a room of my own.

This is where I work...

It took nearly a month but I’m off of the sofa and I have a space of my own.  With the door closed and the speakers on I’m right back to all of my old habits.  It’s quite amazing how just 60 Euros at Ikea can turn a bare space into something vaguely resembling you.  This ficus might just be my most favorite of possessions.

The clear view of the bus stop across the street is a most delightful bit of two-way voyeurism.  I watch their nervous habits and see how they fill idle time, they get me at my worst.  I’d love to get a decent quality webcam setup and stop-motion stream all of it.

(she’s so beautiful.)

kids will all die in europe!!

your honor i have xibits

xibit 1: The water in Europe is so FRICK--G hot that today I took a bath and made a delicious pasta dinner AT THE SAME TIME.

xibit 2: IT IS NOT JUST WATER I had some rocking sweet potato + coconut milk soup from a restaurant and it took TWO DAYS to feel the roof of my mouth again.  Sure the klein bowl was only 2,50 Euros but think of the poor old people

xibit 3: Okay so I didn’t really make a bath pasta dinner but if you run a bath with the water on only hot and then walk away for **15 minutes** you come back and say “oh now its time for a nice hot OH GOD MY FOOT NOW HAS NEVRE DMG”

xibit 4: THIS HAPPENED IN SWITZERLAND TOO maybe hot water is like land mines that never got cleaned up after the war

xibit 5: Germans SPEED UP when they see you jaywalking it’s like the law bible infuriator!!  if you do something illegal Germans either love you many ways or want to stab your limbs in an energy saving way

xibit 6: IF YOU WEAR A BICYCLE HELMET YOU ARE UNCOOL!!!!  what in the world is going on there are SOFT SHELLED BABIES scooting around like homeless snails all it takes is a crowmobile to swoop down and BITE BITE and then you get to the organic bakery and have a “sweet kinder you did a good bike ride OH NO MY KINDER IS HALF OF ONE” tragedy

your honor where ARE THE LAWYERS AROUND HERE no one is doing anything about it i don’t think germany even has a gross natural product in lawyers but this is messed up

man this place is deadly

dear diary.

Dear Diary,

Earlier this week I saw some tasty bait in wait and I clicked as hard as I could, only to feel my fragile enamel strike smooth steel as the yank of realization pierced straight through my cheek. I can't exactly blame the fisherman for wanting something known, but what remains plain is that no one ever wants to dangle from the end of a line. I'm relieved there is a vast sea booming with fish like me, mouths filled with metal, attentive and at the ready still.

Last night I went to the Crystal Castles show. I felt like I was eighty years old. The child-girls next to me kept trying to dance into me, to force room for their ranks and files. I laughed at their diminutive size and persistence. Last night I was in no way an attractive trout, I was perpetually the old grouper in the way. Fortunately it didn't matter - Crystal Castles fucking brought it! Alice Glass was literally held high by the hands of the audience a good 20% of the time, thrashing and writhing in scream and surrender. Diary that show was pretty radical.

Last night I also met my first German friend that wasn't already an elderly Chinese roommate. He was wearing an Iron Maiden t-shirt and we formed instant solidarity as unified fish out of water. We made vague plans to break into an abandoned Iraqi embassy, frozen in time thanks to the immediacy of evacuation. I really hope I don't have to wrestle any skinheads for a souvenir. The hipsters I can probably take.

Thanks for listening, diary. You're the best.

circle of life!

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shortcuts.

Once upon a time I had an apartment on Leipziger Straße for a summer, so many years ago.  It was a wonderfully tough time in Berlin for me – living + being left alone made the experience utterly mine, but it took quite a bit of work to have any sense of social life.  I would buy a round of beer for a table of Germans, I would leap into conversation with overheard English, I would basically put myself out there as far as it took, just to have the chance to talk with other people.

I feel like I’ve taken a major shortcut on this visit and have been immediately thrust into someone else’s social stratosphere.  I initially saw this as a possible problem – the pressure of “hanging out” when I didn’t want to, outings and events and the general act of juggling other people’s strangers in a strange world.  What I’ve realized since landing is that this simple “in” peels back a significant layer of inhospitality, showing me a side of this city that I was completely unable to witness on my own.

Monday could have easily been an example of a fun evening I would have had back then.  A really great performance by the Foals inspired Mr. Hat and I to brave the cold and re-enter the night.  First we investigated a smoke-filled “punk” bar called Clash (with TWO pinball tables OMG!!!) – band posters and anti-Nazi propaganda plastered the walls, the servers had all the right saturation of black outfits and black eyeliner, but you couldn’t quite take the influx of hostel-tweens very seriously.  Even the alcoholic pros sitting at the bar looked like they wondered why they kept coming back.  But there was pinball, and holy fuck I love pinball.  The fact that these tables only threatened to Tilt made it that much sweeter.

After leaving Clash I tried to convince Mr. Hat that a goth club on a Monday night would be far superior to the fluffy bed that awaited him.  It might have been the influence of Astra but he syccymbyd to my darque ynqury and we found ourselves mystified before a thick locked door emitting the slightest oontz shortly before 1am.

Around 1:30am we find the buzzer that lets us in and I was immediately transported nearly 6 years into the past.  I’m going to be blunt: Germans over the age of 25 can’t dance – lucky for me the guys still dance 20x worse than their female counterparts.  It’s incredibly easy to feel suave if you can consistently shake any part of your anatomy.

There I was - drinking until the sun came up, smirking and spinning and re-living an incredibly positive, lonely time in my life.  Mr. Hat had wisely left after an hour or so but I was out for destruction - at 5:30am I tossed my half-filled pilsner aside and stumbled out into the bright chilled sky.

Tuesday was the revelation that this trip could never be that one.  One of my elderly Chinese roommates has several friends in the world of acrobatics, and I was fortunate enough to be guest listed by one of the performers into Chamäleon – an incredibly popular venue in an incredibly touristy bit of Mitte.  This show “Versus” featured quite the impressive display of human form pushing, pulling, accepting, and rejecting one another - hitting the heart a little deeper thanks to the soundtrack by Antony and the Johnstons.  A few Pils with a juggler-turned-writer and meeting our talented benefactor was a fantastic way to end the evening.

All of the nights since have all been a series of drinks with a series of new people - from the embedded Tea Party journalist who just returned from midwest America to the large-scale sculptor off to cast in Siberia to the photo exhibition of an elderly Chinese now-ex-roommate running her own gallery on a budget of nothing.  I’ve met an incredibly wide range of personalities from all over the world within mere weeks and this would never have been possible if I had gravitated towards my own leanings of just, being, left… alone.

Opportunity is a beautiful thing, especially when it doesn’t involve money.

music > alles.

The last five years of my life have been one endless loop of working for others and saving, working for myself and bleeding, working for others and saving, on and on and on.  When you get out of habit of spending what you earn, the budget you set for yourself can easily constrict your ability to experience life.  That $4 daily coffee is suddenly 1/6th of a live show, 1/15th of weekly groceries, or 0.5% of a future month’s rent.  While doing this math is quite helpful within the discipline of saving, you can take this logic far too far. 

One too many times I’ve found myself staying in only to extend my next bout of bleeding out just a wee bit longer.

The problem is that this doesn’t get any easier once you have saved a stack of bills, focused on your own plan again, and have no more money coming in.  The belt simply tightens further and proper outings don’t really become an option, because you are at point zero of your goal and every single dime you spend shortens your freedom by an equal number of moments.

I expected to continue this trend in Berlin – to tighten my spending, hunker down, and just get to work (at the expense of experience).  Finding balance here has been trivial, thanks to like-minded tight-pursed broke-ass elderly Chinese roommates but also that the city itself continues to draw me out in new and wonderful ways.  What I simply can’t ignore and what has become a beautiful re-ignition is my absolute love of live music and European music festivals.

Original plan and budget be damned – while I still plan on working myself into a mild coma + spending wisely, I will be alternating this with a wild variety of shows and festivals over the rest of the year.  This will provide me with the perfect excuse to take a plane-train somewhere new, and to fill my senses with something that hasn’t been witnessed one hundred thousand times before.  Don’t get me wrong - old buildings are nice, history is fascinating, views can be breathtaking, but music drives me in such a way that even the Louvre never could.

Now I have reason to see Vienna, Barcelona, Birmingham, Minehead, and hopefully * countless other cities.

Impulsive and jealous?  I booked a double room for the first weekend of the Donau Festival in Krems, Austria and only need half of the queen-sized bed.  Join me! **  Alec Empire, Glenn Branca, Panda Bear, The Ex, Fuck Buttons, Matmos - this shit will get straight up b-a-n-a-n-a-s served alongside all the Schnitzel you can eat.

* extended visa permitting

** assuming I don’t hate you and you don’t snore like a train

onion bear lean!

When I was a child I played football (you people in ‘merica need to get with my hip new EU lingo, I’m talking soccer!).  I was downright terrible at football.  The ball?  Boy I could kick it.  I could kick it so far out of bounds it would take a good 5 minutes to go find it.  My hands?  My hands were so powerful that they would swat away anything that came close to my precious face.  Funny enough the coach never appreciated such talents, and so a fullback I became.

I couldn’t pass up the chance to see a proper European match, so I met up with Mr. Hat and his German friend to go deep East into Hooligan territory.  What immediately struck me upon the opening of the S-Bahn doors was the legion of Polizei waiting for us upon our arrival.  They formed a single-file line down the long stairs and spilling into the station.  Atop the pile of armored brutes was a camcorder on a long stick – evidence of our sober non-violence recorded for future episodes of The Most Boring Footage In the History of Berlin, a very popular show in Korea.

It became a little more obvious as time went on why they were there – supporters of the other local team arrived en masse, surrounded by police in a V-wedge formation, and led to their seats.  Such preparation was a bit of a pity, really - while the first twenty minutes of the match were exciting enough to justify the entrance fee, the lack of hostility was appalling!  I would have easily paid twice as much for a few flying bottles and a round of tear gas.  The one thing that stuck with me after this match was the deep vocal chant of ONION BEAR LEAN, which clearly explains why all of the vegetable-based mammals in this city bend a bit to the left.

After this match Mr. Hat and I parted ways, only to meet back up with one of my elderly Chinese roommates for a night of live music.  Show 1 of 2 was dubbed String Thing, an experimental performance involving a bunch of violin-shaped objects.  While we were a good 5 minutes late the small room contained 40 chairs and only 4 people sitting in them.  The foreshadowing here can also be applied to restaurants around the world – if no one is present during prime time, chances of suckage increase exponentially.  The show began shortly after we took our seats and basically involved an impromptu jam session … ahhhh … “experimental”.  The band was led by a man playing a series of paper bags while everyone else wildly let loose on their chosen instrument in a manner God never ever intended.  Mr. Hat sat patiently and eventually leaned over, whispering “I think we have ourselves a Jazz situation”.  I nearly burst out laughing, swallowed back the tears, and properly composed myself until the lot of us could make our escape.  Our favorite audience member was the man who came in, found a seat, and immediately got up and left.

After drowning our musical wounds in a bowl of Vietnamese goodness we arrived to Show 2 of 2 at a bar called Schokoladen.  THAT’S RIGHT IT IS A BUILDING MADE ENTIRELY OF CHOCOLATE!  Either that or an old chocolate-factory-turned-squatter-art-culture-bar which will be formally evicted come June.  Her Name is Calla was already performing and I must say this show was an incredibly moving surprise.  One part Radiohead to one part Silver Mt. Zion - these sweet-faced British youth sang ballads of quiet heartbreak, layering instrument upon instrument over and over again until you were left with sound so thick it filled your gut and weakened your knees.  Not only was I an instant fan but I literally have no clothing here in Berlin - I was eager to put petrol in their van with a shirt on my back.  After some banter with the band I finished my drink and headed out into the street.  As the door was closing behind me the wind whispered “Americans are always the first to arrive and the first to leave”, said to bring the Brits and the Germans just a little bit closer.  I didn’t mind.

begin, again.

It’s taken a few days of [documen/re-visi]tation to realize what a vast purgatory I’ve built for myself.  Projects that are close to your heart are often the worst business moves imaginable.  For whatever reason I’ve had the requirement of building my own ethos and ideology into everything I’ve embarked upon.  I don’t want to write stories, I want to turn my own fiction into reality.  Computer programmers are fortunate in that we can create just about anything we dream up.

Sadly creation is not adoption and it isn’t anywhere near success.  “If you build it they will come” is only true if you are Kevin Costner or happen upon a vacant storefront in the middle of everything.  A programmer needs solid design.  A programmer needs stable infrastructure.  A programmer needs smart marketing.  Basically a programmer needs more than the sum of his own two hands – anyone claiming to be capable of everything generally sucks at programming.

Starting back up on a project you ran out of resources to finish is a tough internal prospect.  This is the first abandoned child I’ve dared picked back up. I’m feeling a bit overwhelmed at figuring out exactly where I was, 1.5 years ago.

What remains unchanged is that I completely believe in it, even after the heartbreak – more than evidence enough that I need to give it another shot.

This is my neighborhood in eastern Berlin - an average stroll from Ostbahnhof to the sofa I perch myself on.  This is where I work.