Diversions Manifold

  I finally - probably not for the last time - started reading Thinking the Twentieth Century by Tony Judt with Timothy Snyder . That may sound suspicious: admitting two authors is generally a bad sign for a book, but here it was a necessary conceit. Tony Judt was an eminent moral historian who was struck down with ALS (the illness made famous / trivialised by 2014’s ice bucket challenge fad): Snyder is an American historian of Eastern Europe who faded in and out of Judt’s comet trail over the years and who decided that Judt’s own history, views and development over the decades needed to be captured before the inevitable, swift, end.   So this is a “spoken book”, a conversation between two colleagues speaking and discussing at eye level, rather than an interview between a professional journalist and a professional of something else entirely. Judt and Snyder by necessity follow in the Eastern European tradition of such transcribed conversations. I’m looking forward to discoveri

This morning, another relaxed, family- and work-free morning, I pottered about getting up, making breakfast and checking the weather. Finally, the rain was due - but only later in the afternoon. So, I packed my bag, plopped in my contact lenses, had a cup of tea, read more of “Teach us to sit still” by Tim Parks - an amazing account of his battle to find his balance, in order to alleviate his pain - and then finally hopped on my bike to the Tiergarten swimming pool. It was the perfect time to go. I was ready to swim at 11:45 and there were three people in the play pool (the readout showed that was 22 °C - and it really took my breath away when I plunged in), though there was a flurry of wet-suited triathletes taking up a third of the olympic pool (which was a balmy 24 °C). The rest of the place was practically deserted, and I had a lane to myself. Without the stress of having to watch out for other swimmers, I realised what really stresses me about swimming - it’s bloody noisy! Whet

Comet on 3rd August 2014 - ESA via Ars Technica Well, it's a stone of a few kilometers girth - but compared to the vastness of space, it's a stone, alright. And somehow, humans have managed to send a spacecraft to rendezvous with it. Incredible when you think about it - and almost incomprehensible! Here's a great article from Ars Technica summarising the rendezvous. Looking forward to the news in November, when the lander should tether Rosetta to the comet!

This has been an interesting semester of music with the Musikfreunde Heidelberg Symphony Orchesta . When I first came across the programme, my heart sank a little: we were in for a crowd-pleasing semester of cheesy dancy Latin American stuff with minimal musical merit. Well, it certainly pleased the crowds - and, I am glad to say, it won me over, too.  We played seven pieces in all, ranging from Ravel's contemplative Pavane pour un enfant défunt (a Pavane being a dance), through to the highlight of the evening, Danzon 2 by Arthuro Marquéz, all kicked off by Gershwin's inimitable Cuban Overture. As you might guess, there was a lot of rhythm to play, with all the precision and control that that implies. It's very easy to think too much about rhythm, but I certainly had to clarify things in my own mind about how long to play a note, how loudly and with which accents - along, of course, with the basic question of when to play each note. There was a section in Danz

A short and not excessively dramatic story of loss and gain Some seemingly random and certainly uninvited bugs ganged up to cause me quite a hefty a throat infection this week, with the usual range of symptoms that such an ailment entails: difficulty in swallowing, running a temperature, lethargy - and more or less losing my voice. That I could still just about speak made things interesting to observe on one front. Since I've been having to speak “around” the swelling, I have automatically reverted to my most relaxed, my most sonorous voice - but for some reason not my most natural. I’ve been noticing of late how I have developed, especially at work, a sharp-edged “scratch” to my voice. It's almost certainly a subconscious attempt to project my voice through the hubbub and grandstanding of the office environment, in a similar way to how city birds have increased their pitch and volume to overcome the ever louder traffic and general background noise of the city. This may e

Another semester of orchestral music has drawn to a close with Saturday night's concert of the Musikfreunde Heidelberg Symphony Orchestra in the Stadthalle. The hall was packed, we played with passion and precision (though not always both at the same time), and the audience was by all accounts happy. It was an unexpectedly relaxed end to an otherwise hectic term - for me, at least. It was presumably much less relaxing for our principal conductor, who was ill over the last few weeks leading up to the main concert and is still reuperating. He had to limit himself to the concerts (in Gernsbach and Leutershausen as well as the Stadhalle itself), so a couple of final rehearsals were cancelled. With those "pre-concerts" being two weeks before the main one, the final weeks were much less packed than usual. Given that the final result was so good,  perhaps the timing was just right to "depressurise" things, keeping us keen and fresh rather than jaded and exhausted

Staatsfeind Wikileaks - "Wikileaks - Enemy of the State" - published in January 2011 by two journalists (Marcel Rosenbach and Holger Stark from Der Spiegel ) who followed Julian Assange during the tumultuous year of Wikileaks "revelations" and exposures throughout 2010 is one of those perplexing "history of now" books Reading the book (a Christmas present from my brother in law) now, especially the introductory paragraphs, feels strangely hollow, as if there's a large, NSA and Edward Snowden-sized gap in the story being told. Conversely, today there seems to be a Wikileaks and Assange-sized gap in the news - though it's a gap nobody appears to miss very much. I'm only at the beginning of Staatsfeind Wikileaks and, despite a noticeable editorial miss (unless I've missed a large Australian city called "Syndey"), it's shaping up to be an interesting read. It has flowed fairly chronologically so far, describing an unusual,

Writing about smelling things makes me feel remarkably uneasy. It seems to be more acceptable somehow to write about music or noise, photography or fashion, even about its food and drink counterpart than it is about odour itself. But it doesn’t have to be this way. Developing the sense of smell is, after all, a skill, a talent, an art, just like learning to listen and to see. And, standing as I do at the very bottom of the olfactory learning curve, I’m very bad at it. Unless I had a cold and I couldn’t breathe or taste properly, I took my sense of smell totally for granted. I would pay great heed to it in potentially negative scenarios, like sniffing for food or clothes that were a bit off - until recently, when a book opened my nose to that most chemical of arts, perfume. That book was The Secret of Scent by Luca Turin. I unexpectedly found this alluring accord of olfactory geekery and scientific erudition on my bookshelf at home, where it had been left by my father who, as a c

The "Albums of the Year" articles are trickling in, including this one from the Guardian on Daft Punk's Random Access Memories. In it, there's a wonderful quote that really hits the mark on how I feel about the album - originally from  Sasha Frere-Jones in the NYT :  "The duo has become so good at making records that I replay parts of Random Access Memories repeatedly while simultaneously thinking it is some of the worst music I've ever heard … This record raises a radical question: does good music need to be good?" This hits home on the interplay between composition and production / performance, a wonderfully delicate balance. Of course, a terrible performance can wreck even the best composition - but for me, it's better to find nuggets of a great composition in the rubble of a poor performance than to be able to appreciate an amazing performance of dross. André Rieu and Daft Punk on the same side of the spectrum? Harsh, but one to think abou

2CV hub - reminds me of the Tintin books! The other museum- Oh. Sorry, I'll have to start that again. Over Easter, you may recall, I visited the German Phonographic museum in St. Georgen. We also visited another building full of mostly old stuff - but it wasn't a museum. We went to the Autosammlung Steim in Schramberg. This collection has been built up over the years by Dr. Ing Hans-Jochen Steim, with the express intent of being driven. And what a collection it is! Much more compact than equivalents like Sinsheim, it initially comes across as being small and stuffy - but the quality of the cars in there speaks for itself, as do the occasional tell-tale tyre marks along the otherwise pristine floors. Definitely worth a visit, as the (again, smartphone) photos below will attest. As an aside, Herr Dr. Ingenieur Steim was chairman of the Kern-Liebers group of companies. These make such "dull" products as springs and stampings. However, one look at the rang

Travel often doesn't happen quickly enough, even if you're travelling fast. Often it's a case of losing perspective, losing the perception of speed. We all know it from driving on the Autobahn - our brains trick us into feeling that overtaking lots of cars slowly in a traffic jam is swifter or more effective than cruising along at the same 140 kmh speed. Similarly, sitting in a train with others in a carriage is torture for me - there is no feeling of progress. I had this feeling recently when cycling home from work one pleasant evening (weather-wise, at least: work-wise it had been a crappy day) and suddenly felt that I wasn't proceeding fast enough. It was creating a tension: I wanted to be on my bike, pedalling away my stresses from work - yet, I wanted to be at home straight away, knowing that I would then be in the vortex of kiddy dinner times and puttings to bed. Then I looked sideways. My shadow was fair flying over the fields between Eppelheim and Grenzhof.