33 Sekunden, 70200 Zitaten: Kreidlers ‚product placements’ (Musikstück, Interview, Video) und sein Essay.

Beim Wort ‚Kulturflatrate’ stellt es mir die Haare auf (wie auch beim Thema ‚Schöpfungshöhe'), ganz abgesehen davon, dass Kreidler nicht erklärt, was er sich darunter vorstellt, ja woran er überhaupt denkt, wenn er ‚Kultur’ sagt, dass sich ‚geistiges Eigentum' nicht mit Öl vergleichen lässt und dass Kreidler bei Gelegenheit ein Rhetorikseminar besuchen sollte, ABER: eine herrliche Aktion.

Was würde Ulrich sagen (der immer und ganz besonders dann etwas zu sagen hat, wenn es keine Antwort gibt)? „Die Genauigkeit zum Beispiel, mit der der sonderbare Geist Moosbruggers in ein System von zweitausendjährigen Rechtsbegriffen gebracht wurde, glich den pedantischen Anstrengungen eines Narren, der einen freifliegenden Vogel mit einer Nadel aufspießen will [...].“

This afternoon would be a most perfect afternoon for strawberry milkshakes at a tranquil coffee place. One would sit in the shadow of a plane tree and still be hot, the cold glass all cloudy. It would have to be a bright pink milkshake, as strawberry-y as a Gauguin rose but tasting of real, cold, red strawberries. The coffee place would be in a street of quiet, colorful old houses: a herd of blue, yellow, red cubes cowering on the sidewalk, taking their rest in the heat. Can you see the gerania in the windows and the old woman carrying a basket full of laundry down the street? She walks slowly because it is hot and she feels the rheumatism in her knees, yet the gerania in the windows who, she feels, depend on her, give her a reason to get up every morning. Her apron is printed with tiny flowers, her hair, bright white and flimsy, could use a wash. If she came closer, we could see the pattern the years have carved into her skin and find it beautiful, but she disappears through the mouth of the red house. The street is empty now except for Poe’s tortoise shell cat sitting in the middle of the sidewalk washing her belly and stretching one hind leg stiffly into the air as if it did not belong to her.
Back at the coffee place, where there are neither other customers nor waiters to be seen, there is a you sitting opposite one. It has ceased to be a coffee place – we have placed our orders and do not need it anymore. The you, being too serious a person to order drinks in colors other than brown or shades of pellucidness, has not ordered a strawberry milkshake. You watch me curiously and amused, me and the long straw and my chapped lips, as if you had never seen a girl drink a strawberry milkshake. Maybe you ponder on the fact that I am bold enough to consume liquids as pink as this in bright daylight, and find that I am less like you than you thought. Does that bother you?
I would like you to try the strawberry milkshake, would like you to like it, but I do not ask you to, sensing that you do not know about the unwritten law of strawberry milkshakes that says you have to accept a sip you are offered and enjoy it – if not the milkshake, then the invitation. You might say no and hurt me, and I remain silent.

Somewhere else, Mister Pettersson is chopping wood because it is winter there and he has a wood stove. He is deaf and asks himself whether the song of the sparrow on the gutter of his shed exists in absolute terms even though he only sees it chirp, and comes to the conclusion that it does (he is wrong – the sparrow has not chirped but opened its beak to yawn – but Pettersson will never know that).
Yet somewhere else, a pendulum clock is striking, unheard.

“As for pendulum clocks”, you say, not averting your gaze, “they don’t mind.”

It's summer-raining against the backdrop of a new Will Oldham album. Enjoy.

You Remind Me of Something (from Lie Down in the Light).

Compare to I Feel a Darkness (1999).

I am looking at a friend’s wedding pictures. They seem happy. N. does not look much different from when I last saw her, a couple of years ago. I am happy for them, but I feel worlds away.

G. and she also sent a letter they composed together, describing the ceremony. A very idyllic ceremony it was, with little people, home made pastries, and her brother playing the guitar. I remember the brief time we were friends – seemingly brief, now, in retrospect. But then, the younger you are, the longer feels a year.

I remember how she used to invite me over for lunch after school. She was the youngest of 8 or so siblings. Her father was the evangelical pastor of T. Her parents had been missionaries in Mbeya before they came to Austria. N’s older sister A. was born in Mbeya, and her parents had taught her at home. By the time I got to know her, A. worked as a nurse at the local hospital and had a boyfriend who owned a motorcycle. She was a tall and quiet girl with long, dark hair. N. herself was born after the family had settled in T. They all lived in the parsonage, ten or so people. It was a small parsonage, but it never felt small when I was in there. Only now I realize that they were probably rather poor. They would all have lunch together at a large oak table, and they prayed before eating. One of them would find a few simple words to thank the Lord for the meal, and everyone said Amen. So I bowed my head and did so too.

There was always soup as a starter, and green salad with the main course. Her mother would cook a lot more than we could possibly eat and you almost felt bad when you did not ask for a second helping.

N.’s mother was a lot older than the mothers of any other people I knew. She looked frail like a gazelle and had bright blue eyes that seemed to see everything. She would wear her gray hair open and it flowed down her back like a silver shawl. You could tell that she had lived at so many places, met so many people and seen so many things that her woolen coat and wooden jewelry had become her home rather than a physical house or country. N.’s father was even older and had a white beard and a deep voice and the hearty laugh and calm ways of someone who had saved so many sinners and a faith so deep that he was beyond Pentecost. He looked like a bear or a pirate captain. I expected him to light a pipe and fill the kitchen with a flock of cloud sheep as white as his beard, but I never saw him do so.

They were the kind of people who serve you unfiltered apple juice in large, chunky glasses. The kitchen and the living room smelled of spelt casserole, and wherever you looked, there were quilts and pillows and books and two violins and a guitar and knotted carpets and shoes and music and voices and plants. You always felt welcome, though I was too shy to talk much unless we were in N.’s room. N.’s room was small and orderly and its walls were stuffed with Karl May books from floor to ceiling. She was the only one I knew who had read as many Karl May books as I. My favorite was Unter Geiern at that time. I don’t remember hers, but it must have been one with Sam Hawkens. We would sit on her bed and listen to R.E.M. and Radiohead from her tape recorder, and she had a climbing plant with little light green leaves that kept growing and growing and filled the whole room, creeping along the cupboard and along the bookshelves and you thought you were somewhere out in the woods. I found it strange that she called her parents Mutter and Vatter as if with two t when she addressed them. I think she even said Sie to her father – but I might be making that up.

At that time, we had two drawing lessons at school every week. Our teacher wanted to be an artist, which was becoming fashinonable then, and he had three identical pairs of glasses with the frame in different colors. He would change his glasses several times a lesson. It bothered me that I could never tell according to what principle. The red frame made him look angry, and the blue one as if he had just lost his thread. N. and I were always looking forward to those lessons, but we would hardly ever draw anything we were supposed to. Instead, we wrote stories. I a sentence, N. a sentence, I a sentence, N. a sentence. One big page of drawing paper after the other we filled with words, letters as small as we could manage so our paper would last longer.

I remember the day N. told me she had to leave. They were moving because evangelical pastors must only stay for a certain number of years at any one place. She told me as we were walking up the steps to our classroom, those forty-two gray, chewing-gum covered stone steps, and I saw that she had been crying. I don’t recall what she said, or what I said. I don’t remember what we ever talked about at all.

Years later, she would write every now and then, while she studied German and Mathematics in Z. She was not happy at university and tried to get it over with as soon as possible. The intervals between the letters got longer, and eventually we lost touch; I think I forgot to write back one time.

I saw her two or three times afterwards, when they came to visit old friends around T. I also met G., the man she married; she had met him shortly after she left. The two of them went to Spiekeroog together and then to Canada. N. had been to Spiekeroog many times before. The whole family used to go to Germany during the summers, and I still have one of the postcards N. sent. She was one of the people who use every inch of a postcard, she wrote what she had done that day and about the steamers she had seen at the harbor of Hamburg, how dirty the harbor was and how loud and how filled with colors and noises and smoke. The Spiekeroog postcard was beautiful, all green, and she told me that you had to take care not to step on a jellyfish on the beach and that it was always windy and there were hardly any people. I had never been to an island. I thought it must be the most wonderful place in the world, and she said we would go there some day.

N. had never been to Canada before, and when they came back, G. and she were engaged.

I picture her three years from now, singing "Es kommt ein Schiff, geladen bis an sein höchstes Bord ..." to her daughter sitting on her knee; I picture a little girl with long eyelashes and a Cheshire cat grin. N. is of course going to be as wonderful a mother as her own mother was.

I am happy for them. But I feel worlds away.