Borgweg

on the road again

2008-05-23T00:46:00.000-07:00

Two nights ago, during my odyssey to Basel, I spent the night in London at the St. Paul's youth hostel. As usual, I got in too late and had to leave too early to do anything. So for me London still remains the world's largest pit stop, a place I go en route to somewhere else.

In the hallways of the hostel are various maps of nations once in the British Empire. I found this to be a striking choice of decor. No posters of the Queen's guard or of Parliament or double-decker buses. Rather, maps of Canada and Australia figured prominently on my floor. The Australian map was one of those promotional cartoonish tourist maps, the kind that signify major cities by their famous buildings or favorite sporting events. There were smatterings of sheep and surfers, palm trees and kangaroos, the occasional penguin and opera house dotting the coastline. The Canadian map was more conventional, the kind you'd have on display in a classroom.

As I stood in the hallway, drying my hair after a midnight shower to wash away the airline grime and pondering these maps, it dawned on me how Babel is really a about Empire, the only force capable of unifying the globe under one language and thereby destined to fall.

little sadist in the snow

2008-04-03T20:38:00.001-07:00

Over a beer this evening I recounted the story of a mike stand falling and puncturing a hole in the side of my cello during a gig in Danbury eight years ago. I commented how I was shocked but also kind of relieved. And while I didn't say it at the time, I was reminded of a scene in the film Hilary and Jackie, in which Emily Watson, playing the cellist Jacqueline Du Pré, gets angry with her cello and the life it has made for her and leaves it outside overnight on the balcony of her hotel room during a snowy night in Moscow to punish it. Eventually, she has to drag it in out from under the icy banks that have accumulated in and around it and forgives it, because, obviously, she's the only one who is suffering and punished. (If they had cut the rest of the movie, that sequence alone would have made a pretty great film.)

Never let an instrument get its hooks into you: you can't abandon it, you can't sell it, you can't destroy it, you can't love it, you can't resent it, but it's persists nevertheless. The best revenge you can get is to neglect it. And still you'll feel guilty now and again and do things like buy it new strings or clean and polish it to make it up. But it's never enough. Anything you do to it boomerangs right back, and though it's not technically alive, it's got a healthy dose of autonomy. Everyone knows that instruments "like to be played." Do they also like to see you suffer?

having sprung, the smells

2008-04-01T20:41:00.000-07:00

The month of March has come and gone and cigarette season is almost over. The faux fur lining in the Barbour jacket is out and the thing feels ten pounds lighter but no less warm in the face of blustery winds that, at last, portend spring. There's no turning back now: the windows are wide open, it's ten to midnight, and there's lightning and the sound of rain to fall asleep to. I've bleached the whites that A. gave me - towels and a comforter - and the room smells faintly of chlorine. I'm not sure if that's bad for me, but it masks the musty smell coming from the protective case for my cello, lined with sheepskin with a blue shell made of the same material they use for circus tents. This case makes an appearance from whatever basement it has been in over the last ten years to transport the cello on flights without my having to spring for another seat - and I've never had so much as a loose string after all the baggage handling. But now I don't have a basement and the "behemoth" (as my grandmother affectionately calls it, for it's spent most of its days in her basement) now sits in my dormitory room, exuding the odor of another, stranger part of a house. A part of the house for luggage and junk and memorabilia but not for people.

tonight was a quasi night

2008-02-25T18:25:00.000-08:00

The lock on my letterbox is an imprecise machine. I go to the basement, tipsy on two glasses of shiraz and two cigarettes on an empty stomach, searching for my mail. I'm confronted with a combination lock - an object that is my nemesis if there ever was one. The first time I swore out loud was at age twelve, wrestling after hours with the combination on my first school locker. (The word was "Shit!" and it unleashed a lifetime of foul-mouthed fury that oddly reaches its apex anytime I am around a child younger than I was then.) Most recently, as I was packing to return to the States, I locked my suitcase only to realize I had utterly forgotten the combination. Even if I had had this insight before the fateful click of the lock, I doubt I would have steered my hand away - such is the siren song of the combination lock. (I spent my last two days in Basel wending my way systematically through the possible permutations, and when I found it, 559, and realized the obscure mnemonic device behind the choice, it felt like the most productive thing I had done all fall.) Now I have a mailbox that, when I concentrate on unlocking it, resists my touch. But when I am inebriated and have no interest in the day's contents, it is as pliant as a person asking you for a favor.

Tonight was a Quasi night. I have recently procured the means with which to listen to music on the go. As all my belongings are still lodged in a warehouse somewhere in Wooster, I have the same three CDs I took with me to Germany, Quasi's Field Studies among them. I was down in the basement, futzing with the combination lock, listening and wishing that I'd be met with a bigger struggle just so I could finish out the album before having to head upstairs. Quasi is pretty dangerous for those of us keeping depression at bay; it's so easy to indulge in the unhappiness they articulate, so comfortable to wrap their self-pity around you and think Exactly. That's exactly how heartless the world is to me. At least that's how they sounded to me ten years ago, when A. introduced me to them somewhere in the San Jacinto Mountains, an hour out of Twentynine Palms. Now when I listen to Quasi, I direct their words to others: I listened to them at people who were a pain in the ass to me today. It saves me the trouble of having to tell them off myself. The combination lock included.

friends in small places

2008-02-15T17:33:00.000-08:00

It happens about once a year: circumstance has thrown a new person in your path and suddenly you see them everyday. And you are addicted. You can't get enough of the laughs and the new stories. You get consumed by the other person and you regret the moments when you have to sleep because there's still so much more to say. These are the friendships that flare up and don't do too well over email and the phone. They need the intensive German class, the menial labor summer job, the six hour train rides during a vacation, the research gig where there's not much to research. You have this vague sensation that if you could just get back to a place where you are kind of trapped together on a daily basis, you could pick up where you left off, so there's no need for the phone calls, the email, even the casual cups of coffee or the brief visits passing through town. There's a lot of talk about love at first sight, but do we have words for best friends at first sight? It's the closest you're gonna get to the childhood friendship - the ones forged in homerooms and geometry classes, the ones where you have nothing to lose by cutting to the chase.

rainy sunday

2008-02-10T18:06:00.000-08:00

Today was a day for watching the weather. The sky was blue, nary a cloud - enough to motivate me to take my new sunglasses (in old frames) out for a test drive. Then the light moved somewhere between dim and grey, sometimes feeling dark and sometimes feeling just as bright as before, but just a different color. Then came the famous Bostonian "wintry mix": a blast of precipitation from nowhere, squalls and sleet, huge flakes of snow falling amidst a thousand daggers of drizzle. How can it snow and rain simultaneously? And then the wind dies down, the heavens part, the sky is blue once again, for a minute or two, and the driving rain begins, falling horizontally, in sheets. The sheets give way, the raindrops regain their verticality, and there I am, looking out a window, admiring how the rain still strikes me, now, after all these years away from L.A., away from the desert, as the most beautiful weather to watch.

zillis and zumthor

2008-01-24T19:38:00.001-08:00

memories of müstair

2008-01-24T19:24:00.000-08:00

american shocks

2008-01-24T19:12:00.000-08:00

The sheer scale of Walgreen's
Not having to rehearse every sentence in my head before I say it
The speed with which service happens behind a counter
Everyone's tendency to monologue, or everyone's a talker and few are listeners
Accumulating plastic bags and disposable cups even when I don't want them
Dead space
How cheap everything truly is

death of the bogeyman

2008-01-24T18:51:00.000-08:00

During my second ride in a taxi since my arrival in Boston, I stopped worrying over the meter, trying, as I usually do, to figure out preemptively the tip percentage so that I do not have to stay in the car a second longer than I have to, and instead threw myself against the seat, leaned back my head, and looked out the window for the short ride from the Harvard Square T stop to the Holden Green housing complex. This ride takes me past my most well-worn paths through campus, and as I sat blankly looking out at all that red brick bathed in a grey light that always portends snow but often does not deliver anything more than cold air, I thought to myself, "This? This is the place that caused me such agony for nearly four years? This?" It somehow seemed impossible that so much villainy and heartache could be contained in a place that now struck me as so benign and so downright small. A cocktail of relief and annoyance set in as I realized I no longer had an adversary I had come to count on, one that, as it turns out, I had pegged all wrong all along. Here was no malevolent wave to be met with fists and shouts and rage but a modest pile, provisional, utilitarian. The worst charge I could level against it now was that it is, if anything, strictly functional, without a sensual bone in its body.

the winds of change bring nothing new

2008-01-09T03:23:00.000-08:00

From afar, this election season already appears to be defined by a submission to blind faith in image more worrisome than in elections past. I do not mean to deny the capacity of images in constituting realities, but rather to note that the perception of candidates as "strong," "inspiring," "uniting," etc. not only dictates the coverage and outcomes of the elections but that this image, and this image alone, has become all that is at stake. While this is not essentially new, its vehemence is all the more disturbing as the faith-based absorption with image is, bizarrely, championed as precisely that agent of another vacuous concept - "change" - that is supposed to supplant the very system of Reagan-esque image-politics by which we are so nauseated and from which it secretly receives its legitimacy.

three actualities

2008-01-03T10:07:00.000-08:00

Put an old cassette tape into an operative boom box. Press play at the start of a song and sit at your desk until the song plays to the end. It is permissible to drink a beer. But the film should end when the song is finished, even if the beer is not.

Place the camera in the door of the bathroom. Film your morning ritual: shower, brushing teeth, putting on your face. The film ends when you are finished and ready to go to another part of the house.

Film the retrieval of an Italian periodical located in Pusey 3 at Widener Library, Harvard University. Your cameraman should follow you very closely from behind as you: ascend the steps to the main entrance, pass through security and circulation, take the elevator to the level that gives you access to the underground passage to Pusey library, walk through the tunnel, enter Pusey and go past the stacks to the second elevator, take it down to the lowest level, walk to the corner furthest from the entrance, expand the collapsable stacks, and find the correct volume. Walk very quickly, almost run. You may wish to turn and look back at the camera to signal that it should keep up.

mollusk

2008-01-03T09:37:00.000-08:00

Everyone in the pool today looked like an old boyfriend. It was not especially relaxing sharing a pool with hallucinations of my past, so I only clocked in a half hour before I simply had to get out. There are days when the water is easier to move through than others, days when it feels thicker and gummier, when the place is crowded with the kinds of swimmers who paddle along, refusing to get their heads wet, or the agro dudes who like to torpedo their way through the throngs, kicking you in the ribs as they go. Jackasses, I think.

There is only one indoor pool in Basel as far as I can tell, the Rialto. Its rhythms still mystify me, and for some reason, I can never seem to figure out how to get there the same way twice. The pool itself is on the ground floor of a building that contains a restaurant, apartments, an office belonging to the city's social services, and the headquarters (from what I can gather) of a focus group for disability and sexuality. We knew someone who used to live there, but when we asked, she admitted sheepishly that she never went swimming.

Since I have recently discovered that we will be spending next summer here, I have decided to fulfill my new year's resolution of leaving the house at least once every day by going swimming. This way I will be prepared to go swimming in the Rhine when the weather permits. This past summer suffered from ongoing electrical storms, torrents of rain, and frigid temperatures, and so despite best intentions, we never indulged in this cherished Basel summer pastime. The hope is that bad luck, like lightning, never strikes the same place twice.

weighing on my mind

2008-01-02T02:52:00.001-08:00

These are the objects du jour, two sculptures by Kurt Schwitters from 1945/47, two painted stones, currently in the collection of the Tate Modern and here presented as photographs reproduced in the catalogue to accompany the exhibition curated by Tacita Dean, An Aside (London: Hayward Gallery, 2005).

untitled

2008-01-01T04:59:00.000-08:00

All that has been done is just to bring us to where we can say, again, "Now we can begin."

some recent films

2007-12-21T07:51:00.000-08:00

Brand upon the Brain! (G. Maddin, 2006)
Jagdhunde (A.-K. Reyels, 2007)
Viaggo in Italia (R. Rossellini, 1953)
American Gangster (R. Scott, 2007)
Auf der anderen Seite (F. Akin, 2007)
L’Esquive (A. Kechiche, 2003)
Senso (L. Visconti, 1954)
Sous les Toits de Paris (R. Clair, 1930)
Aelita (Y. Protazanov, 1924) - with live theremin!
Across the Universe (J. Taymor, 2007)

advice

2007-12-21T07:45:00.000-08:00

It is a bad idea to use the exclamation point in an email to strangers when communicating information to them or correcting their mistakes.

muscle

2007-12-21T07:37:00.000-08:00

A good scholar has to be a good schlepper.

I use three libraries on average: the University of Basel library, the Kunstmuseum library, and the Bibliothek für Gestaltung. I have been known to use the libraries of the History seminar, the Sociology seminar, and the Philosophy seminar. I once had to use the library of the Kunsthalle and I have an appointment to visit the music library of the Paul-Sacher-Stiftung (for the original English edition of a late book by Kracauer).

Come January I will have moved six times in six years, once across state lines, twice across international waters, once across international borders, and twice within the same township. This does not include the temporary residences taken up in the summer months.

a truce

2007-12-20T01:05:00.001-08:00

I find myself making peace with the same things over and over again. A tepid peace, not a "forced reconciliation." My awareness that I've laid down my arms and called a truce always comes after the fact, as if there were some hidden negotiator that acted in my name while I continued to scream against the sky, wake up late, and resolve to rewrite the course of my life. This peace yields routine, a habit, a ritual that is often productive on paper but rarely so in the larger scheme of things. And that's when the wars begin anew. When I start to think, "what is all this even for?"

I have thought a great deal about people who appear to sabotage themselves and people who are experts at adaptation. I find myself outraged and insulted and envious of those who are masters of adaptation, who have made this tepid peace their home. When I think about them I direct my rage against them, all the while asking, "why do I do this? To them, to myself?" By persistently returning to the enigma that is the habit that allows us to go on, to be successful, to be productive, I cannot work or read or promote myself or play the adaptation game. But the adept adapters do not want to hear my war cries. They have made their peace. They are one with their negotiators, and I am left with the rubble.

a scene

2007-12-02T04:39:00.000-08:00

There's a scene in a movie that is quite familiar to us all even if we have never seen it: a modest house by a beach (the ocean is the Atlantic, of course), wooden siding, weathered paint, a leather armchair and afghan throws in warms colors and browns, a screened-in porch with a white wicker couch that serves as a daybed or the cot when the children are visiting the summer. It is winter, or at best, autumn - low season, the beach is deserted. And here is where a person - an intellectual - comes to think, to do some serious writing (if they happen to be a writer, which they always are). There's a dash of neurosis, maybe an ornery but wise husband, a troubled mother or sister, and lots of memories - always memories. There are walks by the waves (with or without a dog but always with thick sweater, cowl-neck optional). Here, there is no traffic or television, there's a local fisherman or hardware store owner who exists to point out directions and underscore how alien our protagonist is in this retreat despite property ownership. A retreat less for creativity and more for oblivion.

a walk

2007-11-10T07:47:00.000-08:00

I left the house for the first time in three days today. I needed oxygen, though the temperature outside was enough to make me think twice about making the leap. I rummaged through the closets trying to find a hat and a scarf (I left my own in the flat in town). I stumbled across a bright red scarf and a grey balaclava that would have made me look like a bank robber were it not for my glasses. Instead, I just looked like someone who pieced together an outfit from someone else's clothes.

The sky was overcast and the wind was fierce. I walked as quickly as I could up the hiking trail from the road, deeper into the woods, higher and higher up the face of the hill, until the condensation from my breath made the face mask more of a bother than a comfort. I fantasized about conversations I wish I were having, answering questions so that I could say what was on my mind, like an interview in an echo chamber.

When I got to the top of the hill, I could see the forest on the other side of the valley. There was one patch of trees that had turned yellow amid a sea of wine-colored leaves. The yellow trees were also perfectly triangular, as if a child had cut them out of paper and stuck them on the hillside. Above the hill the sky surged away from me - wet, roiling clouds sweeping to darken someone else's day, somewhere north by northeast by the look of things.

I kept hearing gunshots from that bank of the Birs estuary, and it didn't make the sound any less unnerving knowing its source was far away. I continued to walk, slowing down some and taking off the hat, opening my jacket, unraveling my scarf. My hands stayed cold and I kept them shoved in my breast pockets, my fingers wrapped around my thumbs. This is the best way to hold your hands when they are cold - if the thumbs are on the outside of the fist, they'll never warm. This was a trick I learned when I used to row.

I was crossing in and out of woodlands on a network of trails whose intersections were all blissfully unambiguously marked. I found myself in a Schutzwald, a protected forest, that once had been farms but, due to ongoing division of the lands through inheritance, the parcels had become long, skinny slivers of land that came to be known as Hosentraegerparzelle, "pant leg parcels." At some point, the overcrowded farmers also realized that the soil was too rocky to be any good and the land was turned back over to woodlands. It reminds me of the Jewish joke: "The food at this restaurant is terrible... And in such small portions!"

Suddenly, as I came upon an intersection with the intention to head in the direction that took me back to Grellingen, I saw a sign that forbid access on the very trail I wanted to take due to shooting practice. Fortunately, shooting only took place on the field on certain dates at certain hours, and these were also clearly posted. I saw that the only day in October when there was shooting was on the 20th, so I was safe - until, halfway down the path, I remembered that it was actually November, and turned back in a hurry to see if I had already been flirting with death. In the distance I could hear the pop of guns from across the valley, but it seemed there was no hunting where I was walking today after all.

sounds around, out in the country

2007-11-09T06:46:00.000-08:00

passing cars bypassing the tunnel
the clock on the stove (time reads: 1:00)
the clock above the kitchen door (time reads: 4:50)
the clock by the patio door (time reads: 4:50)
(actual time: 3:48pm)

hypochondria du jour

2007-11-08T07:25:00.001-08:00

Last weekend I was out in Grellingen, reading the most recent issue of National Geographic in the sauna. The cover story was devoted to the vagaries of memory - the focus was on how our brains remember and how little we still know about it. I sat in a dry, windowless, wooden cell with the temperature hovering between 80-85 degrees Celsius, leaning over the glossy pages of the magazine, drops of sweat beating rhythmically down on a colorful chart showing the decline of our memory with age. The chart began with age 21, the graph was at its apex. I roamed to the next denomination, age 30, listed along the x-axis. The dip in the graph was visibly evident. In the intervening week I am convinced that every time I have to look something up twice it is a sign that my brain is crumbling.

sounds around

2007-11-08T07:21:00.001-08:00

the refrigerator
the sparrows on the Jalousie
the children in the Tagesheim
the loudspeaker in the supermarket downstairs
the neighboring baritone
the coughing smoker
the Tram 11
a departing easy jet

caesura

2007-11-08T07:16:00.000-08:00

An overcast day in November. Not a drop of humidity in the air. The light is steely, bright but hardly illuminating. It is not a day to leave the house or to do very much of anything.

we need an image

2007-10-28T09:11:00.000-07:00

Kurt Schwitters with his guinea pigs on the balcony of his home in Hannover, late 1920s/early 1930s

failed autobiography

2007-10-28T09:01:00.000-07:00

[I have to write a 500-word autobiography this week for something official. This is the sort of task to which I am fundamentally opposed. I have tried every way to go about this, but all I have is a graveyard of autobiographies, none of which I particularly like, though I do feel something ought to be done with them, since I am equally opposed to wasted effort.]

The small press Sun & Moon Books used to be on Miracle Mile on Wilshire Boulevard in Los Angeles, next door to the German-language Mastadon bookshop and across the street from the Los Angeles County Museum of Art and the tar pits surrounding the Natural History Museum. One sunny, 80-degree day in December over my winter break during my first year at Yale, my father and I walked to this block – the family weekend ritual throughout my childhood until I started commuting to USC for orchestra rehearsals in high school – to see what Sun & Moon was offering on remainder. We sifted silently through the paperbacks, my father sticking mostly to poetry, while my eye was caught by the cover of Every Man a Murderer by Austrian novelist Heimito von Doderer. I had never heard of von Doderer before, but I had seen August Sander photographs, and the one on the cover was a heart-stopper: a rotund, upright citizen, stood between his two smartly dressed, anemic adolescent sons. Everyone was pretty much the same height and everyone was absolutely bald. I snatched up this Biedermeier Laocoön and, while I was at it, a copy of von Doderer’s epic novel, The Demons (which had a more turgid but less arresting image by Oskar Kokoshka on its cover).

These books stood on my bookshelf for years, after my graduation and first job until just when the Guggenheim decided to reign in its budget by laying off a third of its staff. Living on unemployment for the summer before I started graduate school, I decided to take up cello again, practicing at the Brooklyn Conservatory and then going to the coffee shop across the street to read. This was the last extended period in which I read novels: Robert Musil, Hermann Broch, Arthur Schnitzler, Thomas Mann, and, as it happened, von Doderer were my daily fare. I was a woman possessed: I inhaled thousands of pages about Viennese cafés, sanitoriums, prostitutes, demagogues, anarchists, amputees, armchair Nietzsche enthusiasts, night trains. I began to take long subway rides to far-flung boroughs because some tiny bookshop had another out-of-print von Doderer book by some other bankrupt small press, thumbing my way through the more readily available tomes by W.G. Sebald on my journeys.

[Here is where I got bored and broke off.]

when you're having fun?

2007-09-25T10:46:00.000-07:00

For most of my memory, my life never seemed to be moving fast enough. When I was in one place, I wanted to be in another. When I was a child, I wanted to be an adult - make my own decisions, do my own thing, stay up late, eat ice cream all the time. High school seemed to last an eternity. College too. The workday refused to die. And so on.

Now suddenly everything is moving way too fast. Suddenly, there's a due date to the dissertation. Or at least the money will run out and the university will start to tap its toes impatiently. T. and I have leapt from cohabitation to marriage to immigration laws on both sides of the Atlantic in little more than a month. I have stuff in storage in Boston and L.A., piles of things here in Basel - little deposits all slowly spreading the globe and threatening to splinter off and cross yet more borders. I have a box with dollars, euros, swiss francs, and a check or two made out to pounds sterling. Where are the yen? the rubles? I ask myself. For every birthday after 30, I wonder, will it start jumping by fives? 35, 40, 45 for the next three birthdays? Kind of like dog-years?

How did this happen? Where did the obligatory two weeks to do nothing but sit on a beach and wake up late fly away to this year? And why is every weekend between now and New Year's booked? If someone else were writing this, the words jet-setter or high-flyer would come to mind if I happened to stumble upon it, but nothing could be worse to describe the deep end into which I - as if by ambush - have been unceremoniously tossed.

Spinning her wheels seems more apt. Chaotic, running in place, everywhere and nowhere, in the eye of a storm, maybe. These days the song that goes through my head as I'm in the shower is the chorus of a tune by R. played on the car radio during a vacation I joined with S. and her family:

Don't let the sound of your own wheels drive you crazy.

my first joke in german

2007-09-09T06:52:00.001-07:00

At the Sommerfest to conclude the Eikones summer school yesterday, I. fretted that all the salad was finished, though there was still plenty of Wurst to go around.

"Are you a vegetarian?" I asked. He answered yes, and then I replied:

Das hab' ich nicht gewusst [I didn't know that] - or should I say, Das hab' ich nicht ge-Wurst?

the yiddish part of me laughed heartily

2007-09-09T06:48:00.000-07:00

On the day I presented on Aby Warburg's formulation of Nachleben, I brought in my laptop so I could show a few slides of the Mnemosyne Atlas.

M. saw my machine and admired its diminutive size.

"In Germany," he said, "we don't call it a laptop. It's a schlepp-top."

gare CFF

2007-09-06T22:55:00.000-07:00

On the Tram 11 back into Basel center from the Schaulager, we pass by the central station, a structure divided in half - one half Swiss, the other half French, with a passport checkpoint before you board the trains into France. As we approach the station, we pass the Herzog & de Meuron switching station and a series of buildings ostensibly designed by Donald Judd, and the usual recorded woman's voice announces the upcoming stop:

Nächste Haltestellung Bahnhof SBB.

Then a very different woman's voice announces the stop in French:
Gare CFF SNCF.

Finally, yet another voice - again, a woman - states:
Swiss and French railway station.

We were on our usual commute this week back into town for lunch when I. announced that he loved the voices on the Basel trams, adding that the French voice sounded "so ... triumphant." But it was really the German voice that did it for him. "I adore the voices on German trains - I just fall in love with them. So reassuring, so beautiful. Whenever I hear them call out the stops I wonder about the world I'd find if I got off at that stop. They always sound so magical. One time I was in Vienna, I think... Louisenstrasse. And I thought, I want to go to this enchanted place, Louisenstrasse."

the hitchcock festival continues

2007-09-01T04:48:00.000-07:00

Foreign Correspondent
Shadow of a Doubt
The Trouble with Harry
Vertigo
Notorious
The Man Who Knew Too Much
Rear Window
The 39 Steps
Strangers on a Train

The Stadtkino Basel has finally opened today after the long, dry summer break (dry in the sense of slim pickings in the cinema, not the weather). I am looking forward to seeing Eisenstein's Que Viva Mexico in the next few days and Strangers on a Train for the first time on the big screen. Hoppla, wir leben!

of note for fall

2007-09-01T04:47:00.001-07:00

Rare is the book without a typo.

from fasnacht, in february

2007-08-31T10:28:00.001-07:00

card catalgoue

2007-08-31T07:30:00.000-07:00

The card catalogue was once the mainstay of my maiden visits to public libraries: the first in my memory being by the public swimming pool on San Vicente Blvd. by the Pacific Design Center in West Hollywood, where we would collect children's books in the summer; the more regular outpost of my youth being the branch on Robertson Blvd. between 18th and Airdrome, before the massive renovation, where I used to check out books for new yoga poses or meditation techniques in what amounted to a dark, oversized room that smelled of hot dust. In the center of this room, like an anchor or a pole that pitches a tent, stood the card catalogue. At my elementary school, I recall taking out a drawer of a card catalogue - which they told us never to do - to try and get at one of the cards way in the back, only to accidentally drop the drawer and spend the next five days after school re-alphabetizing all the cards that had scattered across the floor. (In my subsequent encounters with card catalogues, which became fewer and farther between, I learned in retrospect that cards are usually actually attached to their drawer by means of a rod that runs its length and through a hole at the bottom of all the cards to avoid precisely this mishap.) And in my middle school, at the Martin Luther King, Jr. library, we spent an entire afternoon learning the Dewey Decimal System - I distinctly remember it being the single most boring day of my school career (which is still in process). In the end, the only thing I used that library for was to take my AP exams under the patient gaze of a poorly rendered MLK.

Yale's Sterling Memorial Library displayed its card catalogue semi-reverently in the gothic bays of its first floor - something you had to pass by on the way to get in to actually use the library. I still recall the admissions materials that made a point of highlighting the (by then out-of-use) card catalogue with the language reserved for any of its other treasures or precious curiosities. By contrast, the card catalogue for Harvard's Widener Library is nowhere in sight, though the one for the Fine Arts Library still mutely surrounds the computer terminals. There was a rumor my first year in graduate school that they were going to throw it away, but that did not come to pass.

Now the library I find myself using on a daily basis is the library at the Kunstmuseum Basel, the University's art library. And here I am confronted with the bizarre presence of the card catalogue once again, not as a relic of a bygone era, but as something I must actually use. Any book the library acquired before 1990 (I think) has to be looked up in the card catalogue, a call slip filled in by hand (each one separately, each with my full mailing address), and the book picked up a few hours later. The catalogue is organized by Author, Keyword, Galerienkataloge (which are museum catalogues), Kuenstlerkataloge (which, more often than not, are gallery catalogues), Auction catalogues, and Periodicals. If I wanted to look up all the books about the artist Naum Gabo, for example, I would have to go online and then go to the card catalgoue. I would then look up his name in the Keyword drawers, where I would find three books about him. Then I would look his name up in the Author drawer, which might yield another one or two tomes. Finally, I would check the Kuenstlerkatalog, and find, to my relief, the bulk of the books on Gabo, which a library of its quality certainly has but which, for some mysterious reason, are not also cross-referenced in the Keyword catalogue. Unfortunately, in the case of Gabo, as I experienced two days ago, his Kuenstlerkatalog drawer is currently being entered into the online catalogue at last (a good thing), making it unavailable for at least a week (a bad thing).

Having already lived through the era of agonizing digitization of library catalgoues (and suffering at the moment as slide libraries make the analogous "upgrade"), I am none too pleased by my daily guesswork with the Basel card catalgoue. And this despite my general leniency towards bibliophile nostalgia.

you never know

2007-08-24T01:14:00.000-07:00

As I was delivering my good-byes at the museum today, thanks all around for help and Großzügigkeit, my capacity to speak German utterly failed me. Reading too many letters by Kurt Schwitters in a sitting can have that effect. In one letter, the man can wander from German to Norwegian to his idiosyncratic English to Dutch to French, flexing his mastery of now-forgotten nineteenth-century shorthand scripts, a kind of cursive Fraktur (so-called gothic writing), even trying his hand at cuneiform writing (though fortunately admitting defeat pretty quickly)! To be fair, the bulk of the letters are in German, are legible to the modern eye, or are in a whacky English that is remarkably fluent and unbelievably mangled at the same time. I like to imagine that’s how his German reads to someone who knows better: I for one have never read the language used in a way quite like his.

H. asked if I had been out to “Waldhausen” yet and I had no idea what he was talking about. Which must have shocked him at first, because it was the street on which Schwitters lived in Hannover, where the fabled Merzbau once stood, and whose name marked the top of every one of his thousands of missives on his specially-designed letterheads prior to his flight from the Gestapo. My incomprehension had just as much to do with the unexpected nature of the question as it had my rapidly disintegrating grasp of the native tongue. On the other hand, it was also the most natural question in the world to ask and I was taken aback by the idea that it hadn’t even occurred to me to find out where Waldhausen Strasse was, let alone see the spot where the house (destroyed in an air raid) once stood.

H. however jumped at the opportunity to enlighten me: the house next door had survived and furthermore it is an architectural Spiegelbild – a mirror reflection – of the Schwitters home. If I went on the pilgrimage, I’d at least be rewarded with a semblance of what it must have looked like on the outside in nearly the same spot. What’s more, the graveyard where Schwitters is buried is right across the street and H. told me vaguely where I could find it – “somewhere behind the chapel.”

Ironically, my patient attention to all this information – the directions to the house, the right tram to take – caused me to just miss the earlier train to Basel, the second to last that day, which also happened to be the very last day my BahnCard was valid. So, with two hours to spare before the very last train I would take in Germany for the foreseeable future, I decided, what the hell, I’d go and do a little dissertation tourism after all. When I thought about it, barely a week went by this year when I was not in Hannover for at least two days, and it was a bit absurd that I hadn’t had the slightest curiosity about the street where the man whose mail I had been sifting through (drowning in) had lived or even a wee bit of interest in visiting his remains. Then again, I also take it as a healthy sign that I didn’t want to indulge in what could easily be a melancholic wallow in the life of a person who exists more as a concept or idea for me. Albeit a very funny and brilliant one.

Save for my camera and umbrella, I left my baggage in a two-hour locker for a euro – and two hours was exactly what I had. I ordered a gelato, crossed the Bahnhofplatz to the tourist office, got a free map, and set out with the tram to the edge of the city. When I emerged at Waldhausen Strasse, I immediately saw the Döhrener Turm, which I had seen just minutes before in a sketch Schwitters had sent in a letter in 1935. As absolutely nothing around it looked the same, the vision of the medieval tower had the effect of a dream displacement.

It started to rain lightly when I got to Number 5, which, true to form, was a nondescript bit of postwar West German construction. Pretty much every other house on the block, however, was a splendidly renovated, glistening specimen of fin-de-siècle building. Just our luck, I thought, the one building to be hit had to be the Merzbau. I took a photograph of the Spiegelbild and its blank left side, which must have cleanly abutted Number 5 but now visibly cleared the significantly shorter replacement.

This blank wall clearly betrays, as do so many similar walls in Germany, the wounds of the war despite all attempts at Sanierung and Verschönung these decades later. (These words mean “renovation” and “improvement” respectively, but in the echo of “sanitation” in the former and Versöhnung, or “appeasement,” in the latter, the truth oozes out like pus.) Tear down every building with “bad memory” in Berlin, for instance; sublimate every bit of history into countless bronze plaques to trinket up the soulless, safe architecture of the Wende – these blank walls remain indelible. They’re the only thing around that allows me to actually see that any sort of catastrophe ever happened here.

(And here I am suddenly reminded of the news I received at the start of this journey that Raul Hilberg, a pioneer of Holocaust studies, had recently died in Vermont. In Lanzman’s Shoah he goes into excruciating detail about how the Reich nearly bankrupted itself with the Deutsche Bahn as it coordinated shipping Europe’s Jews to all the concentration camps. Sifting through receipts and order slips for ever more train cars before our eyes, reading them out one by one, your mind is supposed to glaze over with tedium – until that moment when Hilberg says that in his hands are the documents that set in motion the Holocaust and the largest planned and organized migration in history. And that the bureaucracy of it all makes this fact invisible, makes you struggle to remember – even as you are watching a 9 hour Holocaust documentary – that each car actually reified so many dozens of people.)

Standing under my umbrella across the street, under the suspicious eyes of a woman living in the Spiegelbild house that I had just photographed (I was about to write “captured on film”!), I thought how depressing it was that there wasn’t a Merzbau behind its walls, even as the view I had wouldn’t be essentially any different if it had indeed survived the war. I thought that behind a very similar façade (just mirror reversed) once was the Merzbau, and it would have been very easy for one of the neighbors to have walked their dog every day by Number 5 and never have had the slightest idea. It sent a shiver down my spine. What was more bizarre was there wasn’t even a plaque mentioning that Kurt Schwitters had once lived in the now-vanished neighboring house. (Having just spent the last four days living in Göttingen, where every single house bears a plaque saying which seventeenth-century chemist or novelist or anthropologist once lived there, it was shocking that Schwitters didn’t get the same quintessentially German memorial honor.) Needless to say, I kept my eyes firmly focused on that blank face of brick wall.

The paranoid tenant was now out on her balcony trying to lure me into a staring contest, and not having the desire to stick around to see if she had called the local police, I trotted off to the cemetery. I misread the map and entered in at completely the opposite end where H. had said Schwitters’ grave was. I wandered about for a quarter of an hour, searching and marveling at the pristine grounds and the gorgeously integrated (new and old), at-attention headstones. This was probably the polar opposite of the Jewish cemetery in Prague, I thought. I remember that mess of stone and tree roots from a photograph my parents gave me from their first trip out of the States.

When I realized my mistake, I noticed I was running short on time, so I walked briskly to the other end of the cemetery and hoped that with any luck, where the grave was would be immediately obvious. I needed a famous-grave/interesting-headstone map, like the one they have in the sprawling Milan cemetery (its centerpiece being the most moving Holocaust memorial to my knowledge). Schwitters’ plot fulfilled both those criteria – fame and an arty stone – and was probably the only one in the whole place that did. I had read all the correspondence by his son about moving the grave from England, where he was originally buried, as the little church in the Lake District disapproved of having a stone replica of Schwitters’ abstract sculpture Die Herbstzeitlose [The Late-Bloomer] on the headstone. Apparently, it was his father’s wish, and off the body went, to where they would let them erect the sculpture – back to Germany of all places.

Of course, when I got to the chapel H. had mentioned, it was distinctly not self-evident where Schwitters was buried and I wandered aimlessly, checking my watch at every other headstone. I absolutely could not miss this last train. But now that I was here I wanted to see the grave. More than anything. It started to thunder. Then lightning. Perhaps the Spirit of Schwitters would guide me. After all, I felt like I knew that spirit pretty well by now, if not the man himself exactly. It started to rain harder. I tried to be “open to his vibes,” be sort of mystic and Californian and receptive to forces at work beyond this world, etc. But I kept heading to inscriptions bearing stern Lutheran injunctions or grim, appropriately sober crucifixes. I looked at my watch one last time. I definitely had to go. Oh well, if anyone asks again, I’ll say I saw it, I thought. I did the next best thing: the best I could.

I wandered towards the chapel and to the gate that leads out to the tram tracks. I turned my head to look down the very last path that forked off to the right before reaching the gate. Staring me full in the face was Die Herbstzeitlose. It wasn’t lining the side of the path like all the other graves did on all the other paths; it was standing at the other end of the axis, my Spiegelbild, a vanishing point. I laughed out loud – not a very dignified thing to do in a cemetery, to be sure, but appropriate. It would seem that the Spirit of Schwitters had guided me in the end, and, true to form, at the midnight hour. Late bloomer, indeed! I risked a few minutes to look at the sculpture and read the inscription – Man kann ja nie wissen [you never know]. I looked around for a rock to put on the headstone, and in the manicured lawns of this decidedly un-Jewish cemetery, the best I could find was the lone pebble the caretakers seemed to have overlooked. A more perfect stone I could not imagine.

gelato captial of germany?

2007-08-22T09:08:00.000-07:00

I am here for my final four days in Hannover - to be exact, tomorrow will be the last. This short reprise has allowed me to read more of Schwitters´mail (and his son´s and his wife´s and his mother´s and his daughter(s)-in-law´s), read an amazing poem about fleeing the Nazis in Norway, and find snippets of the sort that could finally anchor my free-floating Passagenwerk of a dissertation right now. All in all, worth the trip.

More so as it has enabled me to sing a swan song to this nonexistent summer with the best gelato this side of the Alps. There is an ice cream parlor in the Hannover Hauptbahnhof that is so popular they have an extra "to-go" stand just for cones. After swiping a Süddeutscher Zeitung from the Deutsche Bahn lounge, I used to do a drive-by nearly every time I caught the train to get back to Hamburg to help clear the "archive brain." It is also ridiculously cheap. And did I mention heavenly? And delicious?

Tomorrow my Bahn Card 100 expires marking a full year of my German adventure and I am ending it where it began, in Göttingen, of all places. I am staying at P.´s new palatial place - he has just moved in but is actually still in Basel. This is the second friend´s apartment I´ve squatted in this summer while the rightful tenant has been in another country. I think they deserve a special line of thanks in the ballooning acknowledgements of my magnum opus.

"articles may not be exchanged"

2007-08-14T10:11:00.000-07:00

Adorno is always good for an aphorism, and in today's perusal of Minima Moralia (London: Verso, 2002), I found the following astute perception:

"We are forgetting how to give presents... The decay of giving is mirrored in the distressing invention of gift-articles, based on the assumption that one does not know what to give because one really does not want to." (42)

Now, this could be read as a plea for more presents, and, in a way, it is. But in the same beat, I'd like to make mention of one of the best gifts I ever recall receiving: for my twenty-first birthday, S. gave me a three-page list of movies I simply had to see. If I had seen any of them, I certainly don't remember it, for my overwhelming impression after the first read was sheer novelty. And I am still working my way through the list to this day. No only did it rescue me on more than one occasion from rental-store paralysis (a pathology dying out in the wake of tailored "recommendations" from the likes of Netflix or Amazon), but it also opened up a whole world of cinema that had, due to my family's peculiar relationship to film, remained resolutely closed to me. (In my childhood, we went to the movies once a year, inevitably to our great disappointment, but we saw a film every night thanks to the invention of the VCR and always one from the Silver Screen.)

To repay her for giving me Olivier Assayas' Irma Vep and Atom Egoyan's Exotica, I gave her, for her birthday some two weeks later, a similar list of classic Hollywood films that were, until the intervention of her gift, exclusively my daily bread. Now that I am living in Basel, divorced from the independent and revival theaters in Hamburg with their 4 euro student prices, T. and I are thinking twice about going to the cinema for 18 CHF a pop and have taken to frequenting the local video rental store. This is no cause for (utter) despair: I am capable of fetishizing the rental experience almost as completely as I am the movie-going one. This often begins with a profoundly empathetic relationship to the man (always a man, always a little nerdy) behind the counter - a heady cocktail of pity, adoration, and self-pity.

I was a little shocked that T. had never seen a Hitchcock film in its entirety (after an aborted viewing of my copy of Vertigo on one of his return flights from Boston), so it seems we're doing a little mini-retrospective these days. Last night, we saw Foreign Correspondent, which immediately sent me off to make a list - one that had Strangers on a Train, Notorious, and Rebecca but also All About Eve, Laura, and Sullivan's Travels. And while I was furiously jotting down a movie list for him, I said, "maybe we should have an Ingmar Bergman retrospective too." To which he replied, "between Stephen Colbert and French and Saunders, I think I already got one."

Which doesn't mean that I won't make him see Cries and Whispers and Fanny and Alexander with me too.

memory lane (everybody wants one)

2007-08-10T05:49:00.000-07:00

I haven't given much thought to what it is I'm doing here until I uttered the word "fanzine" to T. on the couch this morning. And when I went online to see if I could come up with one of my favorites, Murder can be Fun (whose special issue on "(Anti-)Sex Tips for Teens" was a mainstay in the back rows of my trigonometry class), I realized that there was - of course - already a whole discussion online about the fate of the zine in the digital age.

I don't really have a desire to contribute to that conversation other than to quizzically call attention to the website of MRR (Maximum Rock 'n' Roll), which was the music rag of choice of my teendom. Unlike Rolling Stone, in which you were guaranteed to have heard of every band they mentioned before you read the issue (thus serving to reinforce what you already knew and goading you to go ahead and buy this or that album after all), in MRR, it was a right honor to your cred if you had heard of a single band mentioned within its crappy newsprint pages. It was the magazine where you learned about your friend's band before she even got the chance to tell you she had a band.

While I love the idea of rediscovering MRR online, it is germane to the experience it exists to promote that you get physically dirty from the ink flipping the pages. And it would seem that I'm not the only one who's attached to the paper - the website is devoted to radio broadcasts, subscription info, and a history lesson about the magazine, but the thing itself still has to come in the mail. Diggit!

free love in upstate new york

2007-08-10T03:46:00.000-07:00

From my utopia list-serv, here.

in-flight movies

2007-08-09T12:33:00.001-07:00

On the way out from Frankfurt to Boston, Blades of Glory, which was inspired comedy a la Zoolander. It managed to acknowledge that lazy homophobia that is the hallmark of so many of these dude comedies and simultaneously skirt (even subvert?) it.

On the way out from JFK to Los Angeles, Meet the Robinsons, which I chose not to watch.

On the way out from Los Angeles to JFK, Shrek the Third, which I chose not to watch because, again, why all the CGI cartoons?

On the way out from JFK to Zurich, The Last Mimzy, which was another child-oriented (though live-action) feature with overtones of fantasy (my least favorite genre to boot), but as I inadvertently packed my book in a bag that was checked through, I watched it with the German dubbing. I enjoyed it because after a month in the States, I didn't suddenly lose my comprehension skills.

Also playing on that flight was Roman Holiday, which I decided was worth skipping any attempt at some restless shut-eye to see again. I always liked this movie (Gregory Peck and Rome, what's not to like?) but in the wee hours of the evening-turing-into-morning limbo somewhere past Reykjavik as a few of the Orthodox Jews on my flight began to daven, I suddenly realized all these ways the film is enormously complex and potentially troubling.

sad day for cinema

2007-07-31T17:16:00.001-07:00

Ingmar Bergman and Michelangelo Antonioni both died on the same day, July 29, 2007. They were old, yes, and hadn't been making films for a while, true, but still, an era is, most definitely, over.

movies on television

2007-07-30T14:53:00.000-07:00

One of my mother's many obsessions is the cable channel Turner Classic Movies. This is a fixation I can fully understand. If I had cable and a DVR, I'd be amassing quite a collection. This week I saw The Passion of Joan of Arc (C.T. Dreyer, 1928), Beyond the Rocks (with Gloria Swanson and Rudolph Valentino, 1922), and Stolen Moments (the last "pre-star" film of Valentino and the last in which he plays a villain, here a "devious novelist," 1920).

The Passion of Joan of Arc is a repeat viewing for me, every bit the masterpiece, a film everyone must see and whose every shot is a closeup (save for a number one could count on one's hands). Beyond the Rocks is a romance whose saving grace is its de rigueur travelogue format and the fact that the characters fantasize by inserting themselves into images culled from the historical past. Stolen Moments was edited down to half its length once Valentino became a star, and is a remarkable document for the rather slapdash, irrational, and impressionistic way this editing was done (as in: who's the bald guy suddenly trying to kill Valentino in the final ten minutes?).

reading list

2007-07-30T14:37:00.000-07:00

Before I left for Germany, I deposited two boxes of books in my family's garage. They consisted of books I did not need immediately but which could be necessary before I was able to access the bulk of my library somewhere in a plywood storage pod in Wooster, MA. I am now faced with the same dilemma as I go through the boxes, deciding what I will need for the next five months and what can wait until I finish my Ph.D., at the latest. For most of the books, the choice was easy but there remains a sizeable stack that are on the fence, including, among others:

A.J.P. Taylor, The Course of German History
Peter Fritzsche, Germans into Nazis
Frederic Jameson, The Ideology of Theory
Hannah Arendt, Men in Dark Times
Roland Barthes, Mythologies
Julia Kristeva, The Power of Horror
Karsten Harries, Infinity and Perspective

I have decided that the best way to make the choice is to actually start to read these books - at least as many chapters as possible. I've had some of them for almost a decade now, carting them from residence to residence, to the point of absurdity. But I've only recently begun to believe I have the mental chops to tackle some of them or the emotional strength to handle others.

L.A. by bike

2007-07-24T18:24:00.000-07:00

It takes approximately an hour to bike from my parents' house to UCLA and about 45 minutes to bike back. The last stretch to campus is a significant series of hills, conquerable only with the knowledge that the first thing to greet me after a day in the library will be a long spell of coasting down through shady glades on side streets while parades of automobiles sweat it out on the major arteries. On my rides to and fro today I did notice legions of Prius drivers and scores of buses - part of the "The Nation's Largest Clean Air Fleet" - so something must be afoot in the Concrete Jungle. The biggest secret here, though, is that L.A. is actually a pretty perfect city to bike in. The roads are very wide and obsessively well kept. Automobile drivers treat you with exaggerated caution - at least on the small roads, which is where you really ought to be anyway.

A friend of mine who recently moved to L.A. from Boston remarked that here, since no one can really talk about the weather, they talk about the traffic - how it's doing, its currents and its flows. The worst thing a person can do here is interrupt the flow of traffic; all else could be forgiven, which is important to keep in mind as a cycling commuter here.

I spent most of the day in the Arts Library, a rather small, uninspired nook in the Public Policy building, but I finished by making some photocopies at Powell Library, across the great lawn from Royce Hall. This is one of the most wonderful university buildings I have ever come across, and every time I am in this part of the campus, I'm reminded how beautiful UCLA is, even when most of its buildings strike me as banal 60s-style bunkers or contemporary glass boxes. You don't really come here to look at the architecture - most of it is blissfully tucked within and hidden by groves of eucalyptus - and in those areas where you can't help but notice it, the university intelligently shows off its absolutely best side.

neo rauch at the met

2007-07-19T21:37:00.000-07:00

Twenty minutes to one o'clock in the morning the day I'm supposed to fly to Los Angeles is probably not the best time to meditate on the small Neo Rauch exhibition at the Metropolitan Museum of Art that I caught this morning prior to my last day of research at the MoMA Archives. Given that the Archives do not open until the decadent hour of 11am, I decided to make it to the Met when they opened their doors at 9:30am and stop by Michael Werner Gallery on 77th and 5th to see a Broodthaers installation that just opened this week (and for which I was thwarted from seeing on Monday thanks to Time Out New York anticipating its opening by a day).

After a little of the now-customary security rigmarole at the Met's entrance (flashlight searches of one's bag, standing in a second line to turn on one's laptop and getting a little yellow pass to carry it about once it successfully does not detonate), I bee-lined it straight to Neo Rauch, where, although the show had opened while I was still living in Hamburg over a month ago (there was a little TV profile about his big New York opening on the local news there), art handlers were hanging the main wall label for the one-room installation of some dozen paintings. (I later realized it was one of the most laughably poor wall texts I've read in years: Neo is from Leipzig! Here are some random facts about Leipzig! He says he's 'conservative' and 'romantic' and that he 'paints from [his] dreams'! That makes him like Balthus!)

I had the room to myself for the hour I was there, pondering this little mid-career special installation of a painting cycle, "Para," that Rauch painted for the space. (This is the third such exhibition the Met has staged, and if this one is anything to go by, it is a enormously successful conceit.) The show sealed the deal for me: I love Rauch's work. Normally, I am seduced by a painting's facture - that is what sucks me into the medium. My enthusiasm for the work is therefore all the more surprising because its facture is subtle and secondary. At the same time, the imagery also plays second fiddle: I imagine there's likely to be a lot of talk about his "Germanness," evoked by boxy women with cellos or enlightened hunters-butchers-diggers-painters. (I wouldn't know since this is one of the rare instances where I have not read anything about an artist before actually seeing his work.)

No, for me, what made me stop in my tracks for painting that I would normally never go in for (again, not "material" enough, not abstract enough) was the fact that I have never felt so compelled to stand so far back from a painting (regardless of its size). My impulse to get up close right away was thoroughly unrewarding, and slowly I stepped back and back and back again until the painting looked about right clear across the room. For some of the really large canvases, I still think I could have used a bit more space. I was literally pushed to the other end of the room by these paintings.

I have an immediate theory about why this is, one that might preoccupy me on my odyssey tomorrow. The compositions of these paintings are already collage-like, atomized, disjointed. Figures that ought to be on the same plane are impossibly different sizes, so attempts to locate anything in an illusionistic (and coherent) space goes immediately out the window. But the works go one step further: even at the level of the figures' bodies corporeal certainty is a pipe dream. A man has a hulking torso, a rather tiny head, an hand that is too small and another that is too large. Rather than give the impression of being simply "poorly painted," the body stretches and morphs, distorting under the pressure of our gaze, which is itself anything but consistent, steady, or predictable. The thing looked at is as furtive as the person doing the looking. (And reading this, I think of Ingres, but that's not quite right...)

How Rauch effects the transitions between the pieces of his puzzle-like images is also brilliant: the painting breaks down into smears of pure abstraction, figures fuse into clumsy optical illusion (one woman's elbow is another woman's breast, and both are actually flags ready to be set aflame). All the rhetoric about "Germanness" or "dreams" or "romanticism" is a bit obvious and a bit of a trap. The works are uncomfortable to look at, but the result is - paradoxically - that you can't tear your eyes away.

Top, above:
Neo Rauch (German, born 1960)
Para, 007
Courtesy Galerie EIGEN + ART Leipzig/Berlin & David Zwirner, New York
© 2007 Neo Rauch/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York/VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn
Photo: Uwe Walter

Top, below and at bottom:
Neo Rauch (German, born 1960)
Warten auf die Barbaren (Waiting for the Barbarians), 2007
Oil on canvas; 59 1/8 x 157 1/2 in. (150 x 400 cm)
Courtesy Galerie EIGEN + ART Leipzig/Berlin & David Zwirner, New York
© 2007 Neo Rauch/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York/VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn
Photo: Uwe Walter

See link at right for larger images

the eagle has landed

2007-07-16T09:58:00.000-07:00

I am back in the United States for the first time in little over a year, the longest I have ever been out of the country. Yesterday, while I was having sushi at Nana on 5th Avenue in Park Slope with S. and A. and her new girlfriend, I saw a woman walking out wearing a T-Shirt that said, "Free Katie." I asked who Katie was, and they laughed: "Katie Holmes, as in free her from Tom Cruise."

I suppose it will take some time for me to be less fatally out of it. I arrived stateside in Boston where I spent a little less than 9 hours before taking the train down to New Haven. I stayed in a friend's apartment in Cambridge while she herself is in Paris this month. I was immediately disoriented by hearing so many American accents, especially the special cadences generated by people just shy of 20 on cell phones. And I realized that everyone wears flip-flops here and that they make a rather disgusting sound I never noticed before. When I emerged from the T stop at Harvard Square I got a whiff of that inexplicable smell of shit that seems to waft over the area in the summer, and I was glad I was moving on pretty quickly.

Prior to this visit I have only been to New Haven three times in the last 10 years. It certainly looks well for the wear, and after a breathtaking tour of the Yale University Art Gallery and some work at the positively palatial Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, I found time to wander around the Yale campus a little. My jet lag contributed to my feeling under water, but it was an uncanny experience passing by Louis Lunch, Anchor Bar, Naples Pizza, the Slifka Center for Jewish Life at Yale, the Yale Women's Center, Book Trader, the Yankee Doodle, even Toad's Place (where, during two of my three previous visits this past decade, I saw Built to Spill and Guided by Voices perform). Everything looked fixed up and pretty, and anything that wasn't was under renovation to get there.

The only moment when I recalled how depression was my daily sustenance when I lived in New Haven came when I went to visit the York Square Cinema. When S. and I first became friends, we saw Hight Art and Buffalo 66 there together. That movie house was, without a doubt, the birthplace of my cinephilia. And now it is closed. I stood there silently, stunned but not surprised; the last thing to play there was apparently The Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants, whose poster hung, faded to nothing but its blue tones, in the front display case.

But on the whole, America - more specifically, all the sites of my America - has been a pleasant surprise. At dinner last night, I don't think I have laughed so hard all year. Prompted by my bewilderment at the "Free Katie" T-Shirt, S. and I were in tears as we recounted our viewing of the Cate Blanchett/Katie Holmes vehicle The Gift at least six years agao, and at A.'s apartment, we laughed our guts sore listening to a recording of the "fiasco" episode of This American Life (link to right). It completely escaped me that one could download that program online, which I resolve to do the moment I return to Europe.

12 places in 30 days

2007-07-16T09:56:00.000-07:00

Kassel
Muenster
Hamburg
Leipzig
Berlin
Hannover
Basel
Boston
New Haven
Stratford
New York and Brooklyn
Los Angeles

cell signage on the train to paris last year

2007-07-10T02:13:00.001-07:00

john jacob niles

2007-07-09T03:17:00.000-07:00

Yesterday was another rainy day. When I was a teen and it used to rain in Los Angeles, I would take out LPs of latter-day folk music - Joni Mitchell's first album, Ian and Sylvia records, early Leonard Cohen - and watch the rain on the streets and listen to the occasional passing car through the glass of the bay window in our living room. I would sit on the window seat my father had made, with the stereo fitted under the seat behind a door. It was a secret vice in my already schizo musical existence - classical music on the one hand and punk and new wave on the other.

I only brought three CDs with me to Germany this year, all purchased in last-minute desperation at Amoeba Records in L.A. I hadn't purchased a new CD in ages, not because I had started downloading music (I'm still not hip to that), but probably because I already have enough music that keeps me entertained and that I like to listen to again and again (long ago my chief criteria for purchasing a CD - as opposed to a cassette - in the first place). But I wasn't bringing any of it abroad, and suddenly, I feared I would need something. I re-bought an album by Quasi that an old bandmate of mine never returned about four years ago and I got an album by Nancy King ("Live at the Standard"), whose rendition of "A Small Hotel" the jazz station KLON was playing on repeat during my stay in the city last summer. I normally don't go in for jazz vocals, especially scat, but King's take on that song is inspired and wouldn't let me go. (Since then, my sister sent me Brian Eno's "Another Green World" which rounded out this mini-collection perfectly.)

But the third album I bought was "An Evening with John Jacob Niles." Niles wrote a lot of folk songs or adapted traditional ballads he collected in the 1920s and '30s, and if anyone still learns folk songs, chances are, the version you know bears his thumbprint. I love his voice and his theatrics. I picked up this CD again yesterday, having not really listened to it all that much during my year here after all, and I lay down on the couch in the steely light of the rainstorm and listened without doing anything else "in the meantime." I remembered how they used to teach us folk songs and the autoharp in primary school, and I wondered if that was still something they did for schoolchildren. Somehow, I doubt it, and suddenly I realized that my childhood too was losing its contemporaneity and becoming one of those infinite objects that dissolve and leave no trace.

It's probably no accident that laying on the couch "idly" reminded me of the thing I miss most about psychoanalysis: laying down and being alert at the same time. After this reverie, I went to visit F. for an early dinner, and she lent me a book that I am currently inhaling, A Lady's Life in the Rocky Mountains by Isabella Bird. I never heard of it or its author before, but it belongs to the same world as John Jacob Niles. I thought it significant that a Swiss woman who had spent most of her childhood in the States had been motivated to give it to me. She was prompted in response to my using the idiom, "I don't want to change horses midstream." While T. thought it was a product of my invention, a flash of recognition of something once banal but now precious flashed across her face. Something about hearing this phrase delighted F. to no end, and off she went in search of the book. I noticed, as I started it, how tricked I have been into believing that American culture is what it has been said to become - when what passes as "American" today (ruthless imperialism, political corruption and expediency, and unchecked consumerism without any of the libidinal charge - that is, the ideology of the American Right) is actually something else that, while undoubtedly honed to a science by many Americans, masks or banishes what makes their culture specific and enchanting.

lazy eye

2007-07-09T03:06:00.000-07:00

I have been physically exhausted since I returned to Basel after my trip through Germany with S. We went to documenta and Skupltur-Projekte Muenster, spent a rainy day in Hamburg in a cafe that was new to me in the Schanze and gleefully wallowed in the Willy Doherty show at the Kunsthalle, fell for Leipzig for just about every conceivable reason, and ended up in Berlin, from where I commuted to Hannover to attend a conference on Kurt Schwitters and S. got to mull over the puzzle that is that city without my intervening commentary.

It comes as no surprise that I am tired, but I thought it would have lifted by now. I wish I could say more of the art we saw stuck with me or motivated me to write. Instead, I feel even more entrenched in my current albatross. But there are new ideas on that front, so inspiration came, obliquely and without fanfare on this journey, without me realizing it.

I don't think either of us were at our most comfortable living the life of hotel beds and eating out or on the road everyday. Ours is a friendship that needs its domestic space, and I'm looking forward to my visit to Brooklyn, where we'll be more native and less "roving eyes."

keep it like a secret

2007-06-19T10:10:00.000-07:00

Last night we went around to R. and M.'s place for dinner, our very first social engagement with them. R. said something to us on our way out, after four hours and about as many bottles of wine: "Basel is really the only small town worth living in anymore. It's true. Whenever I go back to Berlin or Vienna, I'm always a little desperate because it takes so long to get anywhere."

And today I had breakfast with Se. after what felt like an age - and was likely at least a year - and our time together stretched until 4 pm. We walked along the Rhine to the Museum Tinguely to see the Situationist International exhibition. The water was turgid after all the storms we've been having, but that didn't stop dozens of intrepid swimmers. After we left the museum, we stuck close to the river, stopping for ice cream before camping out at the Schmale Wurf for Panaches and cigarettes, the first I've had in months. She said that she felt that Basel was the best kept secret and that she didn't want to tell anyone because she doesn't want it to change. Then again, her friends in Paris won't come and visit her here. The rest of Europe loathes Switzerland because, as she put it, "their biggest problem here is boredom."

a metaphor these days

2007-06-12T10:24:00.001-07:00

this way, that way in essen

2007-06-12T10:21:00.001-07:00

vastly improved

2007-06-12T10:10:00.000-07:00

The second time I traveled to Düsseldorf was a vast improvement over the first. My maiden voyage to the capital of Nordrhein-Westfalen took place in January, under the cloud of my nervously awaiting the repair and return of my laptop from abroad after a suitcase had fallen on it during a train ride over Christmas. I had neglected to bring an umbrella and it rained the entire time. My second night was spent in the only central (and rather seedy) hostel in the city, shivering from a fever and mercilessly roused to wakefulness in the small hours of the morning by two drunk Australian teens. What is more, the works of art at the Stiftung Insel Hombroich that I had made the trip to see were incidentally the only ones completely under wraps as they were renovating the room in which they permanently hang.

This time around, I fared much better. I decided to stay across the river in Oberkassel at the DJH hostel. When I travel alone – or with others too, for that matter – being in the thick of things is less important than someplace quiet in the evenings and pretty to look at in the day. The hostel is surrounded by a neighborhood that appears to have been spared by war bombing, unlike the city center, and a lovely riverside park that is home to hundreds of bunnies. Their presence in the park is inexplicable and oddly appropriate: think of the scene in Guy Maddin’s Archangel, where it starts to snow bunny rabbits in the trenches. No one can say why, but it somehow works. I wondered why not all parks have bunnies rather than their less savory counterpart, the squirrel. The tram to the center of the city crosses a bridge over the Rhine, and looking south one morning, away from the park towards another green bank, I saw a gigantic herd of sheep out to pasture. I must be honest and confess that I was not prepared for such arcadia in the urban heart of the Ruhrgebiet.

I have discovered that, in addition to Ohropax and an eyemask, there are three other items worth having on hand for communal bunking: a pair of flip-flops for showers, a towel, and the best map you can get of the place where you are. I also realized this time around that the only thing I do these days to really plan for a trip (other than book a room and the transit to get where I’m going) is to look up the cinema program for the city and note what films are playing that I want to see and when and where on the nights that I will be in town. I also always have check that foreign films have subtitles instead of dubbed voice-overs: I haven’t been able to bear a dubbed film since Pippi Longstocking ran on Sunday morning television circa 1982.

you're pretty but you make me sneeze

2007-06-12T10:03:00.000-07:00

foggy morning in düsseldorf

2007-06-12T10:00:00.000-07:00

benefit

2007-06-04T01:30:00.000-07:00

One of the unexpected perks of living in a country where you don't speak the language all that fluently is the capacity to switch off your comprehension skills when someone decides to lecture you or yell at you or chew you out for some specious reason. Whereas in English my impulse would be to stick up for myself and engage in verbal battle, here, when someone gets officious or testy, I can just refuse to concentrate sufficiently to understand what is being said and can walk away without any residual ire. At least on my part.

duly noted on sherkin island

2007-06-01T03:49:00.000-07:00

nearly everyday in baltimore, co. cork, ireland

2007-06-01T03:43:00.000-07:00

beyond gaggles and flocks

2007-05-30T02:03:00.000-07:00

A Colony of Bats
A Thought of Barons
A Knot of Toads
A Raffle of Turkeys
A Decent of Woodpeckers
A Conspiracy of Ravens
A Company of Parrots
A Smack of Jellyfish
A Murder of Crows
A Dopping of Ducks
A Kettle of Hawks
A Congregation of Plovers

taken aback

2007-05-24T10:41:00.000-07:00

I don't think I can ever recall reading an article in a newspaper that has touched me so deeply as the one I just finished on my train ride out to Hannover this morning from last week's Die Zeit (Nr. 21; May 16, 2007; pp. 15-19), "Vor der großen Flut," by Anita and Marian Blasberg. In this artfully written comparison about preparations to cope with the inevitable consequences of global warming in The Netherlands and Bangladesh, two countries that exist at or below sea level, the gap between the rich and the destitute yawns quietly, soberly, and insistently. I don't want to provide a synopsis of it (see the link at right); all I want to say here is that it made me conscious that climate change is a problem that cannot be fixed, but which rather operates like a living organism introduced to a colony of other, more familiar, social ills. Which means there will soon come a time to write the history of global warming, of which this piece is perhaps one of its first and most successful chapters - and in this history, it will not be some aberrant interjection into geological time, but an ongoing chain reaction that leaves no aspect of daily life untouched.

The Dutch view global warming as a new frontier in economic opportunity and development; the Bangladeshi people pay for it with their lives. Farmers in South Holland face losing their land as the government tests new techniques for keeping the country on the map; in Bangladesh, the hundreds of thousands who have already lost their livelihood illegally pillage forests that might be their only salvation from the floods - as the time between the great monsoons dwindles from every 20 years to every fifth and soon every single year, the trees vanish at a comparable pace. And as the massive U.S., Chinese, and Saudi delegations at the world climate summit in Brussels this April quibble over wording like "many millions of refugees" (preferring just "millions of refugees" and finally settling on "many millions of people"), the sole Bangladeshi representative (the UN pays for only one flight per country) can only look on in silent bewilderment. This is a story as much about architecture and strategies of representation as is it the weather, as much about new migration patterns as it is about a kind of tacit genocide.

hysterical

2007-05-22T15:38:00.000-07:00

It dawned on me today that a good definition of hysteria would be the mantra, "I'd rather be right than happy." There come moments that test this iron-clad law that may seem insignificant at the time - if, in the intoxication of justice, they are noticed at all - but which are decisive if one wishes to resist making one's life a "real Calvary" (as Phillipe van Haute once succinctly characterized the hysteric's existence). One might call it "picking your battles," but that always struck me as pedestrian a thing to say as "Life isn't fair." Because both approximate what I am trying to say by falling back on platitudes, they are more likely to rankle the hysteric rather than bring about a change in consciousness that may salvage her life, if sour her conscience.

The hysteric is in a double-bind: on the one hand, to live an ethical life demands that one be right and that one demand the same of the world. But what does one do when the good is not always the beautiful? Or when its not even all that good? I believe the hysterical woman was the first dialectician - the first to realize that heaven is actually a hell, and that it is here, now, on earth to be lived. And by always keeping this hell in view, she triumphs (but does not rejoice) in the knowledge that she is conscious of this truth, even if it makes her life here, now, on earth unbearable.

Lately, I am thinking of Ulrike Meinhof, especially as we are gearing up for the 40th anniversary of 1968 - which, in Germany, really began on June 2, 1967 with the student protests in Berlin on the occasion of the state visit of the Shah of Iran. Two nights ago I saw one of many TV programs devoted to narrating the history of the decade between that summer and the German Autumn of 1977. And I saw footage of Ulrike Meinhof from the early 1960s, as she appeared as a journalist on political discussion television programs. She looked very Beat and spoke very intelligently and struck me as so very, terribly - depressed.

Gerhard Richter. (German, born 1932). Ulrike Meinhof from October 18, 1977. 1988. Fifteen paintings, oil on canvas, Installation variable. The Museum of Modern Art, New York. The Sidney and Harriet Janis Collection, gift of Philip Johnson, and acquired through the Lillie P. Bliss Bequest (all by exchange); Enid A. Haupt Fund; Nina and Gordon Bunshaft Bequest Fund; and gift of Emily Rauh Pulitzer. © 2007 Gerhard Richter

good bookstore

2007-05-22T15:17:00.000-07:00

Every time I use the Dammtor station when I return to Hamburg by train, I walk over the Dag Hammerskjöld Bridge to the Stephansplatz U-Bahn station. There are entrances to this stop quite a distance away, near the Casino and the Opera, but I always turn right off the bridge and enter into the closest passageway. I descend by a few steps to get to the entrance, and before I take the escalator down underground, there is a little used bookshop waiting there to greet me - an Antiquariat. I have always wanted to go in, but have resisted, thinking that what they sold was too expensive, but today I did. Standing in glass cases where you would expect the usual subway advertisements was a series of books that seemed more interesting than the next - a collection of early graphic work by Georg Grosz, a first edition of a collection of poems by Gottfried Benn, Thomas Mann's diaries, Benjamin's Arcades Project, Upton Sinclair editions with the original covers designed by John Heartfield - and they were all under 30 euro. I walked in.

Of the 17 books I seriously thumbed, 6 were "necessary," and, in the end, I only bought one. I am trying to use libraries even more than I already do, but as I leafed through the Berlin-Paris exhibition catalogue from the Pompidou or a huge monograph on John Heartfield, or even the Marlborough Gallery catalogue of Kurt Schwitters in Exile, I knew that I would one day regret not buying them when I could but that, in the more immediate future, I would regret shipping them back to the States when the time came even more. As for Ilja Ehrenburg's autobiography or Döblin's four-volume paean to the November Revolution of 1918, those were even sadder to let go because they were knocked out the first round, being more for pleasure than "necessity."

Fundgrube fuer Buecherfruende
Dammtordamm 4
20354 Hamburg
+49 (0)40 34 50 16

revisited

2007-05-16T08:40:00.000-07:00

A postscript to my comments on Brideshead Revisited: it ought not to be forgotten that this is also a fundamentally very funny book. Humor is not used to assuage or apologize for the book's bite, but subtends every word so that, depending on your mood or general disposition, you might choose not to despair fully or indulge in righteous indignation - perfectly just reactions to the narrative:

"Even on that convivial evening I could feel my host emanating little magnetic waves of social uneasiness, creating, rather, a pool of general embarrassment about himself in which he floated with log-like calm."

This reminds me that I have always wanted to read Waugh's The Loved One, a satire on the funeral industry that was adapted to film in 1965 with genius performances by wildmen Jonathan Winters and Rod Steiger. I adored this film when I first saw it as a kid, partly because it has all these scenes that take place where I grew up but which, as shown, does not exist anymore. The one shot I can remember vividly (save for one of the players taking a swing from the cliff-side overhang of a Case Study House) was of the outside of a restaurant whose door was actually the gaping maw of a whale waiting to swallow customers whole. When I saw it, I remembered that restaurant, and in doing so, realized that I had not seen it for a long time. I was very startled at having this image trigger a memory of a place I did not yet know had disappeared.

uneasy distraction

2007-05-14T09:15:00.000-07:00

I picked up Brideshead Revisited at the house in Ireland and, against my better judgment, brought it back to Hamburg with me. I say against my better judgment as I only have a few more days in Germany and I should not be reading English novels, I have far too many books to tote around with me to my next settlement, and I am already desperately testing every excuse to avoid the heap of work closing in around me.

It has been a long time since I have been this immersed in something quite so hyperbolically British: it comes as quite a culture shock. At times, reading Waugh might as well be reading a foreign language. I am realizing just how long it has also been since I have read a novel (without wrestling with German too) and how this one in particular is turning out to be a rather comforting and unexpected tutor in the ways of human relations. Even though the world Waugh writes about is a dead world - deliberately saturated in a queasy nostalgia, a loving portrait of a rotten, even pathological, universe - somehow the little betrayals and unfathomable failures of his characters rests close. It is a book that relentlessly shows how every honest impulse or genuine affection is smothered, aborted, banished to the shadows. And while I would be hard pressed to see an economic advantage to this misery, somehow I am lulled, with the characters, into the belief that this atomization, this shriveling loneliness, is the way things have to be. Quiet, oblique abuse becomes one's only hope and salvation.

I once had my own Sebastian Flyte, but because that relationship did not conclude in drug overdose or crippling alcoholism, but rather ended for still more foggy reasons, I suppose I am rather late in learning the lessons this book has to teach. What happens when no one bothers to notice the slaughter of a sacrificial lamb?

hurley making

2007-05-13T03:38:00.000-07:00

There are two native Irish sports: Gaelic football and hurling. One of the three television stations we received was devoted almost exclusively to programming in the Irish language, and I caught a few minutes of a Gaelic football match. From what I could tell, it was a combination of rugby and soccer, with two different kinds of goal posts and players could touch the ball with their hands. Just before dinner the following evening I caught a short documentary called Hurley Making in English on one of the RTE (national) channels. Hurling has the appeal of being an indigenous ancient sport, whose tools were once hunting weapons. I thought this gave an added dimension to the opening of Ken Loach’s brilliant recent feature, The Wind That Shakes the Barley, which shows a game of hurling and the subsequent fallout with British soldiers for an “illegal assembly.” Could the game itself, like the forbidden Irish tongue, have been a palpable threat?

The documentary was focused instead on the craft of making hurleys (bats) and balls. The film started with the felling of an ash tree, whose roots had to be cut a particular way to ensure that the grain of the hurley heads could withstand the impact of the ball. We moved among small family workshops, with different tasks assigned to members of various generations. As the narrator recounted the history of the sport (and myth plays an integral role in the telling of history in Ireland, regardless of its subject), we watched a younger craftsman repair the hurley of a star player. We moved to a renowned workshop for hurling balls in Dublin, and as we watched a man stitch the leather with mitted hands and an aggressive needle, I had to think of sail makers on the great mast sailing ships, which not too long ago, would run afoul on Fastnet Rock off Mizen Head, “the most southwesterly point in Ireland.”

Our last day in West Cork was spent on Sherkin Island, and as we boarded the ferry back to the mainland after a day of strolling through cow pastures and rambling by the ocean, I exchanged places with a boy of ten or eleven returning to the island after school, hurley stick in hand.

teeth will be provided

2007-05-13T03:14:00.000-07:00

Ireland is about to hold elections and campaign posters tied to telephone poles were an ubiquitous addition to a West Cork landscape that usually consists of stone walls, bramble, grass, herds of sheep and cows, wire fences, the occasional tree deformed by costal winds, wildflowers, and (in the recent boom years of the “Celtic Tiger”) construction sites. Without exception, candidates represented themselves with frontal photographs taken against a neutral background, which amounted to little more than what you would expect to find in their passports. Splashed across the posters were their names and their party – and, if they were in the Fianna Fáil party of the current prime minister, Bertie Ahern, you could also read the chummy appellation “Bertie’s Team.” Posters sporting the portrait of Gerry Adams, the president of Sinn Féin, were in abundance, though I do not think he was running for a particular office this election. Smiling through his greying beard and oversized wire-rim glasses, Adams now looks more like a hippie-cum-math teacher from Portland than an alleged IRA terrorist.

I asked T. what Adams’ role in politics in the Republic currently was and we got to talking about his past appearances in the press. I remarked that I remembered seeing him on the American news on the occasion of the Good Friday Agreement, and he asked, “Did you hear his voice?” Legend has it that for years Adams never slept two consecutive nights in the same place, and under the Thatcher regime the ethical conundrum for the Irish press as to how to report his statements came to the fore: on the one hand, he is an incendiary figure of utmost newsworthiness, and on the other, there was no small concern about “giving a voice to a terrorist.” For a long time, whenever Adams was interviewed on television, he would be seated in darkness so that all viewers could see was his silhouette. This is common practice when the aim is to guard a speakers’ identity, yet in Adams’ case, I imagine the effect is quite the opposite – emphasizing his notoriety and rendering him more conspicuous. Yet what I find still more unusual is the fact that his words were also always spoken verbatim by someone else rather than altered by a computer. T. thought he recalled an instance when a woman spoke in his stead, and when no effort was made to change pronouns of first-person address, the “whole thing was just very eerie.”

As it happened we were on our way to Cork for the day on May 8, the first day of the regional government in Northern Ireland – and this nine years after the Good Friday Agreement. Sinn Féin’s Chief Negotiator, Martin McGuinness, and Protestant preacher, Ian Paisley, are to lead the new government. T. reminded me who Paisley was by referring to a video we had seen of the stand-up of Irish comedian Dave Allen. Allen has a routine in which he mimics Paisley’s fire-and-brimstone approach: “‘...there will be a wailing and a great gnashing of teeth!’ And a little old lady in the front row says, ‘But I don’t have any teeth!’ And Paisley says, ‘Teeth will be provided!’”

robert gober at the schaulager

2007-05-13T02:41:00.000-07:00

Last night, the summer exhibition at the Schaulager in Basel opened. This year, the honor goes to Rober Gober, whose Untitled (1995-97, above) is permanently installed on the lower level of this storage facility, designed by Herzog & de Meuron for the contemporary art collection of the Emanuel Hoffmann Stiftung . The collection is committed to new art that uses materials in unorthodox ways, and while scholars or museum professionals can make appointments to view select works year-round, the space is only open to the public in the summer – and then only those parts of two floors reserved for special (typically monographic) exhibitions. Save for the Gober installation and Katharina Fritsch’s Rat King, works in the collection remain hidden from view in luxuriant bays that make up the majority of the building, one of the Basel-based firm’s best.

Perhaps it is the fault of looking at exhibitions at openings or my existing indifference to Gober’s work, but this show is agonizingly dull - and this was a sorry disappointment given that the Tacita Dean exhibition last year, after repeated and intense visits, left me with an unbound enthusiasm for the work of a heretofore unfamiliar artist, and that the Jeff Wall exhibition two years ago allowed me to warm to work for which I had originally deep reservations.

The first work I ever saw by Gober was one of his sinks at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art when I was a teenager. I was with my father, who had apparently encountered his work before. He gestured to it saying, “What’s the deal with the sinks?” That question haunted me again as I wandered through the ground floor, seeing a litany of loving replicas of non-functional old-timey porcelain utility sinks – as well as equally repetitious examples of other favorite motifs (wax legs sporting children’s sandals and socks, baby cribs, household products). The most intriguing work in the show was one of the four large-scale installations, Newspaper, Rat Bait, Functioning Sink, Prison Window, and I guess it kind of answered my dad’s question for me. I had seen it reproduced many times before but could never get a sense of what was going on: as in Untitled, the sound of running water is crucial. Water runs into a series of sinks affixed to walls painted with a forest scene. The forest is so obviously a painting (it even looks like it was attacked by some blight that makes everything look like army camouflage), and though the sinks that intrude into your space continue to interrupt the illusion in an even more obvious way, you nevertheless want to imagine yourself in a real forest with the sounds of a real stream rushing in the distance. Puncturing the walls high above your head are barred windows that look out onto blue skies: you cannot see these skies without keeping in sight the top of the makeshift walls that form the room in which you stand and the lighting fixtures on the gallery’s ceiling. Again, you know that the space behind the window is shallow and illusory, and yet you want to see it as real, as deeper than the manifest stage set would allow. Despite our desire for imaginative distance (the space of fantasy? the breeding ground of ideology?), we are insistently locked into a physical proximity that coerces us to acknowledge that what we want to assume is fake is, actually, real and what we wish were real is, sadly, a sham. And thus we are all the more forcefully aware that we are in the Prison House of the Image, I guess. Scattered around are bundles of old newspapers and boxes of rat poison (all fabricated meticulously by the artist and his assistants); there is another door across from the entrance into the installation space, which leads you to a dead-end in the actual gallery and where you see the backside of the painted walls and more stacks of papers and poison, softly spotlit here and there.

Maybe Gober’s work is just too fussy and involved for my taste given the rather basic things he seems to be ruminating – and his excesses lack the kind of gripping, unpredictable supplemental payoff that would make me want to stick around in the wake of his puritanical, almost schoolmasterish lessons about the seduction of illusion. But I’m willing to hear a compelling argument why I should change my mind. The closest thing to get me to think twice came at the reception, although it was given in the spirit of a damning judgment: one of the art historians doing damage to the wine bar replied to the query as to how he found the exhibition with, “Totally humorless. He’s such a moralist. He’s a moralist and a pederast at the same time.” Now that could be interesting.

first word

2007-05-12T09:42:00.000-07:00

We landed in Basel after an uneventful journey back from Ireland. On the way out to Cork it was quite a different story, as Ryan Air had changed our flight from London Stansted and we found ourselves with an unplanned four hour layover. This alone was not disastrous – we had no appointments waiting for us on the other end, no cause to rush. There are worse things that could befall a person than waiting at an airport with someone whose company you especially enjoy. Instead, I realized that the added security regarding liquids on flights in and out of London was still in full force, though there is nary a mention of the present regulations in the baggage restrictions listed on the Easy Jet and Ryan Air websites. (Apparently, one should now check the websites of the actual airports for such things.) I had finally found a bottle of the contact lens solution I use in the States in a pharmacy in Hannover – all other brands make my eyes frighteningly bloodshot for weeks after a single use – and the bottle was too large to pass security in my carry-on. I spent £8 on 100 mL bottles and we stood in the shop emptying the solution into each. Curiously, the problem is the size of the container, not the amount of liquid. This security measure was put in place after a plot to detonate a flight from London by mixing liquids in the lavatory nearly nine months ago was frustrated. Curiously, this was the same flight that S.’s sisters and father took after their visit with us in Switzerland last summer.

When we entered the Basel airport on our return yesterday, the first word to enter my thoughts was süchtig, the German word for “addicted.” But to my ears, the German word still connotes suchen [to look or search for, to seek], making it somewhat more appropriate as I tried to describe my compulsive urge to travel to myself.

from the bedside table

2007-04-25T12:57:00.000-07:00

In addition to the wonderful little monograph on Marcel Duchamp's 3 Standard Stoppages by Herbert Molderings, Kunst als Experiment (Berlin: Deutscher Kunstverlag, 2006), I am currently reading two books on my train rides.

Friedrich Glauser, Wachtmeister Studer (Zurich: Diogenes, 1989): Originally published in 1936, this is the first detective novel to chronicle a case of Commissioner Studer by the Swiss author. On page 107, it initiates a theme that is a flash of real brilliance, the sort that one imagines led Bertholt Brecht and Ernst Bloch to champion the genre:

Wo hatten die Leute ihre Stimmen gelassen? Waren sie vom Radio vergiftet worden? Hatten die Gerzensteiner Lautsprecher eine neue Epidemie verursacht? Stimmenwechsel?

[Where did the people leave their voices? Were they poisoned by the radio? Did the loudspeakers in the small town of Gerzensteiner create a new epidemic? Change of voice?]

Hugo Ball, Flight out of Time (Berkeley: UC Press, 1996. Trans. Ann Raimes): Although I turned to Ball's diary for my work, it is really more like a fellow traveler through a life often riddled by disorientation, despair at the state of all things cherished and now sullied, and a lack of discipline. Here are my favorite items from the year 1915:

"It does not matter if I stay here or not. There must still be people here who have time, who are not yet 'compulsive'; who are not made of paper and wind and who do not confuse business cycles with life and their interests with fate. The atmosphere is enough for me. I do not need any exchange, any direct contact." (18)

"It is better to forget and forget again; to let things drop and not make a fuss if one can forget. But who really has the strength for that? Who can be so filled with divine things that the assault can do him no harm? Who has closed and guarded his heart and imagination so tightly that no venom can get in and undermine them?" (33)

"I notice that I am falling into a slight madness that comes from my boundless desire to be different." (35)

"I do not expect anything good to happen here. I arrived here with a toothache. The rain was drumming on the roofs, and the room I was shown is as bleak as an operating room in a third-rate hospital. One always thinks it cannot get any worse. But life is inexhaustible in its levels and nuances of discomfort. So I will get myself candles, cotton, and alcohol." (40)

one-word poem

2007-04-24T03:44:00.000-07:00

A particularly musical German word learned today:

Tohuwabohu [total or utter chaos]

television

2007-04-24T02:59:00.000-07:00

Even though I go to the movies nearly every other night, this does not mean that I have sworn off television. I bought a tiny TV that sometimes has problems turning on completely for about 30 euro about a month into my arrival. I believe I am entitled to more channels than I have figured out how to program, but the six that I do get are more than enough for me. Unlike my television habits in the States, in Germany I exercise no discrimination whatsoever. The talk show is an especially prized genre here, with staples like Sabine Christiansen, Menschen bei Maischberger, and Beckmann ruling the airwaves (and the headlines, apparently: Anne Will, the sweetheart of nighttime news, is taking over for the reigning queen of talk, Christiansen, and it was all anyone could talk about in the newspapers for a while). I absolutely cannot stomach these programs in the U.S., but seeing a hoard of people arguing about things like "is consumerism a disease?" is very helpful for language development and cultural insight.

My favorite programs, however, are:

Rote Rosen: a soap opera about a sexy divorcee who starts her life over again after her bourgeois world comes crumbling down when her husband impregnates their daughter's viperous best friend - only to construct and even more saccharine bourgeois universe for herself. It takes place in Lueneburg, a hamlet a scant hour from Hamburg, and I enjoy the occasional pans over twee red brick buildings.

Menschen Hautnah: a fantastic series of documentaries that take a close look at people in particularly vulnerable situations. I've seen one devoted to a hospice that treats children with terminal cancers and palsy, interviewing the families, caretakers, and children. Another focused on middle-aged men who continue to live with their mothers. A third was a portrait of a day in the life of a dominatrix in Cologne. It's difficult to describe, but the program is never exploitative or out to stage a freak show. What I find most original are the subtle and modest ways it confounds our impulse to set up taboos only to congratulate ourselves on transgressing them.

Tatort: a detective series that has been on the air for decades, a real German cult favorite that alternates among the challenges facing the various Kommissare in different cities all over the country. Who am I to resist? (Here is the actor Klaus J. Behrendt who plays Cologne's Hauptkommissar Max Ballauf. I find him particularly dreamy.)

Grey's Anatomy dubbed in German, called Die Junge Ärzte [The young doctors]

I am also devoted to the channel 3Sat, which is a broadcasting consortium for German, Austrian, and Swiss programming. Sometimes I catch the evening news for Switzerland, and whenever anyone in a report speaks in Swiss German, there are always subtitles in Hochdeutsch, which I particularly appreciate.

a one-two film festival

2007-04-23T07:21:00.000-07:00

Tonight I am going to see Full Metal Village, a new documentary directed by Sung-Hyung Cho about a small German farming village and the mega-metal music festival that descends upon it every year. If the previews are anything to go by, it will be hilarious and a perfect companion to one of my favorite German films, Schultze Gets the Blues (2003, M. Schorr). Treat yourself to a mini-film festival and see both when you get the chance.

unterwegs

2007-04-23T06:08:00.000-07:00

This is a collage by Kurt Schwitters from 1945 in the Kurt und Ernst Schwitters Stiftung at the Sprengel Museum Hannover. While the piece is untitled, it goes by the one bit of text to appear within its borders: TO SEA. Could there be any more perfect phrase in the English language? Such economy, and yet it says it all: about striking out into the unknown, about feeling adrift and lost, about yearning to be elsewhere and the hope contained in the sentiment. I was in Rotterdam this weekend to see the large Schwitters exhibition that traveled from the Sprengel to the Museum Boijmans van Beuningen, and I can definitively say it ranks among one of my favorite cities. Apparently, I am a junkie for harbor cities, and this one is a whopper. When I think about how exquisite Hamburg is, particularly now as every tree is in full bloom and canals kissed by weeping willows reflect nothing but blue skies, I seriously want to weep at the thought of tearing myself away. While I haven't become quite so attached to Rotterdam that my departure was cause for gloom, it surely wasn't easy to board a train when we were just starting to get to know one another.

I took a boat ride through the port, Europe's largest and probably the busiest in the world, save for Shanghai. The floating cities that, say, bring oranges from Brazil to rainy northern Europe have unhindered access to the sea straight into the loading zones - no locks, no way stations, nothing to obstruct these buoyant messengers of commerce. Miles upon miles of islands populated by nothing but garish-colored container bins, neatly stacked and switched in and out by computers and robots and the occasional human being made for an eerie sight on my left. And on my right, the most brazen and playful architecture I have seen in a long while. Perhaps I have seen buildings as inventive more recently, but if they aren't integrated in a way sensitive to street-level use, city rambles, and the overall skyline, chances are they left me with feelings that ran the gamut from apathy to rage - if they made an impression at all. Not so Rotterdam. Here, a large number of architects, planners, engineers (and, I gather, politicians) have managed to say "to sea!" with all of what we have always thought a building should be without saying "fuck you!" to the people who have to live with it.

What a contrast to Berlin, which is where I was for the two days before my brief Holland sojourn. Berlin couldn't be farther from the sea, it feels. Upon my departure, I realized that the very thing I like most about the city is, paradoxically, why I can't bear to be there for any true length of time. What makes Berlin so special is its Hofkultur - a culture of courtyards. Duck into a doorway and you could find a warren of fantastic shops and cafes and theaters... and shade! You can lose yourself for hours in the Höfe and never step out onto the street. It's like being in someone else's backyard, except it also belongs to you. I always feel a rush of trespassing there, a thrill of discovering a best kept secret, and guaranteed, I will find respite.

For there to be Höfe, however, there have to be fortress-like exteriors - huge row buildings that make a city block interminable and remind me every time I'm there that it takes hours to get around the city without a bike. Outside the Höfe, Berlin is a wretched place to walk around: no trees, an endless litany of fast-food joints, traffic, dust and dog shit, and only the occasional soul to brush by (but the streets are so wide, there's hardly the chance of that happening). The city takes on correct proportions inside and in I run, seeking shelter and amazed at how frazzled I can become for no tangible reason - except that on the outside, I've never felt more like a woman overboard.

I finally went inside the big synagogue on Oranienburgerstrasse, which was surprisingly emotional. The restoration retained the impression of its ruination in an exceedingly poignant and subtle way. Did you know that it was basically a war ruin, with weeds growing inside where the (now reconstructed) cupola once stood, as late as 1988? Every time I think I've got my mind wrapped around Berlin, I find myself searching for the aspirin. I didn't have the stamina to go to the Holocaust memorial this time around (which, I read in the tabloids, is currently the favorite urinal of the drunken Berliner set). And I am kicking myself that I didn't bring my camera, as surely my conflicted attitudes toward the city might be better understood with pictorial accompaniment.

But I'll be back on Wednesday to see the Art & Propaganda exhibition at the Deutsches Historisches Museum with E. (This visit, she and I shared a couple of hours of enthusiastic mutual appreciation for both the Staatsbibliothek and the Palast der Republik - one might be tempted to call it an architectural love-fest.) And in the meantime, I've booked hostel rooms for two weekends on Sylt and Rügen respectively. I leave Hamburg at the end of May, and I have to see the Nordsee and the Baltic Coast before I head down south. TO SEA!

things people do

2007-04-15T10:54:00.000-07:00

For the three years I've known P., he's been working on this secretary that he saw in an American woodworking magazine. It is a style that originates in Pennsylvania. He finished it a little over a week ago and I went down to pay homage.

Now a thing exists that did not exist before. It took about 800 hours to make, so he tells me.

I try to recall those moments that started me on projects that have consumed years of my life. Typically, they have resulted from some clerical error, misunderstanding, or accident.

It helps to remember this especially as I try to make something myself, which inevitably prompts no small concern about doing it right or well. This is a false feeing of responsibility that is a by-product on working on something for a long time. And it is always accompanied by a necessary amnesia regarding the arbitrary beginnings of such a project. If I always kept in mind how subject I am to things that I do not intend, my projects may never get done. But if I completely forget this fact, they most certainly will never reach their conclusion.

116 films seen in the theaters the last 8 months

2007-04-15T01:51:00.000-07:00

A Dream or Two Ago, 1916 (J. Kirkwood)

A Letter to Heaven, 1992 (Junzheng Wang)

A Lively Affair, 1912? (unknown suffragette farce)

A Movie Trip through Filmland, 1921 (P. Felton)

A Pair of Tights, 1928 (H. Yates)

A Prairie Home Companion, 2006 (R. Altman)

Afgrunden, 1910 (with Asta Nielsen)

After the Wedding, 2006 (S. Bier)

An Inconvenient Truth, 2006 (D. Guggenheim)

Any Way the Wind Blows, 2003 (T. Barman)

Archangel, 1990 (G. Maddin)

Ask Father, 1919 (with Harold Lloyd)

Atlantis, 1913 (A. Blom)

Babel, 2006 (A. Gonzalez Inarritu)

Beatles, Beat und Grosse Freiheit – Der Sound von St. Pauli

Bitter Coffee [Silnỳ kafe], 2004 (B. Gunnarsson)

Blade af Satans Bog [Leaves from Satan’s Book], 1920 (C. Th. Dreyer)

Branding Broadway, 1918 (T. Ince)

Casino Royale, 2006 (M. Campbell)

Dam Street, 2004 (Li Yu)

Das Leben der Anderen [The Lives of Others], 2005 (F. Henckel von Donnersmarck)

Das Schiff ohne Hafen, 1932 (H. Piel)

Das Totenschiff, 1959 (G. Tressler)

Dave Chapelle's Block Party, 2006 (M. Gondry)

Die Biene Maja und ihre Abenteuer, 1926 (W. Junghans)

Die Filmprimadonna, 1913 (with Asta Nielsen)

Die Herbstzeitlosen, 2006 (B. Oeberli)

Die Pamir, 1959 (H. Klemme)

Dr. Crippen an Bord, 1942 (E. Engels)

Einer zuviel an Bord, 1935 (G. Lamprecht)

Eins in die Presse – Der Mann mit der Unterwasserkamera

El Húsar de la Muerte, 1925 (P. Sienna)

Emma’s Glück, 2006 (S. Taddicken)

Ernst Lubitsch in Berlin, 2006 (R. Fischer)

Fleur de Paris, 1916 (A. Hugon)

From Subway with Love, 2005 (F. Renc)

Gesten der Versöhnung (series of recent shorts on the themes of reconciliation)

Grandma's Boy, 1922 (F. Newmeyer)

Grosse Freiheit Nr. 7, 1943/44 (H. Kaeutner)

Hail the Woman, 1921 (T. Ince)

Hamlet, 1920/21 (with Asta Nielsen)

Hans Warns – Mein 20. Jahrhundert, 1999 (G. Maugg)

Himmelskibet [A Trip to Mars], 1918 (H. Madsen)

Ich bin die Andere, 2006 (M. von Trotta)

In Nacht und Eis, 1912 (M. Misu)

Junebug, 2005 (P. Morrison)

Klovnen [The Golden Clown], 1926 (A. Sandberg)

Krigsbilleder [War Pictures], 1914 (Nordisk Films)

Laitakaupungin valot [Lichter der Vorstadt], 2006 (A. Kaurismäki)

L'Arpéte, 1928/29 (E.B. Donatien)

Little Miss Sunshine, 2006 (J. Dayton, V. Faris)

Live!, 1994 (Zhang Yimou)

Mare Nostrumm 1925/26 (R. Ingram)

Me and You and Everyone We Know, 2005 (M. July)

Mockery, 1927 (B. Christensen; with Lon Chaney)

Monte Carlo, 1930 (E. Lubitsch)

Music & Lyrics, 2007 (M. Lawrence)

My Dad is 100 Years Old, 2005 (G. Maddin)

Napule... e niente chiù, 1927/28 (E. Perego)

Nasanu naka [No Blood Relations], 1932 (M. Naruse)

Notes on a Scandal, 2006 (R. Eyre)

Odilon Redon or The Eye Like a Strange Balloon Mounts Towards Infinity, 1995 (G. Maddin)

Okasan [Mother], 1952 (M. Naruse)

Platform, 2000 (Jia Zhang-Ke)

Praesten i Vejlby [The Hand of Fate], 1922 (A. Blom)

Prix de Beauté [Miss Europe], 1930 (A. Genina; with Louise Brooks)

Saftey Last!, 1923 (F. Newmeyer)

Scoop, 2006 (W. Allen)

Sehnsucht [Longing], 2006 (V. Grisebach)

Series of Disney “Silly Symphonies,” 1931-39

Series of Houdini on film, 1909-23

Series of various short Danish white slavery adventure films, 1907-17 (A. Blom, etc.)

Series of various short magic tricks, 1899-1907

Series of Vitaphone Varieties, 1927-30

Shanghai Dreams, 2004 (Wang Xiaoshuai)

Shanghai Serenade, 1995 (Zhang Yimou)

Sommer vorm Balkon [Summer in Berlin], 2005 (A. Dresen)

Spring Festival, 1991 (Jianzhong Huang)

Stand Up, Don't Be Afraid, 1992 (Jianxin Huang)

Stranger than Fiction, 2006 (M. Forster)

Tales from the Gimli-Hospital, 1988 (G. Maddin)

Thank You for Smoking, 2005 (J. Reitman)

That Uncertain Feeling, 1941 (E. Lubitsch)

The Affairs of Anatol, 1921 (C.B. DeMille)

The Big Parade, 1925 (K. Vidor)

The Break-Up, 2006 (P. Reed)

The Cemetery Club [Moadon beit hakvarot], 2006 (T. Shemesh)

The Dead Father, 1985 (G. Maddin)

The Departed, 2006 (M. Scorsese)

The Devil Wears Prada, 2006 (D. Frankel)

The Dream, 1911 (T. Ince)

The First on the Moon, 2005 (A. Fedorchenko)

The Girl Who Stayed at Home, 1919 (G.W. Griffith)

The Good Shepherd, 2006 (R. De Niro)

The Holiday, 2006 (N. Meyers)

The Innocence of Lizette, 1916 (J. Kirkwood)

The Lieutenant’s Last Fight, 1912 (T. Ince)

The Lighthouse Keeper, 1911 (T. Ince)

The Nickel-Hopper, 1926 (R. Jones)

The Perfume, 2006 (T. Twyker)

The Queen, 2006 (S. Frears)

The Saddest Music in the World, 2003 (G. Maddin)

The Science of Sleep, 2005 (M. Gondry)

The Wind that Shakes the Barley, 2006 (K. Loach)

True Heart Susie, 1919 (G.W. Griffith)

Turnpike, 1996 (T. Barman)

Twilight of the Ice Nymphs, 1997 (G. Maddin)

Unexpected Passion, 1991 (Gang Xia)

Unknown Pleasures, 2002 (Jia Zhang-Ke)

Verdens Undergang [The End of the World], 1916 (A. Blom)

Vitus, 2006 (F. Murer)

Warum lügt Fräulein Käthe?, 1934/35 (G. Jacoby)

Windjammer und Janmaate (Die Letzten Segelschiffe), 1930 (H. Hauser)

Workbook, 2006 (G. Maddin)

You Never Know Women, 1926 (W. Wellman)

Zapatas Bande, 1913 (with Asta Nielsen)

musical interlude

2007-04-12T08:42:00.000-07:00

A few weeks ago C. invited me to übel & gefährlich [wicked & dangerous], a club in St. Pauli. The club is located in the Hochbunker, a late Nazi construction that nevertheless reminds me of the Goetheanum in Dornach, just outside Basel and seat of Rudolf Steiner's Anthroposophical Society.

We went to see two of her friends open for Thomas Belhom. Unfortunately, I cannot remember their names. Nor can I recall the name of the bassist for Calexico, who played with Belhom, which is a shame, as it was once one my favorite bands.

I did not know a thing about Belhom before going to the show. He is French and is a one-man-band in the finest sense: the only thing he plays besides a drum set and a bevy of percussion do-hickeys is a small keyboard. And he sings too. In English, but as if he learned the words phonetically and doesn't know what they mean. He looks like a cross between Mr. Bean and Dick van Dyke from Mary Poppins (minus the straw hat).

They were selling a CD of his that I was very tempted to purchase - and still might - featuring performances by the said Calexico bassist as well as the frontman for Lambchop. The last time I saw Lambchop was in Hoboken almost 6 years ago when he opened for Yo La Tengo's Hannukah concert series a few months after September 11, 2001 (seven nights, proceeds to seven charities).

double meaning

2007-04-12T08:18:00.000-07:00

The German word Schimmel can mean two things:

1. mold, mildew
2. a white charger (the kind of horse a fairy tale prince would ride)

Both are masculine.

next year in jerusalem

2007-04-04T12:05:00.000-07:00

Upon my arrival in Cologne, I was able to locate:

My hostel (a grimy fleabag and I think the man at the desk was on X when I arrived)

A cash machine (not my bank)

My lunch (camembert, tomato, lettuce on ciabatta facing the entrance to the Dom)

The only expressionist building in the city (looked a bit lonely)

The Walter König remainders bookstore (someone’s written a biography about Raoul Hausmann and Hannah Höch’s relationship on sale for 8 euro, oy!)

The cable car (turns out I’m much more terrified of heights than I remembered)

Ear plugs (which, incidentally, in German are Ohrestöpsel or, colloquially, Ohropax, after an apparently popular brand. As I didn’t know the word, I simply said to one of the assistants at the Drogerie: Mein Mann ist ein Schnarcher [My husband is a snorer] and pointed vigorously to my ears.)

An ice cream cone

Three movie theaters that were not multiplexes (Metropolis, Filmpalette, FilmHaus Kino)

The night before I left for Cologne, I contemplated seeing The Cemetery Club at the 3001 Kino in Hamburg's Sternschanze. The film is an Israeli documentary featuring two women in a
discussion group that consists of aging Holocaust survivors who meet every Shabbat on Mount Herzl (not to be confused with the 1993 Ellen Burstyn comedy of the same name). But seeing as I had to get up early the next morning to catch the train, I decided against going. As I was wandering about Cologne the evening of my arrival, I stumbled upon a theater that was screening it for two nights (Filmpalette) but the show had just started five minutes before I made my discovery. I do not like to miss the openings of films, so I made a mental note to go back to see it the next day and saw Drew Barrymore and Hugh Grant yuk it up in Music & Lyrics at the Metropolis instead.

On my second day, I found:

The medieval Jewish mikvah, or ritual bath, or Mikwe, as the Germans say (which I can’t help reading as Witwe, or widow. You actually procure a key at the Rathaus [city hall] and let yourself into a gated archaeological excavation.)

The storage depot for Galerie Michael Werner where I had an appointment to see some art

Galerie Michael Werner itself (to see their Per Kirkeby show)

Dinner (a concoction called "Koelschen Pizza" at a great cafe called Filmdose: melted cheese over Reibekuchenteig [grated potato dough] with tomatoes, ham, or mushrooms. It is like a potato latke, but even greasier because of the cheese. "Filmdose" doubles as a theater space but not as a screening room, oddly).

Filmpalette for the 6:15pm screening of The Cemetery Club (this theater was fantastic: generous velvet seats, fabric-lined walls, and so small that the projectionist enters the booth by going out onto the street and entering the neighboring door)

The Cemetery Club is hilarious if you have a Jewish grandmother.

nothing for passover

2007-03-31T10:39:00.000-07:00

The Bas Jan Ader exhibition is opening tonight at the Kunsthalle Basel, so my Easter plans have just gotten a little more complicated. There will be ongoing screenings of the silent I'm too sad to tell you (1971) and two short films I have yet to see, Fall I and Fall II (1970), in which Ader falls off the roof of his house in California and off his bicycle into a canal in Amsterdam. I wonder how this will jibe with Yves Klein's Leap into the Void. That photograph has always seen a little cheap to me, and Ader, while no less ecstatic, seems too much the hysteric. Sort of like Joan of Arc to Klein's Elmer Gantry.

The exhibition will also have all the material related to Ader's final In Search of the Miraculous (1975), his solo trans-Atlantic voyage in a tiny sailboat. He wanted to cross the ocean alone in in the smallest boat on record to make such a journey and was lost at sea. I have to look into it some more, but this conceit may be a deal-breaker.

This work, On the road to a new Neo Plasticism, Westkapelle Holland IV (1971), is on loan from the Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen in Rotterdam. A visit there is also in the works as it has taken on the Merzgebiete. Kurt Schwitters und seine Freunde exhibition with many more objects than the Sprengel Museum in Hannover was able to show. That installation was prodigious enough, but I will snatch at any excuse to go to Rotterdam again. Across the street from the Boijmans stands the Sonnenveld House, a completely restored Nieuwe Bouwen gem maintained by the rambunctious Netherlands Architecture Institute (NAi) next door. Nearly three years ago, I visited the house during its public hours and had it completely to myself. I could tell interiors were an incredible luxury (Bart van der Leck carpets!) yet everything was very modest, almost miniature. It was as if the objects were deferring to the wealth of light and sheer fancy of the color (bronze walls!).

In this picture, I especially like the afterthought of the desk by the window. From what I've encountered since, the De Menil house in Houston comes the closest to matching the color sensibility of these rooms, but the Philip Johnson building is more bunker-like. With the loss of light, the objects inside become more meaty. This difference has also has something to do with the willful reinstallation of the De Menil abode as it stood when I was last there (Brancusi's The Newborn as a doorstop!).

narcissus

2007-03-30T12:55:00.000-07:00

My desk faces a window that faces west. The sunlight is especially strong starting around 3pm and lately, with the seasonal change and Hamburg being rather north, I am treated to radiant sunsets on those days when I am home and lucky enough to catch them. I would rather work with my sunglasses on than draw the curtain or move all my furniture around. I do get distracted by my reflection in my computer screen, as the strength of the natural light during the afternoon working hours puts the lumens of the laptop to shame.

I can't say I've been especially impressed with spring since I moved from Los Angeles almost twelve years ago. But this has changed here in Hamburg. In L.A., spring is mostly an olfactory delight: you notice the eucalyptus more and can smell the wet screen doors in the morning. In Hamburg, spring is entirely a visual spectacle, and not because of blooming flowers or leaf buds; rather, the sunlight is unreal, no matter what time of day. It's a bit like walking around in a television douche ad from the late 1970s. Everything is hazy and rosy and looks warm even if its still a bit fresh out.

Last night was the first night I could sleep with the window open since September. That night is always my favorite one of the year.

Yesterday I also went to get my teeth cleaned for the first time in a year and a half. My insurance here is apparently excellent, though I remain bewildered by it and keep expecting a bill any day now. The hygenist was very serious and asked me questions about what kind of toothbrush I used, electric or manual (electric), in what order I brush my teeth (from left to right, front then back, upper then lower), how often I floss (4 times a week, I lied), and she showed me a better technique for flossing the molars way in the back. Then she looked me earnestly in the eyes and, very sincerely, said:

Aber eigentlich haben Sie wunderschöne Zähne.
[But you really have wonderfully beautiful teeth].

does not bode well

2007-03-29T11:01:00.000-07:00

This is the Zivilamt in Basel, where T. and I are getting married.

This is the Schloss Bottmingen, where we are going to eat afterwards.

When I sent my mother these pictures, she wrote:
"I love it! It looks like The Shining."

Fassbinder's endings

2007-03-29T10:11:00.000-07:00

The first Fassbinder film I ever saw was Fox and his Friends. I had occasion to think of the ending of this film on the U-Bahn today as I was coming to terms with what it would mean to return to Boston in February after nearly two years' respite.

I am planning my first trip to Munich in August. Sometimes I find it helpful to pause and try to picture a city I have never been to before. For Munich, this would be the ending of Fassbinder's The American Soldier. I believe this film was shot there.

I just now realized that both films end with a dead man in a subway terminal.

too much dough

2007-03-29T09:43:00.000-07:00

I was in the mood to bake a challah this afternoon around 4pm. Now I have a vat of tasty bread dough sitting on my desk. If I don't go to the movies soon, it will never get the chance to rise. I keep poking at it, picking away little tastes off the vaguely organ-like doughball. I especially love the smell of yeast coming from the bowl. I like my bread beery.

This reminds me of a scene from Das Kaninchen bin ich [I am the bunny rabbit], in which the protagonist receives the news that her brother is under arrest as she's kneading bread dough. Every time I see this film, I get distracted trying to guess what kind of bread she is making. I think I can tell from the consistency of the dough and to what extent it sticks to her hands.