aporias

Yes it is true! Rumours have beeing going all around the web, paparazzi's tried to track me down, even personality's of high governmental importance begged me... but now it is confirmed. I will write again in this Blog!

What an amazing program! It should have ended with Konono Nr.1 but unfortunatly civil war and visa had other opinion.
Feldman's work is incredibly underperformed and this was, i think, a rare opportunity to see his work performed live, especially
since it was a very long pieced dedicated to Philip Guston. The 4+ hour piece is his second longest if i'm correct (after String Quartet II) and is scored for flute, piano and percussion. The later is very delicate and consists of marimba, glockenspiel and xylophone.

The concert took place in a rectangulary shaped foyer of the Haus der Kulturen der Welt. One L-side of the foyer consisted of terrakota brick walls while the other was completely out of glass, letting the eye wander on the Spree. Every now and then, a boat with tourists passed by.
Inside the foyer, a large staircase, near the window, leads to the mezzanine,opposite to the wall ouf of terrakota.
Between this mezzanine (which covers 1/5 of width of the complete rectangle) are 4 round pillars out of concrete, two of them elevating themself along the balcony by the tangent of their circly shaped form. In the middle of these 4 pillars, the stage with the instruments. Around the stage, blue chairs, spread in all 4 cardinal directions. 3pm, the music starts.

15:31: The marimba and the piano are producing soft tones, repeating themself in various combinations, unperceptibly shifting and appearing again in new arranged combinations.  The conscious floats away, i shut my eyes...

15:57: I wake up again, same combination of instruments, no shift in dynamics. The japanese girl on my right has moved. She now sits under the mezzanine, on the row of chairs located to 90 degrees to her previous sitting place. This means that behind the stage she is seeing the Spree through the glass facade, and the boat passing by, which is full of tourists. They don't seem to notice that something special is taking place couple of meters of distance away from them.
The japanese girl is not the only one who has moved. I start to notice some people moving. Every step is echoed by the stone floor. Some go up the stairs, some go outside by the emergeny exit cut into the glass facade. Some just change places.

16:35: I get hungry. I decide to switch seats and to get as far away as possible from the windows. The place turned very cold indeed, eventhough the sun is shining and covers a small amount of surface on the floor, nearby the windows. Under the mezzanine, the climate remains the same. The flute is different now. The musician seem to have a hard time getting fading notes out of his piccolo flute. The echo of the piano remains, prolonged by the help of the floor, which is made ouf of stone plates.
I go back to my initial seat (to the row of seats arranged in parallel to the glass facade). I only slightly notice the people passing by on the boat. There is some wind, the crowns of the trees are slowly moving. At least time has not stopped outside.

16:47: Lunchbreak! It is cold outside, along the Spree. The sun is still shining. The music is still going on, couple of meters away from us, but it is as we don't notice that something special is happening behind the glass facade.

17:15: Back into the box, the shadows along the facade had moved. I decide to sit on the floor, on the strip of light, my back leaning against the glass. It is surprisingly warm. I am sent to unconsciousness again by the soft tones produced by the glockenspiel, added by several layers of piano notes. As i wake up, the japanese girl on my right has moved. She now sites on the stairs. The strip of light, along the facade has moved and turned into a saw-like surface, covering approximately 1/5 of the length of the upgoing stairs. This is where she sits now, almost rotated to 180 degrees to her previous seat, under the mezzanine. The boat, located in my back, is probably passing by again. I think it is full with tourists, looking all in the same direction.

18:13: I stay up and walk up the stairs. My shoes are squeazing. People look at me but i am very unimpressed. After all, half of them are not in the same place as they were at 15:31.
The mezzanine is actually pretty nice. I stop for a minute and lean against the handrail, looking down at the musicians and the black and blonde heads which are scattered around the place. The colours have shifted, as the music, but nobody notices it.  Around the corner; on the mezzanine, there are blue sofas along the wall. They are parallel to the row of seats which is one storey down, where the japanese girl sat when i woke up for the first time. That is where i decide to end the concert. On the corner, where these two surfaces join, is the entrance. More and an more people are coming. They probably only wanted to see the Necks, or just the end of this mammoth piece. I don't know if they were right or wrong though.
Suddenly, a more optimistical tone has appearead in the music, something more melancholic and shiny. The stripe along the glassfacade has disappeared now. What remains is the music, repeating patterns which seem to point to the end of the piece. But as there is some silence, the flute comes back. Same scheme again: silence, then the flute. Silence, flute. Silence, flute. There are more and more people leaning on the handrail (which also forms an L, opposite to the L of the glass facade).
Silence, flute.
Silence, flute, piano. Piano...only piano. Silence again.
Applause.
The boat, full of tourists which are all looking in the same direction, does not pass by anymore.

It's been a long time i wanted to post this. I couldn't withstand getting this plant. It was love on the first sight. (a term
which seems realistic when related to objects). Anyway, the question is: what kind of plant is this? The retailer
couldn't help me out on that matter, they just called it 'Bleistift', which means pen. I understand that my imagination
is not the most fruitful neither the most fertile - but it seems somebody has good weed around - and that ain't me!

So does anyone have an idea what kind/species this plant belongs  to?

Thanks for contacting your botanist friends out there :)

My new teapot from Yixing out of terracotta with red pigments!

It has been quite a long time since my last venture into the dark halls of cinematic projectors; i could not even name the last movie i've seen while i am writing this sentence. It might be a surprise that Alain Resnais had to rescue me from the movie abstinence i was enduring, or maybe even enjoying.
Aptly named Coeurs ('Hearts' for the analphabets out there), the movie sketches the story of 6 people who are somewhat intertwining in a loose plot reminiscent of another great french movie called Va Savoir by Jacques Rivette. Both movies have strong links to theater - not only in its visual transposition into cinema, but also in the way the plot and the characters do develop.
The movie starts with an aerial view of the Quai Francois Mauriac in Paris, while slowly zooming onto a facade of an apartment with a beautiful view on the Seine. It is winter and the snow covers Paris in a phantasmagoric and lush film of white dust, keeping reality away from us. No cars, no people, no lights in the apartments, Paris looks like a cardboard scale model inhabited only by the 6 protagonists (+an invisible one), which are molding themself into the quiet solitude of the city. Snow is everywhere and is literally leaking into the inside, as if home or shelter is not enough to isolate us from the outside world. This is the background on which we will see a series of carefully constructed scenes, giving us insight into the various lifes of the characters, ranging from a recently unemployed military sergeant quarreling with his wife to a christian and puritan woman whose only way to fulfill her (or men's) sexual desire occurs through the lending of video tapes. While this may sound comical and burlesque, the obvious difference in the characters only underlines the fact that we all are in the same shit when the heart is involved, thus bringing the film to an universal emotional level where even robots should start corroding.
Switching between tragic and comic (while comic parts are sometimes a bit toooo obvious), Resnais manages to convey a deep and profound sense of solitude, longing, grief and finally, the flow of life itself (now this sounds like a generic movie review sentence!). Not as recursive and playful in structure as Va Savoir, the strength of Coeurs relies in its artificial decor and scenery, thus strongly emphasizing the reality of the drama happening on the screen. The film unfolds slowly and undramatically, quietly finishing on individual shots of the characters, each one sitting alone illuminated by a light spot, as if the actors are receiving the deaf applause of the audience as the invisible curtain closes and leaves us pensive among the ending credits.

P.S. : as i am writing this i think i am finally enjoying my cup of Darjeeling Poobong 2nd Flush: 4 previous cups did leave me very unimpressed.

np: 08-Bravely_Born(e).mp3 by Mara Carlyle which would be the perfect ending credit music for that movie.

Today it is one month since i moved to Berlin, if you include the week i had to go back to Brussels to defend my thesis. All these days were spread with lots of different concerts, and my first attendance to the Berliner Philarmoniker. Particulary noteworthy were the pieces by Ligeti, the Violon Concerto and the Etudes, played last week by Pierre-Laurent Aimard. Eventhough i like going there, i feel a sense of heaviness, unspontaneity and conservatism in this place. I am not very fond of their pricing policy either, as you have to do lots of strange things i never did before to get a ticket for a 'popular concert'. (Like standing in the rain on saturday for 2 hours to get a possibility to obtain one of the 24 standing tickets!. My patience wasn't sufficient to get a ticket for the sold-out Gidon Kremer performance, contrary to my roomate who tried it on two consecutive days. Nothing is really worth that hassle i think, even not Gubaidulina's Offertorium played by Kremer. After the failure of the first trial, i remembered that Dino Saluzzi and Anja Lechner played Tango Nuevo in the Kammersaal at the same time, but since the concert hall was empty due to superstar Gidon, the bastards didn't want to sell us normal tickets, offering us only the more expensive seats. Thank you!
This sense of seriousness was counterbalanced by concerts of the german post-rock band Gaston and the swedish electronic/folk collective 'Tape', and some horrible electronic concerts at the berlin porn festival, happening in some art gallery, which was also boring except these 2 photos by Richard Kern.
The slacking month has thus been pretty successful, and now starts the job search, to afford more slacking :)

So finally i'm moving to Berlin next week, without having a single clue what to do there. Possibilities are many: internship in an architecture office, postgradual studies, research, translation work, or any other thing which allows me to pay the rent and food without having the feeling to get bored to death. If anyone knows anything which fits, misfits or subvert this description, please leave me a message. Thank you!

Lunchbreaks in front of the computer are usually pretty pathetic, but today i discovered something very nice which touched me immediatly. Listening to the new Tortoise album, i browsed through the artwork which containted couple of black & white photos of cars, mostly in weird positions and usually pretty damaged. With further investigation, i discovered these are photographs or Arnold Odermatt, a former policemen who accidentaly urned photographer by shooting crashed cars when he was still at duty. Have a look at these beautifully composed and evocative images:



http://www.jameskelly.com/oder/oder.html

Not in Italy, but could be everywhere really

After coming back from Roma i had 3 shots left on the film. That's when self-portraits are usually born :)
Less narcissic photos in later postings.