Merry Christmas and a Joyous 2012!

Zuneigung - A Game of Devotion

Substitute ;D

This one features two of my all time favourite Belgian bands/musicians. Ahh Arno Hintjens you are still wonderful and Belgian music owes a lot to TCmatic.

Wupperbol

There is something about these guys, though there music appears to be on the verge of the annoying and I do not understand a lot of their West Flemish dialect. The drive makes me simply happy. Love it.

Toilettengeschichten-toiletstories

First The Miserable Rich's James de Malplaquet incited by Joseph Patrick:

Then Studio Brussel inciting people to give a shit:

And finally, though not chronologically, Luc Tuymans as well:

There is definitely something about Belgium and toilets these days, please give a shit and donate for Music for Life , spitefully the final edition this year...

What makes a person?

I was watching this last night on youtube...

and it reminded me of my own childhood, but quite differently. In Mauro Pawlowski's case the different ethnic or cultural groups were fighting each other, first they (probably the male youth) played football against each other and this was always followed up by a fight, whereas here - on the German side of the border and in the same village as the local population - we were living side by side mainly with people of Italian and Portuguese origin and at least for me, German and female, it was fantastic to have also Italian life in the neighbourhood, with its quite different take on issues, like food and drink or television programme. My Italian neighbours first introduced me, still being a child, to fruit pickled in rum for example. The consequence for me was that different cultures made and still make me curious.

Open and Frank

Sometimes people are invested with this enormous presence of simply being, granting them an air of the unconditional, a true human being. These are the rare moments I'm craving for so much, what the heck, I adore them....

I Cannot Even Come Close...

... to telling how much I love this song and how overwhelmingly glad I felt to discover that somebody has uploaded it.

There is a sense of freedom in there that reaches its peak in being self-depreciating, a humour that suits me well. Pretentious moi,  ça va!

Dinge in der Schachtel - items in the box II

Without comment

"Hallöchen" and "een heel klein beetje spijtig"

Well, as promised here the brief reviews of two gigs my dearest husband and me have been to last week. First there were The Miserable Rich at the cafe Steinbruch in Duisburg and it started out quite good, as we got in a traffic jam when we had about 10 minutes to go according to the satnav - and it looked like it would actually take us half an hour longer, so we decided to get off the A40 - and then when we were almost there we were told to turn a quite adventurous bend, but hey those two country bumpkins did manage ;). After this venturesome prologue expectations and spirits were high. Being greeted with "Hallöchen" by the waiter made me feel not only welcome but quite at home from the start, the Ruhrgebiet mentality is very open and hospitable indeed. And yes, the presentiment did not belie us,  we were treated to a wonderful intimate event adequately featuring ghost stories, as James de Malplaquet announced, or even more precisely as he would go on to explain about sex. What more should I say the music was marvellous, the musicians very motivated and interacting with each other and the audience, the dubbing was great and not too loud - something I cannot stand is if the bass is too persistent -, the audience was attentive ("polite"), the drinks were good, they had a go at "Pisshead" ("You're doing this deliberately!") though the orchestration was not right, but it did not show too obviously and at the end we even got a lullaby to safeguard us back home. Thus wholeheartedly an event I wouldn't have liked to miss for the world ;)

On Saturday there followed dEUS supported by Intergalactic Lovers at the Theater in Heerlen. The journey was not that adventurous and indeed also the gig would not turn out to be as imaginative or thrilling. First there came Intergalactic Lovers, who were alright, but compared to Genk in March they seemed less motivated and also had regretfully less time on stage and since the audience, which outnumbered the one in Duisburg by more than a thousand, did not know or care for their performance, a lot was really wasted. What a pity! Still "Dank U well!"
When after a break of more than half an hour dEUS eventually entered the stage, my expectations were high, but got firstly crushed a little by the bad dubbing this time. The show and stage design were really breathtaking with coherent projections, wonderful. Also did they play an extented set, played five songs as encore, played older stuff and most of the new album, all quite well and I did not feel that I could complain. BUT and this is a big one, there was no chemistry between the audience and the peformers, not a word of greeting. Only musicians got introduced. The oddest thing to me yet: though they were in Limburg in the Netherlands Tom Barman as the lead singer seemed not to be able to speak more than one sentence in his native language, Flemish, before falling back into some English jargon. So consequently I was left with the feeling of having witnessed a sort of autistic stage performance that oddly included the fourth wall, impenetrable - to still keep up the Miserable Rich's line of thinking ;) - a lost opportunity - spijtig!

Please Do Give a Shit!

Music For Life lied: Zanna | Studio Brussel

This reconciles me with Saturday's sort of autistic concert in Heerlen, more about this later on.... Please buy the song and do take part in the campaign xxx!

Looking forward to tonight

One of my favourites from Miss You in the Days : Ringing The Changes

This uncannily reminds me of Ronald Colman's recollections of leaving Britain and entering WW1 in Flanders:
http://giovanni-severi.com/html/ww1.html

Still feeling kind of awkward

Though I rather fear that this week all occasion do inform against me , I still keep my spirits up by catching the good vibes of this song....

 

Hope to see them in Heerlen this week!

An odd beginning/end of a strange week or Who am I?!

Yesterday the oddest thing happened to me - and I regret my children had to witness it as especially my son was quite disturbed by it.In Aachen when I was visting my daughter a deranged woman, whom I haven't met before, started yelling at me that I should get lost and get back to my hometown and especially to my garden. Then she went on shouting something about witches threatening me. As I entered my daughter's flat she kept on yelling unintelligable things on the outside before she finally gave up - sad bedevilled being. I never thought I was a sight so menacing to behold to get such a reaction to just climbing out of a car ;), or it all just happened to get me into the right mood for The Miserable Rich ;D. Still can't get myself to believe in ghosts and witches - the heavens are empty and spiritualism has replaced it - odd indeed.

Imagination - Vorstellungskraft

Slow Up

Lavendel

A really amazing feature of lavender - at least in my front garden - is that though its branches look apparently dead, it still blossoms. I love to behold those gnarled, old and strangely twisted beings - often white like bone.

What is poetry?

... Thus the dream of learning by heart arises in you.

Of letting your heart be traversed by the dictated

dictation. In a single trait - and that's the impos-

sible, that's the poematic experience. You did not

yet know the heart, you learn it thus. From this

experience and from this expression. I call a poem

that very thing that teaches the heart, invents the

heart, that which, finally, the word heart seems to

mean and which, in my language, I cannot easily

discern from the word itself. Heart, in the poem

'learn by heart'  (to be learned by heart), no longer names only pure interiority, independent

spontaneity, the freedom to affect oneself ac-

tively by reproducing the beloved trace... (Jacques Derrida, What is poetry?)

Antlitz - Countenance

To me it is exceedingly hard to draw a face. The hardest thing is to capture what Levinas would call the countance - I really love the German translation "Antlitz", because it embodies also the word "anderer"/ the "other" (which is something that cannot be touched by the self) - because to Levinas it incorporates an absolute openess and nakedness. I envision this as the possibilty to have a glimpse at a person's soul, a third dimension that is hard to enclose in the two dimensions of a piece of paper...

Yet there have been those few lucky moments when one feels that by whatever uncontrollable miraculous circumstances one has accomplished it. The more miraculous yet, if another person wholeheartedly agrees.

What a man, what a mighty good man

Finally Michael Pennington's book "Sweet William" will be released in February 2012, details here, and I fully agree with Ian McKellen's view, though there is some more to be added. Indeed Michael Pennington is both a great Shakespearian actor and an equally good scholar, but what McKellen does not mention is that Michael Pennington has got a wonderful sense for music and rhythm, which make eevery of his performances a joy to watch and listen to. Just take his Richard II:

My comment from way back still stands the test of time/rewatching:
Thanks a lot ShakespeareAndMore for uploading this wonderful performance. Brilliantly delivered indeed, how he grasps the idea of circular movements here, from king to beggar and back again, the wheel of fortune, from nothing to nothing, the circular movement of the clock. Poor king who has just his own sorrow and person to circle around. I could watch Michael Pennington for hours and hours.

On January 12th Michael Pennington will be performing his one-man-show at the National Theater in London and signing books afterwards!

Jeugd Sentiment

 

If an Englishman grows sentiments, he goes into the garden and shoots himself. (Anton Walbrook as Prince Albert in Victoria the Great (1937))

My Dearest Enemy/ Mijn Dierbare Vijand

Zij hield heel veel van kleuters en van dieren
En van de vogels in het veld
En zij vond dat je alles moest delen
En dat ik alleen maar leefde voor mijzelf
Mijn dierbare vijand
Mijn prachtige vijand
Mijn dierbare vijand
Die mij bemint
In haar dagboek kom ik niet meer voor
Er zijn jonge jongens met ringen in een oor
Ik zei jouw dwaze lijf is alleen van mij
En dat was iets dat zij niet begrijpen kon
Mijn dierbare vijand
Mijn prachtige vijand
Mijn dierbare vijand
Die mij bemint
Haar schim staat elke nacht
Weer voor mijn deur
Ze vraagt mij of ze binnen komen kan
Ze bestaat niet en toch ruik ik haar geur
De geur van zure melk en oude honing
Kom binnen
Kom binnen
Kom binnen
Kom binnen
Mijn dierbare vijand
Mijn prachtige vijand
Mijn dierbare vijand
Die mij bemint
Mijn dierbare vijand
Mijn prachtige vijand
Mijn dierbare vijand
Die mij bemint
Die mij bemint

Gorki/Gorky (Belgian band!)

Sorry, the video does only play outside Germany!

Somehow this feels like a description of myself, I also love (small) children, animals, birds and believe that there is a need to share ;)! Although sometimes the blackbirds do get on my nerves as they eat up all the grapes - even when I'm sitting just underneath them... The most brilliant view of a wild animal in my garden was in the winter of 2000/2001 when an ermine (white as snow) was jumping all over it ;)!

Paradise is Situated on the River "Wurm/Worm"

Once I opened up the newspaper "Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung" and there was a headline reading "Das Paradies liegt an der Wurm/Paradise is situated on the river Wurm" and I was a little bit stunned, for firstly who would  know the river Wurm and then of course how  could the paradies be located there. Reading the article it was actually the Wurm I know, that flows into the Rur in the neighbouring village, and it dealt with a book, whose author argues that Aachen and its area are paradisiac - and who am I to argue with this view ;). In fact Maharishi Mahesh Yogi must have felt the same, because here is where he finally settled...

For no reason at all

I just love this song and want to share it

Kafka II - continued and enhanced

Adding to yesterday's post, a more enhanced this view on an artist may reveal that his or her motivation could be actually to share his or her art. In this light my own little happening  from way back, could and does illustrate exactly this.

Kafka or Does an Artist Need an Audience?

I miss those evenings and nights sitting next to the regular guys in the pub or café just listening for hours with no particular interest to their converstions until the lights go on and just then being caught up in a fervent argument and feeling so strongly about it that the discussion would go on for at least one hour on the outside. One of the most vividly rememberred was my view that an artist per defintion needs/craves for an audience. My opponent proposed as an example to the contrary Franz Kafka, who in his will left manuscripts to Max Brod instructing him to destroy them, but Brod published them instead. Yet I argued that by writing his stories down Kafka had an audience though this just consisted of one - himself (Jorge Borges comments on the odd experience of re-reading his own writings and becoming a reader indeed - later on he would also write a short story in which he would encounter his later self). And even Max Brod at least must have been perceived as an addressee by Kafka, in that he left those private writings to him. All in all this discussion turned out to be a most inspiring one...

Inspiration

"Inspiration: das empfangen zu haben, ohne zu wissen woher, dessen Urheber ich bin./ Inspiration: to have received, without knowing from where, that, the author of which I am." Emmanuel Levinas in Gott, der Tod und die Zeit (Engl God, Death and Time); Zeugnis und Ethik/ Testimonial and Ethics

Little bats

Little bats occur at certain times in my life, sometimes I'm puzzled that people do not perceive them, either in this case or when watching the restored version of Lola Montes open air on the banks of the Seine in the Parc de Bercy ;). Anyway I hope there is at least one living in my house because on warm summer evenings at least two are flying in the garden - transcendence.

Who would have thought

that the early hours of November 6th would have me sitting outside enjoying the night and its silence...?!
I was thinking of the bonfires in England and the fact that pretty soon, on November 11th, there will be bonfires in my home region as well commemorating the day of St Martin. Something that links this region with West Flanders and Ypres, since there St Martin of Tours is also especially worshipped.
Futhermore at exactly 11:11 am on the 11th day of the 11th month the Hoppeditz will awake to mark the beginning of the fifth season, Karneval/Fastelavond ;)!

Sehnsucht und Zufall

Odd that my dearest friend would say that the German word she loved the most  and believes to be unique to this tongue is "Sehnsucht" (best translation: longing), for I've just read an obituary for Jacques Derrida, in which "longing" was a main theme, connected with debt and death. And this is where the "Zufall/ coincidence" falls in, for when I was staying at my friend's in Paris and mentioned the name Derrida, her mother told me that she had been working as a nurse in the hospital where Derrida died and did remember his death.

Living

and being unbelievably young ;)!

Oh Hermine

In a letter to Anton Walbrook/Adolf Wohlbrück Hermine Körner maintained that an actor only can enact/evoke those feelings he personally knows congratulating him on his portrayal of Hjalmar Ekdal in Ibsen's The Wild Duck - a slight side note here to the advocates of Anonymous (the movie) Anton Walbrook was never married nor had he any alleged children, so Hermine, who was well aware of this, was not commenting on some autobiographic anecdote, but surely referred to a sensible and sensitive capacity. An interesting point when one considers that Anton Walbrook wanted these letters to be published after Hermine Körner's death because of the profoundness of their thoughts - btw he did not want people to know their addressee because he believed that this would make him look showy, yet Amy Smith, the editor and longterm friend of Hermine, nevertheless revealed his name and Friedrich Luft even cared to retell the story he had heard of Anton Walbrook of his first rendezvous with Hermine after WW2. A wonderful book btw : Amy Smith, Hermine Körner, alas it is only available in German.

In Our Age of Abundance

we maybe should learn to control our consumption, so Mies van der Rohe's dictum "Less is more" regains again in meaning and importance.

A nice reminder of my inherent local patriotism, for Ludwig Mies van der Rohe was born in Aachen ;).

Immanuel

"Im Reich der Zwecke hat alles entweder einen Preis oder eine Würde. Was einen Preis hat, an dessen Stelle kann auch etwas anderes, als äquivalent, gesetzt werden, was dagegen über allen Preis erhaben ist, mithin kein Äquivalent verstattet, das hat eine Würde."/" In the realm of purposes everything has got either a price or dignity. Whatever has got a price can be replaced by some other as equivalent, whatever is beyond all price, i e it does not allow an equivalent, has got dignity." Immanuel Kant

 

Not a second of everybody's life can be replaced by no matter what!

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"

Life and Art

Lately I've got into drawing, something people have been suggesting, but something that never was evident to me. The thing I've come to find is, that was interests me most, like in any art btw, is the living potential a line can have, and especially so, if it does not serve to seperate two colour fields from each other. This way it becomes an unique utterance, irrevocabel and irrepeatable. In a time when it is hard to find living people because people are rather absorbed by merely surviving, a great luxury indeed.

Driving in my car listening to the radio

How single instances can stay in the memory to that extent that the situation is remembered in almost every aspect and how they sometimes coincide in an odd way.
First instance I'm driving in my car in the spring of 2000, when all of a sudden there is announced on the radio that Ian Dury has died; I still remember the street, the light and the traffic lights.
Next I'm also driving in my car looking for an unoccupied space on a parking lot, it's almost Christmas, when all of a sudden space and time get irrelevant because again on the radio I get informed that Joe Strummer has died.
The last, but the first one in the row was Salvador Dalí, which occured when I had only just my driving licence and I was taking friends home after school.
Every time my favourite radio station would announce these information as news bulletins, interrupting their programme for it...

Novelty and Art III

Strange to read in an apostille in a paper that the commentator wishes pop music to be "new", while moaning the fact that the charts are dominated by digitally remastered reissues of older albums/ bands. Also he criticised the fact (?) that people have turned from consumers into users. Then he links the consuming attitude to owning and sometimes destroying, but also on the positive side to getting inspired by, and the using one to getting bored easily. Maybe it is just me being not so much up-to-date with expressions, but I always believed consuming had a rather passive connotation and would also fit in with a mere user's attitude and why is it bad to listen to music that dates back to the 1960s or 1970s?!
Oddly there are points that I could so much agree with like that music, even pop music should be inspiring, yet I wonder why this should be limited to "new", maybe better contemporary, music, and why I do have the feeling that notions get twisted here?!
Still I do rather share, like way back in the 1990s when in a seminar on New British Art the subject of contemporaneousness was raised and I was to have the final word later on with a presentation of Derek Jarman's Garden(something that I felt was also transcendenting the contemporary, even by the most fragile means), Thierry De Cordier's view "Je n'ai absolument rien à voir avec le XXème siècle" or Barnett Newman's notion that he corresponds with artists from the past and that he was sure that they would somehow understand what he was doing.

 

 

The Calling - To Have or To Be?

"Not a whit, we defy augery: there is a special providence in the fall of a sparrow. If it be now, it's not to come; if it be not to come, it will be now; if it be not now, yet it will come - the readiness is all. Since no man owes of aught he leaves, what is't to leave betimes? Let be."

Petals on a wet, dark bough

Looking forward to the winter, when the boughs of the elder, the black chokeberry, juneberry and the oleaster are covered by tiny white spots thanks to the birds.
The fact that I planted an elder is probably owed to Derek Jarman.

To Be Or Not To Be

Once I've put all my courage together and resolved  to take a work of art to a seminar or rather some informal talk we had afterwards entitled "Um den Punkt gesprochen/ Talking around the point". "As it was supposed to be something small that can be carried around easily, the thing I came up with was "To be or not to be" and so I did deliver the entire soliloquy in English - my dearest lovely professor did not understand a word, but it enabled us to dsicuss more formal aspects like the flow and the melody -, but what it actually did to me was giving me the oportunity to discover my own definition of Art with a capital "A", which turned out to be something that each time you visit it would show you some new aspects, things you have not been able to notice before. Something as alive and complex as life itself or nature.
To me it's always quite nice to walk outside into the garden and simply watch and listen to eg the bees and bumble bees humming around in the lavender, what a gorgeous sight. And then I remember my mother commenting that if one has not got the time to look after one's garden, one should use concrete to cover the space, what a hostile view. I'd rather have a wild garden than concrete, but then my mother's view simply reflects the common attitude today, a shame. There have been so many gifts we received, a walnut tree or some holly, that have just started growing, most probably due to some birds...

"Nachdem der bunte Vogel der Phantasie ihn seit langem verlassen hatte, kam eines Tages das graue Huhn der Depression/ After the multicoloured bird of fantasy had left him for a long time, the grey hen of depression appeared."

The All Together

is a wonderful film and one I nearly missed because of a preposterously wrong, negative review on imdb - note to myself, as far as sense of humour or historic setting in a film is concerned, never ever let yourself be discouraged by the average imdb user, for your sense of humour and your view on the importance of correct historic setting in a film differ too much from their average taste! Back to The All Together, what I really loved about this film was that it makes fun of a lot of phenomena of modern life and culture, not least  of itself, right from the beginning ;D. Some of the issues targeted are the media, especially TV and TV presenters, gangsters, British and American relation and their mutual language, modern art, eg monochrome painting (I myself do monochrome paintings ;)), real estate, French movies, Jehova's witnesses etc, and it not just entertains but it revealingly challenges these matters - maybe it was just me but at one point I was reminded of the abominable Gunther von Hagens and his Körperwelten/ Body Worlds, something that has been bothering me a lot and that I learned to have a laugh at thanks to this movie. Last but not least I truly enjoyed the soundtrack...