'I hope we all die'

Given the quality of the live recording and the fact that this was the first Mountain Goats song that I ever heard (on a train trip from Bayreuth to Trier, as I recall it, circa 2003) I find it's acceptable to post another video from this concert.



So there.

In life we search, and some of us find

Once again, you may have noted, we’ve hit one of those work-related vortexes that has sapped us of either time or inspiration for broadcasting our thoughts and grievances to the world. This may change soonishly (if so, though, on the other side of an upcoming vacation), so please, dear readers, don’t abandon us completely. There will be some interesting stuff on the other side of this silence.

There have, obviously, been no shortage of things worth commenting on in the last few weeks, from the Women’s World Cup to the Euro crisis, though I have to admit not having a great deal original to say on either score (either than, respectively, ‘wow!’ and a series of incoherent, anguished screams).

There is, however, something far more important that I wanted to note today: our tenth wedding anniversary.

This seems hard to believe, as it feels like not all that long ago that we gathered with a few friends for a small, low-key ceremony in the charming registry office in Trier where we tied our particular knot. (Said office is found in the 11th century ‘Turm Jerusalem’ (Jerusalem Tower) which has in its foyer, as I recall, a first edition of Das Kapital in a glass display case...Marx was a hometown boy, you see.)

I didn’t, in fact, understand a great deal of the ceremony (I had only arrived in Germany a month before and was somewhat ill-prepared, linguistically); however, I made sure to say ‘Ja’ at that point when all the German-speakers in the room looked at me expectantly.

That, it seems, was enough.

When I think about what we (and the world) have been through since that day, I find it makes me want to sit down and take a few deep breaths, as it has been quite extraordinary. (Though it’s all gone rather better for us personally than for the world at large.)

So, I just wanted to say -- before the whole world, now and forever -- that there’s no one with whom I’d rather walk through this life than the wonderful woman I found so many years ago (or who found me, I’m not so sure any more).

Happy anniversary, my dearest wife, partner, friend and lover.

Hit it George...

Ah, love

Along with being Europe Day, today is my parents' 63rd wedding anniversary.

They're no longer around to celebrate it.

But I am.

Here, the happy couple in 1960, about a decade before I appeared on the scene.

And since yesterday was Mother's Day, here's a bonus photo from the archives, taken sometime in the early 1960s when my mother had just gotten her driver's license.

She looks pretty pleased with herself. As she should, having passed her exam in a country that drives, from her perspective, on the wrong side of the road. (She was British before becoming American, you see).

Of course, it may also have something to do with that awesome car she's leaning against....

Loving ze Germans

Quite a week. Not only is the BBC showing a documentary on the 'Real Germany' (in which the war is not mentioned, though, of course, only after the ritual show of pointing out that it's not being mentioned) and now someone at the Guardian goes and declares Germany the 'greatest European art nation of the 20th century'.

Gott im Himmel!, as they used to say in my old black and white comics....

Vaz it zomezing vee zaid?

I won't let go, I won't let go

Friday night music.



'This is the Dream of Evan and Chan', Dntel feat. Ben Gibbard

And while we're talking Ben Gibbard:



'What Sarah Said', Death Cab for Cutie

Eight years' wedded bliss...

...is worth celebrating, nicht wahr?



Marie Osmond, 'In my little corner of the world'

(More background and a better version here.)



The Magnetic Fields, 'The Book of Love'

Feel the love!

I will follow you into the dark

From a statement by the family of conductor Sir Edward Downes and his wife Lady Joan:

"After 54 happy years together, they decided to end their own lives rather than continue to struggle with serious health problems."

Having watched as people close to me have struggled with 'serious health problems' (an accurate term but one so bland as to be almost a euphemism), I find their decision not only reasonable but also deeply moving.

Also. And more.

Little Dieter has two daddies

To keep in mind when you next hear that homosexuality is 'unnatural':

A pair of male penguins has adopted an abandoned chick, now about a month old, at a zoo in Bremerhaven, Germany. Zoo veterinarian Joachin Schöne said Wednesday that the two Humboldt penguins took turns incubating the egg, which had been abandoned by its biological parents. Zookeepers had placed the egg near the two male penguins in the hope that they would care for it as their own. The experiment, so far, has worked.

(German version)

Here, an image of the proud baby daddies, 'Z' and 'Vielpunkt', and their adopted offspring:


Ah, family values, eh?....

(Image Source)

Don't fence me in

Seeing that I have a both a (recently encouraged) irrational rage directed at immigration laws and a (far more long-term and stable) appreciation for wedded bliss -- especially of the trans-Atlantic variety -- I was struck by Cory Doctorow's recent Boing Boing post drawing attention to the plight of science fiction author Bruce Sterling and his wife, the writer Jasmina Tesanovic.

As Sterling explains in a post at Wired:

Surprising news has just arrived for us at our American home address. Although we have been married for four years now, the American Immigration services can't find any paper trail for the two of us.

We have no joint bank account, no insurance accounts and no joint children. The authorities therefore suspect that our marriage is a phony "Green Card marriage," and they would like to have Jasmina deported from the USA.

This is not too entirely surprising a mistake, since we're an Internet couple. By our nature, we just don't generate much paper.

We use electronic banking. Bruce uses American banks, while Jasmina uses Serbian banks. Why would anyone want to make his or her alien spouse use an American or Serbian bank?

There's no reason for us to jointly speculate in American real-estate, since we each already own places to live. No sane European would ever want American health insurance. And so forth.

Like a lot of geek couples, we live out of our cellphones and laptops. Furniture, wedding china, massive home improvement loans: we don't even go there. We have a light material footprint that'll generally fit onto a couple of rollaboards.

I don't know either of them (though I have very much enjoyed Sterling's books Holy Fire, The Difference Engine and Islands in the Net) and therefore can't offer any useful proof to the INS about the reality of their marriage, I can (and hereby do) offer that other commodity that they request: moral support.

Here's to love across borders.

Best of luck.

Love, love, love

Declarations of love come in very different forms.

Sweet and melty:

(via Boing-Boing)

Scary, but possibly more practical:

“I will marry you if you bring me a shipful of corpses.”

(Via Mightygodking)

Heavy Duty Rock and Roll

Via Spiegel Online comes an interesting article (another one is also available in English, but for some reason they seem to have taken all the interesting bits out...) about the Wacken Open Air music festival.

Wacken is a farming village in Schleswig-Holstein, population 1800. It seems like a quiet little place.

Wacken Open Air, in contrast, this year featured bands such as 3 Inches of Blood, Hatebreed, and Massacre. (CAUTION: a couple of these links lead to crunching guitars and furious wailing. Not the sort of thing you necessarily want to broadcast at your workplace. Though I suppose that depends on your workplace.)

Iron Maiden headlined.

The festival -- which has grown tremendously since it began in 1990 -- attracted some 75,000 fans of this kind of music.

The locals really do not seem to be the sort of people you think of when you hear the words 'death metal'.

But still, they seem to be really good sports about the whole thing.



And, so far as I can tell from the reports I've read, there is a remarkable amount of, um, harmony between the residents and their guests.

The weird charm of this event seems to have been central in the mind of director Cho Sung-hyung when she made it the subject of her film 'Full Metal Village' .

Here is a sort of trailer-type thing, which makes for good watching, as worlds collide:



Not least since I've been re-discovering my inner-metalhead recently (though my tastes run a bit more toward Black Sabbath, Iron Maiden and Motörhead than, say, Cannibal Corpse; nonetheless, I'm open-minded about these things) this looks like great fun.

I would like to think the atmosphere is as good as it seems from the articles and videos. (Although a toilet was set on fire at the festival this year, the police said things were -- all things considered -- very peaceful. You see, heavy metal is all about love. No, really.)

And happily, it gives me another excuse to offer a Mountain Goats video:



'The Best Ever Death Metal Band Out of Denton'

So, till next time, remember kids... Hail Satan!

Of love and excrement

Francis Sedgemore points us to a classic set of propositions by Slavoj Žižek on the cultural significance of toilet facilities and pubic hair:



Our own contribution focuses on the topic of love. Not as comforting as you might think...



'Something went terribly wrong."

Yep.

Yay

Here's to yesterday's decision by the California Supreme Court

striking down two state laws that had limited marriages to unions between a man and a woman, ruled on Thursday that same-sex couples have a constitutional right to marry.

The 4-to-3 decision, drawing on a ruling 60 years ago that struck down a state ban on interracial marriage, would make California the second state, after Massachusetts, to allow same-sex marriages.

I'll let hilzoy take over from here:

Six of the seven justices on the court were appointed by Republicans.

This is a wonderful, wonderful thing. I am a complete sucker for marriage. I think everyone should have one. The idea that our governments decide to prevent people from having them -- that there are couples out there who love each other and want to get married and can't, not for comprehensible reasons like a ban on incest, but just because of flat-out bigotry, or because of the imaginary threat that same-sex marriages pose to heterosexual marriages -- is just plain wrong. Moreover, I think it's wrong not just substantively, but legally: distinctions based on sexual orientation ought to be suspect, and in this case the state does not have a compelling interest in drawing one.

Yay for California, and yay for its Supreme Court.

Also being a complete sucker for marriage, I say: Yay indeed.