loseblattsammlung

pics & thoughts from abroad

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I will travel to Israel in about 6 weeks and post some pictures from it here. In fact I will visit some places again, I've been six years ago. As a group of students we visited Tel Aviv, Jerusalem and Haifa in 2009 and had some workshops at israeli universities.

Each of these cities made a huge impression on me. Therefore I want to give a short recap on each within the next weeks. Kind of photographic travel preparation.

Let's start like almost every visitor with Tel Aviv where the countries only international airport is located. The city was literally built in the desert sand just a little over 100 years ago. The elite of the zionistic movement decided to build a city in the desert as an expressions of their intentess to build a whole new state.

This moment of history in the making and the notion of constant ongoing are still characteristic for Tel Aviv. It's a city of simultaneity of the nonsimultaneous. Founding period quarters vs. banking district. Functional sixties architecture vs the need for parking lots. Trees that have been planted without thoughts about the time when they will be to big for the back yard.

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Landed.

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Parking sensor.

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The Yale Center for British Art.

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A typical Washington activity is apparently to go out to the Reagan Airport, to Gravelly Point - and have a picnic in its flight lane. Sounds a bit strange but actually feels like a typical park experience: people lying on blankets, guys playing softball, others riding bikes, etc.

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I've seen a nice anecdote at the Yale University Art Galery this morning. It's from the current director, Jock Reynolds, about his teacher Wayne Thiebaud.

"I remember attending my first graduate seminar with Wayne Thiebaud, who looked out at his new crop of students and explained that he and his faculty peers couldn't teach any of us how to become artists, that we had to assume that identity for ourselves and get on with making our work. Thiebaud added, almost cryptically, that there were some very practical things he could teach us that might be useful during our years at UC Davis. What followed was a remarkably lucid lecture on wehre to buy the best and cheapest salami, cheese, olives, coffee, fruit, bread, cakes, wine, and more in the region, things our professor insisted would significantly enrich the quality of our lives. As Thiebaud's extremely detailed talk continued, I recognized many of the Sacramento-area delis and bakeries he was describing from having grown up in the area, and I soon realized that he was sharing something more than a shopping list with us. He was giving his students direct insight into the very subject matter that was inspiring his own art: the frosted cakes, cream pies, lollipops, trays of herring and sardines, and other foods he transformed, through the skilled application of paint onto canvas, into tactile and sensuous visual represantations. I took this first lesson at UC Davis to heart as a genuine gift, a true sharing of what inspired my professor, and proceeed later in the week to pursue a share of his suggested homework."

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roof terrace

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The game itself was a fun thing. And the supporters commited more to that than the level of the game. Montreal could make som impact (pun!) by keeping calm and building the game up properly. Something DC lacked despite they were the better team technically and individually. Montreal went one up but DC could equalize late - So that in a way everybody was happy.

The DC United top players were goalie Hamid (impressive appearance!) and late goal scorer Johnson, who acted a bit sluggish, waiting to get the pass in the box instead to move between the lines.

But the true stars of the game were the DC United ultras. I experienced a very nice home crowd at the Seattle Sounders where the whole stadium is standing and the average level of support higher than in the Kennedy Stadium. But there were two groups of young ultras that really kicked me since they showed what ultra is about: support and ecstasis.

One group was called the District Ultras: Young lads, very diverse, a lot of female supporters amongst them and in fact influenced by some ex pats from Croatia, Denmark and England. They carried big flags, sang chants and had a capo. The other group singing along with them was La Norte. They had a big drum and some very enthusiastic drummers and dancers. The last 20 minutes with them were awesome!

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The Robert F. Kennedy Memorial Stadium has been opened in 1960. Since then it has seen a lot of Baseball and American Football but also European Football.

On Sam's website stadionpanorama.de there is a nice panoramic view of the stadium during the friendly vs. the US team last summer. Some Americans are still proud about this win from their side. I explained them the meaning of a friendly in the summer without any Bayern or Dortmund players.

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Had a great day with Sam. He took me to the area around capitol hill. The Washington Monument is so impressive, especially when you consider that it was completed 1884 - before the era of reinforced concrete in modern architecture.

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Guest at Georgetown, DC. Nice place!

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Today was New Haven's Science Fair. That's a competition where kids from pre-Kindergarten age up to High School conduct research experiments and build display boards to present the results. Some of the colleauges from the Social Robotics Lab served as jury members!

My favourite topics were: a) Bubbles, Bubbles, Bubbles b) Is Iron Man Hiding in our Cereals? c) Photosynthesis? We are into this!

Winner was a project on the correlation of soda and blood presure (see the first & last pic).

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Got my hair cut trimmed by Anthony at Phil's Hair Styles.

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Women on walls. I like the political connotation of murals. It's just something you can not close your eyes to.

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Fire fighters in New Haven. The engines were painted white in the 1940s, apparantely New Haven's firefighters weren't allowed to use the signal during "blackout conditions" in war times. So they painted the engines white to be visible.

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What can you expect from a street named after a colour? Right, colourful buildings! Orange St in New Haven.

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The Beinicke Rare Book & Manuscript Library is one of the few buidlings on Yale campus that doesn't pretend to be older than it is. And it doesn't neet to do so, since it is one of the most impressive structures I've ever been to!

The outer walls are made out of Vermont marble that is thin enough (1.25 inches / 3,1 cm) to let the sunlight shine through. This creates a dimly glowing, almost intimate atmosphere on the inside. The amerstone-colored walls consort with the enlighted library cube of glass in the middle of the building. Visitors walk around it on a gallery, what makes it appear even more cabalistic and sublime.

Among the many manuscripts conserved there are precious originals by Martin Luther King Jr. and two Gutenberg bibles (one in the picture).