You're only here once, so you've got to get it right
- no time to fuss and fight -
Coz life doesn't mean much if it's measured out in someone else's time
XTC, King for a Day, 1989
A lot of IPod this time, walking; speeding the pace and breaking out the sweat. Standing on the bow, staring Byronically into space. The walk back to Konigswinter is a sign of what it is to come in Bonn, capital between 1949 and 1989 and reunification. There is a nice old town, riverside bars, a sense of fun. But there's also Alphaville down the road, where now the Post Office Tower dominates. Politics is gone; though there is a healthy amount of marxist merlarky in the bookshops near where I've been sick in Bonn.
So down through Alphaville, without stopping, that's for Bonn when I'm back, then a twist to cross the bridge and a four hour romp to Konigswinter. A two street town in once sense; that's where the cafes and restaurants are, but looming behind, the Seven Mountains, the Siebengebirge, where the dragon was slayed by Siegfried. Dragon is Drach, see various plays on this in Bram Stoker and indeed Ian Fleming, Moonraker's villain is Drax. And Fleming always said his plot was George (Siegfried) versus the Dragon.
The hills merge and at their peaks, inevitably, castles or ruins. Drachenfels, which gets its own stanza in Byron, is the daily tourist schlep. Most go by the mini-railway, stopping off at the late 19th century industrialists' house cum castle, half way, or going straight for the top and what is, very often, a foggy day in Konigswinter town. It seems fitting that the view back down the way I've come is clouded and mysterious; This is a new phase, moving into the Ruhr, and expected industry. I can cope; quite like the bleak industrial. From the peak of Drachenfels a view backwards reveals an imposing building on the Petersburg. What's that? Hmm, a huge hotel; that would have been the state residence of the President, had the hotels refurbishment not been completed in 1990. Bad timing. Anyway, I make a note to walk up there tomorrow.
There's a wedding going on in the industrialist's ex-haus. Cameramen and women in hats. Inside there's a lot of late 19th faux frilly art, which was once so popular books were published so that arriviste Germans could copy the style in their own houses. The place is monstrously large, and became a catholic boys college in the 1930s - what they must have made of the largely naked Greek-ish art....anyway, then it was a Nazi college of some kind, but details are thin these days. I wander back down to the river, order some schnitzel and download John Le Carre's A Small Town in Germany. A mini classic of espionage from 1969, which benefits from Le Carre's having lived here; in fact I think he wrote The Spy Who Came in From the Cold here. God it's a bleak book; the back drop is a suspected rise in the German far right; and Britain's general impotent uselessness. I read the whole thing in a riverside gloom of red wine as the tourist boats pull away from the bank in search of more fertile excitements.
The facial type I keep seeing is Putin and Harrison Ford. Strange. The world of Bonn and Konigswinter found in Le Carre makes me weep tears of joy I wasn't an adult for the 60s; grey, brutish and run by Etonians. Er...and that's the other thing: the riots in London are playing out their political aftermath and the London hacking scandal lurches on in more - no, they didn't hack thems... - and it is impossible not to follow this real-time on Guardian or Telegraph feeds, how The Times must wish it wasn't behind a firewall....not. So it is a curious triangular experience, the real, the fiction and the Siegfriedian, and what's happening in the world. I've got the Skype app now as well, so London can be calling anytime. The world grows small. The Petersburg Hotel, I learn from A Small Town is where Neville Chamberlain stayed when he signed off on the last vestiges of morality that Britain owned in the 1930s, that we call the Munich Agreement. As I climb the windy forest past a series of 18th century stations of the cross that have been restored now, I think about the car driving the British delegation up here; and I've just read of anxious meetings over lunch here between the diplomats and the Bonn hacks, trying to get a story in the cold war 60s.
The Petersburg is restored now, but a conference centre; the Clintons, Mandela, the Queen twice have stayed, but I am able to wander into the deserted ball room without meeting anyone. On the terrace I imagine the intrigues, then, and during Bonn's prime time. The choice was Adenauer's, a local, who signed the treaty in 1949 that restored some forms of German autonomy. There's a party of Americans and Brits taking a quick tour; most interested in the hotel chapel, where Michael Schumacher married. One of the kids, rotund, aubergine'd in the Cameron mode, throws rocks over the terrace wall with thuggish entitlement; a moment later a cry in german. He's hit an elderly woman walking back down the Petersburg with her husband. The kid does nothing; his mother shouts down in Home Counties: "He didn't mean it." A few minutes later I am in the same place as the walkers and the next Prime Minister but, say, three, is by my side throwing more rocks. "What the fuck are you doing?" I say. He wanders off, probably 9 or 10. His parents give me the full diplomatic diss as I walk past them.
History up here; but not many arrive; there's a far more modern spa half way up the hill, golf not so far away. Once all these towns housed the diplomatic teams from around the world; now they are away in Berlin. So what now for Bonn?
Thursday, 15 September 2011
On not getting started, again
Dordrecht, September 15.
Above me on the wall in green faux handwriting a long quote from Francis Bacon's "Of Gardens". It begins GOD Almighty first planted a garden. And indeed it is the purest of human pleasures...
This has been a different mode of travel since August; less the spiritual philosphe-weg through the vineyards of the mid-Rhine, more a series of exercises in how people live. It began in Koblenz this time, as it ended last year. I am still walking, but these pieces are in a surge of recollection and Moleskine sitting in a converted Water Tower on the outskirts of Dordrecht.
In late September 2010 I took, following Tom, my first boat, from Boppard, location of the Chinese beer-garden, at dusk, standing on the prow like one of those wooden statues from the 17th century brig, amazed at how much faster, how changed the perspective when moving with a little more speed. The colours change as well, purples and mustard yellows replace the fertile greens; the river is lead, then blue; the moon is out.
The trip ended last autumn because of stolen credit cards; and began where Koblenz let off last time in a chorus of people. Last year it was students doing a pub crawl which made my bar, Mephisto, heavenly quiet and then hellishly fully. The bar features old movie posters, plays punk - especially Richard Hell - and a plenty of Wombats, and though later in Cologne and Dusseldorf I'll be told the place is "far too commercial" it suited a need last year; this year I stay for one drink.
Albert Speer spent a great deal of time after his release from Spandau in Koblenz, pouring through the archive to prove he didn't know what people said he must know. Ultimately Gita Sereny proved that Speer's actions were in vain.
In the main square around midnight a group of strange zombie like characters in white bathrobes, but look for all the world like members of the Klu Klux Klan. Tourists from America, off a cruise liner and told to wear the outfit so they didn't get lost because these were (though hardly Chandler's) mean streets. And I am Moose Molloy.
This time it is a few weeks earlier and there are thousands of tour parties in many languages, the new spin being head-sets for each member and a guide speaking into their cell phone. No more palatable. Rain too, as before; Koblenz was then and leads this time, the sense that the sunshine of the mid-rhine is over. I wander around at night, visit the archives, really try, but can't get started....
Tom must have been exhausted by now, unlike me he hasn't had breaks, years passed, in which to regroup and make sense of his experiences. It is not a surprise to hear that he began rowing now, and picked up some other Englishmen who had been studying in Heidelberg. I think his heart was on Cologne - the last biggie, with its famous cathedral - and then London. I didn't want to be in this frame of mind, but couldn't quite connect. I wrote poetry instead....hmm.
The first walk was to Andernach and on the way I got sick; and Andernach was small and not unlike Boppard. Then I got really sick, took a train to Bonn and slept off the languor for two days. Travel wimp.
Germans had shown surprise I was walking on from the glorious mid-Rhine. It gets ugly they said. I was about to see.
Above me on the wall in green faux handwriting a long quote from Francis Bacon's "Of Gardens". It begins GOD Almighty first planted a garden. And indeed it is the purest of human pleasures...
This has been a different mode of travel since August; less the spiritual philosphe-weg through the vineyards of the mid-Rhine, more a series of exercises in how people live. It began in Koblenz this time, as it ended last year. I am still walking, but these pieces are in a surge of recollection and Moleskine sitting in a converted Water Tower on the outskirts of Dordrecht.
In late September 2010 I took, following Tom, my first boat, from Boppard, location of the Chinese beer-garden, at dusk, standing on the prow like one of those wooden statues from the 17th century brig, amazed at how much faster, how changed the perspective when moving with a little more speed. The colours change as well, purples and mustard yellows replace the fertile greens; the river is lead, then blue; the moon is out.
The trip ended last autumn because of stolen credit cards; and began where Koblenz let off last time in a chorus of people. Last year it was students doing a pub crawl which made my bar, Mephisto, heavenly quiet and then hellishly fully. The bar features old movie posters, plays punk - especially Richard Hell - and a plenty of Wombats, and though later in Cologne and Dusseldorf I'll be told the place is "far too commercial" it suited a need last year; this year I stay for one drink.
Albert Speer spent a great deal of time after his release from Spandau in Koblenz, pouring through the archive to prove he didn't know what people said he must know. Ultimately Gita Sereny proved that Speer's actions were in vain.
In the main square around midnight a group of strange zombie like characters in white bathrobes, but look for all the world like members of the Klu Klux Klan. Tourists from America, off a cruise liner and told to wear the outfit so they didn't get lost because these were (though hardly Chandler's) mean streets. And I am Moose Molloy.
This time it is a few weeks earlier and there are thousands of tour parties in many languages, the new spin being head-sets for each member and a guide speaking into their cell phone. No more palatable. Rain too, as before; Koblenz was then and leads this time, the sense that the sunshine of the mid-rhine is over. I wander around at night, visit the archives, really try, but can't get started....
Tom must have been exhausted by now, unlike me he hasn't had breaks, years passed, in which to regroup and make sense of his experiences. It is not a surprise to hear that he began rowing now, and picked up some other Englishmen who had been studying in Heidelberg. I think his heart was on Cologne - the last biggie, with its famous cathedral - and then London. I didn't want to be in this frame of mind, but couldn't quite connect. I wrote poetry instead....hmm.
The first walk was to Andernach and on the way I got sick; and Andernach was small and not unlike Boppard. Then I got really sick, took a train to Bonn and slept off the languor for two days. Travel wimp.
Germans had shown surprise I was walking on from the glorious mid-Rhine. It gets ugly they said. I was about to see.
Thursday, 8 September 2011
The Film Forum Duisburg
There are, I should say, eight fabulous Anselm Kiefers here.
Pocket Spaces
Q. Where are the nice bars?
A. In Dusseldorf
Q. What about Innenhafen?
A. It's made by computers
Spaces in between are pockets of resistance,
Fight escalated prairies of market perfection
By requiring either an informed local knowledge
Or a forensic informal nose for the nuance
That separates OK from possibilities
To learn more than the latest in high street fashion
In Duisburg the challenge is compounded by
Aerial poundings in the name of freedom,
An old town only by computer generation
In the Stadt museum; a docklands of cocktails...
Bolero ist gut, go to Innenhafen:
Identikit cultures - kubar, chilli-haus - come on...
...The rain doesn't help, sending inside helpful signs
Of independence, spirits unbowed by the mall's
Fierce grip; and a campus zoo university
Where Schliemann archaeologists must dig for life.
This victory's reward: to dream of Dusseldorf
Whose altstadt is the longest bar in the world.
Film Forum cafe, Duisburg, September 8, 2011.
A pocket of resistance.
Pocket Spaces
Q. Where are the nice bars?
A. In Dusseldorf
Q. What about Innenhafen?
A. It's made by computers
Spaces in between are pockets of resistance,
Fight escalated prairies of market perfection
By requiring either an informed local knowledge
Or a forensic informal nose for the nuance
That separates OK from possibilities
To learn more than the latest in high street fashion
In Duisburg the challenge is compounded by
Aerial poundings in the name of freedom,
An old town only by computer generation
In the Stadt museum; a docklands of cocktails...
Bolero ist gut, go to Innenhafen:
Identikit cultures - kubar, chilli-haus - come on...
...The rain doesn't help, sending inside helpful signs
Of independence, spirits unbowed by the mall's
Fierce grip; and a campus zoo university
Where Schliemann archaeologists must dig for life.
This victory's reward: to dream of Dusseldorf
Whose altstadt is the longest bar in the world.
Film Forum cafe, Duisburg, September 8, 2011.
A pocket of resistance.
Thursday, 1 September 2011
Bonn
Kulturkampf
Gott und die Staat features in the neat bookshop window frieze
Suggesting that Bonn has not lost all of its politics
With the reunifying right hand shift back to Berlin.
Because old-school Marxist analysis never said seize
The day and raise pedestrian downtown for an Adidas fix
And, here, class action isn't in pursuit of a plasma screen.
It's weird now, news, a café password and the world undresses
At the tourist table, and the unlikely urban tales
Of literal carpet bombing and god-driven primary
Infect the body-politic reading die local presses
With the ordinary disease, and my mobile betrayals
Alienate further the chance of serendipity.
Bauhaus Less is More, that revived spartan revolution
(requiring less Spartan credit facilities) that's passed
Away again with counter-revolutionary
Inevitability, poses the intuition
That a simplicity can help shape how our lives are cast -
And yes, pared down are the Apple products that I carry.
Somewhere nearby there's a Beethoven thing, claims Google
With a little luck I can walk it in eighteen minutes
From here - using GMaps - but there's a live feed, Adele...
And Test Match Special where Anderson's bowling is frugal;
Rolling updates on the acting commissioner's regrets
While across the street, for all I know, Icarus just fell
Couples reconcile, plan pregnancy, consider divorce.
Maybe...their narratives beyond my basic Goethe-trained drawl
Do I gain from the comment page of no firm conclusions?
And this pause for thought - head up, screen off - now reveals the source
Of what politicians always name the wake up call:
My battery is dead, ach, total social exclusion.
Gott und die Staat features in the neat bookshop window frieze
Suggesting that Bonn has not lost all of its politics
With the reunifying right hand shift back to Berlin.
Because old-school Marxist analysis never said seize
The day and raise pedestrian downtown for an Adidas fix
And, here, class action isn't in pursuit of a plasma screen.
It's weird now, news, a café password and the world undresses
At the tourist table, and the unlikely urban tales
Of literal carpet bombing and god-driven primary
Infect the body-politic reading die local presses
With the ordinary disease, and my mobile betrayals
Alienate further the chance of serendipity.
Bauhaus Less is More, that revived spartan revolution
(requiring less Spartan credit facilities) that's passed
Away again with counter-revolutionary
Inevitability, poses the intuition
That a simplicity can help shape how our lives are cast -
And yes, pared down are the Apple products that I carry.
Somewhere nearby there's a Beethoven thing, claims Google
With a little luck I can walk it in eighteen minutes
From here - using GMaps - but there's a live feed, Adele...
And Test Match Special where Anderson's bowling is frugal;
Rolling updates on the acting commissioner's regrets
While across the street, for all I know, Icarus just fell
Couples reconcile, plan pregnancy, consider divorce.
Maybe...their narratives beyond my basic Goethe-trained drawl
Do I gain from the comment page of no firm conclusions?
And this pause for thought - head up, screen off - now reveals the source
Of what politicians always name the wake up call:
My battery is dead, ach, total social exclusion.
Friday, 26 August 2011
A thought on New York from Rugen island, Germany
After the Thirties
Even Auden came to God in post-war years
And he did quit while we weren't ahead -
Although his Manhattan destination
Was not yet cursed by fiscal deity
And forgiveness can be found for that voice
Which, no more confused than, say, Aquinas
Preached a pretty practical kind of love.
And who not born again can think clearly
About their deficits without some help?
Clarity, he proves, isn't simplicity:
A limo'd abstraction - for poet or banker -
Adds up to a lack of vision, shorting
Opportunities to gain in kindness,
And perhaps the market for such brutal
Compassion is up for the brutal
While compassion needs bailing out, but
After attacks September went viral
Proving a universal gold standard
Which all kinds of people appreciate.
Even Auden came to God in post-war years
And he did quit while we weren't ahead -
Although his Manhattan destination
Was not yet cursed by fiscal deity
And forgiveness can be found for that voice
Which, no more confused than, say, Aquinas
Preached a pretty practical kind of love.
And who not born again can think clearly
About their deficits without some help?
Clarity, he proves, isn't simplicity:
A limo'd abstraction - for poet or banker -
Adds up to a lack of vision, shorting
Opportunities to gain in kindness,
And perhaps the market for such brutal
Compassion is up for the brutal
While compassion needs bailing out, but
After attacks September went viral
Proving a universal gold standard
Which all kinds of people appreciate.
Sunday, 14 August 2011
Rhinetown, a little different
Rhinetown
A rash of Rhine-bank motor homes broadcast Bundesliga
From Achilles' shields and the Jesuit college is closing:
The group can deal, will later uncork Gewürztraminer
At wine festivals concluded by 'rock stars' overdosing
On crimes committed against musical humanity
And the piped paddle-steamboat accordions battle beats
With disco cruisers and containers freighting white Audis
To Cologne - while, off-Rhine, Frankfurt (am Main) counts tax receipts.
At weekends hinterland parks with tended paths and signed walks
Echo to the Iron Man ker-klunk of local baseball leagues,
In Kunstmuseum back room post-docs write Otto Dix talks.
Below, sinewed heptathletes dodge leashed dogs and frisbee geeks.
Mark Twain once hucked-up here with all the usual suspects
Of the grand theft auto tour who inflamed all their senses
With sublime stimuli for their unexpected subtexts.
Peak-top castles canto'd by many now host conferences
Where global ethical governance Powerpoints are penned
After veal and port and minstrel songs as new strategy
To spark the market engine; tidy warehouses that send
Good goods up and down stream without need of an elegy.
Spry mystics, dry vintners, prefabricated haus gurus
Ferment their vintages high in these heritage site hills
Explained by the staffs of multi-lingual tourist bureaus
In stark example of Germany's pan-european skills.
With magic Merrells sodden the only shoe shop around
Has silver Birkenstock sandals deigned by Heidi Klum
(@ several hundred Euros) - few spotted on the ground.
Ein bischen half-arsed hoodies on T-Mobile chewing gum:
Small town rebellion, Commerz-bankers' sons don't belong,
They're still winning bets by BlackBerry cheat in cocktail bars
- Peopled by red-braced Mohicans, though that could just be Bonn -
Serving tinned Sontag brunch spaghetti with chill-out guitars.
These towns that lack the serious loot and ripe Reeperbahns,
Without golf-karting Messe halls or Keifer collection
Tide along the waves of summer seasons with few alarms,
Such picturesque business gives strangers cause for reflection.
A rash of Rhine-bank motor homes broadcast Bundesliga
From Achilles' shields and the Jesuit college is closing:
The group can deal, will later uncork Gewürztraminer
At wine festivals concluded by 'rock stars' overdosing
On crimes committed against musical humanity
And the piped paddle-steamboat accordions battle beats
With disco cruisers and containers freighting white Audis
To Cologne - while, off-Rhine, Frankfurt (am Main) counts tax receipts.
At weekends hinterland parks with tended paths and signed walks
Echo to the Iron Man ker-klunk of local baseball leagues,
In Kunstmuseum back room post-docs write Otto Dix talks.
Below, sinewed heptathletes dodge leashed dogs and frisbee geeks.
Mark Twain once hucked-up here with all the usual suspects
Of the grand theft auto tour who inflamed all their senses
With sublime stimuli for their unexpected subtexts.
Peak-top castles canto'd by many now host conferences
Where global ethical governance Powerpoints are penned
After veal and port and minstrel songs as new strategy
To spark the market engine; tidy warehouses that send
Good goods up and down stream without need of an elegy.
Spry mystics, dry vintners, prefabricated haus gurus
Ferment their vintages high in these heritage site hills
Explained by the staffs of multi-lingual tourist bureaus
In stark example of Germany's pan-european skills.
With magic Merrells sodden the only shoe shop around
Has silver Birkenstock sandals deigned by Heidi Klum
(@ several hundred Euros) - few spotted on the ground.
Ein bischen half-arsed hoodies on T-Mobile chewing gum:
Small town rebellion, Commerz-bankers' sons don't belong,
They're still winning bets by BlackBerry cheat in cocktail bars
- Peopled by red-braced Mohicans, though that could just be Bonn -
Serving tinned Sontag brunch spaghetti with chill-out guitars.
These towns that lack the serious loot and ripe Reeperbahns,
Without golf-karting Messe halls or Keifer collection
Tide along the waves of summer seasons with few alarms,
Such picturesque business gives strangers cause for reflection.
Tuesday, 9 August 2011
Tuesday, 2 August 2011
Ich habe keine Ducati
So, two intensive weeks at the Goethe Institute and I am linguistically charged ein bischen.
I can now count to a thousand and name all the countries in the EU. Still have some problems translating Heine.
Anyway, the final leg begins next week from Koblenz...My only new fact about the city is that Albert Speer came often to the archives when writing his autobiography; Gitta Sereny's book was better. In fact amazing.
Still walking, no Grayson Perry motorbike for me. A last few days in the BL, writing dissertation on Elizabethan terror, and sneaking a glimpse of old Tom's Crudities, just to remind myself....
I can now count to a thousand and name all the countries in the EU. Still have some problems translating Heine.
Anyway, the final leg begins next week from Koblenz...My only new fact about the city is that Albert Speer came often to the archives when writing his autobiography; Gitta Sereny's book was better. In fact amazing.
Still walking, no Grayson Perry motorbike for me. A last few days in the BL, writing dissertation on Elizabethan terror, and sneaking a glimpse of old Tom's Crudities, just to remind myself....
Saturday, 11 June 2011
PLF
"The European trek was undertaken with a book in mind – he was inspired by George Orwell's Down and Out in Paris and London – but 40 years would pass before Paddy published the first volume of his projected trilogy on the adventure. Asked why it took so long, he shot back: "Laziness and timidity."
Full obituary here
Sunday, 5 June 2011
Thursday, 28 October 2010
Am Frankfurt
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.
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.
Thursday, 21 October 2010
Bopping to AOR
So, a short walk along and next to the Rhine on the second attempt to make Boppard with all the speeding car, toy train, barge and cruise-liner semiotics. That's ok, sometimes the vineyard wanderings make me a little too sublime-centric.
Phil Collins was being interviewed last night on German TV; I watched in a type of suspended animation that never occurs wandering a Roman ruin or Reformation church. I've just been asked to go and speak in a week or so at the European Parliament in Brussels about digital piracy: I want to say that the money in music these days is in touring, getting played on Spotify, or better still soundtracking a Will Farrell movie: the CD or the I-Tunes download is really just a promotional device.
But that's subversive. Unlike Phil Collins, who seems to think he is Goethe. Faust vs. A Trick of the Tail?
I re-water at a biker's motel right on the river, filled for some reason with lots of salty dog, shiver-my-timbers, Billy Budd imagery. At least the water is only 1 Euro. Then Bad Salzig for a bun. It's not that the castles have become boring, but they are repetitive. It is hard to make judgements about which to hop to, and which to merely shoot from afar. I walk past a cyclist, older, my age, but he looks really fit and tanned. He's doing "Heidelburg-Cologne" in two days. In many ways I even him, but I so like my slowness these days. I realise belatedly that I have never yet been on the Rhine; everything else but not on. I wonder what that experience is like?
I take a couple of photographs for my cyclist and he stops for a sandwich, half an hour later he passes with a wave and a happy-walk. Soon enough I am noodling into Boppard. It is early afternoon, feels so like a market town. Humming - in its own way - with end of the week-ness. A brass band walks out from the Boppard Tourist Office in outfits that would shock Yes or Supertramp at their most pompous. Half Pearly-Queen, half Gutenberg Bible. It is five minutes to three.
Later I wander towards the railway station, looking for an off Rhine hotel; there are about a zillion on the water front, each waiting for the cruise ships to arrive. I've wander-weg'd the front and feel like a change. Lolling at the station two Chinese girls, students perhaps, but dressed to kill, Last Emperoresses both. Sisters. Where are you going, I ask.
The younger pouts; the older - Frankfurt. Their parents came here thirty years ago; originally their from a city south of Shanghai, but the girls are born here. They like New York, relatives, in business, not really sure what. And Atlantic City, relatives, in business, not really sure what. Not interested in Las Vegas, but Disneyland - oh yeah. They work in the hotel in the summers, study economics - and, clearly fashion. They've met a lot of English students, "you know, getting Kulture." I tell them about walking in the Vineyards. The pouty faces again. "But how can you do that in stilettos?" They phone and text and are off for the night to Frankfurt.
I book into their parent's hotel, complete with Chinese restaurant. Back in the marketplace the Brass Band has made-over into red frock coat based outfits. It seems the mid-Rhine is cigar friendly, there are a lot being smoked out here in the crisp chilling sun over beers and ice creams and the occasional coffee. Dali-style moustaches are also not unknown. The band kicks in, I polish another espresso and watch as from an apartment window above the Restaurant Alte Schmede a sweet-faced granny bops away like crazy to the music. Perhaps this is where Boppard gets its name?
The band is called The Blue Mops, they have come from Nigmegan in Holland, because - oh yes, I had forgotten, there is a wine festival tonight. Here is their first set in full. Everyone of the songs rocking with a rather fine rhythm quite unlike those oom-pah Brass Bands of old. And one member just dances, like the man who stood next to Suggs in Madness. I think of a scene in The Ipcress File with Michael Caine and his stiff-upper-lip boss in Hyde Park listening to the old-school brass band for a while.
The Set.
The Lion Sleeps Tonight
Boogie-Oogie
We Will Rock You
We Are the Champions
River Deep, Mountain High
I'm So Excited!
Something German that everyone claps along with
Take Me Home, Country Roads (obligatory in the mid-Rhine, it appears)
Top of the World
By the time the Blue Mops exit, everyone is happy. I celebrate by ordering a Dunkle Trinkschokolade Mit Chilli. I think of that movie set in France, Leslie Caron, Juliet Binoche, all that whimsey and Chocolate. If I am really unlucky the next visitor to Boppard's marketsquare will be Johnny Depp carrying a ridiculous Irish accent.
In my book, Goethe's Frankfurt house has been garrisoned by the French. I think back to Mainz and Napoleon's brothel for his officers. From one of the waiters in the chocolate cafe I learn that small change is Kleingeld, sounds Wagnerian - if a little too minimal for his usual grand tastes.
I meet an architect on the pull at the wine tastings, in a second marketplace centred on the town's main church. Vineyard stalls have set up around its periphery, and at the far end a stage for tonight's "live" concert. A band named "Online". I speculate on their playlist, only time will tell. My pulling architect is slick, though showing a photograph of your young son does seem a little...crap. "I design houses like women,," he says. The wine seller mentions her boyfriend in Berlin for the eighth time.
She's Stephanie, though everyone calls her "murky". Her brother, who's has died, started calling her that twenty years ago, when murky was 10. She's down from Berlin to help out her father, who runs a hotel here - everyone's father seems to run a hotel here. Murky went out with the same boy for 13 years, lived and worked and played here. They split up around her 29th birthday: it was time for a change. "My cousins kept saying come to Berlin, but, you know, it's so cool, different from here. I went there last autumn, loved it, and now I have a new life."
I start sampling white wines, very unusual. I hate white wines. "It's better tomorrow," Murky says, "there are fireworks." I sip a Goldene Kammerpreismunze. Not bad. In the background Architect is on his third pull, and Online are warming up by circumcising the melody to some horror by Bon Jovi. I sip a something else and then another. "Boppard used to be very big for bowling clubs, but the numbers are falling off now," says Murcky. "Now the older people think: hey, what about Majorca?" When she left college she went with a friend to London for the excitement of it all; she stayed a few weeks and bought a cheap ticket to Thailand. "I understand why the old people want the sun, it's just hard for business here." The Top Mops come into the square but they are initially drowned by "Online" and their soundcheck. When it is quiet enough they play, for some strange reason, the very oom-pah style brass band that NOBODY wants to hear. They last two songs and slink off for a kebab. "My ex cycled the same journey you've walked," Murcky says. "Except they started in March. So stupid. They got close to the Italian border and in some village a guy said to them, 'how are you going to fit the skis on your bikes?'"
Boppard is having fun, but it's older. I understand why the Chinese girls have gone to Frankfurt; how Murky is only here to help her father. "Online" kick off with We Built This City. Oh Gott. Easy Lover follows. When the singer announces in a key further from the melody than I am from Bejing that she "made it through the wilderness" I begin to weep for live music. Let's Dance. Something Got Me Started. Billy Jean (oh, ouch). Hot Stuff.
It is the pop syllabus of the 40s generation; me too, at a stretch. This is a set honed on cruise liners and Rhine holidays. Online move into the 1990s with Relight My Fire. I go and buy a hot dog, burn my palette, and smoother my Moleskine with mustard. Good Wine Tasting, I guess.
At the RhineLust hotel it is worse still. A disco featuring only 1970s German Pop. I buy an overpriced espresso and hack their wi-fi. Murcky's mother, she's divorced now, came form England. She arrived in Boppard thirty years ago at the start of her world tour.
And fell in love.
Tomorrow: the Chinese return, the Romer Burg, sublimity, Tom the Busker and Tears...And then Frankfurt, the Book Fair.
Am Rhein.
Phil Collins was being interviewed last night on German TV; I watched in a type of suspended animation that never occurs wandering a Roman ruin or Reformation church. I've just been asked to go and speak in a week or so at the European Parliament in Brussels about digital piracy: I want to say that the money in music these days is in touring, getting played on Spotify, or better still soundtracking a Will Farrell movie: the CD or the I-Tunes download is really just a promotional device.
But that's subversive. Unlike Phil Collins, who seems to think he is Goethe. Faust vs. A Trick of the Tail?
I re-water at a biker's motel right on the river, filled for some reason with lots of salty dog, shiver-my-timbers, Billy Budd imagery. At least the water is only 1 Euro. Then Bad Salzig for a bun. It's not that the castles have become boring, but they are repetitive. It is hard to make judgements about which to hop to, and which to merely shoot from afar. I walk past a cyclist, older, my age, but he looks really fit and tanned. He's doing "Heidelburg-Cologne" in two days. In many ways I even him, but I so like my slowness these days. I realise belatedly that I have never yet been on the Rhine; everything else but not on. I wonder what that experience is like?
I take a couple of photographs for my cyclist and he stops for a sandwich, half an hour later he passes with a wave and a happy-walk. Soon enough I am noodling into Boppard. It is early afternoon, feels so like a market town. Humming - in its own way - with end of the week-ness. A brass band walks out from the Boppard Tourist Office in outfits that would shock Yes or Supertramp at their most pompous. Half Pearly-Queen, half Gutenberg Bible. It is five minutes to three.
Later I wander towards the railway station, looking for an off Rhine hotel; there are about a zillion on the water front, each waiting for the cruise ships to arrive. I've wander-weg'd the front and feel like a change. Lolling at the station two Chinese girls, students perhaps, but dressed to kill, Last Emperoresses both. Sisters. Where are you going, I ask.
The younger pouts; the older - Frankfurt. Their parents came here thirty years ago; originally their from a city south of Shanghai, but the girls are born here. They like New York, relatives, in business, not really sure what. And Atlantic City, relatives, in business, not really sure what. Not interested in Las Vegas, but Disneyland - oh yeah. They work in the hotel in the summers, study economics - and, clearly fashion. They've met a lot of English students, "you know, getting Kulture." I tell them about walking in the Vineyards. The pouty faces again. "But how can you do that in stilettos?" They phone and text and are off for the night to Frankfurt.
I book into their parent's hotel, complete with Chinese restaurant. Back in the marketplace the Brass Band has made-over into red frock coat based outfits. It seems the mid-Rhine is cigar friendly, there are a lot being smoked out here in the crisp chilling sun over beers and ice creams and the occasional coffee. Dali-style moustaches are also not unknown. The band kicks in, I polish another espresso and watch as from an apartment window above the Restaurant Alte Schmede a sweet-faced granny bops away like crazy to the music. Perhaps this is where Boppard gets its name?
The band is called The Blue Mops, they have come from Nigmegan in Holland, because - oh yes, I had forgotten, there is a wine festival tonight. Here is their first set in full. Everyone of the songs rocking with a rather fine rhythm quite unlike those oom-pah Brass Bands of old. And one member just dances, like the man who stood next to Suggs in Madness. I think of a scene in The Ipcress File with Michael Caine and his stiff-upper-lip boss in Hyde Park listening to the old-school brass band for a while.
The Set.
The Lion Sleeps Tonight
Boogie-Oogie
We Will Rock You
We Are the Champions
River Deep, Mountain High
I'm So Excited!
Something German that everyone claps along with
Take Me Home, Country Roads (obligatory in the mid-Rhine, it appears)
Top of the World
By the time the Blue Mops exit, everyone is happy. I celebrate by ordering a Dunkle Trinkschokolade Mit Chilli. I think of that movie set in France, Leslie Caron, Juliet Binoche, all that whimsey and Chocolate. If I am really unlucky the next visitor to Boppard's marketsquare will be Johnny Depp carrying a ridiculous Irish accent.
In my book, Goethe's Frankfurt house has been garrisoned by the French. I think back to Mainz and Napoleon's brothel for his officers. From one of the waiters in the chocolate cafe I learn that small change is Kleingeld, sounds Wagnerian - if a little too minimal for his usual grand tastes.
I meet an architect on the pull at the wine tastings, in a second marketplace centred on the town's main church. Vineyard stalls have set up around its periphery, and at the far end a stage for tonight's "live" concert. A band named "Online". I speculate on their playlist, only time will tell. My pulling architect is slick, though showing a photograph of your young son does seem a little...crap. "I design houses like women,," he says. The wine seller mentions her boyfriend in Berlin for the eighth time.
She's Stephanie, though everyone calls her "murky". Her brother, who's has died, started calling her that twenty years ago, when murky was 10. She's down from Berlin to help out her father, who runs a hotel here - everyone's father seems to run a hotel here. Murky went out with the same boy for 13 years, lived and worked and played here. They split up around her 29th birthday: it was time for a change. "My cousins kept saying come to Berlin, but, you know, it's so cool, different from here. I went there last autumn, loved it, and now I have a new life."
I start sampling white wines, very unusual. I hate white wines. "It's better tomorrow," Murky says, "there are fireworks." I sip a Goldene Kammerpreismunze. Not bad. In the background Architect is on his third pull, and Online are warming up by circumcising the melody to some horror by Bon Jovi. I sip a something else and then another. "Boppard used to be very big for bowling clubs, but the numbers are falling off now," says Murcky. "Now the older people think: hey, what about Majorca?" When she left college she went with a friend to London for the excitement of it all; she stayed a few weeks and bought a cheap ticket to Thailand. "I understand why the old people want the sun, it's just hard for business here." The Top Mops come into the square but they are initially drowned by "Online" and their soundcheck. When it is quiet enough they play, for some strange reason, the very oom-pah style brass band that NOBODY wants to hear. They last two songs and slink off for a kebab. "My ex cycled the same journey you've walked," Murcky says. "Except they started in March. So stupid. They got close to the Italian border and in some village a guy said to them, 'how are you going to fit the skis on your bikes?'"
Boppard is having fun, but it's older. I understand why the Chinese girls have gone to Frankfurt; how Murky is only here to help her father. "Online" kick off with We Built This City. Oh Gott. Easy Lover follows. When the singer announces in a key further from the melody than I am from Bejing that she "made it through the wilderness" I begin to weep for live music. Let's Dance. Something Got Me Started. Billy Jean (oh, ouch). Hot Stuff.
It is the pop syllabus of the 40s generation; me too, at a stretch. This is a set honed on cruise liners and Rhine holidays. Online move into the 1990s with Relight My Fire. I go and buy a hot dog, burn my palette, and smoother my Moleskine with mustard. Good Wine Tasting, I guess.
At the RhineLust hotel it is worse still. A disco featuring only 1970s German Pop. I buy an overpriced espresso and hack their wi-fi. Murcky's mother, she's divorced now, came form England. She arrived in Boppard thirty years ago at the start of her world tour.
And fell in love.
Tomorrow: the Chinese return, the Romer Burg, sublimity, Tom the Busker and Tears...And then Frankfurt, the Book Fair.
Am Rhein.
Monday, 11 October 2010
Circular St. Goar
An early Biedermann heavy frustuk. A glamourous blonde German woman of the later years says: "I hope you jogged," when I explain where I have walked from.
In the wi-fi annex I meet Antonio, an Australian travelling with his wife. He's running the Cologne half-marathon soon. More pertinently to my needs he has an IPad and we talk SIMs and roaming and pros and cons.
Rheinfels is already moodily higher than the town of St. Goar, it looks imperiously down - but frankly all the castles do that. Down there is a pretty motley collection of cafes and cuckoo clock shops, and it holds little allure. I head up, away from the river, climb through the hinterlands to avoid the two valleys which add two more climbs and descents. Lets be efficient about this.
I'm moving upriver, through a flurry of larger bungalows and then into open land, rectangles of colour, like 60s wallpaper. Like yesterday, except that the light is very different; and this is starting to matter. It's not that I am becoming an artist; it is just that I am looking more closely at everything, and more slowly. It is a dark wet morning, the clouds are pale gray, or darker, hinting at coal. Burrowing down on the abbreviated horizons, ploughing the painters' facades I'm seeing every moment. The uneven geometries of grazing land, fields, forests and pathways, primeval information highways; from dark pastels yesterday to full rich oils today. These scenes are all around, emergent from the light morning darkness. Once again I whirl, a wet dervish this time, wiping the camera lens often, yet frequently finding on "playback" that a spot of moisture has ruined the shot.
Cows and bulls lumber; the isolated trees stand proudly morose, thoughtful. And then, past the bird-watchers' raised hut and into the woods. Properly now, light fades, is glimpsed through the tips of trees. 25 kilometres to go.
It's been raining all morning, lightly. Now outside the forest the deluge begins. I put on my wooly hat for the first time since crossing the French Alps from La Chambre, three years ago. June 2007. New hat.
A new kind of silence descends, far from absolute quiet, but far also form the bustling cacophony of the riverside. Which in turn is church peaceful in comparison with even a small town, with Oberwesel or Bacharach. Bird songs and falling leaves lead the chorus; the Steve Reich monotony of the rain droning above.
Enclosed now, the footpath is narrow, at the right hand edge the ground falls away steeply down deep ravines, below fallen trees, upended, assume new positions, different ecological roles to play. I feel closer to Tom than for ages, certain that he was around here. A turn; a choice, left or right. Soon, naturally enough, the diurnal connection with Tom is bust and I am vaulting streams, walking across upended trees, temporary bridges, and scrabbling hillsides. Another choice, left, right. Open land again, progress. I look across to a pair of trees, like a Kiefer. They are the same trees I've obsessively photographed an hour ago, from another perspective. The light and the rain are different now, so I obsess
some more. Then turn around. Back into the forest. Hours pass. I see pizza sized and coloured - like a pepperoni - mushrooms. Every kind of mushroom; apple trees; hear bird songs I cannot place. It is cosy in the forest, hermetic - signalless.
Eventually I emerge to a stunning almost horizonless vista of fields and plots and horses. In the dark distance pretty much Constable's Haywain - minus the haywain. I plunge the camera to lower and lower angles, emphasising either the vast gray-white clouds or the moist green fields broken apart by long straight farming paths and lanes. Finally a village. I must be close. A football field. A church spire in the distance, peeling. It is three in the afternoon. I ask a local man how far now to Boppard.
It's about 20 kilometres, perhaps you should go to St. Goar and take the bus? It's only 2 kilometres away.
I have inadvertently walked a giant five hour circle. Brilliant me. St Goar may be 2 kilometres away but I am down the wrong valley. I climb through vineyards wet with ripe and readiness, and then in the cloudy distance my castle home emerges, with the Rhine next door, still rolling along. The castle, like Greta Garbo, gives good face in all kinds of weather. She's moody today. Perhaps she is still angry with the Plastics' boys singing last night.
Down, down, to the river and outskirts of St Goar. My wonderful Merrells are soaked through. For my unexpected new afternoon back at Rheinfels castle - I will have to stay another night now - I could do with some trainers, something. I walk into a wet half-empty town, the forlorn cafes of storm-time in mid-week. In Tourist Information I ask about shoe shops in St Goar. "Ah, yes we have Birkenstock, just down the road."...
We Mexicanly stand-off for a few seconds; she breaks first. Into laughter. "I guess sandals aren't exactly what you want? Sorry." I laugh too - it's funny.
In the Birkenstock shop window Heidi Klum's silver "designer" sandals get pride of place. With no brick to throw, I wanderweg back up the final climb to Rheinfels. I take a muddy right half-way up the hill walk and find a small outhouse, known as a "Tusculum" . A place of retreat and creative solitude. It was the idea of Landgravine Anna-Elizabeth, born in 1549. Otto Dix, the artist, came here a lot in the 1920s. I make a note to 1) learn some proper German history 2) Find out about Otto Dix.
Back in Biedermann-Spa territory I change rooms, download the new John Le Carre, Our Kind of Traitor, because some of it is set in Switzerland, and polish off a bad though strangely compelling book before dinner. Dinner experiences no acapella singng and in the late night house bar the cattle owner's wife has some trouble fighting off an 80 year old German with a pepperoni pizza red nose, who spends most of the evening in pursuit of her upper thighs. I guess you have to kiss a lot of Biedermann ass if you run a castle-hotel five minutes from Loreley.
Later I get to meet a Lion - which is like the Rotarians, I learn, only they have an unlikely seat at the UN. He explains the Rhine wines is great detail, loving detail. The bullet point is that the roots of the Riesling grape can be incredibly long. I wrote down 15 metres, but perhaps I had drunk one too many Rieslings. So it needs very particular kinds of soil, and earth. AKA around here.
Chardonay is a slapper, by comparison. She'll do it anywhere.
Fritz wasn't always a sommelier, he used to run an electric organ factory nearby, employing 80 people. Then the banks got involved. "You know that everyday those guys play with eight times the world's GDP?" he says.
I don't. "They really do run the world."
Handy: I'll be in financial Frankfurt soon, I can see for myself. On the curious time-machine digital jukebox that Gustel the High German Scribe cum barmaid plays Gilbert O'Sullivan is singing "Nothing Rhymed." I'm so tired from my circular day it sounds positively Irving, if not Isaiah, Berlin. Upstairs walking to my room in the old castle I stumble across one of the staff in full medieval costume. The team are having a locked door party downstairs somewhere. It is 11.30.In the morning I'll walk to Boppard the river route, zoning out the cars and trains and cruisers. I'd like to - like - get there.
I chat to Antonio about IPads some more in the post frustuck wifi annex meet up zone. Mouthful. He tells me there's a wine tasting weekend kicking off in Boppard tonight. With live music.
I wonder if it will creep beyond the 1970s?
In the wi-fi annex I meet Antonio, an Australian travelling with his wife. He's running the Cologne half-marathon soon. More pertinently to my needs he has an IPad and we talk SIMs and roaming and pros and cons.
Rheinfels is already moodily higher than the town of St. Goar, it looks imperiously down - but frankly all the castles do that. Down there is a pretty motley collection of cafes and cuckoo clock shops, and it holds little allure. I head up, away from the river, climb through the hinterlands to avoid the two valleys which add two more climbs and descents. Lets be efficient about this.
I'm moving upriver, through a flurry of larger bungalows and then into open land, rectangles of colour, like 60s wallpaper. Like yesterday, except that the light is very different; and this is starting to matter. It's not that I am becoming an artist; it is just that I am looking more closely at everything, and more slowly. It is a dark wet morning, the clouds are pale gray, or darker, hinting at coal. Burrowing down on the abbreviated horizons, ploughing the painters' facades I'm seeing every moment. The uneven geometries of grazing land, fields, forests and pathways, primeval information highways; from dark pastels yesterday to full rich oils today. These scenes are all around, emergent from the light morning darkness. Once again I whirl, a wet dervish this time, wiping the camera lens often, yet frequently finding on "playback" that a spot of moisture has ruined the shot.
Cows and bulls lumber; the isolated trees stand proudly morose, thoughtful. And then, past the bird-watchers' raised hut and into the woods. Properly now, light fades, is glimpsed through the tips of trees. 25 kilometres to go.
It's been raining all morning, lightly. Now outside the forest the deluge begins. I put on my wooly hat for the first time since crossing the French Alps from La Chambre, three years ago. June 2007. New hat.
A new kind of silence descends, far from absolute quiet, but far also form the bustling cacophony of the riverside. Which in turn is church peaceful in comparison with even a small town, with Oberwesel or Bacharach. Bird songs and falling leaves lead the chorus; the Steve Reich monotony of the rain droning above.
Enclosed now, the footpath is narrow, at the right hand edge the ground falls away steeply down deep ravines, below fallen trees, upended, assume new positions, different ecological roles to play. I feel closer to Tom than for ages, certain that he was around here. A turn; a choice, left or right. Soon, naturally enough, the diurnal connection with Tom is bust and I am vaulting streams, walking across upended trees, temporary bridges, and scrabbling hillsides. Another choice, left, right. Open land again, progress. I look across to a pair of trees, like a Kiefer. They are the same trees I've obsessively photographed an hour ago, from another perspective. The light and the rain are different now, so I obsess
some more. Then turn around. Back into the forest. Hours pass. I see pizza sized and coloured - like a pepperoni - mushrooms. Every kind of mushroom; apple trees; hear bird songs I cannot place. It is cosy in the forest, hermetic - signalless.
Eventually I emerge to a stunning almost horizonless vista of fields and plots and horses. In the dark distance pretty much Constable's Haywain - minus the haywain. I plunge the camera to lower and lower angles, emphasising either the vast gray-white clouds or the moist green fields broken apart by long straight farming paths and lanes. Finally a village. I must be close. A football field. A church spire in the distance, peeling. It is three in the afternoon. I ask a local man how far now to Boppard.
It's about 20 kilometres, perhaps you should go to St. Goar and take the bus? It's only 2 kilometres away.
I have inadvertently walked a giant five hour circle. Brilliant me. St Goar may be 2 kilometres away but I am down the wrong valley. I climb through vineyards wet with ripe and readiness, and then in the cloudy distance my castle home emerges, with the Rhine next door, still rolling along. The castle, like Greta Garbo, gives good face in all kinds of weather. She's moody today. Perhaps she is still angry with the Plastics' boys singing last night.
Down, down, to the river and outskirts of St Goar. My wonderful Merrells are soaked through. For my unexpected new afternoon back at Rheinfels castle - I will have to stay another night now - I could do with some trainers, something. I walk into a wet half-empty town, the forlorn cafes of storm-time in mid-week. In Tourist Information I ask about shoe shops in St Goar. "Ah, yes we have Birkenstock, just down the road."...
We Mexicanly stand-off for a few seconds; she breaks first. Into laughter. "I guess sandals aren't exactly what you want? Sorry." I laugh too - it's funny.
In the Birkenstock shop window Heidi Klum's silver "designer" sandals get pride of place. With no brick to throw, I wanderweg back up the final climb to Rheinfels. I take a muddy right half-way up the hill walk and find a small outhouse, known as a "Tusculum" . A place of retreat and creative solitude. It was the idea of Landgravine Anna-Elizabeth, born in 1549. Otto Dix, the artist, came here a lot in the 1920s. I make a note to 1) learn some proper German history 2) Find out about Otto Dix.
Back in Biedermann-Spa territory I change rooms, download the new John Le Carre, Our Kind of Traitor, because some of it is set in Switzerland, and polish off a bad though strangely compelling book before dinner. Dinner experiences no acapella singng and in the late night house bar the cattle owner's wife has some trouble fighting off an 80 year old German with a pepperoni pizza red nose, who spends most of the evening in pursuit of her upper thighs. I guess you have to kiss a lot of Biedermann ass if you run a castle-hotel five minutes from Loreley.
Later I get to meet a Lion - which is like the Rotarians, I learn, only they have an unlikely seat at the UN. He explains the Rhine wines is great detail, loving detail. The bullet point is that the roots of the Riesling grape can be incredibly long. I wrote down 15 metres, but perhaps I had drunk one too many Rieslings. So it needs very particular kinds of soil, and earth. AKA around here.
Chardonay is a slapper, by comparison. She'll do it anywhere.
Fritz wasn't always a sommelier, he used to run an electric organ factory nearby, employing 80 people. Then the banks got involved. "You know that everyday those guys play with eight times the world's GDP?" he says.
I don't. "They really do run the world."
Handy: I'll be in financial Frankfurt soon, I can see for myself. On the curious time-machine digital jukebox that Gustel the High German Scribe cum barmaid plays Gilbert O'Sullivan is singing "Nothing Rhymed." I'm so tired from my circular day it sounds positively Irving, if not Isaiah, Berlin. Upstairs walking to my room in the old castle I stumble across one of the staff in full medieval costume. The team are having a locked door party downstairs somewhere. It is 11.30.In the morning I'll walk to Boppard the river route, zoning out the cars and trains and cruisers. I'd like to - like - get there.
I chat to Antonio about IPads some more in the post frustuck wifi annex meet up zone. Mouthful. He tells me there's a wine tasting weekend kicking off in Boppard tonight. With live music.
I wonder if it will creep beyond the 1970s?
Friday, 8 October 2010
I'm Not Singing in St. Goar
The first thing that changed things was the dog, a dachshund called Spritz. It is late and after a grandish dinner in a place on Bacharach's market square, a dark woody restaurant where elderly German Warrrior Queens with unfeasibly large breasts snigger with their somewhat smaller husbands about the man in leather on his own (who is actually reading James Fenimore Cooper's Rhine diaries from 1836, newly downloaded onto I-books) I am in the late night retreat up a narrow alley.
That's me in the leather, BTW. Serves me right for going a little upscale. Still the venison was lovely. Now I'm sitting with my free, digital, Last Mohican author and realising it's all been done before (again) and Spritz is all over me in the corner. It's a local Bacharach bar, but there are English voices, an Australian woman, it is her birthday, she's pleased she tells me later, once my bona fides as genuine listener are established by Spritz's owner, because she came to Bacharach ten years ago and has never left. There's been a hiatus with her boyfriend, but he's come tonight, the first time they've seen each other in three weeks. "Now I can get back to my old, real, life," she says.
Somewhere else an American woman is talking about the haircut she needs before she goes home to see her parents. She hasn't seen them for "about 15 years." She works in munitions at base somewhere.
Spritz speeds outside with me when I go for a smoke. His owner follows. A scholarly looking chap, neat but tweedy, scarf, the air of someone who quotes Thomas Adorno or Klaus Mann. He's my age, I discover, but could easily be 30. Is there a hint of a lisp? "I come from an old family, I mean old, East Germany, way back, I mean we had a lot of workers, we were farmers with land. They were loyal, patriotic, and then something snapped in my grandfather, he realised it [the war] was wrong. He and his wife began to hide people, a professor of Russian, one of the old school. At the end of the war he had to move, the Russians wanted him dead. He became very religious, Calvinist, we couldn't know anything of the world, no newspapers, no television; he wanted us taught at home. Very strict. And the professor of Russian, well he married my cousin and she became a great translator of Russians, I mean Breznev, he was a friend...Gorbachev...
What do you do Wilhelm? (And why are you in exile in this tiny town on the Rhine?). "I teach, in a high school, politics and civil engineering. I've been here eight weeks, with Spritz. I mean everyone might not know me yet, but everyone knows Spritz."
Why are there American soldiers here, is there a base?
Dismissive, yes, 80 kilometres away. "Do you want to know something? I used to work - I'm 52 - for a minister, in Berlin. I went to university....many places. I was his advisor, I went to many countries with him. I was in Washington, just before the invasion of Iraq. With Senators and Congressmen and (there is a list of very famous names, the usual suspects of the Washington of 2003). Afterwards we went to a bar and - ha! - said to me, this war is a good thing, we can get rid of some of our rubbish, and get hold of the oil." I shrug, the detail is good, but the idea is a commonplace of anti-Americanism. Who knows?
"The minister wanted me to get involved, being a member of the parliament, but I couldn't balance, I mean, the life led at cocktail parties and receptions and the formality, with my real friends, my life."
And so Bacharach?
The expression is beyond wistful. I realise that Wilhelm is in some kind of exile. Was it a scandal in Berlin, or just a sudden Emersonian desire for escape? "Writing a book? That's good, I should like to write a book one day. What stories I have!"
In the hotel I've done a search for "The Rhine" on I-Books and Amazon, and come up with the unexpected James Fenimore Cooper title, "A Residence in France with an Excursion up the Rhine."
"To write anything new or interesting of this well-trodden path, one must linger days among the ruins, explore the valleys, and dive into the local traditions."
Or as my friend who grew up in Bingen emailed: "you must go up."
At first it is the shafts of early morning light exocetting through puffy off-white clouds. The housetops of Bacharach, the spires and the absurdist castles are the natural beneficiaries. And then the vineyards begin and the sun starts to make a more concerted effort; the clouds develop subtleties, gradations, lighter and darker shades, gaping mouths of whiteness and jaws of deep gray. And the landscapes colours beg to be bathed in. After the relentless routine of Rhineside walking on cycle paths, this is something utterly different, and not 500 metres in land.
Just "up".
The greens (Hildgard of Bingen was obsessed with "greening" a kind of religious metaphor for spiritual growth, as I understand it), the dark soil, soiled, earthy and fertile. The russets. Silence descends, but quickly I realise this is not silence, just not urban-sound. It's like nature's version of John Cale's musical theories.
The vineyards vie with tilled fields; sheep grazing suddenly achieve acute definition as the sun breaks loose. And punctuating everything trees solitary, in pairs, clumps and forests, each with their own allegory to tell. Solitary beasts of aged knowledge, imperious rows like sentries. There is a curious geometry to it all. Or perhaps it is just the pantheist neural network that lies dormant in my head kicking in.
In the hills ahead a small town, lolling in the contradictions of the skies. Somewhere, not so far away, the Rhine. But for once, for now, nowhere in sight, unseen and un-needed.
I am photographing like a Dervish, a sufi of spinning shots and dances as I try and bring the sky and the land together in compositions. A hundred, two hundred...by Oberwesel, when I come down, I've taken 700 photographs.
The light had seemed mysterious and un-catchable from the first moments I climbed out of Bacharach. It played restless tricks on its canvasses. A few hundred metres from the vineyards the Riesling green vines swim in a yellow wash; then a more formal undulating green, Turner town, Constable, if I was a painter I'd never leave. This is fashion shoot territory too: I can imagine Nadav Kander - or indeed Mathew Barney - up here. Abstract, crisp, delineated and then lost. Architypical, biblical...Claude....no wonder they loved the Rhine, those guys. I hope Tom got up here. Wasn't down by the river with the kiss me quick brigades.
It does become easier, suddenly, to understand the Romantic Sublime.
Later I go down, a trick of descents and re-climbs, into another hilltop castled town, Oberwesel. There's an Italian ice-cream and coffee shop. The young waiter is surly at first, checking out the old leathery man with the Ipad but when I tell him about the first walk, across northern Italy, and now Splugen, he gets very excited. "I've only seen people like you on the television," he says. I want to say that if they were on television they had a crew and a make-up artist with them, however solitary their jaunt. Some elderly cyclists, grazing on giant sundaes, just say: "Bravo!" when they hear my story.
Down the main street and a little right, falling towards the river there's an old school hotel where the German national anthem was first sung. I go check it out. There's a plaque and a framed document, but it's all a bit too uber ales for my mood. I'll write more about German singing and songs from St Goar, my afternoon destination.
I stay low now, the trains pass by near me and across the river; and the barges, the cruisers, cyclists, cars on the B9 road. The valley has narrowed, it's tight now and must once has been so treacherous....cue, suddenly the Loreley "thing". A big slab of rock that means a lot. Cruise ships cruise it like seedy businessmen on the Kaiserstrasse in Frankfurt. One boat named "Germania" handily passes as I'm taking pictures. Thanks Tom.
The river arc as I approach St. Goar is a demi-crescent of motor-caravans; a caravanserai of mobile homes. And every one of them has, or is in the process of having attached - a satellite dish. Deck chairs, pick nick stuff; late afternoon sun puffing now, thinking about a rest. Long long shadows. "What you watching?" I ask a man from Munich.
"Champions League,"
Ah yes. And Mainz are still top. "On Saturday, all over, they play us."
We will see. I like the fact that the small underdog team is top of the Bundeslege.
Another climb, muddy paths, steps. Blowing for air, and I am fit now. But still smoking. Finally Rheinfels castle, now a splashy-ish hotel and spa. "We've been expecting you, Mr. Hunt." At least Herr Owner does not have a white cat. The view from the bar is everything a Turner or Claude might want. I'm in the Mrs Rochester attic, the only thing I can afford. In a strange kind of digital apartheid, the old castle rooms are ADSL, and the new conference centre annex hotel is wi-fi. I wander over in the light rain and download more Rhine books. I book a table for dinner - posh - and take a sauna, relaxing. I "dress" for dinner (new underwear). And am told the table's not ready. I sit in the gallery bar for half an hour without a drink reading Fenimore Cooper. Ignored by Buddy Holly the rookie waiter, and certainly by all the scooped cleavage waitresses who are serving a conference party in the main dining area. I go out for a smoke: there is a delegate Iphoning his wife. A Candian-German. "Plastics, we are coming together from around Germany - and the world - to exchange best practice and to ensure that the environment is our central consideration. And you?"
I explain.
"That's very cool. I live in Heidelberg once, you know."
Cool.
I go back inside still no drink. Then my table; a lonely Lorelei space surrounded by Biedermanns and their Wives. Lots of jewels. And stares. No drink, no menu. Around fifty minutes into my dinner date I get a thin gin tonic. "And to eat, sir?
A menu.
Ah.
I get up and walk out. I have my first hissy-fit of the trip, explain to the Italian maitre'd that the restaurant service is "rubbish." He practically hugs me; in reality it is more of a rugby malling movement that finds me sitting back in the gallery bar with a free glass of rather fruity Rhein red and better service than Angela Merkel gets.
I go for the venison stew.
Next door the Plastics Boys are being entertained by a fat-Falstaff with a post-modern lute. He's been warming up with a beer in the lobby, now he's on a roll. When everyone starts singing Take Me Home Country Roads, I begin to lose my new found contentment. Then the lute-ing stops and the Plastics Men sing a long acapella song that isn't Tomorrow Belongs to Me; isn't a Michael York Cabaret Closer kind of number.
But is scarily close to it. I feel sick. I start joining the dots from the Germania staute at Bingen, the National Anthem locale in Oberqwesel, the Loreley, and now something about flowers and blossoming and...well what do you rhyme burn the books with? It aint' Wagner, and it's not The Scorpions. And it is definitely not Supertramp...The Italian maitre'd looks embarrassed; so do many of the Biedermanns. Tomorrow my new Italian friend will apologise. "Too much wine," he will say.
Plastics Men vanish; they're not in the little house behind the castle where the management close down their night with the more social of the castle guests. I drink some wine, write about my day in the Moleskine, watch some Champions League, listen to pretty much every unusual song composed in the 1970s in Britain or American, I mean The Legend of Xanadu? Magic, by Pilot? Heart of Gold? Sir Duke? All Around My Hat? Then I pay. I am 16, going on 17.
The barmaid Gustel, writes the bill with a fountain pen.
In the most perfect High German Script. The handwriting is so lovely, so time consuming, I ask to keep the bill. I can have it when I leave the hotel.
Only later do I wonder why High German Script is so popular in these parts. In the morning the 30 kilometre walk to Boppard - through more of this fertile land. After eight hours in the rain I come to a village with signs (my first for hours): I had completed a perfect circle, by accident, and was 18 straight kilometres from Boppard, and two kilometres from St Goar. I am the worst walker in history. I book, damply, for another night, and am moved from Mrs Rochester's attic to Dorian Gray's. But that walk is for tomorrow.
That's me in the leather, BTW. Serves me right for going a little upscale. Still the venison was lovely. Now I'm sitting with my free, digital, Last Mohican author and realising it's all been done before (again) and Spritz is all over me in the corner. It's a local Bacharach bar, but there are English voices, an Australian woman, it is her birthday, she's pleased she tells me later, once my bona fides as genuine listener are established by Spritz's owner, because she came to Bacharach ten years ago and has never left. There's been a hiatus with her boyfriend, but he's come tonight, the first time they've seen each other in three weeks. "Now I can get back to my old, real, life," she says.
Somewhere else an American woman is talking about the haircut she needs before she goes home to see her parents. She hasn't seen them for "about 15 years." She works in munitions at base somewhere.
Spritz speeds outside with me when I go for a smoke. His owner follows. A scholarly looking chap, neat but tweedy, scarf, the air of someone who quotes Thomas Adorno or Klaus Mann. He's my age, I discover, but could easily be 30. Is there a hint of a lisp? "I come from an old family, I mean old, East Germany, way back, I mean we had a lot of workers, we were farmers with land. They were loyal, patriotic, and then something snapped in my grandfather, he realised it [the war] was wrong. He and his wife began to hide people, a professor of Russian, one of the old school. At the end of the war he had to move, the Russians wanted him dead. He became very religious, Calvinist, we couldn't know anything of the world, no newspapers, no television; he wanted us taught at home. Very strict. And the professor of Russian, well he married my cousin and she became a great translator of Russians, I mean Breznev, he was a friend...Gorbachev...
What do you do Wilhelm? (And why are you in exile in this tiny town on the Rhine?). "I teach, in a high school, politics and civil engineering. I've been here eight weeks, with Spritz. I mean everyone might not know me yet, but everyone knows Spritz."
Why are there American soldiers here, is there a base?
Dismissive, yes, 80 kilometres away. "Do you want to know something? I used to work - I'm 52 - for a minister, in Berlin. I went to university....many places. I was his advisor, I went to many countries with him. I was in Washington, just before the invasion of Iraq. With Senators and Congressmen and (there is a list of very famous names, the usual suspects of the Washington of 2003). Afterwards we went to a bar and - ha! - said to me, this war is a good thing, we can get rid of some of our rubbish, and get hold of the oil." I shrug, the detail is good, but the idea is a commonplace of anti-Americanism. Who knows?
"The minister wanted me to get involved, being a member of the parliament, but I couldn't balance, I mean, the life led at cocktail parties and receptions and the formality, with my real friends, my life."
And so Bacharach?
The expression is beyond wistful. I realise that Wilhelm is in some kind of exile. Was it a scandal in Berlin, or just a sudden Emersonian desire for escape? "Writing a book? That's good, I should like to write a book one day. What stories I have!"
In the hotel I've done a search for "The Rhine" on I-Books and Amazon, and come up with the unexpected James Fenimore Cooper title, "A Residence in France with an Excursion up the Rhine."
"To write anything new or interesting of this well-trodden path, one must linger days among the ruins, explore the valleys, and dive into the local traditions."
Or as my friend who grew up in Bingen emailed: "you must go up."
At first it is the shafts of early morning light exocetting through puffy off-white clouds. The housetops of Bacharach, the spires and the absurdist castles are the natural beneficiaries. And then the vineyards begin and the sun starts to make a more concerted effort; the clouds develop subtleties, gradations, lighter and darker shades, gaping mouths of whiteness and jaws of deep gray. And the landscapes colours beg to be bathed in. After the relentless routine of Rhineside walking on cycle paths, this is something utterly different, and not 500 metres in land.
Just "up".
The greens (Hildgard of Bingen was obsessed with "greening" a kind of religious metaphor for spiritual growth, as I understand it), the dark soil, soiled, earthy and fertile. The russets. Silence descends, but quickly I realise this is not silence, just not urban-sound. It's like nature's version of John Cale's musical theories.
The vineyards vie with tilled fields; sheep grazing suddenly achieve acute definition as the sun breaks loose. And punctuating everything trees solitary, in pairs, clumps and forests, each with their own allegory to tell. Solitary beasts of aged knowledge, imperious rows like sentries. There is a curious geometry to it all. Or perhaps it is just the pantheist neural network that lies dormant in my head kicking in.
In the hills ahead a small town, lolling in the contradictions of the skies. Somewhere, not so far away, the Rhine. But for once, for now, nowhere in sight, unseen and un-needed.
I am photographing like a Dervish, a sufi of spinning shots and dances as I try and bring the sky and the land together in compositions. A hundred, two hundred...by Oberwesel, when I come down, I've taken 700 photographs.
The light had seemed mysterious and un-catchable from the first moments I climbed out of Bacharach. It played restless tricks on its canvasses. A few hundred metres from the vineyards the Riesling green vines swim in a yellow wash; then a more formal undulating green, Turner town, Constable, if I was a painter I'd never leave. This is fashion shoot territory too: I can imagine Nadav Kander - or indeed Mathew Barney - up here. Abstract, crisp, delineated and then lost. Architypical, biblical...Claude....no wonder they loved the Rhine, those guys. I hope Tom got up here. Wasn't down by the river with the kiss me quick brigades.
It does become easier, suddenly, to understand the Romantic Sublime.
Later I go down, a trick of descents and re-climbs, into another hilltop castled town, Oberwesel. There's an Italian ice-cream and coffee shop. The young waiter is surly at first, checking out the old leathery man with the Ipad but when I tell him about the first walk, across northern Italy, and now Splugen, he gets very excited. "I've only seen people like you on the television," he says. I want to say that if they were on television they had a crew and a make-up artist with them, however solitary their jaunt. Some elderly cyclists, grazing on giant sundaes, just say: "Bravo!" when they hear my story.
Down the main street and a little right, falling towards the river there's an old school hotel where the German national anthem was first sung. I go check it out. There's a plaque and a framed document, but it's all a bit too uber ales for my mood. I'll write more about German singing and songs from St Goar, my afternoon destination.
I stay low now, the trains pass by near me and across the river; and the barges, the cruisers, cyclists, cars on the B9 road. The valley has narrowed, it's tight now and must once has been so treacherous....cue, suddenly the Loreley "thing". A big slab of rock that means a lot. Cruise ships cruise it like seedy businessmen on the Kaiserstrasse in Frankfurt. One boat named "Germania" handily passes as I'm taking pictures. Thanks Tom.
The river arc as I approach St. Goar is a demi-crescent of motor-caravans; a caravanserai of mobile homes. And every one of them has, or is in the process of having attached - a satellite dish. Deck chairs, pick nick stuff; late afternoon sun puffing now, thinking about a rest. Long long shadows. "What you watching?" I ask a man from Munich.
"Champions League,"
Ah yes. And Mainz are still top. "On Saturday, all over, they play us."
We will see. I like the fact that the small underdog team is top of the Bundeslege.
Another climb, muddy paths, steps. Blowing for air, and I am fit now. But still smoking. Finally Rheinfels castle, now a splashy-ish hotel and spa. "We've been expecting you, Mr. Hunt." At least Herr Owner does not have a white cat. The view from the bar is everything a Turner or Claude might want. I'm in the Mrs Rochester attic, the only thing I can afford. In a strange kind of digital apartheid, the old castle rooms are ADSL, and the new conference centre annex hotel is wi-fi. I wander over in the light rain and download more Rhine books. I book a table for dinner - posh - and take a sauna, relaxing. I "dress" for dinner (new underwear). And am told the table's not ready. I sit in the gallery bar for half an hour without a drink reading Fenimore Cooper. Ignored by Buddy Holly the rookie waiter, and certainly by all the scooped cleavage waitresses who are serving a conference party in the main dining area. I go out for a smoke: there is a delegate Iphoning his wife. A Candian-German. "Plastics, we are coming together from around Germany - and the world - to exchange best practice and to ensure that the environment is our central consideration. And you?"
I explain.
"That's very cool. I live in Heidelberg once, you know."
Cool.
I go back inside still no drink. Then my table; a lonely Lorelei space surrounded by Biedermanns and their Wives. Lots of jewels. And stares. No drink, no menu. Around fifty minutes into my dinner date I get a thin gin tonic. "And to eat, sir?
A menu.
Ah.
I get up and walk out. I have my first hissy-fit of the trip, explain to the Italian maitre'd that the restaurant service is "rubbish." He practically hugs me; in reality it is more of a rugby malling movement that finds me sitting back in the gallery bar with a free glass of rather fruity Rhein red and better service than Angela Merkel gets.
I go for the venison stew.
Next door the Plastics Boys are being entertained by a fat-Falstaff with a post-modern lute. He's been warming up with a beer in the lobby, now he's on a roll. When everyone starts singing Take Me Home Country Roads, I begin to lose my new found contentment. Then the lute-ing stops and the Plastics Men sing a long acapella song that isn't Tomorrow Belongs to Me; isn't a Michael York Cabaret Closer kind of number.
But is scarily close to it. I feel sick. I start joining the dots from the Germania staute at Bingen, the National Anthem locale in Oberqwesel, the Loreley, and now something about flowers and blossoming and...well what do you rhyme burn the books with? It aint' Wagner, and it's not The Scorpions. And it is definitely not Supertramp...The Italian maitre'd looks embarrassed; so do many of the Biedermanns. Tomorrow my new Italian friend will apologise. "Too much wine," he will say.
Plastics Men vanish; they're not in the little house behind the castle where the management close down their night with the more social of the castle guests. I drink some wine, write about my day in the Moleskine, watch some Champions League, listen to pretty much every unusual song composed in the 1970s in Britain or American, I mean The Legend of Xanadu? Magic, by Pilot? Heart of Gold? Sir Duke? All Around My Hat? Then I pay. I am 16, going on 17.
The barmaid Gustel, writes the bill with a fountain pen.
In the most perfect High German Script. The handwriting is so lovely, so time consuming, I ask to keep the bill. I can have it when I leave the hotel.
Only later do I wonder why High German Script is so popular in these parts. In the morning the 30 kilometre walk to Boppard - through more of this fertile land. After eight hours in the rain I come to a village with signs (my first for hours): I had completed a perfect circle, by accident, and was 18 straight kilometres from Boppard, and two kilometres from St Goar. I am the worst walker in history. I book, damply, for another night, and am moved from Mrs Rochester's attic to Dorian Gray's. But that walk is for tomorrow.
Tuesday, 5 October 2010
Bingen: the mystic multimedia artist
I didn't know much about Hildegard before I came to Bingen, though I did know someone who was born and grew up here. They'd said to expect a few minor miracles. They'd also said that the waterside front - where the cruise liners pull in and everyone but everyone, and I was no exception, take about a thousand bad photographs of the castle on the far bank in conjunction with the "mouse tower" on a small island close to our side - was where they smoked their first joint, many years ago. This morning it was rowers, mists, and a hint of dare one say the mystical? Probably not. I hadn't smoked anything stronger than a Marlborough Light.
You'd have to say it's pretty photo-friendly here in whatever light. Today was a dull morning, but that just made the hill-tops greener, rather than yellow, and the mists gave Germania a spectral glow. I
The museum to Hildegard is maybe thirty metres in land, around an area with a Swiss hotel, a conference centre and an ominous looking bar. It's all peace inside, and Hildegard's music is playing.
Hang on, she's a twelve century religious mystic; what gives? In 2008 the academic William Harmless wrote "Mystics" for Oxford University Press. His chapter on Hildegard is entitled: Mystic as Multimedia Artist. It is fair to say this is interesting. She was the 10th child of a noble family, born in 1098. At eight she was "enclosed" that's locked away for life, in a cell of a monastery at Mount st. Disibod, not so far from where I'm standing now. That was supposed to be it: a life given up to contemplation of God. She ends up running a monastery, touring Germany preaching, having visions, persuading the then Pope they are good visions, writes the first known European morality tale, invents a secret language and writes beautiful music. She's a prophet too. We need to know more.
"Truly," as Tom wrote, "there are very admirable matters written of this woman by the historians."
The museum is lovely, but what really grabs me are the maps: how far her letters, her relics, her ideas, her music, travelled. It is the Niebelungens all over, except that this is even earlier. I don't buy the CD in the gift show; I download it at half the price next door at the Swiss hotel on the lobby wifi.
There's a great image of Hildegard, a saint and also known as the Sibyl of the Rhine, writing on a wax tablet in her study, looking for all the world like she's checking her Facebook page on an IPad. Multimedia indeed. Her visions are apocalyptic, flame-driven. There is so much rich material here in terms of image, music, ideas, language, geography, sexual politics...Hildegard seems to have fallen off the radar in the Renaissance and her writings and ideas were only really re-discovered in the twentieth century, when some saw her as a kind of feminist icon. Did I mention the medicinal innovations? Or the sartorial freedoms her fellow sisters had in her monastery? Amazing.
There is much to be read about Hildegard of Bingen. Rhine route now, check out the mouse tower, many myths and kids stories, but really a navigational point at what was until the damning of the Rhine a treacherous (lecherous, Gershwin joke) part of any ships's navigation of the river. Hence, soon, the Loreley and all that mermaid/undine stuff.
Can't disagree it looks good, but then so do the vineyards, the castle, the freighted-up barges. In a riverside garden there's a small museum with brilliant technology, invented by the University of Dortmund. A large Mac-Style computer screen mounted on a moveable frame that is a camera/telescope to all around, the mouse tower, Germania, etc, but clickable and data emerges. Downstairs a touchscreen 10,000 year history of the Rhine, watch it change. The curators here could not be more friendly. They release me from embarrassment and pull the switch for the model railway upstairs that illustrates how trade and freight was brought from one bank to the other. The trains move too, very exciting for boys of all ages. But the train sets - on the left and right of the upstairs gallery remind me of the model railway quality of the entire mise en scene. I scoot down to the Rhine and march on Bacharach, trying not to make too many Burt jokes. But, on Facebook at least, failing miserably. About ten minutes out of town I look up and see an amazing "Gothic Novel" castle. I have to go see.
I was right. Rhinestein castle is a steep upward walk. It looms down on ground level with the same kind of broody/moody intensity possessed by Bran castle in Romania. It also has the best post box address in the world.
Romantik Schloss
Burg Rheinstein
Later the owners point out to me that whilst this is a very cool address, it is a bit of a bore having to walk up and down a steep hill to pick up the gas bill, twice a day.
There's history here alright. Bought in 1975 by a former opera singer named Hermann Hecher from Barbara Duchess of Mecklenburg - the last owner of the "House of Prussia" (which is not a retail outlet) - the castle was improbably first built in the very early years of the fourteenth century, first mentioned as "belonging to Mainz" in 1323. We're in beween, or Betwixt as we like to say in these pages, Bingerbruck and Trechtingshausen, the real start of the Middle Rhine Valley.
The restoration is sublimely good. There are libraries in rounded turrets high in the clouds that Borges would have killed for. There are amazing dining rooms; and most bizarrely perhaps there is wifi everywhere. I immediately email the info@burg-rhinestein for an interview, because I would come back like a shot. A tour party of Swiss and then French school kids Iphone their way around the rooms and later I get it pretty much all to myself. This was a place to collect taxes, oh yes. Like Bran, actually.
I email some more and then Cornelia Hecher wanders down from the family apartments. We talk for half an hour or so. Her father in law bought from the Barbara Duchess because she was threatening to sell to the Hare Krishna. There was a big pow-wow at the next castle down, local government wasn't happy. Hermann got to buy his castle.
How long did the restoration take?
It will take forever, always. Cornelia says.
The family lived at first high in the state rooms, had electricity installed, water. Now they live in housing at the rear of the castle. Cornelia and Marcus's son, Marko, is also part of the castle business here now. "We were so happy when he decided to do that."
A detour but a great one. Back at riverside the school kids are waiting for their motor cruiser: will it be Germania or Goethe or Loreley? I'm long gone when it arrives. The colours are moving towards the autumnal now. The Russets are Coming, I note. At Bacharach I'm staying in a place in the city walls. And they are old. I send emails of Bingen home. My friend who grew up there says I have to go high tomorrow from Bacharach. Into the vineyards and the woods. I feel altitude sickness already. Later after dinner I have a curious interlude in the late night pub.
Wilhelm and Exile is for tomorrow though.
You'd have to say it's pretty photo-friendly here in whatever light. Today was a dull morning, but that just made the hill-tops greener, rather than yellow, and the mists gave Germania a spectral glow. I
The museum to Hildegard is maybe thirty metres in land, around an area with a Swiss hotel, a conference centre and an ominous looking bar. It's all peace inside, and Hildegard's music is playing.
Hang on, she's a twelve century religious mystic; what gives? In 2008 the academic William Harmless wrote "Mystics" for Oxford University Press. His chapter on Hildegard is entitled: Mystic as Multimedia Artist. It is fair to say this is interesting. She was the 10th child of a noble family, born in 1098. At eight she was "enclosed" that's locked away for life, in a cell of a monastery at Mount st. Disibod, not so far from where I'm standing now. That was supposed to be it: a life given up to contemplation of God. She ends up running a monastery, touring Germany preaching, having visions, persuading the then Pope they are good visions, writes the first known European morality tale, invents a secret language and writes beautiful music. She's a prophet too. We need to know more.
"Truly," as Tom wrote, "there are very admirable matters written of this woman by the historians."
The museum is lovely, but what really grabs me are the maps: how far her letters, her relics, her ideas, her music, travelled. It is the Niebelungens all over, except that this is even earlier. I don't buy the CD in the gift show; I download it at half the price next door at the Swiss hotel on the lobby wifi.
There's a great image of Hildegard, a saint and also known as the Sibyl of the Rhine, writing on a wax tablet in her study, looking for all the world like she's checking her Facebook page on an IPad. Multimedia indeed. Her visions are apocalyptic, flame-driven. There is so much rich material here in terms of image, music, ideas, language, geography, sexual politics...Hildegard seems to have fallen off the radar in the Renaissance and her writings and ideas were only really re-discovered in the twentieth century, when some saw her as a kind of feminist icon. Did I mention the medicinal innovations? Or the sartorial freedoms her fellow sisters had in her monastery? Amazing.
There is much to be read about Hildegard of Bingen. Rhine route now, check out the mouse tower, many myths and kids stories, but really a navigational point at what was until the damning of the Rhine a treacherous (lecherous, Gershwin joke) part of any ships's navigation of the river. Hence, soon, the Loreley and all that mermaid/undine stuff.
Can't disagree it looks good, but then so do the vineyards, the castle, the freighted-up barges. In a riverside garden there's a small museum with brilliant technology, invented by the University of Dortmund. A large Mac-Style computer screen mounted on a moveable frame that is a camera/telescope to all around, the mouse tower, Germania, etc, but clickable and data emerges. Downstairs a touchscreen 10,000 year history of the Rhine, watch it change. The curators here could not be more friendly. They release me from embarrassment and pull the switch for the model railway upstairs that illustrates how trade and freight was brought from one bank to the other. The trains move too, very exciting for boys of all ages. But the train sets - on the left and right of the upstairs gallery remind me of the model railway quality of the entire mise en scene. I scoot down to the Rhine and march on Bacharach, trying not to make too many Burt jokes. But, on Facebook at least, failing miserably. About ten minutes out of town I look up and see an amazing "Gothic Novel" castle. I have to go see.
I was right. Rhinestein castle is a steep upward walk. It looms down on ground level with the same kind of broody/moody intensity possessed by Bran castle in Romania. It also has the best post box address in the world.
Romantik Schloss
Burg Rheinstein
Later the owners point out to me that whilst this is a very cool address, it is a bit of a bore having to walk up and down a steep hill to pick up the gas bill, twice a day.
There's history here alright. Bought in 1975 by a former opera singer named Hermann Hecher from Barbara Duchess of Mecklenburg - the last owner of the "House of Prussia" (which is not a retail outlet) - the castle was improbably first built in the very early years of the fourteenth century, first mentioned as "belonging to Mainz" in 1323. We're in beween, or Betwixt as we like to say in these pages, Bingerbruck and Trechtingshausen, the real start of the Middle Rhine Valley.
The restoration is sublimely good. There are libraries in rounded turrets high in the clouds that Borges would have killed for. There are amazing dining rooms; and most bizarrely perhaps there is wifi everywhere. I immediately email the info@burg-rhinestein for an interview, because I would come back like a shot. A tour party of Swiss and then French school kids Iphone their way around the rooms and later I get it pretty much all to myself. This was a place to collect taxes, oh yes. Like Bran, actually.
I email some more and then Cornelia Hecher wanders down from the family apartments. We talk for half an hour or so. Her father in law bought from the Barbara Duchess because she was threatening to sell to the Hare Krishna. There was a big pow-wow at the next castle down, local government wasn't happy. Hermann got to buy his castle.
How long did the restoration take?
It will take forever, always. Cornelia says.
The family lived at first high in the state rooms, had electricity installed, water. Now they live in housing at the rear of the castle. Cornelia and Marcus's son, Marko, is also part of the castle business here now. "We were so happy when he decided to do that."
A detour but a great one. Back at riverside the school kids are waiting for their motor cruiser: will it be Germania or Goethe or Loreley? I'm long gone when it arrives. The colours are moving towards the autumnal now. The Russets are Coming, I note. At Bacharach I'm staying in a place in the city walls. And they are old. I send emails of Bingen home. My friend who grew up there says I have to go high tomorrow from Bacharach. Into the vineyards and the woods. I feel altitude sickness already. Later after dinner I have a curious interlude in the late night pub.
Wilhelm and Exile is for tomorrow though.
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.
Wednesday, 29 September 2010
Mainz Kind a Town
An easy walk out of Oppenheim, and a sense that up there on the hill, the old clerics did their job further afield. They could see so far. The Rhine is not elusive today, but still I walk an inlet, see some archery, and then turn around, feel stupid.
At Nierstein a wine loving couple give precise instructions and big smiles, soon I am in the vineyards and the lines and the smells are fantastic. They go on and on; I almost believe in white wine for a while. Then down to the river, which means the other side of the railway line that always follows me, I tune it out, and on for the afternoon towards Mainz.
The town arrives in a six at night glow; beer gardens on the river, kids playing frisbee (new sport) and laying around. The light is as if God decided Mainz around Harvest Moon should be Ectachrome, all sixties. I don't know if I am on the Campus of Berkley 1968, or something earlier and George Seurat. Very nice.
The bells are ringing of course. It's probably 6.15 but it feels welcoming. Everything is good, the Dom, the Marketplatz; the modernity of the Rathaus and the combination of the two worlds. But no wifi in the hotel; in fact a sort of analogue dismissal.
I wander the streets of the old town pimping for a signal - in Germany I haven't yet found anywhere to give me a new SIM and 3G access, as in Switzerland. There's a bar, an "of course", and soon I am talking to two professional photographers. They make their money shooting new born babies at the hospital; most hospitals now have websites with such things. The great thing is, everybody is happy at the shoot. They recommend an Italian place for dinner.
I sit outside and listen as a pair of Mainzers, husband and wife, she dictating from her IPhone, discuss the evening football scores in the Bundeslige. I ask if they support Mainz, currently top of the league. It is early in the season. Of course, but the fun ends on Saturday - Mainz plays Bayern Munich, the Siegfried of Teams. The husband was born in 1942, his family left Berlin at the end of the war, came here. "Mainz is very Roman," he says, you will see. And the Dom? Well the craftsman who made that...is very respected, the academics say so.
Back at the wifi cafe the Baby Photographers are still drinking; it's someone's birthday, maybe even one of them. I go inside to write; they come later, on their way home, to tell me I am a very "open" man. Later lawyers, students, they all want to work abroad. Spain or New York.
In the morning the Gutenberg museum is a riot of questions. A sea of wonder on many floors, where in the basement kids watch a printing lesson and upstairs I get another lesson in how little I know about the quality and the web-page like intensity of mid sixteenth century print works from the region. It is also a sea of lost meanings, a man stands on a fish, in turn suspended on an Ionian column. He holds a basket of fruit in one hand, a wheel in the other. From the Anglo-Saxon Chronicles, grr, supposed to know about that stuff. I am sure I can find out the "meaning". But I'll never share the illustrations' assumptions to its contemporary viewership. I think about this in the DIY Dom, all being fixed up, the film crew on location with some school kids. Nice, but wrong vibe. Didn't sing for the Chagall stained glass either, he was 91 when he started, after all.
Last night's Husband and Wife go back to Berlin twice a year, even then they are amazed at the changes. East Berlin...."is like New York."
I'm proficient at old towns now; know how to wake up to their bells, wanner their logical streets, centre myself at marketplatz and think. I hear there is a Mainz "Willemsberg". I weg my way there, for hours. Pass the Mainz football stadium, a couple of high schools, and there is a cross between Hampstead Garden Suburb and the Arsenal at Woolwich, that is an old munitions factory. There are supposed to be lots of creative artisans there. I find only a bunch of non-creatives having lunch. Ask the barmaid. Ach yes, photographers and fashion designers and architects and ceramicists and painters and...it is Medici Florence.
But I just find the seamstresses and the assistant to one fashion designer "of London". she studied at St Martins, a few years ago. Where is everyone, I ask Gudrun. Holiday?
No, they just don't feel creative, I guess. Not everyone can be creative every day. Gutenberg spun a little in his grave. And I am sure the workaholic baby photographers did too. I change hotels to one which began in 1346, and is next to the Guttenberg museum. Write and drink coffee and realise, again, how little I know. And how hard it really is to be creative. Tomorrow, well later today, but written tomorrow, the oldest Brothel in Mainz, some Publishing Talk and a bit of a take on 9/11. Mainz kinda Town.
Kein Problem.
At Nierstein a wine loving couple give precise instructions and big smiles, soon I am in the vineyards and the lines and the smells are fantastic. They go on and on; I almost believe in white wine for a while. Then down to the river, which means the other side of the railway line that always follows me, I tune it out, and on for the afternoon towards Mainz.
The town arrives in a six at night glow; beer gardens on the river, kids playing frisbee (new sport) and laying around. The light is as if God decided Mainz around Harvest Moon should be Ectachrome, all sixties. I don't know if I am on the Campus of Berkley 1968, or something earlier and George Seurat. Very nice.
The bells are ringing of course. It's probably 6.15 but it feels welcoming. Everything is good, the Dom, the Marketplatz; the modernity of the Rathaus and the combination of the two worlds. But no wifi in the hotel; in fact a sort of analogue dismissal.
I wander the streets of the old town pimping for a signal - in Germany I haven't yet found anywhere to give me a new SIM and 3G access, as in Switzerland. There's a bar, an "of course", and soon I am talking to two professional photographers. They make their money shooting new born babies at the hospital; most hospitals now have websites with such things. The great thing is, everybody is happy at the shoot. They recommend an Italian place for dinner.
I sit outside and listen as a pair of Mainzers, husband and wife, she dictating from her IPhone, discuss the evening football scores in the Bundeslige. I ask if they support Mainz, currently top of the league. It is early in the season. Of course, but the fun ends on Saturday - Mainz plays Bayern Munich, the Siegfried of Teams. The husband was born in 1942, his family left Berlin at the end of the war, came here. "Mainz is very Roman," he says, you will see. And the Dom? Well the craftsman who made that...is very respected, the academics say so.
Back at the wifi cafe the Baby Photographers are still drinking; it's someone's birthday, maybe even one of them. I go inside to write; they come later, on their way home, to tell me I am a very "open" man. Later lawyers, students, they all want to work abroad. Spain or New York.
In the morning the Gutenberg museum is a riot of questions. A sea of wonder on many floors, where in the basement kids watch a printing lesson and upstairs I get another lesson in how little I know about the quality and the web-page like intensity of mid sixteenth century print works from the region. It is also a sea of lost meanings, a man stands on a fish, in turn suspended on an Ionian column. He holds a basket of fruit in one hand, a wheel in the other. From the Anglo-Saxon Chronicles, grr, supposed to know about that stuff. I am sure I can find out the "meaning". But I'll never share the illustrations' assumptions to its contemporary viewership. I think about this in the DIY Dom, all being fixed up, the film crew on location with some school kids. Nice, but wrong vibe. Didn't sing for the Chagall stained glass either, he was 91 when he started, after all.
Last night's Husband and Wife go back to Berlin twice a year, even then they are amazed at the changes. East Berlin...."is like New York."
I'm proficient at old towns now; know how to wake up to their bells, wanner their logical streets, centre myself at marketplatz and think. I hear there is a Mainz "Willemsberg". I weg my way there, for hours. Pass the Mainz football stadium, a couple of high schools, and there is a cross between Hampstead Garden Suburb and the Arsenal at Woolwich, that is an old munitions factory. There are supposed to be lots of creative artisans there. I find only a bunch of non-creatives having lunch. Ask the barmaid. Ach yes, photographers and fashion designers and architects and ceramicists and painters and...it is Medici Florence.
But I just find the seamstresses and the assistant to one fashion designer "of London". she studied at St Martins, a few years ago. Where is everyone, I ask Gudrun. Holiday?
No, they just don't feel creative, I guess. Not everyone can be creative every day. Gutenberg spun a little in his grave. And I am sure the workaholic baby photographers did too. I change hotels to one which began in 1346, and is next to the Guttenberg museum. Write and drink coffee and realise, again, how little I know. And how hard it really is to be creative. Tomorrow, well later today, but written tomorrow, the oldest Brothel in Mainz, some Publishing Talk and a bit of a take on 9/11. Mainz kinda Town.
Kein Problem.
Sunday, 26 September 2010
More Sagas
A early sunny start in Worms takes me to the river, a statue of Hagen throwing the treasure of the Niebelungen into the Rhine, and the vineyards that brought us Liebfraumilch. A Proustian moment - not. Too many 1970s allusions without any of the ameliorating punk songs, just loon pants and Abigail's parties.
The Dom is not so far from the Martin Luther memorial; and the campaign that will bring the tourists here en masse for 2021 - the 500th anniversary of Luther's address to the Diet of Worms - is already up and running. To get there, and it's still around 8am, I've walked past the Jewish cemetery, outside the city walls. I know I should know about Luther and the Jews, but I don't - I make a note to find out.
The Niebelungen museum is controversial; a lot of locals didn't want it, there were too many bad associations with Germany's "Illiad". It is a very clever piece of design, built into a slice of the still remaining city walls. Standing on these walls after a couple of hours inside I wonder: where in the world has not been invaded in, say, the past two hundred years? And is there any correlation between being - or not being - physically invaded and a country's relationship to overseas war? It is just a thought.
The museum is an audio-visual experience of the good kind. In fact the entire point of the museum is that it is a fascinating series of spaces, towers, which the visitor climbs to watch and listen to the story, and some of the recital, of the German saga. Who knew it was centred in Worms?
The narrator of the piece is the anonymous author of the German version of the Niebelungen. Even in English he has a nice fruity voice, and a gentle sense of humour. On small video monitors clips from old black and white German movie tellings of the myth, including Fritz Lang's play away, moodily. And there's a modern music score that adds to the atmosphere.
"When I wrote this story, some 800 years ago, the world was a very different place...Over the centuries I have seen what you, the living, have made of my story, and how you have interpreted it..." The narrator disagrees with some of Snorri's version..."many interpreted my poem as they pleased, not really caring for the truth...There were many who let themselves be compared to him [Siegfried]. All this has nothing to do with my work. What fiendish interpretations were these! Oh sceptre of misfortune!"
It makes me think of Luther, his "re-interpretation" - his going back to The Word - of the Bible. It is the curse of all texts to be too open, too malleable. I think too about the word "freedom" in the past decade. Then back inside, our narrator does not rate Wagner's take on the myth so highly. Indeed the museum's creators say that they "deliberately shied away from all of the Romantic epics..."
In the "Listening Tower" there is a real panorama across the city to the cathedral, and in the other direction to the Rhine. There's also a series of audio clips of where exactly the "Burgundians" - yes indeed, the original Worms folk were Burgundians - travelled. Iceland, Hungary, Jerusalem, Denmark...It shames us, even Tom, how far they went.
The cycle path to Oppenheim starts at the railway station in Worms. I buy sandwiches and water from a shop there. The woman behind the counter is wearing a nice Burberry scarf. I praise it, "from England," I say.
"Ach, from Istanbul," she laughs. "It's a fake."
This morning I've received an invitation to talk at the European Parliament, at a conference about copyright. Brussels. Not on the route, but not so far away. Copyright a year on from Britain's Digital Act. Should be interesting. But what to wear? The travel clothes will be walking by themselves soon, leaving their stinky presence...Hope the shops are good in Brussels. Maybe I should - like Tom in 1612 - hop to Istanbul...
I start at around 12 and it's still warm, the weather doesn't break until Thursday. Still the one hour detour around an inlet that leads nowhere puts me back an hour, though I do get to see some archery fields. Another sport for the list. It's plain sailing down the river, but a long way, and when I'm forced to take the ferry across to Gernsheim and find that at 5-ish it is still about another 20 kilometres I wilt, sit and have a water and a giant Snickers bar. And head for the cycle route.
Go wrong, first time on the right bank of the Rhine. Always been a Left Bank kind of Guy.
Hot, tired. A vision. She's a schoolgirl, well just finished, going to study mechanical engineering at Darmstadt next month. She leads me to the railway station, explains the complex train route I'm going to have to take to get to Oppenheim (it involves going to Frankfurt, briefly), and then marches me off to the supermarket to get provisions as I have 20 mins in hand. By the time I collapse in my somewhat swanky just off the hill hotel in steep-streeted Oppenheim The Schoolgirl has already tracked me down to be a Facebook friend. She may well Rule the World shortly.
In the morning I wander the hilly streets and enjoy a small city museum that fills in a few Tom gaps. I realise I am not reading Tom much at the moment, am too ensconced in Don Quixote. There'll be time in Mainz. I leave at midday and am in Mainz by 5.30. The walk through the vineyards of Nierstein is fantastic.
And for tomorrow.
The Dom is not so far from the Martin Luther memorial; and the campaign that will bring the tourists here en masse for 2021 - the 500th anniversary of Luther's address to the Diet of Worms - is already up and running. To get there, and it's still around 8am, I've walked past the Jewish cemetery, outside the city walls. I know I should know about Luther and the Jews, but I don't - I make a note to find out.
The Niebelungen museum is controversial; a lot of locals didn't want it, there were too many bad associations with Germany's "Illiad". It is a very clever piece of design, built into a slice of the still remaining city walls. Standing on these walls after a couple of hours inside I wonder: where in the world has not been invaded in, say, the past two hundred years? And is there any correlation between being - or not being - physically invaded and a country's relationship to overseas war? It is just a thought.
The museum is an audio-visual experience of the good kind. In fact the entire point of the museum is that it is a fascinating series of spaces, towers, which the visitor climbs to watch and listen to the story, and some of the recital, of the German saga. Who knew it was centred in Worms?
The narrator of the piece is the anonymous author of the German version of the Niebelungen. Even in English he has a nice fruity voice, and a gentle sense of humour. On small video monitors clips from old black and white German movie tellings of the myth, including Fritz Lang's play away, moodily. And there's a modern music score that adds to the atmosphere.
"When I wrote this story, some 800 years ago, the world was a very different place...Over the centuries I have seen what you, the living, have made of my story, and how you have interpreted it..." The narrator disagrees with some of Snorri's version..."many interpreted my poem as they pleased, not really caring for the truth...There were many who let themselves be compared to him [Siegfried]. All this has nothing to do with my work. What fiendish interpretations were these! Oh sceptre of misfortune!"
It makes me think of Luther, his "re-interpretation" - his going back to The Word - of the Bible. It is the curse of all texts to be too open, too malleable. I think too about the word "freedom" in the past decade. Then back inside, our narrator does not rate Wagner's take on the myth so highly. Indeed the museum's creators say that they "deliberately shied away from all of the Romantic epics..."
In the "Listening Tower" there is a real panorama across the city to the cathedral, and in the other direction to the Rhine. There's also a series of audio clips of where exactly the "Burgundians" - yes indeed, the original Worms folk were Burgundians - travelled. Iceland, Hungary, Jerusalem, Denmark...It shames us, even Tom, how far they went.
The cycle path to Oppenheim starts at the railway station in Worms. I buy sandwiches and water from a shop there. The woman behind the counter is wearing a nice Burberry scarf. I praise it, "from England," I say.
"Ach, from Istanbul," she laughs. "It's a fake."
This morning I've received an invitation to talk at the European Parliament, at a conference about copyright. Brussels. Not on the route, but not so far away. Copyright a year on from Britain's Digital Act. Should be interesting. But what to wear? The travel clothes will be walking by themselves soon, leaving their stinky presence...Hope the shops are good in Brussels. Maybe I should - like Tom in 1612 - hop to Istanbul...
I start at around 12 and it's still warm, the weather doesn't break until Thursday. Still the one hour detour around an inlet that leads nowhere puts me back an hour, though I do get to see some archery fields. Another sport for the list. It's plain sailing down the river, but a long way, and when I'm forced to take the ferry across to Gernsheim and find that at 5-ish it is still about another 20 kilometres I wilt, sit and have a water and a giant Snickers bar. And head for the cycle route.
Go wrong, first time on the right bank of the Rhine. Always been a Left Bank kind of Guy.
Hot, tired. A vision. She's a schoolgirl, well just finished, going to study mechanical engineering at Darmstadt next month. She leads me to the railway station, explains the complex train route I'm going to have to take to get to Oppenheim (it involves going to Frankfurt, briefly), and then marches me off to the supermarket to get provisions as I have 20 mins in hand. By the time I collapse in my somewhat swanky just off the hill hotel in steep-streeted Oppenheim The Schoolgirl has already tracked me down to be a Facebook friend. She may well Rule the World shortly.
In the morning I wander the hilly streets and enjoy a small city museum that fills in a few Tom gaps. I realise I am not reading Tom much at the moment, am too ensconced in Don Quixote. There'll be time in Mainz. I leave at midday and am in Mainz by 5.30. The walk through the vineyards of Nierstein is fantastic.
And for tomorrow.
Monday, 20 September 2010
My Diet in Worms
Frankenthal's cloudy centre is drinking beer at 9.30, but it is Sunday. The weekend cyclists soon appear as I walk towards the Rhine, through a subdued suburbia close to the autobahn. It is a morning of sports, first the teenage footballers in their new kits, ready for grudge matches. The weather is amazing, in the literature of the region that I picked up in Speyer it repeatedly uses the word "Mediterranean" - now I begin to see why. The sun doing its shadow dance with the trees across the river, the fields, the paths I'm walking. My own shadow making me a temporary hero of some Rhine Saga. Taller at least.
It's warm, but the air has something chilled about it, like a good Riesling. September on the Rhine.
The river is majestic now - and I've not yet reached the alleged Romantic Sector, where all the Lorelei action takes place - it's boulevarded by massive trees, neat like a classical garden. The kayaks are out, the power boats, the long-slung barges slink by. Then the cycling parties, dog walkers with great packs of beasts, largely tethered and all well behaved. Fishermen, couple just noodling on the bits of beach. I zig-zag from the walking path to the cycling, changing the angle of these vistas. A woman practicing her dressage on a spotless small course. A horse and buggy come down a glade; it is 1890 and Sherlock Holmes must be in pursuit. Or perhaps he's in Pinewood, working on the sequel.
More heartache as the Turner riverscapes just keep coming; my camera must be getting bored with staring into the sun for those Wagnerian cloud formations. Not so far today, about 15 kilometres, or less. Another woody glade and then a strange sound, one that I recognise but it can't be possible: metallic, montonous, repetitive. Out of the glade and the fields, really a park, open out.
It is.
The Worms Cannibals and warming up for their baseball game with the Cannibal Old Boys. I take a seat behind the pitching frame. Pierro is from Frankentahl, but lives here now. "It's a global game - it's just that nobody knows that. They've been playing baseball in Worms for years." The practice goes on, friends and family turn up. I can't say surreal anymore, but it was unusual.
I turn inland just before the Niebelungen bridge, that can wait for sunrise. In a car park, somewhere south of the centre I ask a middle-aged woman in a shiny Beemer, door open, where is the Zentrum? She shakes her head violently, don't know, don't know. The man beside her closes his wallet.
The diet of Worms on Sunday is ice cream. I guess I have missed lunch. There are hundreds of outdoor tables in the marketplatz and around the DOM hotel. And hundreds of different kinds of gellato. Even the waiters look Italian. As my baseball player was "Pierro" I wonder if there is some kind of Italian community, some Roman connection. Perhaps it is just the Mediterranean climate.
At dusk I drink coffee and hear about a new archaeological find in the past year: an underground bridge, the Volks Brucke. It's seventeenth century.
Valhallah.
Sleep.
The Niebelungen bridge in very early morning, crossing the Rhine, not so far from the Niebelungen Museum, closed today so I book another night, somewhere else (not so keen on last night's place, particularly the thirty or so nineteenth century Chucky dolls in the tiny hotel reception, sitting on all the seats). The Bridge Gate - the Brucketurm - is a big Gothic-style "hello" or "goodbye" to Worms. It's surrounded by a host of highways and paths and autobahns to all parts of Germany. Heavy Goods Vehicles Chunder by, barges slip their way: I like the contrast, the continuity. In fact the bridge gate is not so old, just over a 100 years, but it looks it - sort of Hogwartian, full of tricks. Close by a modern statue celebrating where Hagen threw the Niebelungen treasure into the Rhine long before Joan Rivers. More on this when I have Ein Klue (Museums shut on Monday in Europe).
The new - old - underground bridge is not so far away and is, not so dug yet. Is nascent, a promise of digs to come. At tourist information Sabrina explains that this was built in the early seventeenth century when the Rhine was not controlled, not dammed, and smaller tributaries served the walled city, bringing the food and goods to the marketplatz in small boats. I am getting closer to an idea of Tom's Worms.
Around the city walls, the synagogue, rebuilt in the late 1950s, after wartime destruction, but first here in the eleventh century. A monument to King Leopold; and then another massive multi-figured memorial to Martin Luther, looking pretty good. This is said to be the largest memorial to The Reformation anywhere in Europe. Plenty of tourists take its picture.
It is positively Greek Island Heat at lunchtime and I'm pondering last night's discovery that Worms fights with Trier to claim their position as oldest city in Germany. More of that when the culture re-kicks on Tuesday, plus the Niebelungen Saga, Martin Luther and the 1521 Diet of Worms (they are already advertising the 500th anniversary in 2021).
But, for the first time in ages, I am live. I have, as it were, caught up with myself. So much is unwritten, missing, missed. But I am here, the sun is out as I write and I'm getting tanned. In front of me a pair of middle-aged Loreleis that Lunch have just put away a meat platter about the size of Hampstead Heath, in London. They are both posh thin. There must be something in the wine.
Or the Rhine.
It is September 20, 2010 and the bells of the cathedral have just given us the quick 2 0'Luther.
It's warm, but the air has something chilled about it, like a good Riesling. September on the Rhine.
The river is majestic now - and I've not yet reached the alleged Romantic Sector, where all the Lorelei action takes place - it's boulevarded by massive trees, neat like a classical garden. The kayaks are out, the power boats, the long-slung barges slink by. Then the cycling parties, dog walkers with great packs of beasts, largely tethered and all well behaved. Fishermen, couple just noodling on the bits of beach. I zig-zag from the walking path to the cycling, changing the angle of these vistas. A woman practicing her dressage on a spotless small course. A horse and buggy come down a glade; it is 1890 and Sherlock Holmes must be in pursuit. Or perhaps he's in Pinewood, working on the sequel.
More heartache as the Turner riverscapes just keep coming; my camera must be getting bored with staring into the sun for those Wagnerian cloud formations. Not so far today, about 15 kilometres, or less. Another woody glade and then a strange sound, one that I recognise but it can't be possible: metallic, montonous, repetitive. Out of the glade and the fields, really a park, open out.
It is.
The Worms Cannibals and warming up for their baseball game with the Cannibal Old Boys. I take a seat behind the pitching frame. Pierro is from Frankentahl, but lives here now. "It's a global game - it's just that nobody knows that. They've been playing baseball in Worms for years." The practice goes on, friends and family turn up. I can't say surreal anymore, but it was unusual.
I turn inland just before the Niebelungen bridge, that can wait for sunrise. In a car park, somewhere south of the centre I ask a middle-aged woman in a shiny Beemer, door open, where is the Zentrum? She shakes her head violently, don't know, don't know. The man beside her closes his wallet.
The diet of Worms on Sunday is ice cream. I guess I have missed lunch. There are hundreds of outdoor tables in the marketplatz and around the DOM hotel. And hundreds of different kinds of gellato. Even the waiters look Italian. As my baseball player was "Pierro" I wonder if there is some kind of Italian community, some Roman connection. Perhaps it is just the Mediterranean climate.
At dusk I drink coffee and hear about a new archaeological find in the past year: an underground bridge, the Volks Brucke. It's seventeenth century.
Valhallah.
Sleep.
The Niebelungen bridge in very early morning, crossing the Rhine, not so far from the Niebelungen Museum, closed today so I book another night, somewhere else (not so keen on last night's place, particularly the thirty or so nineteenth century Chucky dolls in the tiny hotel reception, sitting on all the seats). The Bridge Gate - the Brucketurm - is a big Gothic-style "hello" or "goodbye" to Worms. It's surrounded by a host of highways and paths and autobahns to all parts of Germany. Heavy Goods Vehicles Chunder by, barges slip their way: I like the contrast, the continuity. In fact the bridge gate is not so old, just over a 100 years, but it looks it - sort of Hogwartian, full of tricks. Close by a modern statue celebrating where Hagen threw the Niebelungen treasure into the Rhine long before Joan Rivers. More on this when I have Ein Klue (Museums shut on Monday in Europe).
The new - old - underground bridge is not so far away and is, not so dug yet. Is nascent, a promise of digs to come. At tourist information Sabrina explains that this was built in the early seventeenth century when the Rhine was not controlled, not dammed, and smaller tributaries served the walled city, bringing the food and goods to the marketplatz in small boats. I am getting closer to an idea of Tom's Worms.
Around the city walls, the synagogue, rebuilt in the late 1950s, after wartime destruction, but first here in the eleventh century. A monument to King Leopold; and then another massive multi-figured memorial to Martin Luther, looking pretty good. This is said to be the largest memorial to The Reformation anywhere in Europe. Plenty of tourists take its picture.
It is positively Greek Island Heat at lunchtime and I'm pondering last night's discovery that Worms fights with Trier to claim their position as oldest city in Germany. More of that when the culture re-kicks on Tuesday, plus the Niebelungen Saga, Martin Luther and the 1521 Diet of Worms (they are already advertising the 500th anniversary in 2021).
But, for the first time in ages, I am live. I have, as it were, caught up with myself. So much is unwritten, missing, missed. But I am here, the sun is out as I write and I'm getting tanned. In front of me a pair of middle-aged Loreleis that Lunch have just put away a meat platter about the size of Hampstead Heath, in London. They are both posh thin. There must be something in the wine.
Or the Rhine.
It is September 20, 2010 and the bells of the cathedral have just given us the quick 2 0'Luther.
A short little palimpsest of Speyer
Ever since I saw and became obsessed with the work of the German conceptual artist, Anselm Kiefer, I've wanted to see - and walk - and, inevitably, photograph, haphazardly, some of the rhineland landscapes that appear to have influenced his monumentalist work.
Kiefer''s art tries to - I think - reclaim a connection, a continuity, with a long, ancient, tradition concerning land that was eviscerated, literally burnt away, by the twentieth century in Germany. All that history that I know I must confront at some time.
In much of his most central work Kiefer uses quotes, ideas, and allusions to, Jewish mysticism, the cabbala - but not that LA-Madonna stuff - that I am discovering has a very strong link to the Rhine towns I am visiting now, here in Speyer and in Worms - not so far away beyond Frankenthal. Here, and separately in medieval Spain, the Jewish mystic tradition evolved in the 11th and 12th centuries; it feels strange as I enter the world of the Niebelung, the Germanic Saga, to be realising this.
Simon Schama, the historian, who I should really just quote every day, but a traveling man has some pride and hopes for originality, wrote of the 2007 Kiefer show in London at the White Cube:
"Much of Kiefer's art represents a resistance to this inhuman virtualisation of memory; its lazy democracy of significance, its translation into weightless impressions. The opposing pole from that alt/delete disposability is to make history obstinately material, laid down in dense, sedimentary deposits that demand patient, rugged excavation. Kiefer's work burrows away at time, and what it exposes also makes visible the painful toil of the dig, skinned knuckles, barked shins and all.
For a German born amid the slaughterhouses of 1945, booting up could never be glibly electronic. Kiefer became famous in the 1970s and 80s for his frontal engagements with the totems of German history: blood- spattered trails befouling the deep Teutonic woods (his name means fir tree) from which the national culture had been proverbially rough-hewn; torch-lit timbered pantheons within which heroes and anti-heroes lay provisionally interred."
Yes.
I think perhaps I have seen some of this land now, and meeting the Roma twice I feel we are still not home, still determined to find scapegoats, to torch land - my mind, dislocated by the travel and the attentiveness to detail not the big picture, still can't understand the Koran-burning fiascos of Florida.
There's a judenhaus here in Speyer, bathhouse remains, restored ruins. I visit on the Friday afternoon of Yom Kippur, atonement. Speyer had a long tradition, a vibrant, integrated community, of jews until around 1540 - unlike many towns that, while tolerant, still placed their jews in ghettos.
I keep thinking about the Roma, on the run from Sarkozy. Walking to the cathedral later a girl passes in a "I 'heart' Roma" t-shirt. She's more Spanish Steps, Armani store on the via Condotti, I suspect - still I read it as a gesture in Anti Sarkozy-Bruni (I think we have to add her, regretfully) polemic.
In the bookshop at the judenhaus there's a small brochure about the jewish mystics of the region. If this diary every becomes a book I will, in Chatwinny/Stewartian prose talk about these men. For the moment their lives are for contemplation back at the British Library.
I spend a few hours in the cathedral, but nothing quite becomes it like first viewing, walking the rhine, church as media, presence, power. It is plain, huge, being restored with vast UNESCO funds; down in the crypts those Emperors that Slyvie talked about yesterday in the dreamy, statue-filled, gardens of Schwetzinger. It really was a sublime pitstop, a wander into a truly other world for an hour. I imagine pageants there, bacchanalian festivals, regal strolling. But it is the Palatinate, and I am stupidly ignorant about it.
Down in the crypts the tombs are like giant loaves of bread, pressed into the walls. Upstairs I sit and consider the Romanesque interior, very plain, arched, austere. I can't help but think of certain mosques I've seen in Istanbul.
There is more that connects us than separates.
There's no phone, no television and no wi-fi in my Catholic hostel. I find a network at Maximillian and read about the Pope and terror arrests in London. (Later the suspects are all released). There is a tepid conversation with loud Russian women, who give me a what's he worth once over: not much they conclude.
--
In Baden-Baden walking to a cafe at around nine one evening I heard the most pitiful sound. From a side street comes the echo, from a building with the terrifying blue neon logo often seen "abroad", away from England, that just reads "pub". The sound is of a male chorus, clearly well on their way, singing in various keys, Carly Simon's "You're So Vain."
I'm remembering that moment now as I go for a late night coffee/red-wine at the Irish bar in Speyer. I don't do this sort of thing. But last night, walking home, it was quiz night at the Irish bar, and one of the answers that boomed out into the courtyard to a question was "Schnitzel." Which brought about large-scale applause. At least it will be German Irish, not Englishmen singing You're So Vain, or indeed Anticipation or Mockingbird. Inside it is pretty quiet. A couple of guys my age standing at the bar, drinking Guinness. I order a red wine. Gunter says: "Why are you drinking red wine in an Irish bar?"
--
"We started in the Library, with champagne. The Oriental Club, just off Oxford street, in Marylebone. And then the food...the wine...Finally, we stand, we say the Loyal Toast, to the Queen! I am 18, in a borrowed morning suit, the first time in London. Me, from Speyer. The wedding [a family friend's son - connected, investment banking....Hong-Kong heiress...] was in St Pauls! I mean people took their video cameras out, they filmed...us."
The following year Gunter met an older, and married, woman...
I loved this story because it touches at so many things: travel, difference, influence, class, marriage, money...the English, but most of all the moments that matter - that change us. I think - I feel - that this story, this spot in time to misuse Wordsworth's idea, changed Gunter's way of seeing the world. He's seen a lot of it now, and like many of us, feels spiritually at home in New York, that confusing brutal melting point where old Europe meets Steel-Canyon Modernity.
Gunter's friend Peter tells me about the Palatinate, the subtle distinctions of "east" and "west" of the Rhine. I listen and learn and sadly forget. Because Peter wants to know about the British Royal Family.
What do you think of them? They're very...expensive.
"But a great tradition," says Gunter.
"Very expensive," I say. I laugh. "Look, did you guys see The Queen?" [It is part of my doctoral thesis, exploring the distance between Peter Morgan's script and some sense of what really happened. And yet The Queen is an Oscar winning movie.]
"Of course," Peter's mantra.
"Well, I don't think it really happened like that." I give a pompous lecture on history, narrative, new media and trust.
"A bit like the English histories of what happened in Ireland?'
- Exactly.
"Absolutely."
"But what do you think of the Royal Family, expensive aren't they?"
Soon we are trying to think of something useful, and inconsequential, for Prince Charles to do.
"Look, they're all useless except for the Queen," I say, "she does her job. But look, I'm a champagne socialist sort of guy, I would say this."
"From Hampstead," says Gunter, who understands these things.
We end, after a lovely chat, tilting at windmills in a bar named Don Quixote. But not for long; in the basement there is frenzied youth and deadly music. Gunter and I agree to meet next year; there's a Clapton concert in London. My round, this time.
There is more that connects us, than separates, I say to Gunter and Peter. Why not?
I like my new red-wine, rhine-side, aphorism. It is perhaps a little Howard's End, but..why not.
After the Farmer's Market with Serious Hangover, and the Pope or God punishing me by hexing the wi-fi in the hostel, and at Maximillians, and by ensuring that when I phone my friends to meet up - via a train - nearby - they are in a shopping mall without mobile reception, I resign myself to a train to Frankenthal. It's about 30 kilometres and I'm not in the mood. By the railway station there's a unicorn [see Facebook for photographs]. My first of the trip.
Frankenthal is a bit belchy. A lot of men on the street with plastic bottles of vodka. A lot of men milling about generally. Don't like the mood, though the town is nice enough to look at. At the family bar it is Ladies Night, which allows Robbie Williams' Angels to be played without postmodern irony.
It's not for me. At the sport's bar I learn that Mainz are top of the Bundes-League. The first time in their history. And I'll be there in a few days.
Still, I suspect, missing super Speyer.
Kiefer''s art tries to - I think - reclaim a connection, a continuity, with a long, ancient, tradition concerning land that was eviscerated, literally burnt away, by the twentieth century in Germany. All that history that I know I must confront at some time.
In much of his most central work Kiefer uses quotes, ideas, and allusions to, Jewish mysticism, the cabbala - but not that LA-Madonna stuff - that I am discovering has a very strong link to the Rhine towns I am visiting now, here in Speyer and in Worms - not so far away beyond Frankenthal. Here, and separately in medieval Spain, the Jewish mystic tradition evolved in the 11th and 12th centuries; it feels strange as I enter the world of the Niebelung, the Germanic Saga, to be realising this.
Simon Schama, the historian, who I should really just quote every day, but a traveling man has some pride and hopes for originality, wrote of the 2007 Kiefer show in London at the White Cube:
"Much of Kiefer's art represents a resistance to this inhuman virtualisation of memory; its lazy democracy of significance, its translation into weightless impressions. The opposing pole from that alt/delete disposability is to make history obstinately material, laid down in dense, sedimentary deposits that demand patient, rugged excavation. Kiefer's work burrows away at time, and what it exposes also makes visible the painful toil of the dig, skinned knuckles, barked shins and all.
For a German born amid the slaughterhouses of 1945, booting up could never be glibly electronic. Kiefer became famous in the 1970s and 80s for his frontal engagements with the totems of German history: blood- spattered trails befouling the deep Teutonic woods (his name means fir tree) from which the national culture had been proverbially rough-hewn; torch-lit timbered pantheons within which heroes and anti-heroes lay provisionally interred."
Yes.
I think perhaps I have seen some of this land now, and meeting the Roma twice I feel we are still not home, still determined to find scapegoats, to torch land - my mind, dislocated by the travel and the attentiveness to detail not the big picture, still can't understand the Koran-burning fiascos of Florida.
There's a judenhaus here in Speyer, bathhouse remains, restored ruins. I visit on the Friday afternoon of Yom Kippur, atonement. Speyer had a long tradition, a vibrant, integrated community, of jews until around 1540 - unlike many towns that, while tolerant, still placed their jews in ghettos.
I keep thinking about the Roma, on the run from Sarkozy. Walking to the cathedral later a girl passes in a "I 'heart' Roma" t-shirt. She's more Spanish Steps, Armani store on the via Condotti, I suspect - still I read it as a gesture in Anti Sarkozy-Bruni (I think we have to add her, regretfully) polemic.
In the bookshop at the judenhaus there's a small brochure about the jewish mystics of the region. If this diary every becomes a book I will, in Chatwinny/Stewartian prose talk about these men. For the moment their lives are for contemplation back at the British Library.
I spend a few hours in the cathedral, but nothing quite becomes it like first viewing, walking the rhine, church as media, presence, power. It is plain, huge, being restored with vast UNESCO funds; down in the crypts those Emperors that Slyvie talked about yesterday in the dreamy, statue-filled, gardens of Schwetzinger. It really was a sublime pitstop, a wander into a truly other world for an hour. I imagine pageants there, bacchanalian festivals, regal strolling. But it is the Palatinate, and I am stupidly ignorant about it.
Down in the crypts the tombs are like giant loaves of bread, pressed into the walls. Upstairs I sit and consider the Romanesque interior, very plain, arched, austere. I can't help but think of certain mosques I've seen in Istanbul.
There is more that connects us than separates.
There's no phone, no television and no wi-fi in my Catholic hostel. I find a network at Maximillian and read about the Pope and terror arrests in London. (Later the suspects are all released). There is a tepid conversation with loud Russian women, who give me a what's he worth once over: not much they conclude.
--
In Baden-Baden walking to a cafe at around nine one evening I heard the most pitiful sound. From a side street comes the echo, from a building with the terrifying blue neon logo often seen "abroad", away from England, that just reads "pub". The sound is of a male chorus, clearly well on their way, singing in various keys, Carly Simon's "You're So Vain."
I'm remembering that moment now as I go for a late night coffee/red-wine at the Irish bar in Speyer. I don't do this sort of thing. But last night, walking home, it was quiz night at the Irish bar, and one of the answers that boomed out into the courtyard to a question was "Schnitzel." Which brought about large-scale applause. At least it will be German Irish, not Englishmen singing You're So Vain, or indeed Anticipation or Mockingbird. Inside it is pretty quiet. A couple of guys my age standing at the bar, drinking Guinness. I order a red wine. Gunter says: "Why are you drinking red wine in an Irish bar?"
--
"We started in the Library, with champagne. The Oriental Club, just off Oxford street, in Marylebone. And then the food...the wine...Finally, we stand, we say the Loyal Toast, to the Queen! I am 18, in a borrowed morning suit, the first time in London. Me, from Speyer. The wedding [a family friend's son - connected, investment banking....Hong-Kong heiress...] was in St Pauls! I mean people took their video cameras out, they filmed...us."
The following year Gunter met an older, and married, woman...
I loved this story because it touches at so many things: travel, difference, influence, class, marriage, money...the English, but most of all the moments that matter - that change us. I think - I feel - that this story, this spot in time to misuse Wordsworth's idea, changed Gunter's way of seeing the world. He's seen a lot of it now, and like many of us, feels spiritually at home in New York, that confusing brutal melting point where old Europe meets Steel-Canyon Modernity.
Gunter's friend Peter tells me about the Palatinate, the subtle distinctions of "east" and "west" of the Rhine. I listen and learn and sadly forget. Because Peter wants to know about the British Royal Family.
What do you think of them? They're very...expensive.
"But a great tradition," says Gunter.
"Very expensive," I say. I laugh. "Look, did you guys see The Queen?" [It is part of my doctoral thesis, exploring the distance between Peter Morgan's script and some sense of what really happened. And yet The Queen is an Oscar winning movie.]
"Of course," Peter's mantra.
"Well, I don't think it really happened like that." I give a pompous lecture on history, narrative, new media and trust.
"A bit like the English histories of what happened in Ireland?'
- Exactly.
"Absolutely."
"But what do you think of the Royal Family, expensive aren't they?"
Soon we are trying to think of something useful, and inconsequential, for Prince Charles to do.
"Look, they're all useless except for the Queen," I say, "she does her job. But look, I'm a champagne socialist sort of guy, I would say this."
"From Hampstead," says Gunter, who understands these things.
We end, after a lovely chat, tilting at windmills in a bar named Don Quixote. But not for long; in the basement there is frenzied youth and deadly music. Gunter and I agree to meet next year; there's a Clapton concert in London. My round, this time.
There is more that connects us, than separates, I say to Gunter and Peter. Why not?
I like my new red-wine, rhine-side, aphorism. It is perhaps a little Howard's End, but..why not.
After the Farmer's Market with Serious Hangover, and the Pope or God punishing me by hexing the wi-fi in the hostel, and at Maximillians, and by ensuring that when I phone my friends to meet up - via a train - nearby - they are in a shopping mall without mobile reception, I resign myself to a train to Frankenthal. It's about 30 kilometres and I'm not in the mood. By the railway station there's a unicorn [see Facebook for photographs]. My first of the trip.
Frankenthal is a bit belchy. A lot of men on the street with plastic bottles of vodka. A lot of men milling about generally. Don't like the mood, though the town is nice enough to look at. At the family bar it is Ladies Night, which allows Robbie Williams' Angels to be played without postmodern irony.
It's not for me. At the sport's bar I learn that Mainz are top of the Bundes-League. The first time in their history. And I'll be there in a few days.
Still, I suspect, missing super Speyer.
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