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.

Bürchen in Switzerland (reposted)

Milka milk chocolate, with the milk from happy cows---that was the slogan of a chocolate commercial during my youth in Germany. And there we are, in Bürchen, Switzerland, and it's true.

Near Bürchen, Bietschhorn in the background (peak in the clouds)

Bürchen is located on the southern side of the Valais valley, near the side valleys of Zermatt and Saas Fee, at 1600m altitude. The ski lift begins right in front of our settlement, the Chalet zone.

Frankentrix

(Bob Bienpensant)

Gemini (Jezza Smilez)

(Click here for Jezza's website)

Find a caption

"Those damn darn liberals"

Monday matinée

Henri Rousseau: The dream

Demons (Imagine Dragons)

(Let's put it this way: we're only one year behind: this was published on May 7, 2013) 

When the days are cold

And the cards all fold

And the saints we see

Are all made of gold

When your dreams all fail

And the ones we hail

Are the worst of all

And the blood’s run stale

Dutch for beginners

San Francisco (last post) --- Neighborhood eatery

We discussed this before, the Riverside Café in two of its emanations,

(1) as a proper river-side café and
(2) as a hill-top café in Phuket town in Thailand,

"river-side" here being code for the hex value #00703C == Dartmouth Green == upmarket conversations in clipped voices at neighboring tables about Muffy who did not make partner at Overy & Allen == Chardonnay as default wine == chicken breast fillets served with sauce Hollandaise == checks that do or do not carry remarks to the effect that a 17% tip would be obligatory == and so on.

Now we're on our last day in San Francisco, we have a writer's blog after a productive morning, we hit the Castro District where old-fashioned in-your-face homosexuality is still en vogue, HIV and all, and we are on our way back home. The idea is to have dinner at the Chinese restaurant we've frequented so frequently during the last 2 months. But yesterday, on the way back to our apartment on Potrero Hill we walked past an outfit with a wooden sign saying "Neighborhood Eatery"---we were on 24th Street, between Mission an Potrero (street), a peek through the window convinced Michael that this is, in fact, a neighborhood café, and there's a person outside smoking and interrupting his cell-phone conversation and assuring us that the place is "great."

Neighborhood Eatery, interior

So, today, now, we walk along 24th Street again and I raise the subject of this "eatery" as an alternative to the Chinese restaurant. Chang, still mellow after my birthday yesterday doesn't really object but insists on studying the menu first. There's no menu outside to study, we have to enter the place---bistro layout, open kitchen, glasses, bottles, international semi-upmarket---to have a look at the menu.

__________________

"I would venture, folks, practically everywhere else in the world you eat better than in France."

__________________

The menu is incomprehensible to anybody living in France where dishes come in six or seven varieties (Steak frites, Magret de canard, Loup grillé, and so on), and (where dishes) are always accompanied by rice/potatoes/aïoli (don't ask). While we are at it: It's a well know fact that the French are the best cooks in the world, so they cook well BY DEFINITION, which means they have to make no-effort-what-so-ever-to-serve-drab-and-overpriced-fare-through-jaded-garçons-or-garçonettes who have more important things on their minds than to help their customers. I would venture, folks, practically everywhere else in the world you eat better than in France. It's Obama's fault, of course, because he's not only from Kenya, he's also French, as has been recently shown in a lengthy study from the Heritage Foundation.

Find a caption (Sacha)

Michael Ampersant, surfing the net for pictures for his blog

(Artwork by Virtues, you can order this on Fiverr for $5)

Computer science

San Francisco (15) The Warhol factory

Our title is misleading, as usual. And unfair to Warhol.

Anyhow, while we are at it: somewhere around 1966, the term Pop Art made it to Europe, and the name of its inventor, Andy Warhol. There were also pictures of the guy, and from the first picture I saw I fell in love with him, especially with his hair. Great, I thought, great, that's the hair I want. Blond, ebullient, expansive (the hair sticking out), extraneous even, subversive, inspired.

Andy Warhol: Self portrait

Andy Warhol died in 1987, in tabula, i.e., not the way you would have expected him to die after having watched too many clips of Lou Reed and the Velvet Underground (one of the productions of his factory), or of Joe Dallesandro, the hunkiest hunk ever, another one of his productions, no, he died on the operating table.

San Francisco (14) --- Connubial bliss, Nordstrom, and so on

Nordstrom on Market Street, San Francisco

Michael A. to Nick Ch. (02 May 2014 07:25:14):

...just great to be in the US...so many ideas...this one came from some billboard for some San Francisco Law School...

“Certainly,” he says, “that’s why we are in the business of writing, isn’t it, to feel inspired, and by feeling inspired getting inspired, and by getting inspired feeling more inspired, and so on.”

“You sound like an expensive graduate course of something,” I say.

________________

Nick Ch. to Michael A.  (02 May 2014 07:26:50 -0700):

Are you still here?

________________

Michael A.. to Nick Ch. ( 02 May 2014 07:29:44 ):

...until May 10...

...Chang sits on the bed next to me (as we speak) and tells me he doesn't want to go back to Nordstrom (the department store) on Market Street, because he went to the toilet there which turned out to be cruising territory, and he fears the police will come next time and arrest him...

Thursday matinée

Bob Bienpensant: Habana, Cuba

The Term Resurrectors of Trayas (Maud)

We met Maud in the street the other day, and she, normally a serene neighbor with a charmingly stand-offish approach to local gossip, she was all-aflutter.

"Michael," she says, "I have something for your. I've seen the light! Have you ever been a member of the Militant Grammarians of Massachusetts?"
"Yes," I say.
"And?"
"Well, I got evicted."
"By Avril Mondragon?"
"How do you know?"
"Never mind," she says, "but we're getting the band back together again. There's a new society. The Term Resurrectors of Trayas."
"The what?"
"The Term Resurrectors of Trayas. Let me explain. Or better, let me not explain. A picture says a thousand words."

(She shows me this picture:)

"Queer"

"Here, she says, "queer" resurrected. Queer!"

Obama's fault

The many little Nazis of Germany tended to ask rhetorically "Wenn nur der Führer das wüsste," (if the führer (Hitler) would only know); meaning to say: "it's not Hitler's fault." Führer translates to "leader," by the way, I think any business school worth its endowment would fire you immediately if you would raise the subject at a faculty meeting.

You get the gist.

But we have something else in mind, Something lighter. Stay tuned.

Handsheet for the erotic writer (6)

Salvador Dali: The temptation of St.Anthony

(Like the last post on this...)...not exactly a hand sheet either, but we couldn't help developing second thoughts when reading the following short quote from an article about sanctification:

"Saintliness is part of the church's DNA," the Vatican's current chief saint-maker, Cardinal Angelo Amato, wrote in his 2012 tome on canonization. "Through the centuries, saints have been the spiritual doorway through which humanity is directed toward God."

Like Alex says, the power of substitution, folks. Start considering substituting terms for "saints" and "humanity."

(Just saying, okay. When you write sex scenes---yes, it happens, people write sex scenes---you have to rely on the power of similes and analogies. Along those lines. Nothing deep. Peace from Cali.)

(Sorry, Alex didn't say "the power of substitution," he said "the power of subsumption"---never mind)

Shakespeare---let's celebate his 450th birthday...

...and repost our piece about his 18th sonnet:

(So, it starts:)

Since we are a literature blog now, we have to do serious stuff, like posting some serious pictures, like. Like this one...

Tyson Beckford

...which brings to mind Shakespeare's 18th sonnet...

Shall I compare thee to a summer's day?
Thou art more lovely and more temperate:
Rough winds do shake the darling buds of May,
And summer's lease hath all too short a date:
Sometime too hot the eye of heaven shines,
And often is his gold complexion dimmed,
And every fair from fair sometime declines,
By chance, or nature's changing course untrimmed:
But thy eternal summer shall not fade,
Nor lose possession of that fair thou ow'st,
Nor shall death brag thou wander'st in his shade,
When in eternal lines to time thou grow'st,

So long as men can breathe, or eyes can see,

So long lives this, and this gives life to thee. 

...(you don't want to look at the HTML code underneath)...

...but you might want to look at this clip, eternalizing David Gilmour, the singer of Pink Floyd, when he set the sonnet to his music, because that's what aging rock stars, like us, do, when, they, have, their, reflective, moments...





...and judge yourself.

Hold on, here are a few pointers to Sonnet 18:

Tuesday matinée (Jezza Smilez)

(Just a new picture from Jezza:)

(Click here for Jezza's website)

Time for a really bad poem

Upfront update: This is really getting embarrassing folks---we're getting so many hits for this post, possibly because people think: "This must be a good poem," but no, this really is a bad poem:

The Morning flame is on her mind

The up-and-up is hard to find,

For every dollar is a dime,

For summer solstice is a crime.

When moonlight strikes the heaven breaks,

Has nothing done, has eaten steaks,

Has drunken whiskey far to much,

Has left the sickbed not as such.

Halfdead she is and half alive,

Not given much to sinful strife,

How is she getting out of this,

Well, she is not, tell mighty Chris.

It's Easter morning here in town,

My neighbors dog won't show his crown,

But royals will, and that's enough.

(And you thought we were joking)

Happy Easter

Taurus (Jezza Smilez)

(Click here for Jezza's website)

San Francisco (13) --- A walk across the Berkeley campus (Teaser: "Freedom Fries")

University of California, Berkeley---market stand near the entrance

So we're visiting Berkeley across the bay and in particular the campus of UCB, because our first, still unfinished novel "Freedom Fries" is partially set there, with Pamela Woods (fictional) as the dean of Berkeley Law School, John Yoo (real; the legal brain behind the Bush/Cheney waterboarding policy) on the faculty of said school, and a harebrained subplot to abduct Yoo and somehow press him to confess to evil deeds, preferably not by waterboarding. In order to execute the plan we need to know where Yoo parks his car. Zack, Leona and Liz are co-conspirators, and Justin Bieber (fictional) is the school's vice dean; the plot is set in 2009, the year (or more precisely the week) that Justin Bieber, the Canadian singer, finally breaks through.

Not the parking lot of Berkeley  Law School ...

They need to know where Yoo parks his car; else the plan would not work. He has stopped using the parking garage in the basement, and the rumor mill---a defective tool in Yoo’s case with his few friends---the rumor mill has it that he is upset by hostile bumper stickers on his Lexus and scared of water-boarding related scratches.

... but the parking lot of the physics department (you can read it, right: it says: "Parking space reserved for Nobel Laureate.") 

Zack and Leona are at Barbara’s cabin, Liz is studying Supreme Court opinions, Jim is helping her, somebody has to find out. It is fairly urgent. She collects the secret phone---Zack could call any minute now---hides it in her bag, and leaves the office. She will take up position in the lobby, where she will play the Populist Dean. The populist dean is expected of her anyhow, occasionally, and her performance is not without merit (despite mixed reviews), especially on Friday afternoons when people want to go home early, an inclination she applauds with one hand and dismisses with the other. Anyhow, there she stands, expansive as always (not always, only since twenty years), dispensing kisses, Hi’s, compliments (“you look great”), compliments (“you look great”), feedback (“we missed you at the budget meeting, where were you”), more compliments (“where did you get that tan?”), as her academic subjects are drifting toward TGI weekend.

Handsheets for the erotic writer (6) --- from Catherine Millet to James Joyce

Not really a handsheet, but anyhow:

We haven't seriously researched this, but writing style is not different from finger prints or irises, every author has her own. And the spread of the distribution is wider, think of comparing the foot print of a dinosaur with the touch of an ant or the mark of a rabbit (even inside a genre, just compare erotic writers Susan Johnson and Ludmilla Sanders).

We had this idea to look at a few female erotic authors, their rendering of the climax, the crest, the moment, when he

brings you off with that extraordinary precision soon unbearable, sooner or later after having you mounted with the vacant expression of a mating animal, having you kept there for an hour with his extraordinary erotic fabulations, perhaps after he would have tried out the most acrobatic positions, and the most improbable substitutes (cucumbers, sausages, Perrier bottles, a policeman's luminous white trunchheon), and then he would suddenly become quiet a few moments before orgasm...

...and compose all this into a report of last night's meeting of minds and bodies of John ("Ben") Fletcher and erotic author Brigitta Haagen-Dasz in the second part of the Green Eyes.

Yes, along those lines, more or less, although we'd like it to be a bit more poetic.

Let's think.

Okay, let's proceed this way, let's try to apply a simple elimination filter, not really modifying anything, just eliminating unnecessary, extraneous, or otherwise irritating expressions.

Catherine Millet at home

So, for example, let's not employ the verbification (yes, it exists, and an ugly word it is) the verbification of climax.

By the way, all expressions above are from Catherine Millet, founder and editor of France's leading art magazine Art Press, you may have heard of her and her book The sexual life of Catherine M. It is---spoiler alert---extraordinary---her book, and there's this familiar clustering of superlatives that we will now try to tackle:

Tuesday matinée

(Bobby Jones)

Green Eyes (teaser) --- Germans playing Monopoly

Apologies, apologies, this has nothing to do with the Green Eyes, except that we played Monopoly once, with Sacha, the model for Jack Horn in the novel, and it ended in tears like this (I was Karl Marx)  (click to enlarge):


(find a few lines from the Jack Horn chapter underneath)

San Francisco (12) --- Bullit

While Chang and I were strolling through San Francisco yesterday, the conversation turned to the peculiarities of the street layout here, each street being its own turnpike, as it were, connecting A and B like Alpha Romeos would in the old days, no, wrong, we mean via the shortest route afforded by Euclidean geometry, straight, that is, straight, regardless of the third dimension---and the opportunities this affords to the cinematography of car chases. So here it is---you've certainly seen it a hundred times already---the car chase scene from Bullit, the 1968 movie with Steve McQueen:

It's Obama's fault

(Recent paintings by George W. Bush)

Monday matinée

(I listened to this, in Horowitz's interpretation, perhaps 500 times, so there you have it. My Horowitz was a studio recording; this is a bit slower, and it is somehow even more gripping.)

San Francisco (11) --- Camp Meeker(2)

More from Redwooood Country north of the Bay Area where we are staying during the weekend, thanks to an invite of Karen, our landlady in San Francisco, to her cabin in Camp Meeker.

Karen's cabin in Camp Meeker

Connubial bliss inside Karen's cabin

Sunday matinée

We rearranged the furniture at Karen's cabin a bit.

San Francisco (10) --- Camp Meeker

À la recherche du temps perdu...along those lines: how does one manage to arrive in San Francisco? We apparently can't make it stick. So we're now in Camp Meeker, 1:30 hours north of SF, in serious Redwood country.

Easy

The view from the terrace

We already had dinner at the Bistrot des Garçon in nearby Occidental. 

San Francisco (9)

Harvey Milk, former (and assasinated) gay mayor of San Francisco

(Another picture from the superb artist Tony de Carlo, whom we discovered lately)

Go here for the previous San Francisco post

Tony de Carlo

Tony de Carlo: "Bird Man Of The Desert", 18" x 24", Acrylic on Canvas, 2006

(We discovered another superb gay artist, Tony de Carlo; see right column for a link to his site)

San Francisco (8) --- Lufthansa flight 454 (reposted)

We posted this once before, a year ago, in a post "not about erotic writing," and in blissful ignorance of our future. So here it is again, and this time it is about erotic writing, at least in the sense that it is about us, and our flight into the world capital of erotic writing:



It appears to be difficult to arrive in San Francisco once and for all, this is our 8th post already, but anyhow. Watch the clip, it's fascinating.

Go here for the previous SF post, and there for the next.

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

Find a caption (Glenn)

San Francisco (5) Potrero Hill

Potrero Hill, that's where we reside, on 1229 de Haro Street. "Potrero" means paddock in English, and the place probably was a paddock before the city took over. The neighborhood is still Spanish (mostly).

1229, de Haro Street --- we're on the second floor, left (Chang in the left corner) 

Opposite side of the street

Health warning (Glenn)

Saturday matinée: Telegraph Road

Telegraph Avenue or Telegraph Road ... see previous post for an explanation.

San Francisco (4) Telegraph Avenue

We're in San Francisco now, which means that the first thing in the morning would be a trip to Telegraph Road, Oakland, CA, where Morning Glory is located, the KP-Asian Supermarket, where they sell Korean food.

The Korean supermarket on Telegraph Avenue

Oakland---you will possibly agree with us---has---or at least had---a notoriously bad reputation---because bad reputations are always notorious---especially next to San Francisco, the reputation---and now we know why.

What we didn't know at that point---or, more precisely, didn't remember---Michael Chabon's latest novel is set on Telegraph Road there---or Avenue---something about a record store and race etc.

Michael Chabon

And then we had a little connubial bliss with Chang---in the afternoon---who abruptly changed directions during a walk through the Mission District after a very brief verbal exchange (the bliss), and departed in the other direction, yelling a departing "f@@k you,  f@@k you," at us, so we went to the Castro district to find a new lover, and went into a bookstore to buy a new York Times, and the Staff's Choice of Book was Michael Chabon's new novel, and since Chabon is one of the new American authors we in fact did read---quite extensively by our standards---we picked up his new book and re-discovered---we had read a review---that it was set on Telegraph Avenue, whence the title of the book---spoiler alert---Telegraph Avenue. We feel---spoiler alert---part of new literary history now. Not yet Chang though, because I didn't tell him yet; we have, however---spoiler alert---reconciled.

Previous SF-post here.

San Francisco (3) Flight 370

Lets start with a picture:

 Malaysia Airline advertisement (as found on Facebook; perhaps you can explain to us why a normal Boing 777 has only two engines, instead of four)

Flight 370, that would be Malaysian Air, the missing plane. Not Flight 545 to San Francisco though, because that would be Lufthansa, our flight from Frankfurt.

You guessed right, our conspiracy theories would revolve around sex and crime, and our departure would be supposedly a real story (I mean, we would start with a real story), told by a stewardess (female flight attendant) who enters the cockpit---spoiler alert---never thought about this, no word is safe in English---and finds the autopilot on, and---spoiler alert---pilot and copilot in the nude, and in a significant embrace. They got fired, supposedly, the---no spoiler alert---fucking pilots. Perhaps they went on to work for Malaysian Air, and---spoiler alert (in the sense that the remainder of this sentence is real silly)---and had it in their contract that they would have to fly Flight 69 only. No, that's not what I wanted to say. I wanted to say that one fine day, namely on March 7---spoiler alert---that they forgot to switch the autopilot on.

Along those lines. In the meantime, let's marvel at the brilliance of our colleagues from the Huffpost blog, who use the following picture---spoiler alert

"I wonder where they are."

---to illustrate a post about the search for the missing plane.

Next SF post here. Previous SF post here.

San Francisco (2) ("Sex im Zeitalter seiner technischer Reproduzierbarkeit")

Right. "Das Kunstwerk im Zeitalter..." Even readers of The New Yorker will know, this was Walter Benjamin. What they don't know, what even I didn't know at the time, I went to school with Walter Benjamin, sort of, in the sense that the house of his (Walter's) parents was located right opposite to my primary school in Grunewald, Berlin, Germany. He was born there. I didn't know since I didn't know about Benjamin at the age of 6 through 11, and because the plaque that informs post-nazi Germany about his birthplace had not been in place so soon after the war.

Walter Benjamin

Reader's of the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung will certainly know (about Benjamin), Germany's newspaper of record, although a bit less than the New York Times (the record), because they (the Frankfurters) had been leaning a bit too far to the right (then). They sound more balanced now (the FAZ), (are you still there?) (nice, isn't it, running your own blog, no anal copy editor to deal with), the layout has changed (the FAZ's), and square miles of its tree-based newspaper space are now dedicated to large, pictogrammatical pieces of artwork so that Germany's post-intellectual elite doesn't have to read so much. The German sounds different, too, a bit more modern. What sounds surprisingly old-fashioned is an article in the last weekend edition of the FAZ about sex and the internet. I didn't keep the copy of the paper, so this is from memory (stupid). (See below for more about Ampersant's hyper-parenthesization).

San Francisco (1)

"We're on our way" (no, actually, "I'm on my way") was the sad swansong of an aging Phil Collins eight years ago. Well, we are on our way now, even arrived in San Francisco already, but stopped over in Frankfurt, Germany, at the Hilton Garden Inn of Frankfurt Airport, the Ikea among the Hilton brands. Right next to the entrance for the Hilton Garden Inn there's the entrance of the Hilton Frankfurt Airport, The Hilton among the Hilton brands, and both outfits share a common atrium, 11 floors high. We're sent up in Hollywood glass elevators to the 11th floor, to room 1126, and an atrium bridge sends us to the other side, the Hilton-hilton side of the atrium.

Not painted by Piero della Francesca

Everything is new here, including the smallness of a room that radiates the coziness of a mansarde of three-pane insulation windows 6 inches thick, and a fashionable bathroom design (if bathroom designs can be radiated (lol, (loller)))---a fashionable bathroom design of misleading tiles that look like hardwood but are made of materials from Mars (this sounds unintentionally old-fashioned but there's no way to salvage this sentence anyway).

We take a shower. Shower and bathtub are integrated, as usual in hotels, and our eye falls on the sink.

Now what?

Have you ever seen a sink like this? Yes. Have you ever seen a sink in this location, right at the center of the tub? Come on, it's not so difficult. It's all about sex, or at least foreplay. You understand if you ever tried in a traditional bath tub.





In the next post we'll hazard a mini-essay about sex and modernity, which, if it were written in German, would be titled "Sex im Zeitalter seiner technischen Reproduzierbarkeit."

Go here for the next SF post.

Turtles all the way down