RUDOLF SCHLICHTER (1890-1955)
Bildnis Bert Brecht, um 1926
Städtische Galerie
im Lenbachhaus, München

I've been a bit obsessed with Bertol Brecht (good to see hes up 2% in popularity on IMDB) these last couple days, and I don't see my curiosity receding any time soon.  In the States he isn't much known, or remembered (perhaps in theater classes this is not the case), though Mack the Knife from Kurt Weil's Three Penny Opera is recognizable and reinterpreted to this day (scroll down to see a few interpretations). I was only marginally familiar with his work, and that, only because my father was in the theatre in Mexico, where Brecht's humour and politics, were and are appreciated.  One of his more famous play's, "The Good Person of Szechwan" was recently put on at the Young Vic theatre.

The Good Soul of Szechuan - Video trailer

Brecht's language just strikes me as lyrical and flowing. Not something I, before living in Germany, ever associated with the German language, perhaps a bit programmed by the caricature of its harsh delivery in American pop culture, or its relegation (adulation?) as the language of reification in academia. Its a wonder, and a discovery for me, that Brecht, the father of epic theater, crafts such mellifluous verse.

I was particularly, moved by a song or poem recently called the  "Erinnerung and die Marie A" or in English "Memory of Marie A."  Listen to the language of the first verse.

 Here is the text in translation: (Knut W. Barde)

On that day in the blue moon of September  
Quietly under a young plum tree  
Is where I held her, the still pale love
In my arm like a lovely dream.
And above us in the beautiful summer sky
was a cloud, which I saw for a long time
It was very white and immensely high
And when  I looked up, it was never more.

Since that day many, many moons have
Quietly swum down and past.
The plum trees probably have been chopped off
And you ask me, how is it with the love?
So I tell you:  I cannot remember.  
And yet, sure, I do know what you mean  
But her face, I really do not know it anymore 
I only still know:  I once kissed it.

Even the kiss, I would have forgotten it long ago
had the cloud not been there
That I still know and  will I always know
Very white it was and came from above.
Perhaps the plum trees are still flowering
And that women now perhaps has her seventh child
But that cloud blossomed only for minutes
And when I looked up, it already was disappearing in the wind.

 Here is the poem in the original German:

An jenem Tag im blauen Mond September
Still unter einem jungen Pflaumenbaum
Da hielt ich sie, die stille bleiche Liebe
In meinem Arm wie einen holden Traum.
Und über uns im schönen Sommerhimmel
War eine Wolke, die ich lange sah
Sie war sehr weiß und ungeheuer oben
Und als ich aufsah, war sie nimmer da.

Seit jenem Tag sind viele, viele Monde
Geschwommen still hinunter und vorbei
Die Pflaumenbäume sind wohl abgehauen
Und fragst du mich, was mit der Liebe sei?
So sag ich dir: Ich kann mich nicht erinnern.
Und doch, gewiß, ich weiß schon, was du meinst
Doch ihr Gesicht, das weiß ich wirklich nimmer
Ich weiß nur mehr: Ich küsste es dereinst.

Und auch den Kuss, ich hätt' ihn längst vergessen
Wenn nicht die Wolke da gewesen wär
Die weiß ich noch und werd ich immer wissen
Sie war sehr weiß und kam von oben her.
Die Pflaumenbäume blühn vielleicht noch immer
Und jene Frau hat jetzt vielleicht das siebte Kind
Doch jene Wolke blühte nur Minuten
Und als ich aufsah, schwand sie schon im Wind.

There is a Brecht festival in his hometown of Augsburg.  I think i might just go visit, drink a hefe, find a book and look for a plumb tree.

Examples of Mack the Knife

Louis Armstrong - Mack The Knife - 1959

Nick Cave on September Songs

Ella fitzgerald - Mack The Knife High quality

Sting - The Ballad of Mack the Knife

Sting sings Brecht/Weill songs in german

Mack The Knife - Robbie Williams Live at The Royal Albert

Mack the knife - cover

Watching the kind of thrashing I have seen with Web2.0 and Gov2.0 and everything 2.0 has made me a bit uneasy. This uneasiness, and they way I have expressed it, I have been told (fairly) is a bit vague, so I thought I would try and express some of the things that have been bothering me, as an attempt to clarify some concerns about the social processes I have seen unfold in the evolution of the diffusion of the “2.0” across networks of people and their cultures.

One of the trends I have found bothersome in my participation in has been the transition  in the framing of the discourse from the inventors and innovators to the pundits.  In the earlier days of the O'reilly brand (and I am only referencing this brand because it is the touchstone for this conversation), which were from the beginning the most commercially focused of open source, served as a meeting place and a place of discovery by those who could package and brand, the frontline iconoclasts that they helped connect and discover each other. These geeks would create things because they had personal desires and points of view about what they wanted to reinvent or create.  These were places of imagination, of reinvention, of a strange and wonderful collaboration that underlies the Internet. O'reilly and events like it served as a kind of commune for a generative effort, filled with the right kind of discord, discourse and creative tension.

But somewhere this conversation changed.  It became about a brand detached form a point of view about how you would reinvent, extend and evolve the Internet and the Web (the great artifacts of our time in my opinion).  Instead they became about teaching to the uninitiated, convincing them that they ought adopt a new model that was different, as opposed to figuring out how to make the models inclusive to their concerns and reflective of who they were.  This is a kind of bifurcation, an unnecessary polarizing dialogue between the “cognoscenti” and the uniformed masses.

More and more the self appointed experts (experts which before were defined by their creative endeavors) would show up at events that brought in “outsiders” and “non-natives” and tell them that their models about the world were wrong, and that they didn’t really understand the world.  Instead of relating to how the new inventions and innovations had this inclusive capacity to reframe shared traits, it became about how these new efforts were ones that required them to transform.  The conversation became about exclusivity, hipness between those that “got it” and those that didn’t.

The irony that an increasing number of these so called “experts” are less a part of the organic nature of the innovations that shaped the current landscape, only adds to a type of malaise that to many creators feels like an usurpation of outputs without the rewarding generative social process and commitment to creation.

This transition is one the has “popified”  the development of new technologies, treated them as simplistic formulas and dismissed the artistic innovations of the “pure thought stuff”.  They have also lead to a strange kind of self affirming unreality.  Companies and products that have yet to justify their value propositions (and I mean this in the expansive sense)  somehow became valuable by anointment of preference, by buzz. They seem, to me, to be increasingly simulacra.

It is little wonder that they get consumed like bubble gum, masticated and spit out, trends without cores, like social-technological equivalents of jingles and pop tunes - the crowd leaping from one to the other. As well, the transition in the discussion about them has increasingly detached the creative act, and is defined instead by the perceived popularity and social capital of participants that fall into this nebulous term. This is a classic inversion, whereby now the correctness of your opinions about 2.0 seem to be more about your “power” or popularity (after all your only as important as the number of twitter followers you have) than about the value of what you have created in a critical context.  2.0 means anything to anybody and therefore means nothing to anyone. Time has brought less clarity and less context, not more.

Perhaps this ought be expected, as it is so with most any trend in technology development (that process that sits between science and art and relies on metaphor and the understanding of the similar and dissimilar) and the transition of innovations and inventions to market phenomena. 

The 2.0 meme is now 5 years old since it was officially named.  I believe its time for a  re-grounding and a new type of criticism.  That process ought begin in going back to the sources of innovation and invention, to focusing on the generative capacity that underpins the greatest acts of creation of this era, and rely less on the increasingly meaningless attempt at self descriptions motivated by a desire to conform to an idealized concept, whereby any action is 2.0 because we describe it as a 2.0 action, any event is 2.0 because we say its a 2.0 event and any institution and culture is 2.0 because, well, we say it has to be so to be in the now, to be one of the hip kids with the right pop song on our ipod, chewing our bubblegum, waiting to like a new band or song when everyone tells us its good.