Offline

dear diary - im going mental. im offline for the second day in a row. i travel with laptop, laptop power supply, mouse, mobile phone, mobile phone charger, digital camera, digital camera charger, digital camera connector cable, a german a swiss and an english modem cable, and still, all the wireless networks around me with their fancy neukölln-kreuzbergian names refuse me connection, and a cheap service provider has blocked the telephone line.

Doing the Berlin Thing

arriving here, god it's cold. sort out the heating. whose flat is this anyway? don't know, and they're off. let's not go out too soon again.

berlin is still a hideaway - not for kriegsdienstverweigerer but for christmas escapists from all over the brd. we've made it to THE city we'd like to stay in, so - chill, be here, live here for a couple of days before the circus moves on again.

Eating gets more and more difficult

three people in a hamburg bakery. we try to keep it down, try to go for something. cant. "i dont want this in my body." the customers still queuing for crap get momentarily irritated as we leave.

Great Quality Frog

((in case you haven't met her, this little lady is adrian's niece no 3 of 4))

Hometown

i hate being in bremen. i arrive, i look in the mirror, and i can't see myself: my spiegelbild did a runner. i know, once i'll have left here, it'll take the better part of a week for it to come back to me.

i am 80 years old, walking the same streets all over again. no surprises anymore, i know every step, every stone along the way. i am 15 now, kissing a man i kissed 15 years ago. i am 15 forever, doing the xmas roam through friends' families who can't see nothing but the past in us.

31 again, i get depressed about the state of things. the street where my mother lives, it's disintegrating, dying. every half year another death in another house. greedy people slip handwritten messages into the letterbox: "are you thinking of selling your house?"

it's the night of the 25th, i've got mail from a friend: "got to get out of here fast. will go hamburg first, then berlin." that's exactly how i feel, that's exactly what i'll do.

Love Düsseldorf

love my new shoes, love the 12 hour flat

Autobahn

karlsruhe, frankfurt. junkies outside, dinner at steigenberger's. thoroughly fed, reasonably drunk: drive on. köln, düsseldorf. what's next?

i love driving the autobahn at night. tic toc toc, it's a quarter to two - we sing the beatles, we shout madonna. the worse the music, the better. clusters of light keep appearing around us, fall back into the darkness again: villages and towns shine in "Abyss"-like aesthetics.

other cars, more cars, floods of cars: each of them a cell on four wheels, hurrying towards god-knows-where, passengers tuned in to the same sounds as we, maybe. arrival in düsseldorf. passing another main station, more junkies, Kraftwerk's studio as well.

ZKM at night

what an amazing building. i didn't know i was supposed to leave before ten in the evening, so i stayed on last night. when i left the studio, the lichthof was pitch black. it took me long to make it down the wood-and-metal walks and stairs. a coke machine's light guided me to the exit.

this night, somebody played piano on the ground floor. everybody, everything got high on music.

Things gone missing

planet harald in my living room; student humour in my studio

So much space ...

traveling through the woods, i caught myself taking measure of space inbetween trees. wow! so much space! i'm re-adjusting environments. the flats in germany are that big, whole rooms tend to get lost in the winter cause they're too far away to walk to in the cold. i guess it doesn't help that i'm using the hfg karlsruhe's graphic studio - you could conveniently fit in the old rca studio here four times.

Christmastrees

it seems i can't keep out of art colleges: in the entrance hall of the hfg karlsruhe, i found an exhibition of christmas trees by students.

Sunrise over Stansted Airport

((pics: uk kids do the snow test; dinner with boys; gurkendoktor; this is how i looked like on the most successful day of my life))

i've missed my flight to baden. ok, it's frankfurt then, a couple of hours later. stansted airport isn't a visually pleasant place to hang out, so i hug my laptop, close my eyes, enter the soundscape. womens' high heels klick-klacking by, i love it. the rotary rhythmical screeching of the luggage trolleys gets on my nerves, while the electrical humming of the little indoor electro cars calms me down again, puts me to sleep.

after two hours i'm so lulled in, i'm trying hard to miss my second flight of the day.

no way. checking in, having a coffee, boarding. i realize my jacket has been nicked. it is somehow consoling that i didn't expect this to happen at all - my series of unfortunate events draws its resources form the unexpected, so no chance the plane will crash, this time.

did i mention that, after the short shock early on, i became more and more amused? - the plane landed in frankfurt, my amusement became giggles: i've lived outside of germany for so long now that, whenever i return here, i see a strange funny people in front of me, outside of me. i can watch them, learn to describe them as a foreigner would, and i think i like them a lot. all these tall strong men working at the airport - *let's prototype the german man!* - , their pose so crumbles and falls apart when they have to deal with the wishes of some sweet japanese tourists (nobody understanding a word the other one is saying, of course).

it has been snowing, the country is white, it is beautiful. the uk children get overexcited: "dad, it's proper snow, it makes 'crck' when you step on it!" i am getting worried about the snow experiences these kids have made back home.

where there's snow, there's chaos, so the friend who's coming to get me is stuck in a traffic jam. i jump on a train from frankfurt (little london) to mannheim (little new york) to meet him there. the wording onboard the deutsche bahn is as odd as ever; the typographic landscape passing by is adorable. you don't get to see such edgy, sometimes quite ancient, but often very characterful outside type in london, and i guess i miss it.

karlsruhe, home-of-the-german-police-city, finally. i have dinner with the boys. knackered. watching dvd, we all fall asleep around a fellow g4.

Pissed off with everything day

Happy Xmas! - Actually, this calls more for a pissed off by everyhing month.

I've been rude by phone, by chat, by sms, by email and in person. I've hit my phone, I've kicked my bike, I've freaked out on some people. Job no1 was horrible, job no2 was worse, and there was never any time for job no3.

Friends, colleagues, flatmates. As one of them put it today (for himself): 'I'm at a point in life where everybody's a ****.' Great.

Stories about friends working together, stories about friends sharing flats. Worst cases: labelled toothpaste tubes ('don't move this!'), plastered cutlery ('this is mine!').

Really, Bond Street Window Decorators...

...our Babuschka did quite well before as office decoration...

Bike, Accident, Church

On Saturday I was cycling towards the city when a guy overtook me, went into a curve, fell. Right on his head. Sat on the street, wouldn't get up. Together, we (me +three schoolkids +one man in his fifties) got him off the street, didn't know shit what to do, tried to get the bleeding to stop. Called an ambulance which had us waiting for 30 minutes.

When we all parted, the elder man distributed some flyers from his church. Everybody took them, trying hard not to react offendingly, not knowing quite what to do once again. This man had been such a good person, how he had helped and talked to the injured guy - I read the flyers, and they were just bonkers, now.

Democratic Internet

Could we have the Internet for 1 week in German, please?

We would all have long conversations with the native english speakers on the effects of living abroad when going online. Reading - Thinking - Writing in foreign terms, mingling your background culture with online culture with local culture, expressing yourself in your own pidgin english.

After that 1 week, a lot of stupid english words should have disappeared from the www. Such as "Yahooligans" (please, yahoo Germany: In Germany, a hooligan isn't only a footballfan - it's a young violent drunk nazi).

EasySound

This shouldn't be an art project, it's just too nice and useful:

Via soundtransit.nl you can book sound journeys from World / Point A (e.g. Buenos Aires) to World / Point B (e.g. Delhi) with a number of stopovers inbetween. Rather conventional, soundtransit's webinterface uses the metaphor of a flight booking system, which helps: it doesn't matter that in the mix you won't be able to hear whether you're in Hongkong, Bali, the Philippines right now. Just knowing that the stream is on the move will make you stream along a bit.

Useful? Gadgety? You can book a journey, or you can search the archives for specific sounds by specific artists. Amongst them, the archetype of gadgety internet experience: how does it sound like inside a closed fridge? Guess we were missing that since the first webcam broadcast from that very location...

Tripping (Cereal Serials)

Inside Liverpool St Station. Being part of the crowd, taking in all these people, all their different looks feels like being on holiday. It's then when I realize: tonight I'll be tripping in the Supermarket.

I haven't had any sensory perception. I've stared at code for nine hours straight. Products in the supermarket will be the only things I've seen before I fall asleep. These products will get to me. I desperately have to take something in, and they'll stress me out.

Enter the full-feature experience: my Stamford Hill Morrison's. Brief confusion to id the right/wrong automatic door to get in. Encounter security guard. Stern looks. Fragments of a second: "Oh god, he's going to beat me up." - Course not. Brief flashback on yesterday's brilliant and sad serial killer movie, "Salinui chueok". Re-focusing the guard. Recapitulating stories of men working as security guards in young age so they'll be able to finance their studies later. My escape from uniform discomfort: "Cool you, you'll have a great thing going, once you're out of that thing..."

Start the parcour. The impossible products. Things rendering you helpless. Olive oil out of the spraycan. Evaporated milk. The meat aisle. That's my maelstroem. I spend more and more time in front of the meat shelf, trying to buy meat. I don't manage. I'm hung up on revulsion.

I'm hung up on pop culture, too. Simon and Garfunkel doodle "Hey, Mrs Robinson" in the background, while Soccer Tigers, Gromits, Bunnies, Beavers beam at me. There's a "Pet Grooming Glove" dangling from the center of cereal heaven, suggesting with full confidence: buy the cornflakes, buy the glove, and you can pet the bunny on the package. I've had enough.

Logo sieht das nicht gut aus...

Cookie Hungry!

This even-more-cute-than-the-hardware software packaging made me surf over to Sesame Street, look what the Cookie Monster is up to. It's in a terrible dieting frenzy! Whilst modeling hungry on the production company's website in flash, it's not allowed to eat cookies in real life anymore (in 2004, it was decided this would set the wrong signals for American kids who should fight obesity instead).

("Krümelmonster" pic: thanks to this src)!

Crazy Swiss! I'm getting homesick

6. Zürcher Samichlausschwimmen (in plain uncomforting English w/o the Swiss German Schnörkel this would be '6th Zürich Santa Claus Swim'). It's the Limmat, it's the 6th of December.

Cute

"ZX Spectrum Cookie" (1983 16k game).

Not so fun Web 2.0

Web 2.0 Validator

Great fun song

World's First HCI Rap: "We Got It"