a fifth of beethoven

The music-royalties clearinghouse of Germany has managed a hearty and hale business since 1902, monopolizing the regulation of performance-rights and artists’ entitlements for music played to German audience. Of course, GEMA (die Gesellschaft für musikalische Aufführungs- und mechanische Vervielfältigungsrechte—the Society for Musical Performance and Mechanical Reproduction) has evolved with the entertainment industry and is a take-down force to be reckoned with. Since the apparent failure of ACTA and similar treaties that the group championed, it has however turned to more traditional staples of the listening tax and now has expanded its reach over discotheques, having made arrangements to levy anywhere from a ten to six-hundred percent fee for music played on the dance floor, with a non-negotiable tithe of ten percent on the door-charge.

Without question, musicians deserve credit and acknow-ledgement for their work, but following strict no smoking regulations that has hurt the business of bars, restaurants, clubs and cafes, these new demands of the studio-system seem like an all-out assault on the institution of the public-house. GEMA’s poor-mouthing probably does not translate directly to more income for performers, though they argue that discos and disc-jockeys are making an absolute killing, nightly, at the expense of starving-artists. In order to make up for the new, higher royalty payments (unless venues choose to skirt the payments by having DJs mix clip-length sampler medleys only), clubs will have to charge higher entrance prices and more for drinks. These developments suggest a scavenging, shadow economy—no rewards for talent but rather for baited membership. Such cost and bother might be enough to bring back live-music and reinvention.

little switzerland or like water for chocolate

Over the weekend, H and I took a very scenic tour of the region known as the Fränkishe Schweiz (Little Switzerland, as the Americans call it) and stopped to marvel at Burg Pottenstein, cleaving to a cliff-face with a narrow ribbon of a path spanning the continuous karst outcroppings the portion up the landscape. As with a dozen other vantage points nearby, the castle commands an impressive vista, both from a distance and looking outward from its towers and turrets. For a year or so, this fortress, vassal to the Diocese of Bamberg, was also home to St. Elizabeth of Hungary (Hl. Elizabeth von Thüringen) while essentially under house-arrest by inquisitor and spiritual-advisor Konrad from Marburg. Married and tragically widowed at a young age, Elizabeth promised her husband that she would never remarry and devoted her life to charitable works. Her politically-engaged family, however, were not pleased with her choice, since at the apex of a noble-line, discounting a second-marriage in high royal circles left them with little chance for advancement.

The family, eying potential suitors—including the Emperor, solicited the confessor’s help to dissuade her from a life dedicated to helping the poor. Elizabeth was abducted and treated badly, taken away from the hospital she founded in Marburg and her chaste existence at the Wartburg by Eisenach, and held at Pottenstein. While secreting bread and valuables for the poor, she was caught but miraculously her bundle transformed into a bunch of roses—which was probably the ideal expression of noblesse oblige for Elizabeth’s conniving family, who’d fawn over that sort of gallant gesture, sort of like “…then, let them eat cake” or the unhelpful exploits of Monty Python’s Dennis Moore, who robbed from the rich and gave the poor lupins. Threatening to cut off her nose, eventually her advisor and family released Elizabeth, who only had a few months to work to reestablish her charities. Her support for the fledging Franciscan Order and ongoing intervention for the destitute earned her sainthood and reverence in her native Hungary and adoptive Germany.

x-förmige

meta-clockwork or synchronized worlds

The grey eminences of weights and measures in Paris who keep the Meter and the Gram, like the warp and weave of the Fates, are gifting the world with an extra second (Schaltsekunde) to compensate for the drift of the winding down rotation of the Earth in comparison to the their household atomics that keep Universal Coordinated Time, the reference point for most of the planet’s civilian timekeepers. With ever more exacting calipers, it seems that the Earth has drifted a whole second off the mark, since it was last adjusted on the last day of the year in 2008.

Time, though surely an analogue thing and not discrete, is by convention or definition, the parsing of now, and formalized in 1967 as the resonance of Cesium atom: at that moment a day was exactly twenty-four hours long and because of the regularity and precision of the experiment, atomic clocks promised to be accurate within two seconds over a span of 65 million years, from the present all the way through the eons to the extinction of the dinosaurs. The inconstant Earth however proved to be more unpredictable, speeding up or slowing down with shocks big and little, like earthquakes, the Moon and the orbits of artificial satellites, probably by an amount as significant over the decades as the meteor impact that caused the mass-extinction event millions of years prior. The hands of a clock have to pass through every degree of a circle and can’t skip around—but the pendulum can be slowed down or stopped, for a second out-of-time to take a relaxed, deep breath. That the Earth shifts unpredictably does make me a bit uncomfortable, for all the ages of study by geomancers, navigators, physicists and philosophers one would think we wouldn’t have an inelegant solution, and I wonder how closely we are following the passage of the Sun overhead or peering into the vibrations of the elements and what standards and perspectives are most sensible.

teufels kreis

Among the many woes and aspects bemoaned about our very global economy—and a worry not countermanded by some other positive element but unilaterally punishing—is the potential that no matter how carefully planned, sacrifice and contingencies made flexible and more than yielding, the weakness or strength, decisions or sentiment touching any other markets could undo all the hard work, arrangements and negotiations and exacerbate problems by posing even bigger set-backs. Eurocrats and eurozone functionaries are gathered together for another installment of talks to issue a way forward, which is of course not just a dodgy doddering through, and a road map is something, although a path fraught with obstacles. Approaching a meeting with only the aim of maintaining a system at all costs rather that with convictions and principles only results in empty compromise, escalation and the true vicious circle (Teufels Kreis)—throwing money at problems and amounts to same good as not discussing or ignoring a problem as a surrogate solution. The diplomacy of map-making, no matter how the landmarks may be shifted or toppled by macroeconomic factors or caprice, are still indelible features to be navigated.