The last few weeks got pretty dark…

“Fingers of thought are raking the space behind the cushions, looking for loose ideas, finding nothing.” Robin Sloan, Mr. Penumbra’s 24 Hour Book Store

The few weeks got pretty dark. After the fire at our venue and after Ninja the cat’s death, I withdrew myself a bit from public life and focussed on work and on not letting the tinnitus and the black hole in my chest let take over. It is silly but somehow spaces like Zentralcafé and now Kantine have become something like an exoskeleton for me that I share with others, and without it I feel a bit smaller and more vulnerable. One platform less. It is so long since I have not been passionately involved in working with others on a shared culture space and naturally it is where most of my social life is rooted, so right now I miss it like hell.

The fire at the Kantine caught us at with bad timing too – not to say that there ever is a good timing for this. It came at a moment in which we finally almost had finished moving in. The first year in the Kantine felt like at least 50% work on infrastructure. There’s so little storage space and everything is in the way, and things break from being constantly shoved from one corner to another, and there are so many compromises to make. I also find it hard to make it work as a social space because it lacks niches and corners, there’s no hallway, just a tiny foyer, so there is no space to hang and chat that is not in the loud main room. And in the main room the bar is efficient for giving out drinks but it is not the social meeting point that a bar counter needs to be in a space that is focussed on low social barriers between guests and us. The things you learn about buildings from having to make do, from practical use. But hey, we do make do! It is but an interim solution and as such it is a great place that we will keep making the best of for the next few years. Hope it will get better in our future venue though.

Back to the personal: As for the ringing in my ears and the emotional limping, well, I don’t know if socially isolating myself is the best way of dealing with it but it is what I always do when I am this far down. It makes me feel horribly visible when I go out and I feel like I can’t cope with small talk. And, yeah, well, after so many years too many people in this city’s nightlife know me, so it’s hard to have an anonymous night out dancing and drinking the sad away. And when I am like this I am bad at reaching out to people I would at least like to try to hang out with. Let’s face it: We are all bad at reaching out. As ever I am very thankful for the internet. It gives you the possibility to keep in touch with human beings even when you don’t feel strong enough for doing so in flesh. There are people I have never met and don’t even feel the wish to do so, but to whom I feel closer than to many people that regularly cross my offline way. Anyway. My life over the last few weeks was mostly working, reading, watching tv series, the occasional walk or a talk or a concert or – like tonight – cinema with friends: Eggers’ The Lighthouse.

Oh, and playing with the cute monsters that have just moved in takes up quite some pleasure time too: We got two new cats after Ninja’s death. Our first instinct was to wait a couple of months and let the mourning settle but then the waiting felt like a pretentious thing to do. So now we got Lani, a fluffy shy Siberian whose previous owner got allergic and who didn’t want to give her to breeders. While two young cats would have been easier, she is such a sweetheart that we couldn’t say no.

Our other noob is a 5 month old kitten and she drives me crazy. In the best way. She is either wreaking havoc, running and jumping and kicking invisible demons and clawing her way up and down anything, or she is the softest sleepy bundle of purr, demanding to sleep rolled up close to you. She now is named Missy after the Time Lady from Doctor Who and Missy Misdemeanour EliotMissy “Misdemeanor” Elliott. Lani has a hard time with that crazy little shit that is all jump attacks and got no idea of personal space but it’s slowly getting better. As am I.

See, now I’ve even done a blogpost. Like I used to. Even with a quote I like at the top.

RIP little car

RIP little car (?1997 – ⚰️2019)

I think that the 20th century reaches almost its purest expression on the highway. Here we see, all too clearly, the speed and violence of our age, its strange love affair with the machine and, conceivably, with its own death and destruction.

What is the real significance in our lives of this huge metallised dream? Is the car, in more senses than one, taking us for a ride?JG Ballard

You were my first and will be my last. Inherited you from my mom. When the tow truck got you today an old neighbour walked over to me and said: “Now yet another piece of your mother is gone.” Loved the pathos and the sad cyborgish ambiguity of that. I also felt a bit sorry for that neighbour because in those words also resonated the slightly bitter note of being reminded of her own transcience. There was an ounce of truth in that sentence: You always kept feeling like the car I just borrowed from my mom for a while. I never would have bought a car for myself but I was a big fan of having one available.

I loved all those long relaxing rides, those long roads, especially when on my own and feeling at peace, listening to audiobooks and the sweetest music or just the humming of the motor and the wheels on asphalt. Oh, the old sin of taking pleasure in car cruising. Sorry, future generations but we had so much fun with it, we all felt a bit like an Imperator Furiosa when we first hit the road in our own car. It was one of the best rites of passage, not because of motor and steel and design fetish but because it was geographically liberating: Suddenly you could independently cover bigger distances away from your home.

Oh, that breeze of fresh air I felt in my chest when I hit your gas pedal and headed onto the motorway, for a holiday, to shows, to dj gigs. The quiet late night rides back from other cities, when the others fell asleep and it was just you and me keeping them safe on the road home. I’ve always enjoyed the luxury of a room of my own, sealed off from others, having your own steel cabin to ride. No fellow train passengers who could bother you with disgusting smells or desperate efforts to chat you up. No train schedules, no airport security checks, you could leave whenever and stop and go whereever you wanted.

As nice as it was: Like so many other burning-oil-things cruising in you, little car, hasn’t aged well. The last couple of years I have already used you less and less and tbh you gave me an environmental headache, dear. Good-bye, little car, good-bye another piece of the 20th century. The 21st will move from oil and steel and plastic and highly visible machines to be all about air and hidden machines and machineries and machinerettes.

P.S.: I like that this seems to be the only picture of you that I got.
(It’s monster heads for an Otto von Schirach + Talibam + Shitmat show back in 2010.)

 

Bye, Facebook and yay, Orchid!

bye-fb

The last time that I was shut out off Facebook for not using the name it requests me to use instead of what I consider my authentic name it was a bit of a shock. I was abroad and felt totally cut off from friends from one moment to the next. Now, that it has happened again, I don’t mind that much. It just makes me realize again why we shouldn’t base so much of our social contacts and chitchat on a system that applies rules as it likes. If you want more info about what is so bad about the real name policy, there was a good new article out this week, by Lil Miss Hot Mess, who sums it up: “Put simply, it runs the risk of a new tyranny of the majority.”

Oh, and what’s sad, is, that my ORCHID page will be dead, too. For ORCHID I have made the mistake to connect only via Facebook. Teaches me a lesson.
Next party is this Saturday, shruggie-Xena-flyer below!

In other news I have finally finished moving this blog and my german one, breakingthewaves.de, to my own webspace so it is finally really ad-free and independent again. Feels good. What else keeps me busy rn? I am writing on a rather long text about street photography. Hopefully it will be finished next week. And we have some crazywonderful shows coming up, I love my little d.i.y. promoter gang!

orchid1504-webflyer

 

yours slothly

 

me, 'occupy sofa' day

Last night a few people said very kind words to me about how some of the things I do matter to them or made their lives a little brighter, i.e. my efforts in spreading music I love, making club nights about more than music, to make the places I have the possibilities in a little bit more queer and more feminist and about building community for community’s sake (instead of community for profit). I’m not very good at some of this according to my standards and I’m always aware that I wouldn’t be able to do this without the support of other people. Still, as last night I might have been too tipsy, too compliment-shy or too busy djing to show how much your feedback means to me: Let me assure you, it sticks, I appreciate it, it keeps me going and feel a little less like a failure. Geez, thinking about how rarely I find the guts to go up to someone and thank them for how what they do inspires me or makes my life a little brighter: really, thank you so much!

In other news I had a wonderful New Year’s Eve and it was so much fun djing with Quirin once again. We are shameless and through being cool. Now I feel like spending the whole next year on my sofa reading and twittering and finally getting rid of that bloody cold. Handcuff me to my sofa, “Block Castor!”-style. Send tea and breakfast by drone or owls. I love you but for now I’ve chosen blankets and books.

A silent companion

everybody

Annual reminder of what has become a silent companion: The quiet stifled anger and sadness that reminds me that so many people care more about “fun” and getting along with everyone in the “scene”, especially with those who have big social capital, than they care about those suffering from those people’s anti-social behaviour. In its worst forms this is nothing but practicising silent solidarity with stalkers, rapists etc.

monsters

I hope that I will never get used to it and that it will always make my stomach turn and that I rather keep withdrawing from certain parts of local nightlife and cultural scenes than joining the pathetic choir that silences those who got hurt and who don’t complain loudly and name names because they are well aware that it would stigmatise them instead of the people who hurt them.

Thus the cycle continues.

So old and still uncomfortable with certain social practices,
eve massacre

anyquestions

P.S.: I think I could do with a bingewatching Buffy session. Anyone in?

A non-holiday

A non-holiday is basically infusionhow I feel at the moment. After a summer flu (my diagnosis) had turned into a sepsis (the hospital’s diagnosis) end of July I was taken out of my regular life and dropped into a strange new one filled with a fixed time schedule, lack of privacy and lots of health checks. I had to spend 11 days at the hospital and it seemed three times as long. I was proper scared by the diagnosis as a friend of mine had died of a septic shock and the first few days there were quite a blur. I had a fever and felt weak and constantly on the edge of throwing up, and my lower left leg was swollen and red. I can’t even remember how I helped coordinating our shows in that state – I may as well have texted feverish nonsense. But my wonderful musikverein gang and friends decrypted it all and made everthing work. I’m still sad that I missed so much – Kurt Vile, Karo, The Tidal Sleep, Perfect Pussy and so on…. Anyways: Smartphones once more proved to be the best invention ever, connecting me with friends by a few simple gestures.

My veins proved pretty bad for needles and after five days of punching holes into me only for the infusions to stop working after an hour or two they gave up and switched to pills. That introduced me to the first allergy of my life: My body didn’t like the first kind of antibiotics they had given me and I was covered in red dots from head to toes for three days. But then I liked the next antibiotics better anyways because they were red and even in that state I liked my world filled with pop cultural references: I chose the red pill!

What surprised me about the hospital experience was how little I minded the lack of privacy. It didn’t matter to me that nurses and doctors entered the room without knocking at any time and interrupted whatever you were doing. I would have imagined me being pretty sensitive about that. I guess it’s due to the weakness and the trust you put in them to heal and help you that makes you give up any claims for private space or time.

It also didn’t bother me much to have a room mate but both I had didn’t make it easy on me. It was two 90 year old ladies. Both were basically nice persons but it was tough to share their lives for a few days each. The first one was lively and chatty, even fun at first but then she started repeating her stories. Again and again. No matter if you listened or not, no matter if you told her you already heard it, she kept talking until I could quietly mouth her words along. Also she was insomniac and a few times she scared me shitless: imagine getting up in the middle of the night to go to the toilet and suddenly a voice starts talking to you out of the darkness. It was as if she was watching me constantly only to start talking at me as soon as I didn’t seem asleep. Or reading. Boy, was I happy when I was strong enough to start reading. Books saved me in there. Books meant privacy and escape.

After this woman went home, they brought another 90 year old woman to my room and this time it was a rather weak and slightly dement lady. She was nice but had a talent to time vomiting, urinating and even diarrhoea to our meals. So for the second half of my stay at the hospital having something to eat was steadily combined with heavy smells and trying to look away from her being helped by a nurse to get cleansed after peeing on floor etc. I lost 6 kilos while in there. (I do not just blame her condition; the hospital food was not exactly good nor healthy. I was so happy when my sister and friends brought me fresh fruit.)
It was stressful though because I not only had to contain myself but also help and talk her into not feeling ashamed. It is natural after all and we all get old sooner or later and we will be just as helpless and happy for others’ empathy.

As bonus stress factor there was a construction site in front of my window which I kept open most of the time because summer, sunshine and to get smells out. The workers there really showed off all the cool tools they got, from cement-mixer to jackhammer and something that made really high shrill beeping noises. Soundwise, it was not lacking in variety. Honestly, most of the time this hospital stay was like having to pass a stress test. I was constantly ommmmmmming myself, constantly telling myself: It’s just a few days, you are quiet, you are relaxed, others are far worse off, you will get better, just focus on this book. I think I passed. The last week-end was especially heavy as in a room next to mine a man was apparently in heavy pain and he was screaming, wimpering, shouting… Even all the nurses were on the edge of their nerves. I almost wished for the construction site workers to also do their noisy job on the week-end to make those screams go away. It didn’t help that at that point I was reading Philip Roth’s Everyman.

ninjaI just wanted to go home. I’m still not sure if it was too early that I got out – my main doctor said it was okay but the dermatologist said she would keep me in there for another week. That’s why the happiness and peace of being at home (and being with Ninja the cat again!) now is distorted with a little fear that it might not heal properly, that I might miss some bad symptom, that I might do something wrong and make it all worse. Suddenly I missed the controlled cage with all its blood-testing and temperature-measuring and professional bandaging. Especially yesterday, when I realised that it was the first day without antibiotics after three weeks I honestly felt a ripple of fear. My leg is still far from being healed and it’s a kind of wound of which I have no experience to tell what’s a regular time span for it to take to heal. Feels like alien meat, like not-me, alienated shin. Being restricted by having to put that leg up doesn’t help. I miss walks.

From reading one book a day at the hospital I have now switched to binge-watching series in order to escape and pass time. I still feel weak and somehow not capable of thinking more complex than “whoa, it’s not very doctorish to let that scared and lonely dinosaur burn alive!” when watching the new Doctor Who or “gosh, will people read this as police-state-in-the-making as it is? as scary and dangerous transgression from secret service military realm to the citizen-concerned realm of the police? will people read this at all?” when seeing the new Crisscross NSA leaks article. Words don’t come as easily as I’m used to. Contemplating the things I read and watch doesn’t come as easily as I’m used to. Watching and reading things as an escape, not as a stimulus for thinking or getting me creative as I’m used to. With every book I put down and with every series I finish watching I just come back down to the here and now to check if my injury has gone away and to be disappointed again. Ah – patience never has been my strength but I promise I’m trying not to let self-pity rule my world. And taking up writing again is a first step.

Oh, and I miss my musikverein gang and going out with my famiglia of friends! Illness is so isolating. Each visit brightened my day like sunshine melting snow. This Friday, Confused, I will try going out again for the first time. I even have been promised a hammock but will be happy with a chair to rest my leg on and be among huminz and chatting and enjoying a bit of loud pumping bass music.