a springtime mixed tape

caught this one from gabriel and couldn’t resist:

List seven songs you are into right now. No matter what the genre, whether they have words, or even if they’re not any good, but they must be songs you’re really enjoying now, shaping your spring summer. Post these instructions in your blog along with your seven songs. Then tag seven other people to see what they’re listening to.

i have to say picking seven songs that are shaping my spring/summer is not all that easy, because most of it is still in the process of being built at our (or his) kitchen table by our neighbor, and even if it’s finished most of it is not released yet. however i will start my mix with one of his tunes that has been released and throw in a few other tunes off my ipod and stuff i’ve recently discovered/rediscovered on youtube that i really like.

wadadda/empiyah empiyah, 2007

various/hater world is gone, 2006

björk/jóga homogenic, 2006

lamb/gabriel what sound, 2001

roni size/brown paper bag brown paper bag, 1998

and because gabe keeps harping about those children and bunnies:
mika/lollipop life in cartoon motion, 2007

and i rediscovered this two days ago. was that really 25 years ago? i am old …
malcolm mclaren/double dutch duck rock, 1983

i’m tagging jason because i want to know what’s on his ipod these days, daisy because she’s a cool hippie goth girl, charlotte because i have no idea what kind of music she likes, sam because she is writing about her home this month and i think this fits the theme, ian because i have totally neglected him for months, missy for exactly the same reason, and jamma because i’m the only one he will do memes for.
i hope nobody will kill me for this.

may wrap-up

so may was a decidedly weird month. besides passing much too fast it was split in halves, into a good and a bad half, by my birthday.

the first two weeks of may brought along the most beautiful weather we had in a very, very long time. it was sunny and warm, yet not stuffy and smoggy as it likes to get in cologne as soon as the temperature starts to climb. there was a constant blue sky and a pleasant breeze from the northeast. thus i learned what an omega block is. i think i spent more time outside than i did the entire summer last year, or what was supposed to be summer at least. after last year’s bad experience — a few beautiful weeks in april and then blah the rest of the year — this time we made it a habit to walk or ride our bikes down to the rhine every day we were here to catch as much of the good weather as we could. plus i’ve established a 3.5 mile walking route along the rhine that i took as often as i could.
and i swam my longest distance ever — 3500 meters, that’s 2.18 miles — on may 7th. however, my scale seems to be stuck and the second half of may didn’t exactly help that fact.
i turned 40 on the last day of this summer streak, it was warm enough to eat in a restaurant garden and to take a stroll by the river after dark, i was reasonably happy and didn’t feel a day older than 26.

the day after that the weather turned cold and rainy and i instantly got sick. there followed — in that order — an UTI, an exceptionally gooey head cold and a bad cough. wow, if this is what forty feels like i’d have loved to die young (did i ever mention my lover owns a button that says “too old to die young”? well, never mind).
to make things worse we had to go to berlin to attend a workshop last weekend, smack in the middle of that cold, and i think the habit of the german rail to cool their compartments down to resemble refrigerator cars was what finished me off completely. the workshop and the stay in berlin were nice by the way. the cold wasn’t.
then a few days ago the weather turned again and believe me, i have never experienced weather like this in germany before. it was very warm, cloudy and incredibly humid. really, it felt like living in a tropical rainforest. not that i’ve ever been to one, but i imagine that that’s what it feels like. walking outside you would be covered by a sticky film within minutes. my hair curled like crazy. my blood pressure decided to take a week off without presenting an authorized substitute.

so i’ve been hacking and coughing and rattling through the last days of may , mostly in bed, wondering where may has gone. i want another one.

a miracle!

let me tell you how good life was to me today.

maybe some of you remember reading a few posts down that our video mixer had died in february. we brought it to the store where we bought it, and learned that it had to be returned to the producer, edirol, in england to be repaired.
our model had — apart from having a hole cut in its side for reasons i won’t bore you with — gotten quite battered over the past years and the warranty expired ages ago. i was amazed i didn’t see a few raised eyebrows at the music store.
now let me mention that that mixer still costs around a thousand bucks new. we couldn’t afford a new one, and i wasn’t sure about the repair costs either. but we left the mixer to be sent to england for repair because we needed it, figuring we would worry about how to pay for this later.

this morning i received a phone call, and when i answered it someone identified himself as an employee of our music store, and asked if i had brought in a v4 video mixer for repair.
uh oh, i thought, here goes. i don’t even know where next month’s rent will come from and now i will have to pay a few hundred bucks for the mixer repair.
the guy explained to me that the mixer hadn’t been repaired. for some reason it would have been necessary to forward the mixer to japan for repair, and edirol seemingly assumed that it would be cheaper to send a new mixer instead. so there would be a brand new v4 model for us to pick up today.
i think at that point i started to stutter and stammer badly, before finally getting around to the question of how much that would cost.
“nothing. the company replaced it. it’s free.”
i checked the calender. yup, april fools day was four weeks ago, i was right about that. part of my brain still refused to believe that we should get a brand new replacement model for a battered old wreck that had been years out of warranty. so we headed out to the store, and after showing our return receipt we walked out of there with a brand new v4 mixer.

i’m still dizzy. but happy. this feels like christmas. life has been very good today.

photo by c. löser via wikimedia commons

the weird seven again

i have done this before, but miz daisybones wants to know more weird things about me. i’m not tagging anyone because i figure everybody must have done this about as many times as i have. here goes:

1. i dye my hair dark brown, but i leave the top layer grey, so you don’t see the grey roots immediately when i haven’t gone for a dye for a month. now whenever i go and get my hair dyed people come and ask me if i dyed the top layer grey. isn’t that weird? must be the contrast …

2. i can’t stand crowds. i’m a very calm, soft and patient person to the point of sheepishness, but when i get caught in saturday shopping crowds i get to the point where i want to hit people within minutes.

3. i’m foolishly, ridiculously in love with my collarbones. in fact i declared the day when i noticed they had reappeared from under that layer of fat “national clavicle day”.

4. i put a period/full stop behind my signature. i inherited (or copied) this from my mother. when i was a child and she still had to sign my class tests, i noticed she was doing this and asked her why. she said “well, it’s a statement, isn’t it?”
i thought that was pretty reasonable.

5. i go into a hormonal cleaning frenzy on the day before my period starts. okay, there are other pms-ey signs like bitching or touchiness, but that one’s a sure sign. because usually i’m the queen of unwashed dishes and dust bunnies.

6. i don’t own a microwave oven. i believe they are evil and alter my food into something unnatural. not at all reasonable and by no means proved, but i just feel uncomfortable about nuked food.

7. although i love to swim i suffer from hydrophobia on some days. just can’t stand the thought of getting wet. i dodge my morning shower and if someone doesn’t kick me i may not take one in the evening either. the next day i’m usually happy to get wet again. i wonder if my body is trying to tell me something that way?

the rye bread conspiracy

there is something that irritates me no end: i can’t find the bread i prefer for breakfast without a) riding my bike into another part of town b) paying more than the average price for bread and c) doing this first thing in the morning or the shelf will be empty.

my first choice for a healthy bread is sourdough whole-meal rye bread. nothing really exotic in germany, in fact it’s a very old traditional german thing. i have discovered my atopic dermatitis gets worse if i have a lot of wheat, so that’s why i’d rather stick to rye.

now, “regular” bakeries (meaning these little chain stores of the three or four leading bakery chains that have by now almost killed off all the little independent bakeries) usually don’t sell whole-meal rye bread. they have “regular” rye bread, or thanks to the health food craze you can get whole-wheat bread, either with or without sunflower seeds, pumpkin seeds, whole grains, oat bran or whatever, all bearing fancy healthy-bread names, but it’s impossible to get whole-meal rye bread, except at a health food store.

the next health food store is only one mile away from me, so i go there by bike. all the others require a car, bus or tram ride which would exalt the bread price to unreasonable proportions. not that the bread at the health food store isn’t already exorbitantly expensive, but if it’s healthy and made with happy grains i’m willing to pay that. but not the tram ride. much less would i want to poison my environment with my exhaust fumes for a healthy bread (now that would be absurd).

the location of the health food store — which not only carries one, but three types of whole grain rye bread — almost coincides with my route to the pool, so on mondays and wednesdays i try to pick up a nice loaf of bread on my way back (if i’d pick it up on my way to the pool i’d have to put it in my locker with my swim gear and that would either leave my towel smelling of fresh sourdough rye bread or my bread smelling of chlorine or both. i don’t want either).

so, when i get to the health food store at about 2:30pm, i’m lucky if i find one sad and lost-looking rye bread on the shelf. one time out of three the rye bread is gone. all the other shelves are stacked with mountains of whole-wheat bread, only the rye is gone. there must be a huge demand in whole-meal rye bread. then why do those idiot unapt inexpert health food freaks order only so little of it? i don’t get it.
and it’s not only “my” health food store. if i happen to be in another part of town, or even another town, and see a health food store i try to get my bread there. if it’s after noon, chances are slim i will get one. there seems to be a nationwide rye bread conspiracy. i’m probably registered as a potential terrorist by now because i try to buy whole-meal rye bread twice a week. is that what terrorists usually eat?

or maybe i’m starting to imagine things. i most certainly am. must be the rye bread withdrawal.

last night

last night a camel came into my room. i had been tossing and turning, unable to go to sleep, when suddenly the curtain at the door was pushed aside and in came a huge, cream-colored camel, lowering its head to pass under the lintel.
i sat up, staring, and it stopped in front of my bed, raising its head to my eye level and looked at me with soft brown eyes, quietly, silently, for a very long time.

losing myself in its long-lashed eyes, i saw shifting sands, dazzling white dunes, cracked, dry riverbeds and red dust storms. the blackest sky you can imagine, spangled with millions of sparkling stars, and the narrow crescent of a new moon like a curved sword blade. i watched blue-clad nomad tribes, graceful women wearing heavy earrings, and noisy little children herding goats. i found secret green places in the desert, where water flowed everywhere and flowers bloomed. there were cities too, the hue of sand, and colorful markets with bragging salesmen, raising their voices above the din of the crowd to praise their merchandise. donkey carts my camel clearly despised, it gave a little flare of its nostrils there, expressing its irritation.
the animal never made a sound, yet it taught me about a lot of things it had learned during its lifetime. about effort, and patience, and beauty. about long journeys that are actually just one step at a time, putting one big, padded foot in front of the other. about days that only become longer the more you wish for them to end. about each sunrise being the most beautiful you ever saw because you never compare them to the ones you saw before.
in its shiny dark eyes, i saw this camel lie in the cool morning sand on its very first day, resting in the shadow of its mother, and i saw it grow, and get big and strong as a bull. i saw that it could easily become eighty years old, and that it never feared what might happen in its lifetime. that it was happy to be just what it was.

smiling at the realisation of this, i started to walk my own pastures in turn, putting one foot in front of the other. i walked the paths of my birthplace, along a slowly rolling river, to a playground with rusty steel slides, and uphill to a church to light a candle with my mother. i explored again the streets of a new town, together with a new friend, and i discovered memories i didn’t know were sitting at the back of my mind. i remembered the color and smell of the little yellow leather purse that i carried to kindergarden and that held my sandwich and drink for the day. i remembered my favorite tree to hide behind when we played hide-and-seek in the schoolyard. i remembered listening to a woman playing the barrel organ in the middle of the night in paris, france, almost falling asleep in my mother’s arms. and suddenly all those memories flooded me like water that had found a crack in the dam. a little ship in a bottle my father bought me as a souvenir after our first visit to the sea. a litter of kittens, still blind and crawling over each other searching for their mother. painting a little playhouse with green fingerpaint in our garden. the wooded hills around my grandfather’s house on a crisp, blue spring day. the cry of the buzzard that woke me up in the morning. vanilla lip balm when i was thirteen. the birds singing in the steel girders of the school building on the lavender blue morning of my high school pre-exams. and more, and more, and more.

i don’t know how long we had been looking into each other’s eyes like this, but finally, eventually, when the flow of pictures and memories ebbed, the camel blinked, and i swear it smiled. and i smiled back.
it lowered its head and slowly moved forward, leaving my bedroom through the other door. yes, i know, i know, my bedroom doesn’t have a second door. but last night it had.

so how does spring look in germany so far?

gabriel gave me a little nudge, i know i have been very quiet lately, so here comes an update.
it started snowing here sunday night. it’s the first snow we have this winter. oh no, wait, astronomically speaking it’s not winter anymore, since spring starts on the vernal equinox on march 20th. so this is how spring started in cologne this year.

the ground is too warm for the snow to really stick and stay, but it kept snowing again and again during the last 48 hours so it’s pretty slushy outside.
after three weeks of sunny, blue-skied almost-spring in february i find this frustrating, i had started doing regular long walks along the rhine and felt all ready for a few warmer days like a new green bud, now i want to retreat back into hibernation.

but we have been busy the last few weeks, had two performances in pforzheim and hamburg, and another one in berlin we had to cancel due to illness on grischa’s side. i don’t know what is wrong with this fellow, one of these days i’ll have to carry him into the complaints department and ask for an exchange model.
both gigs have been good despite the fact that our video mixer died on the trip to pforzheim and we had to work with one instead of two laptops on both the nights, the mixer will probably need another few weeks to get repaired somewhere in england.

i’m not a cheerful person lately, i feel lethargic and lacking motivation to get a grip on anything. i can’t find out what is going on. i feel healthy, i notice the difference of 34 lbs less on my frame, and on my feet. i guess i should be bursting with energy, yet i feel burnt out, spent.
somehow i seem to have gotten ungrounded, i’m missing one or more of my natural sources of energy and balance. maybe i miss my friends. ummm … most certainly i’m missing my friends. now this is a topic that would need a whole post of its own. but i think i’m onto something there.

reminded of “odorifics”

one of my all-time favourite movies is “harold and maude” by hal ashby. i must have seen it … well, like, 20 times.

there was one scene that i found intriguing, where maude shows harold around her house, shows him her paintings, and then with the question “have you noticed that art ignores the nose?” presents to him a weird, rickety machine — the player for her “odorifics”, tin cylinders containing smell samples, called “an evening at maxims” or “mexican farmyard”. she picks one labelled “snowfall on 42nd street, screws it into the contraption and hands him an oxygen mask connected to it. “what do you smell?” she asks. and he inhales deeply and mumbles “subway? … perfume, cigarettes … snow!”

i have always wanted that machine. scents are so fleeting, i’m scared that one day i will forget how those carbolineum-painted fences on my way to school smelled in the summer, they are long gone now. i want my memories, bottled up and labelled “grandmas kitchen on christmas 1972” or “the hearth in holsten 1985”. and i have reason to believe i’m not alone with this.

christopher brosius (cb) makes perfumes that are unlike all perfumes you know. they are labelled “in the library” (english & moroccan leather bindings, worn cloth and a hint of wood polish), “in the summer kitchen” (fresh garden vegetables & herbs on a clear summer evening with a touch of smoked old wooden rafters) or “memory of kindness” (the shining green scent of tomato vines growing in the fresh earth of a country garden).

i love it. some scents are available as home sprays too, i think i need some of “mr. hulot’s holiday” or “burning leaves”. and there are “accords”, single scents like “fresh cucumber”, “celo tape” and “lava rock” that you can wear single or combine on your skin to mix into a new potpourri. i’m already drunk with imagining what i want to put together. honeysuckle climbing our zinc topped garden wall on a hot august night. my grandfather’s study, full of old leather with a hint of earl grey tea. freshly pressed laundry my cat has slept on. oh please …

introducing: anna

want to know what i’m drinking my rooibos latte out of? here you go:

got her last week when we were in hamburg, and i’m absolutely in love with her. called anna after her designer, anna maschmann, she’s available at hamburg’s “pension für produkte”, a little design store i adore. they only have a few selected items at a time, like the reed bathtub plug we’ve owned for a while now.

our night in hamburg went pretty well, except that the top act of the night, rusko, didn’t show up. seems he missed his flight and had a problem getting a new connection. but i don’t think it made much difference to the folks who came to party, they seemed pretty determined to have fun anyway. and so we did.

we stayed in hamburg another two days and on tuesday i woke up with a hacking cough, chest pains and a fever. out of nowhere. someone must have coughed on me at that party. grischa dragged me home and i spent most of the time since then in bed, slowly recovering. i’m pretty pissed off because i haven’t had a decent swim since christmas and it doesn’t look like i’ll get into the water this week either. but at least my temperature’s down and i’m not coughing up gunk any more.

stay healthy, all of you. believe me, you don’t want this.

a strange start into a new year

i’ve been trying to come up with a meaningful new year’s post but i find myself unable to think clearly. things have been happening here in this house that i can’t really write about, and i’m somewhat less than happy. hope this will improve, probably my first wish for the new year.

i’m not a person for new year’s resolutions, somehow it feels like putting myself up for failure. i make plans, i wish for things, but i don’t make resolutions. there are some things i just know, like i lost 28 lbs during the last couple of months and i’m going to lose another 28 in the next couple of months. it’s not a resolution, it’s something i’ll do. then there are the things i don’t dare to talk about, things i plan to do year after year and then don’t get around to, like starting to draw again. seriously, i’m so caught up in all the digital work that i feel i’m forgetting how to use my hands. i used to do beautiful calligraphy. i used to draw. i wish i could find a way to make room for that, time as well as physical space. at the same time i need more jobs that actually pay. we have been doing so many veejay jobs now that don’t pay off much more than the travel costs, money is really starting to get tight. so, there’s a lot i need to get a grip on during those next months. wish me luck.

the weekend will find us veejaying in hamburg again, the last party on the ms stubnitz was really fun, so i should be looking forward to this. i’m sure i’ll get excited about it within the next 24 hours, but right now i rather feel like staying at home and cleaning out my non-existent desk drawers.

however, the party will be heavy, rusko is about the wildest stuff in dubstep you can find at the moment, and all the other guys (and gal) on the lineup are great and fun to perform with.

hopefully we’ll have time and good weather in hamburg to film some footage to use for the party, the “hafenklang exil” is a deserted warehouse dating back to the seventies i think and should be fun to play around with. it’s so ugly that it’s almost beautiful.

and now i have to get my gear ready, clean up my laptop, make dinner, take a shower … and clean out my non-existent desk drawers. this place is a mess.