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.

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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.

Europawahl

In a previous posting I gave some of the details of the neighborhood I grew up in. Our neighbors ran a refuse business and used part of their backyard as a parking space for the garbage trucks. The houses were all small and unusually close together, since they were all built by brothers (long before I was born.) Their mother lived in the original house on the property and by the time my family came along in the years after the end of World War II, although the houses had changed hands several time, we were still the only family in the neighborhood that was not related by blood to the original builders. Across the street was an estate that belonged to the family that owned Bloomingdales, but on our side things were decidedly more proletariat. Most fathers in the neighborhood had blue collar jobs, and when some of them came home in the afternoon, they would come down to the river bank with a bar of soap to bathe. More likely than not, the kids from the neighborhood would all be swimming already and we tried not to splash too much.

The highlight of each summer was when a large communal garage at the center of the half circle of homes was cleared of cars and set up for an all day/all night barbecue. The guests spanned several generations and they came to eat, drink, play games, listen to music, but mostly just to talk. I attended a party in Langenberg yesterday, south of Essen on the way to Wuppertal, that was organized by the Feuerwehr from Velbert and although it was a good deal larger over all, it had a similar feel to those old neighborhood blowouts. This party too was in a garage, but in this case it was a garage intended for fire trucks rather than the personal vehicles of our neighbors. The Fire Department Band played a remarkable line up of favorites including "On Wisconsin," by John Philip Sousa and "Dancing Queen," by Abba, which I had never heard performed by a brass band before.

Other attractions included a small shack that had a smoke machine inside. There was a line of little kids waiting their turn to turn the hoses on the shack, but each time they "put out" the fire, a fire department official would turn the smoke machine on again. Endless fun. Other kids were operating hook and ladder equipment, climbing a self built tower of Bierkisten (see photo sequence below) or wandering around eating their fourth Bratwurst. I spent most of my time in the garage, eating, eavesdropping on conversations and enjoying the music. Two elderly woman across from me discussed "Der Heinz," who one of them was sure was long dead. "No, no...," assured the other, "I saw him at Christmas..." "Oh, I thought he was long dead," repeated the first. "No, no," assured the other, "I saw him at Christmas..." And so on. I listened to plenty of such conversations at neighborhood parties and always wondered what was wrong with adults. Now I have conversations like that too.



Unfortunately conversations in my youth often trended toward the war in Vietnam and it was rarely a good thing, usually ending in some ineffectual blows exchanged and groups holding back the fighters. Yesterday was election day for the European Parliament, but I heard almost no discussion of that. In the Ruhrgebiet only a third of registered votes cast a ballot. I think most people would agree that the Greens are the big winners, to the extent that anyone can be said to be a "big" winner. But I think the most evocative element of the experience was the prevalence of smokers in the crowd. Please don't get me wrong. It's a filthy habit and I'm glad I gave it up after a few years when I was twelve. But in the 1960's just about everyone over 18 smoked and the world had a nice familiar stale nicotine aroma that was somehow comforting. Now smokers in the US are an endangered species, but being at an outdoor party in small town Germany is a little like being in one of those time warps that seemed so common on "Star Trek". Lots of lined faces, deep phlegmy voices and coughing. It gave me a warm nostalgic feeling for my youth.

Musik in the Ruhrgebiet

I'm reasonably pleased with my decision during the past year to subscribe to a national newspaper, but there's no denying that it has had its drawbacks. Because I've been reading Die Zeit each week, I haven't been reading the local paper for Essen (Die Westdeutsche Allgemeine Zeitung). It means that I've been out of loop for some events in Essen, but I've tried to make up for it by paying closer attention to posters and fliers. When I'm out walking, I often snap a quick photo of advertisements like this one for a concert I attended last night:



The Yellow Jackets have a group of dedicated fans who have been following their music for thirty years, but I'm not one of them. I first heard of them back when I lived in Long Beach and they were playing somewhere in Los Angeles. They got some airplay on the campus station and I thought they were pretty good, but I didn't follow up on my interest. But the thing about live music is that it's almost always good. Even if it's something you would never otherwise listen to, there's something about being there that makes it worthwhile for me. A fan might say, "The boys were off their game last night. Bob Mintzer seemed tired from the flight, and they didn't play their best stuff." I, on the other hand, have no particular benchmark for last night's concert. Maybe they've played better in the past, but I'm comparing the performance to staying at home and preparing my Pausenbrot for the next day. As they say on the sitcoms, it's a no brainer.



In the past ten days we've taken in several concerts here and I'm wondering why we haven't been hearing live music more regularly during the year. I guess I know the answer: now it's relatively warm and staying light until about 9 p.m.. A few months ago, it was damp and cold and got dark a little after four. It was hard to get excited about leaving the house at all. My mantra now is, Today is the first day of the rest of your sabbatical. No regrets.

So I'm up for anything now, including a classical accordion performance by the students of Mie Miki, who's in charge of the Akkordeonabteilung of the Folkwang Music School here in the Ruhrgebiet. Miki has been called the Pablo Casals of the accordion and she performed a short piece along with her students. After hearing the concert I decided to get a recording of John Zorn's 1986 composition, Road Runner, which Frau Miki performed. I listened to it today, and probably for the last time. Live, it was electrifying. As a recording it doesn't do much for me. It's not bad music, it just strikes me as pointless. A little bit like watching a magician on TV.

Even the musique concrète concert we saw last week was different live. Admittedly, the sounds are all recorded and the "performers" just stand over a mixing board and move sliders. The spot lights were all directed to the speakers sitting on an empty stage. Still, the music is moving around you, and the concert hall setting forces you to pay attention. If the same music were playing on my Stereoanlager at home, I'd probably think it was a good time to balance my checkbook.


And on Saturday I experienced a performance by a group of not especially talented young musicians from Bulgaria. They were playing a mixture of Bulgarian folk music and pop standards from the U.S. on the street in downtown Essen and I had to stop and listen. In spite of the less than optimum performing venue, or maybe because of it, they were excellent. Passers by began dancing spontaneously and everyone was in a great mood. I don't know what these guys would sound like if I bought their CD and they didn't have one anyhow. The point is, is was sunny, it was Spring, it was Saturday and they were there. Unlike the Yellow Jackets drummer (Marcus Baylor; he's phenomenal) who has a full drum kit with seven or eight cymbals and the best technicians money can buy to set up the mikes, The Bulgarian band just had some weird middle-east tom-tom and a kid who looked about sixteen to hit it, but it was great. I hope they hang out in the Ruhrpott for a few weeks and I'll keep looking for fliers. With ten weeks still to go, I want to experience as much as I can before heading back to Logan.

Krieg' ich 'ne Zeuge?

On Thursday evening we took in a performance of Gospel music in Werden. I saw the poster back in November and bought tickets right away. I thought it would be a unique opportunity to see some real Gospel music while in Europe and a group with a name like "The New York Gospel Stars" seemed promising. What I didn't know, was that Gospel is really heiß in Germany right now, and over the course of the next four weeks I saw posters for ten different Gospel groups in ten different venues. All the groups seem to use a combination of "New York, Gospel, and Harlem" in their names. Since the group I had bought tickets for didn't mention Harlem, I was worried I might have thrown in with a second rate Gospel group. They might hail from Gramercy Park, Tribeca... I might be about to attend a concert of the only Gospel singers from Sutton Place, for goodness sake.

Not to worry. The concert was fabulous. The location, a beautiful protestant church in Werden has the acoustics of a roomy bathtub, but the New York Gospel Stars more than made up for that. The Jungenstil painted decoration and Gothic/Romanesque architecture contrasted well with the lighting and driving rhythm section. We had great seats and enjoyed our status as ringers. During a short quiz section, we were the first to shout out, "Rev. James Cleveland!!" or "Mahalia Jackson!" depending on the questions asked.



I particularly enjoyed Kumbaya, a song I performed with the Our Lady of Fatima Boys Choir in the 1960's. We were a small choir, white robes, pointed hoods... when I did my solo part in Kumbaya, I think I must have looked like a particularly wimpy Grand Wizard. The NY Gospel Stars started the number quietly, but it built to an intensity we never managed to achieve at OLF. The audience was probably a little hesitant compared to a congregation of African Americans in Manhattan, but ultimately das Publikum loosened up and sang and clapped as well as any white folks can. It was another evening to remind you that it's great to be an American, and I'd be willing to bet I wasn't the only one thinking that as The New York Gospel Stars came out and did "Oh Happy Day" as their encore. For my money, I think we could replace the entire State Department with a troop of R&B, Blues and Gospel musicians. We'd probably come out ahead. It's a policy I'd like to ask the President-elect about, but I'm afraid he'd say, "No, we can't."

¡Hola Paco! ¿Qué tal, Como estas?

Henning Sussebach from Die Zeit contributed this week's offering in the feature, The Album that Changed my Life. He selected Herbert Grönemeyer's 4630 Bochum. Bochum is a city just to the east of Essen with a similar backstory and Grönemeyer is one of a relatively few pop musicians in Germany that perform in their native language. If we discount the Schlager catagory of singers. And we certainly do.

My first experience with Grönemeyer was in fact a song from the Platte in question. The song was Männer, and it was played for me in a Textwiedergabe exercise during my six week crash course in German at the Universität Regensburg in the summer of 1994. At this point I knew just enough German to be able to ask where the bathroom was, but not enough to understand the answer when it came. I got a big fat zero in the exercise, recognizing no words in the song. Now I realize why. According to the article in this week's Zeit, Herr Sussebach, a native of Bochum and presumably reasonably competent in his native tongue, couldn't understand any of the words either. The classic line, "Du hast 'n Pulsschlag aus Stahl, man hört ihn laut in der Nacht," came across to him as "Du hassn-pulschla-auschta, mannöti-laut-indana."

Despite this inauspicious beginning, I became a devotee of the pop music method of language learning. There are other methods to be sure. My son used the comic book method and learned to speak a reasonably fluent Deutsch in about four months. He did tend to fall into a Captain Haddock mode once in a while and we all still use expressions from Lucky Luke, (Immer mit der Ruhe, Joe!) but all in all, an excellent learning approach. My daughter, on the other hand, is a firm believer in the TV method. She speaks almost unaccented German, but the danger here is that the TV student can use the language parrot-like and respond to simple questions with impassioned slogans from commercials. (20% auf alles - außer Tiernahrung!) For this and other reasons, I focused on pop music and I'm still using the method.

An advantage with this method is that pronunciation improves dramatically, maybe because singing seems to free us from expectations about how words should sound. It's allowed me to hear a lot of really difficult and subtle distinctions in German. Unfortunately, pop music tends to favor certain kinds of vocabulary. I'm currently studying Italian using the pop music method and if I need to end a romantic relationship with una ragazza during my sabbatical year, I'll be totally fluent. But all learning methods have their drawbacks, including official study in school. I studied Spanish for five years in school but when I go into Pablo's, my favorite barbershop back in Logan, I often give a quick report on the health of Paco y Luisa in answer to the question of how I'd like my hair cut. No doubt Pablo is used to this from some of his other gringo customers.

So did Herbert Grönemeyer's 4630 Bochum change my life? Probably not, but if I include all the music I've listened to in the service of language learning, Schrei nach Liebe, Adriano Celentano, Los Super Seven, I think I'd have to say, "Yes." According to Karl der Große, aka Charlemagne, to speak another language is to possess a second soul. I'd agree, and when you get your second soul by listening to pop music, it can be sehr charmant.

Die Platte, die mein Leben veränderte

Die Zeit has a weekly feature called, "The Album That Changed my Life." This past week's contributor wrote about John Coltrane's milestone, A Love Supreme. It's a great album and it might have changed my life too, but it didn't, because my life was already busy being changed by McCoy Tyner's Expansions. Mr. Tyner was the pianist in Coltrane's quartet when the Love Supreme recording was cut in 1964, so I'm not far off. Expansions was released in 1968 and I probably heard it for the first time in 1970 or so. It was a time in my life when I was pretty malleable and some days my life got changed twice before breakfast. Still, McCoy Tyner's album really was an important puzzle piece for me and I was musing about it this morning as I noticed that on the same page as the Coltrane tribute, there was a review of a new CD by McCoy Tyner: Guitars.

American jazz performers have often found a broader audience on this side of the Atlantic than at home, and it still seems to be the case. One of the performers on Tyner's new CD, John Scofield, will be touring in Europe this winter and I'd like to see him at one of the smaller venues in December. It's been forty years, but I think I might be ready to finally bring the incident with the apple core on Middlebrook Farm Road to a close.

In 1968 I was attending Wilton Jr. High School and Mr. Scofield was driving Bus 22, which brought me there each weekday morning. I tended to sit toward the back of the bus and often got into a certain amount of mischief with a group of like-minded delinquents. There were intense interrogations after the incident in question, but we never gave up the jerk (Eric Steinleicht) who actually threw the apple. I saw John Scofield perform at the Village Gate in 1978, but somehow the time wasn't right. Meeting now on neutral ground in Germany, maybe we can put this thing to rest.

McCoy Tyner's Expansions probably isn't as great an album as A Love Supreme, but my exposure to jazz was random and no one provided me with a hierarchy for listening. So I heard A Love Supreme for the first time performed by John McLaughlin and Carlos Santana on a collaborative album titled Love, Devotion and Surrender recorded in 1973 while they were both were devotees of guru Sri Chinmoy. Chinmoy was running an organic bakery at the time on the north edge of Wilton (I'm not making this up) and I bought a loaf of bread or two from him. But if Carlos ever drove a school bus, it was never my route. And in the long run, the experiences that form us don't have to be the most culturally significant. What I learned from Expansions I might just as well have learned from John Coltrane, but the important thing is that I learned it. I'd like to think that John Scofield might have similar feelings about his time as a junior high school bus driver. It could be that kids like Eric Steinleicht and me are the reason he finally got his ass in gear and got that first gig with Miles Davis.

Deutsche Oper am Rhein

People-watching is, on average, much better in the city than in a smaller town. It seems in a smaller community there is a weaker need to define yourself as "other." I imagine most people recognize their own individuality more easily in a smaller community. Whatever the reason, just watching the world go by can be a fascinating occupation in a place like the Ruhrgebiet.

We were at the opera in Düsseldorf this past weekend. The production was a rarely performed piece by Richard Strauss in which all the main characters are first killed and then resurrected over the course of the next two hours or so. Current American cinema has a bad reputation because it always has to give us the "happy ending," but Hollywood has nothing on the opera. We all know the scene in recent American films, in which, typically, the male lead is forced to proclaim his undying love for the female lead in a public place: the more onlookers the better. In the opera, characters have to proclaim their love in the same sort of way, but in the one we saw, Die Frau ohne Schatten, the audience includes supernatural beings and both parties are dripping blood. It doesn't get much more dramatic.

The people-watching at the opera was great too. The audience is better-heeled than the crowd around the bahnhof, but you get the same kind of extremes. I'm pretty sure I saw a Nehru jacket being worn by one patron. Haircolor, jewelry, shoes... I felt as though I should have had a check list the way birders do. But my best sighting, the equivalent of an ivory-billed woodpecker so to speak, came on the train on the way to Düsseldorf. I sat across from a young couple who had obviously spent a lot of time getting ready for the evening. She was Dolly Parton meets Nina Hagen. A red check gingham blouse and a thin sliver of what looked like PVC pipe lodged in a dramatically gauged out ear. From one point of view, she looked as though she would have been comfortable at one of my mom's bridge parties. Then you notice the two tiny silver balls hanging from her nose and you want to offer her your handkerchief. He was a cross between, maybe, James Dean and Vince Price. White t-shirt, tight jeans, but a big belt buckle with a skull on it. They were probably on their way to a disco, but I couldn't help thinking about them as the opera cast came out for their twentieth or thirtieth bow. At some level, my traveling companions and the world of opera or maybe just the world of "high" art have in common a love of the dramatic and neither is overly concerned with restraint or good taste. And both provide wonderful entertainment.