Letters to a Persian Cat

Who says that cool moves come only from the teens and twens ? BS, I say, not only after we accompanied our son to its dance-lesson-exam ball, and were shocked that all of his generation stood shy and helpless along the walls, whereas their parents like us were dancing the whole night through.

But here comes the ultimate proof: A local Berlin entertainer, with not so juvenile shape and some silver in his hair is doing the ultimate groove on the streets of East Berlin. The places between the Prenzlauer Berg and the Barn-Quatier in Mitte have not so much changed, since I went home there a quater century ago.

(Solomun: “Kackvogel” featuring Friedrich Liechtenstein)

I think it’s a pitty that they have not revealed who was behind this Bear mask. It would be cool if Mr.Liechtenstein ripps off the mask and discovers the face of the red dressed girl who was dancing on the opposite of the road before.

Hi Michael, You know my main access to the social media world is by Facebook. But through your blog and the various links on it, I also got used to read what people post on their own blogs. Some of them are really unique and inspiring, others are boring.

Therefore I set up my top 8 list of Blogs I used to de-follow sooner or later:

• Blogs that talk about cooking and show endless rows of pictures with dishes, which would probably cause me nausea only by their smell . Because I know that most of them are inedible and I can cook better than 99% of people who write blogs about it.

• Blogs which only write about traveling and show the 12.839.431st image of the Sangra Familia cathedral in Barcelona or  this special pub in Dublin.  Because if I want to see these places, I’ll go there by myself. And I think it is a sign of intellectual deficiency if people are not able to find inspiration to write a post while at home.

• Blogs that intends to teach you how to do things right.  This is for sure one of the worst and proliferating pests not only on the book market, but in internet blogs as well.  They should be made legally responsible for anybody who is silly enough to follow them and fails.  Like financial advisers can be made liable if you lose an invesment by following their recommendations,  these “super-intelligent gurus” in the social media should be stoned in front of a public web-cam, each time  they publish another “8 ways to successfully change your leadership potential” or “12 questions one should never  ask his lover after a one night stand” etc etc).    People who still follow posts like this or even link and further recommend such sites should not forget the following:  These “super-intelligent gurus” are not inventing their 100% success proven recommendations out of pure altruism.  They make money with it, and this just goes by increasing web-traffic and placing ad-banners somewhere on their pages.  In fact, they don’t give a damn on any problem you want to solve.

• Blogs which are set-up by girls and boys to present their latest fashion purchases. If I want to see something really inspiring in this sense, I better follow the bill-boards of Desigual or H&M along my daily bicycle ride to work.       
• Blogs which are set up by girls to present their latest attempts as make-up artists and describe in detail how much work it is and how much it costs at the cosmetics store to look really overpainted, rediculous and awful.
• Blogs which cite the daily news and add their own short comment in a style as “I hate this man” or “Funny new information” or “I was not aware of this”. The plain news is usually informative enough without your extra phrase.

• Blog which attempt to spread religious or national surpremacy, whether it is on a christian, muslim or buddhist background. Honestly, sometimes I enjoy such blogs for some minutes, for the absurdity that really makes me laughter.  But in general, I think for any people who don’t have my senseof humour, such religious blogs are doing more harm than fun.
• Blogs which want me to belief that a particular national minority would do much better after achieving independence, and that they would do even better after gaining indenpendence if they could expel any other minority, or at least deprive them of their equal rights. Sorry for all bloggers from Catalunia, telling me again and again how superior their province is compared to the rest of spain, sorry also for bloggers from Croatia describing how much more civilized and culturally developed they are as compared to the other Balkan countries (sorry, but you are still a Balkan country), sorry also for the Walloon and Flemish blogs proposing independence, but not a single word of excuse for de-following any Hungarian nationalistic blog. They should simply be blocked from any web-presence. I know that you fit much better into the European Front of National Freedom Fighters than in the internet.

I hope that this very decisive list that is now posted here does not qualifies your blog itself for category 3 (“list for things I recommend to do”)

Take good care

/Ghazal

Our first concert took place in a remote place called Seeon. I guess it is the German spelling for Zion.

Platon wrote that a man and woman who really love each other are like two halfs of an apple, which were cut apart but only together form an ideal entirety again. What a nice, typical Platonian view of an ideal world, and clearly related to his obsession with ideal forms.

At least in our knowledge about relationships we made some progress since the ancient Greek philosopher wrote down his ideas, and we now consider that a mutual understanding is crucial for a lasting and prospering relationship. But I am wondering how mutual understanding is possible, if the main issue of a relationship between men and woman remains enigmatic to both sides:  A man will never understand why his girl fell in love with him, and vice versa can the girl never understand why the boy she loves so much wanted her.

Because the man in general loves the feminine features, and the girl loves masculine characters, so neither of both can really understand the emotions which drive the others side. It is like in game theory, where one player can only guess what are the intentions of the other player. In game theory each player tries to maximize its profit, without taking into account the opponents losses or gains. That seems to work quite well, if the game is a finite one and we have a fixed date to count our profit.

In privat relationships, however, the ideal is still the eternal love, so we have to find a way to really understand our partners emotions. Thats a funny thing: I still don’t really know why my wife loves me so much. I don’t have shiny, long hair, I don’t have nice long legs, I don’t have a soft voice, and I don’t have full, fruity lips, and I don’t have long eye-lashes and bowed eye-brows. So what the hell she finds in me ?

In theory, if mutual understanding is the key for a stable relationship, in fact two gay or lesbian lovers would have the best chances to live together in a long-lasting harmony. They can understand each other perfectly, because they share the same feelings towards others. If to gays watch a handsome man, they both feel equally attracted, what could rarely happen to a heterosexual couple.

But somehow, this theory is not reality-proven. In reality, gay or lesbian relationships exhibit anything else than a long duration. So common desire and shared taste not neccessarily guarantee a long-lasting and prospering relationship. It is more likely that a mutual interest, driven by couriosity into a very different personality is a much stronger glue for two people than the apodictic certainty that the two knows everything from each other, and nothing remains secret or enigmatic.

Don’t we say “crazy for love”, and does not this implies that one loves much more what on sees as crazy, but not as logical (according to its own standards) ?

Leonard, our son, is in his full-blown puberty, and this last since about two years. Good if one knows right from the beginning that all his renitence, this hard-core opposition against everything what the parents do or say, is an essential part of forming his individual personality. Its also good to know that with other adults, friends of us, or parents of his school-mates, Leonard behaves exceptionally well, he is polite, entertaining, funny. But with us, his parents, he uses every moment to show that he feels bored, that we are rediculous and not cool at all. During normal school time this is still tolerable, since we all have our own business and spare-time activities. But it regularily becomes really annoying when we go on vacation. Whenever we had to spend the entire vacations together, 24 hours a day, somewhere on the Cote de Azur or on the Black Sea or in the Bulgarien Mountains or in Israel, Leonard did not wait half a day to let us know how uncool these places are and how envy he is for his school mates who went to Disneyland, Ibiza or Las Vegas.

So his response was very predictable when we told him that I have to do a business trip to Tokyo in March and would like to take the family there. As expected, he started to complain about my offer, arguing that his limitted school vacations he want to spend with his friends at home in Munich. And the planned trip to Japan would not allow him to go to one of his friends birthday party. So I was not really disappointed about his rejection to go with us to Japan for a week, I was rather amazed of how well I knew him. But at the same time one could also foresee very clearly that after some weighing all the Pros and Cons, and in particular considering the cooleness points he might gain at his friends and at Facebook, he would soon start to revise his decision and with a deep sigh and an expression of generous compliance offer us his company for the Japan trip.

Exactly this happened today, 5 days before departure. I have no problem staying consistent, saying “Sorry , too late now, and somebody has to stay at home anyhow to look after Ivo, our dog”. So Leonard became a sort of nervous, when he felt that I have no intentions to take him with us now. And to be honest, I felt somehow satisfied, to found a way now to confront him with the consequences of his unjustified hostility against us. I’d very much like to give him a week time in complete freedom from us to contemplate about how much one will miss in life by blindly following ones gut-feelings.

But I’m afraid that Marina will decline to her maternal emotions, and probably in the last minute book a flight for him, paying 10 times the normal air fare and totally spoil all my efforts to teach our son some social values.

Read today the letters by Ernst Juenger, which he send home from the battles-fields of World War I. I can not describe the degree of my disgust, while reading all these pseudo-heroic and wanna-be cool descriptions from Juengers front-line years. It has little to do with a new evaluation of the history of the WW1, now 100 years after it started in 1914, and it has little to do with my general attrocity against the consideration of war as an “…continuation of politics with other means..” as it was coined by Clausewitz as it was misunderstoud generations after him too easily.

My disgust comes from very own experiences, from 3 years I had to serve in the army myself. Although the cold war time in the early 80s guaranteed a relative peaceful international status, we were always kept in an emotionally state of permanent alert. And I remember very well that by a complete neglectance of this inhuman situation, and being completely victimized to a stupid and brutal machinery, men escape by guilding this situation and inventing a narrative of heroism, of maskuline challenges, of cool adventures. Those, like Juenger and a couple of others, many of them artists and writers, who obviously were lacking a chance to show courage in their former life, exploited the boring, miserable and useless days at the front to invent a new idendity: This of a fearless soldier, who proudly risks his life for his country and the family and friens at home. Mainly, of course, they think of beautiful woman as readers of their letters. They think that their mediocracy in life at peace can now be overwritten by self invented  fairy-tales of their heroic front-line adventures.

I piss on all these stories, and I piss on Ernst Juenger and his comrades in mind. And at the same time I accuse their families and friends who read these letters from the front-line for not shouting up against. They encouraged and supported all this miserable effusions of sick minds, instead of answering them and encouraging them to deffect from the battlefield and come home.  Most of the men, who initially wrote the self-invented hero stories home, indeed returned soon to their families, although in a coffin or as invalides.

War is stupid, its criminal, it is doing no good, it is a backslash for human evolution to a more primitive state. And there is no space for human dignity at war,  except if somebody decides to lay down its arms. But this is not what Juenger did.  He luckily survived WW1, with several injuries, which unfortunately were not sever enough to prevent him from writing “Storm of Steel”, his memories which misled millions of younger Germans to invade other European countries 20 years later again and conducting the worst war-crimes.

After World-War 2, where Juenger served as a captain and highlighted the “great time” he had in occupied Paris with Picasso and Cocteau, he presented himself as a conservative writer, what did not prevented him to meet several times Albert Hofmann to have LSD parties with him.

When I read today about the horror of war and civil war somewhere in Syria or in Africa, I am wondering if the militia men, the soldiers of the ruling regimes and the rebells, if they are more brainwashed by Juengers “Storm of Steel” justifications of killing, or brainwashed by drugs.  Without sever manipulation of the normal brain function, nobody can seriously consider a war as a field of human heroism.  For me, Albert Einstein, Joseph Roth, Jimmy Hendrix or Hugh Heffner are all real heroes, and they never needed to glorify war or the military.

take care
/ghazal

Send from my Nokia Lumia

Yesterday the great singer-songwriter Pete Seeger died. A month ago I still posted some thoughts on the occasion of his 94th birthday, when he appeared on stage at a small birthday party to sing “Turn, Turn, Turn” with his friends and the audience (which were more or less identical). Now Pete died, and leaves us not only with songs which became evergreens and often covered by other musicians, but also leaves us with memories of a great personality.  And here are my first memories of Pete Seeger:

When in East Germany we had our first english lesson at school, the teacher quickly understoud how to catch our attention: by listening and learning to American and English songs and music. Song texts of Rolling Stones, Led Zeppelin or Jefferson Airplane were not only hard to get, but were indexed by the authorities from being used at the schools. With Pete Seeger or Bob Dylan or Woody Guthrie it was easier: since their songs had a clear political message, left wing, anti-establishment, liberal and pacifistic, the state authorities had to give permission to publish them.

So I had a great LP of american protest songs, many written by Pete Seeger, and I had a song book, with the lyrics and the tunes and the guitar chordes. So we learned English at the age of 12 -16 to a large degree from the lyrics of Pete Seeger songs. When we read “Where have all the flowers gone” and “If I had a hammer”, we watch the cover photo of the song book, showing a photo of a young man with a banjo, in a typical singers position on a folk festival stage. Pete was 54 on this photo, and he was the hero for us teenagers. And also the teenage girls, our class mates, adored him. Somebody as Justin Bieber would have had no chance in those years. When he sang “If I had a hammer”, we understoud that a hammer would be really useful to knock down the wall, that only 1.5 miles away separated our Eastern part of Berlin from the real cool and free world.

When he sang “Where have all the flowers gone ?…. Young girls picked them everyone” we knew that in three years time the stupid army wants to recruit us, and then there wont be no flowers to pick and no girls to meet anymore. But Pete Seegers songs would be there to help us through all the stupidity.

It is sad that Pete Seeger died now, but I am somehow conviced that wherever he will have his incarnation, it will be together with Jimmy Hendrix, Amy Winehouse, Bob Marley, Whitney Houston, Janis Joplin, John Lennon, John Bonham and Kurt Cobain, and they will form the ultimate All Star Band. And last but not least, Marlene Dietrich will also be there to sing “Where have all the flowers gone”.

At the Munich Lyrics Cabinet, the editors presented the collected poems of Thomas Brasch (born 1945 in London, died 2001 in Berlin). Brasch, who was fighting against the harsh literary censoreship in East-Germany until is emigration to the West, later was facing neglectance by audience after German reunification. Only now, more than 10 years after his death the literature critics more and more discover the unique style of his lyrics and the psychological complexity of his different works. His poems, theater plays and film scripts describe the tragedy of lonely heros who are outsiders in a society that rushes from event to event.

As if the organizers of the Lyrics Cabinet had re-designed their rooms for this special event, comemorating Braschs long ordeal with restrictive publication policies, the reading of his newly-published texts took place in front of this very special book-shelf.