Reading list for June 2005

Let's start with a confession: I wrote this on July 2 and pre-dated it to appear in June. So shoot me. <sings>It's my blog, and I'll pre-date if I want to</sings>

I have read comparatively little this month, or perhaps I should say that I have been slowly reading difficult texts. Marcus Aurelius' Meditations (which I read in German as "Wege zu sich selbst") are worthy desert island reading, the book is so densely written that every sentence could be the subject of a day's meditation. It is a book to be re-read many times. I wonder whence this compression and refinement of thought comes, whether it was related to the fact of reading in Greek and writing in Latin? Everyone would admit that the quality of one's tools strongly influence the quality of one's work, and language is a tool like any other. It is surely not a coincidence that so many of the great philosophers - up to the present day - read and wrote in Greek or Latin (or both).

The reason for reading Marcus Aurelius and Michel de Montaigne will be obvious to those who have been following this series of posts: last month's re-reading of Alain de Botton's The Consolations of Philosophy (yes, Witho, you were right). He quotes extensively and favourably from these authors (among others), in the course of suggesting how their words might soothe and heal our worn spirits would we but lend them an ear. De Botton has a distinctive and highly personal writing voice, and I can easily understand how it might grate on more vigorous sensibilities, but I find him very readable. There is much felicitous writing and handily collected wisdom to be found in his books; fans of Proust will be enchanted by de Botton's between-the-lines reading of A la Recherche in How Proust Can Change Your Life, but dismayed by the image of the author that emerges: Marcel was a great author but not a very nice person.

Let's end with another confession: I have given up on Wallenstein. It just wasn't gripping enough to hold my attention.

Currently reading
C.J.Koch, Ein Jahr in der Hölle
Michel de Montaigne, Essaies first volume

Recently read
Alain de Botton The Art of Travel

Next month's list
Last month's list

On keeping a sense of proportion

I was sitting in the train to Stupidville this morning, minding my own business, when it unexpectedly came to a halt in a one-dog town (too small for a horse). This was highly unusual: an ICE would usually flash through a village like this without even registering it, let alone stopping. Clearly, something had gone wrong somewhere.

We were there quite a long time. After a few minutes, the conductor made an announcement: We are going to be here for an indefinite period of time, because the track to Stupidville is blocked by a burning train. A passenger further down the carriage cursed and muttered "why does this always happen to me?"

Excuse me, you ignorant yuppie asshole: it is not happening to you. It is happening to the poor sods in the train that is burning. You, asshole, are just waiting. There are worse things in life than waiting, for instance sitting in a burning train; or standing outside a burning train watching your luggage go up in flames. Shut the fuck up and think for a quarter of a second about something other than your own pitiful pathetic self.

So there.

I've looked through the online news, and found no reference to the fire, so presumably (hopefully) nobody was hurt.

The meeting went well. The SBPFFSC is still quite happy with the software, and we had a pleasant lunchtime conversation about Venice and opera houses.

The last minute

To Stupidville tomorrow, a paid visit this time! I'm on a consultancy trip to one of our first clients, a Small But Perfectly Formed Financial Services Corporation. They were our first client outside our home states of Baden-Württemberg and Bayern, and I still have a certain feeling of friendly gratitude to them for that vote of confidence.

Besides which, I met our contact man there in the foyer of the Teatro La Fenice in Venice last summer at an Arvo Pärt concert. Can't say fairer than that, guvnor.

As always, I have just now (11pm) finished burning the CDs and organizing my thoughts. It's not just architects who have trouble being ready ahead of deadlines; or is it that I used to be an architect?

The invoice for this trip will double my income for this month. Not that I charge obscene rates; on the contrary, this year has been very thin and June has been the worst month yet (only in part because I took that week off in Russia).

Something better change, as the Stranglers memorably sang in my first year in University.

A sit in the Black Forest

I was invited to a small town on the edge of the Black Forest, for the 70th birthday of a friend's mother. Nice people, good food and drink, and a pleasant house in a lovely setting. The photo above shows the view west from their terrace: five rows of hills disappearing into the mist. (The view was even better until that pair of houses was built two years ago.)

Since I am either (1) a sensible person who enjoys his pleasures in moderation, or (2) a pissy wallflower spoilsport, take your pick, I stayed sober and went to bed early (at 2:15 AM), and was therefore up on Sunday morning several hours before anyone else. I sat on the terrace, watched the clouds forming and listened: to birdsong, insects, the wind. For long stretches of time, there were no mechanical or other man-made noises to be heard at all, not even voices. Wonderful. It's amazing how noisy cities are, and how calmly we accept this constant assault.

It is so still there, that you can hear the hissing of the gliders as they circle overhead.

I realized after I'd been sitting there for a while, that I was staring at their yard: contrary to my expectation, memory and belief, it is not a grassed lawn, but almost an alpine meadow. Most of the yard is covered by tiny plants with miniature flowers, the only grass is under the mossy birch trees (alpine meadow needs more direct sun?) where the bench stands.



I was on my hands and knees, photographing the plants, when the others came out. I can't imagine why they laughed.

Friday, slow day

We sent off the competition yesterday, postmarked nine minutes before the post office closed. Cutting it fine, but we have been even closer on previous occasions. The scheme turned out very well, and the drawings are nice too; I think we stand a good chance of winning at least an honourable mention (which would basically just cover the printing costs).

Actually, the odds of winning something are very good. Like most recent architectural competitions in Germany, this was run in two stages: One applies for the right to take part, either by submitting proof of having designed similar buildings (or having won similar competitions) or as a pure lottery, throwing your visiting card into the hat. In either case, the administrators select around 30 offices to compete. Given that there are typically four prizes and three runners-up, the odds of winning at least an honourable mention are 1 in 4. Much better than the lottery.

Now, back to reality. I jumped straight into this project on the Monday morning after St. Petersburg, I still haven't taken my dirty shirts to the laundry or answered half the e-mails and telephone calls that came in my absence.

Time for a little real life: laundry, shopping, a cappucino downtown, maybe a walk by the Neckar if the rain holds off. A little rain would be very welcome, it might reduce the grinding heat and humidity of the last few days.



The soundtrack to this post is "Neve al Sole" by Pino Daniele, melodic soft rock from Italy. Not my usual style, but it's pretty good background stuff. I heard it played in a standup eatery at lunchtime last week, and thought that it was African: sounds like early Youssou N'Dour. I asked the proprietor what it was, and he jumped for joy: Pino Daniele was his father's favourite rock musician back in la bella Italia. He (the proprietor) went running into the back room and returned with a stack of CDs for me to listen to (he actually said "copy" but I don't do that).

P.S. Curses to Blogger for changing my template behind my back. They have introduced a new <div style="clear:both"> tag at the start of each post, which removes the wider linespacing. Damn you, I liked the wider line spacing, it was one of the main reasons I chose this template. Please (1) fix this, and (2) don't tinker with my settings.

P.P.S. Doubled curses to Blogger for also having messed around with the comments page. I have written them an e-mail to complain, and encourage you all to do likewise. Their address is support@blogger.com.

On phishing

I received three identical mail messages this morning, warning me that my account with the Deutsche Bank may have been compromised: I should go to a website (they kindly provided a URL) and type in my name, bank account number, ID, password, date of birth, shoe size and mother's maiden name.

The names of the senders were enough to prove that the mail was fraudulent:
    Escort R. Feet
    Snap O. Basil
and my favourite:
    Plunge E. Teepee

Well, really. How can anyone who is intelligent enough to operate an online bank account, be so stupid as to believe a mail message from "Plunge E. Teepee"? A five-year-old child would recognize this name as a blatant lie and fall about laughing, why does it (or its like) fool so many allegedly educated, allegedly responsible adults? (And we let these people vote?!)

For those who are unsure whether Mr. Teepee is really on their side, here are three simple rules:

1) Every unsolicited e-mail offering to solve a problem you didn't know you had, is an attempt to defraud you.

2) If you are still unsure, call the company concerned and ask them about it (do not use any contact information in the e-mail, look them up in the phone book or on a recent bill).

3) However, even if the company says that the threat is genuine, do not use the URL in the e-mail. Go to the company's usual website in the usual way, using your usual browser. It's easy to fake a URL, try this link to the Microsoft home page for an example. The link text that you see, bears no necessary relationship whatsoever to the webpage it points to.

It speaks poorly of us as a species, that so simple a trick as phishing can work so well.

An apology

To the reader from Dublin who found my blog by querying Yahoo for retired secretaries naked slideshow: I hope you weren't too disappointed.

The kiss

Mir wrote a Friday Flashback piece on memorable kisses, and asked her readers to share their experiences. Mine overflowed the comments box, so I'm posting it here for her:

I am surprised and ashamed to say that I can't remember my actual first kiss, but there was one absolutely heavenly kiss that I do remember in vivid detail, a quarter-century later: the Platonic Ideal of kisses.

I was at Ronnie Scott's jazz club with a lovely Israeli girl whom I'd chatted up in the street (man, I had confidence in those days!). Art Blakey's Jazz Messengers were playing, featuring on that particular tour a chubby little boy named Terrence Blanchard on trumpet, he couldn't possibly have been older than sixteen.

As the band began a very mellow and slow song, she smiled and snuggled back against me, so I wrapped my arms around her and kissed the back of her neck (as one does). She turned her face to mine, I brought my lips down to hers - and the world stood still. The club, the crowd, the music: gone. I don't know how long we kissed, it might have been five seconds or twenty minutes. The only thing I was aware of, outside the kiss itself, was her heart beating in the palm of my hand.

Without either of us seeming to break it off, our lips parted and she rubbed her cheek against mine. In that moment, the band fell silent and Terrence Blanchard stepped forward to play a wonderful melancholy, wistful, yearning solo.

Perfect.

Better, but not yet good

My cold, that is. Thanks for all the good wishes, they seem to be working.

I'm dragging along at half-speed these days, glad that the knife has been removed from my sinuses, but still going through a pocket-packet of tissues every day. The cold has coincided with the end-phase of a competition that I'm working on with my horseracing buddies G and U, so I have not been able to take as much time off as I would have liked. Fortunately, our mutual friend A has agreed to join the team as of tomorrow morning, so I hope to continue to work only a reasonable number of hours per day.

Thank God, the washing machine has just stopped, now I can go to bed. Sweet dreams be yours, my dears, if dreams there be.

Son of Saint Petersburg

Red Eft has recently returned from a week-long writing workshop, where she was immersed in healthy food, funkiness and literature ;-) and posted a stack of questions about St. Petersburg:

What are the bookstores like?

There seem to be very few, but we were possibly in the wrong districts. There are definitely fewer per head of population than in e.g. Toronto, New York or Stuttgart. On the other hand, St.P has a university, and you can't have a university without books, ergo there must be at least one humungous bookshop somewhere. QED. The only bookshop I saw, was an english-language shop near the Hermitage; it was on the second floor of a typical 19th century block that had been turned into offices and flats. There was no shop window as such, just a sign which happened to catch my eye. We didn't go in (can't stop the bus).

Is there fast food everywhere?

No. We saw McDonalds, Baskin-Robbins, a pizza brandname which I can't recall, but these were exceptions: one each in a city of five million Russians and God knows how many tourists (the Hermitage gets 15,000 visitors a day). The public appears to be composed of homesick American tourists and the Valley-Girl-wannabe bimbos of Russian mafiosi, taking a break from double-parking their Hummers in front of Dolce & Gabbana (you probably think I'm joking). I feel confident in stating that the broad mass of Russians can't afford to go near them.

There isn't even a local equivalent that I noticed, in the way that McDonalds is outnumbered thirty to one in Stuttgart by Doner Kebab takeout joints. The Russians seem to take eating seriously.

The supplimentary question that Red didn't ask: so what is everywhere?

Alcohol. Apart from the kiosks selling vodka and other spirits, apart from the street vendors selling Kvass from open stalls, at least half the population walks home of an evening with a bottle of something open in their hand. It's very common and clearly a socially-accepted form of behaviour: you see business people in suits, secretaries in twinsets, students in hoodie and jeans, walking down the street sucking meditatively on their bottle of beer. (Price comparison: half a litre of Russian vodka costs 103 Roubles = 2.90 Euros = US$4.12. A bottle of Russian beer in a restaurant costs 80 Roubles = 2.28 Euros = $3.20. A family-sized chocolate bar (100 gram) costs 22 Roubles = 0.63 Euros = $0.88)

Can you buy organic produce and soymilk anywhere?

No idea. I very much doubt that I would have recognized soymilk on the shelves of our local supermarket. It may well have been there, but God only knows how it would have been labelled or how the packaging would look. It's probably available, we did see stores that looked like the German "Reform" chain of health-food/macrobiotic/holistic thingies.

There was a mutiny on the day that we visited the Dostoyevsky Museum: certain highly vocal members of the group insisted on having some walk-about time before lunch. By coincidence there was a large Farmers' Market Hall-type place next to the museum, so I walked around there for a while. The food looked fresh, healthy and non-genetically-treated e.g. the veggies were all lumpy and patchily coloured :-) But I wouldn't swear that they were organic in the sense that the West uses the word.

Tell about funky bohemian hangouts, if you found any.

Well, um, you see ... no. Given that St.P has got a university, there must be some funky bohemia around somewhere. But I wouldn't know where or what, we certainly didn't see it.

It's like this: it was a guided-tour group, and we were supervised and led every inch of the way. We spent our time on the bus or in the enjoyment of Culture or being excellently fed and watered.

Communism may be gone, but the Russian administrative bureaucracy is still several dozen decades away from grokking the service mentality. One cannot just "go to Russia", dear reader, no no no: you need a visa. In order to get a visa, you must book a recognized Touristic Package from an accredited Russian tourist agency. This includes your hotel, museum visits, a guide, laid-on meals and gypsy dancing bands. This is then supervised by the agency: there were two unnamed, unmentioned young women who followed us around all week. As we boarded the bus in the morning, the blonde was there to number us off. When the bus arrived at the restaurant for lunch, the redhead was there talking to the manager. That evening at the Mariinsky, the blonde was at the kerb waiting for the bus. The guide resisted telling us who they were, and neither of them was willing to say more than "I'm Anna"; "No, I'm not the guide". Shades of the good-old, bad-old KGB days!

To be fair, this degree of organisation also has its good side. A concert was cancelled due to illness on a midweek evening, the agency phoned our guide (every Russian has at least one cell phone) midafternoon to tell her, so we could spend the afternoon walking in the gardens of the restored imperial palace at Pushkin. When we got stuck in traffic and missed our appointment at the river cruise, they arranged on-the-fly for a replacement boat to meet us at a mooring point on canal X and take us on an improvised tour to a mooring point on canal Y, where the bus was waiting for us. That was pretty impressive.

I would like to have had some more time on foot in the city centre, but it didn't work out that way. The geography of the city works against the casual foot tourist: it is, as I have said, enormous, and the public transport system is cracking under the strain. There is a subway system: two lines that cross near the Neva, and a circle around the outer suburbs, with very few and widely spaced stations. The principal subway line runs parallel to the Moskovskaya Prospekt, which we travelled daily from the hotel to the city centre. It's some 12 km long, and I counted three subway stations.

According to our guide, the city actually runs on an informal system of paid hitch-hiking: you stand by the side of the road and wave your hand. Somebody stops for you (a private car), and you negotiate a destination and a fee.

I didn't feel up to either of those alternatives: the language is a real barrier. (More on that later.)

On fame and hard work

The cold that I picked up in St.P has developed into an extremely nasty something or other (the doctor is still debating). Every breath feels like a knifeblade pushed into my sinuses, I have a nose that is running the marathon and a cough that would frighten an elephant. Blah.

I was invited to a party on Saturday night, which was still in fine spirits when I left at 4am on Sunday (which surely didn't help my cold). The hosts were people I'd met when I first started coming to Stuttgart twenty years ago; they were then at the top of their professional ladders and are now happily retired with a first grandchild to coddle. The party was a meeting of families: three generations of the hosts met up to three generations of guests. The group was a good mix of ages (the hosts' kids are somewhat younger than I) with not a few toddlers and youngsters weaving among our legs.

There were some very well-known names there, respected professionals at the peak of their ladders, world famous among 50 thousand people as it were. I have to admit to being flattered by being addressed as Du by these people (the friendly, intimate form of "you", as opposed to the formal Sie).

I wonder whether there will be ambitious young professionals standing at the back of my parties in twenty years, looking goggle-eyed around and whispering "OMG do you know who that is?!!" Let us hope so. Some of my college friends have already achieved a measure of fame and glory equivalent to the respected oldsters at the party, but nobody that I associate with has done so. We are all just struggling by, our concerns are the monthly rent payment rather than the judgement of historians and newspaper critics. Certainly nothing that I have so far been involved in, neither as an architect nor as a programmer, has appeared in a national newspaper or on TV.

The fellow-student of mine who has achieved the most fame and glory is Ben van Berkel (who practices together with Caroline Bos as UN Studio. They are building the new Mercedes-Benz Museum here in Stuttgart). It was immediately obvious in college that Ben had got it, people were talking about him within weeks of his arrival in fourth year. He was one of the most modest people in the school—not difficult considering that we were all hysterical prima-donnas elbowing our way to the top. Ben just didn't bother with that, he spent his energies on work.

What is this it that he had so much of? Hard to say. "A different way of thinking about the world" would be the simplest explanation, but I'd have to qualify that by stating that every lunatic has a different view of the world, Ben's was convincing: surprising but not shocking, unusual but not improbable. You would look at his projects and say "Well, yes, he's right, that's how it should be". He has retained and refined this ability to make outlandish ideas seem sensible and desirable.

But having it is by no means the end of the story. There were many others who had it, some of the prima-donnas could really sing. Almost all of them have disappeared without trace. What distinguished Ben in the end was his capacity for hard work and his ability to absorb and benefit from (sometimes quite harsh) criticism, without losing confidence in himself or his work.

I admired him greatly. He has earned his success.

Saint Petersburg

Well, that was fun. I can heartily recommend St. Petersburg to adventurously-minded travellers with open minds and deep pockets.



The first surprise was the sheer size of the city. St.P is enormous, around five million people at a fairly low average density. The city achieves an almost North-American degree of sprawl, helped by the many inner-city acres of derelict and rusting smokestack industries that closed down after the end of Communism. (Gorbachov is not a hero in Russia, they see him as the man who took away their cosy lives and dropped them into the present political chaos and economic misery.) The "doughnut effect" of new suburbs surrounding a rusting, dying inner core (as seen in many American cities) is in full flower here.



It didn't even look particularly "Russian". One looks in vain in St.P for silvered onion domes and colourful wooden churches. Peter wanted a modern city, and hired in architects and craftsmen from France, Italy and Germany. The Cyrilic writing is in many places the only clue that you are not in a large, moderately prosperous, Western city. I shot hundreds of photos out the bus windows: gas stations, parks, the queue at the bus stop, taxis, trams, advertising hoardings, street-corner kiosks. Many of these were unfortunately out of focus or marred by reflections in the window, but I'll be posting quite a few on Flickr.



But the most surprising thing about St.P was how little of it was truly unusual and unexpected. The streets are full of European (and American) cars, the grocery stores sell Danone and Nestlé and Coca-Cola, the kids wear Adidas and Tommy Hilfiger (though I wouldn't wish to swear that these weren't knockoffs). There was a wonderful supermarket around the corner from our hotel (12 km from the city centre, near the airport, at exactly the point where the German siege of Leningrad was broken after 900 days) where I bought yoghurt and candies and bottled water, and where one could buy just about anything from vodka (obviously) to freshly made salads to current DVDs (many western films dubbed into Russian). I was too polite to take photos there, though I would dearly love to have done so.



There were of course things that were specifically Russian and different. Shoes, for example: Men and women wear extravagantly long, sharply-pointed-toed shoes (the Leningrad Cowboys were only slightly exaggerated). An astonishingly high percentage of Russians have blue eyes, but there are vanishingly few redheads. There are also very few fat people; either the Russians are healthy or they can't afford to eat enough of the bad stuff to become obese. Probably the latter, to be honest: according to our guide, the average old age pension is around 80 to 100 US dollars a month. The cost of living is lower, but not by that amount.



I realized once I had returned to Stuttgart, that the Russians walk differently: they have a (comparatively) erect posture and a businesslike stride with relatively short steps, where the Germans slouch and lounge. Perhaps it's a status thing: High status there is having places to go and things to do; high status here is having time to waste. Or maybe it's the shoes.



We were there in pursuit of culture, attending the White Nights festival. The name derives from the amazing fact that the sky never gets dark in high summer. Sunset was at around 11:30pm, over the next hour the sky became a darkish blue, then started brightening again and by 3:00 the sun had risen. The sun also remains relatively low in the sky, and really does seem to roll around the horizon. In southern climes, the sun starts out on the western horizon, mounts rapidly overhead, then sinks into the east. In St.P the sun moves around you on a flat course just above the horizon, like an egg rolling on the edge of a plate.



Yes, there was culture. We saw Mazeppa by Tchaikovsky, a story of ambition leading to the downfall of everyone involved. Unusually (for western tastes) it ends with the death or madness of all innocent bystanders; the eponymous villain lives to darken other lives. It was performed in Russian (with surtitles in English) by the orchestra and stars of the Mariinsky Theater (known to some readers by its revolutionary name: the Kirov Theater). The singers were uniformly very good; we had previously seen Mazeppa in the role of Alberich in the Mariinsky Ring Cycle at Baden-Baden in 2004.



That was followed (also at the Mariinsky = Kirov) by the ballet Swan Lake by Tchaikovsky, which had been given a happy ending (the Prince defeats the evil Swan King and lives happily ever after with his Swan, raising a daughter named Hope). I'm not a big ballet fan, and this did not change my general opinion, but it was marvellously done. I was surprised and amused by the sheer noise of ballet: when 28 swans all touch down at once, their feet drown out the orchestra. Nobody ever talks about this aspect of ballet, the constant tap-tap-tap-THUD of many feet. It put me in mind of the Japanese puppet theatre, where everyone pretends not to see the black-dressed mummies moving the puppets around. Just by the way (the Lioness would call this a testosterone comment) the ballerinas were much "larger" than is usual in the west. Our ballerinas are typically stick figures, even scrawnier than Laura Flynn Boyle, you would take them home not for sex a romantic evening but to feed them; these Russians were good healthy girls.



The second opera was Rigoletto by Verdi, sung in Italian so the surtitles were in Russian; but hey we all know Rigoletto, right? Quite good, very moving. The productions (this and Mazeppa) were very different in style and staging: M had been realistic and classical, R was abstract and modern in the "bare stage with one large Thing" mode.

That will have to do for now. I picked up a nasty cold and/or sinus infection on the way back and now need my beauty sleep. More anon.

Roses

This may be the last post for a while, I'm off to Russia tomorrow for a week. I'm "doing" the White Nights Festival in St. Petersburg with my parents and a group of opera fans, we have seen Rings together in New York, Baden-Baden and Amsterdam.

I'll try to find internet cafés or some such blog-enablers to keep you posted (and to keep myself up to date on all your doings), but don't wish to make promises that I might not be able to keep.

I shall leave you with the glory of my neighbour's rose garden:



Take care, be good, have a wonderful week.

[Update: The alarm clock is set for 3:30am, the taxi is ordered for 4:30. Wish me well, that I don't fall asleep during the 3-hour stopover in Frankfurt.]