Ramblings on a January Weekend

It is becoming clear that I do not handle Berlin winters well. Technically I should have gone running again yesterday — my heel feels as fit as a fiddle again after the long rest since the 29th of December — but I suspect that my running clothing is not warm enough and honestly the frigid rainy weather was not inviting.

I've been going on walks and to the weekly ballet class, instead. On the walks I've seen that heroic joggers have been striding along the Frankfurter Allee with snow flying in their faces, wearing regular hoodies and leggings to keep warm — no professional gear. But if I were to emulate them, I'd just end up with more disturbing feelings that a strip along my heel has been overextended, more hobbling, more going down train station stairs step by step holding onto the railing, etc., more worrying dramatically if I would ever dance ballet or run more than a kilometre again, and more biting pains at my ankle even when I have been sitting down and exerting nothing. In other words, I'd just end up replicating the emotional experiences (note: that is an overdramatization) for the first week or so of this month.

It's true that I was asked today how my life is going and I was able to say that it's going happily and to feel that this was not a lie — in the moment it certainly felt right. But, aside from feeling like the gloom of winter is permeating my bones and bringing with it the unhappiness I've learned to dread since I was a teenager, I've also reached a nadir of confidence at work.

I am finding it harder to get out of bed in the mornings; and I no longer find work the most interesting and most productive part of my day. Listening to the three feminist audiobooks that I 'reviewed' for the books blog, for example, was far more engrossing, or even staring out the train at frozen Berlin rivers and 'seeing short stories' in the trains and train stations.

That said, I think I am just going one from one phase to another, and need to give up some of the hopes and aims of the old phase to find new hopes and new aims. — Like spring!

Re. hopes and aims: I've been reading more Structure and Evolution of the Stars, which I actually appear to be finishing quickly now that I've weaned myself cold turkey off fiction on the U-Bahn and S-Bahn. I am concentrating on non-fiction because I don't want to tote this textbook and Aristotle's Politics around for another two years. (My intended project of becoming less ignorant about the natural sciences and mathematics should begin to diversify away from this one book, too.) Then I am reading books and listening to audiobooks for the sake of writing more 'book reviews.' But I do want to read up on MySQL and GitHub work, as well, so that I can be far better positioned to help along my team in the kind of professional development that one of the managers would really like us to do.

Unrelated to work, I also want to start supporting more charities, and need to decide how to go about this most wisely. It's purely selfish; feeling useless is the worst feeling.

Then, the piano: Right now I desperately want a new project — playing short pieces as I've been doing is not the right process to help me improve much, and I do still want to 'sink my teeth' into Beethoven's sonatas again, but I should go shopping for new scores again too. I haven't played Tchaikovsky's or Rachmaninov's piano concertos properly, for example; I've been yearning to play these for a decade at least and I've heard them reasonably often. That said, I think that Tchaikovsky is not the composer I play best; it seems too comfortable to play him without intellectual rigour, and I think that I am so short of this rigour that I need to be forced into applying it a bit. I am also a little worried about sitting down at the piano because it requires becoming absorbed in my feelings, at least the way I approach it, and there are feelings one just doesn't want to fall into.

A propos of that, in the Berlin evening news today, a Holocaust survivor replied to a television reporter's question about how she 'felt.' She said, paraphrased, 'I deal with facts; and my feelings aren't necessarily anything that the whole world needs to know about.' Afterward, I realized that it is perhaps what I worry about with this blog — that I describe too many insecurities and worries that people with other mindsets would find self-indulgent. Ignoring for a moment the fact that any parallel of her harsher experiences with my own is impossible, and that she is speaking as a half-public figure of the general public, I think that hers is a worthwhile point of view, and a hundred percent understandable in her circumstances. But I cannot 'connect' with other people and cannot begin to fix things that are bothering me without being open. Also, stoical silence was far easier before I began working at my present job, because then I was absolutely convinced that nobody cared about my feelings, or that if they did care, it would have been a huge burden to them instead of just something that everyone deals with some time or another.

Much of the drama of my life seems to happen after the real interactions — the real annoyances or grievances that everyone speaks of freely. It happens in my brain. So that's why I rarely complain about pleasingly concrete things. I can't complain of what a person did at once, because I don't want to be judgmental or to assign the blame without finding out why he or she did it, why I reacted as I did, and if it was right to react that way. It is less the interaction itself that is painful; it is the thought process afterward, if I don't find a good reason why the other person did something, or if I presume that I was in the wrong somehow. That is one reason why I think that being mean to people is almost unforgivable: it usually drips a poison into the system instead of making a quick and easily healed wound, and one can't guess how much damage it will do.

I also miss Papa because he discouraged, I think, going through life imagining yourself to be the innocent sufferer of the terrible perfidy of everyone else's behaviour (for example, of schoolmates). At some point, one probably needs to accept responsibility for something, too. At the same time, if I told him about a way someone had hurt my feelings or wronged me, he would trust me to be in the right so fully most of the time, that it made me want to be extra-fair to the 'villain,' so that his indignation was not awoken on false pretences.

But I wrote to a colleague about a work-related gripe (that was not about anything he'd done) last week, and his reply helped me to realize again that there are different kinds of openness and honesty, some that I should practice more than others... He replied that venting feelings can be done by pounding the keyboard (for instance!) or by talking to the people involved, instead of mentioning feelings to third parties. That was painful, because it made me worry that I have become passive-aggressive to the point of devious, and that, all questions of principle aside, I'd really annoyed him. Also, it's been a longish while since I've been so worried that I've been doing something genuinely terrible, so I was rusty at the self-examination, and brooded most of yesterday rather exaggerating how perfidious I'd been. But the more I think about it, the more his suggestion makes sense as something to think about whenever I have grievances in future. He has done me an immense favour!

A Very Long Overview of the New Year's Concert

[Apologies for any factual errors or exaggerations]

A few minutes before the Vienna Philharmonic's New Year's Concert began broadcasting on television, the doorbell rang, M. came to visit, and I woke up. We ate doughnuts, or Berliner as Mama would insist I call them, and drank rose hip tea as well as coffee, M. had brought his lovely homemade cookies as well, and I had a little of the leftover punch with mandarin oranges and peaches from last night.

This year the Vienna Philharmonic's guest conductor was Christian Thielemann. I associated him slightly with German right-wing nationalism, and Mama associated him heavily with Wagner. At any rate he is not Austrian and indeed regularly conducts the Sächsische Staatskapelle Dresden. So (after I played a silly game I've often indulged in since we moved to Germany, of sorting people I briefly see on television into CDU, SPD, Linke, FDP, Grüne or CSU politician personality types, with him, and decided on SPD) we began listening with trepidation.

But there was no galloping nationalism, no heavy Wagnerianism or portentous Beethovenianism in the music he produced — and I felt that with him he was not merely there to let the orchestra express themselves, but was purposely steering the concert and music — whereas some of the repetitious Viennese flourishes that are often emphasized in the Strauss family's music fell by the wayside. To be honest, I welcomed this as a temporary change.

Thielemann clearly wanted to try a mildly different approach, and I didn't feel I was hearing a twice-told tale. The music lacked some of its energy and sparkle, as M. also remarked, but it had gemütlichkeit and I thought Thielemann was adept at making the music tell a tale or describe scenes. I didn't need the hovering camera shots of Austrian pastoral scenery that overlaid some of the music in the televised version to be transported somewhere else.

This year is the 150th anniversary of the Vienna Opera House's opening. So in the intermission, we were transported from the golden rectangular hall of the Wiener Kunstverein hall, with its blingy chandeliers and coffered frescoes, to a stone-walled-and-bronze-roofed birdcage with a grand central staircase, pale sculpture and gilt decorations, other frescoes, and other chandeliers. There was so much opulence that my inner Marxist emerged fully fledged. The Marxist wondered, firstly, where the money for the building came from (banking? exploitation of the peasantry? colonial labour?); and, secondly, whether the original builders could have ordered fewer decorations and redirected more expenditures to food and shelter for the poorer classes.

But the cameras did not only roam in the lobby and amongst the opera-goers. It was nice to peek 'behind the scenes' of the Opera House, even if backstage it was unconvincingly tidy. I think that the traditional aspects of stage work were also played up a little; for example, I don't know how often the crew at the Opera House still use rope made of natural fibers, but they showed one coil of it that happened to have survived, anyway.

Also, when we had left the trolleys and pulleys and washing clotheslines of the towering opera sets briefly behind us, there was an interlude in the room where the ballet troupe was 'practicing' its pairs dancing. Their cute summery garb — the women dancers often wearing what I'd call 'sleeveless crop tops' at work that made me rack my brains trying to figure out how they stayed on — did not look like something dancers would normally practice in. And in the middle of winter the sight of that many bare limbs suggests painful cramps, muscle strains, and breakages, unless the dancers have had a good warm-up; but I'm sure it was filmed earlier in the year.

Anyway, at some point in the intermission, I figured that it might be more interesting to be pushing around backdrops and nailing down canvas onto wooden frames than to be one of the singers on the stage, or to be a musician like the ones trying not to look enervated when the camera crew blocked the exit from the greenroom where they were just practicing.

Chamber music groups taken from the ranks of the Vienna Philharmonic also performed arrangements of opera music by Mozart and Strauss and others, during the intermission. They were scattered inside and outside buildings, yet blessed with the same acoustics whether they were contending with the breeze and traffic noise on a roof overlooking a busy Vienna street, or perched at ease in a serene, lofty hall adorned with white marble sculptures. A quartet of cellos played at the head of the staircase — having watched a lot of Agatha Christie adaptations, I expected one of the four cellists to meet a vertiginous (and not very accidental) death at any moment. A pianist and other musicians were gathered in a room like one of the committee meeting rooms in the British Parliament, surrounded by a choir as if by ranks of courthouse visitors. Sometimes I much preferred the idea of the orchestral originals; but I warmed to the way the Rosenkavalier waltz was adapted for a smaller group of instruments.

Two interludes during the intermission made my hair stand on end.

The first interlude was a 'rehearsal' of an "Uhren-Duett" from Johann Strauss's operetta Die Fledermaus. An Anne-Sophie-Mutter-esque soprano sat on a round seat in old-rose plush, dressed in a pale tulle tiered skirt and a black top skin-tight at her bosom. (Her chest is such a significant part of the narrative that I imagine that, in a fairer world, it might have received third billing.) A Roberto-Benigni-esque tenor fiddled around with his fob watch. Then he expressed the most polite annoyance when the soprano filched it and dropped it into her bosom. From a practical standpoint I worried that unless the soprano had an all-encompassing bra, the watch might slip further, wriggling down her skin like an ice cube. Sacrifices must be made for art, however, and either she is an excellent actress or no mishap occurred. Needless to say, my inner gender studies theorist just pretended I didn't see this. Although I felt that there was such an absence of genuine lasciviousness or elementary romantic attraction in the scene* that despite the noxious concept it wasn't as sleazy as it could have been.

The second horror: a soprano and tenor's duetting from the Magic Flute, as Philharmonic musicians with poker faces that would be the despair of Las Vegas stood around them and pretended that all of this was sane. The soprano (Pamina) wore an A-line dress, as plumy and golden as Big Bird from Sesame Street with feathers dribbling off her chest and tufted in her hair, and her demeanour like an irritating version of Zoë Wanamaker. The tenor (Papageno) wore a matching Sesame-Street-yellow suit. In a worse vagary of artistic judgment, both of them wore rope nooses around their necks. Of course the first associations that came to mind ran the gamut from keel-hauling and suicides to lynchings. In fact these ropes were part of a life-saving apparatus that later lifted them into the air above the stage (as the Philharmonic musicians, imperturbable as ever, remained in position); but it takes a battle-hardened soul to find the nooses less than weird.

Of course there were ballet interludes. My inner amateur womyn's studies theorist emerged again: I found the gender politics — the froofy tulle skirts in which the tiny-waisted women were clad as inexorably as if it were the 1950s and Coco Chanel had never designed a pantsuit, and the tendency to treat each man-woman pairing as a romantic pairing — reductive and behind the times. Only a man-man pas de deux, although it had no kissy elements in the least and therefore did not disturb the heteronormative bias, warmed my cold theorist's heart.

The first round of costumes was not bad, I thought. Just a spotted, bustier-style dress paired with affrighting black-speckled white tights underneath unsettled me a bit. But the second round, in which the dancers wore primary colours à la Fisher Price, and the women's tunics ended high above the knees, as if the costumer believed that a glimpse of butt-cheek aesthetically uplifts any balletic effort, was weird. I'd never have thought of dressing ballet dancers in blazers that must restrict their arm movements or of risking their necks by suggesting that they dance on cobblestones, either. Hip-hop dance was woven into the choreography, so that whenever this happened it was neither good hip-hop dancing nor good ballet, but just a middling mixture. The artistic concept of flailing around long limbs and awkwardly seizing the hand and feet of one's partner was a little outré as well. The choreography didn't lack naturalistic moments, like the pas de quatre legs to which we were treated: two dancers sat in niches, hidden from the screen except for their feet and shins, and wiggled their limbs. But at times the choreography felt counterintuitive with regard to how the human body moves, how people gesture when they interact, and to how ballet dancers should use their finely trained muscles to produce something fluid and beautiful.

[Also, there are only so many times that a dancer can rest hands thoughtfully on the balcony of an old Austrian palace, gazing at a view that is never shown (so that we never see how many cars and Edekas there are); can appear in a doorway and stop in amazement at the sight of a fellow ballet corps dancer whom they've known for years; and can rest their hands on a window sill and peer at another colleague beneath them, without running the risk of looking a trifle unoriginal. But this is hardly the choreographer's fault; it is, rather, a hazard of working with the Vienna New Year's Concert format.]

Anyway, although I do dance beginner's ballet, I felt that it has given me no greater insight into the dancing whatsoever, except to make me worry more about dancers injuring themselves. So the previous paragraphs are not at all the result of professional observation.

Returning to the music, there were no 'gimmick' instruments this year, as far as I noticed. That said, the orchestra — not all the musicians; some were tactfully silent — sang 'La-la-la-la' during the 'Egyptian' piece by one of the Strausses. (I could picture Edward Said in the afterlife, whipping out his pen and drafting a new chapter of Orientalism, but it wasn't bad from a musical perspective.) I enjoyed the zither last year, because it required being quiet and attentive and appreciating an instrument that usually only comes into its own full power and glory in the framework of folk music. And, of course, because the music itself was lovely. But I think a year without gimmicks is nice, too.

Lastly, the video footage of castles, ruined or intact, on the banks of the Danube, was a nice accompaniment to the "The Blue Danube." I found the Radetzky March more easy to endure than usual, too.

Prosit Neujahr!


* I googled it, and it looks as if the tenor sings:

Dieser Anstand, so manierlich,
diese Taille fein und zierlich,
und ein Füsschen, das mit Küsschen
glühend man bedecken sollt',
wenn sie's nur erlauben wollt'.

Based on the romantic chemistry, I wouldn't have been surprised if he'd sung: 'Excuse me, Madam. I believe you have left your wrap on the staircase, and I almost tripped on it. Please guard your belongings more carefully next time.'