Whether the game journalist of the newspaper – proudly dismissed, annoyingly noisily about it – would like to zap a day or two? I am skeptical. In the warm and pleasant lap of YouTube, a nice video of a bass guitar teacher who is thinking about a song from the band New Model Army analyzes. In structure, melodies, weird songwike shops that I would never have noticed. Solid distraction in harsh times, far from politics, reliable and entertaining.
But ahead: for tonight I leave this safe country and enter the swamp, full of no -nonsense about fathers who cannot keep their triplets apart, and Limburg au pairs who think it is that American parents coordinate the clothing of their three children militant.
Distraction? Then I shouldn’t pay attention to the story of the black, bisexual au pair aron, which is rejected with one glance by the paternalistic head of his former family in San Diego. “I had more of a girl in mind,” says the father. Painful. The episode attempts to fly by – this has to be nice holiday television, it must remain ‘an adventure’ – but it keeps haunting my head.
Terschelling dunes
Good. Distraction. Where can I find it?
Oerol! Good, Cornald Maas is a bit more wrinkled and tanned than my bass teacher, but the vibe is the same. Art, depth.
His table is in the middle of the long grass of the Terschelling dunes. The public is exhausted in the sand. It is always long, such a festival, tiring, warm, every sensation seems raised and then flattened – that sensory memory suddenly shoots through my body. They are also talking about senses, Cornald, his guests and his reporter, Carolien Borgers. Carolien has been cast in a vacuum suit. “If I had known that there was an island somewhere where you could be sucked vacuum, I would have jumped on the boat for a long time,” says writer Michel van Egmond.
He doesn’t want to talk about his book. Even though Cornald is insisting. “It’s about a writer looking for a topic to write about. That is once not about sport.” What he and his partner, journalist Antoynette Scheulderman (who refused to appear without her dog Dizzy) want to let go of something about is the theater performance they have seen. It is about a theater maker who wants to help a homeless person by making theater.
Van Egmond and Scheulderman have both sometimes made or did something to help someone in need. Sometimes that goes well, they say. Sometimes not. “Maybe some people just want a house and money without doing anything,” Scheulderman Overspaks, but quickly nuances that help may be meant for professionals. Yes, okay.
In that half hour Oerol opium (AVROTROS) I think myself in a different world. A place where we can chat about art, without thinking about threatening war, censorship, cutbacks.
That thought drags me out of the distraction.
I zap from Terschelling to Vlieland, where Other times speaks with ‘tankers’. These are tank drivers, who held a funeral for the Dutch tanks eleven years ago with nostalgia. “Very Dutch Reflex, the threat of Russia was gone,” sighs Major General Harm de Jong.
The tankers talk a lot about boy dreams, the reporters bombard them with sometimes teasingly sexually-tinted questions-“what do you attract in tanks?” The one asks. “That almost sounds like a deflowering,” says the other, after a poetic description of what it is like, if you can fire a bullet with the tank for the first time.
They mimic nostalgic, the tankers. What a beautiful weapon. The scent! But they prefer not to think about war. A tank is distraction for them. Former tanker Gerrit Buurman wanted action, not war, he says. “Look at Ukraine.” What is the use, he mumbles. What is the use?
Suddenly I craved my bass teacher.