Good mornnggnggshshzstaphzzshzzztaptapzsshshhsgzzzgzgh.....

Unbelievable. Awoken to drilling. Sharp, penetrating and, worst of all, impossible to localize. Repetitive but completely irregular making it absolutely nerve wrecking. The walls, the ceiling, the floor, my bed, my head: all these could be the origin of the sound which was not just a sound but a palpable physical disturbance. The very air molecules shuddering with every grating, vibrating drill.
Construction? Destruction? Mass disruption? The drilling was broken by an irrhythmic hammering. Even higher pitched and almost more irritating because of its unpredictability. It was tinny and cut off but still so unforgiving.
Unacceptable! I say, inexcusable! Curses! And curses again! And where to throw these worthless sounds? From what direction was this unendurable noise even coming? What untenable objections to a maddening, maddening, maddening sound!
Anytime this would be irritating, but at 8 in the morning? Torture.
Unable to stay one more moment I ran out of the apartment and began to pace the hall like a crazed dog—hunting, ears rigid, for the possible source. Upstairs? Downstairs? Up. I went two floors on the lift. 22nd floor. The halls were literally shaking. So was a very livid I.
By the 24th floor I couldn’t tell if it was louder or not. Still in an underslept dreamstate I gave up and went back to bury my head between pillow and bed. I started to imagine that a giant was taking a mega enormous drill down the whole side of the building At some point the drilling died down, but not before strange dreams emerged in which I was still restless, hunting on the balcony of the highest floor, for the source. Barging in and out of people’s private rooms, in and out of vibrating halls until giving up and retiring once again, in an endless cycle, back to my bed; only to be importuned myself by barging dream people coming in to meddle with my dream windows.

pitchers part I: living and studying

Ok here it is! What you’ve all been waiting for! A semi-demi-update in picture edition. brought to you by berlin-so-far productions.

i rent a place from friends. this is the family, she's a photographer, he's a musician. cute no?

the view from my windows, ta da
in case i need to check the time, two clock towers! (rainbow, limited edition)

and this is the sunset sideit looks over Hackescher Markt.
i wanted to take a picture of the vertical view to the bottom but i dont know if i have—oops i dropped my camera from the 18th floor—insurance.

here is berlina in my kitchen, on a night lotte was here and we all wanted brownies and ice cream and banananas foster.

note the e f on the wall. i rearranged it to my liking but it was already there before i moved in.
fate?
p.s. that was the most awesome dessert night of my life.




so..sound studies. here are some people
jan who makes records and marco from venezuela who documents everything and has amazing video art.
we explored an former brewery and
found some underground artists studio.

i mean literally underground.
















we are all working on a project about Siemensstadt, an old industrial settlement to the west.
jana and marco and i went there to do ground research and find out what this place was about. so we climbed a refrigerator.


found some tracks.







went through a dark rusted gate




and found an alternate universe

well, thats all for today. photos upload so slowly! tune in for the next installment: people, music and madness!

nightwalker

It is late. I am restless, and descend from my tower to pace. survey the realm.
Places should all be closed by this hour, concerts over, kids asleep. And there is a certain stillness, quietness to a Sunday midnight. Still, there are many many exceptions. Oranienburger is decked in its perpetual post dusk glow (tourists roam drunken, lost, loud, overwhelmed, euphoric; prostitutes pout—dotting the way like sugar candy in plastic pink wrapping and black laces; dealers lounge in the gated doorways of Tacheles courtyard; the new 24 hour health food snack store glares green from across the tram station, and all is right with the mitte world). So I wander in a wide circle, past these lights, around to Tor (the last fruit and beer stands still open, grapes for sale) peer in schokoladen as I pass, then back down through some winding way finding the right path half by instinct and half by following the blinking light of the tv tower.
It is still one of the things I love about berlin that you can walk down not just one, but even two or three streets in the very middle of the city and not see a soul. As though the night retains a certain sacredness.

why do we find out all we would have wanted to know
as soon as we don't want to know it.

sleeping like a baby

Babies filled my dreams,
Babies with oversized heads and eyes.
One with a robotic looking thing for a neck. The head atop it shaped elongated like a fetus.

On the subway somehow a group of us who were gathered for a reason I now forget, passively resisted the controllers of the train car. We refused to pay, to leave, we just wanted to get back home. At the critical moment when the controllers first came the man across the aisle, eye twinkling, looked at me and said ‘tar?’
I knew what that meant.
‘tar.’ I answered. We shook hands.
That’s how the resistance started.
When we got to where we needed to go we dispersed in small groups. My friend, I and a man with a crooked nose went to an abandoned ice cream factory, or a working one that my friend owned. Upstairs was an apartment (christines? Where lived her mother father, grandmother) with colorful but yellowed wallpaper. That’s where the babies were. It was just one at first, sleeping. But then they started waking up.

for whom

I can hear church bells out my window, interspersed at various distances. Muted by buildings, tilted widows and that gathering dusty fog that seems to settle here of an evening. Sunday, they began at half past five and are still at it. It’s something that still strikes me as quaint, church bells; something that shouldn’t be part of the city soundscape. In my dirty old town, sunday bells were the toll of ice cream trucks.

Its hard for me to hold up the first few classes (the first week) of the sound studies program against what I expected, because I have no clear idea exactly what I expected. Dissent is brewing over the sound anthropology section though. It turns out that the professor who was there before needs to leave for a while, so he is not teaching our class and there is a woman instead. She has written a lot on music and philosophy and so on and so forth and must have been deemed the woman for the job. But her program, though it includes fascinating materials and themes, is very different than the focus before. Many of the students, myself included, find it far too much music theory and traditional aesthetics and not enough of the sense-based acoustic communication approach that the previous professor outlined. How to reconcile this? to move toward the former themes without alienating our present professor? We will figure something out. The side result of this is that, I think, we are banding together more as a group.

Ah, the group. its quite funny. There are a people who seriously studied music (medieval chamber choir) and have done sound to installation art, a guy who studied acoustic engineering/mastering, musicians of rock bands, electronica, a couple people from punk music, a pr rep who’s done logopaedic singing, people who’ve done music to animation or video or commercials even, an engineer from Tokyo who’s done fluxus-type art pieces, a mixed media photo-documenter from Venezuela and then there’s, well, me. Aged across the board. I’m definitely curious to see how and what turns out. also remind me to talk about sam auinger.

The bells have stopped. It’s six.

it says so

When i heard we were to present ourselves for a 10 15 minutes and i wondered what i should say about myself and what i would present my first instinct was to turn to books. This i think in itself is a good indication of the way i go about things.

reservations

Finally by the time the bus comes i have considered the 6 plus hour train ride. I barely want to look out the windows to the last views of the bielefeld highway.
The boy a seat ahead reseves the front windows with two beers so that he can stare down at his sodoku.
We pass eckendorferstr and i feel...sad! or not so much missing as though i did not get enough sleep. Was that only this morning that they left, I accompanied on four hours sleep to the train station to bid farewell, on a long flight to ny?

I miss them already, I am anxious to go, I am anxious that I am going, I miss my space already, maybe it is the small sleep but I start to cry half a dozen times before breakfast.

Aha! I am here, am in berlin. Disoriented and sleepyheaded or dreamachy as much as six hours sedentary bus ride as sleeplessness.
Sibylle’s baby is crying in the next room, she awws and oohs to calm it. Mostly it is a cute bundle, pimply at the moment with some sort of babyacne, which just makes it look so comical and easier to laugh at, which is good, because that makes it smile too.

swords

Its beautiful thing to have ones heart burst apart first thing in the morning. By words which, irrespective of time and place cut lovelingly all your skin open and leave you only able to stand breathing lightlife hard in as all bloodlife rushes out from your veins. Pulled into old and near past, present future and even more disorienting a new present new past and those past presents futures that may have been or almost were. And those you are still not sure can’t be.
The effect of a few letters strung together. Backed by a few thoughts, the trail of one finally thinking through perhaps, what they ought to have much earlier.

The bbq and easter fire burned anticlimactically..but perhaps that is just the way in bielefeld. Existence and stability in mediochrity, all somehow just not coming to an ecstatic frenzy, not codaing into cadence just crackling in a halfway attempt and..well...come in come out, everything kind of stays the same. Pleasant but explosionless.

also i was just sent this.

now i remember'91

the fulled moons all have names

My entire family went with to berlin. I was still looking for apartments and we wanted to show dante the sights. We mostly ate a lot of ice cream and returned yesterday under a full pink moon. I have options now. I can live on my own on the 18th floor, a city like existence a view over the buildings of berlin, the radio tower and, with access to people with toneechnical knowledge (hendrik) or in a small and strangely cut room near one of my favorite streets with two friendly girls and a checkerboard floored kitchen. Is this one of those moments where I have to decide what kind of person I am?
The program is starting next week...in less than a week. I cant believe it. Somehow I’m still not sure what im doing. My dreams are uneasy mixes of people places and impressions, of past and potential, of not knowing where I am or when.

no more pencils no more books no more relativesatznominalisierung übungen

last day of class.
im converting my focus of time and energy to the downstairs radio station.