Diebold Essen--Arts My first memory is of a huge blue-striped umbrella on a sidewalk along Nathan Road in Hong Kong. I am in a pram pushed by my nanny on the way to a stroll in the park, I suppose. And here is this huge, bright umbrella over a street vendor's stand. From my vantage point in the pram, looking up, I see mostly umbrella, but also--brilliantly white--the intricate lattice of the enormous mosque in the middle distance. That's it. The frame is filled with white and blue. Not bad for a three-year-old, huh. No doubt I have subtly edited the image since then, giving it a certain assymetry and a better range of hue than the original possessed. As a first memory, it does in retrospect indicate a fairly deep-seated inclination toward 1) esthetics, and (by extrapolaition) 2) esthetes. It is a long way from Nathan Road to my 60th floor pied à terre overlooking Grant Park and Lake Michigan, where I sit at my desk à la Louis feeding this little auto da biography into my sizzling modem. I fled Hong Kong as soon as possible, which wasn't anywhere near soon enough for my refined tastes. Hong Kong, you have to understand, is a city whose coarse greed makes Texas look like a model of enlightened Renaissance patronage. For example, the Hong Kong Symphony is a bunch of superannuated European musician-mercenaries who know only two pieces: Beethoven's Ninth, and God Save the Queen. Nowadays I suppose they're down to just Beethoven. My father, himself an upper-level mercenary in the German diplomatic corps, loved Hong Kong and contrived his career so that he was always number two or three in the German consulate there, and could thus survive any change in management above him. So we stayed, and stayed, and stayed. I wasn't the only one affected. My mother, starting out as a good product of private Catholic schools in and around Stuttgart, after a decade or two in Hong Kong wound up a Mormon. Which of course meant I spent more than a few hours in (are you ready) Chinese Mormon churches surrounded by Chinese Mormons discussing the finer points of Joseph Smith theory, in Cantonese. A-levels got me to Oxford, which was a breath of new, if not exactly fresh, air, until I realized that the only significant difference between the English and the Chinese is that the Chinese have a wall and the English have a channel. After reading--and acing--Classics, it was off to--where else--New York. Where, for a number of years I appeared bent on replicating in the literary world my father's career in the diplomatic world: I languished stubbornly as a mid-to-upper-level editor at Knopf, which at that time still had pretensions. But the pretensions were fading rapidly. Weeks of work on some Third World Nobel Prize Winner's latest would be followed by serious attempts at turning some blockbuster pulp writer's techno-thriller into readable and complete sentences. The money was good, and kept getting better. Then two things happened within a month. My parents were killed by an avalnache while trekking in Tibet, a voyage undertaken at my mother's behest to bring the latest version of the Book of Thoth or whatever it's called to the straving masses huddled about the skirts of Everest. Only then did I learn from a Hong Kong lawyer that my father hadn't needed his sorry career at all, that I was in fact the heir to a large trust fund set up in the 1950s by my maternal grandfather in Berlin. He had bought a huge number of shares in Volkswagen in 1949--and held them. Only a few weeks after I was thus freed from servitude at Knopf, Doc Cuddy called and offered me the Arts domain of his new on-line mag. I said yes and prepared to move to San Francisco to be near the Mother Computer of Magellan's Log, which rumor has it is somewhere south of Palo Alto. But I couldn't do it. Move to San Francisco, I mean. Too close to Hong Kong, and, under its clever veneer of culture, too much like it. I thought: Where do I really, really want to live? And it came: a really, really high floor in the Hancock Building in Chicago, where I can look in one direction and see sky and water, and in the other, great architecture. My pram snapshot all over again, you see... |
