Harrison Ford

If you ever find yourself sitting in a car at night as a passenger, driving on a highway or an autobahn, listen to 'Harrison Ford' by Someone Still Loves You Boris Yeltsin! Then close your eyes. Open them again and look out the window. At the forests and the fields. The silhouettes. The distant lights that signify a town or a city. The clouds illuminated by the moon.
Then repeat until you are home.

SSLYBY - Harrison Ford: http://youtu.be/rVUdxBjTebg

Postmodernism

Modernism

Got up this morning between 10 and 11, left the hotel alone because Byron was already out while Matt and Michael were still sleeping, grabbed some breakfast here in Jersey and took the PATH (Port Authority Trans-Hudson) to Christopher Street, reading Above All Men on the ride, then walked through the warm and sunny streets of Manhattan noon towards Strand where I browsed through the cheap used books outside for half an hour, finding a book with two short novels by Salinger for $ 0.48

and Proust's Swann's Way (Vol.1 of In Search of Lost Time) for a dollar, then went inside for more endless browsing through innumerable shelves and displays of paperbacks, hardcovers and collector's editions of nearly everything that has ever been printed, limiting myself to buy Cormac McCarthy's Blood Meridian for $7.??, got out again and went to Washington Square Park where I intended to flee the rush, grab some sun and sit on the grass reading - an idea that was, however, immediately thwarted when I caught sight of all the commotion happening in the park, all the locals and tourists, the hipsters and squares, the children and parents, the dogs and the pigeons, and most of all by Tic and Tac who attracted my attention just as easily as that of almost anybody else around the fountain by having their drummer play a tight beat and hollering around, advertising their show which was about to begin shortly, introducing Tic's or Tac's young son who was also participating in the shouting, which all eventually led to a great performance that was a mixture of very self-aware politically

incorrect comedy and break dance/acrobatics that elicited much applause from the audience which afterwards dispersed, dismissing me onto a lawn next to those cosplay kids looking weird and acting crazy, distracting me once more from reading, just like this hipster jazz trio to my left that played some really good stuff and kept on going, song after song just as I kept on going from jazz band to jazz band in Washington Square Park, oh and then seeing these quiet introvert indie kids playing songs for a few amazing modern dancers who even incorporated this one monument into their performance and didn't let go, me finally going adrift, walking to the Caffe Reggio on MacDougal where I had been before and now wanted to go there again because it seemed like the perfect place to have a first look into Swann's Way 

because both the cafe and the novel might have been created around the same time at the beginning of the last century, and then I read into it and it felt a bit like falling in love with Proust's very beautiful and sometimes suggestive and elusive prose which makes a (reportedly) difficult book seem easy to read while it doesn't really reveal the direction this might go into and what it is gonna be about so I sat for another minute or two thinking and then left, tipping not too generously because today's lousy and standoffish service seemed even worse in comparison to that very friendly waitress that I had chatted with in January and who was the first person out of a few to tell me about the Strand which had eventually brought me back here today, all before I went back to the 9th Street station to catch the PATH back home because we were supposed to meet at 7:30 in the lobby in order to go to that awesome Indian restaurant here in Jersey not far from the hotel where I and Rene and Paul shared a table discussing courtship and marriage and where I might have had too much food because it was so delicious, after which I finally headed back home finishing part I of "Combray" in Swann which has taught me how to write a long sentence.

GLC Road Trip

On the road to New York. Our GLC class will give a presentation in Manhattan on Monday. Good reason to go there for the weekend already.
I left the house at 8 this morning (after having gone out last night 'for just one beer.' But in Athens, there is no such thing as just one beer. So once again, home after 2). Sat on our porch and started reading my newest purchase - Above All Men by Eric Shonkwiler - and was once again amazed by how beautiful Athens is in the spring. Especially mornings. The yellow tulips and daffodils on our small patch, the clear blue sky traversed by plane tracks, the mist rising out of the not too distant woods, the incessantly twittering and chirping birds that seemed to surround me by dozens. Didn't make the reading easier.
Around 9, the group arrived and picked me up in a van. Since we have one more person on board than seats in the vehicle, and I was the last one, I had to share a seat first and then squeezed in between the two seats of the middle row. On the floor. Riding backwards. It was okay, though, and now it's Mitch's turn. We're somewhere in  Maryland on a perfectly sunny day, driving through a still somewhat barren but very green countryside. Couple of hours left until we'll arrive at our hotel in New Jersey. We're very quiet now, some are sleeping, others reading. On the stereo some very good indie electro pop with a female vocalist provides a somewhat surreal atmosphere.

Scenes

Beat Heaven.

Serengeti: animals from different continents living together in perfect harmony.

English Department humor

Our deer hangin' out in the back yard

Pub Art: "Steroid-Speedo-Astronaut-Chimp"

abandoned house, great source for firewood

Sleepy Hollow

See the squirrel? She lives in our walls.

Fest Season!

Mill Fest

Spring's here, and Fest Season in Athens is almost over. I think it starts in March, and—to my understanding—it’s basically comprised of some fests that are named after the streets that they are happening on, like Palmer Fest, Milliron Fest, Mill Fest (MILF fest, according to my professor), and High Fest. They’re all privately organized ‘festivals’ along certain streets, which simply means that from around 10 a.m. onwards tenants turn their front porches and lawns into party zones where (almost) everyone is welcome. Some houses have dj’s, a few might even have a band playing, others just turn up their ghetto blasters. And OU students go there; and they go crazy. 

Mill Fest

If you’ve ever been to a music festival—it’s pretty close to that experience, except for the fact that this is an ordinary street, and not a field closed down for the purpose of a festival. People just know that everyone who lives on the respective street will participate in the fest. Which doesn’t mean much more anyway than to play some music and allow people to hang out and get wasted on your lawn. And apparently, these fests have been around for more than twenty years. I’ve never seen anything like it.

Mill Fest

The sidewalks and lawns are crammed with people, many of them dressed very very casually or in some kinda crazy way—as a hotdog, or in their pajamas, or whatever. And you just stand around or walk from house to house, hiding your open beer can from the cops because it’s not allowed to drink on the street (on the private lawns, however, it is), or you dance. As you can imagine, some people are better at handling that than others. I’ve heard of a guy who’s lost his job because his employer saw a video of him on a fest. I don’t know what he did in it, but it’s probably nothing to be proud of. Anyway, these fests usually get shut down by the police (some of them are even there on horseback!) pretty early, sometimes around 5 or 6 p.m. And for no apparent reason. I’ve heard of a burning couch, even a fire inside a house last year, but this year, I didn’t see any of that, but the police was still going from house to house, telling us kids the party’s over.So the first fest I’ve witnessed was Milliron Fest, but only for the last hour or so. We arrived there after nightfall, and the police hadn’t shut down all of it yet. I and my buddies have been invited by my good friend Blake who lives there, and we were there for maybe an hour before most of the people were gone, and we’d eventually left as well. Being the first fest for me, though, it was relatively impressive to see about 150 or 200 people on a very short section of the street.

Mill Fest

Next day’s Mill Fest, however, made Milliron look like a bad joke. It’s located downhill from the way we came, so while it was comparably quiet uptown, the view and the noise on Mill Street were pretty stunning as we approached. Hundreds of people walking and standing around on sides of the street (warm and sunny weather, by the way), music, singing, and conversations everywhere. I had the feeling that we just went from lawn to lawn on the left side of the street, pausing on many premises to have a beer or dance or meet people, and then went back in the same manner on the right side.

Mill Fest

I wore this kind of (artificial) fur hat—an inside out hood of a winter jacket—and this one guy on a porch  told me that he liked it (like many others on the street before him), but I didn’t catch his words due to all the noise, so I went up there, and we got into talking. And he tells me how he travels to Alaska (Alaska!) every now and then for hunting. Killed a bear once, supposedly. “Dude, shooting that 500 pound bear, it’s like killing a fuckin’ person!” Yeah, he wasn’t a bad guy, but then again…Recreational hunting isn’t exactly the kind of hobby I wanna relate to. After that, the group kinda dissolved, and Rene, Justin and me had some Chinese buffet at that place where that poor huge white fish lives all alone in a fish tank that is maybe twice the size of its inhabitant. Depressing politics, good food.

High Fest

Then, High Fest. When I joined the gang, we hung out more on Justin’s and Michael’s porch than on High Street. Most of them had already been there (while I was studying diligently). So Rene, Lisa and I just walked along High where party was still going on, passing a parked van that was full of empty PBR cans, uphill and then down, and then back again while the mounted police were putting an end to people’s peaceful celebrations.

Palmer Fest was on the weekend that we were in D.C. (maybe there’ll be a separate post on that trip). So I don’t know how that went, but Rene did apparently have a good time there. This weekend, Number Fest will close fest season. But I’ll be out of town again, going back to New York, this time for the presentation of our GLC project. Maybe that’ll spark another post.

West Side, Best Side!

Geeg (who ranks very high on the list of best roommates ever) was born and raised in Cleveland, OH. Two weeks ago, she took me and Sophia to her hometown that is located on the southern shore of Lake Eerie. She had to do some business, and knowing that the two of us had never been there, Geeg wouldn’t take no for an answer. And, of course, no wouldn’t have been our answer, for that matter. Since we do not have class on Fridays (unlike Natalie, who would have loved to come along, but didn’t want to miss class), the matter did not need much discussion. So, when classes were over that Thursday, we left Athens at around 5 p.m., and I sat in the back of the car because I wanted to catch some sleep. And I seriously needed some sleep; the previous week had not been too good to me.

It started with a great Monday: St. Patrick’s Day! Unlike the probably totally made up (that is, without any religious or traditional background) Green Beer Day, which was celebrated furiously on all of Court Street the Wednesday before St. Paddy’s (while I had tons of work to do) , St. Patrick’s Day is not really a big festivity in Athens. It is, however, a great day for Irish-American (and some Italian) Geeg, and thus for us. So we all had a good time at Lucky’s, along with a drink or two. That day, I must have caught some kind of infection or cold or whatever. Because the next day, I did not feel too well. And it was not a hangover!

"Jack the Ripper." Get it?

Unfortunately, that very Tuesday, our Global Leadership Center class made a trip for an overnight stay at two lodges in the Hocking Hills, about an hour’s drive from Athens. That was ill-timed because I was not really in the mood for partying all night, which was probably the (unofficial) point of going there. We had a good dinner and hung out a bit, made a fire outside, played some pool and foosball, and we even had a bath in the hot tub. Yes, pure decadence. But since I still felt kinda sick, I was neither really enjoying all of that, nor was I in the mood to nag, especially about the bourgeois temptations of the hot tub that I had fallen prey to. But some kind of Marxist deity (I know—what a profane idea!) was quick in judging me. After a short night of no more than four hours of sleep, I woke up jaded, and with a sore throat. And the entire Wednesday was mostly a sick day. Thursday wasn’t much better, but since we did not plan on going out in Cleveland, I thought sick in Athens, sick in Cleveland—what’s the difference? And I really wanted to see the city and visit Geeg’s family.

So, back in the car to Cleveland. All in all, I might have caught an hour of sleep on the three-hour drive. The girls were able to tell from my eyes being shut while my mouth was open wide. At least I didn’t snore, they said.

When we arrived at Geeg’s home in a nice residential area in West Cleveland (West side, best side!, I’ve been brainwashed) we were greeted by her parents and grandma, and a huge black cat by the name of Clarence Clemens, I think. We had a great dinner (first pasta since I don’t know when, great salad, and a tasty desert), and later the girls and I watched some Portlandia until I had to go to bed in order not to fall asleep on the couch. Still being sick, the prospect of falling asleep in a warm and comfy bed has rarely felt so good.

View from outside Sokolowski's

The next morning, I already felt better. First highlight of the day: Sokolowski’s. Geeg had been talking about this Polish restaurant the entire week, promising the best food ever, and she wasn’t exaggerating too much; it was very good indeed. My meal consisted of chicken paprikash, pierogi, and sauerkraut, and it was great, but way too much for me to finish. So I took it home in a container. Just as good as the food was the place itself: very cozy atmosphere, and at the service counter, Polka music was playing, while in the restaurant’s main room, a guy played the piano.

Afterwards, Geeg’s mom chauffeured us around town; we passed the Indian’s baseball stadium, the Rock ‘n’ Roll Hall of Fame, saw the shores of Lake Eerie, went to a market hall, and visited the national gardens, a big park where many nationalities are represented with statues and monuments. The German Garden featured a replica of the statue of Goethe and Schiller in Weimar along with a smaller bust of Friedrich Ludwig Jahn, that old gymnastics guru. Finally, since we were there during the International Cleveland Film Festival, we saw a good movie, Bart Van den Bempt’s “82 Days in April,” in which a Belgian couple travels through Turkey in order to retrace the trip of their son who had died in a car accident. Very touching story, a bit lengthy at times, but probably intentionally so. Great visuals.

And then it was time to head back home, the car loaded with food that Geeg’s mom gave us poor students.