I HATE ART

I hate art.

2010-08-11T22:13:00.002+02:00

I love art. Really. I have been asked why my blog is called ‘I Hate Art’ many times. The truth is: I do not love all art out there and foremost I am concerned about all those objects that are called art nowadays. I think somebody has to draw a line and say “That is bullshit. That’s not art. I hate it.”

The contemporary art market has expanded rapidly over the past ten years and the people who consume and buy art have multiplied. People who buy art are no longer those exclusive, extremely wealthy collectors. No, it is those people who have two cars, a nice home, wear designer glasses and need to put something on the wall in the living room. The piece has to make a reputation about the owner’s good taste. And of course, at any cocktail party or family reunion he will have a witty story about the creation of the piece.

Today, the people who buy art are just as orientationless and indulging in self-flight and hedonism as the art they buy. The immediate quality of the works is being pushed aside as long as it is authentic.
Sometimes, I feel like I should trip on acid and paint while I’m at a swinger party on a hotel room with blacklights on and tape it and send it to all the governments around the world with a letter saying that this tape contains the meaning of life and the solution to all their problems. Then I would collect all the articles about my performance and pile them up on a raft and row across the Channel while the paper is burning and if the raft does not sink and I do not die, I would collect the ashes and bury them underneath a tree in England. A year later I would come back and chop the tree up and make a bunch of furniture from it. This furniture I would offer as a gift, as an exclusive unique handcrafted piece of design to members of the UN, the Vatican, the US government so they all would sit on a product of acid, paint and sex – would that make me more authentic or more credible?
Would people call me a great artist? It’s not so unlikely. Let’s take a look at it: If I did the performance above, that would tell people the following traits about me: I was a performance artist, a drug addicted artist, a painter, a hedonist artist, a nyphomaniac artist, a video artist, a voyeur artist, a perverted artist, a con-artist, a political artist, a philosophical artist, a nature artist, a spiritual artist, an international artist, a social artist, a land artist, a megalomaniacal artist. Would you buy my art because you’d like to tell everyone that this is the painting from the hotel room in which it all started out?
I know personally, that many people, preferably bored, wealthy but oh so open-minded people buy art to act out their desires that they were ever too scared to live out themselves. Those people who put the plates on the table for breakfast before they go to sleep at night – those people buy art to be part of the adventurous, dirty, exclusive and exciting life they associate with contemporary art. Art is not bought for art’s quality but for social and self-indulging purposes.

The art scene. It is such a myth. Everybody thinks it is a huge party. It is not about opening receptions and champagne and limousines. It is about fucking hard work. Those very few artists who make it to the top and are celebrated by the art scene must feel so out of place. Nobody knows how much they actually had to put into their carreer, how many hours a week they worked, how much they had to give up to make it there. No, the people who celebrate you and kiss your ass think your life is a party.
Of course, I know people who tattoo, do drugs, have excessive sex, ride motorcycles, get into barfights, stay up for four days, are polyamorous, go swimming naked, gamble, get drunk and black out, get suspended, punch cops, pick up hookers, get into hooligan fights and so on. But that is the non-art part of my life. Why does everybody confuse that? (I hope all you prospective art students are aware now.)

Wait, maybe I’m all wronng about those who make money with bullshit. Maybe they do deserve our admiration instead – because Banksy said “Who is good at cheating doesn’t have to become good at anything else.” It is so true.

Chuck Palahniuk, Andy Warhol and I

2010-08-05T01:19:00.003+02:00

Lately I have been smelling a lot.

I read this book by Chuck Palahniuk, the author of Fight Club, entitled Rant. An aural biography of Buster Casey. The main protagonist lives in the ordinary town Middleton, but he is not an ordinary boy. When a storm hits the town and the trash buckets in the streets get kicked over, a fence of barbed wire catches condoms, tampons and sanitary napkins. Since it is a very small town, everybody is too embarrassed to walk up and clean the fence – so Rant Casey does it. Every condom he picks up, he smells and then can tell who in town used it. He can even tell, what the people ate or if they are on medication.

Rant is an outstanding book that gets more and more intriguing, but still – it’s fiction. When I read it, I also thought of a book that I had read before: Andy Warhol’s Philosophy from A to B and back by Andy Warhol. Indeed, it is not an autobiography, it is rather a collection of rambles and anecdotes on everything that moved his mind. By times, it is witty, other times it is extremely simplistic. It is definitely a shallow book of a shallow character who did shallow art. Anyhow, there is a passage called „perfume space“ in which he rambles about smells and fragrances.

„I switch perfumes all the time. If I’ve been wearing one perfume for three months, I force myself to give it up, even if I still feel like wearing it, so whenever I smell it again it will always remind me of those three months. I never go back to wearing it again; it becomes part of my permanent smell collection.“

Everybody has a permanent smell collection. But not everybody is aware of it. There is so many things that you are not aware of everyday. Think about showering. I am sure that you usually take your clothes off in the same order, wash your hair and body in the same order and dry yourself off in the same order every day. There are some things that you just get used to. Like smell.

When was the last time you walked down the street and consciously smelled? The laundromat, the Indian food, the grocery store, the trees, the dog shit, the broken beer bottle, the bus exaust fumes, the rain on hot pavement? Once you concentrate on your smell perception, you can discover unbelievable things. When I got out of the plane, out of the airport and smelled New York City from afar, do you know what it smelled like? All those millions of smells melted together, but there was one which dominated the others – New York City smells like Chinese food.

I had this theory that I would be blindfolded and led into any of my friends’ houses and apartments and I could tell from the smell where I was. I still hold onto that but what happened to me coincidently was even weirder. You can only perceive a room’s smell when you enter. Once you’re in, it only takes half a minute and you got used to it. It’s just like feeding a snake. If the snake does not eat the mouse right away, you have to take it out because it adapts the smell of the cage and the snake can not locate it anymore.

A little while ago, I was entering a house of a friend for the first time. Her house seemed really familiar and reminded me of an architect who is an old family friend of mine. Later on, we somehow talked about her house and found out that it was actually built by that architect, who knew both of our families really well. And I said „That’s funny because when I entered your house, it even smelled like his house when we visited him.“ She gave me a funny look, maybe a little embarrassed, and said „Well, his dog and our dog are siblings.“

OK, what the hell happened here? I could not stop thinking about this incidence. It had been years since we had visited this architect at his place. He does not even live there any more. Still, the smell had been in my passive smell collection. Think of it as your vocabulary. There is an active vocabulary which you use when you speak, and there is the passive one which consists of words that you know and understand but do not actively use yourself. The house had been in the latter one. The craziest thing was still that I thought I was making the smell up because I connected it with the architecture and the brick stones and marble floor. In reality, you never smell a house but all the persons who live there – even the dogs.

I like perfumes. I think I never bought one myself but I still like them. Thinking of the Andy Warhol quote above, I, as a matter of fact, do have an almost empty perfume bottle on my desktop. It is called Waterlove by Méxx. I used to wear it everyday when I lived in New Zealand. I put it on everyday after I showered before I went to school. Every time I pick up the bottle and smell it, I get a flashback and see the way I walked to school everyday. Through the jungle in the backyard by the creek; up the wooden stairs which smelled like moss when it had rained; across the street kicking the pebbles on the sidewalk; past the dairy, down the hill underneath the bottlebrush trees to the front gate. Interestingly, the thoughts that come to my mind immediately when I smell the perfume are all memories of the morning, when the perfume was still fresh and I was still smelling it. It’s sitting in my form class everyday. I don’t even remember all the other people that well, only those ones I met every morning.

These are the more pleasing flasbacks. I recall my social service when I had to help lift a very old woman into the bathtub every Monday morning. I wore vinyl gloves but no matter how many times I washed my hands and arms, the smell would stay on them all day. When I held my hands under my friend and co-worker’s nose, he grimaced and knew exactly what I had been doing. Even thinking about it now makes recall the smell and makes me feel unwell.

Has is ever happened to you that you met a person who wore the same perfume as you or somebody you know? It is the worst. First, you are reminded that not even beautiful people smell good naturally, but that fragrance is a lie that everybody can articulate. The absolute worst is still to meet someone who smells like somebody you once were very close to – like your ex-girlfriend. Try out what happens when you see her signature. Do you think of a letter she wrote you? Speak her name out loud. Do you think of a particular situation when you called her name? Now you smell her perfume on somebody else but you are reminded of her so much, of how you were so close to her, of her room, of her bed, of the inscents on her drawer, of her hair, of her neck, of her perfume.
You notice how tying experiences to smells rather than to visual perception leaves a much more intimate picture in your mind, which vividly brings back connected perceptions and emotions, that is much more alive than from looking at a photo.

Think of my words when it happens to you.

Pablo Picasso and Friedrich Nietzsche

2010-08-01T14:31:00.002+02:00

Friedrich Nietzsche (1844-1900) was a German philosopher. In his early work The Birth Of Tragedy Out Of The Spirit Of Music he invents the Apollonian-Dionysian Concept. This concept has great influence ever since in the field of art, literature and philosophy.

This essay is about the interrelations between the Apollonian-Dionysian Idea and the work of Spanish painter Pablo Picasso (1888-1973). Picasso read Nietzsche and was heavily inspired by his work. In this work I wish to visualize Nietzsche’s presence in Picasso’s paintings, especially in his ground-breaking work Les Demoiselles d’Avignon which introduced Primitivism and Cubism and therefore deliberate Abstraction.

Apollonian and Dionysian.

Apollonian	Dionysian
Thinking	Feeling
Self-controlled	Passionate
Rational, logical	Irrational, instinctual
Ordered	Chaotic
Individuation	Wholeness
Human order and culture	Celebration of nature
Appearance/illusion	Realism, absurdity

The name derives from ancient Greek mythology. Apollo and Dionysos are sons of Zeus, the King of Gods. Apollo is the God of light and music. Furthermore he is associated with harmony, rationality and order. He is often depicted in a chariot, also accompanied by Aurora, the Godess of dawn. Dionysus was not regarded as his counterpart, however, he represented opposite values. Primarily was the God of wine and intoxication who had excessive orgies in the forest with his disciples. From that, the Roman version, the Baccanal arouse, named after the Roman version of the god of wine, Bacchus. Bacchus and Dionysos symbolize drunkeness, excess, extasy and irrationality.

Eventough these two gods were originally not perceived as contradictory, Nietzsche established this connection. The connection is not historical but metaphorical. He uses them as metaphors for two different kinds of art. Apollo, traditionally the God of music, often depicted with a harp, becomes the patron of the visual arts. Sculpture, painting and architecture fall into this category. There are similarities to Hegel’s system of the arts. He places the disciplines on a horizontal axis between two poles. One of them is devoted to the physical part of the artwork, the other one to the intellectual part. The disciplines range on this axis between the extremes according to their degree of physicality and spirituality. The most physical art is architecture and, more towards the middle which represents the ideal, painting. On the spiritual, non-physical side, there is music and literature. The ideal that holds the balance is sculpture.

However, Nieztsche does not distinguish the arts exactly like that. He juxtaposes the Apollonian and the Dionysian as characteristics that can be found within different mediums, despite of the initial connection between Dionysos and music. There is apollonian music as well as dionysian painting.

As a matter of fact, Nietzsche developed the idea of these two opposing forces straight out of Greek tragedy. In ancient Greek plays there was a chorus which would comment on the protagonist’s actions and thus support the understanding of the plot. The chorus contrasted with the outstanding action of the single character. Nietzsche saw the overwhelming force and frenzy of the chorus’ music as wholeness in comparison to the individual protagonist’s words.[1] He regards music as going “right to the heart, as the true universal language that is understood everywhere.”[2] Language itself is an instrument of consciousness whereas music is pure being. The mixture of words and music in Greek tragedy has been lost over the time. Nietzsche sees the logical, dialectic and apollonian pushing aside the subconscious, universal dionysian up until his own days.[3]

However, he had the vision of the reinvention of the Dionysian. During his engagement with The Birth of Tragedy, he was a great admirer of Richard Wagner. The German opera composer and Nietzsche retained a strong friendship that strained and broke over time. Nevertheless, Nietzsche strongly promoted his work in his lectures as the art that finally brought the dionysian back to attack the strictly dialectical approach in art and philosophy.

Pablo Picasso.

Picasso still perpetuates the reputation of the greatest modern artist. His œvre is vast and includes hundreds of drawings, paintings, sculptures, prints and design objects. He gave birth to numerous styles, cubism probably being the most famous one. Pablo Picasso is known to have read Nietzsche and I wish to accentuate the influence of the Dionysian in his work, particularly in the painting Les Demoiselles d’Avignon.

The painting is fairly large, measuring 244 x 234 cm. It was painted oil on canvas and finished in 1907. It depicts a brothel scene with five naked women arranged in a circle. Four of them are standing; the one on the very right cowers with her back towards the viewer, looking over her shoulder. Picasso did more than hundred sketches for this painting which reveal that he originally intended to include male figures in the composition as well. There are drawings that show a medical student and a sailor (are they an implicit references to Apollo and Dionysus?).

The painting seems flat. What Picasso would later make the trademark of cubism, the planarity and flatness, the surface of painting and color, can be observed in this work already. The background does not create a defined space in which the figures are placed but seems to be a composition of abstracted curtains and drapery. The only spacial statement that he makes is the ground plane, indicated by the very left figure’s foot.

In the foreground there is a still life with fruit. Scholars have suggested that the placement of fruit in a brothel is pure sarcasm from Picasso’s side – men do not visit brothels to eat fruit.[4]

The figures seem to show a progression from left to right. The most distinctive features in the painting are definitely the masks worn by the women on the right. The figure’s faces appear to morph into these grotesque visages that are inspired by African tribes’ masks worn for rituals.

Picasso’s treatment of color is not very traditional. He divides the human figure into planes only distinguishable by slightly different hues and values. He does not use gradients but shapes the body with line – mostly outline and inner contour. There is no indication of directional light which enables his palette to focus exclusively on the subtle rendering of the figures’s volume.

Dionysus in Les Demoiselles D’Avignon.

The impact of Nietzsche’s philosophy is evident in this painting as well as in other works by Picasso. He did several paintings that were caricatures of traditional works by, for example, Dominique Ingres.[5] Picasso did a self-portrait of himself as Bacchus, the Roman aquivalent of Dionysus around the time that he painted the Demoiselles.[6]

Artists and writers in the early 1900’s were inspired by prostitutes. The constituted a different appeal of beauty. A beauty that did not confirm the society’s ideal of traditional female beauty depicted in Ingres’ work. In comparison, prostitutes resembled a wild, polyamorous image of beauty. It is an attractiveness induced by sinfulness. It is the evil, the forbidden attraction that lured artists and made them sublimate this feeling in their work. For that part, the demoiselles represent a very dionysian image of beauty and love.

The masks give another hint towards the presence of the dionysian in Picasso’s painting. He was heavily influenced by pieces that he saw in a Parisian museum. They were African tribes’ masks, worn by shamans, medicine men or chiefs during rituals. Let us not forget – the ritual of Dionysus is what gave birth to Greek tragedy and therefore Nietzsche’s concept.

Above all, I would like to expound the metaphorical, painterly presence of the dionysian in Picasso’s painting. Picasso is a master of abstraction. He does not rely on detailed, realistic naturalism. He goes beyond that. Traditional, academic art can reasonably be called apollonian, since it comprises the human strive for order and system. Picasso breaks with this approach and employs broad shapes, curvy lines to sublimate his impression of the subject. He does not use detail – single, individualistic parts of the subject – to construct a composition. He rather grasps the scene as a whole and therefore conveys it as a whole that is more than just an accumulative collection of parts.

Picasso and Nietzsche.

This last paragraph means to point out the similarities between two people who are not as different as we suspected in the beginnig. Nietzsche was ahead of his time that was dominated by rationality and logic. He was convinced that the dionysian within a society could not be surpressed effectively for an indefinite amount of time, but would break loose at some point. Picasso also advocated this point of view. As Nietzsche did not engage in art himself (except for literature), Picasso wanted to bring the notion of the dionysian into the fine arts – just as Nietzsche did to philosophy and Wagner did to Opera.

[1] Safranski, Rüdiger, Nietzsche. A Philosophical Biography., W.W. Norton & Company Inc. (New York, 2003) 62

[2] Ibid.

[3] Chessick, Richard D., A Brief Introduction to the Genius of Nietzsche., University Press of America (Lanham, MD, 1983) 39

[4] Richardson, John, A Life of Picasso. 1907-1917. Volume II. The Painter of Modern Life.; Randomhouse (New York, 1996) 14

[5] Richardson; 15

[6] Ibid.

Music/Life - Life/Music

2010-07-07T00:57:00.004+02:00

Many people tend to abuse music. They violate it by listening but not acknowledging music. They do it just for distraction, not to have that uncomfortable anxious silence around.

I am telling you: music is more. It all starts, in the classic case, in a record store. You look around and grab CDs with appealing covers. The interesting thing here is, that you pick music by its cover.

It is a visually translated metaphor of what is waiting inside for you. If you are not a lucky guy who does not have a record store which can provide a short preview of each track around the corner, you take it home, put it in the player, lie down on your bed staring at the ceiling for the few dramatic seconds in which your CD player starts humming before the first track begins.

Sooner or later you will have to polarize whether you like or dislike what you are hearing. Let’s take the best case: you lie on your back and listen to the soundwaves your stereo wraps around you. Mellow basses stroke your ears, the rhythm of the clicking sticks makes you groove and finally the vocals give you a shiver. Excited you draw in every word and your room’s walls expand. Suddenly you see colors, maybe a landscape that you picture yourself in. The sun is shining and a gentle warm breeze swooshes through the barley fields at dusk. You look up and you can see the first stars have come out on the midnight blue top of the firmament. And you wander down a green alley with a gorgeous girl by your side. You’ve got nothing in your pockets but the tune in your mind and the road under your feet.

This is how particular songs become part of our lives. We project our hopes, wishes, and visions right into them. They turn into screens for our future we wish to accomplish. We listen to these songs over and over and dream of life and breathe liberty. Songs become part of our lives’ soundtrack when we finally tie them to certain phases or episodes of our lives.

That is the point in time between past and future at which a song dies. As soon as we stop dreaming about a song it is drawn out and empty. In fact it is not empty, but has exhausted all its potentials and is overloaded with hopes, fears and worst of all reminiscence for all that we projected into it but never accomplished.

Listening to old songs can be wonderful, but it is never as great as it was the first time. They throw back what you put into them.

Music can have huge impact on your life. New music is what I am talking about especially. Get some new music from somewhere. Load it, buy it, copy it, borrow it, steal it! Put a lot of music into one pot, stirr it and be surprised what breathtaking song waits for you around the corner. Erase your memories. New music makes you a new person. Get off your dirty stinking ballast from once.

Loose yourself in the music and invent yourself one more time.

Americanism Revealed

2010-07-06T07:37:00.003+02:00

Americans are afraid. Americans are scared of everything. They are afraid of car crashes, germs, terrorism, guns, robbery, rape, dirt, smell, strangers, enemies, diseases, falling behind, God, body hair, communism, rejection and infection.

Americans are afraid of everything. That is why America has one of the highest rates of perscirption drug abuse. That is why Americans own guns. That is why Americans have nervous breakdowns. That is why Americans shower twice a day. That is why America produces so much waste. That is why America has the highest emissions of carbo-dioxide. Because they’re afraid!

PS: I just found this quotation by David Lynch:

"Dark things have always existed but they used to be in a proper balance with good when life was slower. People lived in towns and small farms where they knew everybody and people didn't move around so much so things were a little more peaceful. There were things that they were afraid of for sure, but now it's accelerated to where the anxiety level of the people is in the stratosphere. TV sped things up and caused people to hear way more bad news. Mass media overloaded people with more than they could handle, and drugs also had a lot to do with it. With drugs people can get so rich and whacked out and they've opened up a whole weird world. These things have created a modern kind of fear in America."

Marina Abramovic

2010-07-05T23:34:00.004+02:00

Of course I saw the Abramovic show in the MoMA. I mean everybody wanted to see it. Tourists from all over the world stood in line (only the Tim Burton show was even more packed). I was quite impressed by the show. I did not stand in line to participate in her performance, but was utterly blown away by the intensity of her re-enacted performances featured in the show.

I knew about Abramovic before, especially because of her performance at the Venice Biennale (yes, that thing with the piles of bones which she cleaned from rotting meat leftovers). Still, I had never seen any performance like that first hand. The most fascinating thing was that the actors did not even seem to act. All they did was more or less maintaining one pose. That made me think of her works as sculptures that are made of living human beings.

I had to write a response paper on the show, but I'm not going to drop it on you now. What I want to share with you is a kind of percept that I scribbled down frantically.

„She hangs on a white canvas. I am wearing clothes. She is completely naked. I see her chest rising and falling with every breath. Our eyes meet. She does not move. Breathe in. Breathe out. She is alive – mounted onto a wall like an inanimate object. We look at each other, not moving. I am looking up to her. She is looking down on me. She is completely exposed. There is nothing inbetween us. I am unable to move. Neither of us moves. We are just staring into each other’s eyes. I am looking at an artwork – the artwork looks back at me. When I was small, I was scared of the tv because I thought the people I see can look back at me. She is looking back at me. She is the artwork. I am the audience. The distinction blurrs. We breathe in at the same time. We adjust to each other. She is looking back at me the same way I look at her. Motionless. I am being watched and so is she. We are both paralyzed. We stare into each other’s eyes and minutes pass. No movement. I lose my sense of time. I am caught. She doesn’t let me look away. We don’t move. I don’t feel like I am looking at an artwork. I am looking at her and our souls intertwine. We are exposed. We know nothing about each other except for what we see in each other’s eyes. We feel. We feel this mixture of exposure, embarrassment and trust and closeness. I know she feels it. I can see it. We look into each other. She is naked. I am wearing clothes. It’s the same. We are one.“

If you think I'm retarded you should have a look at this.

Marina Abramovic Made Me Cry

I totally comprehend.

Rebirth

2010-07-05T23:25:00.002+02:00

OK, this blog has become kind of run down, alienated piece of forgotten binary code. However, today I felt the urge to review my concept of the blog. In the past, this used to be a broadcasting tool for whatever did or did not come my mind. That made the posts pretty scattered and unpredictable.

Now, since I have some time over the summer, I will try to catch up on my writing and share my volatile thoughts and absurd findings with you.

Cheers.

M.I.A. - Born Free

2010-05-10T05:36:00.003+02:00

One of the rather disturbing things I have recently seen.

M.I.A, Born Free from ROMAIN-GAVRAS on Vimeo.

Bei Nacht

2010-05-10T01:13:00.001+02:00

Video Final Project

A FEW THINGS ABOUT ME AND YOU

2009-11-02T07:04:00.001+01:00

Who are you?

Are you what you possess? Are you the product of your genes? Are you the sum of what you created? Do you know who you are? And I got one more question for you: Do you really want to know who you are?

I am really satisfied with my life so far. I have always been healthy, my parents love me and I love them. I got good grades at school. I have the best friends I am able to imagine and met some of the most fascinating persons on this planet. I do not really have to worry about money and have always found a way out of unpleasing situations that my own stupidity got me in. Things are going in the direction I pushed them.

You are living a life that everyone would desire, you may say. What is your problem? There are people freezing and starving to death everyday and you have such self-indulging worries about who you are.

Let me tell you a story.

Once there was a man called Dave, but then he died.

What is death to you? Is it the ending of your life? Or is it the beginning of another life, over and over again? Quite frankly, I am really glad I do not have to live forever. If I had an unlimited amout of time to do anything, I would most likely become incredibly lazy, because I could simply do it tomorrow. Or the day after tommorrow. To me, life is that short period in time between birth and death. It’s so simple. And if you think about it like that, death is the only thing that urges you to move on, to run as fast as you can.

The question is: where are we running? Where am I running? Tied to that is the question why I am running to where I am running? The only answer to that is: because I want to run there and nowhere else. To figure out where I want to go for what reason is one of the most striking and most influential possibilities in everyone’s life.

In fact, nobody can be forced to achieve this. It might never happen to you. But it never happens instantaneously. It is a long, lonely road.

I am on a beach. I have no idea how I managed to get here, apart from why I am here. A few days ago, I packed up a few clothes, a few groceries, a tent and a sleeping bag, got into my car and drove west on the A4 towards Belgium. A few kilometers before Liege, the route I printed out from Google Maps leads me off the Autobahn. It takes only a few minutes until I am completely lost. The road I am on is not indicated on my map. It takes me an hour to get back on track. And another three hours to Paris. Once I am on the circle around the city, I miss my exit to Bordeaux. I take the next one and end up in a terrible banlieu, a run-down suburb. I go back and forth, trying to find the direction to Versailles to go down south on a countryside road. I have to stop at a gas station and buy another map of the Île de France. It takes me another hour through the horrifying Parisian traffic to see the first roadsign to Versailles. After I passed by hundreds of busses, spitting out thousands of tourists next to Louis XIV’s palace, I drive for a while through beautiful landscapes and finally find my way back on the highway.
It is already dark when I arrive at the bridge to l’Île de Ré. My right heel hurts from being stuck on the gas pedal for 14 hours in a row. As I arrive on the Island, everything is closed, everyone’s sleeping. It starts to rain. I follow signs towards a small campground which consists of a small patch of grass and restrooms. The flashlight saves my life as I set up my tent in the cold, dark rain.
The next morning I get up, pack up my stuff and leave without paying, assuming that nobody noticed my late arrival and presence. The sun shines as I drive down the coast. The air-conditioning is switched off to save gas and money. Instead I pull down all the windows. I can barely see what is happening right of me because I put my 6’7’’ surfboard into my 12’ car, flipping down the back seats, pulling it inbetween the driver’s and the passenger’s seat, reaching from the right exterior mirror to the far left of the trunk. I am looking for a place where I heard there was a beachbreak, eventhough I cannot remember its name. I make a right eastwards towards the shore and after another 45 minutes I end up on a sandy parking lot shaded by pine trees.
So I sit here and listen to the waves. There is nothing to watch. Nobody is there. I haven’t got a cell phone. I barely know where I am. Everything that I know, that I am used to right now is myself. And it is these moments in time when your vision becomes so clear. You focus on nothing but yourself because you know that everything around you is replacable. And it is these moments in which you look back and question everything you did so far. Why did you do this and what purpose served that? Did I do all this because I really wanted it? Or was it because I assumed it might have been what I wanted?

When people break up with the ones they love, when someone they loved just died, when things like that happen, people need to be alone. Is there only such mournful occasions to be with yourself?

If you feel the desire to dive down the depths of your self, it’s time to get away. Get away from what you know. Get away from everything that holds you on a leash.

It is moments like that on beach which change you. Actually they do not change you, but they can tell you which way to go. Life is not a dead end – it is an intersection. However, it is a one way. You can never go back. I never wanted to go back. Aldous Huxley once wrote: “Experience is not what happens to a man, it is what a man does with what happens to him.” Behind this quotation is the thought, that whatever happens to you, it will not have no effect on you. How you deal with what happens to you is to constitute how it will affect you in the future.

I believe the one way character of life is a precious notion. Above all because it neglects that I am. It rather enunciates the term of becoming, of never standing still, of never stopping to evolve, to alter, to change.

I have come across quite a few people who felt likewise me – in many different matters but in particular about becoming. Among them are lots of musicians, many are writers, but all of them are artitsts in one way or another. The least of them I have met in person. The only connection between them and me are shared thoughts. It is bizarre how sometimes I feel this connection is so much stronger than the one to the people around me.

One work that made me feel like this was Thus spoke Zarathustra. I stumbled upon it not a long time ago. When I read those lines it felt like someone has been watching my life, my emotions, my thoughts since I was born – someone who knew more about me than I do. It was like someone found words for what I was struggeling to express. It made clear what I have always been thinking and seemed to verbalize even what I was going to think in the future. This book became the articulation of my mind and it unveiled things in me that I never saw before. I felt like I was told things for which it takes an entire lifetime to figure them out.

Do you know what this feels like? Let me try to envelope it in words. You are being hit in the face. You taste the blood in your mouth. You get that weird feeling of numbness in your nose. You can feel splinters of what used to be your teeth on your tongue – and they are damn sharp. At the same time you are unable to move. Your jaw rests in a position that makes you look like a primate. Your eyes stare at something that you cannot discern. Your body is completely paralized. You forget about the presence of your body. You forget about where you are. Even your thoughts freeze. You are sitting there and you are unable to think of anything. You think of absolutely nothing. In this moment you could die. You could die and it would not matter to you at all. You have just found a truth which kicks the ass of everything that happened before – a truth that is undefeatable and has instantaneously become a turning point in your life.

Whatsoever, you never know whether you were right in what you did. The day might come on which you discover you were running down the wrong road with blinders on, no matter how right it felt. At that point you may know your valleys, but you have never seen your highest summits. The one single opportuniy’s name to rewind your tape of experiences is oblivion. It is not going to change who you have become so far but it offers you new roads of building up on what you have been through – if you choose to treat your past like that.

On the other hand, the fascinating thing about forgetting is that it works automatically. You leave things behind which you do not need anymore. Get your head clear for what you are about to become.

Why am I telling you all this? All these words might sound bizarre, absurd and even moronic in your ears. These exploring words are probably less about me than much more about you. However, if you feel like I wasted your time, I am sincerely disconsolate because you certainly could have spent it more wisely on watching TV.

If not so, here is a very few final words of my congenial brothers that I could not have pronounced better in any way:

“Who we are depends on three factors: what we inherited, what our surroundings gave to us and what we made in free choice out of our genes and environment.” (Aldous Huxley)

„Canst thou give unto thyself thy bad and thy good, and set up thy will as a law over thee? Canst thou be judge for thyself, and avenger of thy law?” (F.W. Nietzsche, Thus spoke Zarathustra)

Roman Cops

2009-08-20T04:27:00.003+02:00

Lately I’ve been to Rome and what I saw there inspired me for an alternative carreer: becoming an Italian cop.

Roman cops are constantly bored – no, actually they’re always simply avoiding their cop’s job. Their cars are in dark metallic paint and unmarked – the only revealing thing is that they’re always perfectly polished. Apart from the fact that they never take the flashing blue light off the roof.

I got the impression that they were always waiting – whether something’s happening or not. Leanig in custom-made Armani suits against their Alfa Romeos while gesturing with Prada sunglasses in one hand, an espresso in the other and one of their girls on the celly. Then they ride once around the block and come back to the same place as before - and get their cellys out.

That is what being a cop is about to me.

Off the Wall

2009-08-06T13:48:00.001+02:00

Irish Pubs continued

2009-08-03T12:58:00.006+02:00

I just wanted to back up the connection of Irish pubs and shit music once more:

Sting - So Lonely
George Michael - Amazing
Brian Adams - I'd do anything for love
Beatles - Hello Goodbye
Manu Chao - Me Gusta
Aretha Franklin - Baby, baby, baby
Bob Marley - No Woman No Cry

I ain't saying all these songs are whack. But please - stop nodding your heads slightly and tapping your feet and pretending you know the lyrics by moving your lips to the few lines you think you can't be caught singing wrong while sipping on your Guiness. I think it's blasphemous to play absolutely brilliant songs like No Woman No Cry in a bloody pub.

My latest theory is that they play all this music because EVERYBODY knows it and EVERYBODY likes it - and at least NOBODY can hate on it. I call it opportunism!

Have you ever asked yourself why - wherever on this planet: Hong Kong, Rome, Berlin, Melbourne, L.A. - you'll always find at least two Irish guys hanging out there?
Probably all Irish pubs around the world are only designed to comfort Irishmen on the road. I believe the average Irish guy spends more time in the pub than at home. Maybe this is just a prejudice, but certainly a very appealing one.

So, the final conclusion is that deep down we all want to be Irish and that is why Irish pub owners can make a living.

Bench-Hi-Jacking

2009-07-30T15:07:00.003+02:00

Spot a bench in a public place and steal it. Now, find the best place you're able to imagine and set it up there. The place where it used to be will be filled up with a new bench sooner or later.

Spread benches all over the country!

Hi-jack tonight!

Sedative

2009-07-30T11:35:00.001+02:00

Portraits

2009-07-23T16:31:00.003+02:00

A few unpersonal photos.

It's Time To Get Away

2009-07-20T12:08:00.004+02:00

A stop-motion roadmovie.

Being asked for I.D.

2009-07-09T12:40:00.003+02:00

You know what I’m talking about. When you’re something between 16 and 25 you’re the target group of I.D. fetishists.

In fact I have little problems with that. It’s rather the case that people guess I’m something around 25 than 20 or younger. Lately it happened to me several times that I was going to clubs where all my friends were asked for I.D. but not me. I was quite unsure what was the reason for that because I was along with guys who are taller, bigger, beardier and older.

However, I am fine with that because I never carry any I.D. The more strange it was when I was at a deli two months ago. My lighter was done and I just popped in to get a new one and run. I took a short look at the journals but figured I hadn’t enough money to buy anything but the lighter. So, I slipped to the counter and said „One lighter, please.“

The fat owner looked at me without any expression on her rugged face. „I.D.!“ I thought she didn’t get me right: „See, my lighter here (holding it under her nose) broke down. I want to buy a new one.“ – „I.D.!“ I really couldn’t believe she wouldn’t sell me a lighter. I was so perplexed that I stood in front of her and my face showed nothing but incomprehension. I looked her in the eye for ten seconds, turned around and left without one more word.

I really could not believe it. When I was fifteen, I used to buy cigarettes, lighters and beer and nobody cared at all. How could this happen to me at the age of 20? I entered a liquor store next door and asked whether they had matches or lighters. The employee was sad to inform me they had run out of either. Still shocked by the previous action I told her what just happened to me. „What? I.D. for a lighter??“ She was just as shocked as me. „I would guess you’re 26“, she said with an evaluating look.

Finally, I went to the drugstore next door and bought three lighters for a buck without any complications.

This whole thing got me completely confused. Within five minutes my age was guessed somewhere between 16 and 26 – ten years apart! I must really have a confusing appearance…

What made my day was the way back to the car. The fat owner of the deli was arranging some signs outside her shop as I went by, lighting a cigarette and presenting her my three new electronic lighters in different neon colors that costed me less than one of her bloody lighters. I’m not sure whether I actually said it or was just thinking: „Yeah, look at me. You don’t deserve my money!“ And I’m really sure, even if I just thought it – she knew exactly what I meant.

Splash

2009-07-08T11:34:00.009+02:00

Flash Mob Cologne: Waterfight pictures

(c) of all by JB

Irish Pubs and Shit Music

2009-07-06T21:34:00.003+02:00

I’ve heard that Irish pubs get all their interior from suppliers who sell not much but retro-ads, lampshades and all this used-look-furniture. It’s obvious that almost every Irish pub, wherever on this planet, looks the same from the inside. But I’ve figured something else.

Did you ever pay attention to the music in Irish pubs? In fact I’ve not been to a pub with that Irish folk music yet. Actually it’s hard to say, because in pubs you scarcely pay attention to the background music. Do you remember what songs you heard in Irish pubs?

My guess is that the pub supply store has a mp3-CD-for-free offer. To verify that I went to the pub and sat there for hours just to capture the playlist. And I drank beer, of course. Here’s my finding:

1. System Of A Down – Chop Suey
2. Guns n’ Roses – Paradise City
3. Blink 182 – All the small things
4. Kings Of Leon – Sex on Fire
5. Placebo – Every me and every you
6. Gloria Gaylor – I will survive
7. Avril Lavigne – Complicated
8. Metallica – Master Of Puppets
9. Metallica – Whiskey on the Jar
10. Jon Bon Jovi – It’s my life
11. Elvis Presley – Jailhouse Rock
12. Die Ärzte – Schrei nach Liebe
13. Metallica – Master of Puppets
14. Green Day – Boulevard Of Broken Dreams
15. Creed – Sacrifice

The weird thing is not only that they play ‚Master of Puppets’ twice but that there was not one song that I didn’t know. How strange is that? OK, OK, the most recent song was ‚Bvd of broken dreams’, so the rest is NOT brand new.

I think the pub supply store assistant who burns these CDs in his no window basement appartment needs serious taste improvement. I bet he’s one of these guys who genetically can’t accept that there is great music besides Metallica. I hope someday someone will set free this poor man from his dusty one-way "hey,-that’s-a-classic"-taste.

A Man's Story

2009-07-06T16:56:00.002+02:00

A man is searching something in the light of a street latern. Another man approaches him:

„Can I help you? Have you lost something?“
„Yes, five bucks. Over there in the dark, “ he points his finger.
„But why are you looking here then?“
„Because it’s illuminated!“

Getting and Becoming

2009-07-02T12:56:00.003+02:00

Here is a simple formula:

GETTING = BECOMING

Here is my view on that:

Getting. I guess I don’t have to tell you much about getting. The wealth generation (how I like to call us) is obsessed with getting. When we were small, we wanted candy – and we got it because our parents thought we were so special and shouldn’t lack of anything. We got candy, we got toys, we got video games, we got flatscreen TVs, we got convertibles. We are used to getting.

Point is, getting made us want to get even more. My former psychology teacher Mr Hughes explained Freud’s model like this: „The id says ‚I want it! And I want it now!’“ I have the impression that no generation before us was so id-driven like us. We want everything and we want it now. We want sports cars and penthouses and beautiful spouses and intelligent children and espresso machines and manager salaries.

Second problem: We don’t strive for what we want. We are used to get things immediately. So, what we get is instant coffee, instant music and instant fame. We think we can get famous by posting boring details of our instant lives on Blogger. We’ll get rich by being discovered by a model scout. We’ll get happy by running into the love of our lives in the supermarket. In short: we think we’ll get anything because we believe in it.

Becoming. Let’s take a look back. The previous generation was different. There was no wealth. There was no getting. All there was is work. So people were used to work. People had to work because otherwise they couldn’t make a living for their families. Today, we don’t have such responsibilities. We are committed to nothing but our own pleasure.

Because people didn’t get, they had to work hard for things. They had to set long-time goals because the world was not instantaneous then. Our parents knew that they wouldn’t get anything from nobody. This is significant. People had to discipline themselves. They had endurance. They had a long breath. They stood up if they fell to the ground and tried another way to achieve their goals. What people had was certainly one important thing: Passion.

So, let me reveal it:

GETTING ≠ BECOMING

The biggest difference is that becoming is not immediate – it’s a process. The problem is that getting often is mistaken for becoming. We define ourselves rather by the clothes we wear, the car we drive and the things we own, than by what we do. We think we are the sum of the things we get. That in mind, we think we can become anything we want to be right now.

Instead, we should look back and see what way we’ve actually come so far. We should look more on what we DID than on what we bought. And when we set ourselves the next goals we hope to achieve in a week or two, we should keep in mind that we are not what we get but what we do.

Set up something that you want to become – not something you want to possess.

And keep in mind:

BECOMING IS NOT AN INSTANT PRODUCT.

The Black Keys

2009-06-30T10:32:00.005+02:00

Here’s what I lately bumped into: The Black Keys.

If you like pure rock music, this is for you. Thickfreakness is an album recorded with only two instruments: an overdriven guitar and a trashy drumset. The vocals are exceptional too. The voice alternates between Kurt Cobain in ‚You know you’re right’, Audioslave’s Chris Cornell in ‚Show me how to live’ and ‚Blurry’ by Puddle Of Mudd.

For me, this album is the soundtrack for a roadtrip in a convertible heading for the Pacific. You look at the deep sky, the setting sun blinds your eyes and the driving wind pulls on your hair. ‚Have love will travel’ is a great opener that conveys heaps of associations like that.

‚Everywhere I go’ prooves, that there is no need for speeding up the beat. The intro evolves unveils itself in one minute that passes quick. Due to the improvisonal sounding guitar, an atmosphere is established, that drags you in for the entire five minutes and makes your ears suck in even the last tone.

Great resonance between vocals and guitar shows ‚Hard Row’. Often the voice rises and falls right into the guitar’s tones that catches its fall smooth like marshmellows. On the other hand, the guitar provides rythm and drops into the voice’s chorus.

In general, I mujst say, the guitar play is exceptionally vituosic. A stable, rough rythm sets up the background without working counter the vocals. The resonance and interaction – the symbiosis of both elements are the greatest characteristic of this music. Great richness of bluesy licks and variations with vibratos, slide downs and muted tones can be heard in ‚Hold Me In Your Arms’. This shows you how dirty hard rock can sound. If I played the guitar, I wouldn't want to play any other sound.

The music is rough but brilliant. You couldn’t change one tone without getting this house of musical playing cards crashed. Speaking metaphorical. ‚Midnight In Her Eyes’ is another song that I absolutely couldn’t get out of my head. Now imagine me trying to sing this song as it sounds on the record. It’s impossible to have your throat roaring with that soft vibratos and that five-pints-of-beer charme! This is absolutely authentic singing from the heart. I’ve read that this album Thickfreakness was recorded in the band’s basement in 14 hours. Explains a lot, I reckon.

Buy it, Steal it, Load it - none of my business…

BUT - listen to it!

Autobiography

2009-06-29T12:18:00.004+02:00

a poem by A. Gray

I am new born.
I want to suck sweet and sing
and eat and laugh and run and
fuck and feel secure and own my own house
and receive the recognition due to a man in my position
and have not nobody to care for me
and not be lonely
and die.

Rubbish.

2009-06-29T12:03:00.002+02:00

What to do with your rubbish.

You’ve got to cross bridges and publish all that rubbish you produce. Retrospectively you will see that it ain’t so much rubbish, but simply stuff that lacked of what made your recent works so much better. Everybody has to start at the bottom. I am having serious struggles with what I produce. Nothing is good enough for me. The ones that are good enough though, appear to recipients like nothing special because they are operating on a very abstract, emotional stage that is hard to convey as a frame for reception.

People will not accept results. People want to know how and why you got where you’re at right now. People want to see what way you’ve come along to make sure that nobody else could finally have done what you do.