36. The Cannibals of Amsterdam

Day 36

Location 8: Amsterdam

Dec. 6, 2022

My good friend Nick Caldari plays in a soccer league in Brooklyn, New York (seeing as this is a European-focused blog, I'll be referring to the sport as football from here on out). I'll tell you his team's name in a moment, but first you need some background info:

• His football team's name is a reference to the great Italian footballer and current coach Andrea Pirlo.

• His football team's name is also a reference to the great painting Girl with a Pearl Earring by Johannes Vermeer (which hangs in the Mauritshuis, a 45-minute drive from where I'm staying in Amsterdam).

• One day, Nick asked me to create a photo encapsulating his football team's name.

His football team's name is "Girl with a Pirlo Earring". Below are the images I created, with Nick's direction, to represent his football team visually. Please follow the guide below:

(1) Girl with a Pearl Earring by Vermeer

(2) Substituting Pirlo for Girl by Smith (me)

(3) Substituting Pirlo for Earring by Smith (look closely at the earring)

(4) Swapping Pearl and Girl by Unknown

Anyway, all that is to say I saw a similarly altered version of Girl with a Pearl Earring in my hostel this morning. Just look at that sultry gaze:

The advancement of culture and humankind has been, throughout history, inevitable (stick with me here). Over time, we've shown an innate talent for improving our situations. We discovered fire, invented the wheel, designed airplanes, and eventually reached the current gold standard of human creation: the resealable package of Oreos .

Amsterdam is no different. What I mean is they don't lack this instinct for human improvement, and in some fields have advanced far past the rest of the world, including America. If all of Earth is competing in a race from "A" to "Z", Amsterdam retains a slight lead. While the United States is stuck on "J", Amsterdam has long since moved on to "K":

Today, I walked by a ton of Amsterdam's canals. It was beautiful. After exploring the labyrinth of the city's waterways, I went to a movie theater that somehow surpassed the canals in its beauty. The outside and inside felt more like an opera hall than a cinema.

Here's a video that (towards the end) captures the real beauty of Amsterdam:

At the movie theater described above, I watched–on my friend T.Y.'s recommendation–Bones and All, the second collaboration between actor-director duo Timothee Chalamet and Luca Guadagnino (and a spiritual sequel to this video). The film depicts a subset of people who cannot help but give in to their cannibalistic urges, despite their best efforts. Coincidentally, the co-star of the duo's first film, Call Me By Your Name, was Armie Hammer who has since been accused of cannibalistic abuse. People complain when they cast a white actor to play an Asian woman (re: Emma Stone in Aloha) and people are up in arms when a deaf character is played by someone who isn't hard of hearing. And yet, I hear no one complaining when this would have been the perfect opportunity to cast a real-life cannibal to play a cannibal. Disgraceful.

Pssst: to be clear, I am joking. Armie Hammer seems like a bad person. And hiring actors with relevant cultural or life experience helps add to the role and allows for important checks on misappropriation while helping prevent creating caricatures of important concepts.