And what is this....?

The guy below right is little Michael, fourteen years ago, at the Monaco Grand Prix, which he attended upon an invitation of Glenn, his mysterious friend, who figures a lot on the pages of this blog, and who coughed up the 417 EUR, which was the price of a ticket for the event even then. Glenn also took these pictures. Thank You Glenn, thank you so much. Wonderful: 

"ALLE REDEN VOM WETTER, WIR NICHT"...

     ...was the title of a famous poster by the German Bundesbahn in the winter of 1967, pointing out that their trains would work even when the Autobahn got frozen over:

It got soon parodied by an infamous poster by the SDS ("Sozialistischer Deutscher Studentenbund") a principal agent of the 1968 movement:

And now us, 53 years later: the famous Chang Man Yoon...

...and his infamous partner Michael Ampersant...

...lounging in their swing in the middle of an overheated summer worldwide while enjoying a fresh Atlantic breeze of 22°C in their garden in Alcobaça, Portugal.

(A bit smug, this post, but anyhow.)

We moved, we moved -- and met our first Covid-victim

Yes, we finally did it--did it precipitously, since Chang feared that the Lusitanians wouldn't let us back in, what with the excessive French Covid infection rates. We did the journey from Cannes to Portugal in two days (normally it takes three). The first night we spent in a rural Airbnb near San Sebastian, where we met the first Covid-victim of our life---the charming Airbnb owner---who told us that she got infected in March---fever, self-isolation in her bed-room---a whole month---food served through a window. She got an X-ray, but the lungs didn't appear affected, even though there was fever and coughing. But now, seven months later, she still feels secondary effects---palpitations and fatigue, mostly. We handed her a bottle of Beaujolais---we had to explain about "Beaujolais"---and left early. Eight hours later we arrived here:

The InnBar on Nazaré beach, Friday, Oct 23, 2020, around 6PM local time

To be continued.

 

Les temps modernes -- Modern times

"Les temps modernes" --named after Charlie Chaplin's film -- was a magazine founded by Simone de Beauvoir and Jean Paul Sartre in 1945; it folded in 2019. 

Here's a modern version of the modern times, expressed in the words of our favorite NYT columnist, Ross Douthat. We've been trying to say this since forever, but Douthat says it better, and it doesn't only apply to Republican voters in the US:

"For Republican voters who want more — well, for them you can just make up some triumphs, whether banal (a new social-media executive order!) or exotic (a secret purge of pedophiles!), and trumpet them as victories worthy of Reagan, Lincoln or F.D.R.
In which case Trump could be a special kind of pioneer, and the party he shaped a digital-age novelty: the first political party to exist entirely as a simulation."

Michael was born 4 years later and still remembers the ruins

(Our friend Glenn sent this:)

Fragment, fragment...yes, here, cool, from Michael's essay, My Childhood Ruined, which tells about his youth in the suburb of Berlin-Grunewald:

Halfway experiences are also fairly common, I believe, and it took me some time to get over the shitty first sex of my teens, like when Amy, another classmate, him from Armenia, living alone with his father in one of the villas not bombed out, took me to the plot opposite his home which had been cleared of the rubble and grown into an orchard of sour apples with an undergrowth of stinging nettle—-and then suggested that we’d play doctor. We had barely started when Evelyn, whom I hated, and who was officially my friend, turned up and sent us scampering into the stinging nettle.

Fruit trees and cleared plots weren’t typical, however. Roughly half the splendid villas of the Grunewald, by reputation Berlin’s most residential area, had gotten hit by air raids during the war and burned down to black skeletons of eternal stone and reinforced concrete, with rusty steel rods sticking out and begging for accidents to happen like when you were chasing an Indian under fully-feathered headdress up to the fourth floor of the rubble and trip and fall to your death. Yes, fourth floor, or fifth even, since these structures had been built by the nouveau riche in the ’70 and ‘80’s of the nineteenth century when Berlin became the capital of the Second Reich. Falls from ruins never happened, though, or were never reported in the West-Berlin of the ‘50s, an insular place so devoid of news that nothing ever happened—-save for a world-shaking crisis when Nikita Khrushchev, the leader of the Communist World, threatened to take us by force and unclench WW3—-so the press had to play along and beg any visiting celebrity to confirm with his/her own eyes that—-yes—-Berlin was still the Hauptstadt, even though the government resided in Bonn and anything of consequence had decamped to Munich in Bavaria, including Siemens, the founder of local Siemensstadt (don’t ask).

How about the fruit trees, then? Well, if you’d trip while aiming your pistol at this Indian, you wouldn’t land on an apple tree, but on an Acacia. Nobody ever remarked on it, or explained it, but newly grown Acacias dominated the ruined plots, whole forests of them, until Khrushchev’s ultimatum was forgotten, investors regained confidence, and reconstruction got under way.

German for beginners

via GIPHY 
 Kleine Sünden bestraft der liebe Gott sofort

Q&A --- Q: Who will remember D. Trump in 2 000 years?

A: Everybody. He'll be remembered together with Washington and Jefferson. 

Comment: just consider this---which Roman emperors do you "remember"?

Hint: You remember Caesar, of course, who's was only a "dictator", but who started the whole thing. You remember Augustus, Caesar's adopted nephew, and, yes, you remember Nero and Caligula. 

Looking at Hadrian irreverently --- a new review of "The Fountain"

Amos Lassen

Cool, folks, there's a new review of "The Fountain" out, and it's by LGBT-lit-authority Amos Lassen. He normally reviews people like Hanna Arendt and Albert Einstein. And now this: 

I had a great time reading this new and revised history of Hadrian in Geneva. Ampersant is a wonderful satirist and he writes so casually you actually feel like you are having a conversation with him. I am sure that there are some historical facts here (...) This is so unbelievable, it must be true: Roman Emperor Hadrian---yes, him of the liaison with the Greek youth Antinous---is asked to help the Swiss with a crazy, all-male Nordic tribe (...) I can promise you that you will have quite a few laughs.

"Click"

The Bzzfrzzakitamot period

Future archaeologists from Titan and other parts of the galaxy will call our epoch the Bzzfrzzakitamot period ("bizarre blond comb-over period") for its excessive depictions of always the same blond comb-overed male embedded in electronic artifacts, mainly in satirical contexts.

"The Old New World" (Photo-based animation project) from seccovan on Vimeo.

Shoot-the-messenger and other things North-Korean (reposted)

People are inquiring about this post, stirred by North Korea's supposedly thermo-nuclear test yesterday. The post was written in March 2013 while Michael was staying in South Korea. Here it is:


How about the situation? In Korea? Now? Aren't your scared? Don't you think they are going to throw their nukes? They know this would be the end of it, wouldn't they, a full-fledged war would trigger a violent American reaction that would certainly bring down a regime unable to feed its own people properly? They aren't crazy, or are they? Kim Jong Un, the new "leader," has studied in Switzerland, he has seen the world, he knows, right? They know, don't they, they know! At least he does!

Note the map of the US on the wall

Relax. Lean back. (Just back from the Korean dentist). Lean back.

My father was so lazy, he did not actually swim when dipping into the North Sea during our summer holidays. Instead, he did a "dead man," filling his lungs with extra air and staying afloat motionless in the water like a buoy. Along those lines, let's do an dead man and tell a story from 10 years ago when I last heard from Michel Kortczek. Michel had specialized in China, and then North Korea, and had published a beautiful essay on North Korea and its ideology on the internet. The page has disappeared in the meantime, but what I recall of his essay spoke of a regime quite unlike any other on earth, a regime completely in the thrall of  magic, superstition, and delusion.

A brief note on homosexuality

We haven't studied this, of course, not in a serious way, but when you are standing with one leg in the classical-antique period, as we did for a while, working on Plato's Symposium or studying Hadrian's life, you can't help but observe that the classical attitude vis à vis homosexuality was very different, very different from the attitudes my generation grew up with during the latter part of the last century. Not only attitudes, in fact, but facts, or perceived facts. The perceived facts were that there's a fairly sharp divide between gay and straight behavior, separating anything between 90-95% of the population from the rest---the overwhelming majority being straight, a small minority being gay or lesbian, with a few bisexuals in between.

Antiquity wasn't like this at all. There wasn't a single male deity in the Greek Pantheon that's wasn't bisexual, for example. Out of the first fifteen Roman emperors 14 "made" (to put it in Gibbon's words) "incorrect sexual choices," (at least according to the author of Decline and Fall...). Etc.

"What I believe," (1947) Paul Cadmus

We are not the first to observe this, and helpful theories in re have been proffered for quite some time, the dominant ones putting the onus on Christianity. How these theories will fare in the future remains to be seen, there's some historical research now showing that gay marriage was tolerated during Roman times and accommodated by the Christian Church (one of the funny things in the debate about gay marriage is that practically everybody making historical claims (i.e., the conservatives) is ignoring the fact that the institution didn't require sacral input then. Marriage was a matter of private contracts, and it took the Roman law quite some time to adapt to the Judaeo-Christian claims as to its sanctity (marriage still is, in Islam, a private affair). Anyhow, with the advent of Christianity, the screws on sexuality started to tighten, which wasn't particularly helpful for the gay cause.)

“I can almost write like Mr. Johann Sebastian Bach” --- seven things we knew about Ernest Hemingway

The New Yorker sends a link to an article by Lillian Ross about Ernest Hemingway (H.), published in 1950.

We’re curious, we don’t know much about H., having read him when everybody else read him, The Old Man and the Sea in our case, in a German translation. We’ve been to Key West, FL, where everything is H., and got fed up with Sloppy Joe, his watering hole there, so decided to get drunk somewhere else (we’re possibly not the first to mention tourism and locust in the same sentence).

So, what we knew about him was

(0) writer of short sentences, user of simple language, herald of Huckleberry Finn (Mark Twain’s novel), in-quote: “All modern American literature comes from one book by Mark Twain called Huckleberry Finn. American writing comes from that. There was nothing before. There has been nothing as good since.”
(1) macho,
(2) Nobel Prize,
(3) lookalike contests,
(4) big game hunting,
(5) drink,
(6) serial husband, perhaps something of a womanizer.

Spot the difference

(This is somehow related to our Fountain of Geneva story:)

The fountain of Geneva (3) --- erotic talent

John and Alex, our friends from the Green Eyes, are being told the back story of the Fountain of Geneva, the most phallic object on the planet, in a liquid sense. Hadrian, the visiting Roman emperor (117-138 AD), has to help the Swiss locals deal with a ravaging Nordic tribe, the Muttoni. And he does so in a circuitous way. He starts a school for erotic talent. Richard Zugabe, librarian of the city archives of Geneva, tells the story. Please note the adult content warning.

Part III --- Erotic talent

“When I said that Hadrian kept his plan secret, I meant he kept his intentions secret; the facts were plainly recorded. He put an empire-wide call out for, let me concentrate, let’s get this verbatim, for the primum proelium ego ingenium venereae.”
“Huh?”

Publius Aelius Hadrianus Augustus (Hadrian), Palazzo dei Conservatori, Capitoline Museums.

“I-have-erotic-talent, roughly. You’ll see soon. The call was a big success, the emperor calls upon the youth of the nation, what do you expect, most Roman careers involved the casting couch. So he held his own talent show---even women were admitted in the audience---first to filter for physical features, then to identify sexual prowess, then to select the sensual few. Hadrian had a sensual soul, and he yearned for reciprocity.

___________________

These boys were not for one night, mind you; to complete the program they had to get laid for several months.

___________________

These boys were not for one night, mind you; to complete the program they had to get laid for several months. His final selection comprised exactly fifty specimen of the finest proto-erotici ever gathered in one place.”

“Wow,” I say.

Fucking Foucault (reblogged)

Here's another beautiful piece from the mysterious Mr. E., the force behind the 50 Shady Gays. Enjoy:

I’m sure that every queer cultural theorist has thought about it at some point haven’t they?

I was first fucked by Michel Foucault during the nineties when I was a raver/rock star and all round fuck up. It wasn’t until I was a mature student, when I was reading articles on discourse and power, that I thought to myself, I actually love this man.

Michel Foucault (1926-1984)

I have never been literally fucked by him of course, but I have in a literary way, which is often much more intimate and powerful – and I suppose in some way it’s all about the power isn’t it?

Anyway, being incredibly vain and sexually unfulfilled as a performer (exclusively top), I naturally thought that in some way my life mirrored his; indeed, as I flounced across stages, and tripped through a myriad of alien, urban sprawls (oh so bohemian and clever); I stupidly imagined myself to be his successor. Yes, I alone would weave the power of his madness into my own duvet of sexual discovery, because I was unique – it was like he was speaking to me, and me alone.

Meet the Trabbi

We're on our way to Switzerland, getting gas (diesel, to be precise) at the gas station of the Geant mall in Mandelieu, and there's a motorcade of alike-looking cars riding up to the pump next to ours. They are all from Germany, from Cologne, to be precise. They look antique. "These are Borgwards?" I ask one of the young men descending from the conveyances. "No," he says, "these are Trabbis."

Communism lives, folks, these Trabbis (Trabants) were the Volkswagens of East Germany. They didn't have a good reputation in my days. Production was soon discontinued after the fall of the Wall. Why do you do this, I ask another of the young men. He doesn't answer.

San Francisco (7) --- Pitch-O-rama (1)

We arrive at San Francisco SFO (San Francisco International Airport, why SFO?) and the international press, the paparazzi ("paps"), the adolescent girls and boys, all of them, there's a riot. A blogger with 390,000 page views comes all the way from Europe and there's a riot. Well, no, sorry, that was Seoul, Korea, the airport, when we got mixed up with a charismatic baseball player.

So we feel un-famous and under-appreciated and seek consolation on the internet and find a page belonging to the San Francisco Writer's Conference. We send them a message about feeling un-famous and under-appreciated and get a prompt reply pointing us to an upcoming pitchfest of the Women's National Book Association San Francisco Chapter on Saturday in the Women's building around the corner from where we reside. It would be an opportunity to "connect." We procrastinate, then sign up via Paypal.

Spoiler alert: a pitchfest is about pitching manuscripts to agents and publishers, and we're in possession of such a manuscript, the Green Eyes, gay romance/erotica, easily the most topical subject when it comes to Women's Lib. We're not, however, in possession of  a printer here in our temporary abode, and the battery of the laptop won't live for longer than a minute when unplugged. So we don't have any material to take to the event, not even a calling card or anything that could get agents and publishers interested in our work. Plus, one of the participating agents, Andy Ross, has a post on his blog about this: he, Andy, would never go to a pitchfest, not as a pitcher at least, since he wouldn't survive the humiliation of being turned down by his colleagues. That decides the case. We will go, but not pitch. Perhaps there's enough in it for another short story. That's what failed writers do, they write about failed writers. Do your research.

We're apprehensive nonetheless, and it starts early, at 8 AM, and it rains, and we overtip the taxi driver out of sheer apprehension. We expect a crowd of young women, multi-faceted, multi-racial, done up in neo-Afro-look, i.e., all looking like Angela Davis waiving Angela-Davis-inspired manuscripts---waiving their manuscripts at us, balding, aging, failed writers of gay porn---think of a wind farm during a hurricane.

Angela Davis

George Washington boozehound (reblogged)

Andrew Sullivan found this for us here: 

Indeed, we still have available the bar tab from a 1787 farewell party in Philadelphia for George Washington just days before the framers signed off on the Constitution. According to the bill preserved from the evening, the 55 attendees drank 54 bottles of Madeira, 60 bottles of claret, eight of whiskey, 22 of porter, eight of hard cider, 12 of beer, and seven bowls of alcoholic punch.

That's more than two bottles of fruit of the vine, plus a number of shots and a lot of punch and beer, for every delegate. That seems humanly impossible to modern Americans. But, you see, across the country during the Colonial era, the average American consumed many times as much beverage alcohol as contemporary Americans do. Getting drunk—but not losing control—was simply socially accepted.

Dr. Urknall

The Dutch CVB, or whatever the alphabet soup, sends us a new European Insurance Card. Because we had discovered belatedly in the ER of the Spital Visp, CH, that the old card had expired. ER? Yes, as in emergency room. Because we had gone deaf.

 (If you continue reading, there's a payoff) 

We use ear plugs when we can't sleep. The wax from the plugs talks to the organic ear wax, canals get clogged, hearing gets impaired. We attempt to clean the ears but push the wax deeper into the canals until we go completely deaf. Which is quite something. You step into the street and get killed. You say good-by to Mozart and Lady Gaga and the telephone and to the relationship with your lover beyond anything but the soundless exchange of bodily fluids.

 (If you continue reading, there's a payoff) 

I had hoped that some natural process would provide relief and foster a recovery of my hearing. I wait one day, two days, three days. Nada. So I give up and flee to the ER of the Spital Visp, a place I know well. Dr. Ursprung is not around, unfortunately (follow the link). I explain my case. People listen patiently. I listen patiently. It's like you're listening to the Urknall (the Urknall was silent, there was no atmosphere to carry sound).

 (If you continue reading, there's a payoff) 

They ask me to rest on the emergency bed (gestures, folded hands put to your (their) left ear). I lie down. Wait. "Wait!" Where is your European Insurance Card? I don't understand. Somebody gets a piece of paper and writes "Europäische Versicherungskarte." Aha. I find my wallet and flash the card. There's a picture of Obama on the card (just kidding). Everything is fine. Somebody will take my blood pressure. The nurse looks quite concerned.

 (If you continue reading, there's a payoff) 

They try all sorts of things. Liquids dripped into my ear, compassionate facial expressions, electrodes applied to my testes, prayers, Alpine cleansing rituals, shaking heads. Shaking heads. It's my fault because the European Insurance Card has expired. The healing hands are raised in despair and I am sent to the local Hals-Nasen-Ohren doctor who cleans my ears with a nanoistic vacuum-cleaner and ask for 108 CHF in cash. I can hear him loud and clear and pay and call the Dutch alphabet soup and ask for a new, valid, European Insurance Card. Which arrived today, the card. I'm not making this up.

If you are still there, here's the payoff: