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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