T A B L E_T A L K How much is too much to pay for a plane ticket? Weigh in on air fare gouging in the Wanderlust area of Table Talk R E C E N T L Y Sex and the salaryman By Dave McCombs Changing fortunes are altering one of Japan Inc.'s most cherished relationships (05/08/98) Road Warrior Dawn MacKeen Airfare roulette (05/07/98) Mondo Weirdo Come back soon An ambiguous encounter in Switzerland (05/06/98) West Africa's capital of ghosts By John M. Edwards What has Parisian-style boulevards, eight-lane highways and Christendom's tallest church -- all dead-ending in jungle? (05/05/98) Coronation Everest By Jan Morris Remembering the first Everest ascent -- and a lost age of mountaineering (05/04/98) Browse the Wanderlust Road Warrior archives		Insider's guide to Brussels AN EXPERT ADVISES ON EVERYTHING FROM OUT-OF-THE-WAY HOTEL TREASURES TO THE BEST BAR FOR SUDDEN DEATH BEER. BY BRENT GREGSTON Europe's push toward economic union and the forces of globalization have conspired to transform the small capital of a small country into a city that wields power over the lives of 300 million people and influences global finance and trade. Brussels is not only the de facto capital of Europe, it is the headquarters for NATO and for many multinational companies. The union of Belgium and Luxembourg (they share the same currency) derives 58 percent of its gross domestic product from exports, the highest figure of any country in the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development. Given all this, it is not surprising that Brussels has the same magnetic pull on accountants, consultants, lobbyists and lawyers as Washington, D.C. Business travelers and foreign lobbyists don't have much time for art and architecture, but they speak volumes about this city's metamorphosis. A current exhibition of Magritte's paintings is being held in celebration of the 100th anniversary of his birth -- and some visitors might find that the city he lived in now looks stranger than his pictures. Perhaps it is not a lack of civil pride but a sense of the surreal that allows trees to grow out of abandoned buildings in the middle of Europe's third richest city. That and a civic personality split between Dutch-speaking Flemish and French-speaking Walloons who agree on literally nothing. Real estate developers have been the ones doing most of the juxtapositioning for the last two decades. Entire neighborhoods have been demolished and countless buildings of architectural interest have been leveled for monolithic office blocks, many occupied by the European Union bureaucracy. Among the casualties were masterpieces of modern architecture by Victor Horta and the art nouveau movement. Developers have also hit upon another method of destroying old buildings, so-called "Brusselization," allowing them to decay to the point where demolition is unavoidable. As a result, a typical Brussels street in the city center looks bizarre: Boarded-up 19th-century shops stand next to an abandoned red-brick factory, which adjoins an '80s office block that has fins like a spaceship; sandwiched in between somewhere will be a peep show with a name like Paradoxe or Blue Chance. The boarded-up buildings sport more bilingual signs than a passerby can decipher: "Deviation WEGOMLEGGING" -- in other words, "Ceci n'est pas un building! It is a stone suspended above your head." A boarded-up building is also a readymade billboard, an economic resource the city fathers are eager to monopolize. Every derelict building bears the same warnings: "Ville de Bruxelles affichage communal reservé a l'administration STAD BRUSSEL GEMEENTELIJKE VOORBEHOUDEN AAN HET BESTUUR." In other words, the city reserves the right to plaster boarded-up windows with its own poster art. Looking up and down most downtown streets, you can see such ruins, some disemboweled, some under scaffolding. More deviations, more posters. The biggest piece of state-sponsored poster art is Berlaymont (Metro: Schumann), the headquarters building of the European Commission. Symbol for the future of an interdependent, united Europe, it has been under a white sheet for almost seven years and will remain so for many more. It may look like a Christo masterpiece, but the plastic is an expression of asbestos-removal functionalism rather than pomo aesthetics. Until its unveiling, EU Commission officials will remain dispersed around the city in 70 buildings. Members of the European Parliament and their 3,500 administrative staff have recently moved into a $1.2 billion silver-glass palace. Europe's press has been mocking them ever since, noting that each new office is equipped with a shower costing $12,000. A Danish member of parliament recently protested that each office has a computer, too, seeking to reassure the public that real work takes places inside. In fact, European taxpayers have been forced to endow their supranational parliamentarians with a second $1 billion silver-glass palace, recently completed in Strasbourg, where the Parliament meets for 60 sessions of the year and each member is assigned two offices, two showers and two computers (it's a big building). The big decisions, however, are not made by Europe's Parliament; they are made by the European Commission, which spends almost $20 billion annually on programs managed directly from Brussels, about 20 percent of the entire EU budget. The EU's own court of auditors estimates that nearly 25 percent has been wasted for three years running through fraud, mismanagement and lax oversight. Scandals notwithstanding, Brussels's 18,000 Eurocrats will have more power at the end of next year than this one. They are entering one of the most critical times in EU history. The pace of change is accelerating as the EU launches the Euro, deregulates telecommunications, pushes ahead with monetary union and adds several new members from Eastern Europe. N E X T+P A G E | A pissing statue dressed as Elvis