Atop the mountain, we start, as always, with our shoes on the ground.
Because we're gonna need those shoes … to drink mountain beer. An old German hiker was happy to see me here. He counted and laughed.
… to greet mountain babies. Happens when babysitters work there.
… to greet mountain cows.
… to get to the top of a mountain apparently worth claiming.
… and to come back to the ground again.
"When rhyme goes against character, out it should go." –Sondheim, on his regret of I Feel Pretty's too-good internal rhymes in West Side Story.
Also on the topic of modulating self-expression, I'm happy when Louise Gluck is happy — sexy "At the Dance," in Slate's weekly poetry feature.
Need your advice here. Was diagnosed last winter (the season Patrick Cooper broke down) and felt the first issues in a while tonight. Played soccer here, had legs for miles, ran out of air after half an hour, hurled behind some trees to clear the pipes enough, headed home, took a hit on the inhaler, took a shower, breathed. I'm very frustrated at all this. I thank the Salzburg Parks Dept. for the groves of trees and apologize.
Having come to diagnosis later than most folks, I missed the whole conversation of tips and tricks that people had on rec soccer, church basketball and Little League teams. The halfway funny thing: Didn't have great lungs at that point, but I figured I was just out of shape. With serious practices twice a week in all three of those sports for years, the only thing actually out of shape was probably my brain.
So, asthmatic friends (I just learned how to spell "asthmatic"), have any good tips? Comment, e-mail, whatever. All appreciated, thanks.
#touristfail. Beautiful lake. Don't know its name. We spent a day there.
But I know this part of the path reminded me of the Kennedy Center.
And the thing below is a Pythagoras Cascade. "One of his inventions is a cup containing a system of opposing tubes. As the cup is filled, the liquid also rises in the tubes. If you exceed a certain height, a siphon mechanism is activated and the cup empties automatically. With this 'Justice Cup' Pythagoras showed his pupils the value of moderation."
The concept here was simpler: "Listen to the Drops."
Less simple: Whatever happened to poor Erich, Johann and Alfred.
Then it was time to take a cable car up the mountain. To be continued.
Ran across the L.A. Times photos from '99's Jewish Community Center shootings. I hadn't thought about the story in a long time, but it was the first real, hard, in-progress narrative demand that initial summer on the Web. Initially meeting the question, how did you take a horrible story, put it into a box and template and still have it mean something to the crowd? It was different, of course, from reporting the story or living in the story. The issue came in where you stood on meaning — and where, as news cycles continued, you would continue to stand.
(I was a judge, no worries.) Shot by our great multimedia students…
Bonus from the team: Vid of the Chinese students' One Night in Beijing, which brought down the house and was the closest we got to a victor.
We can only tell a story with the information available to us at the time we need to tell that story. The result is always incomplete, necessarily imperfect, and storytellers have to live with that condition. Comparing narratives of Dachau and the concentration camps in the last several days, our students are in better position to understand the challenge.
On Friday, the students visited Dachau — walking the empty grounds, moving through the museum, listening to the audio tour. Last night, they watched 1955 camp documentary Night and Fog and discussed the film for an hour afterward. Reactions were mixed. Some viewers were deeply moved, and others thought the movie felt short.
Recognized on numerous critical lists for its power and narrative, the film does bring issues. The director returns repeatedly to the "kapos," prisoners who served as lower-level functionaries in the camps, a noticeable attention that "clearly smacks of the atmosphere of the 1950s," as one comparative analysis puts it.
The movie touches only briefly on the sprawling cultural and industrial contexts that make the Holocaust unique among modern genocides, factors in so much of the storytelling since. Jewish victims never receive mention, for instance. A viewer only sees a Star of David on a coat.
At the same time, one of the most surprising aspects of the post-war period as portrayed in the Dachau site's museum is the pursuit of transparency around the camp. Descriptions report the U.S. military forcing the town's residents to visit the site, moving through as many other visitors as possible and publicizing camp photos and films.
With how much we associate transparency with the current age of Google, and with how distant current American military actions are now, it's easy to see the importance of these post-war movie — and hard to grasp their difficulty. How does an army begin to sort out a continent's worth of war and genocide? How does a filmmaker?
Imperfection and subsequent evolution in storytelling chase even the modern memorial site. A book, Legacies of Dachau, by University of California professor Harold Marcuse, traces the site's post-war history, and Marcuse has put the book's introduction online. The extent to which a visitor's Dachau experience has changed in the last decade is remarkable. What's changed includes key parts of any current trip:
With such dramatic narrative shifts possible, the test for the storyteller today is awareness. Is Dachau going to wait another three decades between renovations? No. Does a modern filmmaker walk away from a film on a critical issue after its completion? Not if a DVD's coming. The Dachau account, as it has evolved, has turned more uniquely Dachau.
More than ever, the story continues, and we bear responsibility for what's next. As we tell stories, we have to ask, who are our kapos? What narrative pieces loom larger today but smaller tomorrow? What greater themes or plots take their places? Awareness of imperfection in storytelling is a start. We have to go to work and provide a unique value to today, and any humble singularity only grows in importance.
Crossposted with some editing from Salzburg Global E-Media blog.
From Friday at Dachau to Saturday in Vienna to Sunday in Prague to today, rushing from a train to lectures to dinner to a Skype meeting to watching and discussing early Holocaust documentary Night and Fog, I'm a bit all over the place and looking forward to falling asleep.
But one indisputably bright and shiny thing about today is new Post Sports columnist Tracee Hamilton's look at new Nat Nyjer Morgan. Good column, good player, with promise to go around. The kind of thing that makes me glad I haven't followed through on the bad days.
Wrong, jolted, I'd expected more time before the bell rang, but when the sound shot into the chapel we were in the last words of prayer.
A motor low in the tower alternately jerked cords stretching upward to the bell's yoke, swinging the mouth away, the clapper following with a clang out and across the empty camp — and then toward us, back into vision, gaping mouth first then the clapper's weight, with noise rushing into the space, over the stone altar and chasing the round walls, and the German prayer that vanished I assumed was of peace. The bell was Dachau's reckoning, once a day. I took my eyes from it just once, and the nuns, priest, layman leading, and tourists were watching too. On the altar, the crucifix couldn't see the ringing, only the camp road.
Not until the layman ushered me out and closed the chapel was the daily rarity of the moment clear, with timing near a kind of emptiness. Down the camp road, the prisoner barracks on both sides were gone except for numbers and rockbeds, similar pebbles taking the road to the roll-call ground and filling it, a tract to contain standing thousands, now unpathed walks around a memorial of bodies as barbed wire.
The word I wanted was "Shekhinah," but I didn't learn it until later.
Shekhinah was the concept of God bringing presence to a space, like the Temple in Jerusalem or the Dachau chapel or the camp's entire grounds or when earlier I'd stumbled on the convent church sooner than I'd expected to pray or, nearby, the Jewish Memorial. Lava block ran underground, and in a distended cone, the memorial was dark inside but for a strip of marble on the far wall that led up to daylight.
As I walked to the bus, visitors took a picture of the camp's main gate closed — the iron "Work Brings Freedom" lettering in the foreground, the roll-call of pebbles behind it — and when their pictures were done, the next person coming grabbed hold of the gate and swung it open. Free to depart, there was a moment of waiting, which was nothing.
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Things not to tell me when traveling in cities where I don't speak the language: You know that tram we were on earlier? The one we hopped on and off repeatedly? Where you were so impressed the city ran it all over as a free public service? Well, it's not free. Plainclothes inspectors can come up to you, flash a badge and demand to see your transit pass. If you don't have one, they fine you on the spot, and if you can't pay the fine, they take you to jail. Except if they're not real transit inspectors and are just trying to get your money. If so, argue with them. But just to be safe, sit in the last tram car and keep an eye out. They're never going to expect you, with the Expos T-shirt and duffel bag, are not a commuter.
Keeping an eye out in Prague after apparently greatly overestimating Vienna's municipal love (but escaping inspector-free), Son of WMATA.
