birthday coming round again...

today i want to go see this art exhibit
.

i'm hoping Loopy will want to go and will actually enjoy it. she might. it may involve naked people, and who doesn't enjoy that?

well, if not, at least we can have lunch somewhere new and just enjoy each other (the museum is way up in a northern suburb so new territory to explore).

it would be the beginning of my birthday celebration. (i've posted about birthdays and even one of the memories that follow in other years, but i don't care... :) )

next weekend we are going to Madison to spend Saturday with herspiral and her husband. then we're going to have a party two weeks after my birthday. we realized we know and like six people in chicago. that's enough for a party. :) two former coworkers plus one fiancé, one current coworker, and a guy i used to know when we were small children plus his wife whom we met for dinner with my mother and who turned out to be delightful.

i always try to have an extended birthday celebration, at least two weeks and sometimes a month, full of gathered friends and special pleasures. one of these is usually a museum - often an art museum, tho one year it was the . (i didn't consciously create this tradition, but when i ask myself where can i give myself purest joy, that's usually my answer). when i was in college i went to the Museum of Fine Arts at least twice... once I went alone and sketched this piece:


I spent all afternoon, allowed myself to just fall into it, alone in the dimly lit gallery, just become completely absorbed with nothing else to do... it was one of the greatest pleasures of my life. (Of course i had forgotten and missed a meeting with my thesis advisor so guilt and rushing quickly resumed their usual roles...)

(some of you - to the extent that there are any of you! - might know that I am or used to be, or sometimes am an artist, of sorts, maybe. as well as photography i know how to paint and draw, though i haven't for years. after i left art school i was always working on a painting or other piece in my head, but never painted them and the ideas stopped coming. though just this morning i saw a piece in the New Yorker that reminded me of one of these unborn or stillborn ideas... it sounds ludicrously obvious if i describe it but i wanted to make it haunting.... i have a number of pieces in my head related to different phases in my perceptions of our current system of schooling (wouldn't dignify it by calling it 'education') and the harm it does especially to Black children...)

ANYWAY! birthdays.

another year i went to the Museum of Fine Arts with Sylvia and Franklin and we came upon this painting:


(MFA has ridiculously gigantic links - that one was 562 characters!)

It says in the upper right corner - and is titled - "D'ou venons-nous? Que sommes-nous? Ou allons-nous?"

Sylvia commented with wry amusement (misreading the middle phrase), 'We came from Cambridge. We're in the museum. We're going to lunch.'

It is a beautiful painting...

in recent years I have taken to breezing through museums... the slow pondering way I used to traverse them has come to seem too painfully obsessive to me... i remember feeling very driven to absorb all the information about all the works and slot it into a massive database in my brain... it's a relief to leave that behind... associate it with Harvard and over-achievement. Loopy has taught me this...

at the same time I hurry more than I would without Loopy (she may be surprised to hear that! heh)... she is not the biggest-ever fan of museums and i try to balance our conflicting desires for depth and speed by looking at one or two things in each room in depth, then skipping the rest - it's a good Buddhist practice to just let go. it's a good human practice to remember others and be considerate... had to do the same in Iran. consider the group and don't get sucked into anything...

there is a sort of agreement tho that for my birthday i get to linger and savor... be a lil bit selfish... maybe?

This makes it sound like I don't have fun at museums with Loopy. i do. i have a lot of fun - it's just a different kind of fun. Loopy has definitely added new dimensions to museum going... we have little games that sound silly when i describe them, so i deleted the descriptions, but we have little games we play among the objects, that bring us into our own shared world and give us (or me anyway) a lot of pleasure... and i'm looking forward to today, I'm gonna go wake her up.

It also occurs to me that since this is Valentine's Day, maybe I should offer to do something that SHE wants to do. hmmm. there's a concept. ;) anyway i miss her and will go wake her up. :) even though i didn't make her Valentine's Day project which i still want to :) and will!

lil added bonus: while browsing the MFA site i discovered a section on wallpapers for your phone... i don't get why you'd buy them since you can just download them or screenshot them and then email them to your phone, but maybe if you have a simpler phone you can't do that. Anyway, their suggested wallpapers are fun, including some like this:


i love that lil frog. if i didn't already have a lovely picture of Loopy i might get any one of these....

whew... London

I am falling behind - there are still two days to blog about from Germany that I didn't finish - but I'm jumping ahead anyway.

Honestly, I was getting really depressed being in Germany, for reasons I don't feel like dwelling upon here... but it's so great to be in London. We love our London friends. They have "good enjoyers" (one of the first things we did was go to a pond and feed ducks) and they are happy - they have a good marriage and satisfying jobs. And they're fun, funny, intellectually curious, thoughtful, smart, and did I mention fun? It's just such a pleasure to be with them. And their new house is soooooo adorable!

R & C 's cute new house! Complete with art by R and decor by both :-)



Our afternoon adventures... visiting an old manor house (no pix inside, sorry!), feeding ducks on Hampstead Heath, and dinner at one of the oldest pubs in London (fish n chips, natch).



Can't write more now, I'm too tired. But... just happy.

european ballet + chinese acrobatics = wow + huh

Tonight our gracious hosts took us to see a really amazing performance: it was Swan Lake, done by Chinese acrobats who had also mastered ballet. (I'm just assuming that they were acrobats first, but I could be wrong. Their mastery of both forms was impeccable to my (admittedly untrained) eye).

If you've ever felt that classical ballet was lacking something, perhaps you were longing for frogs dancing on their hands...



or amazing poses assisted by stage equipment previously unknown to ballet, or a ballerina bent into really extreme shapes...



Or maybe what you have been missing, o less-than-fan of classical ballet, is a ballerina dancing on her partner's shoulder...



or head:



Overall, the spectacle was dazzling and impressive, and included several tricks I hadn't seen before in other Chinese acrobatic shows. My favorite new trick involved people rolling around in giant metal circles:



However, there was still something oddly lacking. Maybe it was a coherent story. I'm not too clear on the original story, but there wasn't much story here. Just the barest hint of some continuity from one scene to the next, just enough to provide an excuse for spectacular stage sets, amazing costumes, and tremendous feats of acrobatic skill.

Did I forget to mention the scene where all the supporting swan-ballerinas were on roller skates? That was probably my least favorite innovation. You'd think it would be cool to see them all gliding, but they didn't really glide - turns out, even on roller skates you need to move to propel yourself - and the movement was a lot less fluid than the floaty thing that real ballerinas do when they glide across the stage en masse....

Anyway, a good time was had by all, and if you have a chance to see it, I definitely recommend it. "And now for something completely different," guaranteed!

Here is a review by someone who knows more than I do about ballet.

One more day in Munich... thinking of taking Loopy to a Kandinsky show... she likes Kandinsky.

wacky castle

So, now I'm behind with the travelogue.

Day before yesterday was the castle - Neuschwanstein. It was shrouded in fog and very picturesque.


It's forbidden to take pix inside, so I'll borrow a few of theirs. Click on the photos to go through to the castle website and learn more.



The castle was built by a King who didn't much care for matters of state and preferred to go into massive debt in order to build pretty things. It was begun in 1868, just after the Civil War, when there was definitely no real use for castles. So it's just a giant vanity project.

The amazing thing to me was the total mishmash of artistic and architectural styles, themes, and motifs. There was no unifying philosophy or anything that linked the different rooms together, or even linked the different elements of a single room together.

For example, gothic architectural details in this hall and bedroom:


...combined unnervingly with realistic painting, as you can see in the top picture (above).

Then there was the throne room, in a heavily Byzantine or maybe early Romanesque style, including columns of solid porphyry, an elaborate floor mosaic, and gold background everywhere - though the images were again painted in an incongruously realist mode.



And then, just in case you weren't totally sure that you were in the full flower of the Romantic 19th century, there were the random little odes to "nature" and naturalism, such as this "grotto":



It was so realistic that I asked Loopy, "are you sure it's not a real cave?" She scoffed at me: "Lovey, we're on the third floor." Well, you know, maybe it was, like, built into the mountainside or something. OK, OK, shut up. So... yeah. Pretty wacky.

Loopy said all this aping of earlier styles, especially without total coherence, was a quintessential expression of the birth of modernity. That makes sense to me.

In terms of how our day went, it was quite a schlepp to get there: we took the subway, the train for two hours, a taxi, and finally a horse-drawn carriage up the last part of the mountain. And we still had to walk about 200 yards up very, VERY steep road. Loopy was so brave.

knitting on the train	knitting in the horse carriage

After the castle we had a delicious lunch very close by - roast pork with a giant dumpling (knoedel) and sauerkraut for Loopy, and potato dumplings with cheese, onions and sauerkraut for me (sort of like a Bavarian mac & cheese!) It was deeeeelish.


It was kind of funny that we traveled four hours each way for a 35-minute tour, but we had a great time anyway. The journey is part of the point, right? We love our adventures.

ugh....

We interrupt this fun and cheery travelogue for a medical update. A week before vacation I started a 10-day steroid blast that was hopefully going to cure my miserable back pain, at least for like six months or so. I had to lie in bed all weekend and whined and complained a lot on Twitter, so those of you who've been following me there will doubtless remember the event.

I don't know if I twittered as much about how much the symptoms improved, especially around the sixth or seventh day. The last day of school, I think I twittered about how I had overslept, but I'm not sure I got a chance to note that a few hours later, it occurred to me that it was really cool that I'd been able to oversleep - usually the pain wakes me up if the alarm clock doesn't. Anyway, by the time we had to get on the plane I had no pain at all. It was awesome!!

So the steroid blast ended a day or so ago. The pain is back full force. Pretty constant. Often intense.

I don't think I can wait til spring break for the surgery. The few days without pain really showed me how much the pain takes away from my life. The pain makes me cranky and short-tempered with students; it interferes with my concentration and focus; it makes me dull and plodding - it has me just looking at what I have to do to get through the day, instead of dreaming and planning and creating. It has me coming home and going to sleep instead of even trying to interact with my wife or do anything for school. It's like a cloud in front of my vision and cobwebs in my brain. I didn't really realize all the ways it was affecting me til it was gone.

Maybe if I were a saint I could carry on without any impact, like some woman my mother was just describing over Christmas dinner, but I kinda bet the saints either don't have a lot of pain or have some kind of impact that we don't see.

I'm pissed right now that I chose not to go to a concert of Bach in an old church on Christmas Eve because of the damn pain. It wasn't a question of "should I just endure it to enjoy the concert." I couldn't endure it. Those mythical "saints" may cluck their tongues all they like. I know what I can stand.

So next when I get back, is more medical crap, an MRI etc. More appointments; more days off school. And hopefully soon enough the surgery.

Should I grin and bear it, wait til spring or even summer break for the surgery? Ten years ago I might have said yes, I should sacrifice months of pain to be sure I do good work and keep this job. At 37 I've learned: you can sacrifice everything and still lose a job, and then what did you do all that for? And you can NOT sacrifice and still keep a job. And realistically, I'm more likely to do a good job if I'm not in pain.

And, a job is just a job. Even in this economy, there are more jobs out there. I have to get rid of this pain.

There is some part of me that's also hoping that I will somehow get a break, for having medical issues; that they'll give me another year, even if they feel this year was less than stellar, because they think I might come through for them. But, if I were the boss, my decision would not be based on the medical stuff. I'd feel that I had seen enough of my performance to guess whether a 10% or 20% improvement post-surgery was likely, or would make a difference. So basically... yeah. Actually to even consider my stupid job in a medical decision is kind of dumb, isn't it.

Glad the power of those mythical saints has waned in my life.... even though they still whisper in my ears at times. I just have to bat them away like the lil vampires they are. (How's that for a mixed up metaphor).

Cuz you can never have too much Christmas Market

So let's see, the next day, which was yesterday, we putzed around the house, put up Christmas decorations, and then in the evening, we went to two Christmas markets and rode the Christmas streetcar! Woo-hoo! You know these guys (Germans) basically invented Christmas as we know it, so it's totally reasonable that it's just perfect here.

Loopy commented, of the Christmas Streetcar - "This is something they'd never do in the U.S. Let's see, decorate a streetcar for Christmas, serve alcohol inside, and charge the same amount as usual to ride it. Play some music." I suggested that this was because Americans didn't know how to drink reasonably. Loopy stated that it was because Americans don't know how to have fun.



Click through on the pix without us in them, and you can see more Christmas market photos etc etc. Yay!

whee!

so yesterday afternoon, after a snack, Petra and I decided to go for a walk. she said there was a nature preserve nearby and that there was supposed to be a small church-sponsored fest there, with free mulled wine.

we went to the nature preserve, but after some squelching around in the mud, which made us laugh a lot, we could find no church-fest or mulled wine. so then she suggested that maybe it had been moved inside. so, we went to the church, and sure enough, there were people milling around, and food. there seemed ot be some kind of Indonesian festival, with many Indonesian church members, and a caroling program about to start. We snuck in, ate a lot of Bavarian and Indonesian desserts, and ran away before the caroling program. We thought this was hilarious. (There was, however, no mulled wine).

We did however feel a little bad about leaving the others home alone without pastries of any kind, so we quickly turned our steps back to the house. But we found the house dark and everyone fast asleep. I tried to rouse wifey, to no avail... so Petra and I thought we'd go find some mulled wine. Somehow we ended up in the Christmas market. (About 20 minutes on the train, so the sort of 'oh how did that happen?' that we affected was, in fact, pure affectation).

THe Munich Christmas Market is one of my favorite places in the entire universe. I was so happy to be back there. There is some competition for both time and technology here, so I will cut this post short, but Petra and I got drunk on mulled wine, ate candied almonds and lebkuchen, and loved the heck out of the lights and presents. It was bliss.

To see some pix (since I didn't have camera last night and have to cut this short now), check out the official website for the Christmas market.