Defenders of the Literal, Unite!

The problem with words is their unceasing and often misleading connotations. How many perfectly good words are ruined this way.

Falling on my own deaf ears

"Our truest responsibility to the irrationality of the world is to paint or sing or write, for only in such response do we find the truth." ~ Madeleine L'Engle

Last weekend here: a modified email

I went to a concert at the Philharmonie with C last night, part of MusikFest Berlin - he had an extra ticket. The Concertgebouw Orchestra from Amsterdam played a program of Wagner and Debussy, some of my favorite music. Chromatic, hesitant, full of interesting orchestral colors and instrumentation. We also went to an exhibition at the Haus der Kulturen der Welt beforehand. Last night was also the "open door night" at the Staatsoper on Unter den Linden; the opera house was open to the public past midnight to watch rehearsals and small concerts of the Oper singers and instrumentalists, held at different venues and areas of the opera house and surrounding buildings. Amazing, such a great idea. We stopped by after the Philharmonie, since it's on the way (on bikes). We saw part of a rehearsal on the main stage (the most gorgeous hall, quite small but tiered with 5 balconies, straight up) of a big opera, some singers in the downstairs bar (a large hall, really a work of art), some clarinetists, and then 4 cellists playing their own arrangement of pop songs in the huge, warehouse-like storage magazine - that especially was great. Lots of people were there to hear all the music.

A good way to enjoy Berlin before I leave for the fall.

I had the typical Sunday Berlin brunch this morning with A at a decadent Russian restaurant. The weather was lovely, perfect brunch weather, and everyone sat outside; the food was even lovelier, and A and I stuffed ourselves for nearly 3 hours. A is British; she works here in translation but, ready to get out, is looking for new programs and other countries to live in. But it's hard because she's been here 10 years. C and D had a booth at the big flea market at Mauerpark today - I guess it's a yearly thing for them, getting rid of stuff they don't want anymore - so I went over and watched weird Berlin people looking through all sorts of junk and not-junk (a lot of East German communist memorabilia) and goofed around and had a nice afternoon. I don't know D as well, but she's nice; her English is ok but not great, heavy accent, and she speaks so fast that sometimes I only catch half of what she says.

I don't miss many people in general, which is kind of mean, I guess; I don't do it purposely. But I will miss C and A. And I miss R. Three of the best people I've ever met. Absolute gems.

Two Paragraphs

When I think of New York, I’m back at Lincoln Center surrounded by screeching yellow cabs hurdling around street corners and honking at pedestrians, dazed silhouettes against the gray slabs of sheetrock and metal, portrait-stills in the swirling vortex of necrotic fumes, gas, hotdogs, and roasted peanuts wafting across Broadway, almost poetic in this shaken snow-globe of cement. I can nearly glimpse the exploding chandeliers in the Metropolitan Opera beyond the square office buildings, promising something golden and spectacular to the ones lucky enough to escape the pelting rain or oppressive heat--opera or ballet, depending on the season, cool and velvet crimson, submerged in swells of sound, a place to go and dream. And dream I did.

Why my mind conjures up the colliding streets at 66th and Broadway is unclear. I didn’t live or study there, save for one summer of Fordham University classes, nor did I attend as many concerts as a New York musician should. Tourists imagine Times Square with its massive commercial impact, a slap in the face of one’s sensibilities, shoppers fantasize about 5th Avenue’s sleek glass windows and smooth facades, hipsters mourn the high rents of the Village and lost days of soul-brother boozing in the Bowery, but I think of Lincoln Center for no particular reason, maybe just to slight my nameless uptown college and my closet apartment as if they had feelings and could be offended by my trying not to remember them. Few things in Manhattan have feelings; the skyscrapers and turbulent crowds of passersby effectively smother any inner life, a little love-fern starved to death in the desert, strangled by a thorny briar which takes root in the soul and emits, from time to time, a high-pitched scream of rage.

Different State of Mind

My new scheme is to visit countries that don't exist.

Life is hard.

Yep, that just about sums it up.

I've read a few books lately, though, which shall be mentioned now:

Herzog - Saul Bellow
an academic work of great philosophic proportions (ok, sort of) - my friend - Cornell University Press, to be published 2008
Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows
Never Let Me Go - Kazuo Ishiguro (incredible novel)

One must find an escape somewhere. Frankly, though, it doesn't work very well.

Quoting a world traveler

I just read this on somebody else's blog. He gets it and says it exactly right.

"I'm sick of saying goodbye. It's beginning to jade me. You have the best times with the most fascinating world travelers and then you must always say goodbye. goodbye. goodbye. goodbye. I need more hellos, which end in tomorrows."

A Different Kind of Morning Sickness

What am I going to do with my life?

A Rainy 4th

The wintry weather in Berlin did not make 4th of July very festive for any Americans seeking sunny summer fun. I got rather drenched in a few downpours and ate dinner at a Spanish tapas restaurant. Star-Spangled Banner indeed!

In sad news: 3 of my (um, like 8?) friends in Berlin moved away this week, two to London, one to Chile. :(

A Good Reminder (Listen up, boys!)

This comment today on the PostSecret website from a 33-year-old father:

"True good guys are good guys for a reason: they walk the walk and are kind and considerate. They might be dicks once in a while (I still am), but at the end of the day, they call, they listen, they love."

Brandi Carlile lyrics - now go listen to the eponymous album! (2005)

Hold out, I know you feel it getting cold out
Without the blanket for your soul now
Before you know it you'll be frozen
You have to see this through
There's no one here but you

Don't go to sleep and cry because tomorrow
If you let it, it will swallow
You up and none of this will matter
Will matter anymore
---

Tracks 2, 4, and 6 are my favorite, but I also like 1 and 3 a lot.

Assaying Religion, People, Metal

A very brave woman on Al-Jazeera, "discussing" Islam. Watch this before the link is disabled.

http://switch3.castup.net/cunet/gm.asp?ai=214&ar=1050wmv&ak=null

---

From Die Tageszeitung 28.06.2007, as posted on signandsight.com:

Filmmaker Werner Herzog, to whom the Munich Film Festival is currently dedicating a retrospective, talks in an interview about the quality he looks for an actor: "It's really only when someone is under extreme pressure, because for example they have to fight for their life, that you recognise what they're made of. It's similar with materials that physicists analyse. You have to expose a metal alloy to extreme pressure and extreme heat to find out about its composition. The same's true of people who're put to the test. Just like an ore that's assayed and refined in the forge."

---

Quote of the day:

Sarah: I'll be an old maid before you.
Me: How is that possible? I'm 6 months older.

Dear...

I hope you enjoy the:

1. sunshine while it lasts
2. bike riding
3. brown-bagged lunch
4. library browsing
5. frantic reading

because life could be a whole lot worse, and someday you might look back and think "Those FU Berlin days weren't really so bad - kind of relaxing, idyllic" in the split second before your pregnant 15-year-old daughter starts screaming about the empty refrigerator, your 7-year-old boy throws the remote control at the TV, missing and smashing a hole through the living room window, and your second ex-wife's new boyfriend, who is over to collect the 3-year-old, crashes, in his drunken stupor, into the glass case containing your mother's precious porcelain dishes handed down four generations, and just as the shelves start tipping, a cascade of painted white bone china like a mountain avalanche, your 3-year-old, momentarily dropped by the startled ex-wife's boyfriend, projectile vomits all over the newly polished hardwood floors, and as this cacophony is turning you into a Moses Herzog figure, a cocktail of paralyzing self-pity and enraged insanity, you glance out the window to see your ex-wife impatiently glaring at you from the passenger seat of the shiny blue Mustang parked in your shabby driveway, and you jolt into action, run to the door, and shout, "How dare you let this RAVING DRUNK MADMAN drive with little Bobby in the back seat!"


This is why all of you, dear readers, would be lucky to maintain email communication with me: I'm known to send wishes, possible predictions, and very long sentences at 10 in the morning, to unsuspecting homo sapiens.

Moments That Expose My Apathy and Laziness

This man utterly puts me and my aspirations to shame. Some people are unbelievable.

3quarksdaily.blogs.com/3quarksdaily/2007/06/getting-better-.html
www.gawande.com/bio.htm

Writes a friend in response: "Yes, you should be utterly ashamed of your pathetic, inactive, lethargic, useless, careless, spiritless existence."

I know, I know.

One of the Worst

Today was a really bad day.

A really really bad day.

I want to go home. Where is home?

The Piano Problem

There's only one solution: record record record. Otherwise, I'll sound bad forever.

Today's count:
--Prelude: 11
--Fugue: 6

Father's Day

TWO POEMS AND A REFLECTION**

I. "HE SPEAKS IN YOUR VOICE, AMERICAN"

I understand
my father
more
after reading DeLillo's account
of Bobby Thomson's 1951 homer
than I ever did
living in the same house
for 18 years

How could I have been
so blind?

II. "AND THERE'S A SHINE IN HIS EYE THAT'S HALFWAY HOPEFUL"

At my age,
23,
my father had already survived
the bug-infested
snake-swarmed
lonely
damp
dangerous
jungles
of Vietnam

What right have I
to give up?

--

**In the cool pallid summer dusk,
I saw my dad weep over his dad
and realized that someday
I'll be the one in the twilight,
weeping

(posted also on medusaskitchen.blogspot.com, June 16)

"He was thinking continually, but nothing clear resulted."

I don't know what to do. I can't concentrate on anything, not even my book when I was trying to read at a cafe this morning. I'm completely immobilized. What am I going to do?

"Readiness to answer all questions is the infallible sign of stupidity." - from Herzog

--

What they really think. From Dutch magazine Trouw, as posted on signandsight.com, European Feuilletons:

Trouw dedicates its culture section to "The power of the image." There's a excerpt from Al Gore's new book, "Assault on Reason" as well as a pointed critique of it by Henri Beunders, a history professor from Rotterdam. "An American book must naturally have an alarming beginning and an optimistic end, otherwise it won't sell. His understanding of 'the old media' is just as narrow as his grasp of the Internet is naive. He writes, 'Web democracy is arming itself. You can feel it. We, the people, are still the key to the survival of democracy in America.' What naivety! As if 'the people' always want what's best. In 1914, 1982 (the Falklands War) and 1991 (the Gulf War) 'the people' marched joyfully into war. In the thirties the Germans begged Hitler: 'Free us from freedom.'"

Poetic Reponses to "Riding Bitch"

(click to read)

Riding Bitch

Last night I dreamt
of slick black streets
reflecting the glittering fluorescents
of New York,
a flaming tar mirror
over which we motorcycle-burned,
pillion style,
my body melting into yours


(medusaskitchen.blogspot.com, June 9, with photograph)