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2003-04-27
Better than Cats
After the disappointment of "Cats", I had been anticipating the concert in Potsdam last evening with mixed feelings, but it turned out that my wariness was entirely unfounded. Although visually less stimulating than the musical, the evening definitely was one of the musical highlights of the year for us, and that for less than a third of what we had paid for the tickets for "Cats".
The Hilliard Ensemble, an a-capella formation which specializes in pre-16th century music, was announced as one of the world leading vocal ensembles, and the praise was no exaggeration. The four men, a counter tenor, two tenors and a baritone, have a masterful grasp of harmonics, and what's more, they use their expertly trained voices with the ability of true virtuosi.
Performing a program that encompassed ancient music from France, England, and Italy as well as a few church chorals in Latin, their voices filled the hall of the Nicolaisaal with the beauty of polyphoneous music, and we lost ourselves completely in the experience. We only emerged from our state of music-induced bliss two wonderful and too short hours later when after two encores the four men left the stage for the evening. Besides giving us two wonderful hours filled with some of the most beautiful music we had ever heard, we are also grateful for them to have restored our confidence that there are still musical performances to experience which totally capture our hearts, something that was shaken badly after the much-hyped but underwhelming "Cats" in Berlin.
2003-04-22
Easter
This was by far the most un-easterly Easter we've had yet: no bunny, except for the one which had the warm, cosy place in the oven ;-), no dyed eggs. But we had the basket search (yes, we still do that) and the obligatory family meeting (on Good Friday this time), which was better than anticipated, thanks to the absence of one of my wife's cousins and the presence of the other, who is the most pleasant family member to hang around with for us at the moment. He's also an electrician and has already agreed to help his favourite female cousin with the electricity on the upper floor of the new house. One problem down, umpteen jillion to go.
In fact, several more down. We used Easter Saturday for a pilgrimage of all the DIY department stores that litter the landscape in a radius of a few dozen miles. And we were quite successful in what we were trying to achieve, namely, outfitting our future two bathrooms as cheaply as possible while still not violating our sense of aesthetics. And we got basically everything we need, except for the floor and wall tiles: shower cabins and tubs, a bath tub, wash basins, shower heads, faucets, toilets, the whole nine yards. And we are still several hundred bucks below what we would have paid the construction firm for doing our ground floor bathroom alone, which means that once the tiles have been bought, we'll be at about a kilobuck more than that sum. This is better than we had hoped, and unless you are willing to go for the absolutely cheapest stuff (which we aren't: everything worth doing is worth doing right, right?), is about the best you can do around here.
Of course, the comparison isn't entirely fair because we'll have to do all the work: installing the stuff and tiling the floors and walls. But we've already outfitted two bathrooms were we had to do everything, even the pipes, in the more than 130 year old house we're living in right now. So how hard can it be in comparison when the house is new, all the walls are straight, and the pipes are already in place? Granted, it's still a lot of work, but it's certainly manageable.
In totally unrelated news, gardening season has finally and irrevocably started. Blue skies and temperatures in the low 70's meant we spent most of Easter outside. We cleaned the pond and replaced the fish which had sadly all died in the unusually long and cold winter with some new ones from a local fisherman. We also cleaned up our compost piles so that instead of three we now have only two plus a pile of prime compost soil which we'll likely use up in the coming weeks. We also replanted all our Oleander plants into bigger pots and converted the site of the third, no longer existant, compost pile into lawn.
And I got my first sunburn of the year, nothing bad but still a noticable reddening of the skin. But after that long winter I just needed to soak up all the sun I could get, especially since the skin problems on my back have gotten rather bad during the long, dark, cold season...
2003-04-20
Oops, she did it again
Layne has again vanished off the net, at least for me. It looks like DNS issues again, as what greets me under that address is a Notwork Solutions place holder page. And Enetation doesn't work either.
I need my Easter blog fix! Y'all come back, you hear?!
[Update: both Layne's blog and my comments are working again, and thus Easter was saved! Yay!
While I was at it I also made a few minor tweaks to my link list: Shell is gone as Shellshocking has turned into a warblog, and Caoine is new to the list.]
2003-04-19
Making love, not war
We had a fight yesterday. Like almost all fights between two persons who have known each other for more than a dozen years and loved each other for more than ten, it was ultimately pointless. The disagreement was not, of course, but the fact that it devolved into some high-decibel fighting.
The topic was kids and when to have them, which is not an easy topic between us. Early in our relationship when we were still students, she had more or less wanted a baby, but I had been of absolutely no mind to become a dad - at the time the thought had quite frankly scared me. Nowadays, it's the other way round: I can not imagine going through life without kids much longer, while she is scared of the prospect, of the changes this will inevitably bring into our private and professional lives.
Things had started innocously enough. We were discussing the near future in the context of our house building project when the topic came up and somehow devolved into a shouting match. When my wife could no longer take it, she left with some work in hand and locked the bathroom door behind her, thus declaring herself incommunicado for a while. After about an hour, when we had both the time to sulk and calm a little, in her case after washing the frustration away with tears, we did what we should have done an hour ealier. I kissed away her last tears, we had a short, productive talk of no more than five minutes and put the topic aside afterwards.
After lunch I had the chance to attest to Ryan's observation from a few days ago: sex after a fight is wild and exquisite, with both parties determined to make up for the previous idiocy with all the passion they can muster up. Great as the sex was though, I sure as hell am not eager to repeat the procedure - even after-fighting-sex is not good enough to be worth the fighting that preceeds it. Nothing is.
But hell did it come close.
Does the phrase "best sex ever" have any meaning for you? Well, after discovering her g-spot, almost every bit of nookie deserves that title, and to our considerable delight and utter amazement it just keeps getting better. After she started things off with some wildly erotic oral attention to the little prince, it was no longer little, and we quickly progressed to me almost eating her breasts and stomach with my kisses. Which was the moment that someone knocked on the door. Living under one roof with my parents-in-law, we are of course aware of the possibility of just that happening. So being of no mind to stop what we were doing, I barked an angry and decisive "Not now!" in the general direction of the door, which in all likelyhood left absolutely no doubt in the potential trespasser's mind what exactly was going on, a fact we later verified with my mother-in-law.
Soon after that my wife demanded I enter her with something, anything, and being of no mind to do the tabs and slots thing just then, I inserted two fingers into her warm, eager wetness and proceeded to treat her g-spot to some serious attention. This certainly had the desired effect of taking her mind off the potential embarassment of a few minutes ago and sending her into the state of bliss that had become so joyfully familiar in the last weeks. After quickly demanding more pressure she was soon at a point where she just couldn't take it anymore and needed a few moments to catch her breath.
After cuddling for some time, I put a drop of lube onto her nether regions and again put two fingers onto the spot of her rapture, adding a third one into the opening further south, which she had allowd me to explore just a few weeks before. The result was immediate and dramatic as she totally phased out again. When she asked me to finally do the tab and slot thing we learned that as good as the sex had been up until now, it still had the potential to become even better: it seems that a variation of the missionary position with her tilting her hip forward by gripping my hips with her legs, aligns things perfectly for a meeting of g-spot and penis. The result was nothing short of exstacy for her.
I became the witness of her face contorting into a mask of almost otherworldly rapture which I absolutely lack the vocabulary to do any justice. Seeing your penetration do something like that to a woman is an incredible aphrodisiac. But when after a few minutes that mask on her face hadn't changed a bit I became slightly worried and stupidly asked her what was up. "Will you stop, please" wasn't exactly the answer I had expected, but that's exactly what she said. The surreal juxtaposition of her bliss and her request to cease and desist was just too much to take, and I broke down in helpless laughter.
It turns out that the sensations transmitted from penis to g-spot were just too much to take for her. Exstatic as she was she just couldn't let go completely to submerse herself in the feelings and let them wash over her. Holding back the ultimate release which no doubt would have been emotionally overwhelming led to her feeling as if she would burst any moment, which again led to that utterance. That wasn't completely unexpected, as we both know that she has problems with letting go, but still a small disappointment in an otherwise perfect afternoon.
Another moment of unbridled laughter came shortly after this when I told her that my internet research on our new favorite toy had turned up the factoid that after discovering the g-spot, the sensations it causes increase in intensity for a few months until it has reached its full potential. The mock dread on her face when confronted with the prospect of things getting even more intense was priceless. And I count on exactly that progression to get her to let go, something she has needed to learn for years but still can't bring herself to do...
I'm looking forward to that.
2003-04-15
Karen Koehler: Slayer
I love reading, I really love reading. Learning to read was the one motivating factor why when I was six I wanted school to start in spring, so I didn't have to wait for September until I could finally properly learn to read. Since 1st grade I have read voraciously at times, and I loved most of the stuff. Some of what I read is so great I recommend it to all and sundry when there's half a chance they might like it, some of it is really good and worthy of an occasional re-read, most of it was at least enjoyable while it lasted. Quite a few books where fundamentally flawed due to e.g. gaping plot holes, stylistic issues, or the author having an agenda and neglecting the things that make a good book in favor of advancing that agenda (a strategy that usually benefits neither the book nor the agenda), but still provided decent entertainment or food for thought. And then there is the rare book that I find so goddamn awful that I wish in hindsight I'd never started reading it.
"Slayer" is one such book, unfortunately. Its suckiness is on par with that awful modern day continuation of the Artus saga by Deepak Chopra the title of which my mind still mercifully declines to dredge up out of some murky place deeply buried in a dark recess reserved for those truly evil memories. Said suckiness, my unwillingness to leave a book lying unfinished, and my inability to finish reading it without interleaving the ordeal with something better (Raymond E. Feist's "Krondor: Tear of the Gods" which I won't review here, seeing as it is as mainstream as fantasy is going to get) is the reason for the rather long delay after the last review.
Imagine a modern day New York where vampires are a reality, although they are different from what the legends tell us about them: wooden stakes don't work, and neither does silver, garlic, a holy cross or holy water; iron is deadly to them though, as is sunlight or a mortal wound to the neck, and vampirism is not contagious. Each vampire has a specific psi power (think X-Men), and blood is what gives them the energy to keep those powers up, and to heal any non-mortal wound within minutes. Imagine also that the Vatican knows about them, and that there is an agreement in place such that the Vatican doesn't prosecute the vampires as long as human fatalities are kept to an absolute, unconspicious minimum. That agreement is upheld by the Coven, the organization of the Slayers, the vampire militia. And imagine that the head of the New York Coven is something far more sinister and evil than a "normal" vampire, and that our protagonist, once the chosen successor for the post of Covenmaster, has been cast out and marked for death for discovering that something is wrong.
So what besides the slightly cheesy premises is wrong with that book? Almost everything. The plot is an impermeable thicket without a lot of sense to it, the characters, strangely lifeless (pardon the pun), act without discernible motivation, and the author manages to get so many small details wrong that I almost suspect she did it on purpose. And the thing drags! Watching molasses flow outside on a cold winter day is pure action packed excitement when compared to some parts of the book.
Alek, the protagonist, now needs to find a book of legend, the Covenant, possession of which somehow will act as an insurance against the other Slayers killing him. That book, which both the Vatican and the old Covenmaster Amadeus (a misnomer if there ever was one!) would like to get their hands on as well, is supposed to explain the origin of the vampires not as a curse of God, but as an improvement or at least a valid alternative to normal humans. So the hunt is on, and the only motive the reader ever finds for any of the actions in the novel are the ability of the Covenant to ensure Alek's survival (itself never really explained) and the desire of some vampires to not let the book fall into the hands of either Amadeus or the Vatican, as this would spell the end of the vampires one way or the other (and why this should be so is never satisfactorily explained as well).
Besides the dearth of motivation we also don't learn a lot about any of the characters, Alek being the only one about whom we get to know a half-way reasonable amount of information. And this despite the most irritating way in which Karen Koehler intersperses the plot in many places with dreams and thought streams of a great many members of the cast, which together with the dragging pace and the fact that nothing ever gets explained in sufficient detail to make any kind of sense makes following the plot an ordeal. (And FWIW I don't think English not being my native tongue has anything to do with that difficulty: I've read and enjoyed Dune - all six books, the complete History of Middle Earth and most every story ever published by J.R.R. Tolkien, as well as the very intricate plots of Janny Wurts' Wars of Light and Shadow, which should in theory prepare me for almost anything.)
Then there are the things Koehler gets wrong, each a minor irritation, but taken together a major PITA: Many of the Slayers carry Katana or Wakizashi, commonly known as Samurai swords. It is evident that she has read a few things about them, as she intersperses most of the sword fighting scenes with many of the Japanese words for parts of those swords. And it is equally evident that she has done a sloppy job, seeing as she manages to get about half of them wrong, when it would have been much easier to use European swords and the far more common English names for the equivalents of those parts, seeing as the use of those Japanese swords has little to no significance, except perhaps to capture the Highlander fan crowd...
And don't even get me started about the main antagonist and the fact that of course he is of German origin. While I find that irritating, this alone is hardly worth mentioning, seeing as the association of German with evil and awfulness is so pervasive in american post WW II culture. No, what gets me is that Koehler absolutely must pepper Amadeus' speech with interjections of German as if living in New York for half a century wasn't time enough to learn proper English. AND on top of that the German is horribly, awfully, utterly wrong to the point where I can't make heads or tails of it! (Or can anyone please explain to me what "der Vampir sklavischer" is supposed to mean?
Gah! Double Gah!
With the book as awful as it is, the end is of course utterly anticlimactic and disappointing: a pointless death or two in what passes for the final showdown in that sorry excuse for a novel, before we learn the great truth of the origin of the vampires from the Covenant. This truth is so metaphysically at odds with the rest of the universe depicted in the book, it was all I could do to not throw the laptop down in disgust. Blech!
Stay away from that book at all costs.
2003-04-14
Exhaustion
We were on vacation last week, but you wouldn't know that from looking at us. We are in fact so mentally fatigued that unless Layne gets her blog going again and saves the day with some of that truly great writing of hers, the only good thing about this week is that like the next one it only has four workdays...
With our construction permit finally in our hands we used Monday and Tuesday to phone around for firms who could dig the pit for the basement, and for someone to supply us with a subterranean waste water container that satisfies the stringent requirements from the permit. We were moderately successful there, so things are looking up at least in that respect.
Of course, being on vacation meant that my wife's body decided that now was the perfect time to finally let the latent head cold she had fought these last few weeks come out full force. With her sick to the bones, nookie was a non-option for most of the week - a severe disappointment for both of us. And it also meant that I did all of the driving last week, including twice 360 miles to and from the nearest branch of the construction firm which is to build our new home. And of course, Saturday, the day we drove back home, was also the first day of the Easter holidays for all the schools in the area, and so, with weather forecasts being favorable, everyone and his dog was filling up the highways with motor homes and SUVs packed to the rim as if people were moving homes instead of going to a few days of vacation.
At the office of the construction firm, two days of making one decision after the other awaited us. Everything from the color of the roof and façade to the shape of the toilet bowls, the bathroom tiles, and the placement of every single wall socket was discussed in detail and decided upon - pure unadulterated hell for decision-averse me. While some of those decisions were fairly easy and some even enjoyable (like the time we went wild with some of the cheapest floor tiles they had on offer and came up with a gorgeous, vaguely italian style pattern for the kitchen and living room that impressed even the woman who did the stuff together with us), some proved to be very hard indeed. In the end, we even came to the conclusion that we would do the bathrooms ourselves instead of letting the firm do them, as none of the bath room floor and wall tiles they had on offer met our tastes. This means more decisions this week as we need to finalize some aspects of the bath rooms, notably the shape and placement of the bath tub and showers, in order for the whole project to proceed. Bummer.
Besides all the decision making things were reasonably enjoyable though: the food provided by the local restaurants was good and abundant, although somewhat less ethnically diverse and adventurous than I would have liked, and the landscape with its rolling hills, forests and meadows, the plants and wild life freshly awakened by the spring sun, was inviting us to long luxurious walks along the many designated tourist routes, which with temperatures around the freezing point were still mercifully devoid of other people. Still, those walks were insufficient counter balance for all the rest, and so I'm looking forward to an extended Easter weekend where the hardest decision will hopefully be along the lines of whether we'll get up from bed now or an hour later...
2003-04-07
Oh well...
... I know I've been remiss in updating my blog last week - I just couldn't muster up the energy to mangle any of last week's events into blog entries - and due to me being away from Wednesday to Saturday, things don't look any better for this week. Anyway, quite a bit happened last week, some of it deserving of blogging, so here goes the update:
For one thing, we finally received our construction permit. This happened somewhat faster than anticipated, but was conversely also much less of a "Yay" moment than expected, probably because so much yet remains to be done for our house to actually happen. The two most pressing needs involve finding a firm to dig the pit for the basement, and finding another firm to build the underground waste water storage container as required in the permit. This requirement is a rant all by itself as we could theoretically just as well build a small biological waste water treatment facility, which would be much cheaper in the long run, seeing as waste water disposal is bloody expensive around here.
With the construction permit in our hands, the felling permit for the big larch is now legally valid as well, so the tree was felled Saturday morning by my wife's uncle and cousin. While my wife and myself drove the big chunks of wood to a friend who still has an oven and who can consequently use the wood to heat his home, the two dug out the stub. And now there's a big pile of wood - branches, twigs, etc. - lying in our backyard, waiting to be turned into ashes, which is what I will busy myself with today. What a way to start a one week vacation: making a nice big meditation-inducing fire. :-)
After having felled the tree, we changed clothes and drove to the Potsdamer Platz Theater in Berlin, where they are showing the musical "Cats". After all the hype and the good things we had heard about it, we were looking forward to watching the performance, but where somewhat underwhelmed in the end. While the stage decoration and the costumes where certainly well done, the dancing and especially the singing left things to be desired: I've certainly heard "Memory" performed better before, much better in fact.
Apart from the lack lustre performance of some of the artists, we independently arrived at the same conclusion about the musical itself. We both liked "The Hunchback of Nôtre Dame" much better than "Cats", and "Cats" would have benefitted significantly from having more of a plot/story/whatever to hold the whole performance together. As it was, the thing left the impression of being sequence of more or less independent scenes jumbled haphazardly together. I find this acceptable in a revue theater, but it's not something I would consider a real musical.
Consequently, the real highlight of the evening happened after the musical, when we drove to the birthday party of an old school friend of ours. The party was exactly what I like: excellent food, lots and lots of laughter, some old friends with whom to share updates of our lives, and some new people to have intelligent conversations with... I'm really looking forward to a repeat performance next year. ;-)
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