in conderation of too tiny shoo droppings...

There's a viewpoint that believes there's a rent-seeking corporate model that leaves no stone unturned. I cite as evidence to the contrary my existence under a heavy stone. At least I think it's heavy. Either it's too heavy to lift or best left unturned in order to keep the likes of me in their place.

 

In the interest of exposition, I first cite evidence of the existence of the aforementioned model in the form of an apple and a window:

 

Consumers be hungry. To eat a window is to know the pane of existence. Those consumers who have recognized the pane for the pain it is have chosen to eat each day (and all day) the proverbial fruit that grows from the labor of people they must think (at least somewhere deep in their underawareness in order for their awareness to live with whatever is left of it) are nary but trolls toiling happily for the fruits of their labor, roots and grubworms, and that they otherwise feel no pain and suffer no uncertainty. Am I certain this is not the case?

 

The proprietor of this daily and day long fruit owns the apple and the seed. And so does this Johnny Appleseed wield a quasi solitary influence over his laborers and consumers, the latter of which occasionally enough express a feeling of being coerced while demonstrating their loyalty to their marketplace master. For many have otherwise known the pain of regularly renewed shard consumption.

 

Johnny Appleseed leaves no stone unturned in seeking profit, as if down to the final minted nickel, "There's five cents left in his pocket!" 

 

He has his contrivers continually re-engineer both apple and seed so that just in time for the quarterly greet-ups he can announce that his consumers will be needing a lip and tooth and belly and bowel enhancement to keep up with the marvels of modern digestibles.

 

Leaving aside the technological elephant you didn't used to need to eat, let alone feel compelled by its eye candy conveying quality you can't look away from, I return to my original point that it's not always done this way and cite as an example my subscribed-to enabler of this form of communication:

 

He/She/It/They started, as the tale often goes, as the upstart eager to jump into the market. Let's call them Malice.

 

Malice built a loyal following doling out data rates and rock bottom prices, only to cash in and cash out when someone with global level naming rights, let's call them GoTo, swallowed them like the snack you get before the pilot says you're getting ready to land.

 

It would be normal as a customer in this scenario to expect to get screwed. There is no way in hell my something-nine ninety-nine per monthly ransom would not be going up. Yet here it is, decades accrued, and not a nickel more.

 

Sure, over the years that followed I'd been strangled occasionally, followed uncannily by a robocop offering me a cigarette before the strangler returns, i.e. respite from future threat, but even that dissipated.

 

Don't get me wrong. I don't mean to suggest I am being rewarded for my loyalty. Alternative reasoning would consider a business school approach whereby all newcomers pay an ever more punitive price for membership, and the oldies are left alone, lest they be lost to someone they know they can't quite swallow. Yet.

 

In other words, somehow they haven't managed to monopolize the market à la the democratic apple in the republic of windows, where the fruit functions as resistance to anything better and its host pummels what's left into asphalt paste.

 

My guess is there are few enough of my variety to make the tiniest bump on a chart that charts bumps in behemoth boardrooms. Because for a giant that large, the stone would be so easy to turn.  

Der Parkbank Pinkler Kapitel XXXIX: die Dimension der Demenzen der Menschen

XXXIX.

 

In einer, sagen wir mal, nicht allzu fernen Zukunft, hier heute als vergangene Zeit dargestellt, als man damit anfing, Straßennamen nach Straßen zu benennen, genauer gesagt, umzubenennen, sowohl die Umbennener selbst und die, die von derselben von Abscheu überschauert, waren sich bewusst, worum es ging, sprich dem (eigenen) Arschloch hinterher eilen. Arschlochallez! Als hellseh' historiker darf ich solche Maßnahmen bürokratischen Umwege nennen. 

 

Ich kann dies und auch anderes tun. Wie, zum Beispiel, die Zukunft in die Vergangenheit verwandeln. Denn ich bin zwar kein Hellseher, aber ich sehe heller, auch wenn ich eventuell geisteskrank bin. 

 

Genau deshalb rede ich nicht nur von, sondern sehe ich vor mir auch die Stalinallee-Allee, ehem. Karl-Marx-Allee, ehem. Stalinallee, die nach der nach dem verrufenen Georgier benannten Allee umbenannt worden ist.

 

Ich leite an ihren, ähm, Anschluss weiter, die ehemalige Frankfurter Allee, die zum Glück, zumindest aus Gründen des Fortbestands, nach der gleichen Allee namens des selben Mannes aus Stahl benannt ist. Ohnehin, würde Polen glücklicher mit Krupp an der Oder nebenan?

 

Diese beiden Alleen sind noch für den Namen geeignet. Ich denke hier an die Stralauer zwischen Ehrenbergstraße und Elsenbrücke, wobei die Umbenennungsorgie eine gewisse Folgerichtigkeit enthält. Die heißt nun Stralauerallee-Straße.

 

Und das ist noch nicht alles. Stell dir das mal vor. Sie haben die Spree in Amazonas umbenannt. Im Bezug Bezos natürlich.

 

Zur Einheit (schon wieder): 

 

Die Spree strömte sich in Grenzen, Gebirgszüge sowieso. Doch letztere hat schon jene lang gehaltene Teilung in den Schatten gestellt, die hier an den Bänken der früheren verlief, im Alten Fritz' Hain.

Die Beute aus der Himmelswand gekratzt, ein Geschoss nach dem anderen, in die Luft, über diese einst gespaltene Stadt.

 

Eine Einheit an die andere, sich zu einem konkreten Tribut erhoben, an Höhenflüge, Schwingen der Begierde.

Triumphierend beherrscht, die Teilung vor den Bänken befestigt. Denn wenn so eine Kette stetig strömt, fließen die Früchte dem Siegreichen zu, einst gemeint zu den Massen hinunter...
 

...Moment. Sind die Fesseln mit einem Schlüssel versehen?

Apropos vorbei gelaufen: 

  

 

 

 __

xxxviii. << -- >> Kapitel ??

.

To KD PhD

Honourable Dr D,

Dear. Welcome to the club, by which I imply credentials I don't share to ward off potential collectors of weakness should this dispatch fall into the wrong hands. No irony here; they never read past the first clause. Nor do I mean to suggest by way of sarcasm disrespect toward the value of your hard earned letters. Quite to the contrary, as I hope will shortly (or, anyway, not too longly) become clear.

For there are those who devalue such achievements with derision, invoking and inverting haughty hubris to curry favour amongst the commoners, much too common in today's climate, I'm afraid. As with virtue signalling, arrogance cuts both ways, it seems, if one can place it alongside resentment as back-to-back faces of a ruddy red cent. Hey, did I coin a phrase;-? The truly regrettable thing at its base is that those who don't know the joy don't know the joy. But enough of the Philistines.

I'm sure you made it through the gauntlet with high honours, though I'm unsure what it has to do with the volume with which one expresses one's arousal. At any rate, whether you reached the summit, or it was just so-so, or that one in between, you'll always be tops in my book. I frequently find subjects of your interest fascinating enough that they become forever committed to memory, speaking of magnetite.

And now I arrive at the less pleasurable point of this missive. Though I thank you here heartfelt and sincere for the invitation, I shan't be joining the festivities on the night. Do your people still say 'shan't'? I only realise now it eats at me a little that you who hail from your neck of the wood can adopt Americanisms with all the cred of the seemingly cool, whereas one of my ilk doing the reverse is what, to my projections at least, would be deemed by way of today's standardisation 'cringe'. Is there anything more cringeworthy than distilling an otherwise perfectly useful expression down to one syllable? It's efficient, I guess.

Anyway, as I know you're aware, I have my Allemanaphobia therapy session to attend, the forgo-ance of which would send me into a spiral of guilt from which recovery is formidable. Not that there's a dearth of guilt associable to an RSVP in lieu of being attendantly complimentary toward a friend I hold dear and whose friendship for which I would mourn to be unfit. Whatever happened to guilt for guilt's own sake and why does it have to dilute pleasures with pains? Not that this is a clash of polar proportions, but, to take that one symbolic example, whether the migratory raptor is repelled by magnetic north or flies its path along a mental map, me circular thoughts there-above do be webbed & spinning. Doo bee doo.

I am reminded of something I heard recently, and as recency bias would have it, I cannot recall whence (what with the way things are these days): There are a couple types of people (among many others I am sure): Those who fear public speaking above much else; and those for whom not being the one publicly speaking is similarly nerve-wracking. I do believe I have overcome the former to become a version of the latter only to then again default to whichever wields the threat of the moment: the wide-open space and/or its mass of peeps, or the blackhole of a claustrophized carton from within which no communal message will transmit. Research that, why don'tcha! We could make a play of it!

 

Forgive my wordly wandering, but what is my wont, when not merely a mask against emotional import, but a string of non sequutur with a view to a purpose? For you, inspire me so.

 

I commend you for your pursuits as well as congratulate you for this accomplishment, with an emphasis on my admiration for which exaggeration is an unknowable entity, and which I hope you can muster to receive in the same spirit, given you're not meeting it face-to-face (as in, like, literally (cf. all literal-like). If that's too twisted a way to put it: You're the best!
 

davidly
       o
        u

         r

          s

'cep 'timber!'

Fruchtstr & Stalinallee 1960

Hover over Foto:

Straße der Pariser Kommune & Karl-Marx-Allee '25 

 

Peer't through to the be side

Rounding a corner with The Professor is like sharing cheese with a ghost. The guilt trip's your own pleasure.

He'd barely glanced at the sign, if at all, when he muttered disbelief at the modern day marking of the streets of the city after a person who'd inspired so much death and destruction, to which I said dude's no more responsible for the gulags than that edgy objectivistesse for the brutality of United Fruit. Not everyone named Chiquita is a brand-marked terrorist enabler. He thought on this long enough to see my point about the perversion of good intentions, which for Pratt was the duration of the tick before the tock, and said the analogy bordered on no true Scotsman, something he liked to drop in wherever he thought it fit, his analog kidded quarter-proof Scotch himself.

 

I complained the fallacy camouflages a scary creature of dry stalks of cereal plants, and he said at least the chaff's removed, which I think might've been a comment on the potential misreckoning inherent to the citing of a fallacy and the confusion that abounds whenever someone makes inexplicit a construction or the recognition of one, an observation or an accusation.

 

It's perfectly fine, even exemplary, to be a master of filling a composition with nuance of raw power yet not be able to swing from a rope even were it hung from the heavens by the coach of creation. No amount of the big money can afford that wily watchmaker’s wares, let alone grasp what one’s reward whispers not to. Still, the beat was always solid and the words were moving pictures.

 

Knowing of his aversion to in-his-face sentimentality, I apologized when I told him I’d probably feel a heart-crossing shadow upon the news of his passing. Without thinking, he reassured me that was perfectly fine as long as I was aware it wasn't him I was missing.

 

Fin.

Der Parkbank Pinkler Kapitel XXXVIII: durch die Tore

        Du bist dran.
            —das Alltribunal

XXXVIII.

 

Jenny de la Torre Castro

 

 __

xxxvii. << -- >> Kapitel ??

Grüngubener

As usual with this series, hover your cursor over and off the image to compare it to 2025, or just click on it.

  Grünberger- & Gubener, Friedrichshain-Berlin 1955 | (hover/click 2025)

Cousins

heut früh himmelwaerts

Jup'ter, Saturn, Venus, Mars

sie starren mich an

 

früh freigekommen

Jeff, Ricky, Jackie, David

Vetternsprozession

 

im engelchen Sinn

gleichsam geistlich als Sinnbild

und auch andersrum

 

im engeren Sinn

seid ihr äußerst weit entfernt

von uns, die warten

Heiligabend

Untold suns dawning out of darkness

I recall an interview of an artist roommate of Syd Barrett's in which he told of how when he'd be working on a painting in his room, he'd also be acutely aware of Syd's inert presence, lying on his bed in the other room, and he imagined Syd must be thinking that he could get up and do anything, but as soon as he did, it would preclude the possibility of anything else. At least that's what I recall of it (though I'm not gonna search for it on YooToob and distract myself).

 

Anyway, it struck me as profound at the time, whereby only now do I consider his roommate's tale a classic projection, of which he would seem to have been aware, insofar as he did state it was what he had imagined Syd might be thinking.

 

At any rate, this reminds me, too, of what I perceive as the increased commonality of the discussion of the notion that we humans have no free will, but rather, like everything else in the observable physical universe, are only objects in a chain of determinism, and, though this is not new, it not so long ago occurred to me that this is both a simplification and complication of reality.

 

In short, the deterministic nature of the cause & effect universe does not preclude our having choices at every twist and turn. Yet most of these seem to me like choices at the ho-hum place of the routine management of the human condition of being aware we can make them. Or not.

 

The choice to paint one's walls falls into this category, I think. Then there are the manifold decisions to be made that become increasingly unavoidable as the state from which this confrontation occurs falls into categories we perceive as more crucial to wellbeing, and ultimately survival.

 

As regards depression and anxiety, I think about how my established routine has gone so far toward diminishing their debilitating effects by keeping them less looming than their latency would imply. But that's not all !-D

 

Indeed, the sense of purpose is always looming; indeed, merely getting up early achieves only the first step wherefrom the rest presents itself with nagging choice after nagging choice, to be made, or not, whereby each has its own threat assessment swimming synaptically unseen yet ever present, as is evinced by what I've coined the OCD of mind, i.e. the manic nature of seemingly shambolic and infinitely rapid thinking that won't let one go.

 

Hence the routine, which continues with a series of doings, the only obsessive nature of which is anything that would get in their way, i.e. force a choice to change the program, a change of commitment. But these are pretty easy to get around as long as I can avoid all-or-nothing thinking.

 

Enough of the pitfalls of freewill; there is also a liberating freedom — at not just one, but two ends of the spectrum of always choo-choo choosing: At the one end is an eternal recurrence of the realization that, even if I cannot do anything I want, I can feel any way I want about it; what was nagging me was merely me. At the other end's the choice to not choose, leaving one's future free for whatever comes next.

 

As long as I can balance the ability to know what I can do without (and say, 'I don't need this' without nagging consequences) with the recognition of how doing-with would net positive results without drastically changing my universe, my sanity remains intact.

 

As regards the fear of commitment, I think it is based on all-or-nothing thinking, with oft unwarranted worries about the exclusion of anything or anyone else. Selfish or not, can't I choose to make someone else (feel) good or better or less bad?

 

People who love music have reported sometimes getting more out of creating mixtapes for someone else. Correctly or not, they feel a sense of giving to someone else the enjoyment the music'd brought to themselves. I can't imagine the choice to make a mixtape shuts out future personal possibilities.

 

Can I do that by painting a wall? In my case, probably not, yet the walls of my kitchen have provided a sense of something whose value I cannot diminish. And I didn't even do anything.

 

Had I painted the collection of tiny triangles that just happen to recount to my mind the tale of The Illustrated Man, with the other tales therein, including the blank spot on the wall for the fear of the known future, I am sure my retelling of the tale of the painting of the wall would paint my face with the sense of accomplishment, my attitude about pride notwithstanding. Let's say the sense of satisfaction would be net positive if not at all selfless. And you can always repaint a wall or leave it for someone else, assuming someone does not come along and take that choice away beforehand. 

 

The creative impulse rules.

"The World the Children Made"

Bleglgauze

Not so much a bandage as a pun-adjacent comment on the previous entry whose final paragraph is in permanent revision and whose final paragraph is not necessarily the current one and this fact justifies the relative clause being a defining one so as to forgo the comma despite what follows having no such excuse concurrent with an entry whose speech simulacrum is like "La Villa Strangiato" in that it both bespeaks an exercise in self-indulgence along with an attempt at recursion to a point between which I will reference a refrain that provides this excuse to express the same again from that prior entry that eventually entails being the penultimate point before the point that says none of our values are the same let alone immune to inflationary implosion in the aggregate or not as our superficial style of survival rests on a rock as our extinction hearkens hindward hard and so it finally arrives that davidly dot eu is dead because davidly dot eu is not broccoli but brokered by bait and switch rent seekers whose likes led a long long time ago to my removing the feeding tubes to +49301785853304.

 

Der Parkbank Pinkler Kapitel XXXVI: Tat dem Leid

Der Faktiv ist dem Genitalien sein Boot.

—Basteln Blick

XXXVI.

 

Leut heut reden von ihrer eigenen Wahrheit, wolle diese aussprechen dürfen. Nicht drumherum kommend, spricht jeder aus der einzelnen Blase heraus, gewollt oder nicht. Meistens ist's gewollt, wenn auch unbewusst, dass's gewollt ist.

 

Mag sein, dies ist eine faule Verallgemeinerung. „Sprich für dich selbst“ würde da eine passende Erwiderung. „Genau!“ ist die Antwort auf diese, entsprechend eben wovon jenem abhängt. Dem Haken dem Wirklichsein: Projektionen bis ins Tiefste.

 

Zum Glück, oder zum Wohle der Menschheit, finden die Menschen über gemeinsame Interessen zueinander. Sie knüpfen Freundschaften, manchmal lebenslange Beziehungen. Diese Leute mit ihren gemeinsamen Interessen zusammen mit ihrem unterschiedlichen Vorlieben, Vorstellungen und Grundwerten könnten in sogenannten Venn-Diagrammen dargestellt werden. Während sich jeder in der eigenen Blase bewegt, reisen die Gemeinsamkeiten in der jeweiligen Venn-Bubble zusammen. Der Fortschritt.

Leider, oder zuungunsten der Menschlichkeit, bauen manch ein Zweckverhältnisse, zur Erzielung kurzfristiger Vorteile oder aus reiner Bequemlichkeit, bewusst oder nicht. Meistens ist's bewusst, in der Regel einseitig. Sprich Beidseitig mit jeweiligen Hintergedanken. Der endlose Regress. Sweet dreams are made of these.

 

Dann gibt es Kommunikationsstörungen, die selbst die Anerkennung von besten gemeinsamen Interessen unterbinden können. Zum Nennwert genommen funktioniert Kommunikation via Sender und Empfänger. Es wird geredet, es wird zugehört. Aber eine Gesamtübertragung gesättigt mit werbenden Scheinwerten hat nicht nur Anziehungs- sondern auch Erziehungskraft.

 

Die Mustererkennung ist keine Erfindung von Maschinenlerntechnologien. In der ansonsten vertrauenswürdige Kommunikationswelt wird's gelernt, Züge von der Manipulationskunst wider zu spiegeln. Viele werden mit Schuld überhäuft. Man tut so als ob und fühlt so als wäre. Wer weiß, was alles verlernt ist, wenn man zum Bot wird. Von wegen KI.

Als Empfänger sammeln Menschen Kosten. So das Gefühl. Also nur als Sender können sie dafür aufkommen. Da hat man zwei Modi vom Zuhören möglich. Beide sind stets von unwesentlichen Gedanken unterbrochen, mit dem Unterschied, dass die entweder von außen eingehenden Infos diesem Gedankengang untergeordnet sind, oder umgekehrt. Ist es umgekehrt, dann stimmen Empfänger und Sender in irgendeinem Glauben überein. In der Praxis haben wir hier allerdings zwei Sender, wobei Sender Nummer 2 auf einer gewissen Ebene mit dem anderen Sender in Resonanz ist.

Spielen dagegen die eigenen Gedanken eine übergeordnete Rolle gegenüber dem Gehörten, sind es auch zwei Sender, jedoch ohne Überschneidung der Vorstellungen. Und während jene Schnittmenge bei der ersten Variante eine Art Venn-Blase bilden würde, ist es trotzdem eine Blase.

Zurzeit treffen diese zwei Modi vom Zuhören dermaßen aufeinander, Signalen wird gestört, Resonanz wird unstimmig, angeblich abgesicherte Gemeinsamkeiten ungewiss, eine Panne ist vorprogrammiert. Wie bei dem Konjunkturzyklus.

 

Wenn die Werte nicht stimmen, platzen die Blasen, die darauf basiert sind. Worauf die fragwürdigen Werte stützen, kommt auf der befragten Person an. Aber wenn die Werte, in denen Einige keine finden, schrittweise von oberflächlichen Dingen, zu den (falls man darauf verzichtet) kleinen Unannehmlichkeiten im Leben werden, und letztendlich zu dem, worauf man nicht verzichten kann, sei es aus Sucht oder als sonstige Überlebensbedingung, wahrscheinlich beides, was heißt, das, was wir brauchen, bringt uns um, dann kommen daweil Venn-Blasen zwischen Hammer und Amboss. Zumindest die von anscheinend menschlicher Gemeinschaft.

 

Dies gilt für Institutionen ebenso wie für ihre Symbole, sei diese ein Haus oder auch wieder eine Person oder sogar ein Link zu etwas anderem,  wie zu der Metapher vom Dreibeiner mit nur zwei von drei verlässlichen Beinen oder zum Gleichnis vom Turm, der von Baumeistern errichtet wird, die weder die gegenseitige Sprache, geschweige denn ihre tiefsten persönlichen Absichten verstehen. Unbewusst gewollt oder auch umgekehrt.

Wer so tut, als könne er das Leid unter einer solchen Vereinbarung nicht vorhersagen, kann nur so tun, als würde er den Urheber erkennen.

„Projektion!“ Eben.

 __

.vx << -- >> Kapitel ??

No cymbals, no crash

When I hear an ambulance at a distance, I don't take my good fortune for granted; someone else nearer that sound has to suffer the brunt of its siren blast.

 

Should the sound approach, as it often does, and one after the other, some nearer to each other, trumpeting the same cause, some further apart but close enough together to shred the nerves of the audient, unwilling and ill willed, I leap to my feet and scream through the window down to the street below, and wave my fist in the air for good measure, "Oh, you think you're cool! 'I'm sooo important! I'm going to an emergency!' Give it a rest already!"

 

I know of course the driver's just doing a job, and an admirable one. But, like the driver, I have no free will. The driver can't help but to switch on and sustain the wailing even at times when it's unnecessary. Like lunch time. The appetite calls the tune. Less than free will, there's protocol. Rules rule. Less free will than that, the siren must sound. It's the sole purpose of the siren. Therefore, as with the alarm before it, it must be sounded.

 

I can only pretend I'm not annoyed.

Gedouda Dashtreet

Stalinallee/Fruchtstraße - 1960

Hover or click for Karl-Marx-Allee/Pariser Kommune - 2024

Don't gimme no Flaco

Got 20 years to life on a bill said in God we trust.

Sprung at 12 to fears they'd locked

the living sense out of him. 

The rat finks were no match for

freedom turned out to be free.

Screeched 'God is great!' but

couldn't bring the house down.
Never forget. 

Novem be nine

No ember benign,

November bemoan:

the West that is known

will never be mine.

 

Gabriel-Max-Str. - 1989 (hover/click: 2023)

Uh, nuh!

There was rain.

 

A steady drip down Leipziger to P'damer Str: a stretch done dirty down to a degradation of an already desperately needed haven from the bog potential ((that) I can say I'm glad is no longer my weekly cycle). I even did what I normally wouldn't, which is ride on the covered walk of the shopping strip and subsequent hotel, which kept me out of the drizzle a while.

I'd read in the paper long enough ago that this segment was to be a cyclist's dream. As it is, the previous marks, heat-sealed into the pavement, have another stripe across them, which doesn't mean "no bikes allowed" so much as "ride at your own risk".

 

P'damer Plz is the least laudable yet most appropriate symbol of die Wende, being, as it is, literally, a transition from the dick-swinging sectors parcelled out to would-be protectors of freedom, with their freshly defeated fascists in the fold, armed muzzle-to-muzzle opposite would-be arbiters of collective emancipation from the same. Authorities reign over all parades. As it connects to those armed to protect and those armed to resist and those armed to overcome and those armed to come over, only they justify themselves, nourishing each other and no one else, which seems fitting to the news of the day.

 

Anyway, as a metaphor for ever-swelling pots of piss, P'damer takes the cup. And there was rain.

 

Tho' none on this parade: Gock's (generous gift) giving a ship in the midst of the mist: two ticks to Eno at the house of the philharmonic, worthy of its color & in contrast to too much surrounding it (and built at the same time as the Wall).

 

Gock couldn't make the trip and I couldn't blame him. On behalf of his forgone half came K8 none too late. To her level of concern that her unfamiliarity 'd amount to an unworthiness of attendance, my assurance was it's nearly exclusively the stuff from the century past I'd made intimate acquaintance with: We were in the same boat if not the same harbor.

After Viet rice and noodles and a vape too deep (ye don't get off, unless ye cough), we ventured over and into the venue, about which I can say the following: outer doors at 8 and inner admittance at 8:30 is not entirely unlike the feeling of being schlepped from lock to lock at the airport (tracking moments too minutely (in this case, w/ thc (s)talking); maybe Ambien I woulda worked).

Once relaxed into the space, I observed what could be called Music for Concert Halls, as the pre-performance music accommodated this: a ship's bottle being slowly but surely filled with conversing characters who, each in their own fashion fit the part cast by their composer (who for his part rewarded recognition of all of this without demanding it;-). While the piece (or pieces) were full of familiar vocabulary, collectively none of it was identifiable as a previously known title. I think the point I want to make is they were not, as I would otherwise worry, substandard versions of what preceded them, but rather exemplary of an oeuvre and the essentials of one guy's self-defined genre. Derived without being derivative in the pejorative sense. And for all I know it was created for this purpose.

 

Houselights down, the woodwinds and strings entered first, literally, as they sort of wandered on while establishing the waves upon which the Ship would be set. And so it began, auspiciously (with the title track of the concert's namesake, followed by its three roman numbered companions): during this section, apprehension abated, disquiet dissolved, and this combo's potential shined, culminating in its swoon (or maybe the bombast).

 

It's a challenge of wordsmithing to convey how the players reproduced the aforementioned genre: they gave a shape to a one-time fantasy of mine that an orchestra could just warm up for several hours: the gradual formation of harmonic narrative left that idea in its wake, but with the wake remaining contiguous to the periphery of the performance of the wake itself, it never strayed entirely out of the scope of the audient.

 

The point I failed to make in the previous paragraph is that the character of the sound was true to that which was to be recreated, down to its subtlest. That is, it came off as original, orchestrated but un-orchestral.

 

(I am reminded here of the service done by the Metropole Orkest to Fripp's The Wine of Silence, but with a greater degree of difficulty in consideration of the variance of texture involved.)

 

I have to mention one of the best aspects being the fade to silences being uninterrupted by the slightest peep from the house. Then, an eruption of enthusiasm. Each time except one, where, appropriately, the transition between pieces flowed unbroken except by the silence.

 

Of course the Baltic Sea Philharmonic has a conductor. One can be forgiven for feeling too much shine from such a presence. What is a maestro but a knob, after all. Yet despite my traditional dilettante's doubting their necessity, I cannot believe (in this instance) that the swelling & shrinking and fading in & out of each other could have been accomplished as effectively devoid of direction from somewhere. The best bands break up without it keeping the egos in check; individual instrumentalists move on to escape the hubris of the same (I think I glimpsed a smirk or three among the blowers and strokers, but there were smiles, too). All in all, I found it easy enough to focus my attention away from the demonstrative dirigent dirigenting (which K8n't be said of everyone;-)

 

The Ship was followed by something the players created that sounded familiar. Was it from On Land, or was it another exemplary combination of chirping & croaking to remind us of it? (Later in response to one of Mr Conductor Man's between-song chatterings, this time about the coming piece's featuring birdsong, Eno humorously self-deprecated that everything he's ever done does.)

 

Anyway, the previous fed into "By this River", with the harpist introducing Roedelius' part, and, as far as I could tell, a keyboard taking Moebius', and mallets filling out the former (percussion was in partial view at the back). This would be the sole representation of the twentieth century. Dating back to 1977, it puts twenty-eight years between itself and the nearest chronologically sourced part of the rest of the set, which ranged between 2005 to today.

 

If you're a fan of the vocal melodies from ForeverAndEverNoMore, you won't find your way off of your cloud for a bit. The artist's voice was as could have been desired (tho' he remarked of a cold, which was only recognizable when he spoke or sang too softly to be heard anyway). His rendition of "I'm Set Free" really shone its own, and  along with "By this River" brought the other soloists out, and clustered waves of chamber-like activity in (like Music for Bridges), which made the returns really pay off.

 

Few as his live performances have been, this will serve as a landmark to its having been ventured and a testament to a career headed this way, as if it had embarked to get here.

 

Like, for me, the thing I said before about exemplary vocabulary as part of his genre, last night's experience has reestablished in my mind that this territory does in fact belong to him. That is, he didn't just take from others who've influenced a certain approach, and he didn't just result in those who continue to ape his influence, for good or ill, but he's established a lexicon with his name on it. It's easy to lose sight of that, and the stage was a perfect reminder.

 

Had the acoustics of this house been present at the Hammersmith, or had I been sitting in the best seat in the house, as here, I'd still be throwing away my pants.

Thanks to Gock for a birthday well spent.

Why the Whysplanation Bothers Me

The reason why is because. And how.

 

In my opinion, a why-statement should be used to state Why it is that something has come to be. In other words, it should aim to name the cause of an effect.

 

While, indeed, it can be nearly identical to a how-statement, as in both how and why I came to like pizza, it gets ambiguous with increasing frequency whenever someone sets out to explain to you why-something. If, for example, The Beacon beckons you with Why the Economy is Good Right Now, it's probably trying to convince the reader who might not think the economy is good by presenting current qualities and arguing they make this so, usurping the how and relegating the why to something more akin to campaign advertising.

 

As alluded to by my example, the preponderance of offense occurs in news item headlines. Annoyance at these demonstrates how I or anyone with housepet peeves is a pragmatist of selective convenience. Notice I said how and not why. I'm more inclined to say pet peeves demonstrate selective intolerance but wanted to point out here that the offense can occur as well in everyday speech, as I would've done had I written "demonstrates why I'm a pragmatist of selective convenience", to which my snide reply would be "Because I'm an asshole".

 

The following is an example of a micro infraction I read this morning: Why this summer that's actually not one comes at just the right time.

 

[Here's another pet peeve: you'll have to trust my translation. Our deep translator does not yet offer a proper rendering of the defining relative clause as I have written it and instead offers exclusively versions of a non-defining Why this summer, which is actually not one, comes at just the right time. German grammar makes no distinction without the comma, but I, being a part-time pragmatist, understand that it's the not-being an actual summer aspect that's had a timely arrival, not the summer itself, the latter of which is what the non-defining rendering with the commas would indicate. I'm fully aware the context would provide the clarity to the intended reader, i.e. I know the last several weeks have been cool and rainy and that the inference of "this summer's arrival" alone could preclude anything other than this. But other people read, too. Not everyone's privy to the defining quality of this timely arrival.]

 

A logical explanation of the why in the above headline should involve an examination that explores the mechanisms that determine the weather in this region of the world and an observation of present conditions that would answer the question Why is the weather like this now? What makes the infraction less flagrant is the strong contextual association of "comes at just the right time" with "is what is needed or desired". The answer is so broadly self-explanatory there need not be a question; we need rain more than fire right now. But I cannot help myself; the why bothers me because I know it lacks an explanation as to why this thing we need now but does not typically occur at this time of year has so mercifully and seemingly coincidently arrived now, of all times.

 

I've identified a couple levels of irritation that could be split into categories based on the amount the glare each grates: 1) the whys that are all how and 2) the whys that cover both how and why to more and less proportional degrees.

 

Here's a fun one: Call up an array of news sites and do a page search for why to see if you can guess which category the headline corresponds to. I have to admit that, to its credit, the NYT homepage had at the time of conception no examples of either, only four real whys. [Checking again just now, they have a whopper with cheese.]

 

I'd like to think there's a real linguist or grammarian or lexicographer somewhere researching the origins of this and cataloguing usage. Advice to myself regarding pet peeves: Go with the flow. Mind the gap. 

What are turds for?

Herewith a suggestion that another word be added to the puns of irony lexicon along with foster siblings "transparency" and "oversight".

 

In similar fashion to how the former can stand for the unintentional presence of obvious malfeasance right along side the notion of official openness to scrutiny, and the latter functions as a matter of trust that those responsible for it will not be held to account when it turns out to mean they hadn't seen something coming, I propose that "sustainability" connote acting in whatever way necessary to make sure that when another transparent swan arrives to join the one that inspired the sustainability project, it'll be too late even for scapegoats.

  

About the title:
 

What just happened to be featured news:
https://www.berliner-zeitung.de/mensch-metropole/u2-alexanderplatz-bvg-abgesackter-u-bahn-tunnel-am-alex-arbeiten-im-plan-aber-es-gibt-neue-zweifel-li.357398