1st of October

Today is October 1st, a day of gorgeous autumn sun. (Or so I hope, writing this at midnight.)

It's the National Holiday of the People's Republic of China, also of Cyprus, Nigeria and Tuvalu.

It's World Vegetarian Day, so if you want to turn vegetarian, why not start today!

In Austria, it's Coffee Day; coffee shops and cafés do all sorts of funny things to celebrate coffee (no use to me, because I never drink any coffee).

It's the birthday of ex-US-president, Nobel Peace prize laureate Jimmy Carter, also of celebrated actor Walter Matthau and the wonderful Julie Andrews.

It is also the death anniversary of Professor Arminio Rothstein, who passed away on October 1st 1994, after an unusually intense life of 67 years.
Having survived the hell of the Nazi regime (as the son of a Jewish father) he managed to continue in the playful and enterprising spirit of his childhood: as an art student, high school art teacher, caricaturist, musician (he played the guitar and the saxophone, and three dozen other instruments, too!) stage magician and puppetteer - which turned out to be his chief vocation.
Everybody who ever watched Austrian television during the 70s and 80s saw at least some of Arminio Rothstein's puppets! Some were portraits of prominent Austrians of the time, such as chancellor Bruno Kreisky or automobile racer Niki Lauda. Others were funny animals, circus acrobats, weird beings you would not know which name to put to... hundreds and maybe thousands of puppets, as small as a finger or as big as a zebra, all from the hands of one man. Yes, even today, they are there, they are alive and acting - proof that their creator lives on in them.
In 1967 he had founded the Arlequin theater, where his marionettes played classical drama (Brecht's Threepenny Opera, Molière's Malade Imaginaire...), but also pieces for children - most famous (and on TV every week!) was the Zirkus Habakuk, a circus consisting chiefly of hand puppets, constantly threatened by surreal dangers - most often caused by evil magician Tintifax - but always saved by the clever Kasperl and Habakuk the Clown - Rothstein's other self. (He also lent Kasperl his voice, even when they talked together, as they do in the picture! Yes, he was a ventriloquist too.)
He entertained two or maybe three generations. He made legions of budding weirdos, like myself, grow up yearning to be clowns, magicians and puppetteers. He even taught them the most necessary skills in his book Du wollen Clown spielen? ("You wanna play clown?", illustrated by himself, who else?). He was just so great.

By the way, today, there is a comparatively uninteresting, really quite marginal election in Austria today. All the media are full of it. How can they, with Arminio Rothstein's memory to be celebrated? He did more for us than any politician ever will.

Thanks a lot, Mr. Rothstein.

German for Weirdos 2: Jäger-Tee

If you ever go skiing in Austria's mountains, or maybe go there on a walking tour in late autumn, you may be sure that the local innkeeper will offer you some Jägertee ("hunter's tea", mostly pronounced, and even written, as "Jagatee"). If you take one, don't imagine it's tea. There is some tea in it, black tea - but rather more of it will be rum, or fruit schnapps, or both, with maybe some orange or lemon juice, and sometimes some spices added, such as cloves, nutmeg or anise.
Supposedly hunters, and lumbermen, and other people who had to spend much time outdoors in cold weather, used to drink this stuff in the good old times, to keep themselves warm. It certainly does keep you warm, but it also gets you blasted drunk; when drunk by skiers, it accounts for the behaviour of the so-called Pistensau ("slope-pig").

And then there is this other kind of Jägertee: a little teashop in the heart of Vienna, presumably belonging to someone whose family name is Jäger. They calmly put the inscription "Jäger-Tee" over the door of their shop - fully conscious of the implications, obviously.
It's a very noble tea shop, offering a rich sortiment of Japanese green teas. They also sell spices, and Jamaica rum (!), and some very fine works of art from East Asia - fancy teapots, and little Buddha statues, and Chinese lions made of porcelaine. Also, their windows reflect the facade of the Vienna State Opera. Pure beauty.

Watch dreams unmasked... and early snow

in connection with Aasa's foggy experiences, yesterday night i read up some bits about dreams, hypnagogic states, and also false awakenings. reading about the latter, i remembered my famous Recurrent Watch Dream of years ago... a really weird one.

i used to wear a watch in those days, and put it by my bedside at night. whenever i awoke i first reached for the watch, to see what time it was. it always lay in the same place, and the numbers and hands on it were shiny enough to be read in the semi-dark - so, on the whole, the process was very easy to reproduce for a remotely intelligent unconscious.
my unconscious did exactly that. on mornings when i had to rise early, it would have me dream that i woke up, consulted the watch and found i still had two or three hours to sleep. so, when i had to rise at 7:00, maybe at 6:30 i thought i woke up and it was 4:45... and i'd sleep all the sounder for that last half hour.
so far, so nice. but one such morning i woke up twice and looked at the watch each time. the first time it was 5:15, the second time it was 4:30! then for the first time i knew that maybe i sometimes only dreamt that i looked at my watch - in fact, at most one of those times could have been correct - and i really had no clue how late it was. i got up in the middle of the night, looked at all the clocks i could find, and was really damn disoriented.
soon after that, the Watch Dream (angry at being recognized as fake) recurred as a nightmare. i had to get up at 7, and i dreamt i woke up and it was 8:30! it wasn't, of course, but i sure jumped out of bed!
from that time on, the Watch Dream knew i'd never believe him again, and stayed out of my life. i subsequently changed my attitude towards time in general, and stopped wearing that watch.

oh, and after reading about all that dream stuff last night, i had a dream that really convinced me i was awake. i thought i had spent the day at the university (hardly likely, on a sunday in the holidays), sat in a café for a while drinking tea, and went home, crossing the campus. as i walked, it began to snow. very fine, almost invisible snowflakes, and most of them melted at once... but the ground did get white, and i left a track of bare feet in fresh wet snow.
i knew no one would believe me if i told them, so i took out my camera (i happened to be carrying one) and took a few pictures of the snowy courtyard and the footprints. then, still in the dream, i walked home and went to sleep.
when i awoke this morning, i remembered all that and had quite some job convincing myself it couldn't have been true. i'm convinced now. but then, that film isn't developed yet. maybe there ARE some snowy pics on it...

Turkish bread

Next Sunday, 1st of October, we will elect the Austrian Parlament. Half a dozen of political parties have been flinging dirt at each other since March or so; the Conservatives (ÖVP) and the Social Democrats (SPÖ) are fighting for first place like ill-behaved little boys in a sandbox ("You had more scandals than we had!" "Yes, but yours were worse!"), and one Mr. H. C. Strache, head of the "Liberal" party (FPÖ), is trying for third place.
Mr. Strache was trained as a dental technician - maybe that gives him the necessary competence for showing his teeth ten times a day. He is billed as The Patriot (did Mel Gibson sue him yet?) and calls himself things like a "patriotic socialist" (he might go all the way while he's at it and use another adjective instead of "patriotic"!). His posters say "Let's be master in our own house" (let him stay at home, then he will be!) and also "Home, not Islam" (my o my... all we've waited for is a guy who will save Vienna from being taken over by the muslims... after all, they tried twice, in 1584 and 1683).
It's all tactics, of course. No sane person could seriously believe that Austria is really any the worse for a few hundred thousands of Turks living in Vienna. And just because some rotters in Vienna do not like their Turkish neighbours, even they won't be silly enough to vote for Strache. Or will they?

There are some parts of Vienna that might easily be in Istanbul, if you don't look close. Turkish shops, Turkish cafés and restaurants with menus printed in Turkish only. Great fun - you can practise the language and eat lovely food at the same time! After all, if you went to school in Vienna, you are likely to have Turkish friends and speak a little of their language.
You see lots of women with scarves on their heads, if you walk through the more inhabited districts of Vienna... and you meet very pretty Turkish girls who maybe pretend to be shy and well-behaved, but make fun of you behind your back - great fun.
And what I and my friends like best are those Turkish shops whose owners are pious muslims. Because, you see, that means that they are closed on Friday, but open the rest of the week... and if you are a student, or an artist, or just a busy weirdo, and don't get time for shopping during the week, you can go to the Turkish bakery at the corner (named Gül, or Aslan, or Karadeniz) on Sunday morning, and get a very nice meal of fresh Turkish bread and olives and cheese, and maybe some oriental sweets... Really, we can hardly imagine this town without our muslim friends.
And so we'd rather subscribe to what some of them have judiciously written on the FPÖ posters: Bir iki üç, Strache boklu kiç (One, two, three - Strache, sh*tty *sshole!)

P.S.: This is my first and last commentary on an election topic.

the thousand arms of guanyin

As seen on Break.com

mahayana buddhists of northern india, nepal and tibet had long been depicting the bodhisattva avalokiteshvara with a thousand arms - to show that he has his helping hands everywhere for everybody. when buddhism came to china, the chinese made a female goddess out of the male bodhisattva, possibly because the qualities of being merciful and having one's eyes and hands everywhere were associated with a mother rather than a young man - still, they painted and sculpted her with a thousand arms, sometimes with an eye in the palm of each hand.
over the times, a dance developed, where a row of dancers, one behind the other, pretend that they are one goddess with many arms. (this, too, may have been inspired by indian tradition, since in classical indian dance sometimes four dancers represent an eight-armed shiva in the same way.)

the chinese name of the feminized bodhisattva is guanyin - or, in its full form guanshiyin "the one who listens to the sounds of the world". the dancing girls in the video do not listen to any sounds, not even to the music. they can't, because they are deaf... and they belong to the Disabled People Performing Arts Troupe of china.

just in case...

...you haven't seen a good mask changer lately. you cannot see all the changes, because when he steps down into the audience, you see just his silhouette.
but he's really cute in some of the masks, especially as Monkey King, and in that rabbit-toothed clown face near the end of the dance.