Amerika’s First Millionär

Johann Jakob Astor (his mother probably called him 'Hansi') made his money off fur, protectionism, and the ever popular real estate...after showing up in North America with a few bucks and a few flutes in 1784. He later financed, among other things, the first US community on the Pacific coast, discovery of the South Pass through the Rockies, Audubon, Poe, and the New York Public Library.



Astor hailed from the small village (Dörfchen) of Walldorf, near the Rhine in the northeast corner of Baden-Württemberg, also the home of SAP (the current city architect of Walldorf is an Astor, Dieter). He wasn’t directly responsible for the salad (that was the maître d’), or even the hotel, that was great-grandson John Jacob Astor IV (who went down with the Titanic, after deciding to return from an extended trip to Europe due to his wife’s pregnancy—they had gone there hoping to wait out the negative publicity stemming from the fact that she was 30 years younger than he was). No, he was not even the founder of the school (that was that kook Rudolf Steiner...a Germanic kook and therefore highly touted in this country, now an American kook, say, Mr. Hubbard, scares folks here just as much as anyone—more, actually).



The first Waldorf school, complete with racist theories which come with the territory when you decide to make up the world in your own head, was commissioned by the Zigarettenfabrik Waldorf-Astoria in Stuttgart in 1919. They used to include trading cards with packs of cigarettes between world wars, subject matter ranged from the German colonies to, you know, the Wehrmacht.

Palimpsest

World’s third best airport, unbelievably still surrounded by a pattern of fields that seems simultaneously medieval and democratic. These shapes were governed by the fact that a field was as long as your oxen could plow without a rest, and as wide as what you could accomplish in a day. The airport is next to the river, which seems rather quaint, as if they needed it to turn mill wheels or dump their sewage into. One can also clearly see the Autobahn



(signs for which are color-coded according to which german-speaking country you are in, and numbers for which are determined by the state it's in and its degree of regionalness, if you will). I have never been to this airport in a car. We go around the corner and down an escalator, and 45 minutes later emerge from a covered area in the middle of the top photograph...right in front of Terminal 2 (Lufthansa).
As long as we are in the country, it’s bonehead sociology all the way. People simply cannot conceive of how time-consuming this is. It involves Germans, Americans, and every other tribe over here. This morning I read a review of a comedy I just may order (strictly for purposes of research), which read, “Americans are such an easy target - they take themselves much more seriously than we do!” This from someone in Tyne and Wear, England, a name dating all the way back to the early 1970's...something to do with bringing coals to Newcastle, I think.
Last night it was a TV movie (a romance, the occasional viewing of these turns out to be the biggest surprise of my life—but the language is just so darned easy to understand). It was a Jules and Jim type story about former members of a Wohngemeinschaft (‘dwelling community’—or shared apt.) in the sixties. The music was great (the Germans’ guilty pleasure that I like best is the wide-spread use of great old American music, and don’t take the guilty pleasure part too seriously, we preface everything with guilty here). One of them had become a (drumroll) Spießer (shpeessuh). Stemming from the 17th century ‘Spießbürger’ (armed citizen), the short form came into use in the late 19th century to denote narrow-mindedness or the state of being bourgeois (engstirnig, literally ‘tight-brained’...well, tight-foreheaded, but that makes no sense). The term got a big lift in 1968 of course, and many Germans today are adamant about letting you know that they are not a Spießer...no matter how desperately they pursued their Bulthaup kitchen or flat screen TV. As in the U.S., or probably anywhere, the Spießer gets nowhere without parental funds. On the other hand, the proverbial self-made man (der Emporkömmling, having nothing to do with pork), actually has negative connotations here. It means an ‘up-and-comer’—but is understood as an arriviste. Things have a way of flopping themselves over when undergoing transmutation from English to German, or vice versa. For instance höflich, which means polite, but is derived from courtly. Hardly bringing to mind the ‘niceness’ that it implies in English. Even the simple ‘It’s me’ (it is I) becomes ‘Ich bin’s’ (I am it). Is it me, or am I it? I think, therefore I am a non sequitur. You’re it.

Fröhliche Weihnachten! (a command)

You can refer to any number of sites which will tell you that Thomas Hampson grew up in Spokane, and who he studied under...but not that he speaks German quite well. However, I was told he did make a gender error or two (adjective endings and the like), and I myself could just tell that his native language was probably English--and yet too boring to be the British variety. These native English speakers who hold their own in German are rare, and worth watching. They are rare, even though integration is "encouraged"--especially if you speak a language the Germans were not pounded over the head with from early childhood.

There are a lot of things between the idea and the reality here, like the concern over one's laser printer emitting harmful particulate matter...when, on the other hand, you don't have to smoke to smoke--just walk into any restaurant. Which is fine, but then don’t sit around worrying about your health. Or how specialists can spend years studying the inclination of campaigns promoting nationalism to lead to xenophobia, and yet no one ever points to the fact that drinking heavily (on the street) and scaring the crap out of people (with or without violence), has been a major part of growing up here for centuries. Granted, I can’t talk, as I come from a place where violence is primarily allocated to certain areas...and, as long as you don’t live in them, the system works great.



Anyway, like I said, Merry Christmas.

My Brush with Death in Venice

The novel, not the state of being. Although I did see a casket piled with calla lilies go by, and assumed it would be bad luck (not to mention tasteless) to photograph it. Everything that moves on roads and highways elsewhere, goes by relatively small boat in Venezia; freight, ambulances, penitentiary transports, etc.



While reviewing a clip of a traghetto pulling away from the dock, I noticed that the older, heftier guy at the far side of the gondola said something to the guy in the traditional black and white striped shirt, so he turned around to grin at the camera. It took me awhile, but I finally put this together with the fact that Sarah Brown's blog (having nothing whatsoever to do with Venice) had mentioned a 2007 calendar of gondolieri...well, actually it mentioned the one with priests, but anyway...this was one of the guys (albeit now working the Santa Sofia stop, as opposed to San Tomà). The fact that he thought I was photographing him, and not the entire scene is beyond ironic of course, but I'm glad these kids are getting a bit of attention. If you do happen to be interested in one of these boys, you can spend all day with them for two bucks an hour, going back and forth across the canal.

Speaking of attention, I have found the perfect book for traveling, 'Stuffed Animals and Pickled Heads (The Culture and Evolution of Natural History Museums).' If the mere title doesn't get you left alone, Jan Van Rymsdyk's "truly exceptional" rendering of a "mind-numbingly" detailed gravid uterus will. Pushy sorts can be dealt with by way of a quick reverie of what conditions must have been like when drawing this from a (recently deceased) model in 1774...or perhaps a short rant about how the pig he drew this sort of subject for, over a twenty-two year period, did not credit him in his groundbreaking 'magnum opus' on the topic (although one has to assume he was at least paid).

Want to go to Venice? Here, watch the vaporetti come and go...you'll have to imagine the unbelievable grinding noise they make when pulling up to, or leaving, a stop.

The least I can do

Was sitting in a museum café with my infinitely superior half the other day, and repeated what I thought I’d heard, “I could come here and read the Grapes of Wrath?” expecting the usual hilarity. All you have to do here is repeat what you think you’ve heard (in English or German), the difference between perception and reality is almost guaranteed to be amusing. Seriously, even if you’re not easily amused, try it out. Go to a country where you couldn’t pronounce the word ‘higher’ if your life depended on it, not with a warning and a head start, nothing, no way…you’ll see what I mean. Anyway, the guy across from us was actually reading The Grapes of Wrath. He probably understood what I said, because I don’t think the subject would have come up had he been reading Früchte des Zorns (Fruit of Spleen)...or Die Straße der Ölsardinen (The Street of Oil Sardines). But it wasn’t embarrassing, almost nothing is, in a place where grasping things cannot be taken for granted. Not even flying off your bike, should a small, poorly supervised dog stop dead in its tracks in front of you (Die Fahrt der Beagle).

Geography

This girl I know, and by girl I mean an adolescent female, wrote me about her geography test on Europe last week (“you have to put it a half inch of where it is or it's wrong”). She thought it would be annoying to live in the Balkans, because of the long names. I was tempted to tell her that they have many things to be annoyed by, exactly what I don’t know, as a ‘short history’ of the region only succeeded in making my head spin. Does she need to know how many people were beaten up there recently for public displays of affection? Do I tell her how they are barrelling towards their assumed goal of joining the rest of the continent so quickly that peacekeeping duties no longer require the cooperation of the entire North Atlantic, but have been taken over by cosier forces like EUSUK and EULIE. She now knows the capital of Slovenia is Ljubljana (and can actually spell it), do I tell her about the ‘forced relocation—after residents threatened to expel them’ of an extended Roma family in one of its suburbs last month...or should I just mention how a friend went there and everyone was quite nice, and their English was excellent (and that most cities and countries have completely different names in German, not to mention in their own languages).

She’s 13, still at the age where one feels drawn to stem the tide of (oh so overrated) maturity. What to say, what not to say. Hereabouts, members of my own ilk that pay this sort of news any heed (as gauged by witnessing them say boo about it), could easily be counted on one or no hands. Things just drop off the radar, like socialism in the United States, or the following in Germany:

Antihistamine



Bigfoot



Prozac



UFO abductions



Abusive priests

Mr. Rogers vs. Germans

It's a beautiful day in this neighborhood
A beautiful day for a neighbor
Would you be mine
Could you be mine

It's a neighborly day in this beauty wood
A neighborly day for a beauty
Would you be mine
Could you be mine

SA headquarters? Just down the street
Ramming into folks on the sidewalk is always a treat
Got permanent residency so you can kiss my ass
Like a Disneyland Passport with less fiberglass

So, let's make the most of this beautiful day
Since we're together we might as well say
Would you be mine, could you be mine
Won't you be my neighbor
Won't you please, won't you please
Please won't you be my neighbor

Okay, so maybe the Germans aren’t as nice as Fred Rogers was (they would have called him superficial)—they’re not as creepy either...however, they are into model trains and puppets. Don’t say I didn’t warn you.