Old/Nutcase vs. Young/Knowledgeable

It's three weeks until the US elections. According to my sources, there were 204 people reading this blog from the US in the last three weeks - the largest number of readers I have in any country. Now, if another 204 people become little rickety rockets over the next three weeks, enlightening discussions with merry laughter and awkward smiles, the future should look bright!
This is therefore just for you US Americans - straight from my heart to yours, understandable for any hockey-mum, everyday-joe, countryclub-hipster, wrestling-couchster or fastfood-conservative:

Please, don't vote for McCain/Palin and do vote for Obama/Biden next month. You will have to make up your mind between old/nutcase and young/knowledgeable. I know that can be hard, but do try and do vote. It will feel very liberating and hence truely American, I promise. It would make a difference to us, i.e. the world, if you did that --- for us, God and America. It would be as grand of you as what you did in Vietnam or Iraq, only much, much nicer.

You're maybe still unsure, but let me tell you this: If you're scared of someone because somebody else is talking about him or her in a kind of scary way, you are actually scared of the one doing the scary talk. Most of the time.

Just watch this video...

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Berlin and Back in a Day

Sitting on a high speed train
I stretch my brain
Each ripple I watch unfold
Memories untold and flimsy hope
Crumbled dreams and dust of gold
Falling like postcards across my mind –
Germany rushing by

My Friend Autumn and I

I told you about Autumn being my friend this year. Another friend of mine - from the tropics - asked me to post some pictures of Autumn, as she has never seen what he looks like. OK, so here are some pictures of us inside our local park…

This is my friend Autumn. He really likes leaves, but thinks that green is boring. That’s why he changes their colours into various shades of yellow, red and brown. I often challenge him to do blue or pink, but that’s just a no-no: He usually says he’s an artist and that there are certain colours that just don’t go down well with his general appearance, political mission and interior personal landscape. It’s a long standing discussion between us…

This one he really liked – the technique is apparently called juxtaposition: “Wait until I bring in the wind and all the leaves mix --- everyone’s equal in a leaf-pile…”, he nods significantly while I quietly mumble a ‘smartass’ in his general direction, wishing that I could do something like that...

This guy lives in the park and just overheard my friend’s artistic comment. He said he had thought about this and other fundamental questions of life and death for a long time now and has eventually come to think that if Autumn really thinks so, he must really and actually exist; probably as an entirely separate substance from any body and therefore wholly distinct from the nature of anything physical, i.e. as an incorporeal, indivisible, non-spatial, unextended thing, which is entirely distinct from any object and would therefore not fail to be what it is even if every object in the world would cease to exist…
“Who’s existing now?” Autumn laughed, blasting two dozen leaves off some random, innocent tree - just because he can…

This is Schneeeule (pronounced "Shnoile") and she knows Autumn for quite some time now. She thinks he is generally ok, but she actually prefers the real thing --- Winter. “Not good,” I thought, because for sure this Winter is now out to kill my good friend sooner or later...

“I never really wanted to be a migratory bird. I just didn’t read the small print when I applied for a job as an entertainer in Europe and even though I don’t even care about Autumn or any of that seasonal nonsense, I could imitate it if you gave me a 10er. I’m saving up and working 24/7, hoping to someday wriggle out of my contract in order to fly back to my tropical home...” Those are the working conditions for professionally trained parrots inside our local city park. Truly shocking, but Autumn couldn’t have cared less…

This is me in front of the arboretum. Autumn just made some bad and politically incorrect joke about all those trees waiting to get their leaves stripped - just to take a stupid picture of me…

But usually he is good to be around with, especially now, while he’s still joyful and full of colours…

André Heller

I went out to buy a jumper for winter yesterday and came back with five forgotten LP records instead. It was a good tradeoff. I do have a soft spot for 60s-70s poetic songs (as in "chanson" or "Lied") with good lyrics. I consider this the crucial part of the first generation of pop song writing. Sung poetry can be such a drug, amplifying a thousand times what may be lost between bookends.

In the anglophone world there were Bob Dylan, Janis Joplin, Paul Simon, Leonard Cohen, etc. In the francophone world there were Francoise Hardy, Jacques Brel, Renaud, Jane Birkin, etc. For a long time, however, and for very good reasons I kept a safe distance to German-singing songwriters, because German folk music generally sucks. A lot.

But yesterday I discovered a few gems which I think deserve to be mentioned alongside a Paul Simon, Janis Joplin or Jacques Brel and over the next couple of weeks I shall explore and share more of it. So today enters André Heller, a true poet and versatile artist involved in music, poetry, theatre, football, performance, and and and...

Die Hundertjährige ("The 100 year old woman")
...a song about a 100 year old woman and beauty in dignity.

Jetzt wo alles besprochen ist ("Now that everything has been talked about")
...actually the truest song I know in the category "what to say to a former lover".

Denn ich will ("Since I want")
...a beautiful song about freedom in love.

Sei Poet ("Be a Poet")
...my absolute favorite. You may want to learn German for this.

Song to Whoever

For us to be in love, each day I must –

Nourish every passion in this German soul
Feed Love with other hearts and minds
Rekindle Anger with pins in my voodoo doll
Steal moments and play them to Wit on my shoulder
Carefully wrap it all in language and balance
Life dancing across the gorge of everytime
Chase my shadows and ghosts until they love life
Intrude and rage inside the sanctuary of relativism, then
Unplug my heart and shed its blood in thick drops of tears, to
Work for what will be beyond you and me
My mother-tongue I must break to make room for the kaleidoscope of exile

I must only live –
Fly with the owls, hunt with the cats, eat with the eagles and sleep amongst crocodiles
Jump from the stage of my life into the abyss
Knowing that the full embrace of your love will catch me

You must not change anything
For if you really are what glimpse I caught -
Just make me a part of your whole life

Thanks James for the "love or die" graffiti...

War in Mindanao

I recently discovered a very good documentary by Al Jazeera about the current crisis in Mindanao on Youtube. I think it gives a very good picture of some of the current threats to peace: It includes a situationer, as well as interviews with civilians, NGOs, Al Haj Murad Ebrahim of the MILF and Gen. Esperon of the Office of the Presidential Adviser on the Peace Process. It is 22 Minutes long and you can find it

Here (Part 1)

and here (Part 2)


Nothanks, Philippine Daily Inquirer, for the strange cartoon above you published in early August...