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Old World charm missing in New Europe

By G.D.

By G.D. Maxwell

At about the moment his captors slashed into Eugene Armstrong’s throat, spilled his blood and removed his head, all for the greater if misguided glory of… whatever, I was sitting in a salon at London’s National Gallery staring at Pierre-Cécile Purvis de Chavannes’ mural-sized painting The Beheading of St. John the Baptist .

I was sitting there for three reasons, none of which had to do with the demise of the unfortunate Mr. Armstrong. My feet hurt after four days of tramping through London looking at untold thousands of paintings, artifacts, historical landmarks and two millennia of historical gewgaws; I needed a rest. The beheading of St. John has always been one of the art subjects I find most intriguing. And Purvis de Chavannes’ 1869 depiction is both powerful and, as far as I know, unique.

St. John was painted more often than a Newfoundland skiff. His birth, Tintoretto, his portrait as a young man, El Greco, his imprisonment, Verrocchio, and the entire career Caravaggio seemed to build painting him in every conceivable aspect of his life. There are paintings of him being led to death and untold numbers of paintings of Salome being given his head on a platter.

But Purvis de Chavannes captures the moment just prior to his execution. The prophet kneels, back erect, eyes heavenward as if he were either gazing toward his final destination of suggesting if the Lord had a miracle left this would be a good time to pull it out. His face is in repose, at peace.

His executioner, bigger than life size, filling the left-hand third of the enormous canvas – Purvis de Chavannes was most noted for his murals and painted as though he was charging by the square inch – is coiled like a baseball player looking for a pitch he can take downtown. His muscles ripple, his gaze bores into the sweet spot at the nape of John’s neck. He is a lifestudy of male anatomy and unquestioning male blindness; just doin’ my job, ma’am.

The historical galleries of London, indeed the city itself, drip with death and beheadings. The 17-year-old Lady Jane Grey prostrate in all her porcelain whiteness, gesturing with her delicate hands to keep death at bay a moment longer. The Tower of London, being to torture, death and beheadings what Wimbledon is to tennis. The list of treachery and powermongering among royalty and social climbers, military men and colonizers, reads like an historical Who’s Who.

So what does that have to do with the modern beheadings designed to scare and terrorize the citizenry of the Coalition of the Unquestioning? Beats me. I’m jetlagged as all get out and sifting through random thoughts about a three week vacation to foreign places. Cut me some slack here.

It’s been a long time since I’ve taken a journey outside of North America that didn’t involve skiing or family and an even longer time since I was in Europe. My how things have changed. My impressions of Italy etched more years ago than I like to think have passed, were of a country somewhat chaotic but pulsing with a joie de vivre – however one says that in Italian – I’d never experienced before. Even done on the cheap, Italy was a sensory delight: great food, good service, a kaleidoscope of sights and sounds, a people at ease with the understanding life was about more than what they did for a living.

The Italy of the European Union of the new millennium – at least Sicily – is a grind. Automatons almost indistinguishable from their North American or European nose-to-the-grindstone-shoulder-to-the-wheel counterparts, hustling from one rushed encounter to another, booting up one deal before another is done, chasing a Euro and wondering whatever happened to their Lira.

It’s a wireless WiFi world in Malta, Sicily and London, the three principal destinations on this wander. The pomp of the evening’s promenade is dulled by jingling, urgent interruptions. People, as in everyone, scurry with cell phones glued to their ears. Plates of food and dining companions grow cold and ignored as cramping thumbs squeeze out instant messages to others in distant trats also ignoring their linguini to instantly read and respond to their personal flood of instant random thoughts. "Get milk." "Watcha doin’?" "Call me." "Do you think Fabio’s cute?" The banalities of life in the wireless lane.

In a mediocre Indian restaurant in London a businessman ignores both his meal and companion to take, make and text conversations with virtual companions taking precedent over the real one. At an equally nondescript Vietnamese restaurant two young girls sit opposite two young boys. The conversation and cigarettes they’re sharing are interrupted as first one boy and then both whip out their mobiles and plaster them to their ears. Are their two companions miffed? Seemingly not. In another time and place their auguring gaze would have shouted "Guess who’s not getting any tonight!" as they plotted escape from their boorish dates. Today, they patiently wait their turn to mentally wander off into another coupling with someone at the other end of their own phones.

The only distinction between the other-connectedness of males and females in my travels seemed to be their mode of dress. Euros in the past seemed to take a chauvinistic pride in dressing, chauvinistic at least in comparison to their more casual, sloppy North American counterparts. Jeans were rare; shorts rarer. The dominant fashion theme now seems to be the growing divide between the genders. Everywhere, women from young high school age to creeping middle-age seem to Dress. Bold colours, clinging fabrics, a continuum from classic to slutty but all dressed to appeal. Overwhelmingly, their escorts seem to have taken a page from hip-hop and rap stars. Shapeless, formless, colourless clothes in advance stages of droop, defying gravity as full moons rise, a veritable locker room of NBA logowear slouching in stark contrast to fashionably dressed and cripplingly shod dates. It’s as though the women’s movement never happened.

Mostly though, the small bit of New Europe I saw seems to be a land of growing social divides and rising indifference. Whether priced in Maltese Lira, Euros or Pounds, everything is expensive. There is no more Europe on the cheap. From the affectation of bottled water to homogenizing gelati to food basing its hopes more on physical surroundings than regional identities, everything seems both expensive and overpriced, leaving me wondering how the growing lower classes cope. What I’d hoped would be a culinary treat turned into a nightmare of indifferently prepared food served largely by indifferent waiters grown remote and placid by "optional" service charges mandatorily included in every bill. The rule was punctuated by the exception when animated waiters turned a ho-hum meal into an engaging experience.

I never thought I’d think of Whistler as a bargain but I’m beginning to think Tourism Whistler is on to something with its Value campaign. Long live the New World.