tuebingen's past

The Bismarck Tower in Tübingen

Tuebingen students suggested, in January 1900, the construction of the Bismarck Tower. A memorial committee was formed, chaired by Professors Dr. Schleich and Dr. Frank. The committee chose the winning design "Gotterdammerung" by architect Wilhelm Kreis. The City of Tuebingen provided the building site (the highest point on the Schlossberg) free of charge.

The students had for some years had a special relationship to the Schlossberg and they had honoured the Empire in 1871 at 18.01 and annually organized a torchlight procession to the castle hill and lit a fire.

The work was carried out by government architect Franz Baertle from Tuebingen. The 16-metre high tower consists of tuff and coarse-grained sandstone. Inside, there was originally a wooden staircase leading to a platform. The wooden staircase was reopened in 1969, with the last 12 steps of the 63 steps made of steel. The Bismarck Tower remained, in spite of these remedial measures, at least until September 1971, not climbable for visitors.

On the top platform, a fire bowl was featured. Through vandalism and several fires, the tower remained closed until early November 1999.

In 1999, a Tuebingen couple donated the entire cost of the restoration of the tower in the amount of 64,000 DM to enable the Tower to be renovated and made accessible again. On 14.11.1999 it was officially reopened. The fire bowl was removed during the renovation. A sign on the left side of the entrance indicates that the tower was renovated by the Tubingen Cultural Foundation with the donation of the Tübingen couple.

Opening times:
In summer, the Tower is open all day on weekends, otherwise the key can be borrowed from the Tourist Office in Tuebingen.

a noble thought

'the artist is part visionary, part showman, part educator and part trouble-maker.' Adrian Noble

NEWS RELEASE 27/8/2009

Wandering bard Keith Armstrong aka 'The Jingling Geordie' is keeping himself busy. Indeed, he has his hands full with a host of new projects.

Currently poet-in-residence for Newcastle United fanzine 'True Faith', he is planning to publish a selection of his footie verse in 2010.

A new selection of his poetry' Castle Stair Reel' is soon to be published in the States by Baltimore-based 'Hutman Productions'. The selection homes in again on his native North East England to reveal both its sunny and dark sides. As usual, this rootedness is tempered by his strong internationalism with poetry on places as diverse as Berlin, Limerick, Kenya, Tuebingen and Edinburgh. All in all, the new book is an album of songs inspired by Armstrong's strong sense of place, wherever he may be located.

And his biography of Newcastle writer Jack Common, new from the University of Sunderland Press, launches in October with events at Newcastle Central Library on October 17th and at the University of Durham on October 21st.

Also on the publishing front, he's currenty editing a book on the heritage of North Tyneside with the support of North Tyneside Council and Awards for All. Due out at Xmas this one.

When 'Jingling Geordie' is not writing and publishing, he's on reading tours. September sees him giving poetry readings in Ireland, with Groningen City Poet Rense Sinkgraven, and on the Isle of Man, where he delivers his verse on painter John Martin, born in Haydon Bridge but dying on the Isle of Man in 1854.

His links with Groningen, twinned with Newcastle, and Tuebingen, twinned with Durham, continue with visits by Armstrong in 2010 and exchange visits by his Dutch and German counterparts.

In November, Doctor Armstrong's back in Prague.

Finally, his dedicated work on socialist pioneer Thomas Spence comes to fruition in 2010, with the unveiling of a blue plaque on Newcastle's Quayside and related events on Spence's 260th birthday.

Enough to be going on with!


FURTHER INFO: NORTHERN VOICES TEL. 0191 2529531

EPITAPH TO A WORKING CLASS COUPLE

They spent their lives
trying to make ends meet
but met their ends
before such ends could meet.






KEITH ARMSTRONG

EPITAPH FOR A FROSTY GIRL

To please you,
I made a Snow Woman.
It felt just like you,
melted away
in the morning sun.






Keith Armstrong

football diary - from 1997

Verse too: while most Newcastle fans will no doubt go drinking after Wednesday's Champions League tie at PSV Eindhoven, Keith Armstrong, will go to a poetry reading.

The 51-year-old poet and Toon nut will be performing his own works in an all night cafe in Eindhoven, with topics ranging from Jackie Millburn to Hughie Gallacher. Goodness knows how they will go down if Newcastle win.

Keith was invited to perform by the Dutch poet Bart FM Droog, whom he met while visiting the Cuckoo Club in Groningen, Newcastle's twin town. So, when PSV play in Newcastle on November 5, Keith has invited Bart and three other performers, including a didgeridoo player, to do their stuff at a poetry reading in Newcastle.

Hopefully Bart will find a quiet place to stay. For when Keith and his fellow poet Ian Horn slept on the floor of Bart's squat, the avid Magpie got in a flap during the night. Recalls Keith: "We were woken up by three budgies mating in a cage in a corner."

(Martin Thorpe, The Guardian, (UK), 18-10-97)

in iceland again

SNOW, 3 a.m.

Heads filled
with whisky,
we sway along
the whispering streets;
folds of snow
tucked round us,
clean sheets
on a sharp night.
Flakes,
the words
we spill,
float from our mouths.
Traffic lights blink on
long afer the last ghostly car
has crashed
past us
and our families sinking,
sleeping in the deep
drifts of dreams
we carelessly trample underfoot.

This is a land of ice,
of soft light.
A friend guides me to his house,
unveils a bookshelf thick
with fallen thought,
proudly points out
a white and virgin son.
The snow dragged in
with us
melts
between the seconds
of the ticking clock.
We pour out
another whisky,
thaw out,
a slurred path
across paper.



KEITH ARMSTRONG,

Reykjavik.

in cuba

jingling in eastern europe

armstrong in kenya

on tour

FAT MAN LODGED ON DOG LEAP STAIRS

He pounded the cobbles
of the Castle Garth,
bowling along
with his brain hanging over his neck
and his belly
looming over his huge pants.
His overeducated head
weighed a ton
and bore down
on an arse
fattened on home- made pies.
He was carrying a plan
for the working classes
but forgot his heart was too small,
dwarfed by his huge mouth
and an expensive ego.
He had a board meeting to go to,
the big fart,
and he sweated grants
as he blundered along
to the narrow alley.
He was far too broad of beam really
but he was late for everything,
including his funeral,
and thrust his plates of meat
onto the slippery steps.
History closed in on him,
the Black Gate,
the Keep,
as if to tell him
it wasn’t his,
as if to say
‘get out of my town’.
He squeezed himself onto this narrow stairway
and, like his poetry,
got stuck.
He coudn’t move
for his lack of lyricism.
The Fat Man
was firmly lodged
on Dog Leap Stairs
and the crows
began to gather
to swoop
and pick
the bloated power
from his face.





KEITH ARMSTRONG

jingle!

WHERE I BELONG

(for Albert Stubbins & Sergeant Pepper)

I read the news today oh boy,
about a lucky man who made the grade.
I saw the photograph;
a crowd of people stood and stared,
they'd seen his face before,
I just had to look,
having read the book.

Suddenly someone is there at the turnstile;
silly people run around,
they worry me,
turning me round;
I'm doing the best that I can.

Everyone you see is full of life:
people running round,
it's five o' clock.

Picture yourself
in a boat on a river.

Where I belong, I'm right.
Where I belong.



KEITH ARMSTRONG

images

A boat tugs at my roots,
brings out the wordy sailor in me.
I am a poetry boozer,
a staggering ship,
slopping my beer all over the Quay.

tuebingen from the air

FOR THE LOVE OF SIR BOBBY

(in memory of Bobby Robson, 1933-2009)




















For the love of Sir Bobby
we will battle on
For the love of Sir Bobby
we will rise again
For the love of Sir Bobby
we will Gallowgate dream
For the love of Sir Bobby
we will rage on
For the love of Sir Bobby
we will take pride
For the love of Sir Bobby
we will roar by the Tyne
For the love of Sir Bobby
we will rejoice in Newcastle
For the love of Sir Bobby
we will chant on the walls
For the love of Sir Bobby
we will recall the good times
For the love of Sir Bobby
we will brighten our lives
For the love of Sir Bobby
we will drink in the sea
For the love of Sir Bobby
we will sparkle our eyes
For the love of Sir Bobby
we will save our soul
For the love of Sir Bobby
we will keep hold
For the love of Sir Bobby
we will dance with our kids
For the love of Sir Bobby
we will win back our town




KEITH ARMSTRONG

PHOTOS: TONY WHITTLE

I WANT MY POEMS IN A BIG PRESS

so you’re in print with a small press

a little press for a short arse

well I want my poems in a big press
a large press with big breasts

with poems that talk to the world
with spirit in every word


KEITH ARMSTRONG

back again

two cultures

Simon Jenkins
The Guardian Thursday 23 July 2009

This is a tale of two cultures. Towering over Walsall town centre is an acclaimed icon of 20th-century architecture. There is another in Gateshead, another in Salford, another in Cardiff, another in Edinburgh, and many in London.

The Walsall art gallery is adorned with two sure signs of big art, a clutch of architectural awards and a clutch of deficits. Nothing embodied the extravagance of millennial Britain so much as the stupefying sums spent on large arts buildings, with little idea of what to put in them. One day they may yet lie like the Greek theatre at Palmyra, a silent ruin in an empty desert.

These monuments cost huge sums. The Sage Gateshead cost £70m, Salford's Lowry Centre £106m and Tate Modern £134m. The British Museum's new courtyard alone came in at more than £100m. Nor did anyone think of running costs. Within three years of opening, visitors to the Walsall gallery needed a £9 subsidy a head from local ratepayers and a further £2 a head from the Arts Council. At a capital cost of £21m it has stumbled from crisis to crisis, but at least houses the world's most expensive Costa coffee bar.

The chief stimulus to the splurge was the national lottery, taxing mostly the poor to spend on mostly the better off, followed by the wild ambitions of the millennium. The dream of culture politicians was not art but buildings. Intense debate in the mid-90s was about whether lottery money should go into people or structures, into revenue or capital. Capital always won.

Politicians and private donors alike wanted something "lasting" – and with their names on it. Grants were denied to endowments for upkeep. So-called business plans were not worth their weight in paper, let alone the fees charged by their mendacious consultants. The lottery became a breeding ground for white elephants, the bills to be sent later to local councils or Whitehall. It was what Tony Blair, in a speech just two years ago, rightly called the "golden age" of arts support.

Now it is apparently over. A certain victim of the impending cuts is the Department of Culture, Media and Sport. Today's Guardian carried news of a £100m "black hole" in the department's budget. Under threat are such echoes of the glory days as Tate Modern's new wing (£50m), the British Museum extension (£22m), and the British Film Institute (£45m for a project supposedly funded by the Imax cinema). The Royal Opera's new Manchester outpost may also go. All these projects are said to be at risk.

Alan Davey, director of the Arts Council, predicts a "perfect storm … a spiral of decline", with arts organisations so damaged that "it would take an enormous amount of money to get them going again". Davey is clearly no enthusiast for the art of anarchy or for Bohemian garret culture. To the Arts Council, an artist not clothed in state ermine is like a BBC executive without his expenses, shamelessly "dumbed down".

A survey by arts and business revealed that its member organisations now depend on state funding for 54% of their total income, with a further 13% received from private sponsors. A mere third comes from people actually enjoying art by buying tickets and shopping. Such an imbalance between direct and indirect income leaves institutions vulnerable to public spending cuts. As Anthony Sargent of the Sage Gateshead says, it is like being "on an island waiting for a hurricane to come. The rain hasn't started but the streets are uncannily empty."

His streets may be empty, but in the rest of cultural Britain they are not. Such grim faces and empty pockets are a million miles from this summer in Britain. Here are events and attendances booming as never before, abetted by a favourable exchange rate, families holidaying at home, young people with time, and old people with money.

From the vales of Glastonbury to the tent city of Hay-on-Wye, from Latitude to the Glade, from V at Weston to T in the Park, from Womad to Wychwood, from Reading to Leeds, festival promoters are having a year without compare.

Nor is this a phenomenon confined to popular music. Even London's West End, the Royal Shakespeare Company and the National Theatre are posting record audiences. There are festivals for poetry, books, theatre, dance and music. There are "boutique" festivals and "no-VIP" festivals. There is this weekend's eccentric Secret Garden Party in Cambridgeshire, which stipulates fancy dress. There is hardly a valley, meadow or disused airfield in Britain that is not hosting some event.

These events are not cheap. Latitude's tickets are £60-£150. Winchester's Glade clocks in at £115, Eastnor's Big Chill at £145, and Knebworth at £157. Even Hyde Park's supposed expanse of free repose charges £45 when occupied by Hard Rock Calling's "pretend-fest". Promoters such as Mean Fiddler and Virgin are not losing money.

Nor are these cultural manifestations all outdoor. The blockbuster festival of the year will again be Edinburgh, with a whole city as venue. Most of its 2,100 shows have no need of multimillion-pound architecture, just a church hall, garage or even a park. This month's admirable Manchester international festival, likewise, used its city as locale. Brighton festival staged 300 shows in 33 different venues.

A conceit of ageing arts directors is to be erecting a structure, be it a theatre, concert hall or museum wing. They can thus consort with rich architects rather than dry curators or angry actors, building a memorial more eternal than any contribution they might have made to art. Time and energy go on inducing the government to give them money – with accusations of philistinism and no more party invitations should it be denied.

Museums' elites rarely muddy their hands with tickets or charging. They boast their generosity while millions of pounds walk out of their door each year, with the taxpayer footing the bill. They are thus unable to benefit from the surge in attendance and ticket revenue now benefiting most visitor attractions.

Nemesis is at hand. Those who live by the state die by it. But big art and its custodians cannot get away with the plea that any threat to their overhead means doom to British culture. Davey's identification of art with public money is as corrupt a thesis as that art must be free at the point of delivery.

Millions of people are this summer participating in what they regard as the arts with no aid from the state. That much of this is music and in the open air, rather than entombed in concrete, does not strip it of cultural value. As the sociologist of the public realm, Barbara Ehrenreich, wrote in Dancing in the Streets, such collective enjoyment "reclaims a distinctively human heritage, of creatures who can generate their own ecstatic pleasures out of music, colour, feasting and dance".

It is truly encouraging that so many people, young and old, are finding goodness in the arts, unmediated by grandiose overheads and a grandiose state. Their art is consorting with nature and the city, and it is prospering.