Vignettes #68

Recently in conversation Ursula and I were discussing the topic of filming locations, and if we had visited such a location, because we had seen it in a movie, or even experienced a filming situation before. We were talking about any place in general, but came upon London specifically. Ursula mentioned that she experienced the filming of the ape escape scene for "Greystoke: The Legend of Tarzan, Lord of the Apes" at the Albert memorial in Kensington Gardens, while she was on visit there together with her sister and a friend. This must have been in 1983, since the movie was first released in early 1984. 

Coincidentally, I myself experienced the filming of the same scene, when I was on my annual visit to London with my pals. We didn't see the actual filming - we probably missed that by a few minutes - but all the equipment, props and some costumed actors were still there at the memorial, in the park and around the Royal Albert Hall and down to the Natural History Museum.

Ursula and I came together later in 1990. In 1983 we didn't know each other yet, but we obviously were close and our ways may have even crossed!

Vignettes #67

All through the 80s, before I opened a cinema of my own, I worked at and helped build up the cinema of the town's film club, which was (and still is) supported by the city administration and located within its museum complex. Since this was a non-commercial institution, we were obliged to screen a quality program with accompanying educational events, usually seminars, lectures, etc.
One of these events was a long weekend seminar on East European cinema, and for this occasion we had guests from Czechoslovakia, Poland and Estonia who were professionally involved in the film and cinema business of their countries. I must add that this was some years before the Iron Curtain fell, so this was an unusual and rather rare contact with the socialist cinema of those times. There were a lot of things going on those four days, and over time I'll be telling the stories.
The socialist system of these countries had no private or commercial economy, all businesses were state owned, and so it was with cinema as well. All people working within the film business were actual employees of the state. 
Our guest from Poland ran the city cinema of Posen, and he brought along his wife and children - and a large collection of Polish movie posters. As mentioned: the state employed real artists to create their own movie posters for new movies (the official international posters were not allowed in the country). Of course, the state expected top quality art from their employees, and there actually were some very good ones in the collection. Our guest only wanted to show them as an exhibition, but very quickly he got requests from the Western participants to purchase them. He hadn't expected that their would be a demand for the art, so at first he gave them as gifts, mostly to us who were organizing the seminar. But the demand grew, and his wife and we told him to put a price on them, the income would be welcome to him. So, on the second day he asked for 5 German Marks (~ 2.50 Euros in today's currency)  per poster. His wife, however, complained that he was giving them away too cheap. On the next day the price went up to 10 Marks, and on the last day it was 15 Marks. All in all he had reached an income of several hundred Marks - that was about as much as he would earn at his job in one year!
I had 2-3 of the posters, but lost them all over the decades. I only can remember that Blue Velvet was one of them - which I really didn't like...

Vignettes #66

It is at times astounding how you are perceived by other people without being aware of it. I take the bus to work, a 15-minute ride each way. I use this time to read whatever book I'm currently interested in. I manage about 10 pages per ride, that makes 20 pages a day. At home and elsewhere I read a lot as well, but usually others things, magazines, online reviews, etc. Most passengers don't read; a lot of them, especially the younger ones, fiddle around with their phones and music players.
Of course, I've been taking the very same bus for years, but don't really take notice of my surroundings. On one occasion I missed my bus stop to get off, because I was so immersed in my book. But the bus driver halted for me again and let me out.
Sometimes I'm too tired to read, so I just sit there and enjoy my daydreams. On such a day an elderly man came over to my seat and said: "Excuse me, may I ask: why aren't you reading today?"
More often I'm asked about what I'm reading and maybe it'll produce a conversation, although I'd rather go on reading.
And now, just recently, I have noticed on my daily bus ride: more and more people are reading books!

Vignettes #65

It is tradition in Bavaria that on Epiphany Day the altar boys (or some other volunteers) from your parish dress up as the Three Wise Men from the Orient and together with the priest they wander from door to door. They're called "Sternsinger" (Star Singers). If you open the door, they will offer to sing you a hymn, and the priest will bless your house for the new year. You donate a small amount of money for charity and for the kids some fruit and sweets. With chalk they will mark your house door, this year it's "20*C+M+B+15", the letters are abbreviations for Caspar, Melchior and Balthasar.
Last time they 'caught' me I asked how much it'll cost me that they don't sing, since it's always a bit of an embarrassing situation. 5 bucks did it. This year coming home from work I found a note in our mailbox stating "We were here and belssed your house in your absence".

Vignettes #64

Last Sunday I woke up late and had to hurry my breakfast to get on my way to reach my bus to work. Still drowsy I climbed down our stairway and I already heard some loud voices outside in the narrow alley we live in. Just as I opened the door to step out I almost tripped over a blood soaked man laying there his head leaned against the neighboring house door. I turned my head to look up the alley and found myself staring into a camera. Further upwards was a group of maybe 20-30 zombies watching the scene! I had to force myself through the crwod, I really had no time to take this all in. Later I found out that this was film project for our local theater (Einhörn), the initiator a former colleague of mine.

Vignettes #63

Last night I dreamt I had managed to purchase tickets for one of the Kate Bush concerts in September, I got the ones at the lowest price of £49. Standing in a long queue for quite a while I asked one of the security guards behind the gate what I can expect for my tickets. "Oh," he replied. "That's up in the dilapidated top floor. It's every man for himself up there. You can read a book or do some knitting, but you won't be seeing the concert."

Vignettes #62

(art: Antonio de Pereda)

Recently I had such a wonderful that I decided to write it down as soon as I wake up. But in the morning I had forgotten everything but my resolution. The next night I had the same or a very similar dream. At least I recognized it as a recurrence.  And again the next day I had forgotten it. I can only remember that I had a wonderful dream

Vignettes #61

 Some people who know me well call me a 'weirdo magnet'. Just tonight Ursula and I went to visit the opening of an exhibition ('Armenhausreich' at the Kunstverein Graz) where quite a few of our friends were participating artists, and we expected to meet a lot more friends on the occasion. We arrived timely, and the show was already well attended. For a moment we both just stood there taking in the scenery and checking for familar faces. It was just a few seconds, but enough time for an elderly heavyset guy to approach us asking whether we had a few moments time for him. Politely, but reluctantly we didn't say no, and this man started talking about 'outer space physics' and how the 'powers above us' are manipulating us. He managed to include health insurance abuse in his sermon and how our democracy is being undermined. Nothing what he said made any sense, and he was rapidly mentioning different topics which obviously had no connection to each other. We finally managed to shake him off by accepting his flyer and promising to 'study' it. Later a short look didn't help much either, especially since the paper had a text no longer than 4 or 5 sentences. Obviously, he was on about the so-called 'Weltraumgesetz' (The 1967 'Treaty on Principles Governing the Activities of States in the Exploration and Use of Outer Space, including the Moon and Other Celestial Bodies') and his aim was to install some kind of human rights declaration within this law...

Vignettes #60

A friend of mine has 2 sons, the oldest one is attending 3rd grade elementary school. Recently my pal got a phone call by an irate priest who was giving his son lessons to prepare him for first communion. Obviously, his son had called the priest a 'Spatzerlhirn' which is a Bavarian expression, literally a 'sparrow's brain'. I don't think it needs any explanation. So while my friend politely aplogized for his son's behaviour, he was in fact quite proud of his boy.

Vignettes #59

In 1981 I made a six-week grand tour of the United States with 2 of my pals. We started with New York City and from there it was Florida, San Francisco, Yosemite National Park, Las Vegas, Grand Canyon, Death Valley, Los Angeles, St. Louis and then back for a full week in NYC. Besides sightseeing I intended to get to as many record stores as possible and find rare stuff that you couldn't get in Europe. Of course I was successful. However, I did have the stupid idea to bring along some German records, hard-to-get music on independent labels, which I thought I could trade in at some stores. Well, nobody had ever heard of the likes of bands like Missus Beastly, a 70s fusion rock band, so I never got rid of them. At one small second-hand record store in St. Louis which had a wonderful variety of rare and obscure titles I tried to do the trade-in, but there, too, they said no. So I did ask whether there was any interest in German or European music at all. "Oh yes", the store owner replied. "I'll pay any price for a Conrad Schnitzler album." Well, I was only vaguely familiar with that name, Schnitzler was a founding member of the German electronic band Tangerine Dream and later with Kluster, afterwards releasing and distributing his work all on his own. At that time I didn't have much respect for that kind of music and was a bit surprised there was a market in the States for German electronic music. I assume it was initiated by Kraftwerk's success in the USA. Conrad Schnitzler remained a hardly known experimental composer and he released a last album, Consequenz 010B, a collaboration with Wolfgang Seidel, a few weeks ago. Conrad Schnitzler died from stomach cancer in the evening 4 August 2011.

Vignettes #58

National Geographic is a magazine I gew up with. My American grandpa had a subscription from very early on, and in his basements he had hundreds of old editions going back as far as the 19th century. As a child I often spent hours leafing them through and taking in all those photos. I guess I got my fascination for photographic images from there. When we moved to Germany National Geographic was with us, since my Grandpa gave us a lifelong subscription. In Germany we spent our afternoons after school with our German grandparents having lunch with them and doing our homework till my parents got off from their jobs and picked us up. One afternoon I was leafing through a new edition of National Geographic, when my German grandafther gave me a sceptical look and told me to give him the magazine. It was open to an editorial about some native tribe in South America or Africa, and there were photos of naked people all over the pages. My garndfather was a very strict Catholic and didn't speak a word of English, so he wouldn't have known what the text is about. He took a long look at the photos, and I thought he was going to forbid me to look at this magazine ever again. To me surprise he explained to me: "These people live in regions where the weather is extremely hot. Therefore they have no need for clothes. If we lived there, we would do the same."
Although my German grandfather was a very simple man who came from a small town hidden in the Bavarian boondocks and was raised under a very strict and unwordly Catholic environment , he always found reasonable explanations for things you though he might not understand. I eternally admired him for that.

Vignettes #57

The Munich newspaper Süddeutsche Zeitung writes out annually a summer quiz which is notorious for its difficult riddles, over 4 weeks of about 40 brainteasers. At the end it's merely amazing that there is any winner at all. In the early 90s there was the following question:
A customer at the customer buys 4 items and goes with them to the cash register. The cashier types in the prices and says: "That makes $7.77 altogether." The customer protests: "I saw that you multiplied the 4 prices, but you must add them!" The cashier makes an apology and this time adds the prices up. "Well surprise: the sum is also $ 7.77!" So, the question is what are the prices of the 4 items which you can add up or multiply and still the result will be $7.77.
My pal Gerhard is a mathematician, and he told me that at our university all mathematicians working at his faculty were trying to figure out this problem with 4 unknowns. It is not solvable with a simple equation. Actually these experts agreed that you can only find the solution by going through all possible multiplications. So they wrote a program and fed it to the university computer. This was in the early 90s, so it took the computer all night to solve the problem, I guess it ran for 8-10 hours.

I argued that this can't be the way to solve a riddle that is directed to a general audience albeit a more intellectual one. There must be some way to solve it without using highly sophisticated equipment. Basically you'd need to simply try out some variations using simple assumptions, but my pal Gerhard is convinced the only stringent approach is to go through all factors...
After I found a small hint I did get the solution, but Gerhard still disagrees concerning the approach.

Vignettes #56

Whenever I hear speak of 'authoritarian personality' I instantly think of certain teachers I had at school. I guess we've all experienced this kind of teacher sometimes in our lives. In the 5th grade I started at a new school, a German 'Gymnasium', which is a higher-level school where you can go to from elementary school, if you achieve certain grades. The new teacher responsible for our specific class, all male pupils, was a fairly young man who only educated on one subject, arts. On first appearance he seemed to be a liberal and pleasant-natured person, but we soon learnt that he had a mean streak in him, too. On one occasion he had to leave the classroom for a minute or two to talk to someone. However, he left the door to the classroom open, and from where he was standing outside he had a complete view of everything going on inside. Of course, since we were young boys, we all did some chatting and some were a bit more rambunctious. When the teacher came back, he was obviously not amused. Instead of scolding the whole class, he mentioned one of our names and told the boy to stand up. "I'm punishing you, because you were not still, while I was absent," he said. Naturally the boy protested and said that we all had not been still, others had been even worse. "That is true," the teacher replied. "But I'm punishing only you, because you are the one I'm picking out."
A similar incident: this teacher tells an -admittedly - funny joke, and we all have a good laugh. The teacher, however, punished one of us, because he had laughed a bit louder than the rest of us.

Vignettes #55

While discussing Samuel Beckett's play Come and Go Ursula told me the following story she had once experienced: Ursula was with her friend Uschi at one of our local coffeehouses having a coffee and a chat. As in Beckett's play there were 3 elderly ladies at a table nearby and it was impossible not to overhear their gossip. Most obviously they were talking quite nasty about another person not present at their table. After a while one of the ladies left the group, and Uschi told Ursula to wait a few seconds and listen. Sure enough the two remaining ladies started slagging about their friend who had just left the table.

Vignettes #54

While spending a weekend in Dublin in 2010 celebrating my parents' 50th wedding anniversary I had a lot of time to spare and no real plans of what to do. I did take some extensive walks around town and at Trinity College I noticed a bulletin announcing an afternoon preview performance of Samuel Beckett's Happy Days staged by students at the Samuel Beckett Centre on campus. I immediately decided I wanted to see it. In order to be prepared I went to the Hodges Figgis bookstore and bought a paperback copy of the play. I spent the hours before the scheduled performance at 2pm on campus reading the play and enjoying the perfect weather. Then I went to check the bulletin again, but it wasn't there anymore. Although that was a bit strange, I didn't think much of it and went on to the Samuel Beckett Centre about 15 minutes before the announced opening. Again it was strange that there was nobody else there, and the ticket counter was closed. The side doors to the theatre were wide open, and I heard a lot of noise coming from inside. I took a peek inside and what I saw were workers and stage designers hard at work yelling orders to each other, and the whole stage was in disarray. I did wait till past the scheduled entrance time, but nothing happened. Obviously the stage was not ready for a performance anytime soon, and the play had been canceled. I went off again disappointed and imagined Samuel Beckett chuckling from his grave.

Vignettes #53

My late pal Martin was a very shy and closed person, but a good friend ever since our school days. We were a larger group of friends we shared interests in, cinema, music and many other things. In 1979 the movie Caligula had its theatrical release in Germany. It was already notorious for having amounts of sex and violence in it, so we all were eager to see it, but it had an 18 rating which means you must be of full age to be admitted. Some of us were not 18 yet including Martin, so it was just discussing schemes how we might get a way into the cinema. One evening we were again debating the possibilities, when Martin suddenly commented matter-of-factly: "You're talking about Caligula? Oh, I watched it last week." We were all dumbstruck, since he hadn't mentioned that before and we were also wondering how he got himself into the cinema. "Well," we wanted to know, "did it have as much sex and violence everybody was talking about?" "I guess so" he replied. "But I'm not really sure." "Why are you not sure, you were there, weren't you?" "Yes, I did see it." He explained. "But I forgot my glasses, so all I saw was moving silhouettes and colors."
I still haven't seen the movie to this day...

Vignettes #52

I've already mentioned before attending an interdisciplinary seminar at the university on the topic of censorship, which included professors and students from the psychology, law, art, theology and German literature faculties. I also told you that the psychology professor there was a quite awkward person.

With my activity as a cinema owner and my work with Lyssa humana I was very experienced with many aspects of censorship and able to participate quite actively with the discussions, which most of the professors very much appreciated - but not the psychology guy who seemed to dislike me, but then he apparently wasn't liked by his own colleagues either. I think he was self-opinionated, quite ignorant of the achievement of others and a bit scheming.

One day he announced that he had an extraordinary case he wanted to discuss with the group bypassing the schedule for that day. It was immediately obvious that it was meant to be a provocation in my direction. He described the contents of the German horror and splatter movie Nekromantik 2 in all its bloody details trying to shock us listeners. Then he expressed his own disgust about 'this hideous trash' and his shock that a German court had ruled the movie to be 'art' and was therefore not banned.

Since I actually knew the director, Jörg Buttgereit, personally, and had so far played all his movies at the cinema including Nekromantik 2 I explained that despite the summary the director had rather made the attempt to create a more artsy film than part 1 had been, and when I had screened it at my cinema there were flocks of disappointed fans leaving the movie midway for the simple fact that they thought it was boring.

So, after having said that, one of the law professors addressed his psychology colleague with the words: "If a German judge says it is art, and Mr. Kretschmer here says it is art, then we have all means to believe that it is truly so."

Vignettes #51

Sometimes people amaze with their kind of self-concept especially concerning the jobs they work. At my cinema we had an annual Shakespeare festival which was basically a week long screening of movie adaptations of William Shakespeare's plays. It was organized like a real festival with 3-4 different movies each day, and we printed a poster and a leaflet to advertise for the program. We tried to find sponsors and advertisers for the festival, and Ursula had the idea that the largest bookstore could support us by decorating one of their shopping windows with the author's books and our program. The man at the bookstore responsible for their promotions declined and said: "I don't see what Shakespeare would have to do with a bookstore."

A similar incident concerned a local newspaper. As a cinema we regularly informed all newspapers and periodical mags about our program. This was besides our usual advertising in any of the papers that you had to pay for. You would just write up the names of the movies and the dates and hours when the screenings would be, and once a week you'd fax this information to all the papers. Usually a good newspaper has a billboard listing all kinds of local events like club meetings, small concerts, even the old ladies' Bingo evening, but also the movies of the week.

There was one free Sunday newspaper that was new, and I had been sending them our information for about a year, when I got a phone call from one of the editors. He was obviously astounded why he was getting these faxes from me, so I told him that that's what we - and anyone else organizing events - routinely do. He asked me to quit sending our program and said: "As a newspaper we have no use for such information."

Vignettes #50

The first years after having emigrated to Germany my sister and I spent most of our time after school with our German grandparents, since our parents both had jobs and worked till in the evening.

My German grandmother ('Oma') was a horribly pious Catholic and very active in all kinds of organisations within our parish like the woman's club and the so-called old folks' club. Besides having to join her on her daily church attendance (praying the rosemary) we also were forced to attend all those club meetings, while my pals were out having a great time playing.

Our Oma was second chairman of the old folks' club which consisted of about 200 old people from the parish. She was in some kind of competition with the first chairman, so one afternoon during Advent I was to recite a Christmas poem, since the first chairman's grandson would be doing the same.

Well, this kid, maybe 9 or 10, about a year younger than me, did his poem extremely well with no faults and with all the expression and pathos the folks liked to hear. I instantly hated this kid.

Then it was my turn, and although I usually am quite good at learning things by heart, I got stuck in the midst of my recital. My Oma who stood next to me was obviously embarrassed and annoyed and handed me the text to read the rest of the poem. And all those old people were shaking their heads in disbelief.

Despite not having wanted to disappoint my Oma the incident did have one advantage for me: I never had to attend one of those meetings ever again.

Vignettes #49

One of the many acquaintances I had from my cinema days was a fellow I knew by the name of Peter. About my age, maybe a few years younger, he was a film buff, too, and also shared my interest in American literature. So we usually had a jolly chat every time we met.

I did notice that he often emphasized all the big and little mishaps in his life, although he always appeared to be good-humoured. It was either the flooding of his apartment, a bad job, a supervisor who was constantly going after him, or generally his notion that most people didn't like him, although I could hardly ever understand that last point. I also found out that some friends knew him by the name of Peter, while others insisted that his name was Josef. Obviously he had 2 categories of friends he'd distinguish by the name they called him.

I hadn't seen him for a few years, when he did turn up again at my cinema. We started chatting, and he came up with lauding my life. He said I was such a lucky fellow with a beautiful girlfriend, a cinema of my very own and so many good friends.

This made me a bit uncomfortable so I tried to change the subject and asked him how he was doing, since I haven't seem him for such a long time. With a big smile on his face he replied: "Well, I came by, since today's a very special day: it's the first anniversary of my suicide attempt!"