had been used in black magic. Farrant (one of the main vampire hunters) was found by police in the churchyard beside Highgate Cemetery one night in August, carrying a crucifix and a wooden stake. He was arrested, but when the case came to court it was dismissed. A few days later Manchester (the other wouldbe-undead-slayer) returned to Highgate Cemetery, but in the daytime, when visits are allowed. Again, we must depend on his own published book for an account of his actions, since neither press nor police were present. He claims that this time he and his companions did succeed in forcing open, inch by inch, the heavy and rusty iron doors of a family vault (indicated by his female psychic helper). He lifted the massive lid off one coffin, believing it to have been mysteriously transferred there from the previous catacomb. He was about to drive a stake through the body it contained when a companion persuaded him to desist. Reluctantly, he shut the coffin, put garlic and incense in the vault, and came out from it . A later chapter of Manchester’s book claims that three years afterwards he discovered a vampiric corpse (he implies that it was the same one) in the cellar of an empty house in the Highgate/Hornsey area, and staked and burned it .

All of this was reported widely (and gleefully) in the tabloid press of the day, but when I asked our otherwise knowledgeable Friends-of-Highgate appointed tour guide, she said she got the question all the time but knew nothing about it, and then clamped shut. A thought tickled me. If you were a professional tour guide and you got the same question all the time, wouldn’t you think the research it? Was this not a cover-up. When I asked her she admitted the Friends of Highgate wished to downplay the matter. The hysteria of the vampires had after all occurred just about the same time they took over the cemetery … Then another thought occurred – what if the Friends of Highgate were vampires themselves???? What better ruse than to buy up a cemetery under the guise of being a benevolent conservation group, then to shut down the rumours. Is that why the guide got so agitated when anyone strayed from the group and urged us to “keep together””… and what were all those “dangerous”signs on the tombs….. Too much “Most Haunted” and “True Blood”? You decide!

While in town, I also dropped by another lesser-known London attraction connected to death; the Monument to Animals in War. To be honest, I didn’t know whether to be touched by this expression of humanity’s nobler sentiments, or to find it ridiculous.

London Boys

Switzerland

After Paris ( I know, its chronologically all mixed up) I took the TGV express train straight to Lausanne. Daisuke had already left three days earlier to catch up on his assignments before school began.

I had heard so much about his university; but it was still hard to get my head around it when I saw it. Its a strange place; standing on the edge of town, in fields knee-deep in snow, nothing but a pizza restaurant and an infrequently served bus stop nearby. Inside this isolated little bubble, the ambitious, sharply dressed sons and daughters of the global business elite mingle and compete – the guys, though in their twenties, always in suits and ties, the women heavily madeup in business-power-woman mode. Everyone is from somewhere different; all over Asia, Europe, the Americas and the Middle East (and with every combination you can think of). Its a hothouse, both cosmopolitan and weirdly insular, drawn from all around the world but only one social class. I met some great people there amongst Daisuke’s classmates; funny, funloving and sharp, but all slaving themselves to the bone to make the same dream come true.

So most of my Switzerland experience was spent here, hanging out with Daisuke and his friends, helping with assignments, and gazing out the window as snow fell, for days and nights at a time. Outside, the world seemed white on white on white.

I did make a few forays into Lausanne of course, but never really warmed to it. It seemed a soulless place; wealthy and comfortable but drab. It’s citizens  seemed joyless. There was no spark, or electricity or anything much to see. True, it does have a small and picturesque “old town” with a charming wooden staircase up the hill (roofed to keep put out the snow), but that just wasn’t enough. In the end the place made me feel  depressed – its complacency perhaps, its lifelessness, and undoubtedly its  grey skies (I never saw it in the sun). But then, when I mentioned my feelings to the university students a surprising number of them immediately agreed.

Its not surprising then that he things I remember most in Laussane are these pieces of critical grafitti:

My French may be non-existant, but I can speculate that this means “we are all coming” (with a picture of a mosque); a perfect, biting comment I thought on anti-Islamic hysteria, (Switzerland has recently passed a law to outlaw the building of minarets, a clearly fearful and  xenophobic gesture).

The other piece pretty much speaks for itself:

Freaky art

 

Strangely for such a seemingly uncreative town, Lausanne is home to one of the most unconventional art museums in Europe. (But then perhaps it is not such a surprise: Zurich, of all places,  gave birth to the dada movement!). The Musee de l’art Brut opened in 1976 to showcase the creativity of people well outside the artistic mainstream; mainly the mentally ill such as schizophrenics, or the criminally insane. At the time, it was the only  institution of its kind in the world, and it remained that way for a decade and a half until “outsider art” began to build a huge buzz in the ’90s. Today there are similar museums in several cities (such as London’s Museum of Everything) and Henry Darger, ( perhaps the prototypical “outside artist’), was exhibited at least three times in Tokyo while I was there. (Darger was a reclusive janitor who died in 1973, leaving behind a fifteen thousand page novel nobody had ever read – the longest novel ever written in fact – and a series of bizarre, creepy pictures of child torture among other things, to illustrate it.)

But the Muse de l’art Brut pre-dated all of that. I was excited to visit. My Lonely Planet called it a “must see” and gave it as much space as all the other atractions of Lausane put together. Plus, I had a particular interest in the topic. When I worked in Japan at a school for mentally disabled kids I had seen  a wall of pictures, drawn after a trip to the zoo. They were by autistic children. The weird shapes on the wall – some oddly elongated and wiry, others cubist and cut up into boxes – bore little relation to the animals I knew. Was this how these kids saw them…and the world? Perhaps the musem would have some answers.

But, of course – of course – it was closed for renovations when I went. Until March. So that was that, then.

Luckily though, there was another equally intriguing museum just two hours hours away in the small medieval town of Gruyeres.

H.R. Giger was a Swiss artist, best known for his design of the sets – and the creatures -in the movie “Alien”. His style is distinctive, darkly sexual, and obsessed with the melding of the organic and the mechanical, often in grotesque and terrifying ways.

The museum here contains a large permanent collection of his work, displayed brilliantly in a dim gallery with black linoleum floors etched with intricate patterns – like arteries, or microchips. His sculptures in concrete and plastic largely mimic ribs, spines and skulls, melding them with furniture or engines. In his pictures beautiful, impassive women, or else strangely reptilian and metallic ones have sex (are raped?) by weird machines.  And I jumped when a disquieting noise came from up the stairs; it was simply the movie “Alien” – his masterpiece – playing in its entirety, on a loop,  in the attic (and dubbed into French). 

I remember reading somewhere that Giger’s own mother had suffered from cancer and undergone radiotherapy and some kind of metallic implant, and that his had strongly influenced his dread and desire for the body as machine. But there was nothing in the musem to confirm this.

The highlight was not the musem itself however – although it was great (in a queasy, unsettling way). It was the cafe and bar attached, on the other side of a medieval arch. Designed by the artist himself, it is without a doubt the coolest bar I went to in all of Europe; completely unexpected for a tiny hamlet  in the mountains two hours from Lausane, a strong candidate for the title of the continent’s most boring city.

It was astonishing though. See for yourself:

And the special “alien coffee” wasn’t half bad!

Gruyeres

Gruyeres is a tiny, though charming town and the Giger museum is not its only attraction. There is also the local cheese factory, a Tibetan art museum (which uncharacteristically I skipped),  and the stunning mountain scenery.

But the other big-ticket item is the town’s castle which crowns the hill on which Gruyeres stands, dating back to the 13th century.

 

Inside you can wander through various kitchens and bedrooms, see suits of armour and best of all this;

 

Despite colorful local legends about knights being decapitated in battle, the castle’s severed hand seems to be an 18th century Egyptian import; hacked off a mummy. There was a lively trade in mummies at the time, as people in Europe ground them up and used the powder as medicine – ewwwww – and also, allegedly, used the mummified carcasses as fuel for steam trains).

The castle also has a turreted, “prisoner’s tower” fitted with a claustrophobic, tightly spiralling metal staircase. It showcases walls decorated with more of the town’s trademark “fantastic art”; here translating as the kind of gaudy sci-fi fantasy work that Saddam Hussein decorated his palaces with.

Snow country

Hamburg

The Reeperbahn

Hamburg is a city of canals and bridges, lakes and green village-like suburbs. There are grafitti-covered hipster neighborhoods, and landmarks like the Gothic fantasy city hall and a terrifying, concrete fortress-tower like something out of “1984” (its a prison) as well as  impossibly quaint, toytown-like Christmas markets lit with fairy lights in the main square. Unfortunately, my photos of all of that seem to have vanished, but what still remains is this: on our last night in town I insisted Daisuke take me to the city’s famous red-light district, “The Reeperbahn”.

Its a strange attraction in such a prosperous, proper city. Nowhere is the Germans’ interesting attitude to sex and nudity more on display. Although it holds nothing back, the strip exudes an oddly wholesome air; you can almost imagine familes bringing their children for an afternoon stroll past the sex shops – most of which seemed to be full of awful, tacky novelty items – as well as “Germany’s horniest Christmas market”. Its all such a … non turn on.

 

This was our favourite shop sign; from a distance we weren’t sure what kind of “hot dogs” they were referring to, (but it turns out just the conventional, edible kind).

(Note me wearing Daisuke’s “ich bin ein Hamburger” top. I tried everything to get that off him.)

The Reeperbahn has two main claims to fame. One is that it is where the Beatles first played in divey bars before they rocketed to superstardom.  Understandably, local businesses are keen to milk this association. You can see the salon where John, Paul and Ringo had their hair cut, and an odd silhouetted metal statue commemorating the band’s connections to the area.

 

The second main attraction is a weird little barracaded, closed-off street where beautiful women in lingerie sit in windows and call to you to come in. The odd part is that other than them, no women are allowed. Apparently the hookers throw water balloons (which Daisuke’s mother insisted were filled with urine) at those who dare to cross the barricade. And in egalitarian, progressive Germany (bus shelters all over town were advertising the feminist magazine “Strong Women”) , this seems totally accepted. Odd.  The idea I guess is to make the little cul de sac a hedonistic, liberated funzone, far from the nagging and moralizing of mere females. I was quite intimidated; the models (because I’m sure they were, I don’t think those stunning girls provide any services) wer very forthright in calling out and making eye contact, although one laughingly said (apparently, it was in German) “well, obviously you two are gay…”

🙂

hamburg-berlin

Just kidding about the second one …

Winter wonderland: Berlin

 

Daisuke and I spent the New Year in Berlin where we had a great little companion; as a wedding present our friends Antje, Joerg, Bettina and Torsten had made us a little guidebook of the city, complete with map, subway tickets and free vouchers for some of the attractions. It was such a great present:

Writing is on the wall

On our first night in Berlin we took a bitterly cold walk with our friends Antje and Joerg along what is left of the city’s most (in)famous landmark – the Berlin Wall. This short preserved section, called “the east Gallery”  is covered with post-unification street art which was especially commissioned, like a poem to the rights of black lesbians (!), this amusing “detour to the Japanese sector” (I hadn’t realised that Berlin was never a part of West Germany, it had been an occupied city divided into British, French and American sectors right up until the 1990s end), and the popular satirical picture of East germanleader Eric Honnecker and Mikhail Gorbachev locked in a  passionate kiss.

I noticed that these days, the once-infamous and uncrossable symbol of Cold War cruelty sits opposite the headquarters of Universal Music, and is towered over by an electronic billboard playing Scorpions videos.

More Kreuzberg

And below, the eery glowing neon of an ultraviolet window, in a Gothic church:

New year in Berlin

 

New year in Berlin was LOUD. All over the city, people were throwing small handheld fireworks off rooftops and into the sky above parks. The city echoed like a warzone.  This all reached a climax, of course, on New Years Eve. I had gone to a party held in the apartment of one of Antje’s friends, and at midnight we all ran down to the local park to drink champagne and watch the sky (and at one moment, very nearly the hair of a girl standing nearby the fireworks-tossers) set alight. It was exhilirating to see the snoy park and the anarchic, constant barrage of fireworks, being tossed by people nearby; in Australia, fireworks are strictly illegal and the only fireworks displays I had evr seen were big, official ones. But these were spontaneous and unpredictable, just guys on the street, letting them off wherever they wanted. As I walked, I watched carefully for unexploded fireworks in the snow. The next day the papers were full of kids who had lost their hands after playing with firecrackers (many of them illegally imported from Poland where safety standards are more lax).

Also in the papers was a report on the smaller than expected crowd at the annual free concert at the Brandenburg Gate – it usually pulled in a million people but this year only got 500,000, blamed on the cold weather and the choice of entertainment (Right Said Fred performed).

 

The next day we had planned to head out to Berghain, a huge and allegedly wild techno club housed in a vast, hangar-like former power station. It had recently been voted as the best club in the world and was famous for the debaucherous hardcore-Berlin party crowd it attracted. There was said to be a basement where people went to have sex (not that remarkable for a gay club but pretty risque for a straight one).

But Daisuke decided he didnt want to head out, and after spending new Years Eve apart I didn’t want to go without him. So we spent the day in our (admittedly funky) hotel room with its bath-by-the-bed combo and red-lit corridors (it reminded me of the vampire hotel in Season 2 of “True Blood”).

So, we never got to experience the legendarily extreme Berlin nightlife, despite being there on the biggest party night of the year, ( although I did notice approvingly that the local free gay magazine divided its listings section bluntly into “scene”, “culture” and “sex” options).

Berlin city landmarks

The bunkers

Berlin is not a pretty city. It is gritty and harsh, a survivor. The “history” that makes Paris so beautiful has scarred Berlin, terribly. The weight of it is everywhere, still; in the legacy of the divided city, the hulking Cold War architecture, the shadow of the Nazi era. And this point was driven home – excrutiatingly – on a tour Daisuke and I took with Joerg through some of the subterranean bunkers underneath the city. Starting at a subway station in the rough and heavily Turkish/Kurdish looking neighborhood of Wedding, the tour takes you down under the ground to a network of underground rooms, designed to house 1% of the city’s population, in the event of the outbreak of World War Three.

Its a horrible feeling to think that  – as the guide points out – almost everyone really expected this to happen. It wasn’t an abstract idea, but a very real cloud of fear that generations grew up under. West Berlin kept enough food to feed two million people for six months, fearing a return to the days of a Communist blockade. Subway stations were designed to turn into airtight, civilian shelters with huge pipes full of sand to filter radioactive particles out of the air. The platforms would be filled with multi-storey bunk beds. A poster on the tour quotes an American travel brochure from 1981 which says, glibly but with a a blunt sense of what people then thought: “See Europe…while its still there”.

Ever detail of bunker life seems so grim; the scratchy, synthetic uniforms everyone would wear (clothes from outside might harbor contaminants), the color-coded bowls for gruel, the humidity and 40 degree temperatures in the densely populated tunnels, the huge mechanical airlocks, the dimness and claustrophobia. and just the thought that for so many years, people lived up above accepting that one day, perhaps very soon, this might be their fate.

The Pool Ship

The “Badeschiff”, or “Floating Pool”, is one of Berlin’s funkiest attractions; a (heated) swimming pool and sauna housed in worm-like acrylic tubes, floating in the freezing Spree River in the centre of town. And this being Germany, you swim in it naked. Antje, Joerg, Bettina and Torsten had given us tickets as part of their wedding present (thank you!) but we hadn’t realised it was naked and co-ed until we walked into the unisex changing room to be flashed by naked chicks everywhere. But then I thought, “OK, it’s Germany”, stripped off and swam through the warm, dimly glowing pool to a terrace outside the tubing where you could sit (naked) in the warm water with snow falling, looking out at the looming modern sculpture of fighting giants in the middle of the river. It was pretty unforgettable.