Upgegradet worden

The German film, Shoppen, (2006) focuses on the phenomenon of speed dating. It's a masterwork of economy, telling the story of eighteen single men and women in a series of short scenes that leave big gaps in the viewer's information, but provide just enough key details to make us believe we know a lot more. It's a quality I admire in film and one I try to apply in my own paintings. The characters in Shoppen are all living in München, all are single, and all are eager to find a life partner, or at least a temporary liaison. The film addresses a problem that faces many in the US as well as Europe: as conventions and traditions are examined and discarded, what structure can take their place? In an earlier generation, Germans married earlier. Woman didn't enter the workforce as regularly as today, and members of the opposite sex could meet in such thoroughly outmoded institutions as church social groups. As far as I can see, religion still plays a very important role in Germany, but it's a political one. Few Germans would be so foolish as to spend any time worrying about a spiritual need that could be met in a church. That's what Art and Kultur are there for.

One of the characters we meet in Shoppen is Frank. He's a self-described "gatherer," as opposed to, hunter-type, leading what is apparently, an amazingly dull life. He stumbles into the speed dating experience almost by accident and in his first interview responds to the question "What's been the most wonderful surprise in your life?" by saying that he was once "upgegradet worden" on a return flight from London*. How sad," I thought as I watched the film for the first time, "that one has no more significant experience than that to share with a potential life partner." And then it happened to me.

On my recent return from Europe, I too was upgraded, and now I can understand Frank's response. Instead of being jammed into a tiny space and forced to make a choice between either a peanut OR a pretzel, I lounged in pampered luxury while my sommelier worked out which wine I would drink with my smoked almonds. My seat reclined to form a rudimentary bed and I was presented with a teeny tiny tooth brush and correspondingly tiny tube of paste. With my main meal I was given over 8 pieces of cutlery, three of them knives. This from an airline that less than two hours previously confiscated my nail clippers, presumably worried that I would threaten the cabin crew with a really aggressive pedicure. Just look at these pictures:

Chose a knife. Any knife.

Crisp radicchio and an excellent oil and balsamic vinegar dressing, but which white should I drink to complement it?

The strawberries were a little under-ripe. I sent them back.

Another big plus in first class: movies are free. Even the recent stuff you have to pay for in coach. I watched a great film about an alien invasion of earth. Directors like Fellini, Truffaut and Scorsese, have techniques for insuring that plot is advanced and momentum is maintained in their films, but in my alien invasion film, the director just made sure that some marine said, "Go! gogogogogo!" every 3-4 minutes. This kind of action film also benefits if a helicopter blows up from time to time, and I believe the director of this one managed to break a record for rotary-wing aircraft destroyed. As you may imagine, dialog was minimal, but they still managed to work in some hilarious redundancies like "evacuate you out." And every once in a while, some marine would shout out "Let's get to that police station and save the civilians," just in case a viewer forgot what was going on. If you're thinking I'm being facetious in my praise of this film, you're mistaken. There's kind of a ban on alien invasion films at my house and I crave this kind of cathartic release. This movie was so good, I watched it a second time in Italian: "Andiamo! andiamoandiamoandiamo" No real need for subtitles, but you might need them for the Shoppen trailer below.






*Ich bin ma' upgegradet worden von dem Rückflug von London...  da bin ich in den Business Klasse gerutscht, es war nicht übel und echt überraschend.

Der Man in Schwarz

US American culture is readily embraced by Germans. But even in a market that's as receptive to American culture as Germany is, some US artists seem to be more readily accepted than others. In literature for example, John Irving is a big favorite here, as is Philip Roth. Cormac McCarthy, on the other hand, or Michael Chabon don't seem to appear in bookstores here anywhere near as often.

One classic American musician who is incredibly popular in Germany is Johnny Cash. Here in Deutschland, Mr. Cash's music appeals to people in a way that isn't clouded by the artificial categories that are so important to marketing in the States. Cash's music crosses all boundaries in Germany, appealing as easily to a burnt out old hippie-type as to a twenty-something punk. I hear Johnny playing as background music in department stores and on the radio and his CD's stand in the bookcases of almost every home I visit here.

My own radio interests here don't include Johnny Cash. I admire him and his music, but I don't travel to Germany to spend my time listening to American popular music. In Essen the radio dial is dominated by the WDR stations, with WDR Eins focussing on current popular music and WDR 5 offering a broad range of news and cultural offerings. I doubt if many of my acquaintances here listen to WDR5 very often: it has a reputation of being just a little spießig. But I enjoy the variety and novelty of the station. There's just nothing like it in the US.

I often wonder how Germany can offer this kind of entertainment: what's the business model, and how do they pay their bills? The answer is, of course, that Germany is a socialist economy. Until recently, the government ran all radio and television. If you own a radio, you pay an annual tax on it, and those taxes go to supporting public programing, like WDR5. The catch is, WDR has to serve a wide audience to maintain the government support they depend on and their constituents include organizations like the Catholic and Evangelical churches (which, incidentally, are also state-run institutions here.) And that's why WDR5 can sometimes be just a little stodgy. Every morning at 6:05, I listen to a piece produced by a prominent religious figure in the region and they're rarely very dynamic. The speakers are all so damned earnest, so unctuous, so anxious to please. They talk slowly,  and their arguments are formatted in a way that reminds me of the ads the white-haired guy on Wild Kingdom used to do:

The hammerhead tortoise has a shell to protect him from wild predators and you need protection too....

 

But this morning's piece, by Diplom Theologe Markus Potthoff from Essen was really quite entertaining and he made his point with a quote he attributed to Johnny Cash: 

Das Christentum ist nichts für Weicheier

Loosely translated, it means something like, Christianity is not for sissies. It's entertaining for me because it uses some of the great vocabulary German has to describe sissies: Weicheier, Shattenparker, Warmduscher... And ironic too, because, no matter what they do to escape it, all of these religious commentators wind up sounding like a bunch of Weicheier. But today at least, I listened eagerly to the Kirche in WDR5 address, and I'll continue to be a faithful listener, even following the station on-line when I'm back in the States. Tomorrow at 6:05 there will be another preacher greeting me from the electronic pulpit, but at noon I'll be listening to a Hörspiel about a fictional dominatrix who runs a shop in the government quarter of Berlin, beating up on Muttersöhnchen for fun and profit. Public radio in Deutschland makes for strange bedfellows and reminds me every day that I'm not in Kansas anymore.

Barbarossa

Cobblestones are extremely practical. In Germany there are lots of words to describe them and the surface they make. In general, the surface is called Pflaster, from Latin, plastrum. It refers to any of a number of different stone surfaces that cover roads, sidewalks or plazas. I'm only familar with the one word in English, but it really isn't accurate for most of what I see in Germany. A cobble is rounded at the edges, usually from rolling around in a river bed for a couple of hundred thousand years. Most of the stones I see used in Germany have relatively sharp edges, and when they're rounded, it's usually from the traffic that rolls over them.

Many times I've watched as a new electric line or water pipe was laid under a Pflaster sidewalk in Germany and marveled at how simple it is. The stones are removed to uncover a 10 - 20 meter stretch and then, as the pipe is laid, the earth is filled back in and the stones are replaced. The stone surface is porous and flexible. Unlike the concrete sidewalks common in the States, as trees grow, the layer of stones stretches naturally to accomodate the the root ball. In the town I live in, the city forester has another solution: cut down the trees.

There's a down side to Pflaster too. The individual stones make wonderful ammunition for the many demos that take place in Europe. I watched a movie just last night that dealt with the years of student protests in Germany and it made me wonder why the Pflaster tradition has lasted so long here, while in American asphalt and concrete are king. The movie was Neue Vahr Süd, the latest in a series of books (and movies made from those books) from Sven Regener. Herr Regener is one of the driving forces behind a German alternative rock band called Element of Crime and he's written some surprisingly successful books. The books have appeared in reverse chronological order, (or at least, I read them in that order) beginning with Herr Lehman, which reaches it's climax with the fall of the Berlin Wall. It was translated into English by John Brownjohn under the title Berlin Blues. The book I read most recently is, Neue Vahr Süd, which climaxes with a demonstration at Weserstadion, where stones are thrown and some find their mark.

I'm not sure why I enjoy these books/films so much. Frank Lehman, the main character, doesn't do much. Mostly he moves though life like a modern-day German Hamlet, allowing things to happen to him. But it's also true that he can't keep his mouth shut in a difficult situation, where discretion really would have been the better part of valor. He's an interesting Mischung of conflicting characteristics like many of us, and I find that I'm completely sympathetic to his situations. I also find it fascinating to revisit historical events that I'm just barely familiar with from another point of view. I read about the Red Brigade and student unrest in the Norwalk Hour when I was a paperboy, and I experienced the fall of the Berlin Wall mostly on NPR. Now, through Sven Regener's books I'm experiencing them both from a completely different point view. I guess that's what this "Art" thing is all about.

And today is the 70th anniversary of the opening of Operation Barbarossa, Hitler's invasion of the Soviet Union. Somehow that seems like just another link in the chain. Sven Regener's books deal very much with German history, but his character, Frank, was born far too late to have any direct experiences with the Second World War. In the early 1960's, when Frank Lehman was born in Bremen, the last of the German soldiers held by the Soviet Union had already been released. Some prisoners were held for more than ten years after the war's end. And the Soviet troops held as prisoners of war in Germany had all either died of hunger in captivity, or been shipped back to Russia, where Stalin gave them all a long furlough in Siberia. All in all, it makes this question of concrete or Pflaster seem pretty insignificant.

Uninformed

There are many news stories that cross the Atlantic from east to west. Germans know all about congressman Weiner and the "nutiny" that occurred in a prominent Republican candidate's campaign staff. But by contrast, how many Americans are aware of the resignation of Germany's Verteidigungsminister? It was a huge story with serious implications for Germany's current government, but I saw very little about it in the US press. And how about Horst Köhler? The president of Germany resigned almost exactly a year ago, but it went almost unnoticed in the US.

Americans have the reputation of being uninformed about the world, but in some ways, it's not really our fault. Our media just doesn't cover the more subtle world events. Now, if a starlet should wear a particularly stupid dress to a Hollywood event, or stumble momentarily while approaching the podium, Yahoo will crow over her misfortune until every 2nd grader is buzzing about it on the playgrounds of Topeka or Des Moines. But the resignation of the president of the world's 4th largest economy? Whatevah!

I did read several stories about the current E. coli outbreak in Europe and I'm wondering why Americans were interested. In some way, I think this story about random and sudden death must awaken the same kind of Schadenfreude as a badly dressed ingenue. Any German will tell you, Schadenfreude ist das beste Freude, but it doesn't do anything for America's image abroad.

Horst Köhler is on the front page of this week's Zeit with an exclusive interview about his decision to resign in May of last year. I read the story with great interest, but the comments to the online version of the story were even more interesting. Köhler was an immensely popular figure, and like his predecessors, was elected almost by acclamation. His resignation shocked most Germans, and while he didn't give a reason for his decision at the time, most people assumed that he resigned in the face of strong criticism of a casual remark he made while meeting with German troops in Afghanistan. The story in Die Zeit doesn't really have any surprises: it merely confirms what everyone already thought. But the in a world where online comments are typically relegated to stuff like: "Sez who?" or "You and what army?" the comments on Köhler were remarkably on target. Readers registered their feelings of betrayal and asked why Köhler accepted the position if he wasn't up to the stress. I felt that the juxtaposition of Köhler's complaints ("The attacks were outrageous!") and the trumanesque heat and kitchen comments online did nothing to rehabilitate him. I still feel that Köhler is an intelligent man, probably a genuinely "good" man. In fact, he's a guy that reminds me of our own Jimmy Carter. But like Jimmy, he's clearly not build for the dirty game of politics. Arguably the most important quality that we need in our politicians.

Today's papers in Germany were once again featuring a story from across the pond, but this time with a local spin. Dirk Nowitzki, German citizen and member of the Dallas Mavericks was being hailed as a super star, even making the front page of the illustrious Süddeutsche Zeitung. I know because a young woman stopped me in the Bahnhof today to try to sell me a subscription to the Südeutsche. Her big selling point was that it's a "very serious newspaper". With a front page story on American basketball? She had a hard time explaining that. Dirk is a big story here, but if he wants to make it big in the States, he'll need to do something really significant, like get a bad haircut. And I guess I'll subscribe to the Süddeutsche Zeitung when they inaugurate a column devoted to news of Brangelina.

Feiertage

 

Back in May, German Chancellor Angela Merkel made some awkward remarks about her southern neighbors and their attitude toward work. Her comments are still reverberating three weeks later as the problems in the European Union continue to grow. In the speech she made to some party loyalists, she suggested that the EU should equalize the legal holidays in all its member states, broadly hinting that the southern European “domani” attitude toward work was perhaps responsible for the economic breakdown in Greece and Portugal. Speaking as a US Amerikaner, who was driven to the brink of starvation by the frequency and frivolousness of Germany's holidays back in the bad old days when grocery stores were only open until 1 pm on Saturdays, Merkel’s remarks struck me as hilarious. Critics across southern Europe quickly pointed out that in fact, on average, Spaniards and Portuguese work longer hours than Germans and have an older effective retirement age. Basta!

I can understand Merkel's frustration with Greece and Portugal because of my own frustration with the Germans. I often travel to Germany in the spring, and my plans are always being derailed by the string of holidays that loom over late May and early June: Christihimmelfahrt, Pfingsten, Buß- und Bettag, and my personal favorite, Fronleichnamsfest, which translates into something like, Happy Cadaver Celebration. Well, I’m exaggerating a little, and Buß- und Bettag is actually in autumn, but it’s my blog. I was curious enough about this issue to search for more information today on the subject and came across an account of Merkel’s speech on this fascinating blog/website: Holidays to Abu Dhabi. Here’s a quote attributed to Merkel from the article:

“(People) in countries similar to Greece, Spain and Portugal should not retire progressing than in Germany. We should all make the same efforts, this is important,” she told a celebration eventuality in Meschede, horse opera Germany.

In the words of the immortal Hank the Cowdog, “Huh?” I read further in the article and it’s all nonsense like that. With unemployment in Europe so high, you’ve got to ask yourself why the website doesn’t just hire themselves a writer moderately familiar with the English language. I’m particularly struck by the last phrase: in Meschede, horse opera Germany. Merschede is no garden spot, but to me it seems disrespectful to refer to it as a "horse opera".  I’ve always felt that was a decidedly pejorative term.

So maybe it’s not the love of holidays that’s doing in the Euro Zone, it might be badly written blogs, with little or no proofreading. Southern Europeans are justly outraged about Chancellor Merkel’s inaccurate portrayal of them as lazy layabouts, but Germans in North Rhine/Westphalia’s Sauerland have just as much right to indignation under the circumstances. And so it goes, charge and counter charge, in an escalating spiral of tension that pushes Europeans to the breaking point. Before this crisis is over, they’re all going to need a little time off.

Southern Europeans, hard at work

Memorial Day

I'm spending my first Memorial Day in seven years in the US and I have to say, so far, it's been a let down. When I was kid, Memorial Day was a real holiday. We began the day by getting a collection of flags out of the closet and preparing to drive into town for the parade. There would be the inevitable fight over who would get the flag with fifty stars, and who would have to make do with an older 48 star flag. Memorial Day signaled the official first day of swimming in the river behind my house, and usually ended with the first barbeque of the summer, although they were called "cook-outs" back then. Some fifty years later, I live in northern Utah and I woke this morning to heavily falling snow. No one will be swimming anytime soon in Cache Valley.

Thanks to the miracle of the Internet, I can listen to Inforadio Berlin as I shiver in my Logan kitchen eating breakfast. It's 31 °C in Berlin today, sunny and clear. In 1960 as we waved our flags for the veterans and scouts marching by in Wilton Center, Berlin was a grey city, the last outpost before Leningrad: all that stood between us and godless communism. Today, in Berlin, commies and capitalists alike are reclining in Strandkörben and ordering Margaritas, imagining they're in Cancun.

The sun is melting some of the snow here in northern Utah as it climbs toward noon, but the sky is pelting us alternately with hail or a cold rain. Cancun sounds good to me too, but I'd gladly settle for the Kanzlerstrand along the Spree in Berlin or just sitting on the hood of our 1957 Bel Air back in Connecticut. In fact, almost anything would be preferable to the bizarre spring we've experienced here in the Inter-mountain West. I'm planning my annual trip to Germany, but won't leave for two weeks still. I'll be in Berlin for the last week in June and I can only hope that the great weather Europe has been experiencing this spring will hold.

This blog has been pretty moribund for the past nine months but I expect that to change starting now. The truth is, I've been pretty busy since September with university business, but with graduation behind us and the summer ahead, a lot of the pressure is off. For the foreseeable future I expect to be sharing my time again between working in my studio and semi-regular posts to my blog. I missed a lot of interesting stories coming out of Germany this past year, but there will be new ones, and nothing can stop me from writing updates on stories that are no longer in the news. But for now, I'll get out the snow shovel and clear a path to the garage. The only Margaritas I'll be drinking today will be frozen ones.

No Regrets

Chez Louisette

I'm not a big fan of cultural stereotypes. It seems to me that I know plenty of sophisticated Americans, punctual Mexicans, sloppy Germans, and at least one or two people of Irish decent who don't drink. But at the same time, I can't help but make very simple observations about groups of people as I travel. Two weeks in Paris convinced me that the French like nothing better than to wallow in their French-ness. They revel in it in a thousand different ways. Across the Rhine in Germany, that's not the case. To the extent that one can indulge in cultural stereotypes at all, it's good to keep in mind that these things are in constant flux. But I remember attending several parties in Germany during the year 2001-02, and before we had passed the 9:30 mark, someone would always say with predictable regularity,  "I don't think of myself as a German, I'm really more of a citizen of Europe." I might have responded, "Yeah, but the rest of Europe sees you as a Kraut", but I was far to tactful.

Whatever the Germans might be thinking about their own cultural allegiance, the French have no such reservations. And spending time in the company of a big group of people who are enjoying being themselves is really a lot of fun. I had the opportunity to do just that, a week ago today, when I attended what was billed as the "largest fleamarket in the world!" just north of Paris: Le Marche Aux Puces De Clignancourt. It was really big, but unfortunately, also very cold. My fingers grew numb pawing through bins of wonderful French junk and winding down narrow aisles and alleyways filled with antique glass, china, furniture, 78 rpm recordings, chapeaux, books... After a long morning, I was glad to find a restaurant (Chez Louisette) in a cul de sac across from a curio booth selling Zippo lighters. But it turned out to be more than a meal. It was a mind-blowing experience and lesson in the art of being French.

We entered to a din that almost drowned out an older woman with jet black hair who stood less than six inches to my right, channeling Edith Piaf at the top of her considerable lungs. There wasn't an open seat in the joint, but a group right in front of us got up and offered us their seats. We maneuvered ourselves into position at a four or five meter-long table, jammed with people. Waitresses squeezed by with platters of food that had an obviously strong Alsatian influence. One wore a whistle around her neck which she used to get the attention of any diner who had the temerity to relax and ease their chair back a few centimeters into the narrow pathways between tables.

The woman singing was Manuela, a local legend. But she was followed by other singers who did mostly French favorites with lots of sing-along parts. While performing, each singer was unavoidably jostled by patrons and servers alike as they tried to move through the mass, but none of them seemed fazed in the least by the distraction. After each chanteuse completed her set, she worked the room with a basket for tips. Manuela was particularly effective, encouraging patrons to dig a little deeper, in a goodhearted but strangely firm manner. We stayed for at least four sets and these gals pretty much cleaned us out.

None of the photos that I took come anywhere near close to capturing the energy and intensity of Chez Louisette, but a quick scan of the blogishpere gave me my choice of videos on YouTube. I'll include a couple here, but I think it's a place you really have to visit to understand. I've been in a number of similar situations in Germany over the years, but the German cultural soundtrack isn't songs from the war years; it's mostly stuff like Bad Moon Rising or songs by the Eagles. You might hear a Deutschrock hit from the Wirtschaftwunder years that would trigger the kind of enthusiasm in a Köln Kneipe that I witnessed at Chez Loiusette, but can I imagine a roomful of middle class Germans enjoying an afternoon of Sauerbraten and a rousing chorus of Lili Marlene? Ich don't think so.

_________________________________________________

___________

Is Paris Flooding?

 I leave for two weeks in Paris later today and the news of airport closings in Europe and in the States is just a little unnerving. I wonder what I was thinking when I made these plans back in September? Every year I hear horror stories from recently returned travelers and I laugh up my sleeve at them. Who, I ask myself, would be foolish enough to travel at the Christmas season?

Apparently, me.

Then, earlier this morning, I got an e-mail from a family member who is in the city of lights. She informed me that the Seine is flooding. They closed the airport last week for three inches of snow, so what will this mean? I wanted to learn more, and went on-line searching for current info. Here's what I found on a "chat" forum:

Due to all of the recent heavy snow east of Paris, the Seine is at its highest level in 4 years and rising fast. What does this mean?
-- Well, the Left Bank expressway is already closed because it will almost certainly go underwater in a day or two.
-- Half of the tourist boats, especially the big ones, are already cancelled because they can't get under the bridges anymore. The other boats have had to shorten their itinerary.
-- Next to be closed will be the Right Bank expressway (Voie Georges Pompidou) if the river keeps rising. This can wreak havoc with traffic flow near the Seine.
-- Finally, the RER C to Versailles could close if it starts flooding.
If you are going to Paris in the coming week or in January, this could affect some of your plans. (Italics mine, added for emphasis)

If there is any Internet service left on the continent, I'll post an update later this week.

Schlink

For reasons that are not really very clear, not even to me, I subscribe to a weekly e-mail newsletter that lets me know what films are playing in the Programmkinos of the Ruhr region in Germany. I live in Utah now, and the likelihood that I would attend a showing of say, Броненосец Потёмкин (The Battleship Potemkin) by spontaneously hopping a flight to Düsseldorf, hovers right around zero. I should cancel my e-mail subscription, but I don't. I think I keep it for the same reason that people buy exercise machines that gather dust in the basement. A combination of wishful thinking and just plain foolishness.

A Programmkino is what we in the US would call an "art cinema" or something like that. My first art cinema was the Avon in Providence, RI, where I saw Seven Beauties and my first Woody Allen films. I think we might have called it a "revival cinema" or even a "revival house." I visited the Avon Cinema website to check, but they don't call themselves anything but "The Avon Cinema." They are still there though, and still showing Grand Illusion and The Seventh Seal to each new class of first-year students at Brown, RISD, and to the odd townie.

I don't really know why I read this newsletter every week, but I do and I was surprised this week to see that Berhard Schlink is appearing on stage at the Lichtburg to read from his latest book, Sommerlügen. If I were in Essen now, instead of northern Utah, I would certainly be attending this event! Schlink is a great author and all-around clever guy. But in spite of my excitement, I find two things about this announcement disconcerting: first, I'm irritated to be missing an event I'm sure I would have enjoyed, and second the picture of Schlink makes him look uncommonly goofy.

I admire Schlink, but don't think I had ever seen a picture of him before. I'm not so shallow as to judge people only by their personal appearance, but I was sort of hoping the author of The Reader would radiate a little more gravitas. I've read almost everything he's written and in some cases the "reading" was actually listening to the novel read aloud on CD or tape, by the author himself. His voice sure didn't sound like the guy pictured above.

Schlink was trained as an attorney, but began writing in the late eighties with a detective novel called Selbs Justiz.  I didn't learn of his work myself until about 2001, when I read Der Vorleser for the first time. As most Americans probably know, the novel is about a teenager who has an affair with a woman in her thirties. She vanishes from his life when he graduates Gymnasium, but he meets her again, when as a part of his law training, he winds up attending her trial for war crimes. It's a fascinating book, with many of the attributes of detective fiction, but none of its drawbacks. The book became a bestseller both in Germany and the United States and was translated into 39 languages. It was the first German book to reach the number one position in the New York Times bestseller list.

So was I over reacting? Maybe the image in the Essenerfilmtheater newsletter wasn't so bad. I checked it again, and there was still something distinctly avian about Schlink's appearance. He looked like a seagull. No, an albatross. In fact he looked to me like that Disney character in the Rescuers Down Under. Wilbur.

I've heard it said that we dislike most in others, that part of them that reminds us of ourselves. As I looked for more images of Herr Schlink, my initial perception was confirmed. Most certainly bird-like, but he did begin to remind me more and more of myself. Mouth a little thin, nose somewhat beak-like. And like me, Schlink is probably a sterling fellow, in spite of not looking like a movie star. In fact, the best of us have flaws. One has only to think of Barak Obama's ears.

 

And the good news here is that the book Schlink will read from is a new one. He's retired from his position at Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin now and maybe he'll have more time for writing. I'll look forward to reading the new book this summer, maybe while I'm back in Rhode Island. I really ought to check out the Avon cinema in Providence again too. With any luck, they'll be showing The Reader while I'm there and I'll be able to get my favorite balcony seat to relive old memories. I really ought to subscribe to their newsletter so I can keep up on the schedule.

El Greco

Bouzouki

When I'm in Germany I eat a lot of Turkish food. One of my favorite spots is Saka, just north of the Florastrasse stop on Rüttenscheiderstrasse. It's a combination dönerkebap and pizza place but the guys there also make up a traditional Turkish stew of one kind or another most nights, as an option to the standard offerings. It was my Stammdöner the last time I was in Essen for an extended visit and the guys behind the counter always had a friendly word for me and brought out a tea if the meal took a little longer to prepare than they thought was appropriate.


You don't see many Turkish places here in the states, but frankly the menu in most Greek places is pretty similar. And to an outsider, one who knows little or nothing about things Turkish, Greek or otherwise eastern Mediterranean, the cultures seem to have a great deal in common. I realize the Greeks and the Turks have sort of a thing going on for the past 4-500 years or so: genocide, atrocities, blah, blah...  but I just like the food. They both do great stuff with eggplant: where's the difficulty?

Last night I had the pleasure of dining in a nice Greek place in Sarasota FL. I'm attending a professional conference here and although I'm a firm supporter of the Arts, sometimes the party line gets a little extreme. Listening to some of our speakers, you'd think a decent painting would be proof against leprosy and a really good performance of Rigoletto would cure cancer. I needed a break from hyperbole, and this Greek place was perfect. The food was delicious, but what I loved even more was the spontaneous floor show. Not entirely spontaneous. There were musicians there: a keyboard guy with a drum track and his eighty four year old father on a balailika-like instrument called a bouzouki. They were good but were quickly joined by a vocalist and a monster bouzouki guy who remained very impassive while he poured out this music that had the place laughing, weeping, but mostly dancing. The vocalist didn't need much of a range of pitch to sing songs that went on for ten, fifteen, twenty minutes, but he was a master at manipulating the microphone for great dynamic range.

Greek "homies" encourage a fellow dancer.

The dancing was equally impressive and alternated between line dancing and a kind of proto-break dance format. Men seem to dominate in the dancing, and they often squat and clap while each dancer takes a turn doing a solo thing. Apparently there is even a tradition of throwing a handful of dollars at the dancer, presumably if they are particularly good. After a lot of dancers had done their thing, they brought an infant out, barely able to stand, but damned if the kid didn't do a turn or two. He collected big time. I would have taken a turn myself, but it seemed that actually picking up the thrown money was somehow déclassé.

I was impressed with the dancing and with the music and the inclusiveness it demonstrated. These activities were clearly not reserved for the vituosi, but were instead open to the elderly, those not yet old enough to talk, as well as the accomplished. But when the guy in the wheelchair got into it, I thought, that rhetoric I'm hearing at my professional conference really is true: the Arts are in truth a powerful force for good. At the next conference I'll suggest we include the culinary in those other arts and see if I can get any support for a change in the by-laws.

Loki und Smokie

Loki Schmidt, the wife of former West German Chancellor Helmut Schmidt, died at her home in Hamburg today at the age of 91. I don't think I've ever written anything about Frau Schmidt in this blog, although her husband Herr Schmidt has come up more than once. They were an interesting couple: they met in grade school, they both smoked like chimneys, and both lived extremely long and productive lives. They were (and Herr Schmidt still is) what many would refer to as "a hot ticket".

The first video is part of an excellent documentary about the Schmidts. The second is a parody of the two of them discussing the question of vaccination against the swine flu. Einfach genial.

Prophets

As I sat in my balcony seat at last night's performance of the Blind Boys of Alabama and Ralph Stanley and the Clinch Mountain Boys, I couldn't help but contrast the attitude to the concert of my community in northern Utah, with the reception I imagine this act might have received in Germany. The audience here in Utah was enthusiastic and appreciative, but no one could deny, it was also small. Verily, a prophet is not without honor, save in his own country, and in his own house. I think a similar concert, with two such giants of American Roots music, would have drawn a much larger audience in Germany, where people have a proper understanding of what's best about America, even if they are sometimes confused by our bizarre hand gun legislation.

On another note: the date of my last Forschungsjahr post before this one is August 9, 2010. That's over seven weeks ago: a shameful lapse on my part. I don't think a blog can endure that kind of neglect in the long term. My current position at the university requires a good deal from me and in the tension between available time and the demands of an unruly faculty, my blog is the loser.

I'm still writing the posts, but only in my head. It's the time for editing, proofreading and layout that's lacking. I'm committed to continuing my work with the blog, but for the time being, it could be that posts will have to remain short. I guess I'm lucky, in that, like the Blind Boys and Ralph Stanley, my audience is a dedicated one, however small. I hope you'll all bear with me as I get through this academic year, with the promise of lots of time for aimless rambling in the next.

Blue Bikes

I picked up my Aggie Blue Bike this morning and it's a gem.



An Aggie Blue Bike is a bike that a community member can rent from the Student Bike Center at Utah State University for a three month term, renewable pretty much as often as desired. The bikes are all used, some of them ill-used, but all have been lovingly rehabilitated by a dedicated student staff. Bike rental is free, but most people have to endure a tiresome online safety quiz before they can take possession of their bike. I was lucky enough to pick up my bike at a time when the apparently finicky system was "down". I'm a big believer in bike safety, but was grateful to have been spared that part of the bike rental process.

This kind of bike sharing is not entirely without controversy in the cycling community. Depending on whom you talk to, bike sharing isn't very effective in increasing the total number of bike trips in any given area. Many people feel that money being spent to develop new bike sharing programs like the metroradruhr program in the Ruhrgebiet, could be better used to improve bike infrastructure for riders. I re-visited this blog post at Ecovelo today and found a lot of the arguments against bike sharing to be fairly compelling. But I'm not convinced that any of those arguments are really relevant to the situation here on campus at Utah State. And in any case, I'm a bike sharer now, for better or for worse.

And these kinds of programs are growing in the US and in Europe too. Germany has had a nation-wide program in place for many years, sponsored by the Deutsche Bahn and very high tech. I don't know how successful it's been, but I can give anecdotal evidence that DB rental bikes sightings are becoming more common all the time. In many European cities, Barcelona and Paris, just for a few examples, large bike sharing programs are in place and the distinctive bikes are a familiar feature of the city center. Bike sharing is particularly big in the Ruhgebiet, as the map below demonstrates: the cluster of cyclist icons at the map center is the heart of the Ruhr, from Duisburg to Dortmund and each icon represents a bike sharing program. I've never used bikes in any of these programs, so I can't speak from personal experience, but I suspect that these bikes can only be really useful to a relatively small sector of the population.



Which brings me back to my Aggie Blue Bike. It's a clumsy monster of a bike and would hardly be useful for most of my riding purposes. But I plan to use it only on campus for those visits to places like the library, Student Union or our administration building. It's more than a fifteen minute walk across campus from my office and most of the way is level, paved and ideal for rolling along on big balloon tires. If bike sharing can ever make sense, then certainly this is the proper application. I'd like to see the program grow and serve more campus community members.

And I've got an even stronger, more personal reason for wanting the program to succeed: my Aggie Blue Bike is remarkably similar to the bike I learned to ride on nearly fifty years ago. I was only five at the time and needed to mount the bike near a fence or some other object I could climb on. My feet reached the pedals, but not the ground, so stopping could be a tricky maneuver. I needed to start up on a downhill run, and if my neighbor, Mr. Corr, was handy to give me a push, so much the better. But in many ways, it was the perfect bike for a kid. It was built like a Panzer and could be ridden at high speed right into a tree, house or car without any significant negative effect. It was a real looker too with a two tone red and white paint job and my dad used a stencil to paint my name on the chain guard. When I brought up this option with the USU Aggie Blue Bike staff members, they looked a little indignant, so I backed off. If I personalize the bike, I'll have to do it without their help.

Fort Wetherill

I spend a good deal of time thinking about the past. Not my own past so much as the Past, with a capital "P". It's particularly in your face here on Conanicut Island, where I'm spending a couple of weeks on summer vacation. I don't know if it's the pace of development, (slow) which leaves things like a Revolutionary War gun battery facing the West Passage up Narragansett Bay more or less unchanged after 200 years, or just the fact that lots of stuff happened here, but either way, I'm constantly being confronted here with History.



I took a spin around the island the other day on my Flevobike and wound up riding through the state park at the old Fort Wetherill. Wetherill faces Aquidneck Island (Newport) on the East Passage and has been an important part of the coastal defense of Narragansett Bay, like it's counterpart on the West Passage, since revolutionary times. I was struck by a photo on exhibit there that showed the fort as it was during World War II, when it was the site of an antisubmarine net that stretched across to Fort Adams on the Newport side. The net, or the structure that supported it, is clearly visible as a series of white dots that lead across the bay, with a gap at the center that allowed ships to pass. Most of the buildings in the photo are gone now, but several have been nicely restored. The antisubmarine net is gone as well, but scuba divers still explore the remnants.



The net was guarding Narragansett Bay from German U-Boats, quite likely U-boats made by Krupp, the Ruhrgebiet industrial giant so often sited as the greatest contributor to the industrial heritage currently being celebrated with the Kulturhauptstadt activities this year back in Essen. It's true the U-boats wouldn't have been manufactured in Essen: they were made at a separate plant in Kiel, many miles to the north. But I can't help but feel some irony about the whole thing. And looking at the big picture, it's hard not to come away with a sense of optimism about where the world is today.




I guess I'm hopelessly naive in my optimism, but it seems relatively harmless to me. I quite enjoy riding my bike around the island, and in previous years I've had as much fun riding the Industrial Culture Route in Essen, Duisburg, Dortmund and the like. My plan for world peace involves lots of similarly naive dummies who like to ride bikes around and mind their own business. It's got to be better than lots of hard headed realists who want to blown other people up. In all of my thinking about the past, I hope I've managed to develop some insights as well. I've been told those who can't learn from the past are doomed to repeat it. And looking at these photos make me think that would be a real drag.

Still-Leben A40

The average speed on the freeways of Los Angeles can be as low as 5 miles per hour during peak traffic periods, but that's nothing compared to the average speed on the A40 yesterday. The A40, or Ruhrschnellweg, as it is sometimes called, is the main Autobahn through the Ruhr region and yesterday it was closed from Duisburg to Dortmund as the entire Ruhrgebeit sat down to a 60 kilometer long Kaffeepause. Average speed never crept above zero as the classic German picnic benches and tables were stretched end to end and the Autobahn was closed to vehicular traffic for the whole day. Not everyone was sitting down though: 1 million of the 3 million estimated participants were there with bicycles and plenty were just walking or skating or running. It was the biggest and most talked about event of the Kulturhauptstadt Year and I'm sorry I missed it.

But I've got plenty of photos, videos and even a 3D virtual Kaffeetisch that WDR has put together to help me experience the event vicariously. And I'm not sure I could enjoy a gathering of 3 million people anyway. So, I'll check out the pictures online and download a video or two. Hope you enjoy them too.