The Chinese girls arrive home at the Boppard hotel from Frankfurt at midday Saturday; an all-nighter. Karaoke, shots, Chinese songs, R&B, Rihanna, Jay-Z. I tell them about "Online" and the sounds of the 1080s. Sounds horrible, they say. Exhausted now, they need sleep. What else did you do...? Can't really remember. Time for Homework.
At the Romer Burg restaurant, nicely ancient and, the Chocolate Cafe People tell me, the best place to write, I don't write, seems gratuitous, and instead read some more Goethe, eat well, but am surprised the staff are insistent I don't drink German red wine; Chilean, that's the stuff. The soundtrack is samba heavy and the guests wear jackets and whisper. A first-holiday together couple, American-English, laugh too loudly at each other's jokes and think about a cocktail. I wander the high street, mid-afternoon. Tom is setting up his Dobro guitar. He's from Koblenz, plays in a jazz cum blues band up there. I'll be in Koblenz soon enough; just have a couple of detours, to Frankfurt and Brussels. Tom plays beautifully, sparse and with feeling.
Way down upon the Swanee River,
Far, far away
That's where my heart is turning ever
That's where the old folks stay
All up and down the whole creation,
Sadly I roam
Still longing for the old plantation
And for the old folks at home
Chorus:
All the world is sad and dreary everywhere I roam
Oh darkiness, how my heart grows weary
Far from the old folks at home
I start weeping gently. Which must be telling me something. Back in Bingen for the night before Frankfurt I am in Swiss luxury and photograph sublimity and the mouse tower and end up in a bar full of Two Pint Glasses, Accordion Bands and Take Me Home Country Roads. Natch.
I am in bed early. Clouds over the Rhine in the morning and via Mainz I'm in Frankfurt by mid-Afternoon. Tom took a barque, so feel utterly justified in taking the train, even if some of the factories, especially Opel's, look worthy of a wander-weg. Frankfurt is a shock. Skyscrapers; Ayn Rand -esque Euro signs the size of Louise Bourgois sculptures. Starbucks and "Dolly Busters" porn everywhere, on Kaiserstrasse at least. And Hotel is slap bang in the Red Light Slapper-weg; a Tourist Office Recommendation, of course. I wander down to mid-town, then the old town, but it feels utterly rebuilt. Try to write in a few cafes but in the morning the elegant prose looks like Egyptian hieroglyphics. Of course the Germans were good at deciphering that stuff in the nineteenth century; not me. At mid- morning after a wifi cheesecake and double espresso somewhere that could be in New York or London, I brace myself for Frankfurt's double-dose of modernity, the money towers and the strong sense of rebuilt-ness, and head, as all must, to the Goethe Haus. Calm at last.
There is something so nice about reading Goethe in his own garden. Is that a wanky thing to say? Who cares, really? It is fantastic. Frankfurt begins.
Showing posts with label Goethe. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Goethe. Show all posts
Thursday, 28 October 2010
Tuesday, 5 October 2010
Publishing and the oldest brothel in town. Mainz 2
"A matter that may seeme incredible to the understanding of many men, yet most certainly verified by experience. By virtue of this arte are communicated to the publike viewe of the Worlde the monuments of all learned authors that are set abroach out of the sacred treasurie of antiquity, and being now freed from that Cimmerian darknesse wherin they lurked for the space of many hundred yeares, and where they did cum tineis ac blattis rixari, to the great prejudice of the common weale of learning, but especially of God's church, are divulged the common light, and that to the infinite utility of all lovers of the Muses and professours of learning. By this arte all the liberall sciences are now brought to full ripeness and perfection. Had not this art bene invented by the divine providence of God, it was to be feared lest the true studies of all disciplines both divine & humane would have suffered a kind of shipwrack and have bene halfe extinct before this age wherein we breathe. I would to God we would use this great benefite of our gracious God (as a learned author saith) not to the obscuration but the illustration of Gods glory, not to dis-joine but rather to conjoine the members of Christes militant Church here on earth."
Thomas got printing in Mainz, there's no doubt of that. There is an argument that says printing created the Reformation, helped to promulgate its "framework." I'm really struck here in Mainz about the relationship of printing, especially those early printing centres that emerge in the later fifteenth century and onwards to Tom's time in the early years of the seventeenth, to the "River". Especially the Rhine. Strasbourg, Basel, Zurich, Mainz - and Frankfurt just a barge away up the Main - are all deeply constructed around the River as information highway, surely? This is for more thought, in colder, bookier, climes. AKA London.
Baby Photographer One told me about her previous job, house photographer on cruise lines, navigating the world with rich, older, guests. It was hard work: wherever in the world they landed her job was to capture the myriad being happy - and photogenic - in front of, well, the pyramids, the Bob Marley museum, the skyscrapers of Dubai. Photos all day, developing at night. I tell the baby photographers about The Venetian hotel in Vegas; they tell me about the security guards that follow into the toilets in the hotels on the Emirates, because the taps to flush are pure gold. "I'd rather have the smell of real Venice," Baby Photographer 2 says. "Although, I like casinos, as long as I win."
On the outskirts of Mainz heading for Bingen, not so far away up the Rhine, I stumble across a very modern building (photos on Facebook). It is beautiful in a slightly kitsch angular way, and it is certainly out of kilter with its surroundings. An older couple are investigating the exterior, seeing if it is possible to go inside. What is it, I ask.
The new synagogue, it is not even open yet.
It's rather amazing, no?
Yes, very nice. It is a Swiss architect. Mr. Hertz. (Although a later news story says from Cologne.)
They are cousins, he has has come to visit her. She has just retired as Professor of Archaeology here, he too is retired and nowadays translates Irish and Anglo-Irish poetry.
- He's very good, says the archaeologist.
The most recent a volume of Bernard O'Donoghue.
Cool.
Yes and next an anthology of anglo-Irish writers including Derek Mahon - one of my own favourites. We talk a little of The Hudson Letters. Both Swiss, both enjoying the new Synagogue, an unexpected surprise.
I had my first IPad meeting last night. At the next table a well dressed young man, flipping through his "Flipboard" app - Norbert got me clued into that in Zurich, I use it myself, it is a kind of mobile "Daily Me" thing.
You enjoying yours?
Absolutely, for work really.
Of course.
He's a publisher of a business magazine, a trade title, about fast moving consumer goods, FMCG. His title has a great market share, and German - good old still "making things" Germany - is riding the recession a little better, as it were, than Britain or American. We talk about publishing for ages, he's met my old boss; hung in New York with the Economist guys. Likeable, fun. A professional. Apps may be the salvation for publishing? We discuss. In Germany the regional press has a much greater strength and resilience than in American or Britain.
I wonder too if it also has a more refined readership.
The Pubishers' Wife arrives; she's involved in NGO work, Africa. Practical, friendly. They have travelled a great deal, big trips, southern India is next week. I talk about my love of that region, how once, many years ago, I got engaged down there. And next?
Oh next is another big trip - or a baby. I think it is time. The juggle of lives. It is time for dinner, they are going home. We swap Facebooks, then The Publisher says, hey, want to see the oldest Brothel in Mainz?
Irresistible, obviously.
It is their home, right in the centre of town, metres from the cathedral. They have an apartment; it's a very old house, but the interiors are modern and bauhausly less is more.
"Napoleon, when he was here, set this house up as the brothel for his officers. In the grand simple lobby a glass framed exhibit of Roman finds made here, when the rebuilding was being done. An instant series of archaeological and historical allusions.
"Julius Caesar having conquered all the Cities on this side of the Rhine which was in his time called Gallicum littusthe shore of Gallia &c. planted garrisons in each of them...for the better fortification of the place, and to keepe the bordering people living in the same territorie in awe and subjection of the Romans. For which cause he assigned Lieutenants called in Latin Proefecti to all the principall cities and Townesthat he had conquered," Tom writes. I think about that long sequence in Goethe's autobiography in which he describes his family house in Frankfurt being sequestered by the French - he makes some interesting observations, which find an echo I something I read by Tony Judt, but I'll come to them in Frankfurt.
I somehow miss dinner and chat to a couple about terrorism. An IT guy and a Graphic Designer, what really struck me, he says, about 9/11 was how personally I took it. I really thought "these guys are after people like me. And I'm just a regular guy who works with computers."
There's a Siegfried statue outside the Deutsch bank offices, and Mainz win again in their mid-week match. Top of the league still. In the bottom of my back pack I find a ripped newspaper article I've found. The London Daily Mail from September 15. An English woman who fell asleep and woke up speaking perfect French. I sometimes wish I could have that kind of sleep.
Instead I wake and walk to Bingen. It's about six hours, along the Rhine, the Rhine is its mid-Rhine glory, where each curve in the bend augurs another castle on the hills; more vineyards, and a lot of pleasure cruises, with or without in-house photographers. I stick low, close to the river, and parallel to road B9 - and the trains. Which now resemble a giant train set, spotted across the river, some great fantasy of mittel-European play. But they carry everything from people to tanks.
It is dark when I hit Bingen and the hotel sheets are itchy. In the back streets there is a lot of Russian being spoken. In the internet cafe, because there's no wifi around, a group of Turks and Slavs Skype home.
But I haven't seen Bingen by day, so I can't really judge. I know there is a big feminist mystic thing here. Hildegard. I fall asleep staring out of the windown into the gloom across the river and the vineyard hills. There is something up there, bright when the fog or the clouds move. I check the hotel tourist sheets. It is the statue of Germania, one of those Rhine Warrior Women. Frustuck is rather doleful; I head for the Hildegarde museum in the rain. Above me, in and out of the clouds, Germania looks down across the vineyards of the right bank.
Thomas got printing in Mainz, there's no doubt of that. There is an argument that says printing created the Reformation, helped to promulgate its "framework." I'm really struck here in Mainz about the relationship of printing, especially those early printing centres that emerge in the later fifteenth century and onwards to Tom's time in the early years of the seventeenth, to the "River". Especially the Rhine. Strasbourg, Basel, Zurich, Mainz - and Frankfurt just a barge away up the Main - are all deeply constructed around the River as information highway, surely? This is for more thought, in colder, bookier, climes. AKA London.
Baby Photographer One told me about her previous job, house photographer on cruise lines, navigating the world with rich, older, guests. It was hard work: wherever in the world they landed her job was to capture the myriad being happy - and photogenic - in front of, well, the pyramids, the Bob Marley museum, the skyscrapers of Dubai. Photos all day, developing at night. I tell the baby photographers about The Venetian hotel in Vegas; they tell me about the security guards that follow into the toilets in the hotels on the Emirates, because the taps to flush are pure gold. "I'd rather have the smell of real Venice," Baby Photographer 2 says. "Although, I like casinos, as long as I win."
On the outskirts of Mainz heading for Bingen, not so far away up the Rhine, I stumble across a very modern building (photos on Facebook). It is beautiful in a slightly kitsch angular way, and it is certainly out of kilter with its surroundings. An older couple are investigating the exterior, seeing if it is possible to go inside. What is it, I ask.
The new synagogue, it is not even open yet.
It's rather amazing, no?
Yes, very nice. It is a Swiss architect. Mr. Hertz. (Although a later news story says from Cologne.)
They are cousins, he has has come to visit her. She has just retired as Professor of Archaeology here, he too is retired and nowadays translates Irish and Anglo-Irish poetry.
- He's very good, says the archaeologist.
The most recent a volume of Bernard O'Donoghue.
Cool.
Yes and next an anthology of anglo-Irish writers including Derek Mahon - one of my own favourites. We talk a little of The Hudson Letters. Both Swiss, both enjoying the new Synagogue, an unexpected surprise.
I had my first IPad meeting last night. At the next table a well dressed young man, flipping through his "Flipboard" app - Norbert got me clued into that in Zurich, I use it myself, it is a kind of mobile "Daily Me" thing.
You enjoying yours?
Absolutely, for work really.
Of course.
He's a publisher of a business magazine, a trade title, about fast moving consumer goods, FMCG. His title has a great market share, and German - good old still "making things" Germany - is riding the recession a little better, as it were, than Britain or American. We talk about publishing for ages, he's met my old boss; hung in New York with the Economist guys. Likeable, fun. A professional. Apps may be the salvation for publishing? We discuss. In Germany the regional press has a much greater strength and resilience than in American or Britain.
I wonder too if it also has a more refined readership.
The Pubishers' Wife arrives; she's involved in NGO work, Africa. Practical, friendly. They have travelled a great deal, big trips, southern India is next week. I talk about my love of that region, how once, many years ago, I got engaged down there. And next?
Oh next is another big trip - or a baby. I think it is time. The juggle of lives. It is time for dinner, they are going home. We swap Facebooks, then The Publisher says, hey, want to see the oldest Brothel in Mainz?
Irresistible, obviously.
It is their home, right in the centre of town, metres from the cathedral. They have an apartment; it's a very old house, but the interiors are modern and bauhausly less is more.
"Napoleon, when he was here, set this house up as the brothel for his officers. In the grand simple lobby a glass framed exhibit of Roman finds made here, when the rebuilding was being done. An instant series of archaeological and historical allusions.
"Julius Caesar having conquered all the Cities on this side of the Rhine which was in his time called Gallicum littusthe shore of Gallia &c. planted garrisons in each of them...for the better fortification of the place, and to keepe the bordering people living in the same territorie in awe and subjection of the Romans. For which cause he assigned Lieutenants called in Latin Proefecti to all the principall cities and Townesthat he had conquered," Tom writes. I think about that long sequence in Goethe's autobiography in which he describes his family house in Frankfurt being sequestered by the French - he makes some interesting observations, which find an echo I something I read by Tony Judt, but I'll come to them in Frankfurt.
I somehow miss dinner and chat to a couple about terrorism. An IT guy and a Graphic Designer, what really struck me, he says, about 9/11 was how personally I took it. I really thought "these guys are after people like me. And I'm just a regular guy who works with computers."
There's a Siegfried statue outside the Deutsch bank offices, and Mainz win again in their mid-week match. Top of the league still. In the bottom of my back pack I find a ripped newspaper article I've found. The London Daily Mail from September 15. An English woman who fell asleep and woke up speaking perfect French. I sometimes wish I could have that kind of sleep.
Instead I wake and walk to Bingen. It's about six hours, along the Rhine, the Rhine is its mid-Rhine glory, where each curve in the bend augurs another castle on the hills; more vineyards, and a lot of pleasure cruises, with or without in-house photographers. I stick low, close to the river, and parallel to road B9 - and the trains. Which now resemble a giant train set, spotted across the river, some great fantasy of mittel-European play. But they carry everything from people to tanks.
It is dark when I hit Bingen and the hotel sheets are itchy. In the back streets there is a lot of Russian being spoken. In the internet cafe, because there's no wifi around, a group of Turks and Slavs Skype home.
But I haven't seen Bingen by day, so I can't really judge. I know there is a big feminist mystic thing here. Hildegard. I fall asleep staring out of the windown into the gloom across the river and the vineyard hills. There is something up there, bright when the fog or the clouds move. I check the hotel tourist sheets. It is the statue of Germania, one of those Rhine Warrior Women. Frustuck is rather doleful; I head for the Hildegarde museum in the rain. Above me, in and out of the clouds, Germania looks down across the vineyards of the right bank.
Friday, 17 September 2010
Heidelberg: philosophy compulsory
My favourite moment of the Baden-Baden Grayson Perry incident happens without him, back at the Capuchin-Radisson reception desk. An elderly German couple were, they explain, sitting behind me in the Travel Pussy cafe. They want to know, pretty simply - what the hell was all that about?
Neither my German or their English are up to the post-modernish complexities of Grayson Perry's life, art work, persona; the project itself; or Philippa Perry - yes, I keep saying, Grayson's wife. This is a stumbling block.
We use the receptionist, Russian, to translate - even then we are in Scarlett/Bill Murray land, lost in translation.
The photographs of the meeting with the BBC crew, the artist and his wife, are all on Facebook, so sign up if you need to see these, plus a ton of rapturous landscapes. One of the foibles of the IPAD is that it doesn't look as if I can post pix to my blog site, though Facebook is a simple email exercise. Well done Mr. Zuckermann. Sorry about the movie.
For those that haven't seen the pictures the point about Grayson Perry's persona, is that he is dressed in an exotic costume, a woman's dress that's a sort of space-cadet take on Tootsie, and it's all to do with someone called "Clare." There's a lot of iconography going on, but that's for real Freeze art critics, I've got enough on my plate with the catholics and protestants.
Heidelberg looks a bit grim @ the Banhof, then blossoms in a gorgeous triangulation of river, hills, ruins, and old town. It's raining and who cares?
It really has all happened here: Martin Luther, Goethe, Hannah Arendt and the American army (still based in a camp just outside town) have lived in Heidelberg. There's a pedestrianised old main street, with glossy stores and a Foreign-Student Pleasing Starbucks, almost empty. A fine bricked marketplatz and cathedral, a dominating, high on the hill.semi-ruined castle out of the imagination of every gothic novel, and then some. Only it is far older.
As Johann Holderlin wrote, in Heidelberg:
But heavy, hulking into the valley hung
The Fate-Acquainted castle, the vast, all Torn
And battered down to its foundations:
Neverthesless even there the sun now...
Coryat like the place too:
Moreover there are fome that affirmed it i called Heidelberg quasi Adelberg, that is, a noble City, in regard of the nobility, the elegancy, and fweetneffe of the fituation thereof...
I march up to the castle without funicular, the views are stunning, everything triangulates, seems whole. Even the hundreds of camera-friendly umbrella holders, Japanese often. At the arch to the old bridge, fifty metres from my hotel there appears to a continuous Japanese wedding taking place. I think for a moment of Barney and Bjork and their Japanese Whale Ship.
I miss lunch.
It's hard not to feel philosophical here.. Compulsory really. I walk back down windy curved streets and take in the university where Luther defended his revolutionary thesis, and kick-started the Protestant Revolution. And where 400 years later Max Weber invented the Protestant Work Ethic. Then a second hand book store, old boxed set DVDs of Fasbinder, Douglas Sirk, Catherine Deneuve.
I immediately imagine a Jacques Demy movie set here, The Philosophers of Heidelberg. Francois Dorleac as Hannah Arendt, Maybe Delon as Karl Jaspers...People next, I guess.
Neither my German or their English are up to the post-modernish complexities of Grayson Perry's life, art work, persona; the project itself; or Philippa Perry - yes, I keep saying, Grayson's wife. This is a stumbling block.
We use the receptionist, Russian, to translate - even then we are in Scarlett/Bill Murray land, lost in translation.
The photographs of the meeting with the BBC crew, the artist and his wife, are all on Facebook, so sign up if you need to see these, plus a ton of rapturous landscapes. One of the foibles of the IPAD is that it doesn't look as if I can post pix to my blog site, though Facebook is a simple email exercise. Well done Mr. Zuckermann. Sorry about the movie.
For those that haven't seen the pictures the point about Grayson Perry's persona, is that he is dressed in an exotic costume, a woman's dress that's a sort of space-cadet take on Tootsie, and it's all to do with someone called "Clare." There's a lot of iconography going on, but that's for real Freeze art critics, I've got enough on my plate with the catholics and protestants.
Heidelberg looks a bit grim @ the Banhof, then blossoms in a gorgeous triangulation of river, hills, ruins, and old town. It's raining and who cares?
It really has all happened here: Martin Luther, Goethe, Hannah Arendt and the American army (still based in a camp just outside town) have lived in Heidelberg. There's a pedestrianised old main street, with glossy stores and a Foreign-Student Pleasing Starbucks, almost empty. A fine bricked marketplatz and cathedral, a dominating, high on the hill.semi-ruined castle out of the imagination of every gothic novel, and then some. Only it is far older.
As Johann Holderlin wrote, in Heidelberg:
But heavy, hulking into the valley hung
The Fate-Acquainted castle, the vast, all Torn
And battered down to its foundations:
Neverthesless even there the sun now...
Coryat like the place too:
Moreover there are fome that affirmed it i called Heidelberg quasi Adelberg, that is, a noble City, in regard of the nobility, the elegancy, and fweetneffe of the fituation thereof...
I march up to the castle without funicular, the views are stunning, everything triangulates, seems whole. Even the hundreds of camera-friendly umbrella holders, Japanese often. At the arch to the old bridge, fifty metres from my hotel there appears to a continuous Japanese wedding taking place. I think for a moment of Barney and Bjork and their Japanese Whale Ship.
I miss lunch.
It's hard not to feel philosophical here.. Compulsory really. I walk back down windy curved streets and take in the university where Luther defended his revolutionary thesis, and kick-started the Protestant Revolution. And where 400 years later Max Weber invented the Protestant Work Ethic. Then a second hand book store, old boxed set DVDs of Fasbinder, Douglas Sirk, Catherine Deneuve.
I immediately imagine a Jacques Demy movie set here, The Philosophers of Heidelberg. Francois Dorleac as Hannah Arendt, Maybe Delon as Karl Jaspers...People next, I guess.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)