Booze n'Blues

Fakir Hindou will tell your fortune, if you want her to.  She sits atop the wooden bar in her wooden box: just yellowing paper and a whole circle of possible predictions.  Only today Fakir's glimpse into my future is erratic, to say the least.

"Tout marche à vos souhaits", she says.

Suspicious, I insert 20 cents again.  My companion has just had the same result and I am not sure I like Fakir's prediction of my future: it is not always good to have everything you wish for!  If we did, what would inspire us to work hard, to plot grand schemes, to try new things?  The landlady admits that the spinning wheel of fortune does tend to get stuck.  So we receive our twenty cents back, for a new prediction, and I only consider afterwards that this is like feeding coins into a slot machine or having my palm read, or refusing to walk under ladders, or praying - we feel it might help in some way, but are not quite sure how or why.


The jukebox is not working either.  That is a pity, because there are few customers and I could have played whatever I wanted, within a certain epoch.  I take a sip of Grimbergen, and decide to talk to the lady at the bar instead.  Everyone else entering seems to think I am the bar lady.  So I get up and talk, and when I return a few minutes later, as if to punish me, someone has drunk the rest of my beer.

Booze n'Blues has been family-run for the last 13 years.  I've come here several times before, when the jukebox was working.  Not much has changed.  The smoking ban has come in, making the interior a little easier on the lungs, but paintwork and memorabilia and the not-for-the-sqeamish toilet and urinal combo downstairs could do with some touching up.  But this sense of timelessness is really the appeal: I know that if I leave Brussels and return in five years Blues n'Blues will still look the same, and the jukebox might be playing Chuck Berry or Johnny Cash.  Nobody seems too concerned.  It's a personal space of Zappa and Zeppelin papered nostalgia: it is what is is.

Perhaps a little sawdust on the floor to add to the wooden stools, tables and bar and Miller Light signs, and I would feel that I was in rural South Carolina or Tennessee.  But I don't feel quite in America.  The lady tells me her brother opened Blues n'Blues after a former bar, Blues Corner, closed down.  Now he lives upstairs.  He has never been to the US due to a fear of flying, so has missed out on annual blues meetings there.  Instead he has his music here: and a bar interior that reminds me of the US, here in central Brussels.

Booze n'Blues

rue des riches Claires 20

Les gens que j'aime

I like Les Gens que j'aime.  There's something very endearing about a place which makes an effort, has chosen a 60s theme but hasn't gone overboard with it, and where people tap away on laptops with a tea and bagel beside them, undisturbed.  It's not effortlessly cool or a gourmet's paradise.  But it's relaxed, charming and plays The Doors a short stride away from the Grand Place: welcome respite from acres of cellophane-wrapped boxed chocolates, lacy aprons and thousands of Mannequin Pis corkscrews.  I keep meaning to buy a specimen of the latter for my fridge, but I never seem to get round
to it.  I think it's all to do with my aversion to shops with strip fluorescent lighting. Take me somewhere dark and atmospheric instead!

I headed upstairs, where the lighting does seem a bit strange, as if you're seated in a Berlin museum showcasing an East German 1960s interior.  There are a few bars in Brussels with galleries like this one: L'Archiduc is one, but I also recently discovered Le Bonnefooi (another musical cafe to be featured here at some point).  The waiter did not seem that happy to have to traipse upstairs to serve us, but we lay on the charm by serenading him from the balcony and telling him how we liked it up there with the chandelier.  I sat at a little table with its tablecloth of pyschedelic circles, just managing to fold legs away beneath it while I sipped ginger tea and tried to stop the pot dribbling.  Last time I had a bagel here, with brie, honey, walnuts and apple.  This time I chose - from a small meal selection of bagels, burger, meatloaf and waffles - the lasagne.  Smoke from the kitchen rose to join us: we haven't quite worked out the extractor fan, said our waiter friend as he emerged from the stairway with our food.  He seemed to take to the balcony as well.  And looked pensive when he said that they hadn't been that busy over the Summer.

The lasagne is hot, filling, drowning in cheese and drawing me in.   And the verdict on the assembled bagel-burger?  "C'est bon, mais c'est dur a manger!"  It was plenty-for both of us.  And the place?  Pleasant and relaxed for impromptu lunch or evening gatherings, a short walk away from busier and more touristy venues: the meals cost between 6 and 14 euros.  And, our waiter friend tells us, the venue was formerly two separate houses and a naff chocolate shop.  It goes without saying that I prefer it in its current incarnation.  

Becinbrussels eats bagels, lasagne, anything really!  Just don't expect me to be hungry again until some hours have passed.

De Dolle Mol

It is Thursday afternoon in De Dolle Mol, and Jan Bucquoy is in contemplative mood.  “In some countries tolerance for doing a psychological study is higher than in others”, he muses; “But Belgium is the simplest.  I had the idea of going to New York to ask a chambermaid for a pair of pants, but then I reflected I could have ended up in prison.”

I have to agree.   But then Belgians have had several decades to get used to Bucquoy and his antics: the mock Coups d’état; the provocative re-portrayals of Tintin doing things Tintin shouldn't do; a film featuring entarteur (pie-throwing) Noël Godin; and of course his Musée du Slip, which started in 1990 at Bucquoy’s home in Schaerbeek, and has persisted in various locations since then, fanning the reputation of its already infamous creator.

Bucquoy regularly breaks off our conversation to wander round this weathered Flemish bar.  This gifts me a few moments where I don't need to concentrate, so I stupidly take in the utilitarian wooden tables, Marxist books by the window, a vaguely suspect-looking green plant....  De Dolle Mol has always been an anti-establishment place, linked to the birth of the Flemish Amnesty International movement, Women’s liberation and the B-generation, and nowadays the home of dreamy revolutionaries and self-styled outlaws, and a few admiring teenagers.   It was Bucquoy who persuaded a Flemish Minister to save the bar, after rising rents forced it to close.  Nowadays musicians sometimes play and there is space for a theatre upstairs.

While my brain is trying to make sense of the "why", my eyes are taking in the "who".  I spy Lenin, Chairman Mao, de Gaulle, Napoleon…. All with vibrant red lips and with a frilly object on their head.  Surely it can’t be – a pair of ladies’ knickers?  Of course they are, and it turns out that these (washed) specimens have been given willingly over the years by various personalities, and it is Bucquoy who completes the montage: deciding whose underwear adorns the head of each venerable old General, Dictator, politician.  The pants form an inverted triangle – a symbol for the liar used in Medieval paintings, Bucquoy says.  Only Magritte is spared this treatment: “I figured that surrealism was already strange enough!”

Meanwhile our conversation is paused again, and something on the wall has just made me laugh, next to the pant samples generously donated by Plastique Bertrand and Brigitte la Haie:

"Please complete the aforementioned coupon and return it together with your pants."

I struggle to imagine how anyone could refuse.  Do some of these people have no sense of humour?!  I look round at a leering DSK, at Clinton, at Sarkozy, at Michael Jackson - it is clear that this is not "art for art's sake".  It is not just who is represented (Napoleon, not Mother Teresa), but the reaction this provokes in you, the viewer.  We and the pants are there to remind these people that they are just like us, underneath.  We're like their conscience.

But that is still not enough for me.  Indeed it is in the hope of coaxing out explanations to satisfy any literary critic - no, of ploughing Bucqouy's soul- that I'm here today.  I even started reading Guy Debord and something he wrote about capitalism and consumerism, but to be honest I was struggling by paragraph 65.  I quote an interesting passage at Bucquoy, and he flashes me an amused look.  "That's nice," he says.  As our conversation progresses I am beginning to feel that Bucquoy is not taking this - or himself - very seriously.  And what of Bucquoy?  "No, the Director doesn't wear pants", he says, mischeviously.

Anyway I think others have had something to say about all this:

"plus il contemple, moins il vit ; plus il accepte de se reconnaître dans les images dominantes du besoin, moins il comprend sa propre existence et son propre désir."

 

La Société du Spectacle (30), Guy Debord

How can we escape from a world as Debord described it?  "Il faut que le pouvoir puisse

être mis en question", says Bucquoy, simply.  That means attacking the visible symbols, the people behind power, with the potent symbol of sexual transgression - of nudity.  As Bucquoy puts it, "le sexe, c'est le désordre"  But there's also his warning that criticism can form part of the very capitalist system we all must try and cheat.  Suddenly everything seems linked: there's Tintin denuded and his creator un-masked; and the anti-spectacle to counter Debord's malevolent Orwellian state that controls what we wear and what we think.  This is Bucquoy's mock coup d'état, which used to happen on 21 May (in the days when Belgium had a government).  21 May?  "Il pleut pas en général."  Unlike the 21 July.....

This performance reflects events elsewhere in the world, but is a reminder that democracy does not change anything.  Nor do elections.  Instead Bucquoy wants a revolution!  But until that day he's happy being the barman in De Dolle Mol: sending off another 1000 letters to solicit new pant specimens; dreaming of a time when Ministers and riches could be distributed according to a lottery system and power is delegated to the regions.  However there is no need for any of that at present: with no Government he is content with things as they are.  At least nobody is putting up taxes. 

De Dolle Mol is open Wednesday to Sunday from 16:00, until everyone has had enough to drink and it is time to go home.  But Becinbrussels drank apple juice on this occasion.