.
Untitled (Christmas Market, Freiburg): photo by Bakmak (bakmak71), 12 December 2013
Escape
forgot, numb
fingers
in half
gloves at
the bus stop
busy night
market holiday
shoppers with groaning
market holiday
shoppers with groaning
carts
rushing out
automatic door
to celebrate
what bus an hour late
again
Untitled (Christmas Market, Freiburg): photo by Bakmak (bakmak71), 12 December 2013
Untitled (Christmas Market, Freiburg): photo by Bakmak (bakmak71), 12 December 2013
Untitled (Freiburg): photo by Bakmak (bakmak71), 10 December 2013
Untitled (Freiburg): photo by Bakmak (bakmak71), 10 December 2013
Untitled (Freiburg): photo by Bakmak (bakmak71), 12 December 2013
It's really incredible to think that this is Freiburg last Thursday and Tuesday nights. We've never been to Germany, although it has loomed large in my imagination (different cities and regions figuring in different parts of my education) for so long. The light in these photos is exactly like the light we've been seeing in PA and NY for most of the past several weeks: light drained of colors which mostly illuminates shadows and light that feels distinctly un-Christmas-y." Inside the house, Caroline has put some things out to mark the season and we'll really need to get things together soon, but now Jane has reached the age (too soon) where her pressures seem to be out of step with the season as I used to remember it. I would like for that old feeling to return, but I'm not optimistic. At least we survived our two hour drive through the blizzard yesterday to visit old friends we hadn't seen for a long time. It was crazy to venture out, but along the way it was kind of worth it to see illuminated roadside signs flashing on and off reading "Ice and Snow." I guess post-Modernism has arrived in the various regional Public Works Departments. Curtis
ReplyDeleteCurtis,
ReplyDeleteThis winter is feeling very black-and-white here, too, even sans les neiges.
The play of light and shadow in the Christmas market shots reminds us that there is an element of phantasmagoria and sometimes even of menace in the carnivalesque -- we were put in mind, particularly, of Hitchcock, and it was hard not to remember the hallucinatory carousel scene from Strangers on a Train.
I see what you mean about Strangers On A Train. What the photographed scenes recalled to my mind was the early charity fete scene in Graham Greene's The Ministry of Fear (the one that ends with Arthur Rowe guessing the weight of the cake). I can't even remember what season the event took place in, but it's the same uneasiness and dread I feel. I've never seen the Fritz Lang filmed version of the novel -- I think Lang changed things around a lot to transpose the book effectively -- but I expect it shares qualities with the Hitchcock. I feel a strong identification with The Ministry of Fear, something my wife says she can't understand and finds disturbing. Curtis
ReplyDeleteOne does feel so very isolated and threatened in those carnival type atmospheres in the evening. Mr. Bradbury tapped into that so very well. The Hitchcock is, indeed, as ominous as it gets.
ReplyDeleteAll is well here after a slightly hellish year. Hope you are doing as well as can be expected. It's been a year of fading in and out; you are frequently in mind, Tom.
Don
The eyes catch hell... either inward-pointed or splinter-poked by a hard face or a bus-at-a-crawl/roll. The eyes catch hell... dark floaters to the right... flash-floaters streaming leftward. Nothing to do but swallow hard.
ReplyDeleteChristmas in the tropics is bizarre but the universal pressure to celebrate is the same. The weather is so summery that it is difficult to reconcile the lights and the shopping frenzy here for the seconds and other shoddy goods available in the third world. Hope you are as well as you can be. I've been following the posts. They are great. Greetings of the season to all. It is still good to be here although that is easily and often overlooked.
ReplyDeleteHarris
Harris
More and more, the “holiday season” (to be ecumenical about it) resembles one of those fierce winter storms that blow across the country, and which those in its path brace for: there are always a few injured, a few dead; but most people survive the “festivities” and the combat shopping. The devastation, though . . . that’s of another order.
ReplyDeleteMany thanks, sweet friends. Let us swallow hard and attempt to survive. The combat shopping here on the Western Front is already intense. The carousel hell of the market economy seems jacked up on steroids this time of year. Having finally realized the bus will arrive in Freiburg before it ever gets here, I have resolved to take to the bunker for the duration, imagining it is my own private Costa Rica.
ReplyDelete