sociolinguistics esssssssssse..

i know this is like the uncoolest thing to do... post serious shit on here...but hey, sometimes you just gotta post what flows. i can take the mission hipster heat, jack.

it has come to my attention, conveyed to me by a friend , that i have just completed a tour of the most notoriously anti-semitic countries of all time. spain, germany, lithuania. my tour actually retraced almost the exact path of jewish european migrations between the 14th and 20th centuries (without the 3 stopovers in charles de gaulle).

i had first wanted to document where i was and somehow draw parallel paths between me and some ancestral crew back 500 years, but thats not gonna work. tonight is sociolinguistics essay night, so buckle up, ese.

yiddish is a sociolinguistic phenomenon that documents the movement of a people throughout a very foreign land mass. jews were in europe by the 5th century, and by the 12th century had developed languages which mixed their own alphabets with the local vernacular. pockets of culturally semi-autonomous languages began to form including ladino (spanish) and zarphatic (french).

around the 12th century, a critical mass occurred somewhere in the rhine valley, and by the 15th century, a well defined (non-pidgin) language was forming throughout germanic central europe.

like a passport stamped during a long journey, yiddish has been marked by its stopovers. slavic, semitic, and romantic inflections dot a landscape written in hebrew. as crews of jews moved eastward, they picked up pieces of the local languages, and various dialects could be found in northern europe, the balkans, poland , the baltics, russia and ukraine, germany, and elsewhere.

in the early 1930s attempts were made to standardize the language based on committee efforts in vilnius. at that time roughly 10 million people spoke the language, most of them based in europe. hundreds of daily newspapers existed throughout europe and the americas. schools, transactions, fights, debates, and plays were conducted in the langauge.

efforts to standardize was made irrelevant by an attack from central europe that was almost entirely fatal. what was started in germany was finished by an attack from a frigid east -- stalinism froze whatever corpse of a language was left.

today you can still see yiddish in kovno (kaunus) and vilna (vilnius). it marks gravestones, mass murder sites, destroyed (and ocassionally rebuilt) synagogues. consider this a cultural endpoint, or maybe the final stop in the world's shittiest bus ride. consider yiddish the bloodline of a culture constantly on the move, pushing further east as the heat from the west became hotter and hotter. consider the final one-two punch, fire and ice, squeezing the life out of sentence and song.

consider this:


(here rest the bones from the kovno ghetto (1941 - 1944) , which were burnt in 1944. they were buried in 1979)

people like to say that yiddish is not a dead language, but they are wrong. yiddish was murdered, my friends, and that makes it dead as dead can be.

i have taken to schematical drawings...

well i have made it back to germany, for an overnight stay before my return to the states. not sure how or what to blog right now, but i wanted to share a couple observations, in schematical form...

first, regarding the women of my birth country of Lithuania... it's amazingly hit or miss. for my more mathematically inclined friends, there is clearly a bimodal distribution of hotness amongst these women, with one big bump around heidi klume, and another near the area of bob villa. in other words, there are those who are extremely fine and make you realize what an untapped resource this country is, and there are others that would probably do really well on the country farm. i submit the following diagram to further describe this point :



also, while i was waiting for my dad during a dentist's appointment (he must be the only man willing to travel across the world for dental work... let's just call him eccentric), i sketched out my mouth, with a couple of angles of questionable importance:



chag sameach to those who care -- i tried meeting up with the chabad in frankfurt, but they wouldnt pick up their phone, so i guess i am left with kababs and guilt. ahhhhh judaism.

i make a contribution to the growing flooding problem in central europe....

frankfurt is a not so charming city built around a fairly charming river , the Maaaaaaain. last night drinking antics reached their climax; johnny walker came by, as did his driver, jose cuervo... leaving one bar, a pack of us made our way down the river, stumbling , careful not to fall in. i realize i have a whole lime in my pocket (of course) and this is unacceptable, so i throw it as hard as i can against a cement bridge girder. this is funner than i expect, and the others around me dont realize how much i love throwing shit into bodies of water. i find some concrete cylinders from a nearby construction site and throw them as far as i can, getting some major splash downs... i am walking west along the maiiin and the construction people seemed to have forgotten to affix a park bench to the ground. oops. i try to lift a side of it, and notice that it is totally movable but, i cannot do the work alone. a coworker of mine seems curious, but shy -- i shame him into lifting the other end... this park bench, where young lovers speak an incomprehensible language and smoke cigarettes, is all done. we drag this fucker to the river bank -- the mood in the crew is shock with a dash of glee. with an "eins, zwei, drei" we give the wooden bench a lift and toss into the swollen river, clearing the bank by a only a few feet.

normally i wouldnt condone the destruction of public property, or private property for that matter, but these people had it coming, and the doomed park bench provided some sense of release. i realized that this violated my earlier tenet of not being thrown in jail, and for a minute, i see myself being packed in a one-way train to Treblinka. but no outsiders see this, so we do a couple chest bumps and stumble into the red light district, which really is a whole different story...

soccer is so dumb....

the entire country of spain gets crazy today. real madrid v. FC barcelona. its like the yankees and red sox play twice a year, and the history between the two teams involves wars, fascism, riots, etc. so it's big here, mas grande as they say. here is a short diary of the match...

impossible to get a cab, the concierge waved his hand and said 'easy!' ... would like to give him a smack now. the cab line is 40 people long, and these poor bastards are going to miss whatever engagement their trying to get to. but i'm smart, so i walk past la rambla, past la placa de catalunya, to gran via del les corts where i hook a left and walk , trying to find a cab. my mission is to hit the stadium, and party with the good people of barcelona, who are in the midst of the closest thing they have to a holy war. i am walking. i am walking west, the map in my mind tells me this is the general direction of the stadium... walking... walking... im covering lots of blocks, i must have put 10 miles on my feet today, and i am extremely thirsty. the match starts, and i am in the street. i walk past a cafe, and realize this is how the spanish do it. they sit around, yell at each other, plow through the plates, drink a little.. they are way more interested in food than getting lit. i walk past a cafe when a huge noise erupts... it seems like some guy on FCB got tripped in the box, and he gets a free kick. people are going nuts, anticipating him punching it in... a good thirty seconds of close ups on his face, along with a nervous goalie. finally he approaches the ball, fakes left, and scores in the right side of the net. 1-0 FCB. people are going nuts now, screaming, singing ole ole ole or some such shit... i turn around and continue my trek to the pitch, horns are honking everywhere at the placa de la universitat . in the plaza i see a vague flash and have a 20 miliseconds to register that this means incoming mortar fire --- a loud explosion follows, and i realize that when the spanish light fireworks, you better watch your ass.

i contine to walk, hailing cabs, police cars, civilians, anything that seems remotely similar to a taxi. no luck.. i hear an angry spaniard scream something out his window -- he is not happy and im pretty sure he said "kfjskjdf ksjdkjsd puta skldjsjkd akjsd". i am confused and vaguely uncomfortable and 10 other barcelonans are screaming out their window now. one car honks... real madrid has tied the affair 1-1.

i find a cab, tell the man i want to go the stadium and he seems puzzled. he takes me there in the awkward silence that comes from having such a small intersecting word space. i ask him to drop me at a cerveceria near the stadium, of which he says there are many. we get there... silence. rows of police trucks looking like they just broke up something serious or are waiting for something serious to be breaken up. i walk more, no bars. ok, a few tight places where people are talking and not focusing on the game. they are wearing jerseys but are sitting down, intent on finishing the pig on their plate. no bars, in the anglo manner. no people pissing on the street. it's very quiet and dark. i expected wrigleyville and i got west rogers park. i approach the stadium in eerie silence. vague discomfort again washes over me, along with hard hitting isolation and sore feet. i realize that this is not what i expected, i come across the collblanc metro station and head back to la rambla, where i know of a couple places to stand and watch.

by the time i arrive there is like 3 minutes left in the match and it's still 1-1. i understand that i am intimately tied to this match; FCB will only score while i watch and i havent watched much , so they havent scored .

i am back at my hotel, remarkabely sober for my journey , so i spark one up (the australians were resourceful as well as friendly) and watch the game end in a draw.

a goddamn draw!!!! it's like the game never fucking happened.. are you kidding me? imagine the red sox and yankees playing to a draw .imagine getting so geared up for a game that you plan your month around it... and then, it just ends, unresolved, the equivalent of saying , "ahh , nevermind." calling this anti-climactic would be generous. anger, despondency, violence, joy, elation, hatred, tears -- these are emotional responses to some sort of event. how do you respond to a non-event. a shrug? a pat on the back? all i have to say is that i'm happy i didnt drop major euros to try to get into this game. cause these spanish would see the pressure drop ...

i meet my old pals, charles and jack...

i am back in charles de gaulle, and i already feel a kinship to the man, even though i have no idea who he was. ok, he was some big general (what was the last war france won??) and led a bunch of french governments into the ground. seriously, for a country full of beaureaucrats, i am not impressed. they should have named this airport after marseille marceau. at least that way my language problem would have been solved. anyway, more airports today and I am looking forward to 5 nights in germany and not having to unpack every two days... either way i have moved away from the ham (that last bocadilla in barcelona almost killed me) and am focusing on smoked fishes, as to prepare my systems for eastern europe:



that green thing you see is lettuce. also, the coca cola lite is a result of a reunion with another old friend, jack daniels. let's just say jack hasnt changed in all these years. even in the old world, he keeps me good company when everyone around me seems down on old db, but there is always a price to pay. im pretty sure everything went ok last night -- i seem to have all my apendages and no scars indicating any involountary organ donations. though it was a suprise waking up naked on my bed covered in ham...

it does get a bit lonely to be travelling alone, and i've only done it for a couple days. but there is something liberating about the total unaccountability of being somewhere where no one knows you, you know no one, and your only concern is not being locked up in a catalonian prison or being robbed. it is still amazing to see people i know act like this real life... but at the end of the day, are you ever accountable to anything but your conscience? what else is there? is this incredibly short sighted or the key to happiness?

off to frankfurt...

reason #45 on why spain is the place to be...

... sangwiches!!! everywhere! these people love sangwiches so much it hurts... and i'm not even talking about subway, although they got that here too, of course. i'm talking some serious ham and cheese:



you have to understand -- this photo happens like 3 times a day for me in spain. there's also some of this:



and finally.. i've never seen so much pig eating my life.



i think everything in this picture, except arguably the customer, consists entirely of pig. it's remarkable. and delicious!