A Midsummer's Sunday Afternoon

I realized only yesterday that today would be the longest day of the year. I should be aware of things like "solstice" in advance, but somehow, I ain't.

It's a strange notion to know that days will start to shorten, incrementally, as the planet continues turning and the part you inhabit is beginning to angle away from the sun. Since I live in San Francisco and our best weather is still a couple months out, it's not really an issue, but for folks like my friend Charles and his clan who make their home in Minneapolis, he can't help himself from becoming aware that he just passed a sign that says, WINTER: ONLY TEN WEEKS AWAY!!

It just ain't right to sequence thoughts that way, when Wimbledon is just beginning, but there you have it.

Headed to MOMA Sunday afternoon for the Robert Frank exhibit of photos. Mid century American misery and joy, a time when folks lived without air conditioning, traveled by Greyhound and gazed hard-eyed at the world around them as well as at a future that was very far off indeed.

These photos feel more real to me in a way than the world around me now does. I think it must have something to do with how you take in images into your brain when you're growing up; the mechanism in those first years is so profound and powerful that they will never leave and are embedded forever. Which is kinda reassuring actually.

Yet I also had the sense that we're only here for less than a second it seems like; time has a way of collapsing into itself - totally a Joseph Torchia/Kryptonite Kid moment: "Good mourning, Superman."

Before leaving I went to the cafe for something to eat. Earlier in the day in some weird, random interaction a dude I met online (allegedly 27) offered to buy me ice cream if I would let him have his way with me me for 30-45 minutes non-stop. Ha, like my ass could be bought by a frozen dairy dessert. I informed him as a general rule, I don't eat ice cream. "You can have any kind you want!" was his response. Anyhow, in the cafe there was a piece of carrot cake under the glass that said, "eat me." So I did.

And found myself riveted by the woman sitting a few tables away, so i snapped some pix as subtly as possible. And while they don't do justice to her palpable inner tenacity nor how really red her lipstick was, you can see that she knows how to wear a hat. Click to make larger






That said, it wasn't until looking at the photos that I saw the almost epic facial expressions on the Asian woman sitting one table over.

From Russia With Love

Well, maybe love is too strong a word ...

The Flounced Sleeve

She wasn't only a great, great singer. But man, she could really work the flounced sleeve. (Click on the pic to watch the performance)

Je ne suis pas ici de participer, je suis ici de juger

Turns out blogging takes work. 

What was easy on vacation, taking a few hours every other day to assemble a piece + some pics, seems out of reach when back in the terrarium one's real world. 

Of course it isn't, but the natural enthusiasm one has when wandering around Berlin or Paris gets tamped down somewhat on coming home, getting back to work, and dealing with inevitable minor romantic disappointments, which happened when a certain mister X cancelled out hours prior to dinner, with what appears to have been a read-between-the-lines narrative that said either I'm involved or not interested.

While I was in Paris, a comment was left on a post that basically accused me of being a flaneur. I say accused, because that's what it felt like, as in my head I'd mixed the term up with manqué, which basically means a failure at one's given profession.

Great, I was a failed blogger. And not only that, but i was a failed blogger in Paris. And the French had just the mot juste for it. 

But then she sent me the correct definition: "a disengaged and cynical voyeur on the one hand, and man of the people who enters into the life of his subjects with passion on the other."

Now we were getting somewhere. 

And further -  "a flâneur's active participation in and fascination with street life while displaying a critical attitude towards the uniformity, speed, and anonymity of modern life in the city."

Bingo.

As a guy who feels his Irish DNA coursing through him every day, there is probably a "Flaneur O'Connor" joke in all this that i can't quite locate, but it definitely feeds into the personal tag line I've been pushing these past couple years - I'm not here to participate, I'm here to judge.

Je ne suis pas ici de participer, je suis ici de juger

The Gum Line Chronicles

I love getting my teeth cleaned. But, you have to wonder what kind of personality decides to go to school with the idea of becoming an expert at getting into someone's mouth and then scraping teeth both above and below the gum line.

My dentist is one half of a handsome Iranian brother duo schooled in London who bring a great deal of gravitas to the dental experience. Suave, I guess you could say. The hygienists on the other hand are more of a mixed lot. My former hygienist at the office--a large shouldered, dour woman who looked as if she might've been Martha Stewart's less attractive twin given up for adoption--invested in New Orleans real estate prior to Katrina, lectured me on the dangers of pasta and basked in the brutality of process. She used a scalpel as if it were a push mower and she was looking at an unruly yard. 

Her replacement was always so pleasant and sort of winsome, always burbling about her son's high school achievements and friends. She handled the tools of her trade as if she were Blossom Dearie ... all detail and subtle movement. But something has happened. Yesterday I hardly recognized the woman shuffling slowly by me with her head bent, a good twenty pounds heavier. 

I sat with a New Yorker on my lap as she set up around me. She looked at the cover depicting a graduating college class of five and sighed. "I don't get their covers. I enjoy them, but someone always needs to tell me the message."

"Yep," I replied. "They can be evasive. Sideways. That's their appeal, I think." 

"This one's easy," she went on. "They're graduating!!"

"Yup," I said, "but notice, only one of the five has a future so bright he needs to wear shades."

She looked at the illustration again, peering at the line of smiling graduates requiring no protective eye wear to deal with the ultra violet promise of their futures. "Oh," she sighed as she gave the magazine a lingering second look before placing it on the shelf and adjusting her goggles. "OK, open wide. Any sensitivities I should know about?"

I shook my head.

Figure Eights and Destinations Unkown

travel really makes you see how well worn and proscribed your footsteps become in your everyday life.

i think that's part of the difficulty in heading home, because inevitably you know you're going to gradually fall back into the figure eights that somehow define the life you live there. what travel holds is promise. what home holds is routine.

allegedly anyway. 

what i'd like to take away from the trip is try looking at SF and the Bay Area as a place i not only live, but also visit. which means making it a point to explore it more.

but that's going to have to wait until after the jet lag expires. bleary-eyed after being out to a dinner part til 1am and then having to pack in order to get out of Koburger Strasse by 5 am, followed by 15 total hours of travel time, i knew i had to stay awake. this was only possible by unpacking, doing laundry and getting the place back in living order. 

oh, and a burrito. Berlin has many, many charms, but if you've ever experienced Mexican food there, you know that isn't one of them.

tortilla. beans. arroz. pollo. salsa picante. 

but instead of the fall back position of a Sierra Nevada or Anchor Steam, i chose a Trumer Pils  ... which is in the same dense-and-small-almost-champagne-type-bubble style as the Radeburger on hand at Chez Wrench & Franks, my cousin's place.

not the most dramatic beginning to a re-shaped figure eight, but a fella has to begin somewhere. especially when all he really wants to do is dive into the mcrosky airflex and dream of destinations unknown ...

In Dem Wasser Zu Schwimmen

we figured Saturday morning might be the perfect time to get out of dodge and spend some time in a forest. this is Germany, after all.

this after spending a Friday evening at a cabaret featuring a woman named Meow Meow, who is known for her Kamikaze Kabaret, among other things. funnily enough she recently appeared in SF as part of the Weimar New York evening at SF MOMA, which i'd been kicking myself for having missed.

the first half started off a little too broad, comic and forced for my tastes. but the second half was something else altogether; she very cleverly took the audience credits she'd accrued during the first half and then spent them by performing more esoteric fare without sacrificing the comic and ironic undertow you need if you're going to pull an audience with you and leave them stranded and wanting more.

she ended with a hypnotic reading of a Laurie Anderson song called "The Dream Before."

laurie's been off my radar until recently. the performance reminded me of her genius.

Hansel and Gretel are alive and well
And they're living in Berlin
She is a cocktail waitress
He had a part in a Fassbinder film
And they sit around at night now drinking schnapps and gin
And she says: Hansel, you're really bringing me down
And he says: Gretel, you can really be a bitch
He says: I've wasted my life on our stupid legend When my one and only love was the wicked witch. She said: What is history?
And he said: History is an angel being blown backwards into the future
He said: History is a pile of debris
And the angel wants to go back and fix things
To repair the things that have been broken
But there is a storm blowing from Paradise
And the storm keeps blowing the angel backwards into the future
And this storm, this storm is called Progress

not too bright and not too early the next morning we made our way to a brand spanking new steel and glass train station, and bought ridiculously cheap tickets for both ourselves and our bikes and rode about an hour out of the city, deep into the countryside of the former DDR, about halfway to the Baltic Sea. later on when we returned, we pulled in just as a sleeper car to Moscow was pulling out. suddenly i was seized by a pang of remorse. remorse that i might never take a sleeping train that would take me via Warsaw to the soviet capital, or perhaps even better, maybe up to Sweden and into hallowed Bergman Smiles of a Summer Night territory.

after a ten mile bike ride from the station, we set up on the shores of the Stechlinsee, which is apparently a favorite of the so-call "body culture" or nudist movement that was and is still popular in the East (more than the west, i think).

of course i kept my clothes on, since as we know, i'm not here to participate, i'm here to judge!



later, the woman next door pulled out of a nap and was soon hard at work on her crossword (or suduko).



we lazed around the shore until Klaus, our special host and guide for the day convinced us all to go in. the water was a c.h.i.l.l.y 60 degrees or so.



i took the plunge and swam across to the other side and back. like swimming in Lake Tahoe, you run into some very icy currents along the way. and then once back, took a blissful nap with nothing but the sound of birds and the occasional sounds of nudist lesbians frolicking and laughing in the water nearby.



at around 6pm, we saddled up the bikes and road around the lake to a small restaurant that specializes in smoked fish. in this case, some kind of German mackeral or sardine that was served whole--heads and all-- with potato salad and some lettuce and cucumbers. and of course, the requisite beer with light traveling through it at 186,000 miles per second ...







we then circled back around the lake and made it to the train with only five minutes to spare. it struck me once again that exertion does a body good. especially when accompanied by sun, swimming, good company, and of course a book, napping opportunities + fresh fish and beer.

just sign me,
Guantanamera