Parties and Plattenservice
It’s not going to be a good day when you wake up in the morning and realize you have fallen asleep on top of your alarm, have smothered its long ago faded frantic squeals. You know this innately when on realizing the time and flying out of bed, you inexplicibly manage to pull a small but significant neck muscle that will leave you only able to look sideways by turning your whole body 90 degrees for the next week. Squid have eyes that can look forward, backward, sideways, upways and downways. Lucky squids.
Its funny how parents think its okay, and even cute for their strange children to scramble all over you. Actually its not funny at all, its really very annoying. Especially when you are stuck in a small uncomfortable room with one hundred people collectively fidgeting impatiently while trying to inch to the front of the line unnoticed and cursing their ‘on-time airline’ which is not on-time. And you may well know that ignoring clambering children doesn’t work. Being friendly to clambering children also doesn’t work as then you automatically become the entertainment for the next half hour. Personally, I find the best thing is to scare them. Try barking like a dog – an old but memorable approach used by a comrade of mine against drunk Japanese men, it works equally well against young children and their parents alike, unless the child happens to really like dogs. But even if the child likes dogs, the parent wont think there’s anything cute about letting their child near a barking lunatic.
In Germany, people expect the world to be on time. The problem is that just expecting a train due at five fifty eight to arrive at five fifty eight won’t make it happen. After a delayed plane, delayed bus, delayed train and delayed supermarket check-out line, I began to doubt whether I was actually in Kassel, Germany at all. Perhaps I am in Kassel, Mongolia instead.
The best thing about being in Germany is that I could be a German. There’s no staring at the giant pale European as in Italy. There is no touting aimed at the naïve foreigner. There is no launch straight into English…which poses a small problem. As long as I do not speak, I could be German. I am a mute, confused German.
It’s hard to know what is and isn’t art these days. At Documenta 12 the traditional mingles with the avant-guarde. Political wall hangings and sculptures of toast rub shoulders with a stuffed giraffe. Light-switches, Exit signs and door buzzers form works of art. Pity the person who actually tries to use any of these objects. Art is everywhere: question everything, trust nothing. Scattered around the pavilion are deposits of odd looking chairs, huddling together within the boundaries of a white square outline painted on the floor. Does the white line keep the art out, or the art in? I linger, unsure whether relieving my aching feet would mean desecrating a work of art, until I see another confused woman ask a guard if it is okay to sit down. It is.
Due to my recent getting-out-of-bed neck injury I am reduced to scuttling sideways from artwork to artwork. Some way into the exhibition I begin to notice familiar people around me each time I stop. Didn’t I see that bald guy with the glasses back at the giraffe? And that woman with the blue scarf, I’m sure she was next to me for the photos of chewed gum. I scuttle. They follow. I stop. They stop. Did they think I was some sort of piece of performance art? Am I a piece of art?
In Frankfurt I stumbled into some kind of alternate universe. I went shopping for jeans and found myself surrounded by farm animals, German sausage, pumpkins, corn-cobs and cider presses. It was the juxtaposition of the farm animals and German meat products that vexed me. For all I knew though, it could have been a perfectly innocent petting zoo. And that’s what I thought until I saw this sign on the side of a trailer full of piglets: Available for Parties or Plattenservice. Parents brought their children over to animal pens to pet the cute piglets, calves and ponies, but I could see the cartoon thought bubbles filled with meaty delicacies floating above their heads. Below the high fashion high-rises filled with skinny jeans and smock-tops, Germans ate sausages and drank cider at makeshift barn bars. Children poked at oblivious animals destined for the formidable fate of ‘platten-service‘. If only I had big truck, a cargo ship and a farm….
Tags: 1, animals, Art, Dublin, Germany, Kassel, Travel
Em
So you thought you would sneak this one in when no-one was looking and then feign indignation when back in Kiwiland that no-one had read your latest blog …can’t get one past your mammy so don’t you even try my girl!!
See you soon…see you soon…see you soon!! Brie is SO excited cos she depressed and bored with her limpy leg and Guy Fawkes coming up.