Pissoirs of Berlin: A palatial amplitude at Schlesisches Tor

Forsaking the octagonal shape of the classical Berlin pissoir—the so-called Café Achteck which we have discussed in an earlier post—we now come to an alternate model that combines elegance with magnificent proportions, constructed to accommodate if necessary an entire football team of happy urinators. It is built of the same charming cucumber-green cast-iron plates as the traditional Berlin model, now reimagined in a rectangular configuration.

The particular example of engineering excellence you see above has an especially delightful acoustic feature. Due to its location near Schlesisches Tor ("Silesian Gate"), you can relieve yourself to a thunderous accompaniment as the U-3 overhead hurtles into the train station just a few more meters down the line. 

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thanks: unknown flickr user

The further adventures of Heidi, the Cross-eyed 'Possum

Meanwhile Heidi the Cross-eyed 'Possum has been eating too much, so her keepers at the Leipzig Zoo had to put her on a special diet this week to trim her down. Several facebook groups have been created by her many admirers, and We love Heidi, das schielende Opossum has some especially good photos.

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Image source unknown.

Saturday Gallimaufry

1) If the T.E. Lawrence era in the Near East excites your interest, check this series of aerial photos published this week by Sueddeutsche Zeitung in Munich. The Germans found themselves in the ridiculous position of defending what was left of the Ottoman Empire in WWI, which gave some fliers from Bavaria an opportunity to photograph a few of the important venues of Near Eastern civilization, still largely stuck in the pre-industrial past.

2) The Pergamon Museum in Berlin opened a major exhibition on the excavations at Tell Halaf (ca. 6100-5400 BCE) in Northern Syria, which is generally recognized as the most important archaeological site from the Neolithic Period. Here are some pictures of the excavation, and here are more pictures from the show at the Pergamon. The Wiki on Tell Halaf explains what one needs to know. Imagine a public lecture on classical archaeology attended as well as this one on the steps of the Pergamon altar last week:

CHIM KLEUKER/© STAATLICHE MUSEEN ZU BERLIN

3) Don't forget the 44th Annual California Bookfair coming up February 11-13 here in San Francisco.

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HOW TO KILL OFF CULTURE IN SAN FRANCISCO: PART ONE

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Shut down community radio.


2011 is off to a bumpy start with the Arizona shootings, the attempt of House Republicans to repeal health care reform, and now the elimination of KUSF FM by USF university officials, who, in a secret move obviously meant to forestall any public discussion, sold off the station’s license to KDFC on January 20th.


I won’t take time to deliver an elegy for KUSF—either you loved it as I did, or else ignored it, and that was pretty much it. And I won’t bother to heap abuse upon the bastards who simply shut down the station without a word of warning—a volunteer broadcaster was simply told to get up and leave in the middle of his broadcast—or upon the current president of USF, who in his public statement cynically suggested that he looked forward to KUSF’s glorious future as an online broadcasting station—as if an ipod could replace listening to FM radio in your car or home or workplace.


What concerns me is the effect this has on the production of culture in San Francisco. It may help to view the matter historically. When I got here in mid-sixties, KPFA was the only station that devoted several hours each week to recordings, interviews, discussions of local modern composers and musicians living and working in the Bay Area. Thanks to the efforts of Carl Stone and Charles Amirkhanian and a number of volunteers, KPFA helped establish the careers of musicians, some of whom soon enjoyed nationwide reputations —Lou Harrison, Terry Riley, the Kronos Quartet, to mention just a couple—and also brought news and periodic updates from the Mills College composing program, Stanford computer-music lab, and other local institutions that sponsored modern music performance and composition.


The KPFA Music Department—which I co-directed for a year—also pioneered brand-new musical genres not heard anywhere else in the Bay Area: early music, world music, space music, and punk. As at KUSF, most of the KPFA broadcasters were volunteers—real enthusiasts and often very knowledgeable about the material they programmed.


Unfortunately somewhere towards the end of Reagan One, all this got chucked out when it was decided to double the amount of political programming at KPFA. The traditional Morning Concert from 9-11am was scrapped. World music was now taken to mean salsa; culture gave way to politics and current affairs, interspersed with pop music from Mexican radio.


But also in the 1980’s something marvelous happened: there was a huge eruption of musical productivity in the San Francisco pop music scene, with an amazing variety of new bands and music clubs to accommodate them. They were largely punk-derived garage bands, but there were many blues bands early on, with electronic and synth bands developing in the 90’s. It was a bee-hive of experimentation and, remarkably, it was even financially self-sustaining to an extent thanks to the clubs around town.


At the top of all this chaos sat KUSF, on the air with volunteer broadcasters from midnight to 6pm Mo-Fri, covering the whole scene in exactly the way that community radio excels: savvy people sorting out and broadcasting the best of it, interviewing the musicians, sampling the product, promoting local concerts and new recordings.


Contrast this with what happened at KDFC, the local commercial classical music station. Following a horrible trend that started in the 70’s, it chose to broadcast classical music as a species of “elevator music” or Muzak, as one called it. The station became computer-automated, meaning that hundreds of hours of pre-recorded material were sorted and broadcast by computer. You really didn’t need to have a human being present at the station at all, except an engineer to fix a machine that broke down. Certainly you didn’t want anyone around who actually gave a shit about classical music, understood the difference between a good performance or a mediocre one, or who programmed modern composition that was the slightest bit dissonant.


My point here is that there are different ways that one can handle and manipulate “culture.” You can take the SF Hotel and Restaurant Tax revenues and hand them over to the “Big Seven,” the leading cultural institutions in the city, beginning with the symphony and opera, that require monster infusions of money to operate. But that’s not creating culture—it’s reproducing culture, at best spending mega-sums of resources on some highly-nuanced interpretation of cultural artifacts that arose long before any of us were even born. As marvelous as our orchestra or opera may be, the big bucks are going mainly to maintain a sort of acoustic museum, an arena where little will happen to disturb the comfort zone of the audience, (explaining incidentally the current institutional obsession with John Adams’ work).


So now KUSF FM, which has done so very much to generate and create culture in San Francisco for thirty-four years, has disappeared forever, unless the FCC unexpectedly proves responsive to community protests. Good-bye Deejay Schmeejay, Stereo Steve, Irwin Swirinoff, Terrible Ted, Natalie and Jet and all the rest of you—you were completely awesome, and long may you wave—hopefully somewhere else within earshot, if the stereo gods are favorable.


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Rondeau for a break in the weather

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We’re currently enjoying an outbreak of faux printemps here in NorCal: ten days now of clear skies and summer-like temperatures, with more of the same foreseen into February. What better reason therefore to recall


Charles d'Orléans (1394-1465), Rondeau


Le temps a laissé son manteau
De vent, de froidure et de pluie
Et s'est vêtu de broderie,
De soleil luisant, clair et beau.
Il n'y a bête ni oiseau
Qu'en son jargon ne chante ou crie:
"Le temps a laissé son manteau
De vent, de froidure et de pluie."


Rivière, fontaine et ruisseau
Portent, en livrée jolie,
Gouttes d'argent, d'orfèvrerie,
Chacun s'habille de nouveau:
Le temps a laissé son manteau.

*    *    *

Now Time throws off his cloak again
Of ermined frost, and wind, and rain,
And clothes him in the embroidery
Of glittering sun and clear blue sky.
With beast and bird the forest rings,
Each in his jargon cries or sings;
And Time throws off his cloak again.
Of ermined frost, and wind, and rain.


River, and fount, and tinkling brook
Wear in their dainty livery
Drops of silver jewelry;
In new-made suit they merry look;
And Time throws off his cloak again
Of ermined frost, and wind, and rain.

Translated by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow.

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Oh dear.

Georges de LaTour: La diseuse de bonne aventure, vers 1635

Lewis Ellingham's THE WALL -- Part IV.

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Part IV of The Wall, a work in progress by San Francisco author and poet Lewis Ellingham.

© 2010 by author.

Poetry of Cedar Sigo: Stranger in Town

I was delighted to discover recently a truly  interesting and exceptional book of poems by Cedar Sigo, a young poet currently resident in our town. The poems are consistently intelligent and provocative, and the book also constitutes something of a big departure for City Lights, which has been in the doldrums for many years in terms of publishing work by local poets, unless that work qualified stylistically as museum-type-beatnik or else, let us say, as beatnik-derived.

Either way, the number of San Francisco poets included in the City Lights portfolio have not been numerous, and are far out-numbered by poets from Mexico, Russia, Israel, Morocco and indeed almost anywhere but here. Therefore Stranger in Town is something of a breakthrough for City Lights, and it does seem like they've finally hit upon the mad idea of publishing some local poets. (If one could induce the San Francisco Poetry Center and Small Press Traffic to focus more on locals instead of importing authors from hundreds of mile away, one's joy would be even more complete.)

Cedar's writing is indeed marvelous, and achieves its effect through sequences of apparently unrelated associations, meaning that it is up to the reader to provide the context for the poem. You really have to interact with each poem, if you're going to mount your board and surf with it.

I suppose this will seem difficult, arbitrary, perhaps annoying to some, but the trick here is that there exists an internal and intuitive logic to the chain of verbal events, which you may be able to recreate for yourself by simply reading the poems aloud and not thinking too much about them. It's exactly this unspoken logic which renders them convincing, indeed in this case exceptional.

You can find out more about Stranger in Town and its author here, and you can also read the first five poems in the collection here to see if you agree with my enthusiasm.

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A new day dawning

Dali, Le soleil

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Notes from the Corpus Hermeticum

"What is this part of me that lingers to overhear my own conversation? I lie rigid in the rigid circle. It regards me from diametric points, without sex, and wise. We lie in a rigid city, anticipating winds. It circles me, intimating only by position that it knows more than I want to. There, it makes a gesture too masculine before ecstatic scenery. Here, it suggests femininity, pausing at gore and bone. It dithers and stammers, confronted by love. It bows a blunt, mumbling head before injustice, rage, or even its like ignorance. Still, I am convinced that at the proper shock, it would turn and call me, using those hermetic syllables I have abandoned on the crags of a broken conscience, on the planes of charred consciousness, at the entrance to the ganglial city. And I would raise my head."

Samuel R. Delany, Dhalgren

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Pissoirs of Berlin: at Westhafen and Siemens Strasse she stands in snow-capped splendor

thanks: flickr user renov

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Why to study Antiquity

I thoroughly enjoyed Mary Beard's post yesterday concerning her recent visit to the Colossi of Memnon.   Although I must admit that I would have not taken the trouble to search out these towering 14th c. BC artifacts personally, known to the Romans as statues that could sing, I feel very satisfied that Mary should do  so.

If you have time to examine her report, be sure to follow the indicated links, they are an education in themselves. The sheer oddity of much of what one encounters in classical studies--imagine a woman of Roman nobility, a tourist, having some self-composed Sapphic verses inscribed in Greek on the leg of one of the two statues--is one small yet fascinating part of the wider adventure of attempting to understand civilizations far differently reasoned than our own.

Photo: Wikicommons Media

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Pope Lady Gaga I

I woke up this morning contemplating the interchangeability of Lady Gaga with Pope Benedict XVI. In their shared capacity as the most heavily-costumed celebrities presently and continuously ejaculated upon by the international media, I thought it would be interesting for us to see them exchange jobs for a year and observe what effect this might have on their respective careers.

It certainly isn't hard to imagine Lady Gaga being a mega-hit at the Vatican, I can just see her flying down inside the dome of St Peter's on an aerial trapeze, down to the high altar to celebrate mass while disco lights flash and the Vatican Choir pulsates in orgiastic abandon.

It would be much harder on the Pope, of course, who exhibits about as much charisma as a Safeway shopping cart. In fact he seems pretty talentless at much of anything, and his articulation of the standard Vatican twaddle on whatever subject is of current media interest seems nothing short of soporific.

I blame the Protestant Reformation for the present zombification of the Papacy. Today's Pontifex Maximus  is expected to present himself in a constant state of pious self-absorption, apparently worried 24/7 about the ever-accelerating slide of this wicked world into the blazing fires of Hell, not to mention the horrible prospect of gay people getting married.

Who could envision a modern pope sparking up a doobie and putting on some Grateful Dead tapes in his spare time, or kicking back with a couple margaritas on the exquisitely embroidered papal sofa in his bluejeans to watch the NFL Superbowl?

How one longs for a return of the Papacy to Renaissance times, when expressions of piety and spiritual advancement were really about the least one would expect in the behavior and deportment of the popes.

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Poetry of Jack Sharpless

I was looking this morning at Silliman’s Blog and enjoying Ron’s enthusiastic and thoroughly sensible ejaculations over the DVD release of the new Allen Ginsberg film. Allen’s meteoric rise to fame in San Francisco in the 1950’s —assisted in no small part by Kenneth Rexroth’s impresarial efforts and Ferlinghetti’s caginess as his publisher—is such a remarkable story that it does seem worthy of being memorialized cinematically.

It also seems paradigmatic of a more general scenario in which young poets spend their formative years in this city and then move elsewhere—mainly back East—and then gain national prominence of one kind or another as writers, or land teaching jobs elsewhere.

But for those who toughed it out in San Francisco and basically refused to leave, the situation has often proved less satisfactory. If you’ve lived here for some decades, the city is practically a graveyard full of standing tombstones for fallen poets who spent their best years here and died without having seen a collection of their work published professionally.

I hope that before all memory of our vanished poets is obliterated, someone will take inspiration from Vasari’s Lives of the Artists and leap forth to compose a Lives of the Poets for San Francisco.

Certain restorative attempts have met with varying degrees of success, most notably with the recent resuscitation of Jack Spicer’s reputation, thanks largely to the efforts of Kevin Killian and his several collaborators. (After Spicer’s death in 1965, you couldn’t to my recollection find his poems in any bookshop anywhere, until the first Black Sparrow edition initiated the exhumation process in 1975, ending a printing blackout that had gone on for ten years.)

Other San Francisco poets who were published posthumously in book format include Eugene Ruggles, who was published last year by Petaluma River Press under the title: Roads of Bread. I am worried to note at Worldcat.org that not one public or university library has acquired a copy of the book.

Jack Sharpless, an extraordinarily talented San Francisco poet who worked as a waiter and who died of AIDS in 1988, was published in book form in 1989 by Gnomon Press under the title: Presences of Mind. The book is out-of-print, although Small Press Distribution still offers some copies.

The knockout poem in this collection is entitled Inroads, for which Jack won a prestigious prize in the U.K. after it appeared in 1980. The poem describes, hour by hour, the last day in the life of Elizabeth I, which passes in a slow parade of memories, interspersed with erotic longings and random apprehensions of death. Generally it shows the steady descent from royal dignity into the universal meat grinder.

The poem is too long to quote extensively, but perhaps I can give a brief idea of its form from the two opening passages:



Feb 27/28, 1603


6:00 pm


The
wood
round
None
such


cold
gold


hammer
lavender
& argent


in sear
weather


Ears
survive
eyes


Memory
branches


oak
ash


& crow
shadows
clamor
across


the
evening
of my
world


__________________




6:30


In
side


on
oaken
board


a
tabby
cat


sits
beside
a bronze
vase


counting
squirrels
through
the oriel
of leaded


glass




With this poem Jack invented a sort of minimalist lyric narrative technique, which he employs in later poems that reference T.E. Lawrence and aspects of daily life in ancient China.

Because of the sparseness of language and brevity of the lines, individual images—the cat sitting in a wooden cupboard looking out the window—and the sudden interpolation of rhymed monosyllables—cold / gold— lend profile and a sharpened focus to the story and that just wouldn’t happen if you heaped more language onto the situation, as most writers would be inclined.

With Jack Sharpless you get exactly as much as you need to know. It’s a very accomplished and graceful artistry that says much by stating everything just a little short of nothing.

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A film clip from my birthday party yesterday

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The celebration had a distinctly Late Neolithic ambiance.

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Heidi the cross-eyed 'possum

photo dpa

In fear of prosecution by Germany's leading press agency, and despite the fact that you'll probably read about it in tomorrow's Huffington Post, I nevertheless make bold to introduce readers to Heidi, the cross-eyed opossum, curently the most popular resident of the Leipzig Zoo.

Der Spiegel has the full story in English with more photos here. 

Disclaimer.

Forbidden books

Alexander Mark Rossi: Forbidden Books

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Copper Moon

I understand from some comments made by facebook friends that the full eclipse on the night of the winter solstice, the first in 372 years, was at least partially visible in San Francisco. Since I am old and grumpy, I couldn't be bothered staying up to find out.

Instead I contented myself with the recollection of a really spectacular eclipse which occurred here  in June one year in the mid-70's. The fogs had lifted, the atmosphere was sparkling, the temperature warm, and the moment of totality was well before midnight--a perfect set-up for moon viewing, against all the prevailing odds, given the exigencies of a San Francisco summer.

I climbed up from Castro Street to the top of Corona Heights, where I knew there were no trees to obscure the view heavenwards. The show was spectacular even without the employment of substances; after sitting zazen awhile, the moon felt so close that you could reach up and touch it. There's a special mysticism involved with total eclipses that elevates you from the bonds of earthdom and puts you right out there in the cosmos somewhere. I can well understand how some enthusiasts will travel anywhere on the planet to witness a total solar eclipse.

I walked home after midnight and wrote a memory-poem to memorialize the event. In those days you could hitchhike easily and efficiently around the Bay Area if you had long hair, and earlier that day I had been enjoying a pleasant afternoon on the nudie beach at Devil's Slide.

Written on the day of the total lunar eclipse
in San Francisco

During the first warm week of the year

I hitchhiked down the coast to Devil's Slide

Beach. Yellow and red ice-plant flowers

swarmed down the cliffs. A hundred naked

oiled bodies lay upon the sand, as if felled

by the brilliant sun. Others played frisbee

at the edge of the ocean. The surf was

high, because of the imminent full moon.

The same evening I climbed a hill overlooking

Eureka Valley. Once a small quarry, the place

was studded with small jagged carved cliffs.

Wildflowers were visible everywhere in the

pale light. On the crest of the hill, some

persons meditated, chanted OM, and played

flutes. Others were drinking wine and making

foolish noises. An hour before midnight

the Scorpio moon gradually turned the color

of copper.

Photo Chris Hetlage, Imagingthecosmos.com.

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Pissoirs of Berlin

It is the sign of a truly civilized nation that facilities for urination should be made widely available and without any charge to the public, to benefit especially its beer-swilling male members. Wilhelmine Germany truly excelled in this regard, and there still exist some outstanding examples in the city of Berlin, though there are few left that are yet operational.

The only deficiency is that they stank horribly, which explains the open gratings towards the top of cast iron walls and in the lantern on the roof. They also weren’t lighted electrically, since the same openings let in sufficient light to do your business. This was generally absent in the evening, so you were then left standing there to drain the lizard in almost total darkness.

The particularly elegant and well-preserved example shown above is located at the Gendarmenmarkt; it featured two overhead gas lights at the entrance. It belongs to a common species of urinal humorously referred to in German as the Cafe Achteck, or "Cafe Octagon."

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cc photo from Flickr user damiandude -- clicking embiggens

Cornelius Dupree

I felt outraged that this evening’s tv news reportage concerning Cornelius Dupree, released after 30 years of false imprisonment for no other reason than that he physically resembled an escaped perpetrator, at no point mentioned the logical implications supporting the repeal of capital punishment.

The Dallas County D.A. explained on PBS News Hour that there have been 25 exonerations for false conviction in recent years in his county. Given the inherently flawed nature of our criminal justice system and its propensity for intermittent failure, one can only guess how many persons have been falsely executed in the U.S. If there had been even one known case, that alone would justify scrapping capital punishment permanently, disregarding all the other arguments that can be brought against it.

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Alexander in Egypt

I wrote three history papers last semester, including this essay on Alexander the Great's activities in Egypt. If you've ever lain awake at night wondering why Alexander, having beaten the guacamole out of Darius at Issos, left for a long trip to Egypt instead of chasing the Persian king back to Babylon, then the following may be of some assistance.

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Happy New Year 2011

It's always great when the holidays fall over a weekend, so that one can snuggle into the old rocking chair for 3 1/2 days with some books and opera DVD's and expect relatively few disturbances, and then have it happen again, twice in a row. The only reason for complaint was the dark and grismal weather that prevailed this year, which prohibited any attempts to get outdoors and do some serious, or rather unserious hiking.

It is indeed wonderful  in effect to be given official permission to tell the whole world to kiss off and simply to do what one feels like for 3.5 days, but it is the English, from whom we yet have much to learn, who really excel at this. Not only is one authorized two consecutive days to celebrate Christmas, but the whole country goes virtually into lockdown for a week or ten days at the end of each December.

As described in this space exactly one year ago, I habitually put myself through various musical rituals over Christmas and New Year's; this year I enjoyed the Claudio Abbado version of Beethoven's Ninth, which I thought was quite good, before immersing myself in early Verdi, in particular Nabucco and Ernani.


The best Christmas blogging I found this year was by Magistra et mater, who purchased the last holiday cupcakes available in Drumnadrochit, Scotland, and who speaks of the "real historical continuity" involved with feeling one's toes growing numb during Christmas Eve services inside some freezing church. It put me immediately in mind of similar sufferings at Midnight Mass in Grace Cathedral, where one's ability to enjoy the spectacular ceremonies was much hindered by the fact that it was AWFULLY COLD.

The best poem I came across over the holidays was written by Nicky Beer, who describes the inevitably ponderous lust of tortoises at Verse Daily.

As for 2010, I thought the whole year was basically a bunch of rubbish, at least as far as public life is concerned. I cast hexagrams on New Year's Day and came up with #63, After Completion. Following Richard Wilhelm, the idea seems to be that having reached perfection, there is obviously no place to go but down. One is therefore admonished by the Oracle to pay attention to detail in order to avoid structural hassles.