The full version of Marlene on the Wall performed on July 7, 2003 at Shephard's Bush Empire in London can now be seen at


http://homepage.mac.com/mooncusser/Vega/iMovieThea ter93.html

It's my favorite song on the firt lp it's groovy

Kinda wierd question. Does anyone else hear "Marlena on the Wall" instead of Marlene? All the lyrics seem to say Marlene, but I hear Marlena.

I only ask because I never get lyrics right (causes my roomie much frustration ).

Well some folks might pronounce it Mar-LEAN but a large number are more likely to pronounce it Mar-LAY-neh. Either is correct; it depends mostly, I think, on how you first heard it pronounced.

Ah, gotcha. I've only ever heard it pronounced Mar-leen, but I've only ever known one person with that name.

"Kinda wierd question. Does anyone else hear "Marlena on the Wall" instead of Marlene?"

I do!

Isn't it the way it should be pronounced in German? Any German towie to confirm this?

José Carlos

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JC wondered: > Isn't it the way it should be pronounced in German? Any German towie > to confirm this?

in german you would not pronounce it "marlena", but with a kind of "weak e" at the end. my phonetics courses are long ago but i think you would call the sound a "schwa"??????? it's roughly the same sound that you have in the indefinite article "a" when it preceeds a consonant.

remember me, philipp

I don't know German pronunciation but it is Marlene in German, but for sure Marlena is a Polish name

Marlene comes from Maria and Magdalene. Marlena Dietrich name was Maria Magdalene von Losh. Interesting is that in Soviet Union there was name Marlena, some say it comes from Marx (Mar-) and Lenin (len). Don't take this serious anyway....I've read that somewhere....

Ania Marysia K.

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"like a shadow, I am and I am not"

yeah, I heart it always as MArlena

Hi,
there's a german version of "Marlene on the wall" (Marlene an der Wand) of German singer Ulla Meinecke on the album "Die Luft ist rein". She also performs this version at her concerts.
(www.ulla-meinecke.de)
Quite good !

A thought I had about "Marlene on the Wall" a while ago.

I was listening to the radio at work, and heard an old Suzanne Vega song that starts like this:

In the ironbound section near Avenue L
where the Portuguese women come to see what you sell
the clouds so low the morning so slow
as the wires cut through the sky
The beams and bridges cut the light on the ground
into little triangles and the rails run round
through the rust and the heat
the light and sweet coffee color of her skin

Hearing Vega's early stuff (this was off her second album, the one with Luka), always takes me right back to the end of my last summer at home before I left for college. As the days lengthened, the grass went to seed and the bumblebees started coming out in force, I was getting progressively more freaked out. I'd be leaving my home, where I'd lived for 18 years. I'd be leaving my home state to head "south," to a state I'd only visited once or twice before. Most important in my mind then, I'd be leaving the girl I was dating, my first girlfriend ever ( I was a late bloomer), who would be going to school in the midwest, a thousand miles away. I couldn't believe I'd waited so long to date someone, and it was all going to change after a few months.

It felt as though I was on a fast train that was speeding full steam ahead towards a bend that I couldn't see the other side of. I knew my life was going to change once I got past it, but until it happened, there was nothing to be done but to let myself just be carried along, with my life just the same as it ever was until I got to the other side. It was a curious mixture of feelings, of things being exactly the same, but my sense of them heightened by the fact that I knew they weren't going to last.

I was working typical 19-year old jobs that occasionally involved long hours and/or later nights that summer, so I'd often be waking up at noon, working until 10 at night, and only then coming home and eating dinner. It was a weird schedule that meant I spent a lot of time either at work or alone, up when everyone else was gone or asleep.

One Saturday, I'd come home late from work and gone running (where I got the energy for that, I'll never know), then took a dip in my folks' above-ground pool. I skinny-dipped, because it was so dark where they lived that no one would see, and it felt so freeing to have nothing between the water and yourself. I would hold my breath and let myself sink down to the bottom of the pool, then lay there with my eyes open, trying to bring the wavering images above me into focus. It was a beautiful night, the sky dark and as clear as crystal, the stars brilliant. It was breezy, and so quiet you could hear the wind ruffle through the grass. There was just a hint of autumn, the first delicate sense of change, in the air.

After the swim, and getting partially dried off by laying in the grass, I stretched out on the floor in my parents' family room on the ground floor, the big screened window open to the porch so that the breeze from outside would occasionally push through and chill my still-damp legs. My folks were asleep, the house was quiet. I flicked on the TV.

I chanced upon Saturday Night Live, and Suzanne Vega was the musical guest. I had heard of her before, and recall hearing "Luka," which was kind of her "hit" on the radio, but hadn't seen her live anywhere. She was playing a song, "Marlene on the Wall," from her first album. She was tall, thin, almost gaunt, and her voice wasn't like an ordinary singers'. It seemed to me then that she had a poet's voice, and that her words were kind of poems set to music as she began,

Even if I am in love with you,
All this to say, what's it to you?

Her voice spoke (to me, anyway, child of the 'burbs that I was) of the city, of a place where people thought about things deeply and cleverly. But it also spoke of loss, and sadness, and the distance that there can be between two people, even two people who were close.

Other evidence has shown
That you and I are still alone
We skirt around the danger zone
And don't talk about it later


I thought of the high school sweetheart. I know now how little we knew about each other, how very young we were, and how very wrong we'd ultimately be for each other. I think there was a part of me that knew even then that, despite our hushed promises to each other in the heart of the summer about how we'd just go and have fun and then still be able to come back to each other, that our separate trains were going two different places.

But the only soldier now is me
I'm fighting things I cannot see
I think it's called my destiny
That I am changing

I was changing that summer, or at the very least on the cusp of changing, poised between childhood and adulthood for what seemed like an agonizingly long time. And that song tugged at me so hard that I still can feel it today. I went out and bought Vega's second album (to my surprise, it did not have "Marlene on the Wall" on it) the morning after seeing her on TV, and played it fairly obsessively when I got to school a week or two later.

A few months later, I would take my first plane trip to visit the high school sweetheart in a cold, flat midwestern city filled with skyscrapers. She, changing herself, would inform me that she had decided to start dating someone else, a decision she made pretty much the night I arrived, when she took off for a couple of hours and didn't come back to her dorm until 1 am or so. Although I should have left right then, neither of us knew exactly how something like this was supposed to work, and neither of us wanted to be unkind to the other, so I stayed and slept on her floor, and hung out in the big stone academic buildings. The day I did finally leave, I was walking out of her dorm room with my suitcase, and I noticed that her roommate was listening to Vega's first album, the one that DID have "Marlene on the Wall."

"Oh, we think she's just GREAT," said the sweetheart about Vega. I was already coming to think that she would have said that anything was great if the people she thought were cool liked it. "Do you know her??"

"Yeah, I've heard of her," I said. And inside, I thought: I had her first. I'm not sure whether I was talking about the sweetheart, or Vega, or whether it mattered.

That's really beautiful!

Dietrich's earring found under rollercoaster

Workman draining a lake under a Blackpool roller-coaster have found an earring lost by Marlene Dietrich 73 years ago.

The pearl earring fell off as she took a ride on the Big Dipper at the resort's Pleasure Beach in 1934, reports the Sun.

The Hollywood legend was being shown around the fun park as a VIP by its chairman Leonard Thompson, reports The Sun.

After she realised the earring was missing, Marlene wrote to Mr Thompson asking for a search to be made.

But it remained lost until workmen drained water under the Big Dipper, still in operation, in readiness for a new ride called Infusion.

A Pleasure Beach spokesman said: "It appears to have withstood the test of time quite well."

The spokesman added it was "of sentimental value" to Marlene, who died in 1992 aged 90.

Also found by the contractors were a glass eye, a toupee, three dolls, a bra, hats, scarves and £85 in small change.

(http://www.ananova.com/news/story/sm_2151559.html? menu=news.quirkies)

That's a really cool story. However, I have to wonder - HOW did they know it was Marlene Dietrich's earring? Was there anything on it that was a special identifier? Marlene, herself, has been dead for some time, so she can't confirm. Is there some relic like a lost article report that would help establish the provenance? Is there no way it could have been somebody else's lost earring? Not to be a spoil sport, I just was really intrigued but couldn't help but wonder.

-M

HI, does any 1 know the time signature for marlene on the wall? cos it sounds weird and i need to know for college and i'm crap at time sigs, cheers