die Zunft

Ten forms from the hands of Greg Ellis. In 2001, this percussionist conducted explorations in rhythm, and he produced a memorable CD, one I reach for during those moments I feel that my luck has been located so that I can tickle it fully awake. "Rhythm is just another form of time," Ellis says.

Time interwoven with touch. This then, this is the music that was playing as, for the first time, I was welcomed by a guild formed to explore the rhythms of baking bread and brewing liquid bread. I seem to have fallen in with some excellent, hobbit-like Gesellen. Fortunate I was tonight to have been invited after a crafter sampled my home-brewed Porter some weeks ago and happened to like it. How unexpected to find others whose roots are in places and times so similar to the ones that provided me with nourishment. Rhythms of the Old World thrumm in my heart.

I am not a joiner. Never have been. Yet, I will ally myself with these eaters-of-bread, for it is a rarity in this life to sense, at that first moment of entanglement, that another is not an other. Even rarer to then find that, without missing a beat, our hands can together concoct savoury delights. That our hearts feel the same rhythms. How can one but be drawn into the dance.

No conventional titles on this CD. The ten forms spin on. Each form a neutral space. A starting point. Listen to the rhythm and work the melody in together. Thrumm. Bom. Bomm bebomm.

Bomm

Bomm bombebomm

Piwo

Ai, sweet soul of mine, find some shelter, a delirious deluge is coming.

Na zdrowie!

Spinnstube

Start the wheel spinning and then tap on the footboard to keep it whirling ~ like Rod Taylor's time machine. But when the blurring settles back into clarity, I am not in the past. It is still 2009. All I will ever know is that Heinrich carried Anna's spinning wheel home that night, walking with her from the Spinnstube, and that they got sidetracked in her friend Lina's haybarn. My Grandmama Gretel was born 9 months later in November of 1911.



So this spinning wheel has a special place in my heart. My mother gave Anna's brother Otto a bottle of booze in trade for it as he was carrying it out to the bonfire they had built to burn the junk being cleared out of the old house. My Mama saved what she could. I suppose that I have my love of old things from her. It's a good thing for daughters to have something from their mothers. Even if, in the present, this sometimes causes pain.

Briefmarken von 1945

Two stamps from the American sector in 1945.

The first postage stamps issued in Germany after the second World War ended were designed with the Tiemann (also known as Kleist) script 'M'. This was the latest incarnation of the script, used in the 1930's. "Gothic" typeface, as can be seen above, went through a progression over the centuries.