On Brühl's Terrace, a beautiful strolling place in the heart of Dresden's old city that overlooks the Elbe River, you can find a handful of these inconspicuous plaques on the terrace's railing.
It's an interactive art exhibit called the "Touched Echo", which, strangely enough, we learned about after it was featured on a few (non-German) technology blogs. Last Saturday we decided to pay it a visit.
Here's how it works: A device is attached to the fence that transmits sounds, specifically, sounds simulating the Feb. 13, 1945, air raid on Dresden — explosions, falling bombs, low-flying aircraft and the like. The interesting thing is that the sounds are completely inaudible unless you lean your elbows on the railing and put your hands over your ears. The sounds are conducted through your bones. Here's a picture of me demonstrating:
It's like there are ghosts trapped in the ironwork. Very creepy. And cool.
You should totally come try it out.
And on a completely unrelated note, several minutes after experiencing the Touched Echo, we saw this:
Wow, thanks everybody for the sweet well-wishes and offers of help and prayers on my family's behalf. Really. That means a lot to me. As Amy, my sister-in-law pointed out, my mom is indeed young and tough and healthy as a horse, and I have no doubt she'll pull this off in record time and amaze her doctors. My folks also have a huge support system of family and friends who are doing a super job of making sure they're looked after. It's a rotten situation, for sure. But it could've been a lot worse, and in the end, everything will be OK. Mostly I just needed a moment to gush. But thanks so much for the prayers. That stuff works.
Because I don't like having a depressing story as my lead entry, I'm going to go ahead and move on. What I want to talk about today is this:
Jake saw this recently on one of his millions of tech geek blogs and totally froke out. They're making a movie about the Rock-afire Explosion! he said. Isn't that awesome?! he said.
What's a Rock-afire Explosion? I said.
Turns out I missed out on a few things growing up in Idaho. One of these things was watching animatronic bears perform "Black or White" by Michael Jackson in a dingy, noisy pizza parlor that's filled with screaming children covered in pizza grease and seizure-inducing arcade games. Even if there had been a Rock-afire Explosion in Idaho Falls, which I'm going to guess there wasn't, I wouldn't have seen it anyway. My mom didn't allow our family to patronize establishments like that. I distinctly remember her picking me up from a birthday party at a place like that once and telling me in the car on the way home, "Jaz, that is what Hell is like." That was probably the wrong thing to tell a kid because I immediately thought that, if that's really case, Hell rules.
Jake agreed to sit down with AD and talk a little more about the Rock-afire Explosion and what it meant to him.
AD: How old were you when you first encountered the Rock-afire Explosion? Jake J. Michaelson: Probably 8 or 9. AD: So the late '80s? JJM: Yeah. AD: Was it at a Showbiz Pizza Place? JJM: Pistol Pete's Pizza. AD: Your mom allowed you to enter these dens of sin? JJM: Yeah. Actually, maybe she didn't even know about it. I don't think we ever went as a family. I think it was somebody else's party. AD: But the Rock-afire Explosion made an impact on you. JJM: Yes. AD: Why was that? JJM: There were a couple of reasons. They did a few songs I'd never heard before, for example "16 Tons" and now every time I hear that song I think of that big, creepy black gorilla singing it. I don't even know who actually sang it. More in general, I had very conflicting feelings because on one hand I was terrified. It looked like something out of a horror movie. Like "Chucky" or something. But I was also mesmerized by them. I couldn't look away. AD: Judging from the trailer, it sounds like they had a pretty huge effect on some people. Does that surprise you? JJM: Frankly, I did not know until I saw the trailer that it was a chain thing, so I had no idea there would've been such a cult following. AD: Why were you so excited to see they were making a documentary about it? JJM: It was really the people who were the fanatics about it. I found them more interesting than the animatronics. I was interested in the human story behind the Rock-afire Explosion show. AD: Bull. You just want to see that gorilla again. JJM: (ignores AD, continues surfing net on laptop and melts into mournful baritone rendition of "16 Tons") AD: Yeah. That's what I thought.
JEM
P.S. After watching this video again, Jake just pointed out that this Chris Thrash guy absolutely IS J.F. Sebastian from "Blade Runner".
When you decide to move 8,000 miles away from your family, you have to anticipate that you will miss things.
Before we left the States (exactly one year ago tomorrow), I knew that it was financially unlikely that I would set foot on American soil again during our three and a half years in Dresden. I mentally prepared myself to miss my youngest brother's LDS mission send-off, and I told my other brother, Ford, who will be 23 next month, that, should he meet the right girl and feel so inclined, he should not postpone a wedding for me. He said I had nothing to worry about, and from the vague reports I receive regarding his romantic exploits, I think that promise is holding.
We also had to prepare for death. As morbid as it sounds, Jake and I had to make peace with the distinct possibility that when we kissed our grandparents goodbye, it could be for the last time. That possibility has already become reality for us once, with the passing of Jake's beautiful grandmother last winter.
It hasn't been easy being absentees in the lives of the people we love, but it has been tolerable. Until now, nothing has happened that we didn't anticipate.
We didn't anticipate this.
Last Friday, July 4, my mom was in an accident. She and my dad were four-wheeling — their apparent favorite past time as empty-nesters — in Wyoming, when Mom attempted to turn her machine around on a precarious patch of trail and rolled it. By the time her spill was complete, she was pinned beneath the four-wheeler in a stream with several broken ribs, a broken ankle and (the worst of her injuries) a pelvis broken in four or five different places. My dad managed to get the four-wheeler off her, and she, despite spectacular pain, managed to pull herself out of the stream. Naturally, they were 30 miles from the main road, and cell phone reception was null. Fortunately, my dad found a ranger camp with a radio nearby and help soon arrived.
My mom was gingerly hauled to a small hospital in Jackson, Wyo., where she was checked into the ICU. She just left the ICU, but as far as I know, has yet to leave her bed or eat solid food. She goes in today for surgery on her ankle. My dad has been sleeping in their camper in the hospital's parking lot. They don't know yet when my mom will be stable enough to be shipped back to Idaho Falls, where my folks live, but when they do, Mom most certainly won't be going home. She's currently staring down the barrel of a long and painful rehabilitation that could last up to 6 months. She will make a full recovery, they're saying, (thank God) but it will be rough.
Meanwhile, I'm in Germany. Gnawing on my own insides.
JEM
P.S. Thanks so much to friends and family who may be reading this who have visited and checked up on my sweet mom. It's so comforting for me to know there are people caring for and looking out for my parents. I owe you all a lot.
EDITOR'S NOTE: The following is a long and rambling musical journey that many readers will find unbelievably boring. My apologies to these readers, but this is my blog and if I want to talk about Lynyrd Skynyrd, I'm going to talk about Lynyrd Skynyrd. So chew on that. And enjoy the '70s-tastic bikini babes, Billy Joel's pompadour, Three Dog Night's über-tight pants and David Bowie's blond, snaggle-toothed ambition.
I have torrid love affairs with songs.
I have relationships with albums and song-creators, too, but they're more long-term arrangements. More stable, steady things. But it's weird with the songs. They come out of nowhere. Usually they're songs that are older than I am. From artists and eras I have no real connection with. They've just been quietly existing in the ether my whole life, and then I hear them, sometimes for the first time, sometimes for the 100th time, and my mood and the temperature and the scenery and everything is perfectly tuned, and they'll knock the wind out of me. And for weeks, sometimes up to a month, that solitary song — that four minutes of melody and music — will be the only thing I want to hear. I'll listen to it over and over and over. I'll dream about it and wake up singing it. Usually I spend ridiculous amounts of time picking it apart, learning every word, working out arrangements on my acoustic guitar.
And then, as suddenly as started, it will end. I usually forget how to play it. I forget most of the lyrics. But I always have fond memories of it.
The first affair I remember clearly struck when I was 13 or so and just learning how to play guitar. I stumbled on some documentary on TV that included Lynyrd Skynyrd's entire 10-minute live rendition of "Freebird". The last four minutes or so, with the dueling guitar solos and the crazy build right at the end, floored me. The '90s bands I was listening to at the time didn't play like that. They couldn't. They could try for decades and never be able to pull off that kind of energy. Fortunately my dad had the album on vinyl. I don't think he'd listened to it in years. But I warmed up the turntable and sat in the living room with the headphones on and played it until I was capable of rocking out to that song with the best of the bearded Confederates, who, I would later learn, were the primary sharers of my enthusiasm.
The next most vivid affair struck some years later, my freshman year of college. I'd caught a ride back to Idaho Falls from Logan, Utah, where I was studying, with a friend from high school who was a huge Billy Joel fan. We were listening to a greatest hits compilation, and the only Billy Joel song I knew from Adam — "Piano Man" — came up. And I realized, all at once, that I loved this song. The waltzy beat, the theatrical vibe, but mostly the dark, storytelling lyrics. It's a fantastic song. I promptly learned it and played it several times in coffee shops. (I thought I was being terribly clever: a girl with a guitar singing about being the piano man.) I still get an adrenaline rush when I hear Billy sing, "Aaand the PEEE-AH-NO sounds like a CARRR-ni-VAHL ..." That was my favorite part to sing.
A couple of years ago I'd taken up listening to the oldies radio station in town, which had taken up playing "One" by Three Dog Night on a pretty steady rotation. I must've heard it before, but the stars were in alignment this time. I found myself sitting in parking lots, unable to turn off my car's engine until the song's whopping three minutes were over. Something about the tension of that one-note guitar riff against the thumping bassline and splashy drums, and especially that snappy break toward the end. For such a stereotypically mellow band, the song rocks. Hard. I love it. If only it were a couple of minutes longer.
I once again find myself in the throes of a new passion.
I'm not entirely sure how "Life on Mars?" by David Bowie ended up in our iTunes library, but it did. And a few weeks ago our eyes connected from across the room for the first time. I'm not sure if it was the recent news that there really might be life on Mars, or if there was some other cosmic force at play, but I woke with the ethereal chorus in my head one recent morning and knew it had begun again. I've been humming the haunting melody for two weeks straight and have almost mastered the bizarre chord progression. As I was practicing it the other evening, slouched on the couch with the guitar lying across my stomach, the baby went berzerk, kicking and punching at the guitar and tickling me like crazy. I don't know if that means he's a fan or if he's had enough of the Bowie already. It doesn't really matter. The affair hasn't run its course yet and until it does, baby's gonna be gettin' more.
I still haven't the foggiest idea what Mr. Bowie is singing about, but it's something big. I mean, just listen to him. You can't fake drama like that.
"We were bad, that's all. It was utterly deserved. The Spanish played better than us, we had no defence," 41-year-old Marwan, his face painted in the national colours, told AFP in Berlin.
My sentiments exactly.
Germany lost last night to Spain in the Euro Cup finale, 0-1. And I'm not even sad about it. I don't know much about sports, and I know even less about soccer, but even to my sadly untrained eye, Germany looked like a bunch of two-left-feet-pantywaists who apparently fell bass-ackwards into this whole thing. And I know that's not a very supportive thing to say of this fine country that's providing my unborn child and me with such excellent (and free) healthcare, but it's true. By the end of the game, I was cheering for Spain.
The truth is, I'm apparently not the only one on German turf with these feelings. Last week I taught English to a group of German soldiers in their early 20s, and we were discussing the Euro Cup. I was asking them what different teams' strengths were, and the guys were doing a good job of coming up with adjectives. Russia is big and very strong, like a wall, they said. Spain is small but fast and maneuverable.
"What about Germany?" I asked them.
"Germany has much luck," they said.
"That's all? Germany's greatest strength is that they're lucky?"
"Yes."
Apparently they were right.
And in an obviously unrelated news story, the German flags are already vanishing.
JEM
P.S. You can watch a great slideshow here of Germany pouting like this wasn't their own dang fault. Take special note of Germany's coach, Joachim Löw, who inexplicably chose to wear a women's blouse to the final match.
Looks like all the flag-waving is paying off. Smell ya later, Turkey. And smell YOU in the final match on Sunday, Russia or Spain. (I'm hoping for a Cold War grudge match with Russia, but whatever.)
I'm from Idaho, but I live in Dresden, Germany. In a former life I was a journalist. I'm married to a mad scientist from Las Vegas named Jake, who is working on his Ph.D. here in computational biology. We have a baby boy named Jethro. We are Mormons fascinated by various things. This blog is about our lives, with particular emphasis on life in Germany through the eyes of an American. Enjoy your stay.
It's like there are ghosts trapped in the ironwork. Very creepy. And cool.
A Trabi limousine. Awesome.
