Gala opening for Dries Van Noten at Paris Fashion Week. My Gala. That Dries. Antwerp Six Dries. I’m very in love with all this. I want to steal all the clothes and shoes.
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Gala Dries
Category Archives: Brussels
Posts with subject matter about or referring to Brussels, Belgium, where I’ve worked and occasionally lived, mostly about dance, art, daily life.
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Flughafen Berlin-Tegel TXL: Dec 23rd, 2010 Berlin to Brussels
My favourite orange hexagonal airport is closing this week, almost a decade after the original date, making way for the highly blah, much delayed, extremely suss new airport south of the old Flughafen Schönefeld which opened in the middle of a pandemic.
Living in Wedding, we could get to the airport in a few minutes by bus — even quicker for the taxi drivers who knew the tree-lined shortcut along the canal. Yeah, it was old and creaky, but drop-off to boarding was the quickest and chillest of any airport I’ve been in. Coming in to land from the east across lakes and city I’d read the ground finding Wedding and Uferhallen as we descended. Even getting to the south of Berlin was lazy easy, bus to Hauptbahnhof and M41 to Kreuzberg and Neukölln.
Before this terminal was built in the ’60s, before it was a military airport and one used during the Berlin Airlift, it was home to the Royal Prussian Airship battalion. And before that, the artillery range when the Exercier Platz der Artillerie got pushed west into the Jungfernheide forest from near what’s now the corner of Seestr. and Iranische Str. (which had a different name back then).
Unlike the beautiful Tempelhofer Feld, which has so far avoided necrocapitalist property seizure and ‘development’ and remains an open field like it’s been for hundreds of years, Flughafen Tegel has had the money class salivating along with the government. And being Berlin and Germany, we know they’ll ruin it like they did Potsdamer Platz or the new Flughafen Berlin Brandenburg. It’s what money does.
I first flew from TXL in late-2008, I think, going to London and Whitstable. No photos of that except a grainy one of me returning at night, and I remember hating coming back to face a hard winter and poverty. A year later, Dasniya and I flew early morning to Brussels to work with Roméo Castellucci on the Wagner opera Parsifal. Deep geologic layers of frozen snow and air cold as sharp knives.
Remembering my favourite airport this week as it comes to a close.
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I Would Title This: “What? Did I Ask For Caviar?”
Gala Moody once again getting the pervy fetish down on the first pose of the day.
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Gala & Michael Headcasts Portraits
Three Australians in Wuppertal, by way of Brussels, Madrid, and Berlin. Last time I was in Wuppertal it was for The Vase, one of three banging works I’ve seen this year. This time, Friday evening, it’s snowing to whiteout, Gala and Michael are talking about the headcasts they’ve had done for their upcoming work, New People. They want photos. Guess who brought their camera? Saturday morning, after a lazy breakfast and before lunch hamburgers, still snowing, the falling-apart printer’s workshops behind Michael’s apartment having their roofless concrete floors jackhammered by the owner, one of those old socialist tradie types who ends up with a bunch of properties and maintains them all himself. It’s proper winter cold, slush and snow and wetness, and he’s hauling shit around like Sisyphus. We bail into the one building with a roof. Milky glass-paned, rusting windows along one wall fill it with just enough light for us to get away with photography. There’s a temporary scaffolding floor erected, we tall ones are nearly smacking our heads on bits of pipe and beam. Their busts go on the ground, then on a plank, I photograph them like I would mediæval art.
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Koninklijke Musea voor Schone Kunsten van België: Peter Paul Rubens en Atelier — De Aanbidding der Wijzen
One more from Brussels’ Koninklijke Musea voor Schone Kunsten van België / Musées royaux des Beaux-Arts de Belgique in my lazy-blogging of single paintings.
I’d already blogged this museum heavily back in 2015 (Musée Oldmasters Museum, Musée Fin-de-Siècle Museum, and the very popular Peter Paul Rubens’ Vier Studies van het Hoofd van een Moor, among others), so I wasn’t really committed this visit to much more than staring at a few Bruegels, namely De val der opstandige engelen, along with Pieter Aertsen’s De Keukenmeid, and Gustaf Wappers’ Tafereel van de Septemberdagen 1830. And seeing I just mentioned almost all my posts on this museum, I can’t not mention the sublime Pieter Bruegel de Oude’s De Aanbiddung der Wijze, which is alone worth visiting the museum for.
Another De Aanbidding der Wijzen then. This one from Peter Paul Rubens and Atelier around early-1600s — no date on the caption and it seems to be one of his lesser known Adoration of the Magis. It’s in the Rubens Room, a massive, high-ceilinged chamber with natural light pouring in from above. Really one of the few rooms in the museum capable of the dimensions to display his epic works. I always have trouble remembering how large a piece was, but the figures are larger than life, and I dredged up 384 × 280 cm from the internet. And this room had walls of the stuff.
I blame the light. When it hits the top of a painting 2 metres above me and bounces down, I don’t know what to do. Yes, post-processing, but you can still see the upper half is blown out, and has an awkward blue colour cast. So my editing skills also suck. It’s the main reason I only photographed a couple of works this time. Sure I can take hundreds of photos, but the editing takes multiples of the time I spent actually in the museum, and it’s gotten a little out of hand — one of the main reasons I didn’t go to Ghent. These photos, then, don’t do the painting any favours, but it’s Rubens and it’s the Adoration of the Magi, and it makes me smile.
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Koninklijke Musea voor Schone Kunsten van België: Gustaf Wappers — Tafereel van de Septemberdagen 1830
Continuing my blogging of single paintings from Brussels’ Koninklijke Musea voor Schone Kunsten van België / Musées royaux des Beaux-Arts de Belgique, Gustaf Wappers’ massive Tafereel van de Septemberdagen 1830, op de Grote Markt te Brussel takes up one-third of a wall in the main atrium. It’s very Eugène Delacroix in size, composition, and themes, Romantic nationalism meets unnatural, formal arrangement.
I had thought MedievalPOC had Twitted/tumbled this recently, but it was rather John Singleton Copley’s The Death of Major Peirson at the Battle of Jersey (here on Twit, and tumblr) with the Black Scottish auctioneer’s assistant to James Christie front-and-centre doing the business with the flintlock. When I last visited the museum, I blogged Wappers’ painting, but — as is my tendency — it’s kinda under-exposed and dim, and the photos I took last week are far more detailed. As for whether under- or over-exposed or -contrasted, I dunno, this museum has some fucking abysmal lighting, both natural and artificial, and I’m only slightly competent at point-and-click.
So, seeing Twit is shite to search, and it doesn’t seem that MPOC tumbled it, I thought I’d throw this one up, for the shoeless Drummer Boy who’s at the centre of history, keeping one foot dainty on a woman’s dress. Very compositional.
One last thing. The dickwad bro with his shirt open, last person on the right in the foreground light, is totally pushing over a woman carrying a baby with a hearty face shove. No idea what this is supposed to represent or signify, but guy’s spreading all over where the women are, and the third woman (the one lending her dress to Drummer Boy) in this triangle around the other shirtless guy, who’s busy dying, is giving Mr. ’Scuse Me, Bitch, Must Spread a nasty stink eye. So obvs means something, perhaps that the women here are around a hundred years off getting the vote, slightly before Blacks in the Belgian Congo could.
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Autoworld Brussels: Porsche 911 SC Targa of the Belgian Police
Woop-woop! That’s the sound of da police.
Woop-woop! That’s the sound of da beast.
Yes, that’s a 1976 Porsche 911 SC Targa with its blues bolted to the b-pillar (twos are up the front, inboard from the low-slung fog lamps), plus a rough as guts wingnut for fine adjustment. Where its racing number should be, there’s a ‘SOS 901’, and it’s got a huge hazard orange stripe on its bonnet, which (I think) marks it as federal police, along with the white exterior.
Yes, the Belgian — and Dutch, and German — police ran Porsches from the ’60s to the ’90s, because … something something air-cooled, rear engines don’t overheat when reversing at speed in the emergency lane? Fuck I love Europe.
I was pretty blasted after a couple of hours Ferrari-ing, and really didn’t do this glorious work of art justice in my photos, but because I’m in Mode: Hoonage! lately, here are some stats: It’s a rear-wheel drive (duh!) 3-litre flat 6, putting down a not-unimpressive for what it was 231 bhp, to mow down classy international thieves on the Belgian equivalent of the Autobahn at 242 km/h. The back seat (and I’m using that term loosely) was mostly replaced by a crate of emergency gear. As for why a Targa over, say, a normal 911, this was so the passenger cop could stand up, turn around, grab the massive b-pillar, and wave instructions at the following cars. Seriously. That’s why Targa.
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Autoworld Brussels: Porsche 906 Carrera 6
After a couple of hours of Autoworld Brussels’ Ferrari 70 Years madness — where I spent an unholy amount of lust on the F40 (yes, Frances, yes, ‘Brutal’) — I was looking for a quick digestif in the form of a GT40. Who’d’a known Autoworld … Rotates. Its autos.
Not me.
No GT40 for you, Mme Frances. How about a Porsche 906? In the exact same spot? How about fuck, yeah?
’60s sci-fi dreaming of a future they got and we didn’t. My, this is a pretty set of wheels. And it’s road legal. Yay to FIA’s homologation rules giving us something this bonkers you could drive to the shop in for morning milk. How about some stats to go with the smell of victory?
This is chassis-number 906-128, with the racing number 148, under which it won the Targa Florio on May 8, 1966, driven by Willy Mairesse (Belgium) and Herbert Müller (Switzerland). It’s a rear-wheel drive, 2 litre, flat-6, putting down 210 bhp at 8000 rpm for a top speed of 280 km/h, and weighs a mere 580kg. It looks like something from the Jetsons, if the Jetsons were brawlers and Jane ditched George. I like very much how the two times I’ve been to Autoworld, they’ve populated this one spot with automotive mayhem. Porsche 906, for when my other car is a GT40.
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Koninklijke Musea voor Schone Kunsten van België: Pieter Aertsen — De Keukenmeid
One other from Koninklijke Musea voor Schone Kunsten van België / Musées royaux des Beaux-Arts de Belgique, Pieter Aertsen’s De Keukenmeid / Le Cuisinière from 1559. I think there’s a similar one in Gemäldegalerie or some other museum I’ve been to more than once — he painted the same work more than once — but I really love this one, her expression and posture; I reckon she’d be good value for post-work hanging out. I would say yes to a beer at Le Fontainas any night of the week.
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Koninklijke Musea voor Schone Kunsten van België: Pieter Bruegel 1 — De val der opstandige engelen
I didn’t make it to Ghent. All that missed opportunity for mediæval art. I did make a trip to Koninklijke Musea voor Schone Kunsten van België / Musées royaux des Beaux-Arts de Belgique to gawp at the Bruegel stuff, which I thought was a special exhibition, but is in fact a kind of online / digital project, which nonetheless meant I made a round of The Art — quite a bit of it missing due to water damage (or that was my lazy translation).
I’d photographed the museum pretty heavily two years ago (Musée Oldmasters Museum, Musée Fin-de-Siècle Museum, also the sublime pair of Pieter Bruegel de Oude’s De Aanbiddung der Wijze, and Peter Paul Rubens’ Vier Studies van het Hoofd van een Moor) and didn’t really feel inspired to do the same again to paintings I’d already spent so much time on — the light in the museum is kinda horrific. But I do love Bruegel, and hadn’t basked in the Hieronymous Bosch freakery of his De val der opstandige engelen / La Chute des anges rebelles, which coincidentally is one of the works you can get way too close to on Google Cultural Institute’s Bruegel, Unseen Masterpieces, so I’m replicating some of that purely for my own pleasure. So here we go then, Bruegel’s The Fall of the Rebel Angels in all its dog-licking-its-arse (I dunno, that’s what I remember seeing) glory.
