I hate this kind of thing:
So ist das eben mit der Kunst. Das, was man sieht, ist nicht das, was es ist. Und deswegen muss es erklärt werden. Müsste es nicht erklärt werden, wäre es vermutlich keine Kunst.
[That's just how it is with art. What you see isn't what really is. And that's why it has to be explained. If it didn't have to be explained, it probably wouldn't be art.]
From the Spiegel Online "review" of the RAF show. I would quote more of it, but it would probably make me ill to do so. It's fine, it might even be necessary, to write a negative critique of the exhibition (I haven't seen it, so I can't say). But do it with some class. Don't just use a snort of derision to mask your own ignorance. Ugh.
More what-ifs. What if academia were a series of reality tv shows? (Perhaps it already is; some of this sounds eerily familiar. Or at least it's very evocative of the familiar.)
Beautiful pics at Flickr by Ralf2.
Johnny has something especially thoughtful to say today:
Und daher will ich sie sehen, diese Menschen, die den Anstand nicht haben, den Opfern von Massenmorden zu gedenken, und ich will, dass die ganze Welt sie sehen kann. Ich will, dass ihre Gesichter, ihre Reden und ihr Verhalten unsere Herzen öffnen, damit wir uns ihnen mit Mut und Leidenschaft in den Weg stellen.
The essay is a critique of the press' wimpy response and the cookie cutter solution proposed by the government after right-wing members of the Saxon state assembly refused to observe a moment of silence on the day commemorating the victims of National Socialism.
Reading his last paragraph I couldn't help but think of number three in this wicked assessment of human nature. We have met the enemy and he is us.
Did you know that (in MT) on the archive page of your most recent entry, one button in the navigation at the top leads to the previous post and the other takes you back to post number one? I had no idea. How bizarre to read that first, dinky entry.
Tonight we made Armenian Lentil Stew, which is a Moosewood recipe (the link is someone's annotated version, but the ingredients and methods are the same). It's perfect in many ways: most of the ingredients you already have on hand, and what you don't (mint, eggplant, apricots) is easy to get. This is really a nice change from your usual lentil stew, great with some nice, slightly sweet pumpernickel and a good cheddar.
As someone who has been "massiv gestört" by chatty chatterboxes in the library, I was happy to read at Jurabilis that the Stabi has new! harsher! rules about using phones in the reading room. If they nab your chattin' self, they'll kick you out for a day. And repeat offenders can get barred for longer.
From the [PDF!] Stabi's announcement:
Das Klingeln eines Handys, das geführte Gespräch und auch das eilige Durchqueren der Lesesäle zur Entgegennahme eines mittels Vibrationsalarms angekündigten Gesprächs – zur Not auch in der Toilette – sind trauriger Alltag in der Bibliothek. Dies schlägt sich nicht zuletzt in zahlreichen Beschwerden derjenigen BenutzerInnen wieder, die sich dadurch massiv gestört fühlen. Nachdem also Hinweise und Bitten nicht ausreichen, werden wir nun ab 7. Februar 2005 jedem, der ein Handy innerhalb der kontrollierten Bereiche benutzt, ein Hausverbot für einen Tag erteilen. Dabei werden wir die Benutzerausweisnummern und ggf. die Personalien notieren und im Wiederholungsfall auch längere Hausverbote aussprechen. Jeder Mitarbeiter und jede Mitarbeiterin der Bibliothek ist berechtigt, die eintägigen Hausverbote zu verhängen.
BoingBoing has a tip for permalinking NY Times stories. I'm posting this so I know what to do next time I want to link to the NYT, but maybe you missed it, dear reader. The links it generates don't expire and require no subscription to read. Lovely.
If you're in Berlin this weekend, you might want to check out Saturday's opening of the RAF show.
(via the multipurpose sack)
For a little background, the SZ has an interview with Felix Ensslin, Gudrun Ensslin's son and one of the organizers of the show. Worth a look.
SO. I found a hobby. Re-learning to knit while finishing the dissertation. Makes perfect sense, doesn't it? Why spend the little time you have left at the end of the day reading?? Really. So having finished one scarf and started the next, I've begun looking for ideas for making an iPod cozy. So far, these are the best bunch. I especially like the white furry one. I was thinking of trying to felt one, since I need to try that out sometime, but I wonder if there are scratch issues with wool. And Andrew thinks a window would be cool, but frankly I don't know if I can muster that kind of brain power. I was thinking more of a fold-over flap type thing.
Via these folks, Moe links to the German government's position statement against introducing university tuition (and fees) at the level of the "Erststudium," your first go-round. The issue will be raised this week in the Federal Consitutional Court, because a number of CDU-governed states consider this to be an issue that should be governed by them, not by the feds. The government's general position is that "tuition is harmful. Additional financial burdens will result in fewer young people in Germany choosing a university education."
The short list of elaborations (with my interpretations in parentheses):
Like Moe says, this is mostly a symbolic act, since the court's making the decision, but it's notable that the government has spoken so decisively. Although if I were to be a cynic, I might call it an attempt to rebuild confidence after the recent university strikes.
Following Craig's wonderful What If flow chart, Johnny has What Ifs of a different sort. All in German, but come on, you can figure them out. Sure to make you go "hmm."
Craig has an extensive guide to Berlin at Flip Flop Flyin'. Recommended reading! There's a strip of fun photos on the side, many of them from our one-time neck of the woods.
[I know I'm always beating the why'd-we-leave-berlin-horse, but seriously. Why? Right before our friends moved into our neighborhood?]
These pics of the Warschauer Strasse bridge, from someone called Hans_, are exactly the kinds of images of Berlin I love to see. Just stuff going on, people doing things or going places. Nice.
Today BoingBoing mentioned the Human Clock. From the Human Clock site:
Humanclock.com shows a photograph of the current time, with the photo changing every minute of the day (all 1,440 occuring minutes on Earth!) Thus you end up with a rotating picture clock sorta deal.
Click on the "view the clock" link at the top to get the current time as expressed in a photograph by some random person.
Weirdness over at Heimatlos. The lovely t-shirt shop is gone due to, um, religious differences. The shop was being used as a tool for a sneaky kind of evangelism, and I think I would have gotten out, too. The slogans are still available, though, so make your own!
I shouldn't do everything suggested in the blogs I read.
[heaven help me, I watched the video, too.]
Kriston writes good stuff about art and sometimes about Texas. I was just looking at this post (and this shorter, earlier one) about art in/and/outside of Texas, apropos of Turner-prize winner and ArtPace alumnus Jeremy Deller.
Kriston writes
I'm as fascinated as those voyeur Brits by this stuff, but because I lived in Texas for years, I know that an accurate pictorial presentation would involve a lot of pictures of Staples, Chile's, Walmarts and what have you, suburban housing subdivisions, cacti and mesquite. Pretty dull. For the kind of quasi-photojournalistic art Deller practices, the urge to take exciting photographs of interesting stuff competes with a certain obligation to accurately describe what is primarily homogenous and boring. (I think so, anyway, though let me admit that I'm not well versed on the ethics of photography.)
Even after ten years here (nearly. Yipes.), I feel exactly this everytime I see pictures of Texas. I suspect it's the same in any place, anywhere in the world. And I suppose, too, that images of Texas that are expressly banal can be made pretty (I use the word advisedly). See Mike Osborne's photo series of interchanges, for example (I can't find Mike's work online for some reason, just this one from our show last summer), this, this, and this, or maybe Brian Bowers' pictures of West Texas. Texas through the eyes of Texans.
(I got a nod at the end of that post, which was nice. I wasn't sure anyone'd read my essay except the parties involved.)
Several people (Johnny, Sattva) have already mentioned Heimatlos, but for those who've missed it: a Turkish-German (German-Turkish?) blogger in Hamburg. Today there was this excellent link to a super discussion of Turkish-German Rechtschreibereform. Of a sort.
also loving the T-Şörts.
Whew. "Gay Cowboys" (see this entry) and "Sex China" (this one) have finally been dislodged from the top spots in my search strings. The new number one search term? "Snow Car." Whuh? Who cares. I'll take it.
Using this database at something called Percevia, I finally identified the amazing tiny bird that's been living in the tree in front of my desk for several years. It's a Hutton's vireo, and I am so glad to finally have this riddle solved. Here's an image for those interested in birdies.
Percevia lets you choose various characteristics, narrowing your search by location, shape, color, size, etc. It took me all of three steps to find the right bird after spending years never being quite sure with our guidebook.
Recently Sattva wrote about language learning, bringing up two points of view that I've often vacillated between:
1. if you are in germany, you should speak german or at least try. it's your right. 2. if you are just beginning to learn german, it's not always the best method of communication. language is about communicating with people the best you can.
These hit home. When you're trying to learn a language, it's frustrating to find people responding to you in your native language because they think it will make the conversation easier (not facilitate it, necessarily. Just make it easier to get through, to finish). In that sense, I do think you "have a right" to speak the local language, assuming that's part of why you're there. If it isn't, if you can and prefer to exist without the local language, or if in that moment you don't feel like using the local language, then you shouldn't have to. No one should expect you to use it, to struggle in it when you don't want to. The right rests with the speaker, doesn't it?
This gets sticky when we're talking about supermarketgerman, or postofficegerman, or other more pragmatic instances of language. Registering as a resident, paying taxes, all those kinds of administrative things are tough if you don't speak German, though many forms I've had to fill out were offered in multiple languages (Turkish, Vietnamese, Russian, Serbo-Croatian). As Sattva says, this is all tricky because it is bound up with the debate on immigration and naturalization, multikulti etc. Does "allowing" immigrants living in Germany to live there without learning German mean that German Culture will erode? Doubt it.
But beyond “functional” language, I don't know. In Germany I’ve often chosen or fallen into bilingual groups and settings, where expression both in the sense of communicating ideas and in terms of creative expression could happen in either English or German. Regardless of how well I speak German, it's nice to be able to express something in English when I need to and to know that people will understand it on more than just a denotative level. Sattva also makes the point that perfected spoken language can allow those who already have the advantage of "looking German" to disappear, to pass as German, while those who don't, no matter what their language skills, don't have that privilege. Passing was really appealing to me when I started learning German, when I really didn’t want to stand out as an American. In high school in Wilhelmshaven I found I had a talent for accents, and I emulated the dialect so closely that I sounded as if I'd been a Fischkopp my whole life. (My Spanish, which I learned in school in WHV, sounds ridiculously German.)
Passing was proof that I'd accomplished something, that I’d been successful at learning the language. It wasn't until I was in college that I started thinking that maybe I didn't really want to be mistaken for a German. The more aware I became of Turkish culture in Germany, and of immigration in Germany more broadly, the more indignant I became that people (including myself) would think of physical characteristics as a determining factor of nationality or belonging. But more personally (and lets face it, probably more importantly at 21), I started noticing that I was a different person when speaking German, and I couldn't figure out why this was. Now I think it's because, as Sattva suggests, certain intimate aspects aren't communicated the same in a second language. Ever. It took some time before I felt like my real personality was the same in both languages. I haven't been conscious of that process, but I can say that I finally felt it had happened while we were living in Berlin, after almost twenty years of speaking the language.
For those of you in Berlin with an interest in things gender-y, Rochus invites you to this workshop at the FU this coming weekend. Looks really interesting. Voranmeldung wird erbeten etc.
My desk sits at a large window looking out into our "yard" (large patch of muddy, sandy, weedy mess) and beyond that, into the Taco Bell parking lot. Sounds not so great, but actually in the summer when the leaves are on the tree I can't see past our fence, and it's very pleasant. There's always a lot of bird action in the yard, which I really love. At the moment there's a family of four cardinals hanging around.
Well. That's finally taken care of. The other night when we decided to upgrade Moveable Type we had forgotten that our host was going to be migrating data all night, starting at juuust about when we were almost finished. Ugh. So that meant that because we had accessed my page (and Andrew's, as it happens) during the migration, our ISP somehow cached our sites during the period when our URLs were redirecting to the host's homepage. Thus all day long yesterday I Could. Not. See. My. Blog. Which in turn meant I couldn't do anything about the trouble we were having reformatting the new comment form. Luckily everything came back last night, Andrew fixed that template, and hey presto, new thingymajiggies.
So, as I mentioned Wednesday, you can sign in to TypeKey (get an i.d. quickly and easily here) to comment, or you can just use your email as usual. And I'll still be proofing comments before they post [update: unless you get TypeKey, as Andrew has pointed out in the comments].
I suppose it's just as well that I couldn't get to my blog yesteday, because I kept seeing things I wanted to write about but shouldn't because I had a lot of other work to do...and of course I couldn't bother, you know, making a TEXT doc and saving it for later or anything, because let's face it: it's the immediacy of this business that is so compelling. Think it, blog it! NOWNOWNOW! This is true even of those just starting out, am I right? (Of course there are those other things that sort of roll around in your head for a while before you feel they're right to post...I often find I forget those. Sadly.)
Naturally I don't remember what it was I want to write about yesterday, either. I'm sure it'll come back to me if you care to wait around...
Andrew upgraded my MT for me; then we spent some time fixing the "comment pending" page, and now he's going to try to update my comment forms to include TypeKey. Yes, you will now be able to register to leave comments here, but you don't have to; you can just use your email address like usual. Either way, though, I'm going to approve any comments. I wonder if you're registered if I can set them to post automatically? We'll see. Anyway, if anybody notices any funny stuff, please let me know.
(I hear Andrew in the other room saying it's going to be more complicated than he thought to add that new comments form. Huh. Maybe I won't have TypeKey afterall...)
Found this at ORF:
Schlingensief will Intendant des Deutschen Theaters werden
Regisseur Christoph Schlingensief kann sich vorstellen, die Intendanz des Deutschen Theaters in Berlin zu übernehmen. "Das Deutsche Theater würde mich sehr reizen", sagte Schlingensief der "B.Z." (Montag-Ausgabe).
Sounds like the ideal situation in some ways: a 'difficult' director for a 'difficult' position. Unfortunately there isn't anything at the BZ's online edition about this yet; maybe the interview will show up a little later. Looking over the BZ's Kultur/Szene section was a lot of fun, though. Much different from your usual stuffy feuilletons. For example: an interview with the TH's Campino and some marvelous headlines: "Berlins Kultursenator Flierl:
Ja, die Stasi hat versucht, mich anzuwerben;" "Hanna Schygulla - Ich wollte ein Kind von Fassbinder." Too great.
[update: a bit more info at the FR today.]
HeiKu has this shot of Berlin in the fog of fireworks. The most representative of all the New Year's pics I've seen so far. I wish those sparks had been raining down on me!
[only linking to the photo because that server is slooow and doesn't need me to drag it down further.]
I recently saw this distressing press release posted on Tsunami Help for Sri Lanka:
In particular, we have received reports of incidents of rape, gang rape, molestation, and physical abuse of women and girls in the course of unsupervised rescue operations and while resident in temporary shelters, particularly in the south. Apart from these incidents (the number of which is not known), these reports have also indicated that women’s mobility continues to be restricted due to the fear of sexual violence. No proper monitoring body has been set up to receive complaints, to take action against perpetrators, or to ensure the safety of women in these areas.
As usual, it seems, women and girls are the ones most at risk. I hope the organization's call for monitoring is heard by the right people.
