=fino1 FURTHER ADVENTURES OF AN INNOCENT-A__BROAD IN PAGAN LANDS Being a continuation of =ino9.* ------------------------------------------------------------------ #p ------------------------------------------------------------------- The Rostorante here has a new team. Good hard workers I reckon, or exploitable anyhow, but if they have one heart between the three of them I have yet to see it. Unfair to say no doubt, but a well-turned phrase, as such things go. ----------------------------------------------------------------- Sleeping intermittently in my old age, I turn on the TV at night, hoping for soothing views of come-ons for call-center auditory simulated virtual intercourse, or whatever one ought to call it. Instead, for two nights, I get a German documentary on American cinema. The first night deals with the B-movies from the 30s through the 50s of somoene named Olmer , if I recall. I'd rank them less than B, they were quickies. What's extraordinary, based on the excerpts shown, is his continual honesty clarity and realism -- though many of his films are not realistic. But there's a cleanness of character and motivation that one does not find in the self-styled major Hollywood films. It's pretty much American myth-making, which is what the directors, many Jewish immigrants, did in the 30s and 40s. Bogart is the best-known mythic protagonist, and maybe the greatest. An American Everyman, beaten down by life and injustice, a self- styled cynic, who comes through with nobility when called upon to do so. Well, the second night they featured Cinema Verite. I'd never paid any attention to it, a herky-jerky blur that's all. But now I see that cinema verite is like Wittgensteinian ordinary- language analysis. Rather than approach experience enclosed like a spaceman in preconceived cliches, cinema verite and ordinary language analysis simply lay out what's there, and hope that some patterns turn out to have been shown. (Only it's more complex than that, as the cinema verite filmakers interviewed kept pointing out. As Heisenberg showed or said for the micro-scale of atomic motion, the observor is not a negligible, practically infinitessimal neutral objective point ("fly on the wall"); rather, the Observor impacts what is observed. The presence of the cameraperson may induce posturing. And the filmmaker introductes subjectivity in the selection of which 10 percent of so of shot film goes into the published film. And some cinema verite filmakers recognize that what people say and do is only part of the truth of the event; another part is their motivation, both conscious and subconscious. So some use interviews to augment their passive photographing of events. Some of my poetry is like cinema verite. Remembered snatches of conversation, though I usually style them up a bit. Starting with, back at UC Berkeley in '60: "'Hey -- Guess who I just saw -- My ex-roommate -- You know -- the redhead. Guess what -- She wants to model. She'll do ANYthing." ------------------------------------------------------------------- Andermatt, 16 Nov '04: Churchbells calling at 11 o'clock -- to call the herdsmen in to dinner, in the old days. And at evcening, although they seem no longer to correlate that with the last light of afternoon. I guess the church-bells, like the tall church steeples, were to be a sign for lost shepherds and travelers, in the good old days, when there were few roads, and no bright lights. Switzerland is a pagan land which called for Chistianity to establish a presence -- November winter light, and bells with clear steady tones -- light snow falling amongst first tres, a few days ago, at Feldis. Christmas belongs here. And not, of course, in Bethlehem, which is much too warm. ----------------------------------------------------------------- Even Israel does not have so many mini-worlds in such a small space. ------------------------------------------------------------------ A love of gadgetry, of which Swiss watches are the ultimate, the limit, born of long al days, and dark winter nights. Maybe. At its best, innocent trinkets, carvings, unexpected colour- combinations. At its worst, new kinks to sex. In-between, motorcycles. ------------------------------------------------------------------ ------------------------------------------------------------------ CAVEAT TABBYCAT: More Tales of Pee-Pee and Poo-Poo and Whatnot to do with one's usually private parts: I try to stay in cheap hotels. The cheapest you can find are about SF 55, with a privy down the hall. Under SF 50 is a rare find. At that price, some rooms are so narrow you practically have to sleep sideways. But there is often a TV, floating from a wall- bracket, with a remote-control switch, so you can, as you must, lie on the bed to view it. Travelers need to relieve themselves, to drink water, to drink hot water in winter, to sleep in safety and decency, to eat a bit of something simple #L2 So in the USA, whenever one sits down at table in a restaurant, before even asking if you will spend much money, they bring out a pitcher of water and a plate or basket of bread, and salt is always on the table. To greet the traveler with bread, water, and salt is an implied biblical command; and the USA, particularly Massachusetts, originated as a bible-based colony. (As one sees in ersatz with Bush. The Republicans are adept at sensing and exploiting the unackowleged mythology of today's USA.) #L1 Hotels exploit this, unconscionably selling a luxury-enhanced version many would not otherwise pay for. A pitcher of water is not brought to a restaurant table unless one asks for it, and feels like a piker for doing so. Bread is set out only after one orders a meal. A liter of water may be sold for SF 7.50 (about 6 dollars -- in my day one could buy an excellent meal for that, in the USA) -- a cup of hot tea, usually small, is sold for SF 3.60, about 3 dollars. As I recall, in the USA, when I washed dishes at Hayes-Bickford's in Cambridge, the lower-class workingman's cafeteria, the most expensive dinner, the Blue Plate Special, steak and potatoes and vegetable, was $1.25, that would be about 1955. Well, the cost of a cup of hot tea is pennies for the teabag, the water practically free, and the electricity to heat it likewise, and one can buy a little heater for very little. When I am travelling through a village and need a privy, I usually go into a restaurant and order a cup of tea or some such; some villages have public privies, but most do not. Sex is sold as any other commodity, in matter-of-fact ads in the national tabloid, the Blick (published in Zurich). #L2 ( Maybe the same happens in Israel, I rarely even glance at the Israel national tabloid, Yehidot Aharonot, The Last Idiot. In my sub-culture, which is rather strictly religious, people are, as I have said, much too busy making babies to have time even to think of sex. Sexual pleasure is regarded, if at all, as, at best, an occasional pleasant by-product of procreaetion. #L2 So here there is no pretense of 'massage' or even 'escort service'; ads state a price, about SF 160 a half-hour. The price does not exploit the gentelemn, although earth and heaven save the throwaway women. Or maybe it is not like here; I have read in a reliable Israeli newspaper of some foreign women being held virtual wage-slaves and obliged to have non-stop sex. In Germany, where they are more blatant than Switzerland -- in Germany every city has, I'm told, its red-light district; Hamburg's, the Reeperbahn, is included in official city tours. Apparently there is now good old-fashioned American competitin amongst the whorehouses, which state their address in the newspaper, and offer a free lunch (as_it_is_said (by Kurt Vonnegut), "There is no such thing as a free lunch." As well as special rates for the analogue of a smorgasbord. Well, in the early 1960s I was at an AFSC ("Quaker") urban workcamp in East Harlem, Manhattan. It was in East Harlem. A block of so away were the streetwalkers. Nice enough dark-skinned young women, as I recall. We were told that, when asked if we wanted it -- one would not say 'accosted', everyone was polite and spoke quietly enough in the summer evenings -- we were to say, I have just had it. I said so a few times, it was a perfectly acceptable answer. The going rate was, as I recall, $20 a time.And that was in the days before Herpes, much less AIDS. ------------------------------------------------------------------- PEE-PEE & POO-POO TAKE 2: The 'Bloody Cow' Strikes Back: I know of no more sexist epithet than that common British expression. Again: Here is an analogue, offensive but less outrageous, of feminist or 'reverse' sexism. I find another sign, as I had in a Frankfurt meditation center -- trust Frankfurt, which advertises callgirls and callboys on tourist maps, to get even spirituality a bit off -- enjoining gentlemen -- and gentle or gentle'd they must be -- to please be seated rather than, let us say, take advantage of their anatomic enhancement. This sign is not a schematic graphic, but a cartoon depiction. It has a Don't Do and a Do-Do side. The Don't Do shows a husky sort -- probably a soccer fullback, he seems to heavy for a half-back -- standing, arms akimbo as if, like Gargantua or Caesar, he is bestriding the world -- his backside confronts the viewer. As if to incite the Bachantes, it is exposed, as if he had been taught as a young child to lower his pants at the potty, and had not encountered further education. The Do-Do side has the gentleman seated, hands contritely clasped, and any sign of unfair sexual advantage discreetly concealed. Well, la-de-dah. Political correctness of a certain sort rests on the discretionary income, available to political slush funds, of gentlemen who have foresworn raising a family. A further sign indicates that this request is made to accomodate the cleanup crew, who are depicted as primarily women for whom sexuality is at best a distant memory. Well, a few responses: In about 1965 I attended an SDS Convention, I think somewhere in rustic Michigan. Rebels must epater le bourgeoise, and there the most shocking thing, noted in the press, was a shared men/women toilet. Well, this is one of the reasons for that, and an easier solution than inventing an oscillating toilet seat. It is also one of the reaons, as the politically incorrect Swiss do, for placing a urinal as well as an arsenal in the gentlemen's privy. And of course one could, as is often done, simply request users to leave the facility clean, maybe supplying a hose or mop in addition to the usual brush. Two further points: I had read that the female bladder does not readily or fully empty in the usual seated position. So I would suppose the same applies to the male bladder, and that it more fully empties in a standing position. (And if so, for women, the sort of floor-level 'earth- toilet' which one sees in lower-class neighborhoods of the eastern Mediterranean, and which requires a squatting rather than seated position -- which I had been told (by Michael ben Shmuel) is more effective for Doing Number Two -- would be better. Although as one gets older, and the knees creaky, getting up again is a bit of a challenge, to which solutions, eg hand-grips, must easily be devised. And one more point: It may be than when a male is seated on a privy, his body becomes conditioned to relieve his backside. Which is not something that most want to do more often than necessary. Well, the usual apologies and all that for discussing this subject. It was only because, with all my liberal guilt, I resent being induced to feel like the secular analogue of an apikoris each time I needs -- well, tinkle a pinkle, as the Germans may say. ----------------------------------------------------------------- ==============================================================$