Ahh Contemplation

There is...

a kind of love that knows no jealousy and little did I know that while contemplating posting this, exactly this would happen to me. Cheers to all you lovely folks out there!

Are you working hard or hardly working?!*

What I like about this song is its apparent silliness that is yet purposeful and revealing as an outsider's look on Europe. Looking back my own view on Europe as a teenager and when I was in my twenties appears to differ (yet just maybe it does not actually) because at that time Europe appeared very young to me. Mine is the generation that had the advantage of travelling, again speaking a lingua franca, English, that enabled us to communicate in Europe and being able to cherish the vision of a European union. The youthfulness of Europe was nevertheless bought by the loss of a generation in WW2, thus in the 1960s and 1970s Europe was indeed very young. I feel grateful for growing up in the 1970s.

* (Chilly) Gonzales in ARTE's "One Shot Not"

Very Sweet

Somebody - I bl***y well am aware of his name - said the following addressing me: "You are so sweet, because you do not know how beautiful you are."
My reply: "You can not do this to me! Do you know how old I am?! I'm forty...!"
Or the same in German: "Du bist so süß, weil du nicht weißt, wie schön du bist!" - "Das kannst du mir nicht antun, weißt du eigentlich, wie alt ich bin?! Ich bin vierzig...!"

Anonymous or Why the Question of Authorship Actually Does Matter!

Of course one might argue that the Shakespearian plays should and actually do speak for themselves, as they have done during the past four centuries, sometimes more regarded sometimes less. And it would be just fine if we would leave it at this, but like the movie "Anonymous" - which as a piece of fiction is just fine, but whose director's "scientific" ambitions reveal a quite different approach - shows to some people the author and his biography are most eminent. A viewpoint that gets important in the 19th century and this surely comes as no surprise when one realises that this is the age, when acient myths are getting researched, eg in Canterbury we were told that the Victorians ventured to open Edward, the Black Prince's, grave or that it was also them that went looking for the two princes in the Tower allegedly murdered and buried by order of Richard III. An odd century that on the one hand went out to demystify and on the other hand developed a strong sense for the occult.
What we really lose, if we take the Shakespearian plays as mere depiction of autobiographical  events, is the idea that there is relevance beyond this, we are in a way limiting the plays' impact and their catholicity. In January Peter Brook expressed the viewpoint that the great thing about Shakespearian plays is exactly this catholicity, one can at no point extract the author's point of view as he gives expression and his art to depict the most differing ideas and parties. Thus like in Jaques' soliloquy "All the world's a stage", he presents all the world on stage. Of course I do understand that in our contemporary world of antagonism, where it's "either/or" and never "and/or",  it becomes very hard to imagine a human being who simply portrays it all, who gives the Lord what's the Lord's and the Emperor what's the Emperor's. But this again rather illustrates our shortcomings and never Shakespeare's. So eventually this whole business becomes a very modern phenomenon, but also a very dangerous for mind-numbing one: the utter nonsensical and depressing belief that only eminence can produce eminence.

Nightwatching VII

or where is the place of the artist?

As for the social status of the artist there is an interesting point raised in this movie, when first of all Rembrandt is confronted with  his (humble) origins as a miller's son from Leiden, but yet more interestingly yet, when socially higher ranking people (his orderers) imply that he has dirty hands - though he proves to them that at that moment and in this situation they actually are as clean as theirs.

In a consequence the artist falls inbetween the working classes, having to live of their hands' work, and the ruling classes, who do not get their hands "dirty" and rather living of their prestige and intellectual/ financial background. I surely love the idea that the artist is the one, who by his own choice does not distinguish between those two possible attitudes/ ways of living, but he is the one incorporating both, thereby living what Derrida would call the "and/or" rather than the "either/or".

Why Is It That?!

...phenomena tend to be regarded from just one side nowadays (or even in the past), when there might just be at least two sides, if we but cared to have a look?! This might though sometimes take some mental or physical effort, but hey are we not able to spare some of that?!



Adolf Wohlbrück/Anton Walbrook: "..., denn Liebe belohnt sich in sich selbst/...for love rewards itself within itself"