economic matters a la T

Anyway ... there is not much we can do about it now besides of finding ways
through the crisis. Over all there is some bitterness in the aspect of
privatizing profit and socializing losses world wide right now and the
realization that something is very wrong and needs to be corrected to bring
the aspect of a state back to life: Being a state meaning being a bigger
community to protect the weaker ones of the community (for example by public
health care) by taking a bigger share of the profit from the richer ones. I
am still trying to formulate my own ideas about it - I guess I am not angry
about people like Bill Gates who make a lot of money with a good idea,
selling it and creating a lot of jobs on their way. But I get increasingly
angry at for example hedge fund managers (like for example the ones from
Blackstone, ___'s main owner or Carlyle, ___'s main owner) who buy
companies and require them to make higher profits or take savings away for
their own profit - sometimes making a personal income of more than 1 billion
US$ a year! They take long saved money away from these companies, put it in
their own bank accounts and make these companies take additional bank
credits to increase the profit per capital employed. This requires to
companies to pay more money to the banks for interest rates out of the daily
business and not investing this money in their own future. The hedge funds
are fine and most of the time getting away with these companies paying being
taken over by the hedge funds with their own higher credits. So the risk for
the hedge funds is really limited in the end! So one of the main ways for
these companies making more "profit" on demand of the hedge funds is firing
employees and producing in low cost countries, cutting jobs in high cost
countries. So all the people who pay in retirement funds who then invest in
hedge fund shares are in a way cutting off their own jobs! Some calculus: 1
hedge fund manager who makes a personal profit of 1 billion dollars (even
with some tax cutting opportunities like they are offered by the American
government where they can declare this as profit from investments with a tax
rate of 15% instead of income with a tax rate of 35% could - just with this
profit - afford an annual income of almost 30.000 families with 35.000$
each. I am sure if 30.000 families could maintain an annual income of
35.000$ the whole economy would be better off than 1 person making 1 billion
and surely not consuming it in a way that would help a majority of people
... Since most of the hedge fund managers live in the US and a big part of
the crisis started there, it's going to be a big burden and task for the new
president to lead a way out of the crisis. Good luck and a lot of success to
him!

En Route / Unterwegs I

Everyone loves monitoring their transformations, I don't care who you are, but do it. Transition into sickness; changing location, I view my adaptation (the bumbling and success zusammen) with pleasure. What passes? What's untranslatable? Who listens? How do people appear to listen or not to listen? Why?
I cannot help but feel special, arriving in Detroit from Paris. It's a naive specialness//attained only through not knowing the histories of those around me. Especially on the flight to Memphis from Detroit (or anywhere else I might have arrived from Europe), it feels like everyone knows eachother. Everyone has some easier, more intimate conversation...Except me? I talk, but is it intimate?
Why does that matter?

I woke up early this morning. My window open to Memphis in winter (humidity never dying, about 50 degree F) I had been dreaming I was trying to explain some mistake I made. I was speaking German outloud between dream and waking, to some supervisor figure (some sort of kestner paranoia or things to come in another work environment?)
It made me feel more connected though, to the last four months of my life.

I barely got out of my seat on the trans-atlantic flight. I could feel some types of body tissue in my legs pulsing. But I didn't care. I had a headache, came and went, and saw the latest by Ben Stiller and some English drama back-to-back. Could tell I might be getting a sore throat...
But, I wrote out plans, as I always do:
Kunst - Performance irgendwohin
idea-gender switch, -wechseln, -verwirrend
narrative (something to follow, arme Publikum)
an ending without resolution
Musik/Ton - mood/Stimmung darstellen
Use of karaoke (mundane everyday performance possible for all)
the abject-weakness and strength, catharsis
fuzzy numbers, Behauptung / Claims, Assumptions / (Ver)Urteilungen

flying and landing in America

When I think of coming home to Memphis (the HOME of all time) and what I feel there, I am always so excited and aroused. It's the closest I get to the past, The Past, and my memories that are older than 5 years...I was explaining to my colleagues here in Hannover that flying over the Atlantic every year or more is actually a delight for me because it is a quiet time (I have been very lucky in my seating arrangements) and I get lost in thought and read and write as long as I want to and even manage to sleep some. It is a tunnel. And on the other side, I come out into the United States of America. The air is different and the people somehow still surprising to me. The only homelike place in the US is Memphis, Halls, and even Anne's house in DC; No, just her bedroom..the things in there, even the new things, are familiar. Like I was with her when she bought them. Anne, my double cell.
Maybe it's ironic to some people, but being away, I realize Memphis's sophistication. No where I have been do I find the live music, the passionate public display, of people reaching out to eachother through music, that I see in Memphis. And, after considering it so for some time, it isn't just because I understand what's going on (because I do not always) or because it's Home (because it's changed, the crowds have altered), but because there are a lot of people making music, making art, doing things they believe in just because they can and because they are encouraged by their friends and families. No big deals, no huge names--save the history and the living legends.
In Memphis, the places familiar in the US, I feel the most comfortable expressing my desires and driving drunk. Or no. It's another context only.
This week, I had two views or confrontations specifically related to my American identity. One I was able to speak through; the other conversation waits on the backburner--perhaps some LIGHT conversation to bring up at the Christmas Party next Wednesday.
The unfinished one: At my workplace here in Hannover, we watched the old version film of Animal Farm based on Orwell's novel. In the introduction, my colleague mentioned a history of totalitarian regimes, socialism, communism, and critique, and then I did not catch the complete thought (or was it one?) but he mentioned what is having in America.
What IS happening in America?
The other confrontation: THe US and its protest culture and its lack of bureaucricy between an idea and it's realization (at least in the arts). In Germany, this professor was telling me, the people (because of past regimes in Germany, not just National Socialist, but empirial and the Kaiser Reich) are reliant on the government to enact change. In the US, because of the (dreaded) individualism, people do have the idea that they can make change happen. At least, our culture perpetuates this (reality or myth) in historical tales and in biographies of "great men."
Having lived in Germany now for 6 months, the bureaucracy is overwhelming... Perhaps it is also self-assuring and security for some people.
And so my impressions from living in Hungary for two years are confronted with another sort of regime history. How much I assumed to know about Germany! I DO know a lot. I have heard a lot of things and understand. But, I have not yet been an active critic or person involved in German dialogue. It will change, it is changing.

On the plane home, I will listen to music, drink the wine and spirits available, enough to stretch myself out (mind and body) and take self-portraits in the plane's lavatories.
I make plans for projects that I never finish. I have dreams of grandiosity and performance.

Shoutout

First, I would like to send a shoutout to my dear friend, Mihai, in Budapest for telling me to write more.
Ok.
1. Its now December, and the days are shorter and shorter here in northern Germany. I have to figure out ways to cope.
2. My internship at the kestnergesellschaft is going quite well. I am integrated more and more, but still separate. This only takes time (she says optimistically.)
3. My mental state does acrobatics- high sensitivity vs. anger/lunacy. It would seem its all here to stay and I simply must accept it.

I have to laugh more and cry. Its what hurts and feels the best.