A riveting and rewarding read even if you can't name any of Belafonte's songs

Last week if you’d asked me who Harry Belafonte was, I probably would have guessed he was a singer. If you ask me now, I’ll say he is a brilliant man with passion for the arts and a creative fighter for human rights.

One of my favorite stories about Belafonte takes place in 1958 when he and his wife found an apartment they wanted to rent on New York’s Upper West Side. When they let the building manager know they were interested, it was no longer available. Belafonte asked a white friend to go see about renting the apartment and the place was suddenly available again. Belafonte’s friend took a copy of the lease and got Belafonte’s signature on it, turned it in, and Belafonte and his wife, Julie Robinson, moved in.

The building manager was not pleased to see he was renting to a black man (Robinson was white). Belafonte and Robinson were told they needed to pack their things and get out of the building, but Belafonte knew he had a year to work with since he’d signed a one-year lease.

He created three “dummy” real estate companies that engaged in a bidding war to buy the building. The owner of the building, accepted the highest bid and Belafonte bought the building. He then turned it into a co-op, which meant any tenants who wanted to could buy their units and those who didn’t could continue renting.

As owner of the building, Belafonte wanted to offer housing to others who might have experienced discrimination in their search for housing. Lena Horne moved into the penthouse suite, and Belafonte’s favorite bass player, Ron Carter, who was also black, moved into the building, too.

Belafonte’s scheme cost $2 million, but it worked. Throughout his memoir, My Song, which was published last year, there are stories like this that show the determination and ingenuity of this talented artist to fight racism and other prejudice. I’ve never read a celebrity memoir before and I probably would never have read this one if I didn’t live in Germany.

Last week I met with a German woman who is the Director of the German-American Institute in Nuremberg. She set up a talk for Black History Month and a reading from Belafonte’s book. From what I understand, Belafonte has a strong following here in Germany. My job is to select passages to read aloud from the book in which his fans can hear stories of the Civil Rights movement from the point of view of someone they “know” and admire.

I know many have strong views about whether or not there should be such a thing as Black History Month. Black history should be integrated into other sorts of history or other sorts of history should be integrated into black history and all aspects of history should be given their due year round. Still, I’m glad to have been invited to help with this particular Black History Month event. Without it, I might never have known more about Belafonte than that he was probably a singer. Now he is a huge inspiration to me: a creative thinker who isn’t afraid to keep demanding more. We all need to keep demanding more.

As Belafonte puts it:

All of us pushing for integration would have to do more than hold a rally now and then. Without an active mass movement to make the government truly uncomfortable, our elected leaders would not do anything—not because they didn’t want to do something, but because they needed political pressure to make decisions that many of their constituents would resent. (My Song 196-197)

I appreciate Belafonte’s reminder that we all need to work to remind each other of the discomfort we should be feeling regarding current injustices. What does and should make us uncomfortable today? What will this discomfort inspire us to do?

This is what our move will look like, except our building is taller, pinker, and 1960s-er

There’s nothing like signing a binding contract in a language you don’t know. We got a “translation” of our lease in English, but it isn’t really a translation of the document we signed. It’s what is called a “Convenient Translation,” though we don’t know yet for whom it is designed to be most convenient.

The objective of this document is to let foreigners know the basics of what might be found in the German lease being signed, but of course we don’t know what is actually lurking between “Schlüsselversicherung angeraten” and “Grundstückflächen abgestellt.”

What we do know is that the Convenient Translation requires us to air out the rooms of our new apartment every day “by opening them completely (for at least ten minutes, three times a day)” all while maintaining the temperature in the apartment at 17° Celsius.

Also, surface repairs to toilets, walls, radiators, windows, doors, etc. must be carried out on a regulated timeline. Based on how long you live in the apartment, you pay a percentage of the surface repair cost for each item. For instance:

“If the surface repairs in the living room and bedrooms / hallways / vestibules / and toilets during the rental period are more than one year old, the tenant shall pay 1/5, for more than 2 years 2/5, for more than 3 years 3/5,” and so on.

This particular law almost makes you want to live in places for short stints so you don’t ever have to replace the toilet (or the surface of the toilet, anyway). But then there are the steep broker fees you have to pay each time you get a new apartment. The landlord generally does not appear until very late in the process. We haven’t met ours yet, but are supposed to today when we hand him a huge amount of money and he hands us some keys.

In many cases, the broker whittles the rental contestants down to the top three and then the landlord meets them and decides which he or she wants. The landlord seems somewhat like the Wizard of Oz, conducting a grand, mysterious scheme from behind a heavy velvet curtain.

Soon we will move in, once the barge arrives that is carrying our furniture, dishes, bikes, etc. It will dock at a port and our containers will be dragged back onto land and put through customs. And then the moving company will load them through the window of our fourth floor walk-up (which in Germany is the fifth floor since the first floor is the ground floor and the second floor is the first).

And then we’ll move in and eventually I’ll have a work permit and we’ll improve our German and someday, if I’m lucky, I’ll be able to translate documents that will improve the lives of others, things like leases not intended to be signed and maybe also some poems.

Maybe Nuremberg Needs One of These?

Der Klügere gibt nach.  (The cleverer give in.)
–A German Saying

A retired German man was walking in a German city not long ago. He saw a group of people trying to cross the street at a dangerous intersection. The cars wouldn’t stop so some women created a human chain as a barrier to help the others cross. An Audi drove up to the woman-made-chain and pushed their bodies out of the way with his car. The women were shocked; their hands dropped, chain broke, and they didn’t know what to say.

The retired man went over to the Audi and told the driver to stop pushing people around with his car. The man in the Audi opened his car door, got out, and yelled at this thin man who must be in his late sixties. The thin older man pushed the driver back into his Audi and shut the car door. The driver opened the door, got back out of the car, and towered over the old-ish man, yelling some more before driving away.

The retired man said when the Audi drove away, he looked around and no one was there. The pedestrians who all needed to cross the street, the women who made the chain—they were all gone. The only person standing by him was his wife. “And she was probably hoping this was her chance to get rid of me,” the retired man joked.

I heard this story in a short story reading group at the German-American Institute last week. We were discussing an essay about a woman who didn’t stand up to racism on a bus in London and later wrote her regret into the essay, “She Shall Not Be Moved.” The leader of the short story group asked us if we would have told the old white ladies on the bus in London to switch seats so the Nigerian woman could move her stroller out of the aisle.

Of course we all want to say we would stick up for the Nigerian woman with the stroller, but it feels juvenile to act too sure of what one would do in a complicated situation roiling with undercurrents of racism. Especially when you have a child to protect, as Sheeren Pandit, the author of the essay did.

In some ways the retired man’s story is inspiring, but he almost seemed to regret having stood up to the man in the Audi. In fact, he’s the one who quoted the German saying above (The cleverer give in) after telling us his–as he put it–”disappointing story.” I let him know how much I admired his act. He offered resistance to jerkiness, and he got concrete evidence of his wife’s loyalty that day. Besides, isn’t the regret of not doing something worse than the regret of having done something?

I can’t say I disagree with the quote about the cleverer giving in, but given Germany’s history, this particular value concerns me. Tonight I’m going to a book group to discuss The Book Thief, which is about a German family during WWII, who end up hiding a Jewish man in their basement. Despite the flaws of the book, I found myself drawn, deeply, into the story and can’t stop thinking about the Holocaust. Nuremberg was a significant place for Hitler. Therefore, the city was bombed into oblivion, and I see relics of these bombings daily.

Nuremberg has sites that document the area’s Nazi history, but I haven’t yet seen a memorial for the Jews in this city. I was surprised how comforted I was to see a giant menorah in a square in Munich on Christmas Eve. I haven’t yet seen any art in Nuremberg that pays homage to the Jews that this city sacrificed. And I want to.

Any ideas?

Training the Tongue

People say, Use it or lose it, but I’m here to say, all might not be lost. This German language somehow nestled itself in the folds of my brain. After not using it for almost twenty years, I took a placement test and ended up in the fourth class in the Volkshochschule’s German language series.

I love my German class. We meet four days a week for four hours a day. We’re all immigrants and the group is comprised of people from Bosnia, Iraq, Turkey, Russia, Poland, Korea, Columbia, Brazil, Peru, and Greece. I love being forced to talk to people in German.

Usually at break I talk to a guy who’s a Polish retired policeman, who moved to Germany with his wife and daughter because the standard of living is so much higher here than it is in Poland. His wife works for an elderly woman and my new friend has a pension. Another friend is a mechanical engineer from Turkey. He met his German wife while she was vacationing in his town. A third pal is a young woman from Korea who is practicing for violin auditions this summer.

It’s funny, because when I was in fourth grade and homeschooled, a woman from Germany offered to teach a group of homeschoolers German. I was told at the time—and the legend lives on—that I had a superb German accent. Unfortunately, I can attest that this isn’t true. Sometimes the whole class laughs when I speak. I’m the only American, and apparently Americans have especially funny accents.

I think the reason the myth of my exceptional German accent spread with such force is as that time people were surprised I could even pronounce all of the letters of the German alphabet—particularly the German “r,” since I couldn’t pronounce the English “r” at all. It was like my tongue went limp each time it was supposed to make that sound. It was traumatic to not even be able to make my own name understood. I was Sheila for the first thirteen years of my life.

This is how my whole life changed: I had learned how to make the sound itself in speech class in elementary school (do we still have speech therapists in public schools, I wonder?). Yet I didn’t understand how to incorporate it into my everyday speech. I had to really concentrate each time I formulated the proper (though highly exaggerated) sound. I had become so ashamed that I couldn’t pronounce r’s that I had begun to plan all of my sentences in advance, carefully avoiding any words with r’s in them.

In middle school, I couldn’t bear it any more. I began practicing speaking in my room each day. In essence, I had to relearn how to say every word that had an “r” in it. But it worked. And I’ve pursued acting and teaching, which would have been very difficult without that one sound.

Now, here I am, dispelling this beautiful myth that I have a good German accent. Instead I should be mastering the German “r” and “ü” and the lovely throaty sounds in order to make my myth come true.

Meanwhile, a little taste of home now and then is delicious. This morning I got it from a music video that is a big bro-fest in that my three brothers collaborated on it. Ian is the musician featured in the video and it’s his song being played (by him); Devin made the video, meaning he filmed it, directed it, and edited it; and Colin provided the apartment, which is beautifully put together and is in a building Tracy and I used to live in on Seattle’s Capitol Hill.

In this video you get a pure taste of the Pacific Northwest: the salty beach of Puget Sound, the ferry, the Pike Place Market, fresh flowers. I’m impressed by how effectively the song’s story is told visually, and I love the video’s closing image. The song is catchy and beautifully soaked in longing.

Which art pieces capture your home?

*More information about Ian’s shows, albums, tours, radio engagements, etc. can be found at: http://www.ianmcferon.com

Light of My Life

What’s Time to a Pig.

This is the punch line to one of my favorite jokes. The joke itself I can’t remember, but in the closing image a farmer holds up a pig so it can eat fruit from a tree. A visitor to the farm says something like, “That form of feeding sure seems to take a lot of time.”

To which the farmer replies, “What’s time to a pig?”

This phrase popped into my head yesterday as I left the office where I intended to sign up for a German class. As I wandered home/hotelward, I realized that signing up for a German class was going to be a two-day project. Things take longer here. And if I have anything, it’s time.

One example of something that took some time was trying to convince three people (one after the other) in very broken German (not just broken sentences, but broken words) that I belong in a higher German class than they seemed to think.

Another line of inspiration that has been floating around as I wander through my German life is:

For men are made for happiness, and anyone who is completely happy has a right to say to himself, ‘I am doing God’s will on earth.’

I like this line from The Brothers Karamazov because it gives a religious premise for the pursuit of happiness. Religion often seems to encourage us to be unhappy, to work too hard, try too hard, spread the word that we’re not indulging in too much enjoyment of anything. This year, I resolve to aim for happiness and to spread the word without guilt.

Usually when I read The Brothers Karamazov I give up  around page 75 when the priests are discussing Ivan’s article on the separation of church and state. This time, though, I’m on page 134 and reading with great pleasure. Perhaps time plus happiness equals patience. Or is it time plus patience that equals happiness?

The Quintessential Sound Changer

I’ve recently been wishing for an umlaut rich keyboard, which made me curious about the history of the umlaut. When I typed that curiosity into Google, the first result was “metal umlaut.” Being a dense and literal person, I expected an entry on welding and metal art.

Once I started reading Metal Umlaut, I no longer needed any other information about the umlaut. This entry on Wikipedia is wholly satisfying. It is such good reading that I want to find out who the author is. It is also “the personal favourite of Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales.”

Here are some of my favorite parts:

A metal umlaut^[1] (also known as röck döts)

Umlaut roughly means changed sound or sound shift, as it is composed of um-, “around/changed”, and Laut, “sound”

Lemmy, the lead singer of Motörhead said about the band name’s umlaut, “I only put it in there to look mean.”

In 1997, parody newspaper The Onion published an article called “Ünited Stätes Toughens Image With Umlauts”, about a congressional attempt to add umlauts to the name of the United States of America to make it seem “bad-assed and scary in a quasi-heavy metal manner.”

Fictional rocker David St. Hubbins (Michael McKean) of the mockumentary, Spın̈al Tap, says, “It’s like a pair of eyes. You’re looking at the umlaut, and it’s looking at you.”

The spoof band Spın̈al Tap raised the stakes in 1984 by using an umlaut over the letter n; i.e., over a consonant. This construction is found in the Jakaltek language of Guatemala and in some orthographies of Malagasy, a language of Madagascar.

In contrast to other examples, the spelling of Queensrÿche was chosen to soften the band’s image, as it was feared that the original spelling, Queensreich, might be misconstrued as having neo-nazi connotations.

Björk’s diacritical marks are genuine.

I am loving the umlaut and all it can do for us visually and aurally; loving all sorts of works of mockument; loving Wikipedia; loving the various ways and types of information we can write and read about. Here’s to an umlautinous year.

When you want to watch a little something while eating dinner and you don’t want it to be Reese Witherspoon, Sandra Bullock, or Amy Poehler films dubbed in German, that’s when you turn to Joan Rivers for comfort.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gRwlT3DQ3mY

When you have to write another letter of recommendation and you need some music to keep you pumped on what you’re writing, KEXP almost won’t fail. The first time I went to their website, it worked, anyway. Then it stopped working, but I can stream the station through tunein.com.

TuneIn is a startup based in Palo Alto and is:

a free service that lets you listen to anything in the world from wherever you are. Whether you want to hear music, sports, news or current events, TuneIn offers over 50,000 stations, all yours, for you to choose from. From finding local stations to discovering new stations from around the world, TuneIn brings you to where you want to be.

How it works is a mystery to me. If it isn’t mysterious to you, maybe you can work for them. They seem to be doing some wild hiring.

In my listening to KEXP via TuneIn, I discovered this sweet little ditty by Slow Club. My favorite part is at 2:21 when Rebecca Taylor sings, “I like the way that our arguments stop when we fall asleep and the way that your body feels when it’s wrapped around me.” The words almost don’t fit into the melodic shape and I love the way Taylor slips them in with smoothness and clunk.

Merry Christmas if you celebrate it. And if you don’t, do what we’re going to do: hop in the car and drive.

Look Familiar?

My way of saying goodbye to my beloved Denver to Colorado School of Mines carpool buddy was to bum a cigarette from him. As we smoked, he told me he had recently been invited to the parking office at CSM to talk about his parking ticket situation. He owed $1300.

He explained to the parking officials that he parked in the reserved lot when there weren’t any spots in the general lot and that he’d tried to buy a reserved parking pass but had been denied. The parking office’s solution to the $1300 owed was to charge him $100, and give him a reserved lot pass.

I love stories of bureaucratic absurdity, which is perhaps partly why The Trial is one of my favorite books.

I’m currently reading The Trial, not only because I want it fresh in my mind before I attempt to read it in German. I am also reading it because we are mired in bureaucracy and absurdity as we have biometric photos taken; apply for eATs (electronic residence permits); register as residents; open accounts; cancel accounts; learn about federal labor laws, German bank holidays, German pricing schemes for internet, mobile phones, and sitting versus standing at a restaurant; and experience exposure to German words.

We were sent away from the Bundesamt für Migration und Fluchtlinge today due to some papers being suspended between Herzogenaurauch and Nürnberg. We will return to the Bundesamt für Migration und Fluchtlinge Monday; therefore Tracy will begin work several days after his official start date.

Other fascinating details I’ve learned in my 24 hours in Germany:

• Nürnberg would like to secede from Bavaria. If you call Nurnbergers “Bavarian,” they will likely correct you and say they are “Franconian.”
• Making rude gestures to other motorists is a traffic violation.
• Having a warning triangle and first aid kit in your car is required by law.
• Registering each radio and television is required by law, and a monthly fee must be paid for each. You can turn your registration application to the Gebühreneinzugszentrale.
• Overtaking on the right and hogging the left lane are serious violations.
• Three Kings Day (January 6^th) is a bank holiday.

We’ve made many mistakes so far, such as ordering food and biometric photos before finding out that VISA is not an acceptable form of payment. Also, after having the biometric photos taken, we stood in the wrong place. “You must wait in that room,” we were told.

This is a day that needs a dose of Kafka. I’m not very far yet in the book on this reading of it, but just in case you need a dose, too, here’s where I am:

“I daresay you were quite surprised by all that’s been taking place this morning,” said the supervisor as, with both hands, he pushed away the few items on the bedside table – the candle and box of matches, a book and a pin cushion which lay there as if they were things he would need for his own business. “Certainly,” said K., and he began to feel relaxed now that, at last, he stood in front of someone with some sense, someone with whom he would be able to talk about his situation. “Certainly I’m surprised, but I’m not in any way very surprised.” “You’re not very surprised?” asked the supervisor, as he positioned the candle in the middle of the table and the other things in a group around it. “Perhaps you don’t quite understand me,” K. hurriedly pointed out. “What I mean is …” here K. broke off what he was saying and looked round for somewhere to sit. “I may sit down, mayn’t I?” he asked. “That’s not usual,” the supervisor answered. “What I mean is…,” said K. without delaying a second time, “that, yes, I am very surprised but when you’ve been in the world for thirty years already and had to make your own way through everything yourself, which has been my lot, then you become hardened to surprises and don’t take them too hard. Especially not what’s happened today.” “Why especially not what’s happened today?” “I wouldn’t want to say that I see all of this as a joke, you seem to have gone to too much trouble making all these arrangements for that. Everyone in the house must be taking part in it as well as all of you, that would be going beyond what could be a joke. So I don’t want to say that this is a joke.”

I can only hope that you, too, are enjoying the absurdity.

T-Rock, Who Gave Me His Kindle, Knows How to Enter the Next Phase

You know you’re impressionable when you want to change careers with each paper you grade. When I read “Formaldehyde Follies,” I wanted to become a chemist. When I read “The Balance between Piracy and Freedom,” I wanted to become a computer scientist.

Perhaps I’m a little more impressionable than usual since I’m currently finishing one job and searching for the next. The job I need is in Germany and doesn’t require German language skills. I’m moving to the land of Sauerkraut on Sunday.

So far I’ve noticed one outstanding cultural difference between the US and Germany. Tracy, my dude, had to fill out forms for the company that is moving our things to Franconia. The first set of forms was requested by a German moving company and required that everything we own be quantified in number and/or metric feet. For instance, “How many meters of hanging clothes do you have?” “How many parasols?”

The American company wanted everything quantified in terms of how much it is worth. “Cucu Clock, Total Value? Lingerie, Total Value?” (Unfortunately, we don’t own either of these things.) We did, however, have to estimate how much our (my) book collection is worth. When the American moving company sent a guy to do an inventory of our stuff, he asked, “Are you taking all the books?”

“Yes,” Tracy and I both said.

“What about these ones?”

“Yes, all the books.”

“What about these ones?”

“Yes, all of them.”

“These ones, too?”

Tracy and I got to visit Nuremberg for about 40 hours when he interviewed at Puma, where he will be designing shoes. One of the few touristy things we did while we were there was to visit the library. We walked in, stood in the middle of a room lined with shelves of books, all in German. Tracy looked at me with grave concern and asked, “What are you going to do?”

It is occurring to us in stages that Germany really operates in German. The internet there is in German, too. Wouldn’t that be cool if my blog posts turned German?