La Fura dels Baus

I was in Duisburg Ruhrort on Thursday evening for the opening of the Duisburger Akzente, a festival of cultural events, and I enjoyed a performance by La Fura dels Baus, a Catalonian dance/theater troop known for spectacular interactive performances. Thursday night's event didn't disappoint, even with the Kulturhauptstadt media machine in overdrive.

And yesterday I experienced another event planned for the Pfingsten weekend: yellow hot air balloons that float above the Ruhrgebiet, marking the site of each former coal mining shaft. I was at the Landschaft Park to witness the spectacle and I expected to see the whole of the Ruhrgebiet spread out before me, dotted here and there with hundreds of bright yellow spheres. What I hadn't reckoned with: the Ruhrgebiet is flat as a pancake; there's plenty of smog even with the industry mostly gone; the balloons were fairly small and they only went up about 80 meters. The result was a little disappointing when viewed from the Aussichtsturm at the Park.



I'm sure it was exciting for those who were releasing the balloons at the various mines, and probably it looked pretty cool from an airplane. But from any given earth-bound point in the Ruhrgebiet, it was a little less spectacular than the hype may have suggested. The photo above, taken from the top floor of the Essen Rathaus looking north toward Zeche Zollverein, shows the event to better effect.


The Akzente, on the other hand, was everything it was cracked up to be and more. Newspapers report that over 80,000 people came to the Mecatorinsel in Duisburg to view the show and it's unlikely that any went home less than satisfied. Two huge cranes lifted the performers high into the air and they swung out over the audience, lit by a combination of colored lights, projected images and enough fireworks to celebrate Independence Day in even the most pyrotechnically inclined of US cities. Supposedly, the performance entitled Global Reingold, was an homage to Gerhardt Mercator, who was born and lived in Duisburg (who knew?) and Wagner, but with angels flying overhead and a sixty foot high marionette giving birth in the crowd, it was hard to keep the conceptual aspect of the work straight. When the puppet's water broke, there just wasn't time for deconstruction: we all broke and ran. My shirt wasn't completely dry until I arrived home in Essen well after midnight.

Gesichtbuch

I've been a Facebook member for less than a year and find the experience pretty underwhelming. But if actions speak louder than words, then I guess I'm still enjoying it at some level, since I'm still a member. I check my Facebook page everyday for a while, then I'll forget about it for a week. When I'm logged on, I might troll around in other people's photo albums, just to see what they're up to, and when I do, I'm invariably astounded at how many "friends" my "friends" have. I'm hovering around 140. But several people I know on Facebook have "friend lists" that run to four digits.

I read today in Die Zeit that Friedrich Nietzsche has nearly 150,000 "friends." I never even thought of the guy as being that outgoing. That Goethe has 23,070 "friends" comes as no surprise, but I was shocked to find that Heinrich Böll has only 714. Then I remembered, I only have 140. Sartre has 57,033; Camus 37,227; Astrid Lindgren has 77,291. How far do I have to look before I can find an author with fewer "friends" than I have? J. K. Rowling has 30,374 and Gunther Grass has 1848. Most of those so called "friends" have probably never even read his famous play, Death in Venice.

So how do I pump up my own stats? I'm starting to get "friended" by some interesting people I don't already have any contact with, but I've been reluctant to commit to a real "friendship." It's obvious that they're serious people, since they only accept "friends" who are over 18. I guess they don't want to waste their time with a bunch of teeny boppers. If I want to grow my "friend" base, I guess I'll have to take the plunge, maybe with Treena, who promises to show me pictures of her new piercing if I "friend" her. Then I could "friend" all of Treena's "friends." I don't think I'll ever surpass Nietzsche, but it would be nice to at least to pull even with Hitler. I mean, the guy is the most evil dictator the world has ever known and at 457, he's got almost four times the number of "friends" I've got.

Or maybe I should just make the jump to Twitter.

Erstes Futter

Although there is currently an open slot for a saint named Christopher, (see post, Hang on, Saint Christopher) I don't anticipate being elevated to the Canon when I die. I simply have too many faults. But although I recognize my own imperfect existence, I have a generally positive self image. I'm more or less pleased to be me and think most of the time, I'm a pretty good guy. So it comes as a shock when I'm accused of wanton cruelty or blatantly immoral behavior.


As it turns out, my actions have come under attack most aggressively at this time of year, in April, the cruelest month, when lilacs are bred out of the dead land and it's time to prune the willows. When I was a kid, cutting pussy willows was a time-honored tradition. I remember encountering pussy willow catkins even before I entered kindergarten and thinking that they must indeed have been a kind of transspecies creature, formed by crossing kitties with what we always called a "pricker bush" in my neighborhood. It struck me as a fine idea. When I was a little older, I encountered pussy willows in the classroom too and I retain fond memories of these delightful harbingers of spring.

Here in the US, I have a willow growing in my backyard and can cut pussy willows with abandon. Not a spring goes by when I don't cut a few of the earliest shoots to put in a vase in the dining room. But during the years I've spent in Germany, finding a pussy willow wasn't always easy. Sure, there's plenty of rural territory in Germany, but I've always been stuck in the city and avoided taking cuttings from my neighbors, most of whom, I in any case didn't know. You can imagine my pleasure then, when on my most recent stay in Germany, I found a willow growing along a public path. It was a former railroad cut, not maintained as a park, and I reasoned that no one would object if I cut a few shoots to bring home. We wanted to decorate the apartment festively for a party on the weekend.

I was in high spirits until our first guests arrived. It seems that in Germany, children aren't taught to see catkins as the first symbol of spring, but rather as the "first food for the bees." With those pussy willow shoots on my table, all anyone could think of were the the poor starving bees, lying cold and hungry among the crocus in some lonely German pasture. Conversation was difficult and got harder as each of us imagined we could hear the plaintive buzzing of a dying hive, the victim of my thoughtlessness. I didn't like this image of myself as bee-killer, so when the guests went home, I researched this cultural attitude toward the pussy willow thoroughly. It turns out, bees do depend to some extent on willows in the early spring. And this "first food for the bees" thing does run pretty deep in the German psyche. Again and again I uncovered evidence on-line of indignant German speakers, reacting to crimes against the bees. I made a decision to be more sensitive to cultural values and lay off the pussy willows while in Germany.


Willows in America don't respect this new attitude on my part though. They grow like Topsy and this spring the cute little pussy willow I planted behind my house was getting up around five meters high. I hope no one in Germany finds out, but this weekend, I cut it off at the ground and the bees be damned. New shoots will come up and I intend to maintain it as a bush from here on in. Maybe I'll put out a saucer of sugar water for the bees, but come on: rural Utah is lousy with willows. Surely the bees can find some other sucker to provide their first food. And when he dies, I'll nominate him for canonization myself.

Sinn Féin

For several years following my acquisition of an advanced degree in Fine Art, I followed a career path common to painters and artists of all kinds. I tended bar. I worked at an Irish bar in Westport, Connecticut and sometimes on St. Patrick's Day a group of customers would bring a small bottle of food coloring in with them in order to dye their beer green. Doubtless, they thought this would endear them to the Irish regulars. On the contrary, this marked them as helpless amateurs. If they continued with that kind of silly behavior, we sometimes had to take our shillelagh from under the bar and rain blows on them, driving them out into the parking lot.


No, we, ourselves, those of Irish ancestry, are not known for our delicacy or formal manners. It was one of the things that drew the American painter, Robert Henri, to the island. Henri, author of The Art Spirit, was an important figure in American Realism and a leader of the so-called Ashcan School of American painting. Critic Robert Hughes referred to Henri as "vulgar" and he meant it as a compliment. To the best of my knowledge, Henri had no Irish heritage himself, but traveled often to Ireland. One of Henri's more famous paintings is a portrait of Johnny Commins, an older resident of Achill, Ireland, who sat for Henri during one of his many visits. The painting is titled Himself and is a good example of a distinct use of reflexive pronouns by the Irish. You could also hear the construction coming from Barry Fitzgerald in a film such as, Going My Way. I don't speak any Irish myself, but I believe this use of the reflexive is intended for emphasis. We use reflexive pronouns the same way in American English today and you sometimes even hear them referred to as "intensive" pronouns.

Himself, by Robert Henri

Not so with the reflexive pronoun in German. The language is simply chock full of verbs that require reflexive pronouns and it's a minefield for English speakers learning the language. In English, reflexive pronouns are usually optional. You can say "I'm shaving myself'" but why bother? Is it really likely that you're shaving someone else? In German however, the verb to shave is sich razieren, with the sich part being the reflexive pronoun. Forgetting to include the reflexive pronoun often changes the meaning of the verb dramatically and in the case of the verb for shaving, it simply doesn't exist without the reflexive part. Americans learning to speak German can have some cheap laughs by translating German reflexive constructions literally into English. When leaving a German I class for example, a student of German could bring down the house with a translation of a common German parting salutation: "We'll be seeing us!" Or how about a direct translation of the German expression ich freue mich! (=I happy myself?)

Yes, we Americans can laugh, but if we thought about it, we might realize that there is an important truth revealed here: a reflexive construction is one in which the subject and object of the verb are the same thing. It follows, therefore, that one only uses reflexive pronouns (myself, ourselves, etc.) when there is a matching subject for them. Right now in American English, we're experiencing a flood of reflexive usage that I can only imagine some people must feel sounds more refined. I hear it on the radio, around town and on campus, from faculty as well as students. A typical example would be something like, "The nachos were brought by, like, Bobby and myself." Ugh! Combined (as it often is) with the passive voice, it's like scratching your fingernails across a particularly nasty grammar chalkboard.

How did this usage become so popular? Did Seinfeld start it? Was it politicians, that group which popularized such classic expressions as "At this point in time...?" Or maybe this construction was encouraged by those adults who were always correcting grammar by saying, "Bobby and I!" when their children proudly announced "Bobby and me went swimming!" I don't know. And ultimately, I don't care, but my feelings about this stilted use of the reflexive pronoun are about the same as my feelings about yahoos who drink green beer on St. Patrick's Day. One should always keep a shillelagh close at hand.

Balkan Pop

A normal day for me, on campus at Utah State University, involves wearing many hats. I might begin my day in my office, responding to e-mails. Some will deal with a search going on in a neighboring department where my expertise as a generic run-of-the-mill "artist" justifies my participation. In a meeting later that day I might be sitting around a table with a group of important administrator types, interviewing a candidate for a high level position such as Dean. At noon I might be on the phone with a gallery director in the Bay Area negotiating the dates of an upcoming show. At surprisingly rare intervals, I might even be standing before a class of undergraduates, trying to explain the importance of abstract systems in the construction of a painting. Yesterday, in fact, I did all those things and more besides. The variety of my day can be a challenge under the best of circumstances, but I am handicapped by a brain that plays a sound track for me during virtually all of these activities. Sometimes the rhythm builds in a way I can't control and I feel an almost irresistible urge to get up and dance. I live in near constant fear, that in the most inappropriate of situations, I may find myself standing on the boardroom table, belting out a line like "Disko, disko, Partizani!" from the internal soundtrack. Would I ever live down the embarrassment?

I think a lot of us suffer from at least a mild case of the Idee Fixe. In the pre-iPod era, you'd be on your way out of the house in the morning, and before you could react and turn it off, the radio would inject a song like Ballad of the Green Berets, or These Boots are Made for Walking' into your head. It would play all day and there was no way to shake it. Today the problem is different. I can easily control what goes into my head most of the time, so the danger isn't that I'll spend a day running through the theme song to F Troop. Now my concern is that really, really good music will get in and take over my body. And lately, the music I'm most afraid of is the fabulous Balkan Pop from German recording artist, Shantel.

Shantel is the stage name of Stefan Hantel, born in Mannheim on January 1, 1968. Hantel grew up in Frankfurt and got his start in music as a DJ. I read an interview with him recently in Die Zeit and find his music outrageously compelling. In the interview he describes how he grew up playing a variety of musical instruments and was influenced by his grandparents who came out of Bukowina, an old Duchy of the Habsburg Empire. Hantel got involved in the Techno scene of European dance clubs but was sidetracked by gypsy brass bands from Eastern Europe that appeared on the scene after the fall of the Berlin Wall. The sound of these Balkan brass choirs reminded him of his early childhood and he began incorporating eastern rhythms and harmonies into the DJ mixes he did in German dance clubs. Many years later, he has numerous recordings and a film sound track to his credit and he has become a kind of cottage industrial giant of Balkan Pop.

Shantel has a great website and I'll post a link to it in the Forschungsjahr sidebar. I could try to describe his music, but it's better to just listen for yourself. As a start, I'll include a music video from his 2007 album below. He has a new CD out as well, Planet Paprika, that I haven't heard much of yet, but I'll be getting around to it soon. Delayed gratification builds character. And given the addictive nature of Shantel's music, a strong character is highly recommended.