I came across this song while listening to The Philosopher’s Stone the other day. Doing a little research, I learned that the words are actually taken from a poem by one Peter Handke, about whom I know nothing. To the Wikipedia!

Peter Handke is a Nobel laureate novelist, playwright, translator, poet, film director, and screenwriter from Austria. Handke was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 2019. In the late 1960s, he was recognized for the play Publikumsbeschimpfung (Offending the Audience) and the novel Die Angst des Tormanns beim Elfmeter (The Goalie’s Anxiety at the Penalty Kick).

So not exactly a lightweight. You can read the whole poem here. It is pretty great. It also figures heavily in Wings of Desire, which of course required me to have a screening last night. I think I saw this movie when it came out back in the Eighties, but in all honesty I remembered nothing about it. It is extremely German — high-minded, elegiac, pretentious, at times oddly hilarious. Nick Cave is in it. And Peter Falk, fucking Columbo, playing himself. And Bruno Ganz, who plays the angel at the center of the story, went on to play Adolf Hitler in the 2004 film Downfall — and thus be granted immortality in the form of a million YouTube clips. Somehow this joke never gets old; the latest one is a hoot:

So where am I going with this? Good question, and I don’t have a good answer. The brain is a bit scrambled today, but it seemed like time to post something. Go back to the top of the page and listen to Van’s song again; the real writing will resume in due time.