squirm

the sad end to his folk career

the magnificent

ute lemper opened her set at admiralspalast last night with a cover of hildegard knef's für mich soll's rote sosen regnen“. after a long day spent flying to nuremburg (with air berlin losing the luggage), driving an hour into the countryside to the customer site, returning the same way, then racing down the the goethe institut for the initial meeting of my evening conversation course, it was luxury to settle into the soft velvet seating and enjoy her sweet singing. while more than once during the peformance she and the band made most unwelcome incursions into jazz territory (one one occasion resulting in an unfortunate drum solo) her chansons flowed like a honeyed nectar over my outraged sensibilities...

crumpets

and coffee saturday at a villa in berlin-dahlem. here i would meet my first actual anglicans - they seemed almost normal! of great interest was the vacant lot next door at number 24. a hillock of clay and a dozen small rosebushes huddled together providing the only evidence that the lot had once been the site of a luxurious villa, home to swedish chanson and film star zarah leander. the following day found us wandering through friedrichshagen, marvelling at the lakefront villas before venturing into the waterworks museum, which provided a look into the murky history of berlin's water systems. afterwards by tram and ferry to a late lunch in rahnsdorf where, at twilight, mosquitoes the size of small birds emerge from the pines.

Speaking of the German Commitment to Afghanistan

ear of squirm: Heidi Brühl's Berlin

lost weekend

despite the sunny weather saturday found me in darkness. sitting in our tiny lichtlblick kino watching peter lorre's singular directorial effort der verlorene (the lost one). the film, made upon his return to germany in 1951, opens with Lorre as Dr. Neumeister, a physician in a displaced persons camp who is suddenly joined by one Nowak, an associate from his wartime past. as the two men reacquaint themselves in the canteen that evening, we learn the truth about the doctor, his associate and their shared dark past. the film is a meditation on murder, seeing, silence and the burial of truth beneath opportunism - themes which would also haunt it's release and subsequent disappearance (after a short ten day run) from german cinemas. the film's relentless confrontation of historical horror was unacceptable in the germany of 1951 which, on the verge of its miraculous postwar economic recovery, could not bear the sight of its recent crimes. lorre, silenced in his homeland, went back to hollywood where he would live until his death in 1964.

   the next day we left before noon to ride out the the grunewald. in preparation for a planned trek this autumn through the transylvanian countryside i am training to ride (horses, that is). the riding association of uncle tom's cabin (don't ask) has a riding school and so we went out to make the proper arrangements. afterwards, having noted it on the map of riding trails taped to the door of the barn, we decided to bicycle through the grunewald to the selbstmord friedhof (suicide's graveyard) - who could resist? though setting off in a general northwesterly direction, we soon became turned around and lost among the dense network of walking, riding and cycling trails running through the forest. and we weren't the only ones - as we stopped to ask directions from the other cyclists and wanderers we would often as not be asked the same questions - where had we come from? what was down the next fork or over the next ridge? the woods were full of the desperately lost and disoriented - i think i even spied a group of east prussian refugees still fleeing the advancing russians sixty years later. and one can also imagine the looks of horror we received inquiring for directions to the suicide's graveyard... luckily we soon ran into a orchestra conductor out for a constitutional with the faithful hound and young 'protege'. he closed his eyes and waved an invisible baton, directing us through the forest to the banks of the havel where he indicated we could find a map for the remainder of the journey.

   our conductor also remarked that the cemetery was no longer known as the selbstmord friedhof nor the alternate name of friedhof der namenlosen (graveyard of the nameless) but was now officially designated the friedhof grunewald-forst (graveyard of the grunewald forest). the old names reflect the history of the cemetery, which was founded by the local foresters as a burial ground for the bodies that they pulled from the river, whose currents had the habit of dropping the floaters from the big city here along the reeds. since suicide is a mortal sin, the local churches refused the dead entry into the their churchyards and the woodsmen provided this ground in the stillness of the forest as a final resting place for these tortured souls. as the years progressed it became a resting place not only for the suicides and unknown dead of faust's metropolis but also for those who preferred to rest in eternity untroubled by the petty badgerings of religious faith.

   as promised, after a bit more wandering through the forest we found ourselves on the banks of the havel. the warm sun had brought innumerable families to the water's edge where their children were busy harassing the local waterfowl and being repayed in kind. finding the promised map we soon determined that we were several kilometers southwest of the cemetery. given our propensity for misdirecting ourselves we thought it best to ride north along the havel - keep the river on your right (or in this case left) and all that. the next few kilometers found us dodging butterflies, toddlers, teens and ancients along the bike path until we reached schildhorn where we paused for refreshment before heading back up into the forest.

   leaving the waters edge and riding up into treeline, the lowering sun reddened the trunks of the pines. before long, a clue we were headed in the right direction. a wooden sign pointing down the trail and announcing in large letters 'zum friedhof'. heeding, we found ourselves a moment later at the gate of the graveyard. as we wandered between the plots, we spied a small stone with a pair of names, upon which rested a bottle of wine, a lantern and several pebbles. it was the grave of one margarete päffgen and her daughter christa - better known as NICO. singer-songwriter, fashion model, actress, keyboard player and warhol superstar, NICO was buried here with her mother after her sudden death in ibiza in 1988. funny really, as we have been listening to NICO quite a bit lately after reading simon reynolds writing about her in the guardian. her two albums the marble index and desertshore are to be rereleased together this year as the frozen borderline. siren of the lost, NICO was our youthful companion of many a dark and delirious night and we've even a vague memory of seeing her once in concert. our recall of the evening a bit dim, the main thrust being that she was extraordinarily late to come on stage.

   leaving the chelsea girl and onward through the graveyard - past the final resting places of the nameless fished out of the river, the unknown soldiers, the russian war prisoners of wwi, lost beloved parents and the children who perished on christmas eve. all of them buried here in the middle of this pine expanse beneath the dome of the sky. as the hour was growing late and the woods were darkening we left to make our way back into the city, the low wall of the graveyard disappearing behind the pale screen of the pines reaching heavenwards from the sandy hills....

it seems those Fins Finns

might just be onto something!

once more with feeling

spent sunday evening out at the Waldbuehne, an open air theatre on the grounds of the Olympic Stadium designed after an amphitheatre in the ancient greek city of Epidaurus. It was here that the gymnastics competitions were held during the eleventh summer Olympics. Before settling into our seats to watch Max Raabe and his Palace Orchestra through a steady drizzle, we took a walk around the Olympic stadium to check out Karl Abiker's sculptures of the Discus Throwers and the Relay Racers, Josef Wackerle's Horse Tamers and the triumphalist architecture. The sky cooperated, providing fantastic perspectives which would have pleased the architects. Unfortunately the two Arno Breker sculptures (which caused such controversy during the world cup) are not located on the actual grounds of the stadium but are some distance away at Jahnplatz, an area which is not currently open to the public. and though the weather here has already turned towards the autumn, skies gone grey and drizzling, there was still a gaggle of young boys disporting themselves on the diving platforms.

but the little girls understand

the curse of the Knack continues to take its victims (and to think i thought it was only the listeners who were forced to suffer....)

my mind's a mess

lately almost all i have been able to listen to are strange mixes, mashups and bootlegs - the new scissor sisters vs. the beatles creation by dj earworm is particularly compelling. i have begun to feel that these dj's serve a purpose not unlike literary critics - expanding and unfolding the tightly wound conceptual fabrics of the modern psyche... or maybe it is just a way of collapsing kultur into the smallest possible space like some sort of physicist of aural quantums... one thinks of osymyso in this role.... whichever way you position it, my ears like it...

Listening to Policy of Sweet Dreams by Depeche Mode vs. Eurythmics (DJ Earworm)

very far east village radio

listeningto the live stream of my good man Harris Smith interviewing Jeff Penalty, currently singing with the Dead Kennedys, on his radio show Modern Products, which broadcasts every Monday 12:00 - 14:00 EST on East Village Radio    isn't the internet great?

Listening to  modern products on east village radio

Zarah Leander

i took the train out to Friedrichshagen last night to catch an evening of Zarah Leander songs.  Performed in the smoky dining hall of the Berlin Bürgerbräu (a brewery built in 1869 ) i was transported back seventy years when, the workers of the area, unimpressed by the national socialists hung a red flag from the roof of the brewery on the day of Hitler's election victory, 30th January, 1933.

my robot friends

i am loving all my downloaded robot musik.  it allows me to shut down all organic thought while enduring my commute and strictly be a small cog in the great kapitalist machine.  all power to the market!

listening to Ellen Allien's - "Secret"

modern life

just discovered the video for Röyksopp's "Remind Me"...  makes me feel great about being a tiny unobservable cog in the great machine of the modern world... thanx dudes!

listening to  Royksopp 's  " Eple "

back in the country

well i arrived back in the belly of the empire last week...arrived from frankfurt on the same flight as Einsturzende Neubauten, who were playing the following day at the 930... here are a couple of pics



returned to work yesterday to find that my coworker has accepted a position with another org, so that means more work for me.  gonna miss you dude!  meanwhile trying to keep the mind focused on the moving to berlin project, more about that later...

listening to M83's  "Noise"

AIR

tonight!

listening to Air's  "People In The City"

what i am listening to today...

x-ray spex
joydivision
dj yas
nick drake
the violent operatica

perish

listening to dimmu borgir's death cult armageddon.  it fits my current mood well...dark and forbidding, with cinematic flourishes and gloomy atmospherics...i often feel that i have been born at the wrong time - i would much prefer a world of wolves and gibbous moons over the sea...a world of mountain fastnesses with dirt floors and sweet springs...rather than this dull world of suv's and stockmarkets into which i have been exiled...although i am quite conscious that my depression is a side effect  of medication...i still can't shake the feeling of being tired and uninterested in this world...as my father once told me - "prepare to be disappointed" -  though it was an offhand remark - i think that we both realized it had more truth than one might wish....i am currently reading leonora carrington's house of fear - surrealist tales full of talking horses and threatening children...

hello operator

the white stripes were entrancing last night...with meg banging away on the drums and jack turning his guitar into a landscape of sound...they kept all of us at the gwu smith center tapping our feet and nodding our heads in time to the poetry....the set was almost ninety minutes long but i am sure we would have all stayed for more...

except for my friend (c) who had to run off to see the detroit cobras at another venue...