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Smells like Tea Spirit

That lovely featured image up there was once the famous result of a (serious and scientificially substantiated) Buzzfeed quiz, approved by Winston Churchill and recommended by The Doctor. Later on, I got “as British as Stephen Fry walking Corgies”, which is an equally desirable result – Stephen Fry, if you read this, I wanna walk Corgies with you and chat about Wagner like we used to back in 2014. Well, there weren’t any Corgies but there was sparkling wine and we met at the opera and did indeed talk about Wagner for a very brief yet memorable moment and I’m sure he remembers it just as well as I do.

Despite the fact that I have lost all the lovely quirks of RP over time (sniff) and nowadays speak a boring, commonplace English full of mistakes, I preserved my love for British baked goods because nothing shouts cosiness like a 5’o’clock tea with sweet treats fresh from the oven. So here are two exquisite and sophisticated contributions for a tea party suitable even for Dame Maggie Smith – Maggie Smith, if you read this, you are most cordially invited anytime. And please bring along your equally witty counterpart Penelope Wilton aka Harriet Jones, (former) Prime Minister (yes, we know who you are) and look forward to some delicious:

LAVENDER SHORTBRAD

A short bread for the British
but a long journey from the lavender fields de la Provence to my kitchen!

This was my first attempt at shortbread and for someone who loves the crumbly buttery texture and sweet delight of shortbread, I am flabberghasted I waited so long to DIMy! It’s so simple!!* You’ll need nothing but 175g plain flour, 50g white sugar, more white sugar for sprinkles, 1 teaspoon of dried lavender petals**, and 115g (cold) butter, pre-scliced and -diced. Mix all ingredients in a bowl and shorten the paste, wrap it up in foil and let it chill for an hour. Something I can’t do, though dough can do it. Preheat the oven at 180°C. Roll out the by now super chill dough on parchment paper to a height of appr. 1,5cm and make it fair and square. Or more rectangular, see below.

*It is so simple that while writing this, I had to pause here and start making shortbread. It is now in the oven and it smells. So. Fucking. Delicious.*

**I learned the word petals in Don’t Starve. Gamer’s pro tip: petals make your stranded character happy but they are not very nutritious and bad fuel for your camp fire, too. Also, I love that game.**

Carefully heave the dough on the parchment paper onto the baking tray. Take a fork, summon all restrained anger in your life and go rogue on the dough and perforate the shit out of it. Then take a knife, be less angry, and slice it up into rectangular shortbread pieces – as can be seen on the picture above. Sprinkle sugar on top of it and bake the short bread for 33-35 long minutes (because the smell is irresistible) in the oven.

Saviour them and indulge into this sweet and crumbly treat with a provoncial twist.
Done!! Next!!!

LEMON BARS

If life gives you lemons, make lemon bars! Now that we feel very fairytale and flowery with all that lovely lavender aroma in the air, let’s add something sweet and sour to the tea time table and bring some mediterranean flair into the kitchen. They are even easier to make than the lavender shortbread so you’ll have no excuse and since several weeks have passed between writing down the lavender recipe and this one, I have fresh lemon bars cooling off right now and yet again, it smells fucking delicious in my flat. You’ll need 115g sliced and diced cold butter, 50g white sugar, 175g plain flour to be crumbled and then knead into a dough. Grease a square baking tin and spread the dough all nice and flat and bake in the preheated oven at 180°. Set the timer for 15 minutes. (I now have an iPhone and Siri and isn’t it extremely convenient how you can just tell her to set a timer for 15 minutes without figuring out how to clean your hands from dough kneading remnants so you don’t flour your phone? So convenient!). While the dough is getting warmed up to become of a super crumbly texture, we whisk up 2 eggs, 115g white sugar (I recommend icing sugar but plain white sugar works fine, too, I guess), 60g crème fraîche, 1 fresh lemon (zest and juice). Warning: if you have a tiny little cut on your thumb, it hurts as hell to grate the zest off because all the lemon drops dripping down onto and into that insignificant wound you forgot about truly sting/ks. Whisk, add 3 tsp of flour, whisk some more and pour the lemony liquid over the pre-baked base and put it back in the oven for another 10-15 minutes, when the liquid has just started to be firm.

Now be patient and let it cool off completely – I know that’s the most difficult part – and slice it up into squares or bars or triangles or whatever fancy figure you have in mind. Bite into whichever shape you’ve chosen and enjoy the crumbliness, the sweetness and the tingling sensation and imagine a cup of Lady Grey to go with it.

And because we can’t have a British-themed baking adventure without at least hinting towards the current very unpleasant situation and pending decision, here’s the obligatory Brexit joke:

Why does Britain like tea so much? – Because tea leaves.

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The rottenest heart in all creation

Mikhail Bulgakov, THE HEART OF A DOG, Harvill Press, 1999

I stumbled upon this beautiful edition outside an antique book store right across the street from the theatre and simply had to buy it. Look at the cover and the author-protagonist-correlation! To all the Nepper, Schlepper and Bauernfänger out there: I can easily be fooled into buying a book. Just make it look tempting. I’m a victim to artsy editions. The aesthetics of a book matter as much to me as the content. Naturally, this gem joined my comprehensive collection. Собачье сердце was written in 1925, in the aftermath of Lenin’s death and at the height of the NEP (a market-oriented economy policy and one of many revoultionary developments from Russian Empire to communist state. Imho, the Soviet Union is one of the most fascinating chapters in modern history. I recommend the introductory works by Jörg Baberowski, a historian specialised on the Soviet Union and the Stalinistic Terror. Fairly comprehensible to read, too.). The novella wasn’t (allowed to be) published until 42 years later, in 1987 – the year many great things saw the light of day. Me, for instance. But back to Bulgakov and 1925. His Twenties are not roaring, they are howling and barking and generally fairly miserable. At least Sharik, our furry protagonist is:

Oooow-ow-ooow-owowo! Oh, look at me, I’m dying. There’s a snowstorm moaning a requiem for me in this doorway and I’m howling with it. I’m finished…

(first sentence)

Drama queen much?

In the cold, cold winter night our story unfolds, professor Philip Philipovich – mind you, not a comrade, but a citizen, a gentleman even, a dog can smell that! – is also roaming the streets of Moscow and in the snowstorm’s whirlwind their paths cross and events take an unexpected turn for Sharik. For the better, it seems. Triggered, tempted and lured by a irresistebly deliciously smelling sausage, Sharik willingly follows him into his home, “absorbed by a single thought: how to avoid losing sight of this miraculous fur-coated vision in the hurly-burly of the storm and how to show him his love and devotion.” Life in Philip Philipovitch’s 7-room-apartment (7 rooms for 1 comrade – what an outrage for his Bolshevistic neighbours!) is quite the opposite of the proverbial dog’s life , and soon his mood shifts from despair to high self-esteem, pride, and a good deal of arrogance. It doesn’t take long and Sharik behaves like he owns the place and deserves this wonderful new life of his:

Perhaps I’m good looking! What luck.

Damn, I wish I had that self-esteem.

[I gotta interrupt here for a very meta event. It’s 5am on a Friday morning and I’m watching Pointless on YouTube (skip to 28:07) while writing this and the categorie that comes up the second I start writing about a fictional dog is FICTIONAL DOGS. So meta.]

“I am handsome. Perhaps I’m really a dog prince, living incognito, mused the dog as he watched the shaggy, coffee-coloured dog with the smug expression strolling about in the mirrored distance. I wouldn’t be surprised if my grandmother didn’t have an affair with a labrador. […] Philip Philipovich is a man of great taste – he wouldn’t just pick up any stray mongrel. “
[MIKHAIL BULGAKOV, THE HEART OF THE DOG ]

Of course, Philip Philipovitch really did pick up any stray mongrel and not the long lost dog of the tsar family and not as a random act of kindness either (sorry to break it to you, dog pal). Comrades and Comradesses: meet professor Philip Philipovitch, expert for rejuvenation and on the quest to unravel the secret of eternal youth. Sharik is his latest (or from where we currently find ourselves in my plot synopsys more precisely his next) project and will soon experience drastic change in life. An interspecies operation is about to happen! Frankendog or The Soviet Prometheus you might call it. And don’t give me that “it’s actually Frankenstein’s monster, not Frankenstein” speech, because if you actually read the book you’d know that Frankenstein is indeed more monster than the monster… Back to Philip Philipovitch’s laboratory. Halfway through the book, after nursing and caressing Pooka Sharik to live up to his name (that translates as “little ball”), a fresh dead body, formerly known as Elim Grigorievich Chugunkin, 25, unmarried, sympathetic to the Party, plays the balalaika in bars, poor physical shape, enlarged liver (alcohol) is delivered to Philip Philipovitches door, ready to have his testicles and pituary gland removed and transplanted into a heavily sedated dog. For those who are as ignorant as me when it comes to the pink walnut in our head: that’s the part responsible for releasing hormones. Bulgakov was a medical doctor, so he knows what he’s talking about. Bulgakov was also an excellent writer, in case you hadn’t noticed. Ooow-ooow, I could I’d just copy and paste the whole text because there are so many mentionable sentences! But then you’d miss my wonderful comments on it and it’s too nice a book to own to read it online (and reading online is tedious unless its my blog of course) so I’ll go with an unusualy high percentage of quotes that is so out of proportion, if this was a term paper for a literature class, I’d fail it. The narrative perspective switches back and forth between an omniscient commentator, scientific observation protocols, and personal dog’s point of view which is a hilarious technique and adds to the general grotesque, brutal and brilliant deadpan humour consised onto 128 highly entertaining pages.

And now meet and greet the one and only, the hybrid, the medical miracle, the latest craziest creature in creation: Poligraph Poligraphovic Sharikov. Half-human, half-dog and not a pleasant company. He walks and talks – and sometimes the man barks indignantly – but really, he swaggers and swears. He’s an alcoholic bully with basic education and a weakness for chasing cats.

Sharik can read. He can read (three exclamation marks).

He’s the perfect allegory for the foredoomed dream of the the Soviet Übermensch, a Bolshevistic satire, a proletarian joke, a ridicule of the Russian Revolution. Needless to say, Philip Philipovitch is not amused by the outcome of this and the plot denses towards a drastic solution against the drunken bully without manners or etiquette. Philip Philipovitch aimed for Brian Griffith and got the fucked-up black sheep dog of the family instead. The Heart of the Dog is hilarious, on point and dead funny. Phantastic and preposterous.

And if it wasn’t for some old groaner singing ‘O celeste Aida‘ out in the moonlight till it makes you sick, the place would be perfect.

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Making cents

A movie night with Leo and the Joker or: how a pun got lost in translation and has been bothering me ever since.

It’s the hot topic of late 2019, the second fashionable clown after Pennywise and despite the title serious business no laughing matter: Todd Philipp’s [btw, if you read Todd, don’t you automatically think of Bojack’s? In my world, the director of THE movie of the year totally wears beanies and sounds like Aaron Paul] Joker is hitting box office records and people’s nerves. You love it or you hate it. There’s no inbetween. Like licorice. Or Marmite. Although the answer for those two is without any further debate: Both are disgusting. Anyway, since anyone and everyone in the world wide web gets to express their opinion on any of these topics, you get to enjoy mine, too.

Hooray! And you know, I don’t throw that word around lightly.

{Todd Chavez, in: Bojack Horseman]

Mesmerizing master piece or pretentious piece of shit?

Long story short: master piece. Short story long: continue reading. I will not bore you with googable facts because you can – duh – just google them. And you probably already did. And read through the imdb database. I’ll also assume you have already seen the movie i. e. no spoiler warnings because a) if you’ are ‘re reading this you’re probably very bored and that means the option of watching Joker has already been exhausted and b) my blog, my rules, and in any case not a step by step review. Just some thoughts I’d like to get out so I can get on. Also, there is not much to spoil. I mean, yeah, there are crucial plot points but generally speaking, Joker has about the same plot-length-ratio as Thomas Mann’s Der Zauberberg. Up until about halfway through the movie nothing actually happens. It’s a character study, but a pretty intense and sensitive one. Very delicately the director of less delicate movies such as Hangover 1, 2, or 3 brings us closer to Arthur Fleck and carefully establishes him as the eponymous (anti)hero – brackets on purpose – who identifies as the Joker only towards the grande finale and thus only then has truly made the transition from sad, pathetic clown to the mocking grimace of a spoiled society that created him. For a DC movie it quite atypical and has peaked a yet unprecedented level of interest in the public within that genre, specifically in regards of sympathy for the devil villain and how much this one might be a hero after all. It’s literally outstanding in the DC franchise not only because it exists on his own and is only loosely linked to the universe it origins in. Imho, it would work as well (if not even better) without the scenes connecting Arthur Fleck’s perfectly-on-its-own (mal)functioning world to the Wayne family. They felt forced and unnecessary. I mean, yes, Arthur’s quest and pending question of Thomas Wayne being or not being his father – a question that remains unanswered btw – has crucial impact on Arthur Fleck’s state of mind and nourishes his ever growing mental illness. Thomas Wayne is Schroedinger’s Cat because the box doesn’t need to be opened. Both answers are equally valid and both would have maybe different but similar-in-effect consequences. What name that father figure bears, however, is irrelevant. Wayne interessiert’s?, as the German pun goes that was already old when I was young. Meh, let the fandom have their easter eggs. I frantically pointed out anything Whovian in Good Omens so who am I to judge?

Rise of the Phoenix

Joaquin Phoenix is Arthur Fleck is the Joker. Period. And this does in no way minimize Heath Ledger’s performance. Both Jokers have to be regarded as different characters, based on the same comic villain but otherwise related only in terms of similarly oustanding performances. Same goes for Jack Nicholson whose portrayal probably lives up most to the comic palette colour scheme. Oh, and there’s this other guy, Jared Leto, mocked and memed by the internet… Well, to be honest, I slept through most of Suicide Squat so not sure what to say about his joker. Anyway, our spotlight is on Fleck (“spot”, btw can be translated as “Fleck” so spotlight on spot, hehe). His Joker is a character and case study. From the very beginning I was mesmerized. There is no actor, there is Arthur Fleck and you believe it. He’s dead on. He owns the movie.

Smile, and the world smiles with you.

Laugh like Fleck and it’s creepy. His laugh and his grin and his smile are equally cringe and painful to watch. A uniquely human expression of joy and happiness is perverted into a physical condition that surfaces at the most inappropriate times. A natural symbol of happiness is put ad absurdum. It’s almost unbearable to watch Fleck break out into laughter, immediately followed by this grimace of torture. I for my part felt his suffering. I felt repulsed and pity at the same time. Plessner once defined laughing and crying as the borderline symptoms of humanity. When Arthur Fleck laughs, there’s both. And inbetween there’s a smile. A smile that could be all or nothing. Arthur Fleck is philosophy’s laughing animal at the mercy of a corrupt and capitalistic society with no mercy for the weak or unfit(ting). A society where smiles are worn as masks and a clown’s face, the ridicule of the smile, becomes a symbol of rebellion. Oh, and after that movie, you’ll be humming this tune forever. Not cool, king.

Where there’s music, there’s dancing and Fleck, for one, dances. A lot. He dances himself into some sort of trance that transforms him, soothes him. Dancing is his catharsis. And of course there’s the famous staircase dance, where Fleck dances off the chains of a deranged society and breaks free. Such a liberating scene and you can’t but help cheer for him, cheer him on, and then you feel bad because you remember you shouldn’t because wasn’t he supposed to be the bad guy?

And so when we are a-staring at Fleck Fred-Astairing down a staircase, that’s where everything changes. And the audience feels confused wether to sympathize or not, because let’s be real: it is so easy to relate. My actions would be less violent, probably, but the motivation? All too familiar.

Right. One more thing before getting to THE pun that bothers me: the end. I would have loved for the movie to end in the TV studio scene. Two scenes come to mind:

  1. When he’s in the studio, pulling the gun. We all know what he wanted to do. What he practiced and trained for. And we all know what happened instead. Wouldn’t it have been perfect though if we never knew whom he’d shot?
  2. Even before, the very second he dances out onto the stage in the studio. We would never know if he was actually there or dreaming it all up as he had done before. (I’m aware there is the theory/rumour out there that the whole plot didn’t happen, that Fleck made it all up and has been in an asylum all along. I’ll let you decide for yourself how you like that interpretation.)

Both scenarios would have made for a rather unresolved but artistically wise ending. Let me know what you think!

And now to the one thing that has burdened me for so long: that pun. Fairly towards the beginning, Arthur Fleck’s social worker and drug prescriber reads out from his notebook/diary:

I hope my death makes more cents than my life.

Boom. Simple existential crisis that, by the use of homophones get transformed into something else, and is put onto a whole different level, making a person’s life (or death) a capitalistic good, putting a prize on humanity and an individual’s existence, and aren’t we all li-ving in a material world? (and I am a material girl). Anyway, German subs translated it as “Ich hoffe mein Tod macht mehr Sinn als mein Leben”. Sinn. Sense. Not cents. Nonsense!! Which makes it a pretty standard depressive lamentation but ignores the fact that first of all he is, indeed, a joker, and this is a joke, and secondly the implications of a monetary reinterpretation. Not very centsitive, I must say. I was truly upset. And for two and a half men days I should remain ever so, contemplating the flawed German subtitle system and wondering what could be done about it. And then I found the answer. Ummünzen, verb, German: to take something and give it a new purpose/meaning in a different context/environment; derives from German Münze = coin. Booyah. Could have been perfectly implemented in the story. I imagine the previously mentioned social worker and drug prescriber reading out that sentence from Fleck’s diary, pausing, looking him deep in the eye, and commenting: “Sie haben Sinn umgemünzt auf eine kapitalistische Lesart.” Oh. So satisfactory. And a very smart sentence, if I may say so.

My friend next to me had no idea what I was going through in that scene and was completely oblivious to the whole sub(ti)tle dilemma. I was so glad she was there with me though. Joker is not a movie I’d be able to watch on my own. Throughout, I felt physically so uncomfortable, I didn’t know what to do with my hands, writhing and squirming and trying to shake off that feeling of uneasiness. It certainly helped to know she’s right beside me so we could endure it each for ourselves but together nonetheless. “Endure” not because it is a bad movie. I guess you got that. Endure not because it’s full of violence, even though that was one of the biggest concern of the Sittenwächter (in English “guardians of the public moral” which is such a typical complicated compound translation and sounds like another Chris Pratt space movie). There have been worse acts of violence in movies, even in lesser restricted/non R-rated ones. The coldness, the plainness with which it is shown, though, that’s brutal. It feels wrong to watch. And that makes it so uncomfortable.

And I most definitely wanna watch it again.

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We have arrived at an intellectual chaos

Clearly we have, because that what it says up there right before the .com. And on the intro page. Here is a more detailled version of said intro text, one that gives you more background and details. Also, when I wrote the following, I didn’t have that intro page yet so this is future Julia commenting on past Julia’s post.

I’ve started blogging way back in 2010, when I moved to Birmingham, UK. Almost everyone those days went abroad somewhere and they all started sending out semi-personalized newsletters (which I’m simply not a fan of) or they created a blogspot account – blogspot, the StudiVZ of blog pages, way before tumblr and wordpress won over the German market. I wrote in German, for my friends and family back home in order to keep them informed about the weird and wondrous adventures and encounters I had in the industrial town also called “Venice of the North”. I vividly remember how annoyed I was because I didn’t have a proper laptop, just my tiny little netbook that was a pain in the ass to write with, so I spent my freetime at the university’s library and their computers – not being able to figure out how to change the keyboard settings from English to German, which annoyed me even more but I got used to it except for the even more annoying fact, that y and z are the other way round on each language’s keyboard. So annoying. I did write one very passive agressive article about it though and from then on just didn’t care anzmore.

Soon I adjusted to living in Bham, made some British friends i.e. had adorable British accents all around ♥ and decided to let them in on my outsider’s perspective on their country and culture. My blogspot’s name was subsequently changed to a pun – of course – because I had just learned the phrase “what a sight to behold” from my good Gloucester ginger Friend Ellis and since almost everything I saw was worthy to behold, I tried to do exactly that and thus thought it a very fitting title. And ever since my blog was known as “What a Site to Behold” and marked my entry into the English speaking world of puns and, if I may say, I have acquired some pretty decent skills since then. One of the few site-effects of writing in English, you might say. Hehe.

Back in Germany, I kept blogging, now foremost for my UK friends and as a means to keep up my language skills in general and specifically to practice my writing skills because after all, there are yet so many words or phrases that I don’t know or don’t use correctly and I still suck at prepositions (ugh, those tiny two-letter words, in, of, at. I hate you and your random rules) so I saw it as a fun opportunity to improve, to express myself and to impress others. As it is so often in life, my blogging activity slowly subsided and my blogspot (that had meanwhile been transfered to tumblr) became dormant for quite some time until I did a relaunch and for the first time used The Intellectual Chaos (.tumblr.com) as my online identity. Soon after, tumblr just didn’t do it for me anymore. I love the tumblr community and that whole platform is hilarious and a nerd paradise for all fields and topics. But I wanted something for myself. And so I bought this domain right here. And then nothing happened. Because life. Of course. Yeah, I experienced a little with the templates, I chose photos, I wrote About Me-s and whatnot. But it took me a while to actually publish something worthwhile. I’m more self-conscious than I used to be and I am my own worst critic (and enemy). I’m glad you can’t see how many unfinished drafts are in my Posts-folder just because I’m not content with my writing or insecure about whether I should even write about this or that because there are so much people out there who know so much more about whatever I write about and who is interested in what I write anyway! Funnily enough, most of the stuff I publish in the end has been written within an hour or two, when the muse kissed me and the words just pour out of me onto screen. Like this text, for example. It’s 6.22am right now, I’m all snuggled up on my couch in a pompous blue velvet blanket, nicknamed the Pornodecke, with a mug of coffee beside me. The only sound being the clickediclickclack of my fingers running along the keyboard. (And the crying child upstairs. And the city’s cleaning car outside. And the trams passing by. And a feww early birds chirping.)

We have arrived at an intellectual chaos.

…are actually not my words but those of one of my favourite authors: Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn. The Russian writer and historian, 1918-2008, is most famously known for his literary contribution – both fictional and non-fictional from first-hand experience – on Soviet labour force camps, thus raising international awareness of Gulags and Stalin’s regime of terror. So far I’ve only read The Gulag Archipelago and One Day in the Life of Denis Ivanovich because Solzhenitsyn is nothing to read on a light summer’s day. It’s intense. Right over there The First Circle is waiting for me and I’m only two books further up on my reading list away from it (sidenote: one of them is a short story by Bulgakov. He, too, is a Soviet literary genius. Just three words: Master(piece) and Margarita). Solzhenitsyn’s views on politics and society in 20th century’s Soviet Union are clinical, cold, and judgmental. Brutally honest and absurdly funny.

Surely one would wonder if it is inappropriate to use an expression that stems from such a gruesome chapter of history. Maybe. But then you see, the quote perfectly sums up the ridiculous atmosphere under Stalin where the intellectual elite was at the mercy of the government’s ever-changing mercy and favour. They were at constant battle with themselves, trying to maintain their artistic aspiration and stay true to themselves while never knowing if what they wrote or painted or composed or in any other way artistically or intellectually produced would be praised and celebrated or despised or deemed “too western” which would have them put under observance, and them and their families in great danger and possibly eventually in Gulags. Or worse.

I have arrived at an intellectual chaos.

Not because I go through the same. But because I know the tiptoeing around what the art wants to and the critic doesn’t want to say. Because I, too, find myself in a constant battle – with myself. About what is going on in my head, what I want to say, all the things I think, all the things I think that want to get out but I’d think too much about the consequences of making them public, what others might think. My mind hardly ever stops. I don’t sleep well, I am constantly restless, my thoughts go from here to there, they jump back and forth, and go on a rollercoaster ride, and if I didn’t have some sort of means to get at this out, it would be literally mind-blowing and not in a good way. I have so many interests and ideas about all and everything. There’s chaos up here in the thought department and it needs channelling. And found it here. It’s one way to cope. Getting the words and thoughts out – and trying to ignore my inner critic when I hit that “publish” button.

I am a living stream of consciousness. I am an intellectual chaos. I am THE Intellectual Chaos.

[The feature image is by Polish artist Alicja Posłuszna: Indoctrination/Indoktrynacja, 2016. Go check out her instagram! And if you feel like buying me an Intellectual Chaos present, I won’t stop you ;)]

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Moin Moin and Omnomnom

It’s October 31st, and there’s reason to celebrate. No, not Halloween. It’s my good friend and colleague ACC’s birthday. Admittedly, I am going to a Halloween party later tonight and I am dressed up as Eleven (the Doctor, not the Stranger Thing) but birthday treats before the tricky ones. Now my friend ACC is a true Hamburger Perle and far away in the south of Germany in a tiny little town called Freiburg, she misses the steife Nordbrise a lot and not even the Höllentäler can provide some comfort. What she misses even more: Franzbrötchen. Hamburg style cinnamon rolls. Very difficult to get in Freiburg, although Café Auszeit makes quite decent ones as I’ve just learned.

Since I love baking and sharing my baked goods and especially love sharing my baked goods with the people I love, baking something with love for ACC was the natural thing to do. Since I am very bad at planning ahead when it is personal and not for work, I got the idea the day before, the literal shower thought. So I googled recipes and found an original Original-Hamburg-born-Franzbrötchen recipe. YAY! … that required a pre-dough that would have had to settle for 20 hours before making the main dough with it which would then have to settle for another night and so on and so forth. A quick calculation clearly showed: no way I could finish it in time. Even though I am dressed as a Timelord. Hence I had to improvise: on one of the best dessert food blogs our there, Zucker, Zimt & Liebe I found an alternative for those with little time. As usual, I took the steps more as vague guidelines. Or, as my current alter ego would say:

– How do we do that?
– Oh, I’ll think of something.
– You’re just making this up as you go along.
– Yep. But I do it brilliantly.

[Doctor Who, Season 28 / 2, Episode 6, The Age of Steel]

And actually, I’m pretty pleased with the results and overwhelmed by the aroma of cinnamon in my flat that promises warmth and cosiness on a wet cold autumn day, ideally paired with a literary journey to Zamonien,

Where old books dream of bygone days,
when they were wood and bark.

[Walter Moers, The City of Dreaming Books]

Seriously: If you haven’t, read those books. And then read them again. And again. And again. Let the Orm embrace you.

And now congratulations! You made it to the recipe!

Heat up 300 ml milk and 65g butter on the stove. Stir and let it cool to lukewarm. Very important: no chunks! Mix 450g flour of your choice with 1 bag of dried yeast, 60g white sugar and 1 egg. Pour in the butter-milk and knead with your hands until you have a dough that’s still gooey but not sticky. Add more flour if necessary. In the end, you might have to flip it around with a wooden spoon before you take it out of the bowl. Then give it a proper beating (baking is good for angermanagement and saves you an expensive therapy session), put it back in the bowl, cover the bowl with cling film and a towel and store it at a warm place. Leave it be and give it time to rise overnight. In the meantime, make some delicious oatmeal cookies with dark chocoate drops and salted caramel milk chocolate drops. Believe me, they are the best!

2 sticks salted butter / 2 large eggs / 1tsp salt / 1tsp baking powder / 1tsp baking soda / 1tsp cinnamon / 1tsp vanilla extract / 1 cup white wheat flour / 1 cup (darkbitter) chocolate chips / 1 cup raisins / 1 cup oatmeal / 1 cup brown sugar / 1 cup granulated white sugar

Cream butter eggs baking soda/powder cinnamon sugar together with egg beater. / Add flour. Cream in. No chunks. / Cream in oatmeal half cup at a time / Chocolate chips also half a cup at a time. / Throw away the raisins and swap them for Hershey’s salted caramel milk chocolate drops and then also half a cup a time.

10-12min in oven 360 (Fahrenheit), ergo 180° Celsius
Let cool for a minute before removing with metal spatula or they will fall apart.

Now that we’ve successfully cookie monstered and are happily nibbling on one of those monster cookies, let’s get back to our real goal. Fast forward to the next morning, we melt 80g butter and whisk in 100g sugar – I used a 50-50 brown-white-ratio – and 3 tsp cinnamon. Take a baking tin, put some parchment paper on it and preheat the oven to 180° Celsius. The dough should have doubled in size by now. Beat it up again. Basically, you could call this step the punch line. Roll out the dough until it is rectangular with a = 50cm and b = 30cm. Sort of. I never measured it but as long as the sides are roughly in that ratio, you’re good. Pour over the cinnamon cream and spread it evenly.

Roll the whole thing up tightly from side the longer side and cut yourcinnamon sausage into trapezoidal pieces. It should be 8-10 pieces.

Now flip them over so that the they “sit” on the short end. Set them on a baking tin with lots of space inbetween and use the wrong end of a wooden spoon to gently notch each Franzbrötchen in the middle so that the sides sort of fold over it. Cover the sheet with a kitchen towel and let it rest for another 15-20 minutes. Mix milk and egg yolk and slightly brush it onto the Franzbrötchen. Sprinkle a little more cinnamon on top and bake in the oven for appr. 20 minutes.

Can you already smell it? Mhmhmhm…… soooo good!

Best served fresh from the oven and still warm.

Now tried, tested, and approved by Hamburg’s finest export.

Happy birthday, girl!

Indulge and enjoy! ♥

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My things really are written with an appalling lack of practicality!

Could be me, to be honest, but comes from non other than one of the greatest German composers:

J O H A N N E S B R A H M S

1833-1897

Johannes Brahms. The all-time bachelor with a beard and belly so mighty even Santa Clause envies it. More than 200 songs, concert pieces, chamber music, a very mighty requiem and of course his symphonies – four delightful and wholesome pieces I adore like a litter of kittens. Equally. Now that the season of wuthering heights, storms and falling leaves is here; winter just around the corner, it is the perfect time to put on your favourite oversized boyfriend hoodie (no boyfriend required), snuggle up on your couch, enjoy a steaming mug of hot chocolate, and switch on Brahms’ Symphonies No. 1-4. What do you hear? For me, it is the wind howling outside. The window lattice rapping, tapping (not above the chamber door). A slight cold draft through the cracks in the wall. And you inside, wrapped in wool, with a hot cocoa in your hands, preferably leaning against the hot tiled oven. You get the picture. THIS, and all this, is what Brahms’ symphonies sounds like to me. Very cosy, very comforting, yet you can sense the discomfort just on the other side of your four walls. But for now, you’re out of harm’s way. You got your hot beverage, you’re all snuggly and cuddly, you feel safe and warm. And you appreciate it – because you are aware of the outside world and its nastiness. I don’t even have to imagine it because that’s exactly what the weather is like tonight. Brrrr. Since I had chocolate brownies today it’s Yogi Glückstee instead of hot chocolate, but apart from that the symphonies are on! Classic Friday night.For me and in musical terms.

Actually, what would fit the occasion ebven better is a chocolate mug of sadness with the best recipe intro story since the dawn of food bloggers:

There’s just something so… sad about chocolate cake for one. In a mug. So… not right. It should not be this easy to make your own cake in the microwave, for one thing. Maybe that’s what bothers me- how close I am to making chocolate cake. Every. Day. Just for myself. Just for myself in my apartment. Using my Sleepless in Seattle mug. Swarmed by cats as I dig in, all hunched over it, wrapped in a shawl I knit for myself. Plucking a stray piece of cat hair off my Chocolate Mug Cake for One. Feeling the thick cake hitting the bottom of my empty, loveless womb.  Waiting for death. So, you know, ENJOY MAKING THIS RECIPE.

Some Kitchen Stories

Alright, with these existential-critical words and edible sadness filling our wombs and nourishing our love handles, let’s focus on Brahms and his rich and romantic oeuvre. As a dedicated french horn player (if only I practiced accordingly) of course one piece of chamber music gets a special mention here:

TRIO FOR HORN, VIOLIN AND PIANO, op. 40, E-flat major

I was fortunate enough to enjoy a life performance with David Pyatt at the Barber Institute of Fine Arts in Birmingham, UK. Brahms himself was a french horn bro. Bro, not pro. He explicitely wished for this particular piece to be played on the natural horn (i.e. without valves), due to its “truer” sound. Which brings up back to our title quote: no valves = a nuisance and highly impracticality for modern day horn players. Back in 1865 however, the birthyear of opus 40, no valves was the common practice (literally). According to legend, Brahms wrote it in Baden-Baden, so right around from where I am writing this. It is said, that the beautiful landscape surrounding him was the inspiration for this trio. Or, as a (human) trio from the States I once shared a train cabin with, said it:

Germany is so Bob Ross-esque!

Unfortunately Brahms and BRoss – another proud beard bearer – lived in different eras but at least we get to hear the rossesqueness of Baden-Baden in four movements musically painted on a canvas partitura, capturing blooming nature and black forest romance. Between these and cheerful hunting tunes we find the core and heart of the piece: a poetic and lamenting third movement, Adagio mesto. It resulted from the aftermath of Brahm’s mother’s death – who was an avid French horn fan, too.

I won’t overanalyze and theorize too much. I believe music is best heard and not to be scientifically taken apart. Let it affect you, let your mind wander and your feelings evoked and enjoy the deep and rich sound of Brahms.

♥ ♪♫♫♪ ♥

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Pasta alla Nonna

Pasta is the best. Period. There’s absolutely no arguing about it. Fuck low carb. Fuck zoodles. Zoodles. I mean come on. I love zucchini. But I want them WITH my pasta not AS my pasta. That’s just not right. Talking about zucchini, why are the Brits the only one calling them courgettes? French cuisine, o là là, bon appétit, mais pourquoi? It’s like their fable for gâteau (pronounced more like ghetto, in the Brummie accent that is. I’m from the Black Forest Ghetto, yo, and please, love, can I have a cuppa with that?). Brits equate French expressions with haute cuisine. Alors, back to topic.

Pasta. An art in itself. Pasta means simplicity and elegance. Pasta is designed to be flawless in its raison d’être – transporting sauce to mouth in the best manner possible. Pasta and sauce is legit the perfect combo. An al dente dream of two components complementing each other perfectly.

Even expensive pasta is still incredibly cheap. Pasta is easy to obtain, easy to prepare, easy to share. It takes 10-15 minutes to boil and cook some pasta. In the meantime, you may chop some garlic and chilies, sauté them in a splash of extra virgin olive oil, aka the only kind conservatives approve of, stir in the now cooked and draines pasta, sprinkle parmiggiano on top of it – et voilà: Soul food at its best. And: you will always cook too much pasta. And eat it all anyway.

Pasta comes in many shapes. Linguine, fettuccine, orechiette, farfalle, conchiglie, parpadelle, penne rigate, tagliatelle. spaghetti, rigatone, vermicelli – their names alone are poetry and by all means NOT TO BE OVERCOOKED. Looking at you, Mom. My favourites are paccheri (al pesce spada, mhmhmh), rigatoni and tagliatelle, or Nudelneschdle, noodle nests, as we like to call them.

With many shapes come many shames. No fat shaming, no, but wiht the rise of the low carb movement began the downfall of pasta. As with any food, pasta, too, does no harm consumed in moderation. More importantly, it fills you up quite nicely and hugs you from the inside. A life without pasta is sad. Look at all those health hipsters instagramming their overpriced Quinoabowls whereas I get to munchmunchmunch my bowl of penne for half the price and twice the satisfaction. Not really news: Low carb is not about eating healthy. It’s about being skinny. Also: Pasta bellies are the cutest. At least mine is. It’s been a long path till I learned to accept and embrace my little food pouch. And sometimes I forget that it’s actually cute (shout out to all my exes who assured me exactly that despite my disbelief. You were right). So here’s to the carbs, here’s to pasta, here’s to the bread to nibble on before dinner is served and to soak up the last bit of sauce from your plate. No sauce to be wasted!

Now that you’re all convinced (if that was necessary in the first place) of the greatness of pasta, it’s about time we make some! Last summer, in Italy, in the back of beyond in a small town called Broccostella, Frosinone, I learned from a real Italian nonna the secrets of pasta-making. First of all, we need the right soundtrack:

When the phone rang I was in the kitchen, boiling a potful of spaghetti and whistling along with an FM broadcast of the overture to Rossini’s The Thieving Magpie, which has to be the perfect music for cooking pasta. – Haruki Murakami, The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle

This is the perfect music because it is a) Italian, b) entertaining, c) easy listening and d) overly dramatic, like the Italians. And e),you can ballet dance through the kitchen, conductiong and tiptoeing and feel like il maestro of music and mangiare. Any Rossini ouverturre will do that for you.

Now we need the following INGREDIENTS:

400g flour (80% Spätzlemehl, 20% plain white flour) / 4 eggs. Yep, that’s all.

Now the problem was that nonna’s foreign language skills were as bad as my Italian. But since the language of pasta is love, and universal, and with a practical approach and lots of overly dramatic (s. d)) hand gestures involved, we managed. And this is how it goes:

Form a flour crate and crack the eggs into the middle/pit.

Take a fork and whisk the eggs with the flour, afterwards use your hands to knead. Knead knead knead. Stretch and spread the dough with your hands, fold it once, use your thenars to spread it again. Repeat indefinitily. WARNING: You’ll need lots of force and pressure. Pasta (making) is not for the weak. Nur die Harten kommen in Garten. Only the tough can make that stuff. Once you’re convinced there’s no strength for kneading and spreading and stretching left, you may put the dough aside. Sprinkle some flour on a big wooden board. Now we need a mattarello. Which sounds like warfare, like a machine gun rattling, like the angry arrabiata moglia waiting for her marito to dare come home late and drunk again…. So treat her kindly. She’s got a weapon and really strong arms. In our realms, we refer to il mattarello as rolling pin or Nudelholz. So peaceful. Instead of violently, we use our mattarello to carefully drag and stretch the dough even more in all directions. For this, we wrap the dough around the mattarello, place our hands in the middle, apply light pressure and slide our hands slowly in opposite directions, away from each other, towards the ends of the wood. Keep pressing and stretching and stroking the dough towards the outside, basically. Like a cat that wants SERIOUS cuddle, not the cute one. Repeat indefinitely. Once the dough is thin enough, roll it up once more r e a l l y lightly, then remove the mattarello.

Take a knife and cut slices of 3mm, unwriggle them, put them in a bowl and give them a flour shower.
Ta-daa! You’ve made your own pasta!
Now al dente it, serve it with a high-quality truffle pesto, and enjoy!

Buon Appetito!

Sigmund Freud's couch

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We are the best experts on ourselves.

But a little outside input won’t hurt. [it would, though]

In a few days, I will be starting a person-centered counseling – zu deutsch: Gesprächstherapie, which is also the name I prefer because it makes it more about talking and less about counseling or psychoanalysing and whatnot. Definitely makes it sound less intimidating. And me less crazy.

It’s been a long time since I was last seeing someone, as in therapist. It’s been in fact so long that my last therapy sessions were still filed under “home visiting family therapy”. Naturally, I am a bit scared as to what to expect now. I suppose, it can only get better though, right? There’s just been too many things piling up, too much emotional baggage and garbage that I have vigorously ignored. However, in the end, there’s only so much running or bouldering or engaging in other time-body-and-mind-consuming tasks one can do to cope before one realizes more drastic measures are required. I’ve long since gotten to that point and left it far behind, and I’m honestly just glad the bestest roomie was not around when I hit my low-point because that’s something you don’t want anybody to witness. In order to get to grips with all this, I met up with my sister, who always has the answers to all questions I didn’t have the words for. She’s a superstar anyway. Not only did she casually rock her master in psychology, she is also currently enrolled in further training to specialize on above mentioned person-centered counseling. One requirement of her course is that everybody suggests someone in need of therapy who is willing to participate and then in return is willing to become a case study.

In other words, I’m a guinea pig.

Soon I was allocated to Claudia. Soon she contacted me and asked to postpone the beginning of our sessions till June. Which was sadly the opposite of soon and meant I had to wait two long, agonizing months during which merely the prospect of having decent counseling in the foreseeable future kept me going. Sooner became later et voilà, here we are, both ready to begin our journey together.

Gesprächstherapie. For those of you who are not sure what exactly that is and too lazy to look it up, let me explain in a nutshell: established in the 1940s by Carl Rogers, it focuses on the patient, on the patient’s experience and awareness, feelings and thoughts. It is based on empathy and seeks to facilitate the patient so that they might be able to help themselves and find answers, solutions, help within. It’s about knowing and accepting who you are and allowing yourself to be exactly that and thus make change possible in the first place. Six core conditions build the foundation of person-centered therapy: contact, client incongruence, genuineness or therapist congruence, therapist unconditional positive regard, therapist empathetic understanding, client perception. All those fancy words describe a very specific relation between therapist and patient defined by by the therapist’s explicitly and articulated desire and active attempt to relate to the patient and fully understand and acknowledge their perspective. As Carl Rogers describes it:

To be with another in this [empathic] way means that for the time being, you lay aside your own views and values in order to enter another’s world without prejudice. In some sense it means that you lay aside your self; this can only be done by persons who are secure enough in themselves that they know they will not get lost in what may turn out to be the strange or bizarre world of the other, and that they can comfortably return to their own world when they wish. Perhaps this description makes clear that being empathic is a complex, demanding, and strong – yet subtle and gentle – way of being.

Carl Rogers, A Way of Being

In other words: it’s the therapeutic equivalent of Douglas Adams’ Point-of-View Gun, The Hitchhiker’s Guide to Psychology, the intergalactic highway into my mind, the big friendly letters on the back reading DON’T PANIC. And yet, I do.

Person-centered therapy allows the patient to address topics and do most of the talking. Once you say out loud your thoughts, fears, feelings, put them into words, you automatically re-assess them. I have experienced this and I bet so have you. Gesprächstherapie sort of enhances that process and facilitates the patient to come up with possible solutions for themselves. Ideally, during this process, the therapist simply listens, without judging and without showing any signs of approval or disapproval. The patient should perceive this as truly being heard. This should (theoretically, haha) enable the patient to find the answer (the ones that aren’t 42) within oneself. It shifts the attention from outer circumstances to the inner self. It’s a guidance to love, embrace, and accept oneself. Super lame and soppy, I know, – insert pathetic inspirational quote. Oh, well, let’s actually insert a pathetic inspirational quote:

I’m not perfect… But I’m enough.

Carl Rogers

One of Rogers’ key slogans. To truly believe that and live by that principle is what person-centered counseling hopes to achieve. So fingers crossed. To be honest, I have very mixed feelings about this. I have high hopes, certainly. But then – and I know, that sounds weird for somebody who hardly ever shuts up – I’m very concerned about the talking itself. Will I be able to open up? To transform the mush in my mind into meaningful units? Will I be able to talk about whatever if I don’t even know what this whatever is and which part of whatever might be relevant to get to the previously mentioned self-insight? Also, I always considered myself being fairly self-assured. Of course, there are situations I feel insecure and of course I have inadequacies T H I S big which others might not even notice. And I’m not sure how all this soppy “love yourself”-mantra is supposed to help me with insomnia, anxiety attacks, or my psychosomatic pain. But I’m open-minded and willing to try and we shall find out this coming Friday. In a brand new episode of Julia flew over the cuckoo’s nest. Until then, we’ll remain curiouser and curiouser. And needless to say: We’re all mad here. Cheshire Cat over and out.

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“The hog-squeal of the universe”: Upton Sinclair’s The Jungle

Last semester at FernUni Hagen was all about Großstadtliteratur (urban literature? Metropolitan literature? Eh, books about big city life. You get it.) and provided me with a huge collection of extracts and excerpts from the finest authors from the turn of the 19th/20th century.

I’ve read some Rilke and some Raabe, the whole fivehundredsomething pages of Döblin’s Berlin Alexanderplatz, and travelled abroad to Joyce’s Dublin and dos Passos’ Manhattan. My journey began in 1482, Paris, with Victor Hugo and his Nôtre-Dame de Paris (1831). A true classic and yet: So. Overrated. Maybe it gets better once the prominent Quasimodo plot unfolds. But the first couple of pages are merely a tedious and very detailed description of the geometrical patterns, the metropolitan maze and the architectural composition of Paris. It’s not just a literary travel guide, it’s the narrated Paris of Google Maps through the centuries and in 3-D-Zoom-In. Veeeery long. Once you think you made it through, a new paragraph starts something like “knowing this has all been a lot of information let’s try and summarize it all again” and then the narrator blabbers on for another 4 pages repeating everything he just said!! So not too keen on that one. The excerpt stopped here, so I wanna emphasise that it might get better. However, you shouldn’t judge a book by his cover (yet I do) but I think it’s perfectly acceptable to judge it by its first ten pages so my verdict is: boooooring!

However, one book really stood out: Upton Sinclair and his 1906 novel The Jungle. There were only very few and very short excerpts but those very intriguing. So despite having already bought 5 post-exam-reward books, I decided I deserve the full story. And so I made opportunistic use of my American friends and now have my very own copy from a US secondhand bookstore and greedily devoured the whole thing within days.

Accurate depiction of me reading The Jungle

Sinclair’s The Jungle is a ruthless account of the appalling labour conditions in Chicago’s meat (packing) industry and circles around Jurgis Rudkus, a Lithuanian immigrant, and his family, who were hoping for a better life and saw their American Dream shattered by corruption, greed and social brutality. It’s a pitiless urban jungle of injustice where the insignificant folks are doomed to become collateral damage of capitalism, a dystopian and sadly too real depiction of the exploitation of men and meat.

It was all so very businesslike that one watched it fascinated. It was pork-making by machinery, pork-making by applied mathematics. And yet somehow the most matter-of-fact person could not help thinking of the hogs; they were so innocent, they came so very trustingly; and they were so very human in their protests – and so perfectly within their rights!

[Upton Sinclair: The Jungle]

It is a sight to behold when a work of fiction has such effect on reality, i.e. the political world. President Roosevelt was highly appalled by the lack of hygiene and health regulations within the food industry displayed in the novel. Subsequently, the Pure Food and Drug Act from 1906 was passed to improve hygiene standards in meat production. Unfortunately, no such act was passed to protect the workers’ lives. Sinclair’s criticism with the working conditions were me(a)t with scepticism and considered mostly fiction. Needless to say, our socialist author was not happy with the outcome of his novel: “I aimed at the public’s heart and by accident I hit it in the stomach”, he once famously proclaimed.

Nonetheless, it had great impact and it’s social effects should not be diminished. Nor should its literary value. Before you stop reading here and start reading there: Be warned. The Jungle is a very intense narration that doesn’t spare your feelings. It is brutally honest. It’s depressing to read and on occasion makes your stomach turn. You just wanna rebel against greedy bosses, cheating estate agents, against the whole financial, social and political system. A system in which a Lithuanian family has to sacrifice everything they have in order to survive and yet, [SPOILER ALERT] it’s all in vain. Like a Gerhard Hauptmann novel. Bad in the beginning, worse in the end. How they try to hold on to their believes, traditions and each other against all calamities is heartbreaking. And calamities is a quite euphemistic word for jail, rape, death, and the likes. How the Rudkuses still manage to savour rare moments of happiness, culture and family makes it even worse.

To do that would mean, not merely to be defeated, but to acknowledge defeat – and the difference between these two things is what keeps the world going.

Upton Sinclair: The Jungle

Despite the family’s harsh fate, Sinclair ends his book on an uplifting note and offers a way out: socialism! Introduced to Jurgis (and us) towards the end of the book, it equips the working poor with a new hope, a vision, something they can hold on to and believe in. Socialism as the solution to capitalism is the clear message Sinclair wants us to tske from this book. In the 27 preceding chapters, he relentlessly and vividly depicts capitalism as the source of all evil. By narrating the sad and horrible fate of Jurgis and his family he easily plays our heart strings and sense of justice. You can’t but abhor a system that allows such tragedy to happen. In the end, The Jungle is superb socialist propaganda through the gut-wrenching tale of one immigration family. And a must read, political stance aside.