Gloaming of the Mind: travel report 4

Sodala, Ich muesste ja fast diesen Teil des Berichtes auf Deutsch schreiben, nur der Fairniss wegen. Ich nehme an, dass ca ein Viertel meiner Leut lieber Deutsch als Englisch plaudern tun, nachdem dies der vierte Bericht ist... Das einzige Problem ist dann halt nur noch mein Deutsch :)

I did promise you Cassis. Seems like some of my faithful (this is really quite validating, thank you) readers thought that this was a woman. A woman seemingly more out of 1001 Arabian nights than stories. Alas, with great sadness I must report that what I lazily refer to as Cassis are Lime Cliffs, also known as Meditarrenean Fjords, or Calanques at the little town of Cassis, just east of Marseille. Of course my pix are way better than whatever the professional photographer dude can put up on Wiki just so that everybody goes to look at his site. Wannabe web content producer! Is all I am saying. In any case, Cassis was exactly what I needed after St. Tropez.

A first taste of the cliffs right before sunset. I have been lucky in hitting these great spots right around sunset time. Makes weird pictures like this one easy. Please tell me that you know clicking on these will make them nice and large. Otherwise you will now have to go back to all my other reports and read them again - yikes - and look at all the pictures again - yikes yikes - and comment on ALL of my other superbly written blog entries - yikes yikes yikes.

But first we must deal with St Tropez, and I mean that roughly the same way a Russian "interpreter" would have applied it to one of his "customers" in the Lubyanka. Generally, I have had the same image of St Tropez that you all have. A glitzy, swanky place, full of hot punany and downright decadent in its indecency (yup, all known adjectives used up). You can imagine my Vorfreude: Coming down out of the hills of Verdon, looking and smelling like a cave man. I was going to find the most glamorous beach and chase some honeys with my musty yet manly stench. My hair standing on end, like that Young Einstein dude after learning the effects of plugging his fingers in a socket (some genius), my fingers crusty from running around in a dumb canyon when I could have been downright decadent, etc. Even my car embodied the post pubescent cesspool that Volvo always wanted in order to finally project an image of young urban hippness. Imagine a smelly, crusty veritable volvo marketing nightmare befalling the Cote d'Azur like so many Vikings, raping and pillaging my way up and down the coast of Gaul.

Well that was me, but only in my thoughtless Vorfreude. As we know kommt es erstens anders, und zweitens als man denkt (sorry, this is untranslateble while remaining funny, but I want you all to try anyway, I will send you a cookie for the best go at it => comment :) Reality was completely different than image. I guess that's what images are all about. And this strange reality dysfunction reminded me of another one of those images that are so full of hoaxyness they make you want to puke. American Dream? Disney World? Any takers? Your don't see it? Well let me help you with that: First of all you traffic jam your way along the blue coast for however long you can take it. There was literally a jam along the entire coast from Monaco to St Tropez. If this doesnt sound like going to the beach or to Disney Land in LA, I dont know what does. I tried to avoid this silliness, by going to a beach wherever it was that I got sick of thinking that St Tropez would be just around the next corner. Well, of course this was a kiddy beach, and not that I am a typical american male, but I havent seen topless girls on a beach in a long time, and the ones that interest me are generally not underaged anymore.

Of course those were not to be found on the beach that I found myself on. So I split pretty quickly. Seriously, if you think I left cuz of the missing toplessnesses, you should read someone else's blog. Then a flash of brilliance (returning blood to brain maybe) hit me, and I went inland and passed by about 2 hours worth of jamming in what is certainly not the lords name.

Finally I arrived in St Tropez, jammed my way godlessly to a parking structure, and walked into town. Hahaha, you St. Tropez-Knowers laugh happily, he wanted to walk in town, Hahahaha. Well its not that funny. See the problem is, there are too many people there to walk anywhere. You can only fight your way to wherever you want to go like Triathletes will kick each other in the cojones to get away from each other in the water. Presumably they all had the same image as I did of St. Tropez. The hot punany, the glitz, the yachts, all the shit that I am not supposed to care about anyway. Well it ain't there. What is there is a replacement drug for our poor mislead souls. The glitz is what the dealer gets you with, and once he has you, he aint never letting go. You will ride the pink dragon till your commercialized kingdom comes. You can shop till you drop. And if you are a stupid little punany you can walk along the port, trying to look sexy so that maybe you can finagle your way onto one of those yachts. But you will still have to pay in one form or another. And if you dont mind the plaster, or dont know the difference between it and real stone you may admire the cute, tiny streets. And if you dont mind that the stores sell you the same shit as the ones on Melrose, and Akihabara and The Bund you can buy all that crap, ship it back home and tell yourself that you have lived the dream of St Tropez. Except that you bought from just east of Hong Kong, when it comes right down to it.

This is why I do not have any pictures for you from St Tropez. It's a place with no soul, in which european criticism of american consumerism is at the Mount Everest of both its disingenuousness and silliness. One image suffices to tell its entire story of a Potemkin Village, built not for the purpose of fooling one's queen, but rather to fool us into thinking that this travesty matters one iota. Just take some Soma if that is what you are after.

If Beirut is the Paris of the Middle East, St Tropez is the whore of the Mediterranean. It is the undressed puppet in a dirty, bursting at the seems market that only exists because our thirst for buying crap demands more shopping square footage than this disneyfied monstrosity offers. Look at these perfectly shaped curves, the images that we long to possess for ourselves. Check the measurements that every starved and hunger diseased super model would/will die for. See, the puppet has no head! Air in the space between the ears where the brain should be. Does this call anything to mind? Those breasts god could not have made more perfect. And don't even ask for primary genitalia. If I am drawing comparisons between human and puppet headlessness, what, pray tell, do I think of, well... pussylessness? This poor replica, this image of our own empty replacement desires is propped up on a stilt, connecting ass to street in order to remind us who is being cavity searched for their last penny by this Scylla of Mammon. Today the hordes have left this particular whore hanging high and dry. But tomorrow she will be stronger and greedier than ever.

Of course I could have just told you not to go to St. Tropez, but that would be just awefully boring. You still want some pix from Cassis? Peaceful, not crowded, clear aired, threateningly impressive Cassis? The untamed mare of the Mediterranean that will throw you off like dandruff if you do not respect her. At least now you know why it was a breath of fresh air for me.