There is a song by Frank Black that I like, even though the lyrics don't really make that much sense. Maybe it was just the phrase "places named after numbers, different kind of love", which caught my attention. It puzzled me, but somehow sounded true...
This morning I woke up to a burning candy shop on the radio. It is also the day when I'll be heading into a four day luscious holiday with a very special woman. And so I say:
Gut, ok. Ihr seid keine Massenkonsumenten, sondern besondere Menschen. Ja, und genau darum geht's hier. Denn nun gibt's eine tolle Gelegenheit für Online-Einkäufer nebenbei Gutes zu tun. Und ganz nebenbei auch noch unsere unterfinanzierte aber total wichtige, tolle, gute, sinnvolle Arbeit in einem innovativen gemeinnützigen Verein zu unterstützen. Indem Ihr Euch nämlich ganz einfach den tollen auf's philippinenbüro zugeschnittenen Toolbar von clicks4charity.de runterladet:
Yul is a modification of the old nordic word „Yula“, meaning „wheel“ and referring to the ever constant cycle of the seasons. „Yul“ is a pagan celebration of winter solstice. Solstitium in turn is Latin, meaning „resting of the sun“. During Yul, the longest night of the year, the promise of rebirth and the return of the light are celebrated and realised and many candles are lit. While it originally refers to the night of the 21st December, it has been postponed this year by two weeks, for purely personal reasons.
Manchmal wünsche ich mir, ich könnte mich in eine Katze verwandeln. Nach Hause kommen und mich schnurrend auf das Sofa legen, den Körper einrollen und den Kopf auf die gefalteten Pfoten legen. Das dicke Fell schützt gegen Welt und Winter, die Nonchalance der getigerten Seele düpiert die Sehnsucht. Die Sehnsucht nach Schneeballschlachten zum Beispiel und der dumpfen Stille im Neuschnee, nach glasklaren Nächten übersäht von Sternen und schneeflockigen Ingrid Bergmann Küssen und einem warmen Körper und Gegenstück zu diesem Loch im Herzen. Die Sehnsucht danach, nach Hause zu kommen, sich auf’s Sofa zu legen, den Körper einzurollen und nicht an Dinge zu denken, die es so garnicht gibt im Zeitalter des Klimawandels und der Desillusion. Der Klimawandel macht meine Winterwelt letztlich nass und grau und die Desillusion lacht sich ins Fäustchen und verdeutlicht, dass dies strenggenommen garnicht meine Welt ist: Denn irgendetwas, was vielleicht auch irgendwann einmal aus Liebe geschehen ist kommt vermutlich genausogut aus anderen Gründen zustande.
Here is a balad that was recently played to us by a good friend in a session with other good friends. Each of us brought a few songs that meant something to us. My friend brought "Samson" by Regina Spektor and think it is really special. It basically tells the biblical story of Samson and Delila from Delila's perspective - Samson wasn't tricked into cutting his hair, but chose so himself, out of love. I think her story is so credible and such a good alternative to the biblical story - after all Samson's uncontrolled anger was also the source of his invincibility, but how could he truely love with an anger like that? So she cut his hair out of love and she did rightly so. Yet their ensuing true love was only meant for a night: After all Samson, as a major political leader, could not afford to be in love, with enemies waiting for him to pounce upon the sign of weakness - and then they wrote history, blaming it all on Delila.
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!
Sitting on a high speed train
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… 
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…
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.
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 
Bush warning over bail-out delay
Myra startled as a stumbling Leonard crashed sleepingly through the dark living room, fumbling for the ringing phone and breaking glass in the process. She jumped at the corresponding noise but was soon calmed by his brief and calm conversation – “how exactly does it feel, human life,” she wondered. Myra yawned while stretching her back, preparing herself to ponder this thought on the comfortable sofa: How was it that life for Leonard seemed to be fleeting, like rain on a sunny day or sudden gusts of wind slowly stripping the trees in autumn? And yet, it was commandeering, imposing its twists and turns on everyday life in all their briefness or extraordinary drama. But why, she thought while straightening a spot of messy fur on her back, does he antagonise it and still embrace its wonders once they had become apparent to him anyway? She had suspected all along that he got some kind of satisfaction out of this struggle and premeditated that she would observe him, tomorrow, to resolve this mystery. Her dream turned into an eagle-winged tigress, hunting like an owl through the dark and starry night.
This is officially subjectively the first day of autumn at my place, and I decided today that autumn will be my friend. I shall play with it, make fun of it, fool around with it and remember it dearly once it's dead and gone.
Once again I spend a few days in central Mindanao. While a day in Pikit area, two days in Cotabato city and a brief stint to Midsayap gave me impressions, it was certainly not enough to immerse in a community and really deeply understand the impact of the current conflict. So I shall stick to a few impressions. In Cotabato I felt detached in a complex way, much the more since I spend a good chunk of time in the guesthouse in order not to be a liability on my companion’s short-notice trips to a hotspot area in Datu Piang.
I was touched by this lush and abundantly overgrowing garden around a small fishpond at my guesthouse – long ago somebody had created this little idyllic Eden there and had even placed clay figures into the scenery: In the middle of the pond stood a child wearing a T-shirt with “City Boy” written on and he was happily waiving its clay arms. To his left sat a large white swan, which in his glorious past must have even been able to spout water. I particularly liked four musicians joyfully playing from within an overgrowing bush and I could not help thinking of the Beatles. Above it all and in the back stood a large virgin Mary. I was really puzzled by this garden and I wondered what it said about its maker – other than that he/she was probably Christian – was this intended as an antidote to the city, like a treatment to the trauma of harsh everyday realities or was it merely an expression of somebody’s love to a city? The latter, somehow, seemed to me too naïve to be true. Maybe it shouldn't.
Just a few snippets from my beloved Pikit – there are still about 400 families evacuating within the municipality, waiting in makeshift huts for the calamities in their villages to settle or too scared to go back just yet. There are many more in other places in Maguindadao and Lanao, all in all currently around 34,000 families. Rumours of war are frequently cropping up and there is a lot of uncertainty. From Pikit, we drove some way into Liguasan marsh and I was torn between the beauty of the area and the hardship of its people. An Al Jazeera TV crew was interviewing an old man in his preliminary shelter along the side of the dirt road: How many times in his life he had had to evacuate, they asked him. He could not remember. Another man told me they had not received any food supplies since the beginning of Ramadan and he was starting to get worried. Yet another one burst out in a frustrated rant against conflict, poverty and the government when I greeted him. Later on we drove past a large crowd of pupils on their way home from school and our companion said “here comes the next generation of MILF mujahideens.” I was wondering what else I would have become if I had grown up in this beautiful, fought over place.
Yesterday it rained like I'd never seen before. A thick curtain of wet strings fell from the sky and within minutes drains turned into creeks and streets into rivers. The two seconds it took me to jump out of the taxi under the porch were enough to make me wet. Just how much water can fit into a cloud, I was wondering, and this one might have just been overambitious and was now coming down with a crash. I cannot imagine what Manila itself might have looked like - or the slums alongside the river Pasig.
For us up in Quezon City, however, it was mostly fun - the kids in the neighbourhood used the opportunity to swim on the street and I became a laughing stock when I tried to cross the street with my flip-flops on and they got carried away, me hurriedly hobbling after them. Also, I was happy that somebody had warned me to watch out for open manholes: Apparently they are one of the great dangers during rains like that.
There was always something I loved about America by Simon and Garfunkel. The music is gorgeous and the lyrics really get to me. It is basically about a bus journey through America with Paul’s former girlfriend Kathy. It’s so full of friendship, love, longing and the search for some place where all these were actually possible, where one could truly be at home. It is about personal language between lovers and friends as well as unbridgeable distance – the sweet pain of being in love and alone, because there are places within ourselves which remain inaccessible however much we share.
