The Urbanauts are a collective, active at Munich's Ludwig Maximillian University. They emerged from the School of Architecture, with a mission to redefine how public spaces are seen and used.
The links lead to web pages which tell you how to participate. The first activity is TODAY, November 3, so hurry. Sadly, I'm abroad, so I'll miss it.
I believe the ultimate goal is to create a public performance which mimics a flock of starlings. The video below comes from their website, and is meant to give you an idea of the concept. I can hardly wait.
I made MTV Deutschland my German teacher. They subtitle their broadcasts, so I can compare the spoken English with its translation. But a little too often, the translation doesn't quite stretch far enough, and English creeps back in.
In Fine Academic Tradition, Further Research Conducted at Pub.
I was sitting in the pub the other day, watching Pimp My Ride.
That's because Master Right bans MTV from our house. The network's
many reality shows grate against his finely tuned Japanese sense of
politeness.
We once watched Survivor on CBS in New York. "Why must they
vote people off the island?" he asked. "Can't they all stay on the
island and live in harmony? That's what we would do."
Nobody has been voted off, say, Honshu. I guess that's why Japan is so crowded.
Watching MTV Deutschland generates similar disgust in him. "Why must the New York lady act so mean? Why can't the Osbournes get along? Why are these people so cruel to each other?"
I explained it to him. "They're being cruel to each other because...um, that's the point."
You (familiar) need immediate therapy. Piss at yourself, you dull-witted cow. (from New York Goes to Hollywood, Episode 1)
That's why he sends me to the pub to watch MTV on their ogre-like
far-seer. One day, it showed a young lady with a sad-looking Chevy
S10, as she made her case for pimphood.
In German, she declares in that my truck is the same as my character. Literally, the verb suggests that her truck is very becoming.
But wait! What have we here? She tells us that when one over it rubs, one catches totally grey hands.
Now, why does she rubbeln her car when she could reiben it, würgeln it, nitscheln it, or use any one of a dozen perfectly good German words for rub?
It seems that the English word rub has crept into German through gambling. When instant lotteries were launched, marketers coined the phrase Rubbellos, or Rub-and-Go.
Perhaps an English speaker, when hearing the phrase rub-and-go, would think of other things.
Those other things came up in the next programme, a lie-detector dating show. You know, the one where an attractive girl asks questions of two horny suitors, and her friend puts their answers through a voice-stress analyser to see if they play loose with the truth.
OK, the girl wants to embarrass Horny Guy #1, named Josh. She asks him when did you first discover your dick?
Josh is taken aback. He asks for clarification: my dick?
Yes, replies his interrogator, your penis.
This is an outrage, for two reasons.
First, there's the double standard. Would a male get away with asking a woman when did you discover your twat?
Second, network subtitlers used the English word penis. That's right. P-E-N-I-S.
C'mon, MTV! You can't tell me that there's no German word for penis. In fact, if you count the German dialect known as Yiddish, there's a Reichtumof them.
According to Leo Rosten's indispensable tome, The Joys of Yiddish, the dialect seems to require as many words for penis as Eskimos require for snow. I especially like the Yiddish word schmuck, which we have borrowed into American English to mean...well, a schlemiel. Schmuck is the Yiddish word for the penis, derived from the German word for ornament or jewellery.
The sign for a well-known Munich jeweller. Not an atheist hurling an insult.
Josh replies that he discovered his dick at the age of seven. A blatant lie that the lie-detector missed. (Do you gentlemen out there not agree?)
And so with seven years did I meet my penis...
His foe Alex fared worse. The woman asked him if he'd ever dated twins. Now, I don't know about you, but I suspect that just thinking about it would make a fellow's voice tremble a bit. Sorry, Alex.
One of the maidens wanted more from me...
But I digress. Back to the business of language.
Peace. Out.
Host Xzibit signs off every episode of Pimp My Ride by wishing "Peace"to his audience. The subtitlers don't translate it.
Of course, there's a word for peace in German: Frieden. And Germans use it in many phrases you'd recognise: keep the peace, peace and quiet, two enemies making peace. So what makes wishing someone a peaceful life, untranslatable?
Would a native German speaker care to weigh in on the issue? Or Cliff, perhaps?
* * * * *
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My office is across the street from the Theresienwiese, where the Oktoberfest is held. Here are a few people I met one day, walking to the subway station.
In 2005, San Francisco design collective Rebar declared the first annual Park[ing] Day. In a gesture designed to liberate our streets from the scourge of the parked car, citizens claim a metered spot and turn it into a public park of the human sort; a place where ordinary people can interact. In the words of the founders, Park[ing] Day is "intended to promote creativity, civic engagement, critical thinking, unscripted social interactions, generosity and play."
Groovy Munich communications agency Büro Gelb decamped from their offices on nearby Einsteinstraße to take part. One of their staffers explained the creative rationale behind Gelb's 2009 Park[ing] Day concept. "Usually, most Park[ing] Day parks have trees and greenery. We thought that was very predictable." He then used an English word which I hear a lot in translation, when discussing high-concept affairs. "We wanted to do something unseen."
Germans, as has been observed, pursue irony with a passion. Parking a carin a park which is supposed to reclaim the street from parked cars could do one of two things:
Make a brilliantly ironic statement about the role of motorised transport in our lives and culture.
9.00 am,18 September 2009. Traffic restrictions in place around my office. The neighbourhood braces itself for Oktoberfest, which opens across the street on September 19.
10.00 am., 18 September 2009. Supermarket near my office puts buckets of sand near front door. The store is on the path between the Oktoberfest meadow and the local subway station. It helps to clean up any alcohol-induced unpleasantness. They have also employed security guards.
12.00 noon, 18 September 2009. Facebook message from expatriate neighbour:
Uh, oh. Dirndl appears to have shrunk in closet since last year.
1.15 pm,18 September 2009. Text message from Expat Blogger Pal to headbang8:
Do you guys own a sewing machine? My dirndl needs emergency surgery. Thx.
1.30 pm, 18 September 2009. Text message from headbang8 to Expat Blogger Pal:
We're not THAT gay. Too much of the good life, my dear?
1.45 pm, 18 September 2009. Text message from Expat Blogger Pal to headbang8
The good life went straight to my bustline.Have you bought lederhosen yet?
1.45 pm, 18 September 2009. Text message from headbang8 to Expat Blogger Pal.
They're still fattening the cow, I'm afraid.
2.07 pm, 18 September 2009. Text message from Expat Blogger Pal to headbang8
BTW, no pictures of my boobs this year. Or else.
2.09 pm, 18 September 2009. Text message from headbang8 to Expat Blogger Pal
Awww. Your boobs are my most Googled picture.
2.26 pm, 18 September 2009. Text message from Expat Blogger Pal to headbang8
You mean I'm being Google-ogled?
4.30, 18 September 2009. Facebook message from two buddies abroad.
We are sooo looking forward to visiting Germany next week. We'll be happy if we can have lots of food and drink. Will that be OK?
An exhibition poster at the Odeonsplatz subway station, Munich.
Did you ever know a gentlewoman—your former schoolteacher, or a maiden aunt—who felt coy about swearing, no matter how much she wanted to? Such a woman would never dream of cursing a minor frustration with a muttered shit! But she might happily say, in a ringing voice, merde! A foreign tongue made her vulgar thought rather more polite.
I'm beginning to feel the same way about fuck.
Now, we all know that fuck is a meaningless syllable in many languages, including German. But natives of other tongues have picked up a vague idea of its meaning, and the word has become rather popular.
Do non-native speakers of English, even the most skilled, really know how to use it?
"What a fucking day it's been!" I once declared to Master Right.
"Yes," he agreed, "It's been very fucking."
Since then, fucking has become my favourite predicate adjective. The day is fucking. The printer is fucking. The pump jockey at the gas station is fucking. Christmas is fucking.
I've brought all my interpretive skills to bear on the exhibition poster above. I'm still not quite sure what the artist was trying to get at.
Is he trying to say that beauty and hauteur go together? That fame makes you bitter? That that Marilyn Monroe would never have sex with anyone who rides the subway?
English is a long way from becoming the undisputed international language of business, diplomacy, science or academia. (They say, for example, that three-quarters of the world's tax law is written in German. And I believe them.)
But English has turned into the preferred lingua franca for the crude. Blame rock'n'roll.
The world really should make a thorough study of English vulgarity. Starting with that nasty little word at the top of the list. Fuck seems to be everywhere, but not its evil twin. Can you find it on the box below, for a Japanese CD rack?
French is the language of seduction; Italian the language of passion; German the language of precision; and Japanese the language of politeness. English....well, it found a different calling, I guess.
EDIT: To my esteemed colleagues in the office. Don't worry. You certainly know how to swear properly! With great skill and charm, I might add.
In the eighties, Melbourne actors Nick Giannopolous and Simon Palomares were fed up.
Australian soap operas like Neighbours had taken off in the UK. Gloomy Thatcherated Brits loved all the bright, shining, optimistic faces. Such shows gave bread-and-butter work to many Australian actors—to some, even fame
Those bright, shining, optimistic faces were bright, shiny and very, very white. A Sydney casting agent once described the so-called Classic Australian look to me; tall, lean, and dark-blonde, with the hint of a tan. Think Paul Hogan, but younger.
Critics complain, even to this day. Neighbours is set in Melbourne, the third largest Greek city in the world. Yet it has taken over twenty years for the first regular Greek character to appear.
Rebuffed by the establishment media, Giannopolous and Palomares made their own luck. In 1987, the pair teamed with fellow actors George Kapinaris and Mary Coustas to produce a stage show. They called it Wogs out of Work.
The show, from a comic standpoint, shone brilliant. The characters were fresh, outrageous, and larger-than-life. The jokes pulled no punches and respected no boundaries.
I still recall the final sketch, in which Kapinaris and Giannopolous played immigrant women at work in a cannery. The characters chatted as they performed their mindless tasks, speaking mostly of their children. In the course of the conversation, it became clear that they understood almost nothing about the lives which the second generation led in the New World.
The comics milked the material for laughs, yes, but amongst the laughter they affirmed a touching faith in the immigrant dream. That no matter how tough your circumstance, how mindless your factory job, it's worth it if your children can live better than you do.
Stop Laughing. It's Not Nice.
Australia's multicultural establishment was outraged. Many harped on the fact that the show contained ethnic stereotypes. Some acknowledged that the characters "validated the experience" of immigrants, but soundly deplored those who made similar jokes without the pedigree for it.
The multiculturalists saved their worst scorn for a very, very white comedian named Mark Mitchell*. A little after the Wogs, he created a character known as Con the Fruiterer, a Greek greengrocer who milked laughs from malapropisms and a cheerful disregard for the rules of business.
Amid barbs from the chattering classes, a curious thing happened.
Over a million people saw Wogs out of Work on stage. It spawned two sitcom spin-offs: an ensemble piece called Acropolis Now, and a star vehicle for Mary Coustas, called Effie. Real Greek greengrocers named Constantine stuck pin-ups of Con the Fruiterer in their shop windows, for a laugh.
Actors like Alex Dimitriades began to score roles in mainstream cop dramas. A certain swarthy Croatian standup named Eric Banadinovich (better known as Eric Bana) got his own TV show.
Notwithstanding the recalcitrant Neighbours, so-called "wogs" began to appear all over the Australian media.
Did it weaken some of the glass ceilings which NESB Australians faced in other walks of life? This recent article from Jason Di Russo reminds us that it still has a long way to go. But the ability to laugh at one's differences, and one's self, earns you a great deal of moral authority.
Di Russo quotes Italian-Australian journalist James Painichi on the Wogs out of Work phenomenon:
"They started off as buffoons when buffoons were exactly what was
needed. You needed that kind of a figure to take the piss out of people
while not taking yourself too seriously. [When] you're laughing at yourself, you get a chance to throw a few arrows in the right direction."
Why am I telling you this story? Because I recently saw Sacha Baron Cohen's movie, Brüno.
Wogs Out of Work, Fags Out of Drag.
Homocrats have made polite, but predictable noises. Rashad Robinson, senior director of media programs for the Gay and
Lesbian Alliance Against Defamation, said to the Hollywood Reporter.
"We do feel the intentions of the filmmakers are in the right place—satire of this form can unmask homophobia—but at the same
time it can heighten people's discomfort with our community,"
Robinson was particularly skeptical of the way Brüno's adopted African baby worked itself into the plot.
"That wasn't really unmasking homophobia... especially in a
country [the USA] where same-sex couples can still be denied the ability to
adopt children that they've raised since birth. Trivializing gay
families isn't a joke."
You don't need to be gay to sneer. Brits seem to be OK, but the elite media in the USAviewed Brüno as debris to scrape from the bottom of the nation's cultural shoe.
Brüno is not a New Yorker cartoon. You don't see it and have a quiet chuckle to yourself, while nodding "How true, how true..." Brüno is a belly-laugh.
What, exactly, makes this concept so difficult to understand?
Anthony Lane, the New Yorker film critic, writes:
"In his relentless, unmistakably Anglo-Freudian insistence on the
genital and the anal, Baron Cohen takes the double entendre and strips
it to a single one, placing in full view what used to be a smirking
aside."
I'm not sure wat he means by this, but I think he means that Brüno makes dick jokes. And dick jokes couldn't possibly be funny, right?
"To be fair, the two young women beside me howled at the talking penis
(not a bad emblem of the average male, they would say)....Even so,
there was something forced in the women’s laughter, as if they wanted
to banish any suspicion of prudery, and to prove themselves far too
cool for disgust."
It's not the young women who are trying to be cool, I fear.
Frankly, dick jokes are useful. Nothing disarms a homophobe so much as reaching into your pants and flopping out the old fella..
That's pretty much what Brüno does when he interviews an ex-gay pastor—a target whom Lane regards as too easy.
Now, one could lure one's victim into a cunning rhetorical trap, fault his theology, and expose him with one's rapier-sharp arguments.
Or you could just point out that the guy is obviously still a flaming nancy. Too easy, yes. But really the only sensible answer to such blatant stupidity.
The New Yorker headlined Lane's review with the words Mein Camp. Must New Yorker types always see the world through a lens of camp, irony, and multiple entendre? Maybe someone should tell them that Brüno is a big, fat, fucking joke.
Should we take lessons in irony from a magazine that put the Obamas on its cover, dressed as terrorists doing a fist bump, and who thought it was funny?
Having seen Brüno, I can assure you the scenes of gay life are obvious
parody. As intended, they mock the haters who paint such a picture, rather than mocking gay life itself.
Outrageousness redeems Brüno. If you take it seriously, you look like the fool, not the clown onscreen.
Not 100% funny.
Of course, there are parts of the film which are very poorly judged, and offensive.
I cringed at Brüno's swing through the Middle East. The character can successfully expose hypocrisy about subjects where a gay fashion reporter is relevant—homophobia, or the shallowness of celebrity. But the scenes in which he provokes people of goodwill from both sides of the Israeli-Palestinian debate is not satire, it is mockery. It fails.
The less said about his interview with Ayman Abu Aita, the better. There were no belly laughs lurking there, let me tell you.
The Middle East is a hotbed of homophobia. Such prejudice deserves enormous scorn, whether through comedy or other means. But here, Brüno falls flat.
Laugh, and the world laughs with you
In the early part of the twentieth century, a short, scrawny Jewish kid named Melvin Kaminsky got beat up every day in his Brooklyn schoolyard. He worked out that a few jokes would disarm even the meanest bullies.
If they laugh with you, they can't hate you. Hatred doesn't crack a smile.
Today, we know this kid as Mel Brooks. And one of his favourite comic subjects is his own Jewishness.
Jewish humour teaches us about the role of a good laugh in overcoming hatred. Its gentle self-deprecation robs the anti-semite of his power. Should someone start to mock you, mock yourself first. It leaves the other guy nowhere to land a punch.
Just as important, the Jews I know seem very gracious about such ethnic humour. One of my Jewish friends remarked that he didn't mind if gentiles cracked Jewish jokes. "Many of them are quite funny," he said to me, once. "But remember, we Jews always have better Jewish jokes. That is to say, worse ones."
I'm a bald guy. If someone can crack a better bald joke than me, or even a bald joke at my expense, more power to him. But beware. I know some of the meanest bald jokes around.
I've tried to make subculture jokes about groups to which I don't belong. You know what? I failed.
Both Sasha Baron Cohen and Mel Brooks† have made their share of gay jokes. That's OK, as long as gay guys crack better fag gags than they do. That is, worse ones.
I can hear the outcry already. These stereotypes demean gay men. They trivialise us. They make us harmless.
Please think me silly, funny and harmless. It beats being a wicked perverter of the impressionable, and destroyer of traditional marriage. Just maybe, a guffaw works better for my rights than enforced PC.
Taking strides toward equality, one go-go boot at a time.
I understand how spokespersons for GLBT organisations can fault many aspects of Brüno. But I disagree with their fundamental stance.
Brüno follows the arc of a classic romance. Our hero abandons his shallow quest for glamour in the name of true love. He settles down with Lutz, his faithful assistant, and lives happily ever after. Swedish actor Gustaf Hammarsten deliberately plays Lutz without gay affectations, and the perfomance tells us that stereotypes don't always apply. Look closely, and you'll find Brüno becomes quite a traditional morality tale.
Earnestness has its place. But so does fun.
Have the nay-sayers forgotten the drag queens of the Stonewall Tavern, forty years ago, who made more progress for gay rights in one night than their assimilationist counterparts did in a decade?
Have they forgotten how much good PR comes from the sheer, outrageous joy of a Pride parade?
Have they forgotten that people love clowns?
Or do they look on "gayface"—which millions of gay men wear, in earnest, every day—with embarassment and contempt?
I ask you, who are the real homophobes?
* * * * * *
* Full disclosure: in my non-blog, non-anonymous life, I have worked with Mark Mitchell. Before he was famous, of course.
My guide to the homosphere, including the blogs of quality queers. Be gay the Headbang way!
Coming out of the safety of the closet was easier for me than coming out of the mindwarp of the church. This page has plenty for the godless and groovy, including Mojoey's incomparable Atheist Blogroll.
People often ask about life as an expat. The experience is different for everyone. Here, you'll find stories and advice from my favourite modern-day immigrants.
Men and their minds sometimes don't get along. No wonder. The routine abuse that we suffer is enough to drive us crazy. Find links here to recovery resources, and the stories of men brave enough to use them.
The motto of a certain well-known advertising agency is Truth Well Told. The authors behind this link need no reminder that a well-told truth is powerful. They prove it. Of course, tales well woven, and jokes well cracked earn a berth here, too.
Sorry to disappoint, but Deutschland über Elvis, is not an Elvis Presley fansite. The title is a pun on the German national anthem, Deutschland uber Alles. Presley fans curious about his G.I. stretch in Germany (1958-1960) should whack elvisforever.de into BabelFish and follow the link to Elvis in Germany. It contains some extraordinary photos, and the story of a rumoured Munich mistress.
Teaching the Germans to party since 2007. No, not that party. Headbang8 proudly proclaims himself to be stateless, rootless, godless and gay. A fiftyish American-Australian chap, recently posted from New York to Munich. He and his Japanese husband regularly discover new reasons to think the other odd.
Alice Miller: The Body Never Lies: The Lingering Effects of Cruel Parenting I have suffered through endless therapy sessions, support groups, and self-help books which proclaim the abused must forgive their oppressors in order to find peace. Alice Miller calls bullshit on this quatsch, and shows that victims make better progress if they do NOT forgive their abusers. I concur.
Robert Whiting: You Gotta Have WA (Vintage Departures) Prospective expats often ask me for tips on doing business in Japan. This book, which tells the story of American baseball players recruited to Japanese clubs in the eighties, proved the single most useful guide to how a Japanese organisation works. Richard Whiting is a sportswriter who has spent most of his career in Japan, and carved a niche for himself explaining the curiosities of Japanese team sports. Check out his most famous work, The Chrysanthemum and the Bat.
Michael Heyward: The Ern Malley Affair This is so post-modern, it makes your head spin. In 1940s Australia, two would-be poets Harold Stewart and James McAuley grew tired of rejections from avant-garde literary journals. As a lark, the two composed what they thought was were silly parodies of the prevailing modernist school, and submitted them under an assumed name to Angry Penguins, a new journal published by the Adelaide dandy Max Harris. Harris said they were brilliant. The (real) authors revealed that the poems were frauds. Or were they still brilliant, even if the poets responsible never intended them to be? A fascinating artistic morality tale, which still stirs arguments in Australian academic circles.
Gore Vidal: Myra Breckinridge & Myron Today, Vidal concentrates on scathing essays and scandalous memoir. But you'll find his best work in his early satires. Myra Breckenridge tells the story of a ball-busting post-op transexual woman who wreaks revenge on the millieu of B-list celebs and wannabes who spurned her as a man. This short book carries not an ounce of fat; every word packs a punch. It is, without doubt, his masterpiece. The sequel, Myron, runs longer, and is just a little too aware of its own cleverness. Irritated at a Supreme Court decision on censorship, Vidal replaces each of the proscribed nine dirty words with the names of the Justices themselves. Oddly, the judges all seem to sport names which suit the purpose. I am especially fond of the name for a vulgarity which refers to the female genitalia; Justice Whizzer White.
Dana Thomas: Deluxe: How Luxury Lost Its Luster A staggeringly well-written book from a former Washington Post fashion correspondent. The many hundreds of billions of dollars which passes through the hands of the luxury goods industry has not trickled-down to the people who actually do the work. Once proud brands tarnish their reputations by badge-engineering. A merciless expose of luxury marketing, but one which respects the artisanal ideals which spawned the industry in the first place.
Japan Travel Bureau: Japan in Your Pocket: "Salaryman" in Japan No. 8 (Eibun Nihon Etoki Jiten) Perhaps the funniest book on Japanese culture ever written. And it's meant to be serious. Did you know that the highest ranking executive gets the safest seat in a taxi? I didn't, until this book explained all those silly details of business etiquette. Special section on how to curse your bucho.
Mark Leyner: My Cousin, My Gastroenterologist Dali once described surrealism as the chance meeting of a fish and an anvil on an ironing board. As a modern surrealist, Leyner provides plenty of anvils, but the fish are somehow missing. A dozen eskimos in bowler hats have just rung the doorbell, and I must get my llama to make them hot fudge sundaes. Do I make myself clear?
Muriel Spark: The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie The relationship between a gifted student and a truly inspiring teacher is an intimate one. So intimate, the student and teacher can resemble two lovers, with their intrigues, passions, and potential for betrayal. Spark's cool, detatched style is at odds with the simmering emotion that runs through this tale of adolescent self-discovery. It makes her story all the more heartbreaking. A masterpiece.
Nick Flynn: Another Bullshit Night in Suck City: A Memoir What effect does it have on your soul, if you're working in a homeless shelter, and your dad checks in? And you have to throw him out for bad behaviour? A gut-wrenching tale of family dysfunction, emotional torture, and (yes) vanity. Flynn is a poet, and he tells his tale in a way that's morbidly beautiful.
Mary Karr: The Liars Club Like Nick Flynn, another poet tells her tale of childhood neglect and abuse. The portrait she paints of her star-crossed parents, held together by lust and divided my tragedy, will bring you to tears.
P.J. O'Rourke: Republican Party Reptile O' Rourke says he's a Republican, but he appears on NPR. A (political) party animal. His viewpoints, in large measure, suck. But I bet he mixes a mean Gimlet.
Did you enjoy your visit to Deutschland über Elvis? Then take home a souvenir from the Euros über Elvis gift shop. Select from a fine range of quality Schmuck and Flitterkram, , including "Schwanzdraper" boxer shorts, "Johann Six-Pack" baseball jerseys, "Bavarian Beast" beer steins, and more! Why stop at Einstein? Buy zwei or drei Steins! All proceeds donated to beer.
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