Featured posts of the week or month (or quarter)
(depending on how often I get around to changing them)
The view from Schiller’s window
The German dramatist, poet and historian Friedrich Schiller (1759-1805) spent the summer of 1785 in a farmhouse in what was then the village of Gohlis, near Leipzig. At that time, Schiller presumably had a better view from his bedroom window than I did when I visited in 2005. Of course Read More ...
Operas in Wiesbaden
Mary Stuart, Queen of Scotland and the Isles, was executed in 1587 at Castle Fotheringhay in Northamptonshire on orders of her cousin, Queen Elisabeth the First of England. In real life the two queens never met. But they do meet sometimes on the opera stage, in the second act of Read More ...
Skyper
Frankfurt Skyline Countdown # 16 Personally, I find Skyper one of the more elegant and interesting buildings in the Frankfurt skyline, but the dramatist, poet and historian Friedrich Schiller (1759-1805) doesn’t seem to agree with me. Here he can be seen gazing in admiration at the Frankfurt Opera, which is Read More ...
Felix Nussbaum House
The painter Felix Nussbaum was born in Osnabrück in 1904. He was murdered by the Nazis at Auschwitz in 1944. More than 160 of Nussbaum’s paintings are now on display at the Felix Nussbaum House in Osnabrück, including his most famous one, his “Self-portrait with a Jewish pass”, which he Read More ...
Händel’s Julius Caesar at the Opéra Garnier
The opera Giulio Cesare (Julius Caesar) by Georg Friedrich Händel takes place in Egypt in the year 48 B.C. and has to do with Caesar’s Egyptian war and his love affair with Cleopatra. As it was staged at the Opéra Garnier in Paris, however, the opera took place in the Read More ...
The darkest nights of the month in Tân Ba
On October 31, 1964, I rode the helicopter up to Phuoc Vinh, the zone headquarters, to spend one night and pick up some supplies. That night, while I was sleeping at Phuoc Vinh, the Viet Cong launched a mortar attack on Biên Hòa airbase, across the river from Tân Ba, Read More ...
Film Museum in Düsseldorf
The film museum has its own cinema, the “Black Box”, and four floors of exhibit space with displays of the history and aura of the movies. For example: “Film and Politics” is an exhibit on the third floor in between “Film and Money” and “Myths of the Present”. In the Read More ...
Mundolingua in Paris
Mundolingua is a small museum devoted to a huge subject, namely “language, languages and linguistics.” Topics include definitions, phonetics, vocabulary, grammar, first language acquisition, foreign language learning, language problems, myths and origins, religion, etymology, ethnolinguistics, political linguistics, dead languages, dialects, sociolinguistics, alphabets, invented languages, codes, lies, humor, slang, tongue-twisters, proverbs Read More ...
Indicateur d’Itineraires
Here’s a Blast from the Past for you: an electric “Indicator of Itineraries” such as used to be found in about half of the Paris Métro stations. I came across this one — not hooked up and not functioning, but still — in the station Porte d’Auteuil on line 10. Read More ...
Frankfurt OperaTalk
For over two decades, I taught opera appreciation courses in German and English at the Volkshochschule Frankfurt (VHS), the city’s adult education center. I started the German-language Opern-Gespräche in 1999, and added the English-language Frankfurt OperaTalk in 2002. Both these courses were still going strong in March 2020, when they Read More ...
Where the opera singers eat sausages
At Bellevue Square, just a block and a half from the opera house, is the most celebrated of Zürich’s many sausage stands, the Sternen Grill (Star Grill). They serve their sausages with ultra-sharp mustard, so be careful, otherwise you’ll feel like this cartoon character: The cartoon, which is displayed proudly Read More ...
Cutting edge technology …
… of bygone decades. In the winter of 1989 one of the monthly computer magazines — I forget if it was a German or an American one — came out with an article called The Ten Worst Computers of the 1980s. As the absolutely worst computer of the decade they Read More ...
