Wednesday, July 22, 2009

Life Is But A Dream

Row row row your boat
Gently down the stream
Merrily merrily merrily merrily
Life is but a dream

(Nursery Rhyme, origin unknown)

Camp: Bad Fallingbostel; Children: 28; Theme: Canoeing

Can you imagine that I am typing next to a lady bug crawling on a blade of grass? Butter flies of unamable colours amongst bumble bees hurrying from flower to flower? A dainty little stream drifting across in front of me, a meadow at the other side of the bank, sitting on a jetty just like the one we have at home? Little flowers poking out of strands long flowing weed, like adornments on the hair of a bathing maiden...?

(TO BE CONTINUED...)

Tuesday, July 21, 2009

The Melting

This is a little sculpture that I made when I took the kids for a clay modelling workshop, for now its called 'The Melting'.

Thursday, July 16, 2009

All Ears for Erbach


School’s out, camps’ back in! And here I am again, the governess of 42 children at English Camp – themed Dance and Music.

Bit of a difference to Football Camp I went to in April – the atmosphere has hit oestrogen overdrive, and there is a lot of bitchy cat fighting going on, a lot of over-inflated self-confidence about one’s own dancing and singing ability, a lot of toe-nail painting, eye-lash curling, a lot of push-up bras, a lot of calling mummy at 11pm and crying themselves to sleep, a lot of boy-friend swapping, and a lot more tears when it comes to time to go home.
……………..
Unfortunately the last few months amongst the Huns in Berlin saw my English deteriorate faster than my German improved. When I speak to the kids I now sport a really crazy mongrel schpeel:
‘Make we a photo, oder?’
‘Shut-up! I’m denking!!’
‘I don’t care if you’ve duched zwei-mal this week, you should be duching today and jendenday! You simply pong like a fledermaus.’

……………….

The sterile Youth Hostel we are stationed in is at the edge of a small town called Erbach, 50 kms away from Heidelberg and another 80kms from Frankfurt, just around the corner from Bravaria. Its tiny, quaint and seemed slightly unworldly – for the first time in Germany, I have walked around the streets where I made people turn heads because I am of a different race. The village has a medieval old town of little craggy houses and beautiful ancient stone paved lanes, towered over by the Glockenspiel of the monumental Erbach Castle, and a pretty little canal cuts through it, water mills, quaint little bridges and wild flowers lined along it.

On an afternoon break I went and checked out the Erbach Castle, and the famous ‘Count Franz I's Collection’ inside. (see also http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Erbach_im_Odenwald) The guide claimed that it is the largest collection of deer antlers in Europe, and I won’t try and dispute it. And its probably the weirdest too. The Count specialises on collecting deformed deer antlers, ie. antlers that grow in all sorts of shapes, sizes and forms due to disease or injury to the animal. For example, there were antlers belonging to poor deer that had a testicular disease, which caused furry velvets to grow at the bottom of their horns which eventually made them blind. The museum claimed that it was due to the Count’s interest in natural history rather than obsession with hunting that inspired his tireless gatherings of random and weird antlers. Other rooms included a collection of armoury around the world and through out the ages (including Japanese Samurai and Middle-Eastern Armoury), a room full of shot guns including a duck hunting gun with a 2 meter barrel (which could never actually be taken out for a hunt because it was impractically heavy), a few themed rooms with a whole bunch of furniture, paintings, and Roman antiquities which apparently were discovered around this part of Germany, for this is how far north the Romans came to govern at the height of their prowess.

This strange and curatorially disjoint collection reminded me a lot of the Wagner Museum in Northland, New Zealand, where my father dragged us along to one Easter holiday many years ago, started by a German man who immigrated to NZ in the 1830s and just started collecting random shit, but particularly native animals and stuffing them. The obsession with collecting, cataloguing, and displaying, I have been told by our Team Director, is an example of the German character - of prioritising the execution of order, attention to fine details, expressing their inquisitive relationship with nature, and the need to be formally, concretely and publically admired by showing what they have – particularly stuff that no one else in the world could possibly get their hands on
. ………………………..

So apart from teaching English for 3 hours in the mornings, the multi talented team is also expected to entertain the children with workshops in the afternoons, particularly in the theme of the camp – ie. music and dance, and some ‘fun and action’ and ‘sports’ for those less inclined. The team consists of me and 4 Americans. A mousy rosy cheeked DJ who has a cougar twice his age – specialising on ethnic percussions, with his other duty being to give each child the most insulting nick names; an ayruvedic medicine practicing vegan guitarist with a beard long and thick enough to nest birds – specialising on string instruments and tie-dying; a nymphomaniac professional volley ball player – specialising on all forms of dancing from Meringue, Capriara to Hip Hop (he was called in last minute because the original team member who was a professional jazz ballet dancer specially here to teach dancing had to return home due to the death of her mother, and had to give himself a crash course on dancing by watching videos on Youtube); our Team Director, a hellishly neurotic, condescending German-American (think worst of both worlds and then multiply cringe-factor by 25) Business Coach (what-ever-that-is) with zero personality and going through a mid-life crisis – specialising on singing cheesy pop ballads with a soprano voice (she actually, to our horror, literally taught the kids ‘My Heart Will Go On’ by Celine Dion and ‘We Are The World’ by the supposedly recently deceased Michael Jackson in her workshops); and me, the dubious Tiwi freelance social scientist – specialising in everything else they haven’t covered such as whistling little classical favourites (‘Eine Kleiner Nacht’s Musik’ by Mozart and ‘Dance of the Little Swans’ by Tchaikovsky), mask painting, rainbow making, non-alcoholic cocktail mixing, and gutter-ball, a tennis ball and makeshift wooden board game that once swept across all the corridors of New Zealand Primary Schools circa 1990. The dynamic is dynamitic. …………….

It’s the same story with any musician – great or not so great: it is not until you die that anyone bothers to celebrate your ‘talent’ properly, and forget all about those horrible things they used to say about you. Michael Jackson’s popularity amongst contemporary teenagers has certainly surged by about 500% since his death a few weeks ago. Ask any kid what their favourite music is right now – it would be Michael Jackson. Ask any kid to sing an English song back to front – it would be a Michael Jackson. Ask any kid what music the DJ should put on for disco night – Michael Jackson. Ask any kid to do a dance – they would do the moon walk. If these are the same answers in a month’s time, I will take my hat off to him.

……………. …












and consider my well practiced monologue:

Where’s the Southern Hemisphere then?
Ahh yes this bit, this side of the equator.

What happens to the seasons in the Southern Hemisphere?

Ah yes they are opposite to those in the Northern Hemisphere.

So what’s the temperature like in New Zealand right now then?

Ah yes that’s right, its very very cold.

So what season is it in New Zealand when Germany has winter?

Ah yes it’s the summer!

So what’s it like in New Zealand on Christmas Day?

Ah yes its really really hot!
In fact, it is so hot in New Zealand in December that my family celebrates Christmas on the beach.


Yes, the beach!

It’s too hot to sit inside and make a fire on Christmas Day! We have a picnic for lunch on the sand, and we open our presents outside under the sun, and we wear shorts, T-shirts, and jandals, and after lunch we go for a swim or play cricket…yes we do…


And so does Santa Clause – he does not arrive on a sleigh with reindeers like he does in Germany, of course not, he arrives in his little red speedos, on a surfboard, in a pair of sunglasses, his big belly covered in sunscreen… yes he does…crazy, I know…

Sunday, July 12, 2009

The Story of Berlin - Part IV

To Part I & II
To Part III
To An(other) Epilogue

..................................
You already know how the story ends. I went and saw him play for the last time. A packed out smoky room full of the usual, urber urban crowd that no one ever has a proper definition for. He still sang too fast and I still didn’t undertand a word he said, but I understood that he dedicated their last song to me, and I blushed as the audience turned around to look at me. After the show we sat at the corner table, and kissed over a glass of red wine, his prickly stubble scratching my face ever so gently. But its beginning to really hurt now.
................................................

In my last few days here, I did all my favourite things with my favourite people. I shopped at the Turkish markets for all the ingredients for the Oasis Saland, and made it in our dainty retro and colourful kitchen and devoured it along with some devine sect with Suszanne; walked along the cafes and curiosity shops along Burgmannstr and went to the bookshop for dinner on Friday night with Wei; had a sunset picnic by the river with Franci entertained by spontaneous guitarists and fire jugglers; cooked Voku with Emma using gleaned ingredients and smoked rollies outside the Tea House; drank coffee with Amy on those long benches outside the local bakarei run by the Polish family; sat in the audience in Club der Polnischen Versager and saw Teresa pull off her finest performance as the feature act; a leisurely run by the river; tea at Ringo’s; ice cream at Isobel’s; doing homework in front of my open window looking into the neighbour’s windows – still trying to figure out whether there is a hidden rooftop library behind those green vines and purple flowers. Everything I’ve loved about Berlin, the people, the style, the flair, just like how I would have liked to live those every other day, not because these are my last.
................................................

What is it like to make love to someone for the last time?

What is going on in your mind? Recreating something it treasured before so you can take it with you always? Consoling itself by savouring what little it has left now? Rewarding itself because it had made a wise decision? Punished by the aching body that disagrees?


What is going on in your body? In pain because it is about to lose something? In pleasure because the pain is so severe that it is so numbingly and intensely exhilarating? Fighting back the mind a little, giving into it a little?


There’s a battle inside you, the battle we have inside all of us. Love, hate, longing, resentment, passion, dread. Every emotion imaginable culminating inside you and you feel like you’re about to explode, the earth beneath shaking so hard that it splits open. And when you come, you come so hard because you are just so fucking angry. Angry at yourself, angry at him, angry at your over-competent mind and your incontrollable body.


No one ever walks away unscathed.

................................................
My backpack is 11 years old now, and it has been to 39 countries with me. We are about to go onto our 40th. It has a favourite place to be: next to any front door, filled, clipped up, weighed and ready to be hurled upon my back.

Travel is an addiction, but the wanderer has to learn to live with the compromises. Every time I pack up an empty room there are mixed feelings. Exhilarated about the next destination, of the new colours and sounds and smells, and making most of the human experience; Lamented about leaving the place I’ve just become used to, of friends I can call now call family/ people that know me and understand me from just a few seconds of conversation, of leaving a place I’ve just managed to call home; Longing for the homes I’ll always have but I seem to never be ready to go back to, the birthdays and laughter I’ve missed, each petal that flowered and each whisker that shed that I never got to witness.

But I know these are my choices, because any of them are my opportunities, and that I have the knowledge that I have them, and the freedom to go down any of those paths according to the judgement that I am assured that I have. These are the things that my grandmothers or even my mother did not have, and to honour this, I will keep choosing for their sake and my sake, and keep going forth.
................................................

I left Berlin on a Saturday. The train took me on a rickety line out of his graffitied suburbs, through broken depot yards and lines of abandoned carriages, out into the open green, until he simply turned into a little dot on the map.

Wednesday, July 01, 2009

The Story of Berlin: Part III

(<-- to Part I & II)

PART III

Memory is a curse. Berlin’s schizophrenia exists in the sense of
having too many memories.
Like the rest of us, his past is erased physically each day by a new present, as he changes, shaves, eats, breathes. His body replaces those old cells with new ones, as each day fades into dusk, and disappears into the nigh. But memory stores them all, so well and so cunningly. All those fragments collected inside the unlimited abyss in our heads, and on a bad day, they haunt us and chase us, and on a good day, they pride us and reassures us. But unlike the rest of us, Berlin remembers beyond his present life. He remembers every soul that he had ever been before. He’s a 1000 year old stuck in a 23 year old’s body. His past lives come back to haunt him as sights, sounds, smells, touch, and tastes that triggered pain, sufferings, by-gone glories and battles lost.

800 hundred years ago he was a boatsman, running ships for Hansa merchants that traded bundles of fur, grain and logs of timber through the Spree, to the Baltic, to the North Sea, to far off places and to people that spoke different tongues and had a different shade of skin. On land, he lived with his wife and their 8 children, and his four brothers and their family in the market village next to Lange Brucke. They rose with the sun and worshipped the moon, and drank beer as if it was water, until a fire set by his debtors wiped out his entire clan. Four hundred years ago Berlin was a Jewish refugee expelled from Vienna that was invited into settle in Berlin by Kaiser Fredrik Wilhelm, who’s religious tolerance allowed immigrants of all trades and creeds to settle in Berlin to help him build a
more sophisticated city of diverse, well skilled and resourceful population. Despite her family providing an essential lending and financial backbone to Berlin’s growing business life, when she died, at child birth aged 21, they still insisted that her family bury her outside of the city, nine or ten miles away from her home. Her family found her a fortification where she could rest in peace without her grave being desecrated. A hundred years ago Berlin was a man working in a sooty munitions factory for hours on end, but nevertheless made time to play football on Sundays after Church. He joined the Communist Party rallies, went on strikes, and handed out leaflets of propaganda. But despite all this, he still died a few years later, poisoned by British phosgene in a cold, muddy, rat infested trench in Belgium. Sixty-four years ago he was a women who tirelessly survived the bomb raids during the war, only to be raped by Russian soldiers as they took over the city in April 1945, spat on and kicked at as they left her sobbing in pain and in shame behind an alleyway. But she held her head up high as she joined the other women in cleaning away rubbles, planting vegetables in plots of shrapnel littered land, and brought up her children on rations, as the Russians, Americans, French, and British cut her city up in pieces again.

Nineteen years ago, his mother took him across the boarder to the West for the first time, to look for his father, who had fled across the Wall a few years back, and they had not heard from him since. Later he met his father’s new family, the spoilt brats called Amsterdam and Copenhagen, and the bitch of a stepmother called Paris. But he still smiles politely at their dinner table and drank their wine. He figured that he never remembered anything happy from those memories from his cursed past lives, and that in this life now, he should be creating something good, something worth remembering and worth living for. Something his future lives won’t have to shudder at the thought of.

And he can.


Because now he can do what ever he likes. He dresses in second hand clothes – a slouchy zip jacket with white stripes, multi coloured sneakers, fitted jeans, big rimmed glasses,
panama hat adorned in a red pheasant feather, and sports a 3-day stubble. He can spray paint his poems on the side walk, smoke a spliff by the canal, he can even snog another man in the park without being arrested, jump a fence without being shot at, and put on a play about the Prime Minister without his books being burnt. He doesn’t care if no one else likes him, as long as he likes himself. And that I like him. Like how all the ladies like him.
......................................

Much of old Berlin was erased during World War II, and with the East-West division soon after it, Berlin never had the chance to rebuild itself into its old pre-war form like Munich or Dresden. There were 3.7 million people living in Berlin in 1936, and by 1946 there were only 1.2 million, including the occupying forces. First the Jews – sent to their deaths across the concentration camps in Europe, then the soldiers – dying in battle for Fascism, then the other residents – women, children, the elderly, buried under rubbles. Undetonated bombs, as heavy as 2000 pounds, are still being found in and around Berlin after almost 70 years. During the Wall years, West Berlin was still very much an empty shell isolated from the rest of West Germany, and only attracted the young and the rebellious, and the Turkish immigrants that were sent in to support its lack of labour. Even after the Wall came down, despite the efforts in trying to rebuild the city and despite it being the capital of one of the most powerful countries in Europe, it had never really economically recovered from the WWII or the Cold War. Berlin today has 3.4 million people, still short of its pre-war population, and has no industry to support itself economically. The unemployment rate had been going up and down between 20 – 30% in the last few years, so a huge percentage of its population survives on handouts from the government. But neither has it been, reportedly, affected much by the current global economic crisis because, ironically, it is already ‘so poor’ that it doesn’t have much further to fall. Yet strangely, its renewed political prowess and its ‘poor but sexy’ character continues to draw an eclectic mix of intellectual, political and creative residents.

When the Wall came down, Berliners made immediate steps architecturally and infrastructurally to re-link the city, to fill both physical and mental voids and divisions created by the Wall and the no-man’s lands. The previous outline of the Wall could still be seen on the ground like a scars. Despite having the actual structure being leveled down, one can still see the bricks of the foundation clearly running along the ground. Cars drive over those lines, trains run through them, houses and gardens rose from the wasteland, and children throw balls across spaces where bullets used to fire from one side to another.
History collects and shadows, like memory builds and curses. The grand and magnificent buildings like the Berlin Dome, Bode Museum, the Old Synagogue – a lush and glorious reminder of Berlin’s 18th Century grandeur at the peak of Europe’s industrialising and colonising prowess, stands side to side with the kitsch TV Tower, and the straight rows of rectangular, blunt Soviet building blocks that rose out of the rubbles. Further on, remains of bombed out sights like the Kaiser Dome and a large cordoned off section at the old Warschauer Str station is kept like how it was found. The former is kept on purpose, like the Peace Dome at the A-bomb Peace Memorial in Hiroshima, for future generations to ponder – on horrors of war that they shall not ever want to experience and on a collective guilt that shall be shared and inherited. The latter is simply kept there because it happened to be located in no-man’s-land during the division of East and West Germany, and even after the Wall came down, the lack of public funds and the subsequent take over of the surroundings by squatters gave people another excuse to not have to clean it up. A procrastination that has been gotten away with for so long, that it no longer needed to be attended to. That is, unless the multinational developers of O2 fame shall never lay their fingers on that part of the waterfront.














Like any other big city, the rich and poor, the haves and have nots live side by side. Except the rich here are better at keeping a low profile, not really willing to flaunt their wealth or status, and humbly keep to themselves in Charlottenberg and Shöneberg, or try and loose themselves amongst the yuppy young parents in Mitte or Prenzlauerberg. Apart from around Embassies, I’ve never seen big BMWs purring around the streets, and the affluent here still wear expensive clothes, but independent boutique labels from Scandinavia, and not bling-bling stuff like Prada or Louis Vuitton. At least not a despicable, filthy kind of rich. The have-nots seems to be everywhere in Berlin, not like in other big cities where they are only pushed out to ‘ghetto’ areas in the fringes. Its not that they are not out there, its just they are everywhere. The old beggars in the squares in Neukolln, drug dealers with their warted hounds at the train stations, drunks on the trains, Romas in the parks, Turkish teenagers selling stolen bikes on the bridge...This city has tolerance for them, cheap living costs, good social programs, methadone, a liberal outlook and a generous state that keeps them alive, if just. But it has decay, violence, history that comes in cycles, a culture of dependency, and more than anything else, sadness, and above all, no solutions. The students, artists and musicians are not really the haves or have-nots. Some of them are rich, though many of them are poor. But it seems like those questions are beyond their concerns. They have their mental and physical creative space, they have their government supplements that can afford to buy enough in this cheap city, their chemical vices, and their networks and communities that will always have a bed for them somewhere. They survive day to day on adrenalin, on freedom, on self-confidence and on hope.













...................................
I dreamt that Berlin was chasing me in the clouds. Holding his banjo, running so fast his hat almost flew off, I wasn’t sure if it was play-chasing or real-chasing, but I ran. Except I was stepping in thin air all the time, my fleet slipped into the soft mass, going nowhere, and he was closing in. I suddenly fell into a big hole between the wads of cloud, and fell. I lost control of my body, and felt a sharp pressure as the ground sucked me down. I crashed through the roof of glass house, full of exotic plants in fancy pots. I lied there amongst broken glass, and discovered C sitting cross-legged next to me in a commercial pilot’s uniform, holding a clipboard. “I have a new ticket for you, to LA!” He beamed, pouring tea from an antique tea pot. I grabbed the ticket, still thinking I was fleeing from something, and jumped through a small cat door on the side of the glass house, only to enter deep down into a basement. The basement resembled a display room at Harrods or Selfridges, full of beautiful tableware and chic vases. N was there holding two air-blown toy baseball bats, and he encouraged me to take one and smash the place up with him. So I did, guiltily. A waitress came down the stairs and I asked her if I should pay for the damages. “No,” She said, “but you’ll have to pay for lunch, 7 Euros.” So I did. I appeared in the lounge at the RCS lobby. M-1 walked in, and gave me an animated black and white pencil drawing of a man on a bicycle. He said his mother did that drawing, and she would like me to have it. I was half baffled as he walked out. Then T walked in, and presented me with a felt-tip drawing by his mother, of a scribbled multicoloured sunset against the Eiffel Tower. He said she really wanted me to have it. I clutched the drawings from M-1 and T’s mothers under an arm, and opened a big heavy elaborately carved door, and disappeared into a grey misty evening. I just evaporated.
...............................................
Do I have memories? I thought I didn’t pack them with me in my backpack, but they tagged along anyway, obviously. They came back to me via melodies. Sounds linger in one’s mind longer than visions. One may remember words said as records of particular messages, information and meanings, but music trigger whole scenes, colours, an entire mood. When I hear a particular song by Feist, when I would be just sitting in a café or wandering in a bookshop, I would be transported back into an evening in the kitchen of the apartment I had in London, after a day trip to Cambridge, and floods of both sorrow and happiness would rush into my chest. Her soft wounded voice grinds at my heart but the lightness of the melody and strums sent me to another place, and I don’t know whether to love her or to hate her.
.......................................
Memory is indeed a curse. It haunts me like it haunts Berlin. When I lie next to him in the night, his back against my breasts and I could see the tattoo at the back of his neck, the vague outline of a little goat. I like to touch it with my finger, pat it on its head, tell it that it has the most beautiful coat and the loveliest horns. Sometimes it would smile back at me, and sometimes it would ignore me. Sometimes it looked like it was about to charge at me and push me to the ground. I think of the times when he had disappointed me and I had disappointed him. I think of what I couldn’t give to this man, even if I decided that he had deserved it. I think of what we could be, and what we couldn’t be. When I sighed into the night, the little goat would look up at me, blinking its little red eyes.

Because of Memory, the curse that it is.

Memory sliced off a piece of my heart and buried it at the bottom of a garden somewhere deep in another continent, amongst plump Jeruselum artichokes that grew out of abandonment, and cherry tomatoes, clear like droplets
of blood in the desert sand. I wonder if it’s still there, pumping away, or if it had been dug up by a neighbourhood dog, and eaten for dinner. Either way, I don’t know.
...................................
And I’m sorry. I just needed to save myself.

(TO BE CONTINUED)

Die Wanderjahre

I have recently noticed a quirky and slightly camp German 'cult' - young men, often kind of geeky and or unshaven looking, dressed in smart double breasted velvet waistcoats outside a plain white shirt, and big flared dress pants and blazers as part of a suit, teamed with large brimmed velvet hats. There's a guy at the teahouse that I cook at that is often dressed like that, and I have seen quite a few around the streets, and then a few at the Hurricane festival. So what is this 'sececret brotherhood' all about?

After a bit of investigation, I was told that they are young apprentice carpenters in their traditional uniforms. Historically, part of their training also involves a 1 - 3 year soljourn away from home (and must be outside of a 50km radius of their home town), called 'Die Wanderjahre' (The Wander Year) where they travel to broaden their horizons, but must not work for money, but only for food and housing, wearing their very well identifiable uniform the entire time, and ahere to very strict codes of conducts. Many people will taken them in for free board in exchange for them to fix bits and bobs of broken woodwork in their homes, and in turn, support the 'coming of age' and help these youngsters hone up their skills before they set down to business, fostering those informal social relationships that strengthen relationships between/amongst communities. It reminds me of similar Buddhist monks' traditions of journeying as a process of self discipline and character building in Asian countries. Its no longer a compulsory dress code for contemporary carpenters, but you would still find many carpentry businesses using pictures of men on their Wanderjahre as their logos. The tradition of both wandering and wearing the uniform is enjoying a bit of a revival in Germany, and is really appealing to the alternative crowd, and women carpenters are also now going on Wanderjahre (in pants, of course).

Top Photo courtesey of http://www.tagblatt.ch/magazin/leben/tb-le/Wanderjahre-eines-Gesellen%3Bart126,611129
See also http://www.brighthub.com/education/languages/articles/33881.aspx