Somewhere over the “Reno”bow…

Wow,  long time no post! Sorry about that!  A belated Merry Christmas and Happy New Years to all!  I was in Reno for about 2 weeks and although I spent most of that time being sick, I still tried to see as many people and as much of home as possible.  So I’d like to make a post of photos and a few stories about that trip, mostly for my readers who themselves are involved!   Kinda personal, I know, so just hang in there my academic readers!

First photo:

This photo is actually a poster in the Reno airport (technically taken at the end of the trip because I got the digital camera I took the picture with for Christmas), but it being in the airport is symbolic, as my last picture is also of a poster, but in the Munich airport (see below).  This photo is also the inspiration for the title of this blog post, as the Reno arch is the rainbow…

Let’s see, next photo…ooo! Another poster, except this time…

Philipp is in the middle of it!  Great story…we went to the movies to see, um, Yes Man, and I got bought a drink.  When I was finished I started to look around for Philipp and couldn’t find him, but heard a cute little Philipp voice cry out “Darby” a few times, and so I got very confused.  I finally found Philipp’s face in this poster and jumped for shock!  I think continued laughing until I was able to take the photo!

Here’s a picture of Philipp and my dad bbqing…a favorite pastime for both of them!  Speaking of food, we went to my favorite sushi place in Reno, The Oceano at the Peppermill, with my mom, my sister, and my cousin Jesse.

We got the typical wooden chopsticks, like at all other sushi place, but for some reason Philipp was inspired to put them under his upper lip so that they made tusks!  I was chatting with the others and didn’t realize him doing this, but everyone else saw him and started laughing.  I turned around and once again was shocked by Philipp.  So we all took our chopsticks and became sushi walruses, and had our picture taken by the waiter.

If you ever go to the Oceano, make sure to get the Oceano house roll, a bit spicy but really yummy…I could get 4 or 5 if they were put in front of me (and I hadn’t had anything else to eat).  Man, I’m starting to crave one right now but I’m not in Reno! Darn.

So…moving along with my digital photo album of Reno…

For New Years, Philipp and I met up with some good friends at Ceol, an Irish Pub in Reno that has become our “Stammtisch” or I guess you could say regular place to go out.  Even if you don’t tell anyone that you’re going there on a Friday or Saturday night, you’re bound to run into someone that you know.

This picture is of myself and my best friend Nick…based on the looks on our faces you can probably tell we’ve know each other for a while…

We stayed at Ceol for the “ball dropping,” although is was the first year that I didn’t actually see the ball drop on television.  We sang Auld Lang Syne at midnight, which was either very appropriate, being a celtic song sung in a pub named after the word for music in Gaelic, or incredibly ironic, because the song is Scottish, which isn’t quite Irish…hm…

I think my new years resolution will be to learn the lyrics of Auld Lang Syne.

The second photo here is also from New Years.  After Ceol, Philipp and I went downtown and found Jade, my sister’s boyfriend, at Harrah’s.  He had just gotten off work, so we went out with him to celebrate.  His face paint is pretty cool!

Here’s a cute picture of Philipp and me sitting in the back of the car with my puppy Lilybloom! I was so happy to see her!

And for a bit of a surprise, not another photo, but a video!  Philipp gives Lily a doggy biscuit, known to her as a “cookie.”

My puppy is like family to me!  And I have some more pictures of family!  Here are two photos taken with my grandparents.  I’m glad that Philipp is in these photos too!

And during the last weekend Philipp and I were in Reno we went sledding!  Poor Philipp couldn’t go skiing or ice skating because of his knee that he injured while playing handball, so sledding was the snowy alternative.  And we went with my aunt and uncle, there two sons (now all grown up) and three grandchildren.  The youngest son, Cash, went down the slope on a spiffy sled that was driven by his uncle Jesse, and every time they went down, Jesse pushed Cash back up the hill on the sled while Cash persisted “Again!”  It was very cute.  Here are two pictures from that…3 generations shown in one picture and my aunt with her granddaughter in the other photo.

Oh, and I almost forgot the picture of Philipp and me in the snow too!

And last, but not least:

Right after Philipp and I got off the plane at the Munich airport, I found this sign!  Technically it’s an advertisement for the cell phone service O2, but I liked the fact that it’s the Munich skyline and a welcoming phrase in English.  I guess I did feel at home again, even though I had just left home.  I think I like the fact that now, no matter what direction I’m flying between Reno and Munich, I’m always flying home.

Until next time!

(This photo supported blog post is brought to you by my dad, who gave me a new digital camera! Thank you!)

How can I miss you if you won’t go away!

I now have 8 days until I fly to Reno for the holidays (for 2 weeks)!  I figured, since it’s now down to the single digits, I can start that countdown.

Here’s a short list of what I am looking forward to: (not in any particular order…)

1. Driving a car AND cranking the volume on the stereo at full blast!
2. Mochi (funny ice cream balls)
3. Indian food
4. Seeing my sister
5. Seeing my puppy
6. Seeing my grandparents
7. Washer AND Dryer!
8. Reno’s radio stations
9. Getting bags for free when I go grocery shopping
10. Cheesecake
11. Phone numbers that have a pattern (775-xxx-xxxx)
12. Victoria’s Secret and Banana Republic
13. Wireless internet that not only works with my computer receiver at home, but also is available in most public places…(Germany has a different frequency, very annoying)
14. Sleeping on an American mattress!
15. English television channels other than CNN!

I’m sure there are many more things, but they’re not coming to mind at the moment!!!  Most of all, I need to talk to good people, my people, about life in general!  Looking forward to seeing you!

The One with the Late Thanksgiving…

is actually one of my favorite episodes of the TV show Friends, but it is a befitting title for this post.  Two weeks ago on Thanksgiving I had the flu, so we had to postpone it and finally got around to having Thanksgiving last Friday.  Here are the pictures that were taken with a friend’s cell phone camera…my best alternative, since my digital camera is broken.

For now, this is just a photo post.  I’ll update with some stuff from my class/my philosophical rambling when I have a bit more time!

As always, the thumbnails are clickable for the larger version.

Just look at my cute boyfriend carving the turkey (with scissors!?!?!?!?!)

I’m very proud of that pumpkin pie too!  It tasted delicious, and just like the pumpkin pie at home! (although the pumpkin I could find in Germany was very little and I had to supplement it with sweet potates and apple sause! but you really couldn’t taste the difference…)

SCHNEE!!!

I spent all day yesterday studying and it was only because I ran out of toilet paper that I realized I had to get out of the house and go shopping!  But I’m so very glad that happened, because as soon as I stepped outside I was rewarded by gentle and large snow flakes falling from the sky!  This morning I woke up to 8cm of snow on the ground, which has really gotten me into the holiday mood!  Unfortunately I don’t have a digital camera to take pictures of the beautiful winter wonderland, but I did find a few on the net.

Here’s the center of Munich, Marienplatz, with a touch of snow! The little white roofs in the square are booth for the Christkindlmarkt, a.k.a. Weihnachtsmarkt, a Christmas market with arts and crafts and many yummy things to eat!  Here’s another picture from the other side of the square:

This one is at night, when all the lights are on!  A friend of mine and I were comparing this to Rockafeller Center in New York (although I’ve never been there, she has…) and we both liked the subtleness and modesty of the lights in Munich.  Munich, being much smaller than New York, has it’s ice rink at another location…Karlsplatz, just down the street called the Fußgängerzone.

Also at the Christmas markets, one can enjoy a warm cup of Glühwein, a mulled wein that is vital to the German Christmas identity.  Here’s another picture:

I’ve already had about 5 cups this winter so far…and tonight we’re having a big late Thanksgiving/Christmas dinner out our place, so more will be for the drinking!

And last, but not least, because it’s so very cute, I have a small holiday greeting for all of you!

The Hofgarten

This is the painting that I finished yesterday in the freezing cold!  I actually started painting it last July.  I gave myself the goal (since I’m not traveling, but in the city where I live) to not hurry myself and take as much time as I needed to do the painting.  I’m quite proud of it…but since I took the time, I spend about 2 hours in July and didn’t get around to doing more until 5 months later!  So, that explains why the trees are green, even though the painting was completed in winter.

This is a view from the Hofgarten, the royal garden behind the Residenz, looking southwest towards the Theatinerkirche (the mustard colored building) and the Frauenkirche.  I think it’s a beautiful skyline of Munich that many people don’t usually see…so I hope you enjoy it! (and spiffy…a German flag is in the background too!)

Jackalopes and Wolpertingers

If you drive from Ruby Valley to Elko Nevada, and you take the long way round if I remember correctly, you will get to the town of Jiggs, Nevada, which has (I believe) one house, a school, and a bar…the smallest town in Nevada.  The first time I set foot in the bar, I was about 15, and I don’t believe that was quite old enough, because the bar in Jiggs, Nevada is one of the most scary things in my memory.  Although the people in Jiggs (all 8 of them) are very nice, on the walls of the bar hang creatures of horror for a 15 year-old, but of humor for adults.  There you can find the one and only two-headed calf as well as many other montages of mammals, including quite a few Jackalopes.

Don’t know what a Jackalope is?  Basically it’s a rabbit or hare with horns or antlers, looks like this:

Here’s the funny thing…from Jiggs, Nevada to Mittenwald, Bavaria, not much has changed in the mythology! (Although they are 5,564 miles/8,954 km apart as the crow flies.)  In this little corner of Bavaria, up in the Alps, the people of Mittenwald believe in the ferocious Wolpertinger, not quite unlike the Jackalope, however, with wings and fangs:

Here comes the best part!  When I wanted to find out more about these small and strange beasts, I discovered something quite amusing for Art Historians!

(All pictures are clickable for a larger version.)

The first of these rabbits is actually a famous work from the German artist Albrecht Dürer from 1502.  Apparently over time people have independently taken Dürer’s work and re-interpreted it for their own cultural mythology!  Talk about comparative visual culture! *giggle*

On another tangent…

Oddly enough, it seems as though Jiggs, Nevada has more than one connection to Germany.  At one point there was a commercial filmed there for the VW, in which “the entire population of Jiggs can fit into a Volkswagen Bus”!  After much time spent googling, I found the following photo:

That concludes my random blog post!  And all because my uncle asked me for a schnitzel recipe…

Gebirge

“Great things are done when men and mountains meet.”

-William Blake

(I wish I had time for some painted art…but here is a little photography mixed with photoshop)

Oh Nietzsche…*sigh*

Those of you who know what I’ve been through academically the last year and a half or so will probably be surprised to hear that I’ve picked up Nietzsche again.  And by “pick-up,” I mean really in the relationship sort of since.  I have determined that my relationship with Nietzsche is quite like that of an ex-boyfriend.  I could have sworn I broke up with him a while back, but he just keeps finding his way back into my life!  And I know the guy too damn well.  There’s some corner of my heart that does still like him, but for the most part I find him irritating.  And when I read his works and something comes up that I just knew he would say because it’s just so much “him”…I sigh and say, oh Nietzsche.  We’ll also see how he does as an ex-boyfriend on the embarassment front, because I have to give a report on his work Zur Genealogie der Moral (On the Genealogy of Morality) on Thursday.  I actually should be working on the report right now, but I’ve decided to write a post and vent instead…this should be pretty amusing.

All of my friends in here in Germany who hear about this always ask “what does Nietzsche have to do with Art History?”  Well, directly not much, but since he is a philosopher he’s had his influences…in other words he’s been around the block a few times.  The report is for my class called Growth and Decline. Natural and Cultural Processes in Image and Art Thought of Modern Europe which I find very interesting because we discuss trends of decadence and avant-garde.  The class is also interdisciplinary, with 4 professors from different fields: Art History, Philosophy, Music, and Slavic Studies (we’ll be looking at stuff from Russia later in the semester).  To get a basis for the class, two students have to give reports on Nietzsche at the second meeting, and somehow I got myself into it.  A friend of mine is giving the other report on Nietzsche’s first work Geburt der Tragoedie (The Birth of Tragedy) and I’m doing Nietzsche last work.  But we’re trying to work in some art, and I want to post a bit about that too.

**Ok, so I have written a disjunctive blog post!  I started writing this on before I gave the report/presentation, and now I’ve given it, so I will first let you know how that went…oh my.

So, I went to class last Thursday and my classmate and I were a bit nervous to give our reports as they were the first of the semester.  However, one professor was running a bit late, so we started off with personal introductions (they didn’t want to do them last time because they didn’t know how many of the students present would actually be taking the class).  About an hour in, my classmate gave her presentation, very well thought out with a great outline, and then the four professors talked about Nietzsche’s first work for quite some time, during which I just kept getting more and more nervous!  Finally, in the last hour of class, I gave my presentation, but it lasted about half an hour (which I hadn’t expected…) but I just rambled on the whole time in German, and for some reason I was VERY aware of my accent.  I’d never had 60 eyes stare at me while speaking in German!  Right after I had finished, however, one professor said to me, “you know, you only needed to read the foreword and the first part,” and I had read the entire book!  That’s about 200 pages more than I needed to read!  Needless to say I was quite embarassed…I had inadvertently overachieved, and that was the last first impression I had intented to make!

So, I’ve concluded this is all Nietzsche’s fault.  It’s my Nietzsche charma, and it’s just bit me in the butt.

Anyway, I didn’t have enough time, nor was the computer working, for me to show the two artworks from Gustav Klimt that I wanted to present.  One professor knew about this, so he’s asked me to bring them next and show them!  So I guess I have a mini presentation for the next class.  Oh well, I mean, the art part is what I am actually interested in…maybe my classmates will have interesting things to say…

The two works that I’ll show are both from the Austrian Secession artist Gustav Klimt.  One of them I wrote about in my bachelor’s thesis and the other has direct association with The Birth of Tragedy. In this work, Nietzsche writes a great deal about music (probably from his influences from Richard Wagner) and Klimt’s work has the appropriate title, Musik:

Klimt’s use of symbolism in this painting I admire a great deal (being a fairly symbolic painter myself).  The woman figure is holding a kithera, which is the instrument of the Greek god Apollo, of whom Nietzsche writes, contrasting with Dionysis.  Apollo has to do with rational thought and structure, whereas Dionysis, the Greek god of wine, symbolizes chaos and spontaneity…and music and song.  He even had his own type of songs called Dithyrambs.  To the left of the woman is a Silenus, a follower of Dionysis, and to the right is a Sphinx, symbolizing female beauty.

The other work I want to show is Philosophy from Gustav Klimt.  Technically this has to do with Also sprach Zarathustra (Nietzsche’s work) but it also reminds me of the first work of art we discussed in this seminar, Germination from Odilon Redon.  Here you can compare them for yourself:

The one on the left is Klimt’s and on the right is from Redon.  Both have floating objects in them with stars and figures that seem to be in pain, seem to be longing for something beyond the view of the painting.  I’m very curious to hear what the other students think, and what you think as well, my readers!  Please comment!  More updates coming soon!

“Historische Kunst- und Bilddiskurse”: My first experiences

So…if you were to sit me down for a cup of coffee and ask me how my first few weeks of grad school has been, I would tell you the following stories…

The first day was pretty interesting, considering that there are only 13 students and about 7 professors were present! And that wasn’t even all of them! Because the Masters program is set up to be inter-university, we have contact with MANY academics.

Also, in the first meeting we discussed what exactly “discourse” is (since in German the program actually means “Historical Art and Image Discourses”). To understand this better, we read a chapter from the French philosopher Michel Foucault. He stated that a discourse was an exchange of thoughts that were based on a prior knowledge, a priori meaning basic knowledge, the knowledge that all of us have to start with. In other words, anyone is capable of conducting a discourse. Once I realized this (we read the text in German translated from the French) I guess I giggle a bit or something, and one of the professors noticed it! He very politely and eagerly asked “Frau Adams, wollen Sie was sagen?” (if I wanted to say anything…I think he was hoping someone would say SOMETHING…all us students were nervous, I mean, it was the first day!) I then explained that is was kind of funny that all of us were afraid to say anything, were afraid to have a discourse, even though it was right in front of us that anyone could take part in a discourse, there really was nothing wrong that could be said. Maybe a few people laughed inside, but the nervousness apparently made no one else open up quite as much!

Since then, I’ve been to almost all of my classes. Man! Grad school means 3 hour seminars! I never thought they would be so tiring…but I also think I’m starting to condition myself; they aren’t as bad as they used to be! The only problem is that I wish they would be more discussion among the professors and the students. Because the classes are interdisciplinary, we usually have multiple (3-5) professors teaching one class, and it often turns into them discussing and the seminar becoming a lecture. But I also thing that this will change as the students become more confident.

In the second class of my Methods seminar, in which we learn the history of art theory, we read works from Leon Battista Alberti and Leonardo da Vinci and then had to give 5 minute presentations of the sections we were assigned. I thought Alberti was very interesting…he came up with a very technically way of painting a perfectly proportional and perspective painting. You take the main figure, usually a person, and divide it into 3 parts, which become the measuring increments for the painting. From there you can form the perspective grid, which looks something like this:

Alberti also said that the best way to develop the artist skill of proportion and perspective is to paint life-sized. Well, those aspects are exactly what I need to improve in my painting!!! I suppose I need a studio and a couple 6 ft canvases!

Last but not least, I found out that this program incorporates excursions! Yes, I get to go on academic adventures! (Like the one at Schäftlarn!) At the end of the semester we will have a project seminar in Bayreuth, which is famous for being the home of Wagner and his operas. Then we will continue to the Wieskirche, a church protected by UNESCO, and learn about the Bavarian Baroque. A few weeks later, mid March, we are going to Paris to visit art museum and talk about symbolism! The only way that is not perfect for me is that I can’t speak French (yet), but I still can hardly wait!

More on my studies later!….

R.I.P. and Halloween!

Well, it looks like my digital camera has decided to bite the dust. At first I thought it was pining, but it’s not pining, it’s passed on. This camera is no more! It has ceased to be. It’s expired and gone to meet its maker. This is a late camera. It’s a stiff. Bereft of life, it rests in peace. If you hadn’t dropped it multiple times it would be pushing up the daisies! It’s rung down the curtain and joined the choir invisible. This is an ex-camera!

Enough of that, but yes, R.I.P. digital camera…which means I won’t have many pictures to post in the near future.  I do have a few on my harddrive and I will try to get some from friends…but please bare with me for the next few blog posts.

Since this post is already full of dark humor, I thought I would post a picture of Philipp and me from Halloween!  Both of us seemed to have taken our true forms…

More will be posted soon!