btw
I got the idea with the haikus from another blogger. The wannabe girl. One subtitle of her blog is a weblog about weblogs. So a little bit like mine recently. I like her latest haiku which is quite funny in a dark sense:

"Such a boring day
No training and no bomb threat
Need some excitement."

If you are too lazy or uninspired to write your own you can generate 100 trillion haikus here.

i can see the sky it's reflecting on my screen what a blue. so pure.

look out of window the monitor is mirrored in the window pane

a trodden path at left
just open space to the right
which way to go now?

I do not listen to the radio anymore
Only five years ago I still loved the radio, I mean certain programmes on it. I was listening to Bernard Lenoir's "La musique pas comme les autres" on France Inter. Lenoir ("le soir c'est Lenoir") is France's equivalent to John Peel from Radio One. I think his programme is called C'est Lenoir now. But I cannot take it anymore. To listen to one good song I have to listen to 5 crappy pseudo indie songs. No way. Nowadays we have the internet where I can listen to what I want. I am my own dee-jay.
Other programmes I gave up on: Schwarzweiss on HR1, a German station. They were never really great. Now they have changed the transmission schedule. instead of 7 to 9 pm it is 8 to 10 now.
Last but not least my favourite programme of all the time. The Zündfunk made by the Bayerischer Rundfunk #2 (BR2). They know most about interesting music off the beaten paths in Germany. Their programmes are intellectual and quite profound. But they are based in Munich and their programme is for people from there and I am not 25 anymore and it is from 5 to 6 pm weekdays I think when I still have to work.
I still listen to the Skydivers (Google has got my post of yesterday in its cache!) from Washington DC. Great melancholic pop music nobody knows about. Check alcohol, sadness you crave and summer sky (direct mp3 download links). Guitar pop close to dream pop at its lightest and best.

On parle français (FR) (pour toi)
Les weblogs ou blogs en français sont encore très rares. Je suppose il y a si peu de blogs dans la langue de Voltaire parce qu'il n'existe pas encore une bonne traduction. :-) Le terme officiel est blogue, sinon joueb (avec infos comment en créer un) était suggéré.
Une autre possibilité pourquoi j'ai trouvé si peu d'exemples pourrait être le manque de liens entre eux. Peut-être il y a beaucoup de français qui écrivent leur journal sur l'internet mais ils restent dans leur coin.

Une liste non-exhaustive de blogues que j'ai trouvé sur la toile.
- c'est tout: Un blogue collective. Les articles sont rangés dans des thèmes. Circa 3 articles par semaine.
- niutopia: Fait parti de c'est tout. Informations et nouvelles concernant les techniques utiles sur les blogues qu'on appelle jouebs ici. On peut aussi héberger son blogue là-bas si j'ai bien compri. 3-4 article par semaine.
- everybody's weird: Manur aime bien la musique pas comme les autres. Il écrit 3-4 fois par semaine.
- JY: Un Nantais qui aime aussi la musique un peu indé et toutes les choses html oueb etc. JY écrit en anglais tous les jours.
- nospoon: Effort collective. Centré vers la technologie, internet, ordinateurs etc. Très intéressant. Plusieurs articles par jour.
- darnziak: Culture pop, cinéma, musique etc. Bien écrit. Mise à jour tous les deux jours.
- iokanaan: Musique indé, cinéma, BD, culture générale etc. Existe depuis février. Nouvelles articles presque tous les jours.
- karl & cow: Photos, textes littéraires, pensées etc. Très bien fait. Journalier.
- ocw: Je suppose c'est une jeune québécoise qui écrit sur sa vie quotidienne. 1-2 articles par semaine. Il existe aussi un blog en anglais d'elle.
- elanceur: Sous-titré opinions, brèves de comptoirs et commentaires sur le netbusiness. Un article par semaine.

Welcome to the club!

The song I just needed
I was just listening to a couple of mp3 tracks I recently downloaded. Mp3s have become my first source of information on new music. Usually 80% of all the songs I download by unknown bands are average and not very interesting pieces of alternative music.
But sometimes I stumble upon jewels. Like the song Alcohol by the Skydivers. As always in the beginning I just listened to the melody. I was hooked immediately and the song has been playing on repeat for the last half an hour. Extremely light slightly melancholic guitar indie pop with a small dose of psychedelic mushrooms which made me think of the Field Mice and Flying Nun bands from New Zealand like Jean Paul Sartre Experience. Somehow I know this slightly nasal and grave voice of the singer. He sings like someone else. But who?

Then I started trying to understand the lyrics. And this line kept sticking in my head:
"Every time I look at you
I have to lie
And tell you that you're fine"

I started understanding what this song was about. The title which I had not taken notice of made sense now. The name of the band which I had misread as "varied sky" (divers in the French meaning) suddenly seemed like a coincidence. They are from Washington DC and you can download Alcohol and some other songs here.

Nothing to blog about
Today must have been one of the hottest days this summer. We went to eat outside at a Greek restaurant. Just starters, some salad and joghurt. It was strange when we arrived in Kronberg, probably the city with most millionaires (e.g. Leisler-Kiep) per capita in Germany. We parked the car next to the Jugendzentrum (youth centre). On the market square there was a kind of party going on of the local CDU (German conservatives) and at the youth centre the adolescents were smoking pot. Nice smell and even nicer contrast.
The Greek was a German Greek. With the sweetest and lousiest Retsina I have ever had in my life. Retsina has to be a little rough and dry. It has to taste of turpentine otherwise there is not enough resin inside. And it must be drunk at a temperature quite close to zero degrees (5 should be ok). The Greek restaurant tried to do nouvelle cuisine. Ridiculous. But the food was all right.
[slightly amended August 16th]

Connections
From time to time there are these threads at ILM. They are called Only Connect. I think you start with some artist or song and the next person has to make a connection to another artist or song etc. The internet works like that. Hyperlinks are connections and I love jumping from A to B to Z to A. Let's see if it works. 10 hops must be possible.

1 As a good self-referentialist I start with my review of the Van Gogh exhibition in Frankfurt.
2 From there I go to an article by Mario Vargas Llosa in the New York Times on Van Gogh and Gauguin (free registration required) living together in Arles.
3a Next station could be (but is not) the fireworks Rhein in Flammen as in the aforementioned article Arles is supposed to be on the Rhine. A German (ok ok Swiss-German-French-Dutch) river flowing into the Mediterranean. A dream coming true. I hope the translator and not Vargas Llosa could not distinguish the "o" from the "i". Whatever. Next time I (as a European) will write that Washington is the capital of Tierra del Fuego.
3 On we go therefore with absinth as both Gauguin and van Gogh loved it whereas Vargas Llosa thinks of it (in the NYT article) as "a nasty beverage tasting of mint and sugar, pharmaceutically based".
4 Next stop is salvia divinorum, a substance which is legal in contrast to absinth but which has similar effects.
5 I do not know anything about the Mazatec indians in Mexico (who consume salvia) but I know Castaneda (RIP) who wrote about Mexican sorcerers who can fly.
6 Castanedas teacher (in his books) was called Don Juan which brings us back to the old continent. Mozart's most famous opera (google translation from Italian).
7 Now I make a jump of two centuries. The Beatles were to the late twentieth century what Mozart was to the late 18th.
8 The Beatles without John Lennon would be like Christianity without Jesus.
9 At ILM someone imagined that Jesus would be listening to Oasis on his walkman now.
10 An oasis in the desert is like this site in the internet. But watch your clicks. It could also be a fata morgana or like a drug test experience.

Post-impressionism
We went to see the Van Gogh exhibition in the Frankfurt Städel museum. Actually it is not only about Van Gogh but also about his painter friends who developed new styles based on the then predominant impressionism. The exhibition has been organised by the Saint Louis Art Museum and the full name is Vincent Van Gogh and the painters of the petit boulevard.

There were three pictures which really impressed me. The first one was by the man himself. One of his last works called Stairway at Auvers from 1890. It is actually on the cover of the catalog. As so often with Van Gogh the colours are very impressive. In this painting there are many variations of green together with some yellow, blue, red and white. It is not a light radiating picture as for example the Sunflowers. But it is still quite bright. In the middle there are the yellow stairs which an old man with a walking-stick descends. In the front there are two pairs of women, two older women dressed in dark green and two young women dressed in white. I do not want to go on with the description as I am not very good at it. What I like about the painting besides the colour composition is that it is so full of details (almost crammed) and that I did not know it before. With pictures it is like with music. If you have seen them too often you get tired of them. When looking at that painting I get the impression Van Gogh knew that he was going to die soon and he tried to put as much of himself into it as possible. That is why it is slightly crammed.

Charles Angrand, of whom I had not heard of before, painted the Seine at Dawn in 1889 (that was the year when Nietzsche became mad). That is a picture reminding me a lot of Monet as you see a man in a boat on the Seine with the silhouette of Paris in the background.The style is already kind of pointillistic. This painting is a chef d'oeuvre of understatement. There is hardly anything to see. It is very inconspicuous. Just dots in green, yellow, white and different blue tones. From the distance everything is pale blue, but really pale. In the original the boat was surrounded by a halo which I cannot see anymore on the reproduction.

The last painting I liked is the View of Collioure from 1887 by Paul Signac. Another painter I did not know before but I am quite a peasant concerning the visual arts. He seems to be the painter who excelled most in pointillism. In the said picture he melds blue and pink red so that the result is amazingly warm and serene. A funny thing was that the art historian speaking at the audio guide talked all the time of orange roofs etc. But in the original the roofs were obviously pink or pink red. Afterwards I had a look at the postcard and the catalogue. There I saw that the reproduction really was a little orange. It seems to be almost impossible to have authentic colour reproductions. What I like about pointillism is that it is a different perspective towards the world. Everything is not continuous anymore but much more fragmentary and isolated. But when you have a look from the distance you cannot see it.

Entzauberung der Welt (DE)
Do you understand German? If not you can try Altavista's Babelfish for the following post. My chaotic thoughts will suddenly become clear and evident ;-).

Heute wurde mir plötzlich im Supermarkt klar wie doch das Leben heutzutage (früher wahrscheinlich genauso) von Tag zu Tag mehr an Zauber verliert.

Zum einen wird man immer älter, erfahrener, lernt immer mehr Dinge kennen. Dadurch wird das ursprünglich riesige Reich des Unbekannten, Unerforschten, des Abenteuers andauernd kleiner. Am Ende gibt es nur noch ein Geheimnis, den Tod. Ob es dann wieder von vorne losgeht mit uns wie mit einem weißen Blatt oder ob es weitergeht, als wäre nichts gewesen bzw. ob der Vorhang wirklich zugeht, will ich jetzt hier nicht reflektieren.

Andererseits, und das scheint mir heute viel stärker als früher der Fall zu sein, verändert sich die Welt mit einer Geschwindigkeit, dass man kaum noch mitkommt. Es wird bald (in vielleicht fünf oder zehn Jahren) geklonte Menschen auf Erden geben. Das wird nichts (außer ein Weltkrieg) verhindern können. Der Mensch ist wirklich dabei die letzten Rätsel der Wissenschaft zu lösen. Irgendwann wird es keine Abenteuer mehr geben. Schon heute sind Reiseabenteuer in Bezug auf unerforschte Gegenden absolute Mangelware. Daher gibt es ja auch diesen fürchterlichen Trend zu Abenteuersportarten wie z.B. diesem idiotischen Seilspringen in die Tiefe, habe glatt den Namen vergessen. Who cares? Es wird noch viel schlimmer (oder besser) kommen. Alles wird bekannt sein. Alle werden alles wissen. Auch voneinander. Es geht ja schon heute los. Die Leute verwandeln sich ja freiwillig in Glashäuser. Nicht nur bei Big Brother, auch wir Weblogger oder Blogger teilen Dinge von uns mit, die früher tabu waren. Alles wird durchsichtiger. Und das Perfide ist, die Leute machen das auch noch freiwillig bzw. unbewußt.

Wird es der Mensch wirklich schaffen, alle Unvorhersehbarkeit (z.B. auch bei dem Geschlecht, der Intelligenz etc. des Fötus) völlig auszuschalten? Hier kann die Antwort nur nein lauten. Andernfalls müsste der Tod besiegt werden. Einige sagen schon, das könnte möglich sein. Selbst dann wird es immmer noch den Tod geben. Zumindest den Selbsttod. Außer man verbietet ihn. Und wie? Auf Todesstrafe!