Places Named After Numbers

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...
Far from being a maths genius, I did have a fascination with numbers as a child. I had an imaginary football club where each player was represented by a marble, with his own stats for stamina, skill and fitness. And yet later, I would employ that system to rate the girls in my class by character, looks and overall score. It was an attempt to hold on to a childhood dreamworld in the face of hard hitting puberty. As a child counting was my drive for many things - walking in the mountains ("let's reach 3000 meters altitude!!"), running the 50 meters as fast as possible, imagining the size of population of my imaginary planet (yes! I did have an imaginary planet! Ha!) and, of course - the stairs: When I was six or so, I had an obsession with counting steps on stairs during walks with my father. I remember reaching the number 10,000 after a week of counting and it made me increadibly proud. I loved counting. And felt like the count, until there was some maths wizz-kid in our primary school class who really was the count for all of us - he would always win at maths games against the whole rest of the class and later even participate in the German school maths olympics. But also him was just a puny shadow compared this man:
Yesterday, I came across a documentary about Daniel Tammet, a prodigious savant who was diagnosed with epilepsy as a child and Asperger's syndrome later. Recently, he learned German within a week - as he did with Icelandic a few years ago. He can remember the number
Pi up to the 25,000th digit and he can do the most difficult and intricate calculations in his head.
The special thing about him, however, is that he is able to communicate much of his inner life to the outside world, unlike other prodigious Asperger's. I'm deeply impressed by how he describes his inner life, his days are literally numbered. Calculations become imaginary landscapes and when he talks about it, it is quite poetic.
I have my own memory of what it is or was like to have a private imaginary world. But while my fascination with numbers, like that of many kids, was actually counting, Daniel Tammet seems to be doing something else - he reads them and wields the results like a poet would do with a phrase. In his world, language, numbers and emotion are intertwined. Numbers are actually living things, beautiful, intriguing or scary. For him numbers are an integral, necessary part of everything. Like in that Frank Black song -

Beyond below above
A gravity that slumbers
At the center of
Places named after numbers
A different kind of love

Thank you for the picture, Heidi Rettig.

Rock that Candy Shop!

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:

1. It will all come down before the fires of hell
2. You let me in your house with a hammer
3. Rock that candy shop, set it on fire

Here comes the song - "Candy Shop" by "Fatima Spar und die Freedom Fries", an austrian band...

Me Rikey Yur and Likey

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.

Rikey, however, is a racist misconception of Asian English accents used predominantly by white heterosexual young males as a humoristic element in popular language. It connotes “like”, i.e. implying bad grammar and pronunciation as in “likey”. Here is a very good example.

Now, if you don’t know what I’m on about, I don’t blame you. You may even think “is there a single person in this world who would understand that kind of mumbo jumbo?!”

I can guarantee you that there is. And she’s a maverick tingle massage.

Wintersehnsüchtelei

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.
In dieser Situation hilft eigentlich nur etwas Warmes im Bauch, ein gutes Buch, ein Anruf, Bier, Kaffee oder Spaziergang mit Freunden, mit Kindern spielen; Programmkino, Pfefferminztee oder einfach nur ein aufregender Wichs im gemütlichen Prädormitium --- Witze sind wärmstens zu empfehlen und Wärmeflaschen auch nicht schlecht. Gibt es Theater, Kunst, Disko oder ein Konzert zieht’s mit mp3s im Ohr wippenden Schrittes dorthin, wohin die nasskalte Dunkelheit die Menschen treibt. Dort verleiht man seinen Kopf, Geld und Witz und hofft - auf die Nonchalance der getigerten Seele, Schneeballschlachten und flockige Ingrid Bergmann Küsse, die Wangen apfelrot dank innerer Wärme und vielleicht duften fremde Haare nach Winterluft. Währenddessen verkriechen sich Klimawandel und Desillusion vor lauter Sehnsucht zwischen den heimischen Sofafalten.

Thank you Bev for the cat...
Thank you Beautiful South for those Ingrid Bergmann kisses and thank you F.C. Delius for "Ich leihe Dir meinen Kopf".

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.

Autumn's Velvet Underground

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.
Only then shall I tune in to Winter Song.
This year, autumn will be my Fairest of the seasons and I shall be Beginning to see the light, ha!
After all, Who loves the sun? - definitely, not just anyone...
Yes, Somewhere there's a Feather and I shall be there to catch it!

Thank you Diana for that picture.

Who is Kathy?

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.
I love it when songs become real. It happened to me before with the lyrics of Famous Blue Raincoat by Leonard Cohen – he describes the same story in his book The Favorite Game, so when I heard the song it really struck me – “yes”, I thought, “this must have really happened.”
I just accidentally found out that also Kathy’s Song is originally by Paul Simon. I had heard some cover version before, but now it makes so much more sense. Kathy just became real for me and the bus journey must have actually happened. Apparently Kathy is also referred to in Homeward Bound. Hence three of the best S&G songs are about the same girl! So what’s the real story here?
This is what the internet comes up with:
Kathleen Mary (Kathy) Chitty and Paul Simon met at the very first coffeehouse Paul played at when he arrived in England in 1964. She was three years younger than him. Kathy apparently rarely spoke and Paul referred to her as his “friendly haiku”.
They broke up in 1965, when The Sound of Silence became a big hit. Some say that Kathy wanted no part of the success and fame that awaited Paul. How painful the breakup was? I don't know, but in May 1991, when Paul was touring England, he received a letter from Kathy, much to his delight. Kathy was married with three children and living in a remote village in the Welsh mountains, working part-time at a technical college. Despite the great interest of the British tabloids, she did not talk to the press…

Hotel Paradis

Manila is large, loud, smelly and hot. There’s just so much life packed and crammed into this place, you feel like its fermenting, constantly brewing futures, fortunes and fate. Its population is young, hence active and constantly communicating, be it in terms of career, pastime or survival. There is so much life here, that it does not let itself be digitally managed as, say, in London, Frankfurt or Paris. Urban management here seems mostly manual – I watched a traffic police officer yesterday who was physically struggling with the waves and waves of cars, jeepneys, tricycles and people breaking into a crossing – despite working traffic lights. I recently spend a lot of time on public transport and I cannot stop looking at people. I try to imagine their lives, or at least something about them. What a snag that I don’t speak tagalog! On the other hand this allows me to listen to conversations and contextualise, like I’m dubbing brief sketches I make up of people.
If you take the MRT from Cubao to Manila, you can change train lines between Recto and D. Jose stations. These two stations are connected by a totally fenced in skyway through an urban slum area. It feels like a zoo, like a catwalk, like a prison and I had a strange feeling of segregation, like one gets by looking through fortified glass barriers at international airports – you can see the flights to Atlanta, Tokio or Sydney, but you cannot take them.
This was when I saw that sign – “Hotel Paradis – Sound proof wall!!”. Obviously one urban slum dweller had picked it up from somewhere and was now making a point to all those hurriedly passing upon business or pleasure through the skyway. Or at least so I'd like to think. Maybe he is just getting paid by the said hotel...

Treasure is everywhere

Record shops are full of treasure. Here is a great pasttime for a rainy afternoon: Find a friend with a sense of humor, go to a second hand record shop and spend ten minutes looking for the worst album cover you can find. You and your friend will most likely end up laughing your heads off. There was a time in the 60s, 70s and 80s when quirky layouters would come up with a vast range of breathtaking adsurdities...
Take a look at Slim Goodbody - can you imagine what his music may sound like? What may the "FREE full-color activity poster" look like and what on earth would it make you do? Discoveries like this can make your day, you can bottle them up for another rainy day, a shitty everyday moment of murkiness lightened up by their vivid memory.

The music video of "I Wanna Love You Tender" by Armi & Danny is another one of those peaches. Not only is the dancing choreography ridiculously awkward and the lyrics totally naft, but I think it is the grammar that adds a pinch of grandeur ("How can I be sure you're not pretender?") to a great artwork. I want Slim Goodbody and Armi & Danny to team up! I want a music industry that cherishes quirky detail and serendipidous crappiness! I want a museum for artists like Slim Goodbody and Armi & Danny!

Wildlife in Essen

National Geographic would have had a field day. Just came back from a long walk with my father and baby brother in a nature reserve along our beautiful springtime river Ruhr. And guess what - we even saw three large water turtles, lazily lying in the evening sun - right on the log in the middle of the picture, a duck with nine fluffy ducklings floating by. They got really scared when I went closer and they frantically swam towards their calm level-headed mother. Spring now has a firm grip on people's lifes around here, and all those hibernating joggers, cyclers, fishermen, canoeists etc have crept out of their homes and holes. The city meets nature and canadian geese are the supreme rulers of our local river paradise.

Pantoufles

"Il y a moins les buttes qui on fait craindre
aujourd’hui que le bruit des pantoufles."

Dezember 1997

Am Samstag habe ich Ingo kennengelernt. Ingo ist etwa 60 Jahre alt, Alkoholiker und furchtbar unglücklich. Im Suff jedenfalls. Er schwankte an einer Mauer entlang als ich gerade nach Hause ging und weinte und schrie herzzerreißend. „Ich kann nicht mehr! Ich will sterben!“, weinte er. Ich fragte ihn, ob ich ihm helfen könne. Er sagte „die Erfahrung macht das“; er betete weinend zu Gott und wiederholte ständig: „Ich habe eine verantwortliche Stellung, ich bin ein geachteter Mann im Betrieb!“. Dann war da noch ganz viel Familie und Heimat in ihm. Er sprach mit starkem schlesischen Akzent und fragte mich mehrfach, ob ich Deutscher sei. Ein gebrochener, hilfsbedürftiger, aber nicht empfangsbereiter Mensch, der von seinen guten alten Werten mit voller Wucht eingeholt wird. Ich bin mit ihm ein Stück mitgegangen und schließlich hat er mich zu sich nach Hause auf eine Tasse Kaffee eingeladen. Daheim wartete seine Frau, die sogleich sagte: „Iiiingo, wò wahrst dù? Haast dù ahlles eingekauft?“ Ingo hatte nur Eier und Brot eingekauft, für den Rest hatte er gesoffen. Von den Eiern waren acht kaputt. Da wurde mir klar, das es das Romantische im verzweifelten Säufer nicht gibt. Ich sagte: „Du brauchst Hilfe.“ Er wehrte entschieden ab und sagte, er würde nur ab und zu was trinken und er wäre bestimmt nicht krank. Er wäre ein starker Mann und zur Zeit nur in einer Art Pechsträhne, die vorübergehen würde. Er widersprach sich innerhalb von Sekunden. Er gab vor, alles wäre in bester Ordnung und brach im nächsten Moment weinend zusammen. „Es gibt Dinge, mit denen jeder selbst zurecht kommen muß. Ein Mann soll sich nicht helfen lassen.“ Zwar widersprach ich ihm, doch gab ich irgendwann auf. Da war nichts mehr zu machen und ich fühlte mich schließlich einfach unwohl. Ich täuschte vor, gehen zu müssen und verließ die zwei. Die gute, starke Frau und der kranke Mann, den die Leere völlig unvorbereitet traf.