So much of YouTube is 30-second brain candy, clicked away if it fails to load in under four seconds, but here I’m asking you for 10 minutes. I know - 10 minutes! In this age of continuous partial attention, who has the patience to watch the same thing for 10 minutes?
Especially if you might have seen it before. It is, after all, their best-known work. But if you haven’t, maybe watching it here will give you an idea of the brilliance behind the work of Peter Fischli and David Weiss, two of Switzerland’s best-known artists. And if you’re anywhere near Hamburg this summer, you now have a reason to go see it in person.
Because instead of the 10 minutes on a small screen on your computer, at the exhibition you’ll see a full half-hour of astounding ingenuity on a screen five metres square: chain reactions combining the forces of gravity, air and water pressure, fire and chemical reactions into a mind-bending thread of child-like playfulness. Set up and shot in stages, The Way Things Go took more than three months of trial and error before they finally got it right.
The film is of course only a small part of their work on display. Photos of impossibly balanced objects, sculpture in unbaked clay or polyurethane as well as a video showing how they put The Way Things Go together, it’s a look back at three decades of collaboration between the two artists. It’s on at the Deichtorhallen near Hamburg’s central train station until the end of August.
If you follow the link to the commercial - much better quality video than youtube, by the way - you’ll have to agree the similarities are pretty obvious.
I never get any peace and quiet anymore between the time the little red-haired girl goes to bed and her falling asleep, but I don’t mind at all.
“Daaa-deee,” she’ll call from her bedroom five minutes after bedding down. “What does philanthropic mean?”
So I get up out of my chair and go in to tell her.
“Well, philanthropic is being nice to other people, but in a way that benefits everybody. Like you donate a lot of money to support a hospital for sick children, or for buying space for young artists to work in. That’s being philanthropic. It has two root words in one - philo- meaning love of, and anthropos- meaning human being.
Forfeiture
Epiphany
Sophisticated
Pandemonium
Euphoric
Voyeurism
Subjugate
Co-dependent dysfunctionality
I’ve always spoken English with her, but she’s only 11, been taking English in her German high school for all of eight months, and I’ve never used such vocabulary in my conversations with her, so where does it come from?
Calvin and Hobbes. The Complete Calvin and Hobbes, 1400 pages spread over three volumes in a boxed set covering 10 years’ worth of colour and black-and-white comics.
She’d already dog-eared the two Calvin compilations I’d given her, books from my younger days when I too was a fan of the little guy with the big ideas and his imaginary tiger. She bought another one herself a few months ago, but after also reading through that one several times over, went on a hunt for more. After discovering the three-volume set up for auction on eBay, she snapped it up, using her own allowance and birthday money.
I know she’ll probably not retain half of the new words she comes across this way, but that’s not important right now. Expat parents are always trying to make sure their native language gets passed on to their kids in the face of the constant bombardment of the majority language and culture they swim in.
If she’s found something in English she not only loves to read but can’t seem to get enough of, my job is that much easier.
About twice a month I have to get up in the middle of the night and work the hell shift. It’s tough on the system to blast your body into night shift mode and back again so quickly, but I do it because I like my job; it supplements my blogging income.
Anyway at about 3:20 this morning I’m wheeling along enjoying the cool air and stillness on the way to the office when suddenly I get this scraping, crunching and banging from the back wheel. I can’t shift gears anymore and the chain’s not catching on the rear sprocket set.
I stop to look and realise that one of those two little sprockets that keep the tension on the chain derailler had popped out.
Excellent. Middle of the night and only half-way to work.
Luckily I’m right close to a hotel, so I walk into the lobby and ask the friendly night shift guy to order me a taxi so I could at least make it to work on time.
The taxi arrives and it’s the usual boat - a station wagon. Great, I say. I can take the wheels off and bring the bike with me.
The driver looks at me with suspicion.
“Is it OK if I put the bike in the back?” I ask him. “I’ll pay you extra.”
“Well… only if it fits.”
I take the wheels off and he lifts the back door. Taking extra care not to scrape anything, I slowly try to edge the frame in, but although it passes the back door, it doesn’t fit inside by a couple of inches. Then I notice the rear seat backs are split to fold down to make a huge space.
“Can we fold the wider one down to make room?”
“Geht nicht,” he tells me. Can’t do it.
“Really, it’s just a flip of that lever. We have the same thing on our car.”
“Geht nicht,” he tells me again. “Why don’t you lock the bike to that pole and pick it up later?”
Well, I’d thought of that, but the last time I left my bike out overnight in Hamburg, thieves had stolen my derailler. I didn’t want to come back to find just my frame attached to a post.
But rather than get into an argument with this guy over why he can’t just flip the damn lever so I’d have lots of room to put the bike in, I tell him forget it, pack my stuff up and trot off.
We have once again roused our reporter out of hibernation for another Definitely Not the Daily News world exclusive.
By Kathy Kitzler
Hamburg (DNTN) Former US Attorney General John Ashcroft has suffered what appears to be a heart attack while on a personal visit to the northern German port city of Hamburg.
Ashcroft, whose brilliant career at the US Justice Department included having a statue’s naked boobs covered up so he wouldn’t be photographed in front of it at press conferences, keeled over just as he was about to enter the tropical aquarium exhibit at Hamburg’s zoo.
“There’s this funny-looking house-like thingy outside the entrance with all this carved wood and stuff,” said a family friend. “John’s a little short-sighted, so he got up on tippy-toes to get a closer look. Poor bastard had a seizure right on the spot.”
The temple was hand-made in Nepal using ancient woodcarving techniques. It is dedicated to Lord Shiva, one of the principal deities of Hinduism.
“That Cheever guy must have been one sick and depraved bastard as well,” said a weakened Ashcroft in a telephone interview from his hospital room, adding he thought the temple’s location couldn’t be worse.
“Imagine putting full-colour carvings of people engaged in such disgusting and immoral acts right in plain view at the entrance to a zoo, right where all those kiddies walk by!
What the hell is wrong with German people, anyway?“
The temple has been standing for nearly five years at the entrance to Hagenbeck’s, famous for being the first zoo in the world to come up with the idea of displaying animals in natural settings rather than cages.
Witnesses say they never noticed anything unusual about the building until the Ashcroft incident.
“It’s a good thing he wasn’t watching the boob tube,” said one 10-year-old zoo visitor. “You see this sort of thing on TV all the time here.”
Antipodean reaction to Ashcroft’s apparent angina attack was swift and decisive.
“That’s it, I’m headed to Hamburg,” said one well-known Australian nurse and blogger, adjusting her corset while logging on to a travel website. “I just love all those cute little figurines and stuff. Do you think they’d let me make a few plaster casts?”
For those readers living in Germany planning to watch the pizza show when it airs on German TV, the producers have just told me that the segment will be delayed.
Not so much longer to wait though: Friday, March 14 at 1910 on Pro7. The pizza segment should come on sometime around 1950, 2000.
Watch it closely. They stuck little flags of Germany, Italy, and the USA in the pizzas to illustrate which country they represent. There’s a story behind those little flags.
So after dragging all the ingredients in my luggage down to Munich the night before, the next morning a van is waiting at the hotel entrance to pick me up for the shoot. An hour or so on the Autobahn later, we arrive at Bonny’s Diner, an American-themed restaurant where we’ll film how to make the pizza.
On the way there, I learn who I’m up against that evening.
“The Italian runs his own pizza restaurant here in town,” the producer says, “and though he’s been here for ages, doesn’t speak a word of German.”
“And the German?”
“He’s a professional chef, goes all over the country catering to private and corporate functions, giving cooking classes, the works. He must have been on TV a half-dozen times already.”
And here’s me - duff blogger, regretfully opportunistic forum reader and hobby pizza baker, about to get royally humiliated. First before a live, studio audience, and again a couple of weeks later in front of millions of television viewers.
Fighting off visions of taste-testers slowly crumpling in knee-wilting groans of eye-rolling ecstasy as they take the first bite of the competition - after spitting mine out in disgust - we get to work.
After about three hours of walking in and out of the restaurant several times carrying at first a shopping bag and then a pizza, walking into the kitchen, taking the ingredients out over and over, several takes and re-takes of mixing the dough, throwing the sauce together, cutting up the toppings, grating the cheese, and saying and demonstrating how it is built and shoving it into the oven a few times, the crew is RAVING about the two I bake them.
“Man, I don’t know what the kids are going to say,” the sound girl says, “but that pizza is outstanding.”
They’re all nodding in agreement and I ask them, “can we just do that last bit one more time with the camera rolling?”
The cooking school
We pack up and head downtown to the cooking school where as we walk in, another shoot is in progress. It’s the German, and he’s making a pizza. A square pizza. Two huge, square pizzas, with really fancy dough, and he’s got a pile of ingredients on hand, one of which resembles salami.
It’s also like a church in there, because they’re filming and he’s explaining to the camera how he’s making them. But because we’re kind of pressed for time, I have still have to gather all the kitchen equipment together in absolute silence and start making three more pizzas, which are going to be whisked away on a delivery guy’s moped to the gang of waiting teenagers.
At one point I get really into the mixing and cutting and forget myself, start humming a song and banging pots around, and a camera assistant comes over and touches my arm.
…shhhhh….
Things start to get a little hectic in the final few hours. We pack up all the pizzas in containers - not those floppy cardboard boxes, but real pre-heated metal containers - stick them into cars and on the back of a moped for an agonisingly slow crawl through Munich afternoon rush-hour traffic to a school way on the outskirts of town, where 30 hungry teenagers are waiting patiently for us to arrive to do the taste test.
The Italian, as it turns out, has also been kicking around there for about two hours, and it takes another hour or so before the lights and cameras are set up and the kids told how everything is going to proceed. They get shoved from one side of the room to the other because this angle didn’t look right, that shot needed to be done over and the other thrown away, but we finally get down to the taste test just in time for me to realise my pizza has hardened, gone semi-cold and shrunk down to half its height.
They select a half-dozen or so from the audience, sit them down in the front row and blind-fold them. Each one, in turn, comes up and takes a bite of pizza, then is led away for a quick reaction Q&A before another camera.
I really hope they keep this one shot: One of the girls is about 17, pretty but in a Goth - lite kind of way, with cleavage down to a point that almost makes you want to ask, “Honey, does your Mum know you’re hanging out like that in weather like this?”
She stands up and is led toward my table and I pick up a plate with what I think is the best piece of the bunch. She picks it up and brings it to her lips, then opens her mouth wider, shoves it in, and…. bursts out in a fit of giggles, uncontrollably so, her laughter spilling out into the audience, and for a second or two there’s this awkward moment where I wonder if she’s going to lose it, if pieces of topping are about to tumble from the sides of her mouth, when suddenly the fit is over and she’s led away.
Before we know it, it’s seven-thirty in the evening and I have less than two hours before my flight leaves back to Hamburg.
This is where it starts to get surreal. In a mad rush, the three of us troop out of the little theatre and into a side foyer, where we quickly go through a bunch of set-up scenes, which I’m guessing are going to be used for the intro. First they ask us to run through a flag as if we were winning a race, but the camera guy says it looks like crap. So then we’re all given oversized wooden spoons and told to make like we’re gangsters, holding the spoons as if they were guns. We all look stern as we walk toward each other, meeting eyeball-to-eyeball and glaring menacingly at one another. They get close-up shots of that and then we each have to walk across the room, turn and fire the wooden spoon at the camera over a flag and walk on - James Bond 007-style.
Then we all pile back into where the kids are waiting, for a truly televisual bit of theatre. Because I have to dash off to the airport - by now there’s a taxi waiting outside - and they still have to stay at least another hour to shoot the taste test with the German - we have to fake the celebrations. Yup. I won’t tell you who won, but before I leave, the audience is told to go nuts cheering and clapping for each of us in turn, so that when the result is known, they can simply use the one that fits.
One day when we’re old and counting our blessings, my wife and I will look at each other across our bowls of porridge and gum the words:
Oh, that was the time I fainted in front of the television!
Oh, that was the time I found a 50-euro note laying on the ground outside the supermarket!
Oh, that was the time Humphrey the Hamster, our daughter’s first pet, died!
Oh, that was the time our weird neighbour cranked the music in the middle of the night so loud, and we had to call the cops because we couldn’t get her to even answer the door or the telephone!
Sounds like things that occur only once in a while, but they all happened over the past 24 hours. The round-up:
German woman faints in front of television
My wife is not one of these wilting-flower types or a drama queen, but she has a physical reaction to seeing other people suffer. She faints. If you’re that type, best not view what we saw yesterday morning while watching the men’s downhill at Kitzbühel live on television. It’s one of most violent skiing crashes I’ve seen in a long time, and I remember thinking as the American skier Scott McCartney lay there twitching like a rabbit who’d been run over by a car: please, whoever’s doing the directing, CUT THE CAMERA AWAY.
The video is taken from Swiss television, but we were watching it on ARD, the German public broadcaster, whose announcers were so shocked they didn’t speak for nearly a minute. The crowd fell silent for what seemed like ages, then the replay came on, their reaction to which you can also hear. I’m glad they had the good graces not to show the replay of what at the time seemed to be the man’s convulsive death throes.
Is he going to live? asked my daughter.
I don’t know, I said, but if he does, he might not be able to walk again, or talk even. When he fell, he was going as fast as we usually do down the Autobahn, and he smacked his head so hard, he lost his helmet.
Suddenly my wife was on the floor, lying on her back with her arms behind her head, moaning a little and saying in a weak voice: we shouldn’t watch this.
I turned it off, left my wife on the floor because she wanted to be alone, went to do some errands, all the while thinking of how much the images disturbed me too. It was only later that she told me she’d actually lost consciousness.
German woman finds 50-euro note on the ground
Some people are lucky, I guess. I told my wife later: maybe you can put up a sign on the store’s bulletin board. Found: 50-euro note. Owner may claim by quoting serial number.
Hamster falls, dies.
Our daughter took her pet hamster out of its cage to show to a friend, but as she was holding it in her hand, it bit her on the finger and she dropped him to the floor. Unfortunately, she was also holding his food dish in her other hand, and dropped that too - right onto his hindquarters.
I get this panic call at work.
Daddy, we need an emergency veterinarian clinic! Humphrey’s hurt - I dropped his dish on him - and he’s lying in the corner, hardly moving! Can you find one for us?
They were getting ready to take him to the vet’s when they found he’d died.
It’s OK, I tell her. You gave him a good home and it wasn’t your fault what happened. It was an accident.
I get home around midnight find her hamster in the little transport box she used to carry him around in if she were taking him over to a friend’s place, or to the vet. Is it ghoulish to take a picture of a dead pet? I don’t know. I found her flower very touching.
Bizarre neighbour cranks music in the middle of the night.
So since I hate flopping straight to bed when I come home from work, I was lying on the couch quietly reading the first few pages of the newly published diary of a young French Jewish woman when suddenly I hear the unmistakeable sound of German rock music from the 70s - the kitchy pop tunes you just can’t avoid while flipping through the aural wasteland which is the German radio dial.
Damn.
The volume reminded me of the teenage kid a couple of floors down, now since Gott sei Dank flown the parental nest, but in whose worst phases would invite all his metalhead friends over for a ‘rents-away-let’s-all-play no-holds-barred blow-out, sometimes topped off by a marathon open-window scream-n-moan session courtesy of his multi-orgasmic girlfriend.
But it wasn’t thrashmetal or grungecore or whatever the fuck they call it these days, so I knew it couldn’t be him. By now my wife was awake and asking me bleary-eyed: who can THAT be?
Donning a jacket I went out to investigate and it turns out it’s the frumpy, 50-ish Frau who lives right next door to us, which would explain why our bedroom is now rumbling like a disco with shitty music.
So we knock on her door. Ring the doorbell. Knock again, ring again, on and off for ages and get no response.
I go online to telefonbuch.de, find her number, dial it. It rings forever.
We try banging on the door, so hard my wife says this morning her knuckles ache. I go out onto our balcony, try to peer into her place, but though the light are on I can see no shadows moving, no sign of life.
Maybe she’s had a heart attack, I say. She could actually be in some kind of trouble. Best call the cops, let them deal with her.
So my wife calls the cops, but in the meantime, we go back to our trying to raise her. My wife then gets the idea to go downstairs and ring the buzzer from outside, because it has a different tone.
Finally, after another 10 minutes of my wife and I alternately buzzing from the door and from downstairs and just as I’m giving up for the last time and walking away, the woman comes to the door.
Oh, she says. Did you ring the doorbell?
The woman has a face which betrays a lifetime of alcohol and cigarettes, but she doesn’t appear to be that wasted. Aside from a few spells of awkwardness over the past seven years where I actually had to come into contact with this person - I find her extremely repellant, to be honest - she has pretty well kept to herself.
I look at her, don’t say anything. Then I say: often.
What?
Often. We’ve been trying to get you to come to the door for the past half an hour. We gave up and phoned the police.
Then she says something that really floors me.
Oh, that’s OK. Have a nice evening.
I look at her, too stunned to say anything.
Yes, I say finally. I’m sure it’ll be a really nice evening, unsuccessful this time at hiding my anger and frustration.
A half-hour later the cops come. She lets them in the building, they trudge up the stairs to her door and ask if anything’s the matter. Oh, nothing she says. I was just playing some music, nothing special. Would you like to come in?
Maybe she just wanted some company, I don’t know. She does seem rather lonely.
A while back I took the little red-haired girl into downtown Hamburg, stopping on the way to finally explore this huge, hulking mass of concrete about a mile west of the city centre. We must have ridden by it a hundred times already in the ten years we’ve lived here, but never went for a look inside.
It was built during the war and used to be a bunker. It’s one of many scattered throughout the city, most of which are now painted over and dressed up to blend so easily into the surrounding streets, you can go by them every day without noticing what it was originally built for. But this one is not only so much bigger than the others, it sits alone at the edge of a huge empty lot. You can’t miss it.
It was designed both for air raid flak defenses and as a bomb shelter for residents, completely self-contained with its own water, power generation and sewage removal systems.
Local legend has it that the British occupation forces wanted to level it after the war, but gave up after a few attempts to crack the two-metre-thick walls. Others say the concrete didn’t actually set to its hardest state until the 1970s - four decades after its construction - a claim I can neither verify nor refute, and neither can they, I bet.
Today it’s stuffed full of music stores stuffed with all kinds of musical instruments, but I liked just walking around inside, poking into corners and opening doors we probably shouldn’t have, wondering what it must have been like to scurry like rats into bunkers like these from a hail of bombs that over two nights in the middle of summer 1943 killed 50-thousand people in this city alone.
I wanted to climb up to the top of the staircase to see if we could go out onto the roof, but my daughter was having none of it. I could tell what was bugging her. It was kind of creepy walking through creaky old metal doorways, down dimly lit corridors and up spiral staircases of cold, bare concrete, and I wasn’t helping matters much with my off-track mutterings of the folly of man, the use of fear and demonisation of the enemy in preparation for war, how some people rightly or wrongly compare what’s happening in the United States of America today with what happened in Germany before things got really crazy, how some people today speak of Muslims - yes, the boys and girls sitting beside her in school - the way Hitler used to talk about the Jews, the concept of forced labour and its use in building the structure we were standing in, another enduring reminder of the extreme lengths human beings are willing to go in the pursuit of killing each other.
All she wanted to do that day was to hang out in the sunshine near the lake, and here I was dragging her through a bunker giving a rambling political science and history lesson. I can’t wait to take her down south near Munich to Dachau, and try to explain the unexplainable.
...'Reality' in America has become synonymous with the rank and sordid. We've fetishized the true story, the tell-all confession, reality TV, real people in their real lives, celebrity marriages, divorces, addictions, humiliation as entertainment - our version of the public hanging. The crowd gathers to gape.
-Siri Hustvedt
- The Sorrows of an American
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