Housecat

we've got a cat in the house now, and we already hate it. its way of saying hi to everyone was to throw up in everybody's room. officially, it had to come and stay with us cause its owner is on holidays. i think that's a lie: its owner is on holidays from his cat. it's utterly useless, the beasty: there's lots of rats in the frontyard, but the cat is a housecat. if let out, it'd probably be beaten and eaten up by the vermin in no time, and we'd have to return it stuffed. i'm sure its own uselessness has had an impact on its psyche - it sneezes all the time, i think its allergic against itself.

M.F.!

next months's motto. (love bad photocopies of Ryan McGinness's work)

No more...

nic told me it wasn't only my birthday today but also chinese new year. happy birthday to me, then, and: happy 2006 - will take the chance to restart my year cause this january has been just too much of a mess. no more berlin style living then, work is kicking in again - .

Brokeback Mountain

it's utterly impossible for european ears to judge whether these actors are getting their coached american accents right (esp. if one of the accents is texanian). so while i thought this was an ok movie, solving the accent question kept me pretty preoccupied during the screening.

by all means, i'm not the target audience: "Brokeback Mountain" has been banned from selected theatres in utah, hooray!! (gay? cowboy? movie? first the marlboro man gets cancer, and now he's gone gay as well!! omg.). some intensity over there.

and here? i recently discovered that there actually ARE people in MY environment that suffer from homophobia (ok thats comes down to one sort of men having problems with another sort of men). honestly (have to be careful here), i had to laugh, couldn't take it seriously cause it's such a past issue; even for my mother it took less than 15 years to lose prejudice and to grow up.

But Beautiful

geoff dyer's book has blown me away, i've been listening to nothing but jazz since i started/finished it. slightly panicky, though, cause there's so much to discover! i love pop, as well, i love the way it burns down it songs until there's nothing left of them. generosity! but where's good pop? and why are babyshambles a success? i can't bring myself to finish their record even once, and yet they're not only all over england, they took german media in a storm as well.

Honest Complication

last night i found a mobile phone. it's very filthy, you can see (and feel) someone's been fiddling around with it for a long time. i want to give it back. unfortunately i've used up all its charge to browse through txts, pics, movs on it instead of putting down one or two contact numbers. now i'm locked out by pin, and i don't even have the right charger!

Cable Freestyle

i've often marveled at english cable freestyle. marveled at the way the english leave so many cables out in the open. if you pass one of these electricity boxes on the street, wide open, exposing lots and lots and lots of wires and cables - it's scary, it's tempting: i want to pull them all out and see whether the lights go down in my whole area.

Jarhead

now here comes a blockbuster taking on the gulf war, telling its story from the perspective of US marine swofford who's really been there. i don't know a thing about mr swofford as i haven't read his book, but the way jake gyllenhaal as swoff is being introduced makes it clear: he's the good one. he's not as dumb as the rest of his unit (reading albert camus on the toilet); he's good at heart (loves his girl but oh she treats him so bad); and, ah yes, he's the best sniper around as well, bound to kill, if only his superiors would let him.

even when jake's stationed in the desert, going slightly mad, he doesn't lose his beauty. while a voiceover tells us about the obstruse acts of occupational therapy the marines go through in order to fight the boredom of not having to kill somebody yet (well, you name it, it's not a very inventive list, every second point being masturbation), the camera holds still on jake's face who shines like little innocent jesus in the dark.

the dilemma of this movie: it's an interesting portray of explicitly unpolitical marine soldiers. it has failed to sort out it's own politics, though.

i wasn't a big fan of michal moore's "Fahrenheit 9/11", but it certainly transported unique knowledge about soldier/army psychology in the context of the real gulf war. that's not jarhead's objective at all. it is fast-paced storytelling (fast-paced in the sense of history: the war has been 15 years ago, hey let's make a movie!). it uses the gulf war as a wrap for an action buddy movie.

it's not even an anti-war movie. it's absolutely perplexing that the strongest anti-war moment of the film emerges from the scene where the soldiers, not knowing yet they'll go to war, are being screened a copy of "Apocalypse Now" (the helicopter scene, in particular). the audience fiercely celebrates every comrad, every military aesthetic on screen. the soundtrack of francis ford coppola takes over (the only decidedly strong sound element in the movie, btw). at climax, the screening breaks off, and via loudspeakers, the soldiers are being sent to war. 'go on and get some, soldiers!' frenetic rejoicing.

some links:
the most critical Guardian article on this movie... there are more positive ones, but the authors don't seem to be sure why to like it, so basically they tell back the whole movie to us... the Timeout one...

To Hell and Back - a ride to the NHS

am ill. have to go to the walk-in centre, it's to late for my surgery. get in the cold, get on the bus. nuts lady from the neighbourhood gets in. pushes another woman from her seat. shouts: 'i can't breathe! i can't breathe! please open a window!' people who don't know her open a window, people who do know her have a go - 'you're perfectly fine, you've been pulling this show for the last six years!' i wonder which brand of wodka is in her label-less bottle that she presses against her chest like a dead born baby.

nhs walk-in centre. waiting time 1.5 to 2 hours, okay, i've expected worse, to be honest. so many families with kids here, i don't know how they cope? after an hour, a paramedic wheels in a man who looks like he's been found on some street corner. he doesn't look like anything else much to be true, he barely has a face. wheelchair's presumably his own: a regular kitchen/living room chair with cheap wheels welded on. the guy grunts and stinks, and from the moment he enters the scene the doctors and nurses start to play game. musical chairs! 'who'll have to treat that guy? i don't want to, so i'll do anything else and speed up or down my work as i see fit to increase my chances to avoid that patient.' (the avoiding thing, it's not my imagination, no. the medical personnel who ARE otherwise doing a good job are saying it explicitly, loud, and he can hear and we can hear it: 'disgusting'.) we other patients cover our noses ears eyes and hearts and sit on.

(i'll leave out the very entertaining doctor episode here which includes massive language problems, fancy german cars, jobs offers and a good bit of musical chairs, again) ride back on the bus! fight between upper and lower deck, much talk of weapons. 'right in your fuckin throat man!' i'm actually afraid to get out of the bus, i'm exercising being invisible again, esp. as one of the lunatics sits right behind me - normal voice, to me: 'sorry about that'; fight voice, down to lower deck: 'you fuckin cunt, your lucky day man, right in your fuckin throat man'. ok, i'm prepared to die for my right to get out of the bus, now that the doctor's cured me. i survive, i get the laughing fit of my life. bad. never get ill, never get old.

Phone Phobia

when talking on Skype, i don't know where to put myself. staring on screen seems absurd stupid and distracting, so the only comfortable way to talk for me is with my eyes closed. eyes closed, i can't imagine any distance, i feel as if in the same room with the person i'm talking to. i start complaining. "why are we talking like this? why aren't we sitting at a table, having dinner together right now?"

i like the cable-y way of old landline phones. phone line coming out of the wall, receiver dangling from its cord: everything visibly connects up right unto my ear. in my imagination, i follow the phone line behind my wall, get a feel for the distance my conversation travels.

Deichtor

great: Michel Majerus at Deichtorhallen Hamburg

New

what a perspective: while alex's front window in berlin-neukölln/kreuzberg frames the aftermath of yesterday's death match, anab's back window in ahmadabad shows these nice little monkeys (btw i want them bagged and smuggled back into england, for me, please)