Diary: My First Day at a University in Berlin

THIS AUTUMN I'm beginning to study at the Freie Universität here in Berlin, and yesterday I went to the very first course, which is a two-day "Brückenkurs" or "bridging course" for first-year biology students. Biology is not my major or even my minor; but it interests me and it was the scientific field I took in high school after Grade 10, and participation in the course was not recorded so there were no administrative obstacles.

I found out the date, time and place from the university's Vorlesungsverzeichnis (course index) online, and looked up the route on the website of the BVG, Berlin's city transit authority.

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THE MAIN FU campus is in Dahlem, a quiet neighbourhood around a former royal farm in southwestern Berlin.

Recommended Reading: Behind the Scenes of 'House'

A look at House [IMDb] and its abstruse diagnoses, with nice side notes about the ideal work of a doctor in general.

"House MD: The art of looking for zebras" [Daily Telegraph]
By Cassandra Jardine, September 26, 2011

Fashion Week: September 7: Vena Cava, and Organic by John Patrick

Tonight is Fashion's Night Out — a series of imaginative and celebrity-graced publicity events designed to create fiscal interest in the fashions that are to be shown — in New York, Milan, Paris, Berlin, Sydney, Lisbon, Mexico City and London and the second day of New York Fashion Week: Spring/Summer 2012.

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Photo: Willow wood shoes (2004), Photo by Rasbak
Licenced under GNU Free Documentation License
via Wikimedia Commons

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I am not at all an expert, so please excuse the inaccuracies and see the following strictly as an impromptu outsider's snapshot of some of New York Fashion Week's shows:

1. ON Wednesday John Patrick was one of the first to show his collection with his "Organic" line, which appropriately enough given the name is environmentally friendly in its design.

According to the Vogue critic its theme was the safari, and given the chin-strapped hat and the spare lines of the trench coats and shirts as well as the brown, black and white shades, it was not too difficult to see. The make-up was light and suited to the heat of day, not only on the Kalahari but also on the streets of New York during the worse stretches of summer heat; the hairstyles were natural-looking and simple, loose or tucked back into a bun.

The garments were a neat collection of wardrobe basics: dress shirt, slacks, simple white dress, sweater, T shirt, shorts, hoodie, crop top jacket, camisole, trench and minidress.

I liked the colour when it came: the dark bright wine red, the plum colour of the camisole and the bits of yellow, and the browns were beautiful intense chocolate. The tasteful clutches and purse were that colour, and so were the handles of a roomy canvassy white weekender bag.

While the Vogue interviewer was not overwhelmed and said that "the almost exclusively white-and-brown palette looked a little like a blank canvas just waiting to be washed in color," I think it is too harsh an assessment. What my inexpert quibble was, that lighter-coloured stitching against dark fabric backgrounds does not look very solid or elegant, and the crinkly fabrics looked intransigent both for those who sew with them and those who wear them.

The rarest outfit, I thought, was a transparent white latticed dress with a crossed sash at the waist, though I disapproved of the flap down the back on its own aesthetic demerits and because of an irrational horror of its "mullet dress" relations.

There were four women of colour among the models by my quite politically incorrect count.

"Review - Organic by John Patrick" [Vogue USA] by Emily Holt (September 2011)
Slideshow: "Organic by John Patrick" [Vogue] Photos by Marcio Madeira (September 2011)


2. VENA Cava brought to life a clear sixties theme, with bright blocks of colour (tangerine, saffron, crimson, etc., contrasted cheerfully to solid black) and long, elegant silhouettes; the models wore huge round sunglasses and platform heels with their hair pulled back and particularly with the sunburnt dark blush at the cheeks gave a very summery impression. There were homages to Chanel, I thought, with the more formal jackets and minidresses, with their ribbed edges and analytically marked sections and clear cuts.

Or, according to the Vogue review, this clothing is in fact inspired by Vietnam, the designers' (Sophie Buhai and Lisa Mayock) early Brooklynite fashion-making excursions, and slightly by 1940s films. The dresses were worn at a party instead of being presented through the customary formal parade in single file or a Birds-esque mannequin assembly. I like the bold colours, at any rate, and except if I am mistaken in the designer remember being infuriated a couple of years past by what I thought was a wash of weakly neutral tinges on rather limp fabrics.

It's hard to tell because of the sunglasses, but I think that there are two models of colour in these photos:

Slideshow: "Vena Cava" [Vogue] Photos courtesy of Vena Cava (September 2011)
"Review - Vena Cava Spring 2012" [Vogue], by Chioma Nnadi

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THERE are further slideshows and reviews of shows available at Style.com. I'm not covering all of these for fear that this would drive me mad.

The "Virginia Earthquake" in a Nutshell

An earthquake that reached 5.8 on the Richter scale shook Virginia, Washington D.C. and New York City today, and it was felt, according to website commenter anecdotes, in states as far away as South Carolina, Georgia, Massachusetts, Ohio, Maine, and in Canada.

The event had a shallow focus at 6 kilometers' depth; it took place at precisely 17:53 UTC. Two aftershocks followed in the first hour, in the magnitudes 2.9 and 2.2. By coincidence there had been a 5.3-magnitude earthquake in Colorado earlier.

There was apparently no damage to public transportation in New York City. Trains in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania reportedly had to run at 25 mph as a precaution for possible aftershocks; the Washington D.C. metro was cleared so that it could be examined. Buildings like Goldman Sachs's and the City Hall were evacuated, however, and the Newark and John F. Kennedy airports were shortly shut down. The Pentagon in Virginia, and the White House and Capitol Building in D.C. were also cleared. Notable damage befell the spires of the National Cathedral — Wikipedia: "the sixth-largest cathedral in the world."

The North Anna nuclear facility, in Virginia near the epicentre,

Blogspotting: Epi Log

Epi Log: A repository of cookery blog paraphernalia, which I discovered today, at the American culinary website Epicurious, which is owned by Condé Nast and has been online since 1995.

It originated on March 9, 2006 itself. Despite a low profile and modest number of comments it has held steady and is unusually prolific; today it has three blog posts already.

The well-written, very succinct posts are contributed by divers food writers and editors, from the print and pixel realms; some work for the magazine and others are expert friends; and there is a New Englandy, New Yorkish focus.

The Lesser-Known Freedom of Being Obnoxious, Wasting Secret Service's Time and Taxpayer Money

On October 22, 2008 a Californian man, Walter Bagdasarian, posted racist comments on a Yahoo! message board in which he called for Barack Obama to be killed.

Mr. Bagdasarian was reported to the Secret Service. After the investigation he was charged with and convicted of uttering criminal threats. A Californian federal appeals court has overturned this conviction in an opinion filed on Tuesday.

The plaintiff was drunk at the time of the comments and besides the court has concluded that any average person would have understood him to mean that he was for such an assassination in general but not intending to carry one out.

Comment: Based on the details I've read it would have been irresponsible not to investigate the defendant and I think his comments went too far. So I rather wish that he would have had to pay for the Secret Service investigation or given some form of community service around victims of shootings or (though this is less relevant to the actual criminal charges) around African-Americans so that he would have the opportunity to have more enlightened ideas about the advisability of gun crimes and about racism. As it is, he was originally ordered to serve two months at a halfway house.

Besides I wonder, looking at the Huffington Post article mentioned below, who posted his $100,000 bail (which is, after all, a lot of money) back in 2009 — whether his actions and views have the support of people with more money and more power than him.

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"Urging Obama’s Assassination Is Lawful Online Speech, Divided Appeals Court Says" [Wired.com], by David Kravets (July 19, 2011)
(Decision) [United States Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit] (July 19, 2011)
"Walter Bagdasarian Convicted Of Making Racially-Charged Threats Against Then-Candidate Obama" [Huffington Post] by the Associated Press (July 28, 2009)

Roland Petit

The ballet dancer and choreographer Roland Petit has died at the age of 87 in Geneva.

"Roland Petit obituary" [Guardian], by Judith Cruickshank (July 11, 2011)
"Roland Petit, Choreographer, Dies at 87; Conquered Ballet Taboos and Hollywood" [New York Times] by Anna Kisselgoff (July 10, 2011)

The Guardian article in particular is excellently thorough. So I will leave it at that, but cite a passage from Margot Fonteyn's self-titled autobiography (Wyndham, 1976; pp. 114-5) which conveys something of his earlier career in Paris:

Paris certainly gave me a much needed change of atmosphere in work and play. The dancers wanted to show me everything from the Bois de Boulogne in spring to the night clubs of the rue de Lappe, where my mother was not at all dismayed to see men dancing together, and the famous Mme Arthur's all-male cabaret. Wandering about the city in the warm night air we once dived into the Seine for a midnight swim, and we always got home in the small hours, only to get up a few short hours later to be at the class of Boris Kniasev, a teacher of oversized personality and enthusiasm [. . .]. A big man, with powerful voice and generous laugh, talkng, correcting, explaining throughout the class until everyone excelled themselves in effort and accomplishment, he was exactly the teacher I needed at that time.

It was de Valois's favourite, Roland Petit, with the black eyes like Massine, who thought up our various exploits. He was a veritable dynamo of energy and ideas — dancing, choreographing, seeing new designers, composers, writers, his mind everywhere at once.

[. . .] We were perfect opposites in temperament. [. . .] I told him he needed the stability of the Paris Opéra, from which he had broken away. Neither of us took the other's advice. I was not too swept off my feet to forget that my success was based on the position I held in Sadler's Wells, while Roland knew he wanted complete freedom to create ballets in his own way.

(He incidentally introduced Fonteyn to the fairly fledgling house of Dior, and she had met him previously while he was a roughly nineteen-year-old dancing student who had choreographed his first ballet (pp.106-7).)

Lastly, the New York Times has a nearly bottomless archive of ballet reviews, etc., for Roland Petit. I didn't attempt to dip into it because of the 20-free-article limit. But if the link works, here it is:

Search results: "Roland Petit" [New York Times]

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"French choreographer Roland Petit dies at 87" [BBC News] (July 10, 2011)
"Disparition de Roland Petit" [Opéra national de Paris] (July 11, 2011)
Ballets des Champs-Élysées [Wikipedia.fr] Read July 11, 2011