The Good, The Bad, and the Chilly

So there we were, me and the motorcycle, on the side of the road, a few kilometers south of the Grimsel Pass in the Swiss Alps at 2700 meters above sea level. It was almost June, and it was snowing. The motorcycle appeared to be ok, but I was a little uncomfortable there at the side of the road, shivering uncontrollably in my underwear as I tore through my backpack, putting on every article of clothing I had: four pairs of underwear, four t-shirts, and a pair of swim trunks. These articles all went on my person in record time. First, underneath my jeans which had icicles on them–thanks largely to the freezing rain I drove through 1000 feet in altitude earlier. Then, underneath my soaked leather jacket which had acquired a peculiar wet-dog-dead-cow odor. As I struggled to get my head back into my helmet, normally a pretty straightforward endeavor now made incredibly difficult by the fourth of my four t-shirts wrapped around my head, I thought to myself, “I’m on vacation.” As I lazily accelerated back onto the road, I then screamed “I’m on vacation!!” and would, for the next three hours, chant this along with a variety of other obscenities to keep my mind off the fact that I could no longer feel my feet.

I didn’t want to be there. I’m not brave. I felt ripped off, I wanted open road, alpine vistas, and bugs in my teeth. Instead I was drafted into my new post as an explorer into the frontier of “Gloomy Inescapability of Unnecessarily Prolonged Levels of Incredible Bodily Discomfort Land.” I wanted a good experience, and was getting a bad one. Instead of putting clothes on to stay warm, I wished I was taking them off. Rather than wrapping that damn t shirt around my head and having it keep falling into my face every five minutes for the next three hours, I wanted to be dunking my head into one of the many alpine lakes I passed because it was so hot outside. Rather than those alpine lakes being partially covered in ice, I wanted them to be teeming with 21 year old Swiss girls, who, like me, were so hot after being stuck on the bus on their way back from their swimsuit competition in Italy, they just had to stop and go for a swim*

*Being hot “like me,” not coming back from a swimsuit competition, “like me.”

Rather than stopping at every ski hut I came across up there in early summer and shivering my way into the restrooms to thaw out my purple, stiff hands under the hand dryers, I wanted to roll into those ski huts, dried out, red-necked, and thirsty. Rather than going to the cafeteria to drink yet another cup of coffee, and cursing, in my head, “I hate Switzerland, and Swiss people, and I hate how warm they are–their stoopid warm cars with their stoopid heaters, and their stoopid maps, which they can read better than me, and their stoopid weather forecasts, which they paid attention to before they drove up into the mountains and decided to take their stoopid Swiss cars instead of their stoopid Swiss motorcycles,” I wanted instead to be sipping on a cold beer and remarking with my new Swiss friends at just how wonderful life is and how lucky we were to be up here, shirtless on a sundeck at the top of the world, remarking, “Hey, I think I can see all the way to Italy from here!” and, “This round is on me guys. Nope, sorry, Helmut, I can’t stay and sing another song for your guys, gotta keep movin’!” Rather than putting on my wet gloves, and lazily accelerating back into the cold through first gear into second, I wanted to be putting on my sunglasses and slamming my bike into first gear, then leaning hard into a tight turn accelerating through second, back into the sun.

Then, the bad is over. And instead of wanting to be enjoying the moment, I am. The stormy alpine pass is behind me, the sun is again on my face, and my clothes again become dry with each kilometer of my late afternoon descent into the warm air of the Aare river valley-a vista so beautiful, so electrified by its contrast to my earlier ascent into the mountains, that as I sit shirtless in the sun, almost at the top of the world, on a little green hill off the motorway, sipping a beer, waiting for my socks to dry off, I smile, wishing I had someone to share it with, and learn, again, that the good and the bad will always have a mountain between them, and if you’re lucky, it’s a mountain in Switzerland.

First of all homies, two huge apologies: a preemptive one for this email, its longish.
Secondly, for my radio silence. It has been quite
some time since my last mass e-communique, (late January, according to
my calculations). I’ve been slack on emails, returning phone
calls, and overall friendship. I’ve always sortof resented those
people–you know, the ones who only call you on their time, who don’t
return emails, who wait a month to reply to yours, etc. But, as I’ve
discovered, I am one of those people–”You are what you hate,” a maxim,
we all individually wish didn’t apply to us, but ultimately, i think we can just be shitty, as I
have. Or maybe I’m being too hard on myself. I have been,
“busy.”–whatever that means, aren’t we all “busy”, does that excuse
even work anymore? Its like being a fish and saying to another fish,
“sorry Flounder, can’t go breakdancing tonight, I’m too wet.” Know
what I mean?

Anyway, so after reading my last, “hey friends, here’s what I’ve been
up to” email, in January, I had just filmed an episode for Hello
Vienna, Hello Austria, an Austrian lifestyle TV show. They filled me
full of hope, promise, and positive praise and then after a few weeks
of unreturned phone calls, and cancelled appointments, nothing. Its
something I’m learning over here in Austria, being “new guy” sucks. Who am I kidding, “new
guy” gets shit on everywhere. Oh well, at least when I’m running short on
stories to tell future grandchildren I can say, “did grandpa ever tell you
about the time he was on Austrian TV?”
“Yes, grandpa.”
So yup, I was basically used for one episode, then something about not
having the right “work permit, can’t insure me on location, etc…”

Fine. Just don’t get my hopes up, you fuckers. Mostly, because I’m one
of those stupids who believes people, and sort of needs hope to get
by, and because I’m also one of those stupids who opens his big mouth
in excitement, to tell everyone about something cool thats happening
to me, before its a sure thing, then when it doesn’t work out, feeling
like a jackass, and wishing I hadn’t opened my big mouth.*

*If anyone knows how to cure this condition, other than the obvious,
“keep your mouth shut until things pan out, jackass.”–please pass it
on.

Maybe thats also why, I’m realizing now as I write this, I have waited
so long to write–things take a while to pan out, and not surprisingly, things have sortof panned out for me, in sortof wierd ways.

Not long after my TV career ended, I began bartending at a friend’s
pub (two drunk dudes I met at a kebab stand. Upon accepting the position, they remarked, “Actually, we haven’t quite finished bulding it yet, Shaan, so you can help us build you your job?.”
“Sure.”
So we did, and opened the pub. And that was fun. Then Clem and I kept coming up with ideas for the cellar downstairs. And the owners said, “those are all really good ideas guys, here’s a few thousand euro, have fun redesigning and redocorating our basement.”

And after working 28 out of 31 days, long days, in a basement, here’s what Clem
and I made, another of my accomplishments, too wierd to put on a
resume:

http://www.kodakgallery.com/I.jsp?c=5hfwaq5.5bmyztqx&x=0&y=-k7z4ii

Somewhere inbetween meeting these guys at a kebab stand, and helping
rebuild their basement. I managed to get an article published in a
fashion and art magazine here, in Vienna. I met the editor of the
magazine at a bar, and lied to him and told him I was a published
writer, he said “cool. send me your portfolio.” I woke up the next day,
realizing I had no portfolio, so decided to come clean, and wrote the
following to use as my writing sample, and sent it to them:

http://shaanspot.com/?p=23

upon reading it, they said, “we don’t appreciate beng lied to,
but your writing is good, we want you to write an article for us.” So I
did: this one, its about haircuts:

text only version:

http://shaanspot.com/?p=27

published version:

http://shaanspot.com/?page_id=53

The magazine is called “Vernis,” in English that means,”Varnish”. They’ve asked me to stick with them, and edit other English submissions to the magazine, and write articles for them. However, being that this is Austria, and that I’m a veteran at being, “new guy”, and they can try to blow smoke up my ass, but there is already so much smoke up there, they will get blasted with a musty, smoky-filled-butt backdraft, and start doubting themselves. Thusly, all I can say to that is, “we’ll see.” Will most likely go back to teaching English, and making up exciting occupations to tell girls I meet at bars, forever.

Oh yeah, if you haven’t figured it out yet, I sortof started a blog
somewhere back there. I don’t really know what it is yet, or know, really, very much about websites, and have alot more ideas for it, so expect more on that in the future.

http://www.shaanspot.com/

I was dilligently adding content to the website until, rebuilding this bar took over my
life, and then by a stroke of brilliant coincidence, luck, and
stellar, award-winning, friendship, my buddy Dharma, living in Nice,
in the South of France, calls me up and says, “Dude, I’m moving back
to San Francisco for the summer, want to babysit my motorcycle in
Vienna for a few months?” I said, “hell yes,”and flew to Nice the day
after we opened the bar and then took 11days to drive a 500cc, blue
suzuki from Nice to Rome, to see my cousin, then turned around and
drove up and over the Swiss alps, making my way back to Vienna.
here’s some pictures:

http://www.kodakgallery.com/I.jsp?c=5hfwaq5.9eretl8x&x=0&y=-pp4nsb

Oh yeah, I also met up with Dharma and my cousin in Nice for Carnival
(Mardi Gras), back in March, here’s some pictures of that:

http://www.kodakgallery.com/I.jsp?c=5hfwaq5.40×4ouv9&x=0&y=-i911f9

okokok, that’s it. For those of you who made it to the end of this email, congratulations: you have an attention span to be proud of. I would have stopped reading thirty minutes ago. Thanks again, to everyone who came to visit for my birthday, I’m 29 now, wierd.
Things are good in Austria. Ill be back in California at the end of September. Looking forward to the summer here in Vienna. Not sure what the future brings, at the moment, which is equally cool and teriffying, but I’m happy. Hope everyone else is well. Can’t wait to get back and see my friends and family. I miss you all. Lots of Love from Vienna.

der Shaan

Shaan Kirpalani

to jessep, amie, thomasm
Hide options Mar 27
From: Shaan Kirpalani Mailed-By: gmail.com
To: jessep@viceland.com, amie@viceland.com, thomasm@viceland.com
Date: Mar 27, 2007 12:00 PM
Subject: Submission
Reply | Reply to all | Forward | Print | Add sender to Contacts list | Delete this message | Report phishing | Show original | Message text garbled?
Hello. I’m Shaan. I’m from California, I live in Austria. I was drunk
at a bar and basically lied to an editor of a fashion magazine here
in Vienna, and told him that I had a few articles published in your
magazine. He said that was cool, and maybe I’d like to write for his
magazine. Waking up the next day I decided to come clean and tell him
the truth and wrote the attached piece and used it as my writing
sample. Well, they didn’t appreciate being lied to, but gave me the
job ’cause they liked my writing, apparently. Anyway, I thought you
guys would like the story, since it sort of has to do with you. And if
you really like it, you could even put it in your magazine. This way I
can go back to them and say, “see, I was published in VICE, and I lied
to you twice, suckers!”. Then they’ll think I’m crazy, and ask me to
never talk to them again. And that way I won’t have to write anymore
cause that shit is boring and I’d rather keep my day job teaching
English and bartending, which is way more interesting, I think.

Thanks
Shaan

(published in Vernis magazine, May 2007)

Today, I’m in search of a haircut. I’m looking in a neighborhood, that according to a few Austrian friends of mine, I should never, ever go to for vegetables. “The Brunnenmarkt is filled with Turks and Yugos. The quality is shit,” they tell me. Maybe, but I’m American, we actually prefer shit-quality food, and I like the Brunnenmarkt. I like how dirty it is. Compared to the behind-glass, museum sheen of the Innere Stadt districts of Vienna, the Brunnenmarkt feels alive to me. Its dirty, with tacky pictures of Jesus and awful clothes for sale everywhere, but alive.

I went to the Brunnenmarkt looking for a haircut because my hair is getting too long, firstly, and I’m getting a bit bored with my regular haircut neighborhoods–the Neubau, the 6th, Spittelberg–all seem like haircut wastelands today. Its not that I don’t enjoy the haircut experience in these other neighborhoods–I’ve met many beautiful hairstylists in Vienna–svelte and perky breasted, great hair and great outfits. Their salons are all immaculate and modern. They play really hip electronic music and their hair products smell like heaven. We talk, about me mostly. I tell them funny stories, we laugh. They massage my scalp. Tell me, “you look hot,” that my “new cut brings out your cheekbones.” I pay them fifty euro or so after we finish and I feel hot, and cool, and hip, like them, for a day. Then after a month, I look for someone new. Maybe I’m afraid to commit, maybe I’m waiting for the right girl, I’m not sure of the reasons, but I leave these salons feeling empty. Looking good, but empty–like a haircut-slut. I suppose then, this is what I’m hoping to find in the Brunnenmarkt, something real; a haircut, with a soul.

Otto, owner of Frisor Ruya, right on Brunnengasse smiles a wide, toothy smile. A Pensionister, he works two days a week, Fridays and Saturdays. He tells me the 16th district used to be the real Vienna, a working-class neighborhood. I don’t ask where he’s from, but I’m guessing from the names on the postcards stuck to the mirrors behind him–Riga, Ukraine, St. Petersburg, the Black Sea, that he’s Russian, or from some ex-Russian satellite we’ve forgotten about. Otto’s 22 year-old daughter hides from my camera behind a huge hair dryer stuck to the wall–untouched since, I’m guessing, Otto opened his shop and installed them thirty years ago. She speaks bad German, no English, and is as shy as a six year old. Otto tells me the neighborhood has changed. That, “it used to be all Austrians, and the business used to be a lot better.” I ask him if he ever plays electronic music in his salon to get all the Austrians back, because apparently they seem to like it very much in the other districts. “Nein,” he answers. His customer is almost as old as him, and I get the impression Otto has been cutting his hair as long as the shop has been open. They crack an inside joke, probably about me, that I wish my German was good enough to understand, and chuckle about it like little kids.

I’m back on the Brunnenmarkt, making my way towards Friedengasse. I find myself in Frisor Laila. Maybe the stylists at Frisor Laila could give me a haircut with a soul, but I could give a shit, I just wanted to get out of there. Eight overweight men sit inside, frowning and smoking, all staring at me in silence. “Does anyone speak English?” I ask, regretting it immediately. Silence. “Spricht jemand Deutsch?” More silence. The Friseur, also a fat guy, is doing some kind of jumpy movement with an orange string to his customer’s face. He stops, looks at me and yells, “ALTCHIA!,” and says, frowning, “Deutsch,” points to the door in the back, and goes back to the string thing on the face of his customer, also a fat guy, also frowning at me in the mirror. A picture of Orlando Bloom from Pirates of the Caribbean hangs on the wall above them.

“ALTCHIA!,” a round, middle-aged, Turkish-looking woman with nice eyes comes from the back room. She tells me they’ve been open two years, and most of their clients are Turkish and Yugoslavian, and that the jumpy string thing is a procedure to remove hair from around men’s eyes. I reply, “That’s interesting,” and nervously say “thankyou” and “goodbye” and leave.

Friseurenboutique Karin on Gaullachergasse, is so old its cool. I think fashion people refer to this phenomenon as, “Retro.” Three old ladies sit, hair up in curlers under massive, full-headed, orange hair dryers. Hilda blowdrys her customer’s hair with a cigarette hanging from her lips. I take a business card from under a little tree with little easter eggs hanging off the branches, and ask if I might take some pictures because I think her salon is really nice. “Keine Werbematerial!” she shouts, looking at me in the mirror. I try to speak again. Hilda turns off her blowdryer, stomps out her cigarette and shoos me out onto the street, “Keine Werbematerial!,” she shouts again, and locks the door behind me.

This isn’t going so good. I came to the Brunnenmarkt to find something better, a haircut that meant something. All I’ve found is old men who laugh at me, frowns, and mean old ladies who lock their doors behind me. I develop a frown of my own, and bury my hands into my pockets as I walk through the rows of empty vendor stalls of Uppenplatz, an abandoned outdoor market at the end of the Brunnenmarkt. Its industrial and cold-covered in graffiti. I decide to get a kebab. Maybe this is how it ends for haircut-sluts–when the glamour fades, when the electronic music stops, you find yourself alone, rejected, and unhip, eating a kebab in a desolate platz in the middle of an immigrant neighborhood where the vendors can sell you fake Puma’s and a picture of Jesus for a “Gute Preis.”

At the end of Uppenplatz I find Aswal smoking a cigarette outside his salon, Frisor Kristal. He’s good-looking, wearing a striped shirt tucked into faded jeans and white Chuck Taylors. He’s had his shop for seven years. He tells me the neighborhood has changed a lot, and business isn’t as good as it used to be. The platz used to be a busy open-air market, but since the Billa, Hofer, Spar and Zeilpunkt supermarkets all opened up within two blocks of it, the food and vegetable vendors were put out of business. All that’s left are these guys selling clothes on Brunnenstrasse, he tells me. Still, the open-air cafes that line the north end of Uppenplatz are buzzing. “Yugoslavian, Turkish, Russian food,” he tells me, nodding with his pointy hair as he lights another cigarette.

He asks me if I want a haircut. I look over his shoulder into his shop. Young Turkish dudes sit around, all with the same spiky haircut, earrings, thin-immaculately manicured beards, some with the shaved eyebrow thing–all sort of looking identical. “No thanks,” I say, “I’m shaving my head.”

Life is a game, they say. And in the context of any game, its ok to make mistakes, because it’s a game after all, and at the end of a game you count your fake money, put away your little plastic pieces, fold up the board and go back to wishing you had something better to do on a Saturday night in your real life than play Monopoly with your parents. I think this is why they say it-to make you feel better about fucking up.

Perhaps they should change the metaphor. If you prescribe to this notion that life is a game, then who makes the rules..?..Parker Brothers..?..God..?..you..? Maybe it is a game, maybe not. I think life is about fashion, particularly winter fashion–sweaters. Life is a sweater, sort of like the Weezer song. Your mom crochets your first couple sweaters for you, fixes the holes and the frays to keep the whole thing from unraveling and to keep you from winding up weird and in a special needs school. Eventually you have to learn to make your own sweaters. There are different sweaters for different times. For example, I wore a green, corduroy sweater during my first two years of college that stank like bong-water. Some people’s sweaters look exactly the same as other people’s, some fit perfect, some are too big, some people never take off the sweater their parents made for them, some look totally zany, but that’s fashion, right?

My first sweater over here in Austria, didn’t fit. It was a turtleneck. But I figured it’s a cold place, people need turtlenecks to stay warm. You can try and look smooth and winning in a turtleneck, but you just wind up looking like a jerk in a turtleneck, and they’re hard to dance in. Lately, I’ve been wearing my new European sweater. Its form-fitting, black, with trendy little frays (deconstructed) is the term, I think. Its looks really used and cool, but really its only two months old. If I had to give it a brand it would be, “Egal” which over here in Austria means “Whatever, or “I don’t give a shit”. I crocheted this sweater because I discovered that I don’t really have to give a shit about much over here in Vienna, I mean, it isn’t real. Reality is back home, in San Francisco.

Things have been going great in my new sweater. I go out to clubs, tell girls I’m a motivational speaker, a professional surfer, a writer for VICE magazine, a professor, a producer for MTV, who cares. Its amazing how much of a blunt instrument the bullshit meter becomes when it has to translate, people actually trust you. Or maybe Austrians aren’t used to the opportunism that drives “scoring with chicks” in my memories of the American-single-guy ethos. Or who knows, maybe they want to believe they met me, Lance Strongbow, pro surfer, and that I was a great lay. Sometimes you get called on it, actually most times. Sometimes I tell the truth, but that’s no fun. And that’s what new sweater is all about, fun.

Anyway things had been going great in my new sweater until this morning where I found myself, out of my sweater, sitting at my computer in my underwear, unwashed, booze-stinky, fuzzy and fragile from the previous night writing an email to Lea:

“Dear Lea. How are you, I’m fine. So, I sort of have this enormous favor to ask you. At a bar last night I met the editor of an art and fashion magazine here in Vienna. He told me he’s looking for writers and wants me to send him my “portfolio.” He asked me this after I told him that I indeed have a “portfolio” (Lie #1), and that I had been recently published in VICE magazine (Lie #2). Ummmm, how do you do a portfolio, and what should I do about lying to him? I don’t think I should have, but I was wearing my new sweater last night, and got confused, (inside joke between me).We were both pretty drunk, maybe he forgot. Oh yeah, and could you send me that thing I helped you do for Lonely Planet, that’s something that should go in a portfolio, isn’t it?

Yours,
Shaan

I then spent the remainder of the day picking away at the trendy little frays of my new sweater and almost unraveling the whole thing. Maybe I could actually write something for VICE, have it published in the next 24 hours and have the whole thing ready to go by Friday morning. Maybe I could just write something and say it was published in VICE-VERSA magazine, “Oh, I’m sorry, did you think I said VICE? No, no, no VICE-VERSA, its an industry mag, small-circulation, probably not even published in Europe.” “It was published in NICE magazine, it’s a San Diego fashion-philosophy mag, mostly musings on sweaters. I wrote a quirky little editorial on Existentialism, men’s fashion, and lying.”

“What if I blew it, “ I thought, “why couldn’t I have just told the truth…stoopid sweater.” I mean, how much fun would that be, writing for a magazine, I probably could even stop lying to girls and get a nice tweed sweater. I kept unraveling until I suspected that I might be completely wrong about the whole sweater thing altogether. They told me it’s a game. Them might be right. Life is a game, in which we wear a sweater. Yes!, It isn’t just about fashion, or friggin’ sweaters. I decided to sew it back together. I didn’t come here to write for a fashion magazine, I came here to have fun–a working holiday. They’ll either give me the job or they won’t. They probably won’t even pay me, anyway. And besides, Lea says everyone lies to get a job in this business. Maybe they’ll have a good sense of humor about it, maybe they’ll think I’m a jerk. Life goes on. And before I know it I’m playing Monopoly back at my parent’s house on a Saturday night, drinking cocoa in a disgusting red and white holiday turtleneck that my grandma got me for Christmas.