In any case, here is one. Once I had dropped out of school I spent several years working in factories, fast-food restaurants and cafeterias. A few years into this life one of my roommates (an aspiring eye doctor) mentioned that I should consider going to university. I had then no idea how one would go about doing such a thing, given that I was still years short of graduating high school. But it sounded interesting; by then I had realized that fame and fortune would not simply be heaped on me out of the blue.

So I went to the bookstore, to see if I could find a compact guide to help me figure out how to get to college. In the relevant section I came across a slim volume “How to get into Oxford and Cambridge”. Not “if” but “how”. Images of Oscar Wilde comedies, Brideshead Revisisted and Lytton Strachey came to my head (I was somewhat well read). I think the book cost about 9 pounds, but I bought it anyway.

As soon as I read it I realized that getting into Oxford or Cambridge was harder than just following some “how to” instructions. However, the book did spell out in detail how the process worked, the requirements, the exams, the interviews.

I’ve always had the power of dreaming fierce dreams that I make come true through sheer willpower. This became one of them. I began taking evening classes to do my A-levels. I underwent the requisite interviews. I got conditional offers – perhaps because the admission officers were sure they’d never have to make good on them? In those days people who got their A-levels from adult education did not apply to Oxford or Cambridge; it was still a relatively closed club open only to the finer public schools and a few  top-notch comprehensives.

In any case, I got the grades required by the conditional offer, and got into Oxford.

Happy ending?

Well, I wasn’t very happy there. I was shy, intimidated and felt way out of my league. I was surrounded by confident, articulate, extremely bright young people. They seemed to live on another planet than me, a slightly older, poor ex-runaway, with a foreign accent.

I should have gone somewhere else and studied something else.

But I loved the countryside, the old buildings, the choir, the chapel, the music, apple orchards, the botanic garden, the darkrooms, punting. I cycled many miles every day. The smell of the Oxfordshire countryside in the late spring is still magical and transcendent to me.

It was the wrong decision, the right decision, the wrong decision and the right decision.

I gave me the confidence to believe that I can force visions into reality. It helped me get considered for what was a pretty great, very-hard-to-get first job. I wish I could say it fired my love of learning, but I have to admit that a lot of my studying was superficial, reproducing old knowledge rather than creating new. It took me a long time to learn how to do so later.

Anyway, just another chance encounter in a bookstore.

Now, many years later, everyone’s worked on fixing what got broken, with middling success. I’ve managed to patch together reasonable, respectful relationships with both parents and two of my sisters. However, my third sister was so traumatized by her childhood that she, like me, ran away young, but then permanently severed all ties to her family.

She was my favorite sister, even though I never let her know. Blond, very thin and vulnerable, she was the little-est of the bunch, and generally got ground under in the fight for whatever crumbs of attention were to be had. I know where she lives and what she does; she has a general idea of what we’re up to, but remains determined in her refusal to re-establish a relationship.

It breaks my heart but I respect her choice.

A while ago, a new person came into my life through a circuitous route. She’s 87 and lives in my beloved Brighton Beach (I can see the Cyclone and the Wonder Wheel through the windows). She started life in what used to be Romania, but is now Belarus, and has lived in Russia, Poland and Israel. Her whole family was murdered by the Nazis. Her husband and son are dead. We see each other every week, and have long conversations and go on little outings and errands. She lets me practice my still halting Yiddish on her. She is sharp, and witty, and beautiful. She stuffs my pockets with her rugelach, sugar cookies and sponge cake. She makes sure I wear a scarf and a hat. She loves to see me dance at the events we go to, and one day I will get her to dance with me.

I walk to her apartment from mine, one straight line 6.8 miles, down McDonald Avenue, the most utilitarian of thoroughfares. Everyone else is going to work. I am disappearing. Her apartment is my little refuge from the world, a place utterly peaceful, outside space and time, with just the F train clattering by every few minutes.

She is the third of four girls and her name is the also the name of my favorite sister, #3 of our lot.

She calls me the daughter she never had. I can’t call her my mother, because I have a mother. She’s not really like my grandmother either – at 87 she’s still too young, in a way. Maybe somehow, someone has given me another sister.

Oyfn pripetchik

Anyway, Robert Dickerson’s artist name was Benjamin, and he performed in a couple of great Atlanta Bands, The Opal Foxx Quartet and Smoke.

Smoke and Benjamin got their epitaph in the move Benjamin Smoke by Peter Sillen and Jem Cohen.

Photographer: Brian Halloran

Although I have a few bones to pick with this movie, it did instantly get me out of a particular kind of funk in 2000, when I wasn’t sure where my life was going and felt trapped and frustrated. I actually went to see it a couple of times, sneaking out of work to sit in a mostly empty cinema to watch and re-watch it.

It made me decide to apply for an MFA in photography (even though I didn’t have a ton of work to show), and work only part-time for those couple of years. This was the exact right decision to make at the time, and I’m glad this movie nudged me in that direction.

I’m not into the Patti Smith pilgrimage in the movie – neither Benjamin or the band needed that kind of endorsement, and a little of Smith’s faux-prophetic earnestness goes a very long way. And the artsiness of the black and white photograph is perhaps artificially somber, since Benjamin seemed like a very funny and sweet person. But I did love Benjamin’s theatrics, Smoke’s music (strange, langurous melodies and lovely instrumentation – cello, cornet, banjo); and am grateful that it helped me discover The Opal Foxx Quartet, and some of the other bands and people in that orbit.

Anyway, Benjamin would have been 52. So, happy birthday.

Photographer: Brian Halloran

I might go back to the job I had in 1989 where I cleaned out databases for a company that made telephone systems. You just go through really long lists and delete any doubles. The factory was right next to the soon-to-be-opened Berlin Wall, but I did not know that.

Or I’d go back to the clothes factory and sew waistbands on an endless procession of jeans. As soon you had finished a batch and dispatched it to the person who added the buttons, another one woulde along on the overhead delivery system

Or perhaps go back to the typing pool of the somewhat controversial real estate company in Hanover Square, London. Where you’d still type on electric typewriters, made carbon copies, and took dictation from your boss using shorthand.

I did also like filtering the fat at the fast food company at the end of the day. So satisfying to see the dark sludge that smelled of pies, of fish fillets, of fries come out slightly lighter and less chunky.

Or being the tea lady in a large financial services office, steering my little wagon from floor to floor, spreading cheer.

I enjoyed serving breakfast to celebrities I had never heard of in the canteen/cafeteria of a British television station. We had everything, from black pudding to fruit compote, to kidneys, to kippers, to kedgeree, to the usual beans, bacon and toast.

I loved all of those jobs.

I loved the cameraderie between all of us workers, united in our belief that without us the world would come to a standstill. Talking trash about your bosses. Taking contractually ensured full lunch hours. Leaving at the end of the day without a worry in the world. Never having to work late nights or weekends unless that’s the shift you picked. Pouring out your creativity on your private life not your work assignments.

The steady rhythm of every day. Knowing exactly when you had done a good job, quantifiably.

No hating yourself at the end of the day where you feel like a total fake, that you’re not creative and intelligent enough for your job.

Not worrying about your career ladder or your network or your resume. Knowing that even if you lost this job there’d be thousands more out there just the same.

Working with your hands taking pleasure in every repetition.

Wish I didn’t need the reassurance, the status, the money of what I do. Sometimes.

The tags don’t lie: there is a very consistent theme to almost all of my posts, and it’s mortality.

Oof. I hadn’t quite expected that.

I think of myself as an optimistic, forward-looking person. And all I seem to want to talk about is death, the fragility of existence and the past. Where could that be coming from?

I don’t have any really good answers for right now. The only one I can think of is that I have subconsciously adopted this outlook from previous generations of my family.

My mother was two years old when she spent months on the road with her mother and three siblings, fleeing westward by cart, foot and train, through an apocalyptic Germany, ruined cities, dead people, dead cattle, forever crying babies, the smell of dirty diapers, meagre food, sleeping on floors. My grandfather had fled separately, since his presence would have meant certain death for the whole family had the Red Army caught up.

When this little band finally reached their destination my grandparents were both jailed and my mother was given to relatives.

Now, I am not claiming that this odyssee was either unusual or unfair. Millions of people had the same experience, my family had supported the war, they had the benefit of coming out alive unlike so many others, and my grandparents deserved their prison sentences.

But I am trying to put myself in the head of a two year old, and the impact of this apocalyptic journey on the brain of a small child.  Moreover, my mother grew up to the constant lamentations of the lost estate, the lost rank, the lost reputations, the lost country.

Wouldn’t that somehow implant the idea that everything falls, everything will get lost,  will die and come to nothing?

But how would that outlook get transferred to me, since my mother rarely talked about her childhood?

And if this is – perhaps improbably – the case, how do I rid myself of this weight, this outlook?

As I wasn’t very familiar with the sprawling metrolands of London, I’d fairly randomly pick destinations on the outer fringes and take  the bus there, always sitting in the smoky top at the front, get out, explore a little and then take the bus back to whatever cold little room I was living at the time. So I’d go to Harrow, or Brent Cross, Highgate, Peckham, Richmond, Kew, Wimbledon, Southall, Greenwich or Seven Sisters, slowly forming some kind of idea of London as a whole, rather than just a few central tourist destinations.

The other method of exploration was driven by my interest in cemeteries. I’d found a book in the library that listed all of London’s many cemeteries and I made it my mission to visit the most significant ones. Brompton was an early favorite, as much for its busy double life as meeting place for Earls Court’s clone scene as for its beautiful monuments. Highgate I liked too, for its famous inhabitants and hilly location, but soon I discovered Nunhead, Kensal Green, Abney Road and – forever my favorite – Tower Hamlets. London Cemeteries were not well kept then and many had turned into quasi-Amazonian jungles, wonderful places to hide in during the summer, with their soothing promise that however miserable life, rest was within reach.

I did not know many people, and almost never had any invitations for Saturday evenings. But staying home on Saturday night seemed to me then to be the most shameful thing in the world. That’s why I would go on very long excursions on Saturday nights, through dark London Streets, walking purposefully, as if I had somewhere to go to, but going nowhere in particular, turning left or right at random intervals. I’d come home exhausted, having seen only the outsides of whatever life other people were living, a spectator, window-shopper on reality, hiding in the shadows.

That way London slowly became mine, neighborhood by neighborhood, mile by mile.

I did not get into any trouble, mostly because of my debilitating shyness and my total inability to strike up any kind of human contact. I did see a lot of black and white movies, enjoyed the burgeoning New Wave scene and spent many hours in record and clothing stores.

My uncle and his wife were card-carrying members of the West German version of East Germany’s state party, and had the book and record shelves of 1970s communists. It was certainly a very different world from the rural isolation of my native village.

Although I do look back somewhat nostalgically to those days, the surreal night train rides to Berlin through the chemical haze of the East, the punks and squatters and the earnestness with which dogma was defended, the few arty cafes of Schöneberg and Kreuzberg, I cannot ever forget the choking nothingness of Sunday afternoons.

Stores closed Saturday lunchtime and did not re-open until Monday. If you ran out of food you’d have to travel to the couple of special weekend stores, with the stock and prices of a small neighborhood bodega. If you ran out of money you were out of money.

Streets were empty, and ennui descended like a leaden blanket over everything. It was like time had stopped and would never resume. Intense boredom pervaded everything. I am not sure what people actually did on Sundays. Visit cemeteries perhaps? Watch the Bundesliga? Sleep?

Michael Schmidt‘s photographs capture this dead atmosphere so perfectly I can barely stand to look at them. They seem to suck up all the life around them. You feel like you are sitting in a waiting room in which your name never gets called. You are forced to contemplate that you will die, and have not accomplished very much. It’s as if the whole world is covered with a fine layer of ash. I wake up covered in sweat. Thank god for New York.

And then one day my neighbor left for Colombia and I vowed to myself to find out what that song was. Surprisingly, I struck gold early on. In the early 1990s Portobello Market used to have many vendors selling bootleg cassette tapes. At that point I had no knowledge of Latin music whatsoever so I ended up with some Willie Colon, Hector Lavoe, merengue, and a live recording called “The Montuno Sessions“,  live broadcast from Studio ‘A’, 99.5 FM, NYC, later released by Mr Bongo. The song I was after was on this tape, a version of Oriente by Henry and Orlando Fiol.

This is what Stephen Mejias from Stereophile has to say about this song:

 But what really caught my heart was the plaintive, urgent, yearning sound of Henry Fiol‘s  restoration of Cheo Marquetti’s “Oriente.” The song delights me, troubles me. I say without doubt that I’ve never been moved this way. It’s stifling. Time-stopping. Indeed, Fiol’s “Oriente” is a wash of sadness and beauty, ten fleeting minutes of churning, swaying, and pleading; tres locked in dance with guiro, delicate piano backed by heartrending trumpet lines, and, above all, that mysterious, otherworldly croon: “Yo me voy a morir / Caramba, me voy a matar.” It’s magic. I could cry.

I don’t want to leave the impression, however, that “Oriente” is morose. It’s not. There is hope, pride, strength in its many movements. It ends where it begins, with a wave and a graceful turn. It, this song, feels so true to me, I’m nearly afraid no one else will understand. The thought is painful. It’s difficult to imagine another person being lifted, moved, possessed by this song in the same way.

I happen to feel exactly the same way about this song, and I couldn’t have said it better myself.

The Live from Studio A version of the song can’t be found free online (which is just as well), only the studio version which is a little overproduced. This performance gets close but lacks the full hypnotic length.

Oriente, an indestructibly beautiful song, was actually written by Cheo Marquetti, one of the great unrecognized heroes of son. A man who was connected to some of the greatest bands of his age, but kept moving on – who knows why? – and died early in semi-obscurity. There is a beautiful version of Oriente by Conjunto Chappottin with Cheo singing.

Where did that deep sadness come from? Cheo Marquetti wrote other beautiful, classic songs – Sonero, Amor Verdadero, Labrando La Tierra – but none are as yearningly obsessed with death. If I had to select a single song of all the world’s songs to last me to eternity, I would pick this one.

Filed under: Music Tagged: 1990s, beauty, Cheo Marquetti, death, Henry Fiol, London, mortality, Oriente, Orlando Fiol, sadness, son montuno ]]> http://suspiciouspatterns.wordpress.com/2012/01/10/the-saddest-song-in-the-world/feed/ 0 suspiciouspatterns Cheo_Marquetti http://suspiciouspatterns.wordpress.com/2012/01/02/what-makes-a-story/ http://suspiciouspatterns.wordpress.com/2012/01/02/what-makes-a-story/#comments Mon, 02 Jan 2012 18:15:11 +0000 suspiciouspatterns http://suspiciouspatterns.wordpress.com/?p=401 ]]> I am currently working a project on storytelling, examining it from all kinds of angles, from biological to social to past to present to future. One of the questions, naturally, is what kind of impact the current turn towards short-form narrative will have on stories. Can very short stories still be good stories?

I could just leave it with Hemingway (“For sale: baby shoes, never worn”). But there is also Félix Fénéon, whose very brief newspaper stories (1906, Le Matin), published over here as Novels in Three Lines, with an introduction by Luc Sante, prove that just a few words can create small worlds, each with their own miniature dramatic arcs.

Here are a few (my own translations, apologies):

A young man was killed by electric current on the peak of the roof of the Enghien railway station. The sound of his dentures was heard before he fell on a blind.

A young lady of an ambulatory profession hit A. Renaudy with an axe in a restaurant on the Blvd. Rochechouart, then disappeared.

In the bushes by the shore of Saint-Cloud the sword and uniform of the solider Baudet were found; he had disappeared on the 11th. Murder, suicice or bluff?

The Rabies Institute in Lyon was able to heal Mademoiselle Lobrichon. However, because her dog had rabies too, she died anyway.

A 65-year old bookkeeper who had almost stopped eating because he did not have a job died in the quarry of Gauvin of starvation.

Of five mussel-eaters, all of whom were workers in the 2nd artillery regiment (Nizza),  two (Armand and Geais) died, and the others are sick.

Perhaps they are the kinds of stories that would have been rewritten by a content farmer and aggregated by the popular news sites, but one feels that they would probably have been deemed too slight, not sticky enough. These are the small dramas from the back of the paper, extraordinary only to their protagonists and their kin.

Why did I leave high school several years short of finishing? My grades had been very good for the first few years. But further into puberty I had stumbled. I knew no-one who had gone to college. I had no clear idea of what I was good at or what kind of career I wanted to pursue. School felt like one large learning factory that one attended because that’s what everyone else did. I did not understand its purpose. I felt disconnected. My vaguely articulated reason for leaving was that I needed to get back in touch with “real life”, whatever that was.

I am sent back to the soil to seek some obligation, to wrap gnarled reality in my arms.

Being finally no longer financially dependent on my parents felt good. I had never quite understood my benefit to their existence and felt awkward and a little guilty about the costs they had to incur on my behalf.

Real life turned out to be a long journey every day by foot, train and bus to the factory where work started at the crack of dawn, clocking in, sewing piece work, assembly line style, mostly pants, with the odd batch of sweatshirts or jackets thrown in. This was fashion made in West Germany, dowdy imitations of what had walked the runway many moons ago in other places. There were other apprentices but we weren’t really allowed to talk while working. Feeding the voracious industrial sewing machines that drove like race cars required our full focus.

I found the work satisfying. Working along other workers, lifetime factory workers, did not feel strange. The meritocracy of speed and quality ruled. Nobody cared about what you thought or what your background was.

But the very early start and the long journey meant I had to go to bed early. There wasn’t much waking life left, or energy to do other things, not that I had very much going on in my life anyway. This led to the decision to run away to England, detailed elsewhere.

So when I finally read Thomas Bernhard‘s Der Keller I was hit with a blast of recognition.

In Der Keller Bernhard details his seemingly out-of-the-blue decision to quit the Gymnasium (the finest kind of high school), to go to the  job center to apply for an apprenticeship. Bernhard almost wears out the clerk who is in charge of fixing him up with a position. He continues to insist that he wants something that’s in the “entgegengesetzte Richtung” – the opposite direction; the very opposite direction.

He finally finds the place that he had in mind: a basement store in Salzburg’s Scherzhauserfeldsiedlung, owned by a Mr Karl Podlaha, a grocer. This neighborhood was, according to Bernhard, the part of town where the poorest, the most desperate where pushed to live, riven with crime, poverty, addiction and abuse.

In this store he flourishes, he is happy for the first time, in his element. He develops confidence, the ability to deal with people, empathy and business sense. He feels a sense of relief, of rightness – it is naturgemäß that he is here.

It is also the place where he catches tuberculosis, which through incompetence develops into open TB. It’s the beginning of an odyssey that has him in one wretched sanitarium after another. He is left with the dying to almost die himself, and damages his already delicate health further. His beloved grandfather dies, through incompetence, then his mother. It’s a whole other story.

However, Der Keller stands as an account of deciding to take your life into your own hands, and to follow your instincts to try and cure what’s broken about your life.

This tableau was perfectly set up to induce thoughts of futility and disappointment. The strange chemical smell added to it. It did actually smell like what I imagined decomposing human flesh smells like but surely was only extra-strength cleaner of some kind, specially engineered for intensive care units.

My mother, an intrepid walker just like myself, had set out one sunny morning for the vineyards, ignoring warnings of ice. She slipped, fell backward, resulting in unconsciousness and traumatic brain injury. Other walkers found her, nobody knows how long she’d been lying there. We were told she was in critical condition and might well not make it.

Driven by the thought, more than any other, that nobody should die alone, I got myself onto a plane, and began a lonely vigil.

A decision had been made to keep my mother in a coma, to prevent further pressure and irreversible damage. Hence, the coma ward. It held ten patients but was probably the quietest ward in the hospital. Apart from hushed conversations between nurses the main sounds were those of beeping indicators, feeding tubes into necks, waste products back out, with the occasional alarm signal when vital measurements went out of range. Occasionally, a family would put on some music for a patient, hoping that a familiar song would get even just a little response. Never has chirpy German Schlager music sounded so mordant.

After a few days this becomes your new normal. You begin to recognize familiar faces among the visitors. You notice which patients will occasionally twitch or even grunt, with some envy. Your mother is still. A machine is breathing for her. A drug drip keeps her far under – no detectable brain activity. You wonder what it feels like to be so far removed from the world. At first you’re shocked to see her like this, but then you get used to her condition. You begin to talk to her under your breath. You never really got on all that well. But you don’t want her to die either. So you lay out how you feel, holding her hand all the while to let her know that someone’s there, no matter which path she chooses to take.

Hours go by. Nobody talks to you. You get to see the doctors once in a while. They are young and full of fear. They do not like being the bringers of bad news. There is really only question you want to know – “what’s her Glasgow Coma Score?” – but you dread the answer, so you don’t ask. You suspect it’s a 3, the lowest. Just a bit more alive than dead.

At night, with nothing to do, unable to sleep, and no-one around, you try hard not to Google “GCS 3, prognosis“, but you do. The words “dismal” jump out at you. Only a few percent who make it through in a non-vegetative state. You can’t sleep. You think the phone will ring any minute. You are tired, pale, a spectre. The hospital sent back the clothes they cut off her. Destroyed they lie there like the person they belong to. The shoes that let her down lie there innocently. Killer shoes.

You begin to crave the calm sanctuary of the coma ward. It’s the only safe place. The only place where you know right at that moment that everything is still OK, everything still in balance, the cards not upturned yet. Order, not chaos.

After ten days, one of your sisters comes to take over the grim vigil. You go to the movies and drink a glass of cheap supermarket wine. So strange – there is a life outside this self-contained little universe?

Anyway, my mother woke up from her coma (slowly and un-soap-opera-like) and has gradually recovered most of her faculties. She can’t walk well and still needs constant care, but she’s mostly herself and pretty chipper. She credits me for getting her through that narrow passage, but she’s wrong.

Finally, thanks to the folks at Klassic Haus, this recording is once again available.

Of Grandi’s origins little is known – no records survive of his birth and upbringing. He worked his way up to Monteverdi’s assistant, was an innovator in the motet and madrigal forms and was one of the first composers to work in the cantata form. He became widely admired for his compositions in Italy and beyond. The appointment to be the maestro de capella at the wonderful basilica of Santa Maria Maggiore in Bergamo at 41 was his crowning achievement. Three years later Grandi and his family were dead, among the 280,000 victims of the Great Plague of Milan.

The reissue sadly does not contain the liner notes from the original recording, which comprised a detailed   biography, as well as an analysis of the compositions by Denis Stevens. “The total effect is one of firm structure, luminous declamation and unforgettable music of an entirely new kind”, “an air of sadness and suffering”, “the melodic line is innocent and sensuous in turns”, “the languishing of love predominates”. A couple of the motets are settings of the Song of Songs, and their elegiac sensuality defies their religious context.

Who knows what other beauty Grandi would have produced, had he not died so young? His loss is still keenly felt.

The next time I saw faces like this was in my many visits to Brighton Beach, New York City’s Russian enclave. Emphatic, overdrawn faces that seemed to want to portray indifference but were expressive all the same. It looked like long, difficult fates were inscribed in them, and no doubt they were. Many were Jewish and had been able to emigrate in the 1970s and 80s. Before that, what repression, what shattered hopes, how much putting on a proud face on a hard life, biting your tongue for decades on end, keeping two separate ledgers, censoring what you think.

Orlando Figes, in his wonderful ‘The Whisperers‘ brings to life the repressive atmosphere of the post-war years in Russia, especially for the persecuted and their families, and anyone else with a “spoilt biography”, like many members of the Jewish community.

As someone who is interested in images and their uses, I am fascinated by the new laser technologies that are revolutionizing gravestone design. Here are a few of the faces in Brooklyn’s Washington Cemetery, all members of the Russian Jewish community. Such evocative faces. What are their stories?

I never say “I am a photographer”. Photography is a set of tools and techniques that are used by many different people for many different reasons – sell a sweater on Ebay, document their kids’ activities, play dress-up, or whatever else. This is an activity that wants to be a verb, not a noun, nor a descriptor for a person.

I’ve also found the description ‘artist’ fairly useless if self-assigned. Almost a million people claim the profession ‘artist’ on their tax return. Like comedy, art is in the eye of the beholder.

Then, what exactly is it that I do?

I don’t take pictures with a camera to say “I was here” or “this happened” or “I saw this” or “look at me” or “buy this”.

I only take pictures of people, mostly strangers. Strangers who need pictures of themselves, for one reason or another. Like, they want to find someone who will find them attractive, desirable and lovable. And as a photographer, my look will be the proxy for that someone’s eye. I will take pictures that exude attraction, desire and love.

Why do I takes these pictures?

Because I think that photography is built on an illusion, a sleigh of hand, and I want to show it. If I look at a person in a picture, three people are really involved: the person in the picture, the photographer and the viewer. A “professional”, “successful” picture creates the illusion that there is no photographer, that somehow you are looking into a person’s soul  - or some other communion.

What a picture really is, is a document of a very different kind of relationship. The act of portrait photography is fundamentally just this awkward, muddled interaction – two insecure human beings looking at each other. Photographers across the ages have done a great job covering up this strange truth, with ever more elaborate props, poses and staging. I am really interested in stripping all that away, and letting some of that discomfort and vulnerability show through again. To see what happens when people let down their guard and just look at each other.

Barbara Kruger taunted in her famous 1981 collage of jostling men in business suits: ‘You construct intricate rituals which allow you to touch the skin of other men.’ Photography is just an intricate ritual that allows me to look at someone and for someone to look at me.

Parenting was not taken very seriously. School finished at noon and after a quick lunch kids would roam the streets, building sites, local pool and fields for the rest of the day until called home for dinner six hours later.

It seemed like a place far removed from the anxious Germany of the 1970s with the lingering effects of the 1968 ‘events’. Wanted posters for the Baader-Meinhof gang were ubiquitous however. Some of the terrorists were quasi locals, a getaway vehicle had been found in our town, and a pair of minor members had a fatal accident just a couple of miles away. I visited the spot with my bike, and found their blood dried on the asphalt of our country road. Moreover, the place where Ulrike Meinhof, Andreas Baader, Gudrun Ensslin und Jan-Carl Raspe killed themselves was only a few towns away.

We also happened to have an American Nike missile base, decorating the town’s perimeter with a strange Bucky Fuller dome and a barracks encampment. We’d see Americans in trains and around local bars, chewing gum and talking loudly. Occasionally a local girl would follow one of these Americans to some place in Ohio or Indiana, returning only rarely and with a heavy American accent.

I learned very early not to trust the idyll that my town was eager to project.

And yet, there was more.

Behind the village, a couple of kilometers away, between fields and a small forest was a small cemetery called the “Russian Cemetery”. It wasn’t a place ever mentioned or visited. It was assumed that it had something to do with the war.

It consisted chiefly of numbered stones that looked like this:

It turns out that before the Americans built their base, there had been another kind of camp on the outskirts of town, created during the Third Reich. Billed as a camp for sick it was in fact a camp for the dying. Prisoners from other camps – many Russian forced laborers, male, female and children – were brought here when they could no longer work, tuberculosis and typhoid ran rampant, no doctors (but two informally operating internees) were there. It was a horrible place to die, surrounded by glorious rolling hills and vineyards. There are particularly wrenching details to this camp that I cannot get myself to write. Many were killed during an attack on the small airport that was right next to the camp. There was nowhere for them to take shelter.

When I was born – in the late 1960s – the dead had not been dead very long. The Third Reich might seem very far away for many, an era that has already slipped into history, a place reassuringly far away. It isn’t for me. I can’t help visiting this little cemetery, I can’t help looking for the foundations of those buildings. I try and imagine names and faces behind the numbers. It still seems very, very close and real to me.

For more information there is an extraordinary book, privately published and hard to find. It is filled with rage, an obsessively detailed accounting of what happened in that region, who was responsible, who turned a blind eye, who benefited, and who lied. The local library had one copy, with no signs of reading or borrowing.

Another picnic consisted of this: “I have been eating my lunch in the fields nearby (Ryvita, cheese, apricot jam, chocolate, bar of squashed dried fruits, coffee), sitting on my coral air-cushion, given me by May, reading for the fourth or fifth time an outline of the Brontë sisters’ lives.”

I adore the frugality and simplicity of these picnics. Admittedly, many took place during the war (Welch was too sick to serve), where even a fresh egg was already a small luxury.

Perhaps because I am a Puritan at heart I’m irked how food is being fetishized. It seems like it has taken its place at the table of culture, equal to literature, dance, art. It’s culture we can all participate in and become experts in. Great wits used to discuss poetry, politics and novels. They now can talk molecular gastronomy without seeming like oafs. Moreover, it is now not uncommon to eat a feast – to eat like nobles – several times a week, and think nothing of it.

I wish for a time when feasts were rare, eagerly anticipated and savored in retrospect many months later. I wish for a time when food was humble; a small treat. When you ate a hard-boiled egg and a slice of Ryvita, and enjoyed every crumb, without the constant search for novelty, the blogging, the picture taking, the discussions, the ceaseless parade of new food trends.

When food is not culture, not a secular religion, not entertainment. Just food.

“With the most profound joy we would like to announce the birth of our daughter Brünnhilde. May she give birth to many courageous warriors. Munich, The Brown House.”

The announcement had a thick black edge, and was set in fat Gothic type.

A few details beg to be annotated. My mother gave birth to four girls, none of which turned out to be warriors, an irony never lost on my mother. “The Brown House” was in fact the NSDAP (Nazi) party headquarters Munich, in which my grandfather had been employed until the end of 1942, reporting up to Martin Bormann, Hitler’s much-despised second-in-command. His fiefdom was however more mundane than the address or his direct report suggested. He was in charge of village culture, with a particular focus on decreasing participation in church choirs to the benefit of patriotic singing circles. It took me several years to weasel out this fact; a fact that gave me some relief, since this time had been unaccounted for, and 1942 being a particularly dark year among dark years.

What had always irked my mother about her birth announcement, beyond the fake-Teutonic spelling of Brunhilde, was that the language and presentation was that of a funeral announcement. Let’s turn to Klemperer.

I have already mentioned the persecution and suffering of the Klemperers. But what I love about Victor Klemperer is that he did not stop working, even though there was no outlet for his writing. As a philologist he turned to analyze the language all around him, the language of the Third Reich, resulting in the masterpiece LTI (Lingua Tertii Imperii). LTI is a cold-blooded analysis of the ‘new speak’ of the Nazi propagandists, a heavily clichéd language that infected not only speeches and announcements but newspaper reporting and everyday speech. It allowed Klemperer to keep a perspective beyond victimhood,  as outside observer of the lunacy and self-delusions of the era.

In the chapter “Familiananzeigen als kleines Repetitorium der LTI” (family announcements as small instances of repetition of the LTI) Klemperer proves through examples that birth announcements unthinkingly began to mirror the language and appearance of death announcements. This as a results of the pages and pages of death announcements in the papers, in which any kind of good news must have seemed almost sacrilegious, and requiring tempering.

LTI is an extraordinary book. Seething, sarcastic yet disciplined and thorough, it is an amazing product of scholarship under adverse circumstances. It is a fascinating read.

Klemperer was a university professor (Philology) and writer, and Jewish, and therefore subject to the cascading laws, prohibitions and bullying that made life miserable and ultimately unbearable for anyone Jewish living in Germany. The only reason he escaped the camps was his marriage to the long-suffering, faithful Eva, and a daring escape during the bombing of Dresden.

From 1935 Klemperer was stripped of his academic title, job, citizenship and freedom and eventually forced to work in a factory and as a day laborer, bagging herbs and shoveling snow. In 1940 Eva and him had to leave their beloved house in Dölzschen and were rehoused under miserable conditions in a Judenhaus, where they were routinely questioned, mistreated and humiliated by the Gestapo. They are not allowed to keep their beloved cat Muschel so they get a friendly vet to put him to sleep. Food allocations go from bad to worse to nothing; at some point they are living off rotting potatoes. Jewish friends and acquaintances one by one disappear. Their health deteriorates. They live in abject terror and in constant fear of their lives.

During the terrifying bombing of Dresden towards the end of the war they leave the city, Victor sheds his identity, and they end up in Bavaria. After the war is finally over they mostly walk back to Dölzschen, through an often apocalyptic Germany, with their few belongings, dressed almost in rags, pretty much begging for food, and relying on the (enforced) kindness of strangers.

And then, all clouds lift. Their house is theirs again. The end of terror and fear, of homelessness and hunger.

“… by the second night we were already in our house, a still indescribable feeling, still like a waking dream, since then we’ve been living in a fairy-tale world, a comical, imaginary and yet very real but somewhat uncertain world …”

Klemperer’s life takes an almost comical turn for the better from this moment on. He is offered a professorship, he is treated like a returning hero, people simper and bow before him, he gets restitution, a driver, political office. Eva dies, but a smart and beautiful 26 year old student of his falls in love with the 71 year old Klemperer and they marry. Even though they live in East Germany they get to travel abroad. He gets awarded prizes and honors. He’s an influential teacher, and his students adore him. Despite his lifelong fears about his health he lives to a ripe 79 years.

You’d think he’d be the happiest man in the world.

Not only did he survive, but fortune favored him more than he ever imagined.

And yet, almost ever page of the 600+ pages of the 1945 – 1959 Diaries are filled with complaints, fears, self-recriminations, worries, paranoia. His happiness decreased proportionally to all the good things that happened in his life.

Perversely, some of the happier times in the Diaries occur in the 1930s where he manages to extract happiness from life on the knife’s edge, full of uncertainty.

The stoics maintain that happiness can only exist in the contemplation of loss, that in order to feel happy we need to meditate on a time when we will no longer have that which makes us happy.

Which is kind of what I was trying to do, on the Q train in the winter of 2008.