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rmIsengart last night was spectacular. What he does hooks into so many things I've loved and longed for at various points, it's a little ridiculous. A lot of them I haven't thought of with more than a glance in years:
Like how I listened to David Bowie's Heroes in the dark of my bedroom in my parents house, longing to ache over something enough that I could feel victorious in it. How my mother was obsessed with the work of Gustav Klimpt and always pointed out his work in coffee tables books to me because I looked like his women. How I will always maintain I was supposed to be in Berlin when the Wall fell. And the year I had strange nightmares about France in the war and winced whenever my companion (boyfriend? lover? he may acknowledge that we dated for all those years now, but dear god do the words remain inadequate) would speak to me in his clever German because I remembered the smell of rain and gasoline and bicycle spokes from my dreams.
The cabaret music of Berlin was one of those things I grew up with on my parents' turntable. And because I was always lonely and clever and cagey about my otherness I called myself sophisticated, pretended at decadence and smirked at the thought of being queer, there, then....
Like most of my fixations -- even the ones they were handily involved in the genesis of -- my parents were unsettled. I was Jewish. It was inappropriate.
I wanted to study abroad, and being diligent brought all the brochures and paperwork home.
It's expensive, they said. But I knew it was less than they had paid for private school.
From this vantage point, I can see that it was neither the money, nor the place, but the distance. I was eager to run off into the dark, and the fact that I was methodical about such things only made my parents worry more. Besides, they had never been there either, and probably harbored the same fantasies and euphemisms as myself -- Sophisticated. Decadent. Lost.
So I never went to Berlin. But if I had, I would have been there when the Wall came down. Instead I cried at my parents' dinner table over veal and stormed off to my room because they would never ever understand.
Isengart reminds me of everything I was toying at when I was 15. He reminds me of my foolish playfulness about inappropriate desire and dark stories and rain. He takes these songs many of us have heard a million times and puts the meaning back in them with a wink and a nod and a smirk and more eye-contact than is strictly comfortable. That it's silly and perfectly serious and impeccably dressed all at once (really, is there any other man in New York wearing black velvet pants with black and white braces and a fabric rose in his hair?) and begs you to forget if you or he are male or female and just swoon... well it's too perfect.
And my mother would love it. In just a little bit of secret. Because Isengart kept prattling last night between songs about how he's in love with Adele, the women from the Klimpt painting.
I watched the waiters hover past the windows in Cafe Sabarsky to watch his performance -- some rapt, some nervous; watched women in their 70s and 80s remember these songs as from some wicked youth; watched tots careen into each other shrieking in front of the small stage while parents cringed at innuendo and my friends gripped my arms in a failed attempt to keep us all from hysterical Oh-my-god-this-song-would-be-so-perfect-for-a-Torchwood-fanfic laughter.
Magic magic magic. The underworld comes up to visit. And it's not such a bad chap.
Like how I listened to David Bowie's Heroes in the dark of my bedroom in my parents house, longing to ache over something enough that I could feel victorious in it. How my mother was obsessed with the work of Gustav Klimpt and always pointed out his work in coffee tables books to me because I looked like his women. How I will always maintain I was supposed to be in Berlin when the Wall fell. And the year I had strange nightmares about France in the war and winced whenever my companion (boyfriend? lover? he may acknowledge that we dated for all those years now, but dear god do the words remain inadequate) would speak to me in his clever German because I remembered the smell of rain and gasoline and bicycle spokes from my dreams.
The cabaret music of Berlin was one of those things I grew up with on my parents' turntable. And because I was always lonely and clever and cagey about my otherness I called myself sophisticated, pretended at decadence and smirked at the thought of being queer, there, then....
Like most of my fixations -- even the ones they were handily involved in the genesis of -- my parents were unsettled. I was Jewish. It was inappropriate.
I wanted to study abroad, and being diligent brought all the brochures and paperwork home.
It's expensive, they said. But I knew it was less than they had paid for private school.
From this vantage point, I can see that it was neither the money, nor the place, but the distance. I was eager to run off into the dark, and the fact that I was methodical about such things only made my parents worry more. Besides, they had never been there either, and probably harbored the same fantasies and euphemisms as myself -- Sophisticated. Decadent. Lost.
So I never went to Berlin. But if I had, I would have been there when the Wall came down. Instead I cried at my parents' dinner table over veal and stormed off to my room because they would never ever understand.
Isengart reminds me of everything I was toying at when I was 15. He reminds me of my foolish playfulness about inappropriate desire and dark stories and rain. He takes these songs many of us have heard a million times and puts the meaning back in them with a wink and a nod and a smirk and more eye-contact than is strictly comfortable. That it's silly and perfectly serious and impeccably dressed all at once (really, is there any other man in New York wearing black velvet pants with black and white braces and a fabric rose in his hair?) and begs you to forget if you or he are male or female and just swoon... well it's too perfect.
And my mother would love it. In just a little bit of secret. Because Isengart kept prattling last night between songs about how he's in love with Adele, the women from the Klimpt painting.
I watched the waiters hover past the windows in Cafe Sabarsky to watch his performance -- some rapt, some nervous; watched women in their 70s and 80s remember these songs as from some wicked youth; watched tots careen into each other shrieking in front of the small stage while parents cringed at innuendo and my friends gripped my arms in a failed attempt to keep us all from hysterical Oh-my-god-this-song-would-be-so-perfect-for-a-Torchwood-fanfic laughter.
Magic magic magic. The underworld comes up to visit. And it's not such a bad chap.
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no subject
Date: 2008-06-04 03:44 pm (UTC)I was trying to think of a way to describe the performance, but that's it in a nutshell. That, and the fanfic-lulz suppression. ;)
no subject
Date: 2008-06-04 04:38 pm (UTC)The small second lieutenant
he was the best rider
and all hearts
they immediately flew to him.
He could kiss and dance like no second one
He came and saw and also won in no time.
He has fought many moons in France over there
Soon on the Vistula
Piave somewhere...
Now nothing more has remained to him
He became a gigolo!
Nice gigolo, poor gigolo,
think no more of the times,
Where you as a hussar
golden-ties even
could ride through the streets!
uniformly passee
Sweetheart says: Adieu!
Nice world
you went to threads!
If the heart to you also breaks
show a laughing face
One pays and you must dance!