augmented illusions

Will it happen? Won’t it? The E-word has been uttered for days now, but my mother called and said that up north they’re still pumping water to lower the water table and that shipping has not been stopped yet. But tomorrow, after twelve years, there is a Dutch marathon championship on natural ice again. And today many people took the day off to go skating. L. had to go too of course, so we went to Schiedam, because shipping is so essential to Rotterdam that icebreakers are used to keep the harbour open. The sound of skates and the strange echoes of ice with many people on it. A deep yearning has taken hold of the Dutch psyche it seems. This afternoon at the sauna I stood in the cold for a long time. Winter.

Last year, I stood in a CD store, with D. on the phone, while I tried to read CD covers with my magnifier, all the while asking her: “Is this a CD you want? This one?” Turned out she wanted anything I could find by Margalit Tzanani. Hmmm.

She started her musical career in the seventies in the Israeli version of the musical “Hair” and in clubs and at family occasions. Tzanani developed a unique musical style combining an Israeli-Yemenite sound and the blues. She also managed her career for herself. For many years she was marginalized because her behavior was seen as vulgar and cheap.

But we do like her music and we play it a lot: it’s a guilty pleasure, because it has this well managed vulgarity about it. 

Anyway, the Israeli comedy program Eretz Nehederet had a great series of sketches that used Tzanani’s sudden appearance on the scene as a running gag. Here’s one with subtitles.

Originally posted 2008-10-29 09:04:33.

Graphic designer Ootje Oxenaar. Before the Euro, we had the most beautifully designed banknotes in the entire world. 

If you ever decide to have your brain tinkered with and you end up with cognitive deficits and “some” aphasia, remind yourself to go blind first, it helps. Had my first visit with L. who is going to help me with speech/language, but it’s much more than that, it’s strategies for living. After I’d done a couple of tests (word association, counting back, that kind of thing) I must have looked puzzled, because she started explaining to me her thoughts on the brain’s plasticity. Then she said: “and of course you’ve been re-organizing your brain in a major way already, so it should be able to handle this much more easily.” I told her how it feels as if my brain is short-circuiting, with some things miraculously present, while skills I took for granted have disappeared. Like reading. That was a tenuous thing at best, because I acquired braille skills incompletely and late, but it’s always been a struggle, and now I recognize the letters, but I can’t make sense of the words. Using VoiceOver though and having things read to me works fine, and I had become quite skilled at that already, so no worries there. Speech is a bit of a mixed bag. There’s been improvement already, but i do need to find words before they find me. The change with the strongest impact is my lack of attention. L. said: “look at it this way: if you’re cooking, the phone rings, someone says something to you and the house is on fire you’ll have trouble getting your priorities right and you’ll need more time to leave the house.” That was incredibly consoling, but I’d noticed it myself already. D. resorted to sending me emails with the day’s agenda, so that I could keep track of it, and I use google to jot down things I need to do and then I get automatic reminders. But this includes things like: start cutting aubergines for dinner at 17.45. “A good strategy.” L. said and she proceeded to help me track what I normally do on a given day. Amazing how I already had established a routine that was more or less the same every day. “Like being in retreat.” I said and I told her that I had started to meditate again. She theorized that the visualization that is a characteristic of that kind of meditation would help reroute my brain’s activity from the injured areas to adjacent, healthy areas. Quite hopeful, but exausting too. I went home and slept for three hours.

Thirty years ago, Grace Jones’ first album was released. Apparently she, now about sixty, is still performing. That is how it should be. 

Originally posted 2008-10-12 07:00:20.

If you like classical music, Youtube is great. I heard D. grumbling, because the internet connection in her teaching room is so lousy. She likes to let her students listen to many versions of the same piece. That’s how she taught me to listen to music. The wonderful thing about Youtube is its immense backlist of examples of people’s very particular taste. Not so great when it concerns animated lolcatz clips, but wonderful if you’re searching for that one version of Vier Letzte Lieder by Richard Strauss. Four Last Songs is Strauss’s last work, composed in 1948. A farewell to music and a farewell to life, for Strauss was 84 when he wrote these and died before their premiere, in 1950. The Lieder are four poems, one by Eichendorf (Im Abendrot), the others by Hesse. Im Abendrot (At Sunset), was the first song Strauss composed but it is the last of the set to be performed. Four Last Songs was written for soprano and orchestra, and the voice is carried by the orchestra. The effect is a sense of acceptance and calm in the face of impending death. Elisabeth Schwarzkopf is often thought to be the ideal interpreter of these songs, but in the 1980s Jessye Norman performed them spectacularly, and we have a version by Elly Ameling too, which is wonderful. But the best version, in my opinion, is the one by Lucia Popp. Popp is often thought as a singer of “light” classical repertoire, yet her interpretation has a depth and an intuitive character that brought me to tears when I first heard it.

Originally posted 2008-06-18 07:47:43.

An odd coincidence concerning Romy Schneider sent me hunting around youtube for the classic Romy Schneider films of the 1970s. These are the famous “auteur” films that are the hallmark of French cinema at that time. Les Choses de la Vie is a firm favorite, and a number of other films, but the film most etched in my mind (and the minds of many other people if I read the comments correctly) is “Le Vieux Fusil” by Robert Enrico. Like many others, I saw the massacre scene once and never forgot it. It is a film about the love of a man for his wife and his daughter, in wartime. He revenges them when they have been brutally murdered by an SS Division that occupies the castle he has sent them to “for safety”. It’s a film that only deals with the impact of war on civilians and investigates how war corrupts everything it touches: a true breakdown of civilization in all its aspects. Julien, played by Philippe Noiret, descends to the level of the murderers of his wife and daughter. This is how war destroys lives and the film dissects this destruction in painful and excruciating detail. Most poignantly: the memories of pre-war happiness are in the middle of the movie, when the German soldiers watch the home movies of Julien’s and Clara’s married life. But what we learn of that married life and of Julien’s history is not exclusively “good”: he is sometimes violent, Florence turns out not to be Clara’s daughter. In the last scene of the film, even their first sexual encounter is problematic, as Clara rejects him “You happier now? Well, that’s it, it’s over! It’s not because you’re not good-looking”. She accepts him, it seems, only because there’s a war coming. So, the idyllic bicycling scenes  Julien remembers may be false and idealized.

D. took me to lunch yesterday, in the Hague, at Oker. Excellent place on Denneweg, a street not primarily known for its great restaurants, but this is the exception to the rule. And then coming home and having good writing read to you and listening to excellent chöd through skype - who could ask for more! It was nice to discuss teachers and practice of whichever nature. It’s still my intention to go for retreat at Dzogchen Beara and I’ve written to the present Patrul Rinpoche if he would accept me as his student. He teaches in Brussels a lot, which is 2 hours from Rotterdam and 1.5 hours from Paris. There’s so much I need to learn and new ways in which I need to learn things. Speech/language therapy starts tomorrow, fysio on tuesday. My walking is still not steady enough. It’s ok I can hang on to someone, but it’s almost impossible to use two canes, and in any case, I get confused if I have to do a lot at the same time. However, I’m doing quite well, considering surgery was about two weeks ago. The staples can go out tomorrow too, and the scar is healing, but still frankensteinesque. Changes…I’m more easily touched by anything emotional. Yesterday the drumming and the singing immediately unlocked my emotions, wonder, awe, joy. I speculate that there has been damage to the left side of my brain, which has made it less dominant, but which has also caused the weakness and lack of balance of my body’s right side. This reduction of dominance means that the right side of my brain is freed from its inhibitions to some extent. I am more emotional, emotions are more immediate, and the impulse to create is much stronger. The shooting is very direct. No veil between perceiving and gesture, I think that’s what I notice most. But it also means I need someone around to stop me from running with my emotions, because there’s an impulsiveness that pushes me too far sometimes.

One of the most memorable musical performances I have ever witnessed was the scenic recital of Don Giovanni, conducted by John Elliot Gardiner. This was in Amsterdam, in the Concertgebouw, which was wonderful, because the acoustics are excellent there. The entire thing was perfectly put together, with just enough staging to make it fully engaging and horrifying. An electrifying performance, in which the audience was literally a participant. This is the Commendatore scene, the horrific climax in the last act. Interesting that Gardiner has the trombones enter from amongst the audience. Mozart wrote that he considered the trombones to be the sound of judgment, of the final reckoning. All this was in 1994. I was there.

Originally posted 2008-07-01 19:25:04.