Monday, we continued to our destination: the Sedlec ossuary, or “bone church”, near Kutna Hora, about an hour east of Prague.  It was fortunately not crowded.  This changes, minute to minute, depending on the arrival of tour buses.  The ossuary will hold about one tour bus.  We’ve seen a lot of bones this trip, from the human bone/glass construction in Venice, to the reindeer skulls in Kassel, to the Sedlec chapel here.  The memento mori are piling up.  I have been here before, with Klaus and his family in 2013, but Dave hasn’t, and one really ought to have World Heritage Site Parity in a relationship.  Except, the bone church isn’t part of the Kutna Hora UNESCO properties.  It’s too comprehensible.  Two other large churches in town are Inscribed, and documented with absolutely opaque church architecture jargon.

But what you do notice, as a lay person, is that the cathedrals of St. Barbara and especially of St. John the Baptist, are sunny and bright inside.  I think this is because they aren’t so heavily ornamented with dark and history-laden stones.

At night, we decided further to accept no small slips, and gave up going to Prague entirely.  We stayed at a charming little hotel, U Ruze, where we had had lunch.  This is how marketing should work: they neglected to charge 10 Czech kroner for the use of their bathroom, which led us to reward them by having lunch there, and as the sun grew low, we needed look no farther for a hotel.  The room was quite cute and comfortable.

Sunday, September 17, we started driving toward Kutna Hora, Czech Republic, with the intention of seeing the Bone Church, but decided to stop in Dresden to see what there was to see, and then decided to stay because there was enough of interest to warrant it.  Dresden, as you know from reading your Kurt Vonnegut, was firebombed between 13 and 15 February, 1945, in retaliation for the German bombing of Coventry on 14 November, 1940.  That was in response to the RAF having bombed Munich the previous Friday, 8 November, while Hitler was celebrating the 17th anniversary of the Beer Hall Putsch.  So it goes.

Officially, the RAF was supporting the Russian advance toward Berlin by making it difficult for war workers to get to work which was of increasing effectiveness due to incendiary devices and the failure of WiFi to have been invented until half a century later, so they couldn’t work from home.  The old town was mostly destroyed.  When you look at pictures of bombed out cities, there always seem to be facades left standing.  I don’t understand how the outsides of buildings can stand up when the insides have ceased to exist.  I suppose some 9-11 conspirator can explain to me how the photos have all been faked.

After the raids, the medieval center of Dresden was mostly rubble.  The Russians took away the factories on the outskirts of town as war compensation.  I’m not sure what happened between 1945 and 1990, but the piles of rubble were saved and reassembled after reunification so that now Dresden’s old town is a mix of rebuilt medieval churches and palaces, buildings constructed more or less in the style of those palaces, a few communist block buildings, complete with hortatory murals, and buildings like the Ibis budget hotel where we got a room for the night, which look the same as they would in Pasadena or Shanghai.

A lady at the Kreuzchurch was handing out free tickets to a concert at 6 PM that night, in favor of Peace.  We agreed to go to it.  I don’t understand many German words, but I will take their word for it, that they are in favor of Peace.  For some reason, they feel that mutual respect for the world’s religions will favor that cause, which I would debate, and further that this respect is best indicated by singing each other’s music.  And a lot of talking — I was hoping for more music and less talking.  The music was mostly played by the small town orchestra (well, Dresden has half a million) who were quite comfortable playing Mozart and did it well, but “Go Down Moses” sung by an Aryan church choir was of a type with the Seder ceremony in “Sleeper”.  They found a Jew to sing a Jewish song, too, and some Arabians.  All very Museum Of An Extinct Race.

Afterwards we went out and had horse roulade and beer.

I suppose it is done, in 2017, to review the parties of your friends, or indeed your friends themselves, as if they were public places on TripAdvisor.  I personally don’t even “like” Facebook things, so I sure am not going to give any hints of what you missed by not attending Thomas and Bibo’s wedding party.  They had previously got married in Denmark, which apparently is the Nevada of the European Union: Denmark doesn’t require waiting periods as Germany does.  What’s that for?  Cooling off, like buying a ticket on Expedia, or a house or a car?  Getting CE approval — did you know that the C E symbol on things like airplanes and beer steins doesn’t stand for anything?  It’s just a logo.

Anyway, I do want to assure Thomas and Bibo that I never say anything at parties, not even my own (especially my own).  It’s why I never hire a caterer, I want there to be something to do that doesn’t involve being around a whole bunch of people, which upsets me deeply.  Therefore you don’t need to wonder if I am having a good time.

Dave isn’t like this, or maybe he’s less like it than I am.  Dave was talking more.

Perhaps with subtitles it would have been easier,  but no, then there would be less excuse not to talk.  Robert Gibbs told me that extroverts gain energy from people.  I must be the one they take it away from.  I also go to sleep early, before they pull away the table for dancing.  There were a lot of interesting people there, largely from the art community, but from everywhere else, too.  A fellow who had just taken his kids to Ethiopia.  An American lady who advises artists on their careers.  A lady from near Hamburg who plays in a punk band, and whose art is currently getting people to create art with each other.

The cake was served before dinner.  That was interesting.  Afterwards came salads and soups, and then beef and smoked salmon, just out of the smoker which was smoldering in the driveway.  There was a box that brought beer to the correct temperature, as it flowed out of the keg.

In the morning we stopped by but everyone was gone but a couple of folks who had just awakened.  It wasn’t that bad a mess, considering 200 people had been there drinking and eating.  Long life to you until then, as W.S. Gilbert said.  We left a note in the guestbook.

We took a long train ride on Sunday, September 10, from Venice to Kassel.  There was a fast connection in Verona, a trip through the Alps that was beautiful except when we were in a tunnel: the preposition “through” is carefully chosen; and a more leisurely connection in Munich, where we had enough time to buy a snack and be yelled at by the proprietor of the closest stand in the food court at München Hbf. for sitting in his chairs when our sausages were not from his stand.  Later on he decided it was OK.  We were done eating anyway and it was nearly time to board the 2020 train to Kassel.  We got into Kassel just before midnight, which was a terrific inconvenience to our Airbnb host, Niklas, who was hoping to go out that night.  Niklas later said that he was OK with not going out, that he didn’t want to anyway.  I wonder if he was being polite, or if people are secretly wishing for reasons not to go out in the noisy clubs of civilization and instead stay at home snuggling their girlfriends?  Niklas and his girlfriend were both snuggleworthy, though a bit mismatched in height.  Niklas had been an exchange student near San Antonio, Texas, not very far back in the day.  He had somehow decided that conventional American beer was the best kind.  That’s the sort of foreign influence that gives AfD such a boost.

We went right to bed.  I have given a good review on Airbnb for Niklas (although the apartment is listed in the name of Linda, a third party whom we never met) and Monday morning we bought a 72-hour two-person tram ticket for 12 euros, and two two-day Documenta tickets for 38 euros each.  And with those in hand, it was time to start walking.  We began in the old new post office, and then the North and West of the downtown area, in full-on Kim Jong Un Looking At Things mode.

The post office building set the trend for Documenta.  Very political, more exhortation than ideas and more ideas than art.  I am afraid I am much with Henry Carr on this one:

“An artist is someone who is gifted in some way that enables him to do something more or less well which can only be done badly or not at all by someone who is not thus gifted.”
(Tom Stoppard, Travesties)

The folks at Documenta are upset by modern society and I share their discomfort and I wish they were better than I am at expressing it and I wish that what they did could save one of Auden’s Jews (Auden doesn’t know this, by the way; there were quite a few of the Righteous Among Nations and they haven’t all been polled as to what motivated them to risk their lives and the lives of their families.)

It doesn’t take me very long to get tired of art-speak.  Unfortunately, the labels were in English, which meant it was hard to resist reading them.  Every time I think there will be a reasonable commentary on an art work, the word “formally” appears, like the first sponsored link in a Google search.  (And why is it that Airbnb censors the word “Google” out of reviews?  It’s weird.)  And then “dialoguing”.  And then “mediated”, and off to the races and there were many, many, many, instances here and in the Biennale where the curator did not even bother to say what the piece was MADE OUT OF, like is it oil or acrylic, or they said something stupidly useless, as when a photo of a piece in the Hirst exhibit was described as made from aluminum and Lexan because that’s what the lightbox was made out of.  I KNOW THAT, 99.

The reindeer skull curtain sticks in my mind.  Maybe it’s because what the Americans, my ancestors, did to the Indians, my ancestors, was ten times worse than what the Aryan Scandinavians are doing to the Lapland Scandinavians.  Also I can recognize a curtain of reindeer skulls without Artsplaining.

There was a pyramid of plants.  There was a dark room with a bunch of pennies and some weird sounds and various stories of colonialism.  I’m purposely not referring to any of the paper we collected, while writing this.  I want to see what stuck in my head.  People have asked what my favorite pieces were, and presumably, they will be the ones I either liked or hated.  Or were the last ones I saw.

By the time we got back to the city center, it was time for adana kebab, ezme, eggplant, and ayran, at Restaurant Diyar Ocakbasi.  Echt German food.  A very good choice.

Afterwards, we began the enormous Fridericianum which had a gong that didn’t work, and a truly epic piece which looks like styrofoam and cardboard really close up, and turns out to be made entirely from marble.  And then outside to stand in the drizzle and watch the workers dismantling the Parthenon of censored books.

The Parthenon was a joke. First off, they did not have anything currently illegal, such as porn. Nor did I see a Quran, which could have been such a Teaching Moment, owing to Heinrich Heine’s famous statement in Almansor, “wo man Bücher verbrennt, verbrennt man auch am Ende Menschen,” which everybody knows, but nobody recalls that the book they are talking about is the Quran.

What is most disturbing, however, is that there seemed to be only a couple of hundred titles, repeated like wallpaper up the whole structure. Solzhenitsyn. The Bible. Salman Rushdie.

Between Russia and Nazi Germany and Saudi Arabia, every book published has been banned.  They could have had any library they desired. They could have had a rainbow pillar theme in which one column was papered only with banned books whose covers were primarily green.

I think also a nod to Wikipedia and Facebook would have been in order. It’s 2017 for God’s sake.  In the original, Marta Minujín used only books which had been specifically banned by the Argentine government just ousted.  That gave focus.

Also, in the light of a marvelous piece in the Biennale in which a pile of magazines was being eroded by dripping water over the course of the months of the exhibit, it might have been nice not to wrap the books in plastic, but to let them deteriorate in the rain.  As it was, they were giving them away to the ticketholders, and you could see by the piles of the same title over and over, how few banned works were really represented.

It really reinforced my idea that child pornography is the only uncompromised political art form in production today.

Tuesday was another social day.  We have not been many days on this trip without seeing friends.  The first days we saw only strangers would have been Monday and Tuesday in Iceland; and then the day we left for Germany.  There might have been a day in Venice we didn’t see cousin Johan, but by now we must count Christina at Ca’dell’Angelo as practically a friend because we’ve stayed in her hotel (15 days) longer than we’ve ever been in most countries (26 out of 193).

On Tuesday, our friend Alex drove up to see us from his home near Frankfurt.  This was a big hole out of his work day and Dave and I are flattered beyond description that he did it.  We had not seen him for thirty years.  We met him when he and his friend Bertram were hitchhiking away from the Grand Canyon in 1984.  Now he has a family and a job.  I have said this before, that seeing very old friends after a long time, is like being introduced to a stranger by a mutual acquaintance, the mutual acquaintance being yourself, decades past.  It is a good introduction.  Alex is still fun to hang out with.  I expect that Bertram is, too.  We should look him up soon, before we are too old to talk about anything but surgery.

(Cousin Johan said that about his latest trip on the Queen Mary, that most of the people on board only wanted to drink chardonnay at ten in the morning and talk about their surgeries.  I have noticed this also, and tolerate it less well than Johan has.  I want the people on my cruise ships to talk about their lenses.)

Alex walked with us around a large batch of outdoor pieces that did not require tickets.  The two-day tickets did not have to be used on consecutive days.  There was a round tent made out of marble, in one of the parks.  Two makes a theme.  Alex had to leave before dinner.  He gave us a pair of Chicken Guards, which I misheard as Gods.  Apparently it is a Danish custom to place stones with holes in them atop chicken houses.  I forget how he came to be adopting Danish customs.

As we had had lunch with Alex at Falada, a very nice restaurant in Grimmwelt, we had only to top off with hot chocolate brewed with a dash of Havana Club 7 year rum at a place near the main square, and head back to the hotel.

Wednesday: art.  rain.  Finished with the Fridericianum, and saw Documenta Halle, Neue Galerie, and started the Palais Bellevue.  Waited in line.  At the top of a tower at the Fridericianum there was a room full of plate glass flags lying in pieces on the floor.  Only five persons at a time, please.  Got rained on.

There is a large gallery called “Documenta Halle” which had a bunch of unaccountable stuff.  A big fanboy exhibition of Ali Farka Touré artifacts.  Kind of like the Experience Music Project when it opened: here’s a bunch of stuff I collected.  Except that Paul Allen had enough money to buy himself a museumful, eventually.  A very long tapestry with wintery scenes.  Descriptions by an artist of an installation he did at the Whitney in 1975 — really, they presume on your attention span at these places.

And just when you’ve given up hope: Annie Sprinkle! in the Neue Gallerie.  And a room full of actual Nazi headshots!  This is a big deal for Germans; they don’t have Nazis in everyday life the way Americans do.  I did not know that Joseph Beuys was a Nazi, but his room was next door to the Nazi head shot room, and it was closed for safety reasons.  Fluxus kills.

Thursday: art.  rain.  Finished with Palais Bellevue — totally worth it, as the third floor, which we hadn’t seen, had the most worth-it twenty minutes of Time-Based Media ever: “The Dust Channel”, by Roee Rosen.  Vacuum cleaner love.  Refugees in the Negev.  Teletubbies.  Netanyahu. Parts of it are on YouTube.

Also, in among the posters like “Towards an International Antifascist Feminist Front” (who could disagree with that?  But it’s typescript on paper, two columns, justified, how is this what we paid for?), today I saw an Isetta in a museum.  Talk about a car ahead of its time.  Also: gouache on paper, thanks for sharing that, of naked men dancing something called “Zeimbekiko” which is said to date from Greece in the late 19th century.  Really?  They were naked?  Because Documenta spent its first months in Athens before moving to Kassel, there has been a lot of Greek stuff (most of the Fridericianum).  Maybe 400 BC they were naked.  Anyway, the dance is from Turkey.  Greeks hate when you point that out.  Turks also.

A diorama of Kassel after the bombing raids.  I don’t know if that was Documenta, though.  It might have been one of the permanent exhibitions in the venues that dedicated space to it, for the duration.

There was a room with guns pointing into it — another topic that resonates more with Germans because they don’t live surrounded by them.

And, what made an impression and not just because it was the last thing seen, some nutcase from the Netherlands has taken tens of thousands of photographs of people in the years 1992-2017 and remember 1992 we are talking about film here, photography was a big deal then, and he has picked out the best three thousand or so and classified and printed them in sets of 15 or 20 according (mostly) to what they were wearing: plaid shirts.  Hot pants.  Carrying two blue plastic bags.  Brilliant obsession.  makes me want to organize my photos.  No artist statement.  Hans Eijkelboom, hats off, 15 very similar hats on different people through the ages.  Google explains to me that there is a book.  I may have to buy it, when I am home and don’t have to carry it.

Friday: We walked up to the base of the Hercules Tower in the UNESCO WORLD HERITAGE SITE “Bergpark”, but we didn’t go inside because you couldn’t see Hercules any better from inside than out, not even upskirt, and he’s naked anyway so why bother seeing displays of medieval armor which is what’s always inside those places anyway.  

Then a drive to Berlin which was dreadful.  The East is still underdeveloped.  27 years after reunification, there still isn’t data on major freeways, they still haven’t learned to put up detour signs, only guys who hang out at the road closures and tell you you can’t go there.  There are, however, mass-produced red X’s made of wood, which clip onto standard road signs to indicate that a particular route is no longer available.  It took us 8 hours to get from Kassel to Berlin.  Google Maps suggests, 3 hours and 45 minutes.  It is true that there are no speed limits on the Autobahn, but what good are speed limits if you are motionless parked between giant trucks waiting to pass the latest accident or construction zone?  I wrote in my diary a full page on what went wrong for us, but it sounds too much like drinking chardonnay and reciting surgeries.  We stopped at a ruined library and a canal bridge in Magdeburg (a canal crosses a river: impressive).

Dinner was with our friend Lindsay, at the most ironically gendered restaurant ever.  It’s called “mädchen ohne abitur” which means approximately “High School Dropout Girls”, and the walls are covered with early-1960’s girl trash, whether bra straps or Barbie Dolls, pictures of Dreamboat Guys in the men’s bathroom, along with ribbons and lace, and predominantly pictures of hairstyles that you remember from your high school yearbook in the mid-1960’s before everyone started smoking pot.  If you don’t have a mid-1960’s high school yearbook, I suggest you get one.  There are thousands of them on eBay.  I don’t know why these people are letting go of their past so lightly.  Oh wait, we’re dying.  Never mind.

After midnight, we got to the hotel.  The clerk was outside the door and said Mr Spears, I presume?  And so to bed.

After the films, we saw the second half of “Unbelievable” at Punta della Dogana, and met Johan for dinner near Corner Pub, a bar where he has taken to hanging out practically every night, mostly to watch the clientele, who are largely students at a campus of Wake Forest in Dorsoduro.  Matteo is an amazingly friendly and knowledgeable bartender who makes it difficult for Johan to pay for anything.  The rain started back up as we went back to the hotel, and continued Sunday morning as we made our way to the train station.  We opted for a boat ride to minimize the walking.

We had a few stupid travel days.  On Monday, we flew from Eugene to Seattle, waited there a few hours, flew overnight to Reykjavik (seven hours in the air, seven more hours of time change).  On Tuesday, we drove around but were jet lagged, and had to take a short nap at one point.  Wednesday was a nice travel day, driving around.  And Thursday is another stupid travel day, getting up at 5am to fly to Copenhagen and then on to Venice, hopefully arriving at our hotel before dark.

Monday, August 28, we arrived at the tiny Eugene airport to no lines at all.  The Delta agent did a bunch of typing and determined that yes, she could check our bag all the way to Reykjavik, even though it was on a different airline and a different itinerary.  So nice not to have to stand in another baggage check line in Seattle.  

A sign on the outside of the Icelandair plane by the boarding door identified the plane as “Grabrok”, a “friendly volcano” that kids climb up.  Icelandair still seems like a good airline except that now they charge for food.  We managed to get a few hours of sleep on the flight.  By then it was Tuesday.  The tiny rental car place upgraded our “compact” to a “station wagon” that was really a “hatchback”.  Perhaps if we’d taken their offer for a “jeep” it would have been an “SUV”.  We went to a generic chain bakery in Keflavik and paid $14 for someone to press the Latte button and the Hot Chocolate button, and serve a couple pastries.  Premium Mediocre.  Then we drove into Reykjavik (about 45 minutes), got some tips from Tourist Information, including a better coffee place, where we paid $14 for some light-roast yuppie coffee, some yunnan tea, and a nice bagel with salmon and cream cheese.  That was more like it.

The weather in Iceland was fine:  it seldom rained, but was unfortunately too cloudy to see the Northern Lights.  We drove up the coast.  At one point we found ourselves entering a tunnel that was six km long under a fjord.  The first four kms were a moderate downhill, and the last two were a steeper uphill, with a climbing lane; the shape of the fjord bed must be like that.  When we got out they asked us for 1000 ISK ($10), not that much more than the Bay Bridge.  We reached the central western peninsula, and stopped for some more precise tourist information and had a nap.  That information led us to a very nice place on the coast to watch harbor seals and gray seals, a large colony of ducks, and a few other seabirds.  Further along we found a tiny canyon to hike into, walking between the walls on the rocks in the creek.  Several lethargic gulls were sitting on the ground.  Maybe they were sick or injured.  We continued driving through the national park by the volcano, and stopped at a lava field coated with lichen, with a large patch of wild blueberries.  Finally, we found our Welcome Apartments in Olafsvik, and ate at one of the two restaurants in town.  We had a serviceable apple chicken salad, and “fish of the day”, fried cod with vegetables.  Only $50 or so, still a bit premium mediocre.  The fish in Iceland is considerably cheaper than the vegetables.

Wednesday we headed east, stopping to see a waterfall and a lava field.  The first waterfall was next to a mountain whose perfect shape the locals were very proud of.  The river had a curse on it that there would never be any fish in that river and nobody could ever swim because somebody in the mythic past had drowned there while fishing.  Fair enough.  Then we went to see the Hraunfossar, a most interesting formation where snowmelt flows underneath a gravelly lava field (“Hraun”), and leaks out into a river in a row of springs over the length of a thousand meters or so.  At the upper end of this is a torrential cut through a narrow twisted canyon.  It shares one property with Victoria Falls — no good vantage for a photograph.  There are some drone movies showing a traversal of the length.  I suppose somebody must have posted drone videos along the Zambezi as well.  We then visited Grabrok, our plane’s namesake volcano, which indeed was friendly:  stairs made for a very easy climb into its crater, from whose edge one also could peek into the crater of the adjacent volcano.  The Garmin said that the walk up the volcano, around the rim, and back to the parking lot, was only about 1300 meters.

It was starting to get late, and we headed back toward Reykjavik.  We stopped at Costco for gas, where they honored my US membership (though someone came out and helped with scanning the barcode), and checked out prices in the warehouse, which were obscenely high, though probably still a bargain for Iceland.  Apparently 1 out of 4 Icelandic adults are Costco members, and it only opened in May of this year.  Then we went to Matur og Drykkur (“food and drink”) , a delightful little restaurant.  The combination of the two tasting menus started with five plates involving chips:  a chip made out of dried fish, one made out of lamb, one made out of lamb testicles, one holding very-smoked trout (smoked in sheep dung among other things), and seaweed chips served with roe.  The main courses included a nice piece of lamb, and an enormous flambeed cod head, not much smaller than our own.  We got to our airbnb near the airport pretty late but the guy didn’t mind; he was just on his way to pick up one of his other customers from his arriving flight.