How will you spend your Thanksgiving break?
Despite what you may believe from previous columns, Prague really only has one problem, one tremendously big problem: There isn't a comic book store to be found.
"Well of course, dingbat," you may say, pointedly. "It is the Czech Republic, after all. Why would you expect to find COMIC books?"
That's fair, but I do know that I'll be making a beeline to Forbidden Planet Glasgow when I touch down there this weekend. I'm well-traveled enough, so I can recall not being able to track the exploits of precious, precious Batman when I was puttering around Nairobi, for instance. If anything, I've found that you are certainly best off not expecting to be able to indulge in the ways you're used to. We all have our little things though; my girlfriend is at wit's end without Entertainment Weekly, and some who are here with me, having brought a stack of their favorite films, would spear an array of octogenarians for a Region 1 DVD player.
Aiming to replace my habit for illustrated soap operas involving superpowered men in flamboyant tights and the mammoth-mammaried women who love them, I've been going out and filling the void with ... beer and goulash. But last Thursday, I decided to do something a bit more culturally significant, something that would assuage the side of me that craves flashy, Western-style entertainment, and went to a performance in which an NYU Prague professor led a Velvet Underground cover band to sweet musical heights in front of a suitably inebriated Czech audience.
Now that was something.
The professor, who could easily be mistaken for the Pixies' Black Francis from behind and had (probably) consumed a trough of beer, was accompanied by a motley crew consisting of that schlubby dude who thumbs through the Beach Boys' back catalogue in record stores, homeless Yanni, age 60, and a Nico that was, frankly, more of a Kim Deal. They were, needless to say, pants-blastingly awesome.
More awesome, probably, was the native crowd that pretty much put New York's head-nodding hipsters to shame. People were dancing furiously. I — one of those head-nodders who kind of looks like a tool at concerts — was slammed into repeatedly. One gregarious fellow stood near the front for nearly the entire set, his arms pointed straight back as he skipped on his feet like a majestic rock sprite. He ended up dancing with a number of attractive Czech women, likely resulting in his getting laid in the venue's bathroom. (Incidentally, said bathroom lacked any sort of locking mechanism whatsoever. This neat quirk was unwittingly discovered by my girlfriend as she walked in on a man who then mysteriously beckoned for her to draw closer. She did not.)
Oh, Prague, you truly have a surprise around every corner.
And really, it does, as we are discovering each week: my friends, wading through this dark, uncertain European stream together, enjoying drinks, so many drinks, laughing, crying, getting robbed by bartenders at Karlovy Lazne, making the best friends of our lives at Hells Bells, and wondering, always wondering, why we cared so much for comic books to begin with.
Or, well, something like that.
