A Thousand Plateaus

the thousand backing voices weaving one sonic quilt in midlake's "roscoe" are singing with a mixture of jubilation and desperation while i'm riding the bike home. they are driven by the same urgency that makes me head home. it's three in the morning and i'm fascinated by how the street lamps create and release my shadow on the asphalt as i'm passing below them haphazardly : i look down, don't really mind the street, observing how one fading shadow is displaced by another one fading in, growing darker and darker and then dying away again.

"do you think they enjoy the view" i asked nodding at the aquarium and looking to the cathedral in the dark distance.
"you're always so funny!" is the - sadly serious and totally unironic - answer, and then "come, let me show you the newborns!"
i kneel in front of the glass.
"see, these silver ones are the babies of this big one..." tap tap "and of those little black ones..." tap tap "...there were twenty five, but most of them got eaten." more taps against the glass and each time the fish - shimmering in the candle light like oil patches on the street - startle and make an abrupt turn. "and those golden ones i like the best..." tap tap and i have a hard time to keep myself from taking those delicate tapping fingers and breaking each one with a thickening 'crack' like a brittle branch. i know the fish would be thankful!

later i find an excuse to dress and drive back home in the middle of the night.
"you know..." i'm being told "if i wouldn't know better i'd say you're married and an angry wife is waiting at home for you..." i take the last sip of the white wine that has room temperature by now and swallow down the "i wish it was so."

1891 they roamed around foraged
They made their house from cedars
They made their house from stone
Well they're a little like you
And they're a little like me
We have all we need

from yesterday (friday) night : been to the museum with c. in the afternoon, which was cool. it's a museum owned and run by the catholic church, but the exhibition is surprisingly open-minded. they even have a warhol. it has been built on the ruins of a former catherdral (and partly 'around' an old church), and the mixture of old and new architecture has a great effect. afterwards we walked through the city, had a coffee, good conversations and ended up at the café (c. is living right across from it), where i am sitting now.

here are a couple of photos from today:




afterwards at the café :

here's the lamp i bought at ikea the other week. i found its light pretty unpleasant (way too bright), so i exchanged the bulb for a lightchain.

before:


after:

(the little statue in the background is isis, the egyptian goddess so important in beautiful losers)

not much to report : met with marlen and jamie last night and had a beer. the seminar went okay, the term papers are gruesome and my eyes ache. got a package in the snail mail from alice today which cheered me up and gave me a sugar rush because i ate all the sweets she had included right away.

tomorrow : gym in the morning, then museum with c., then correcting term papers. i always thought that my tendency to delay the work on the thesis was bad. but my tendency to not work on the new songs is even worse :-( shame on me!

had a number of small things i wanted to write about, but forgot about most of them. found out yesterday that the internationally famous dj and music journalist hand nieswandt is living in a house right next to the café. gonna go with c. to the museum on friday. we had planned this for a long time, but neither she nor i really had the time. it'll be the first time we meet without the rest of the ehrenfeld gang. she's about ten years older than i am and belongs to this very very very small group of people with whom i've been bonding instantly. i think meeting her once was enough to establish a kind of weird familiarity, as if we had known each other for years.
c&i at caro's birthday earlier this month:

spent most of the day with marlen. the weather was gorgeous so we walked along the rhine, had a coffee, some cake and ice cream.

alice posted a couple of images she took while in the supermarket. we had talked about this the other night and i told her that i had taken my camera to the store but then didn't have the courage to pull it out and take pictures. well, she did! which amount of alcohol was needed to boost her courage she did not disclose. there was one picture of the beverage section, and they even have gaffel and reissdorf kölsch! felt like home! 

thanks to alice this went out tonight to quite a number of email addresses :-)

today on repeat : kt tunstall's "paper aeroplane" (she sang backing vocals on suzy's beauty and crime, by the way. just like shawn colvin did on suzy's solitude standing). anyway, the chorus line is "you're like a paper aeroplane" but all day long what i heard was "you light a paper aeroplane" which, personally, i find much more beautiful. the image of a flying paper plane on fire haunted me all day long. i love the flute sounds, the accordion and the way the guitar is recorded. 

so yesterday night i went to the film premier and really : the director had used "moon birds" and "headcrash". :-) it was fun to watch the movie (which was pretty good by the way) and suddenly hear a 200 lurkers track  in the background. marlen had accompanied me and afterwards we had a beer at the elektra. waking up this morning i realized that i had forgotten the text i need to prepare for the session on monday at the office, so i had to bike to the university to get it *rollseyes*

and then, in the ad-break of the simpsons, i'm switching channels just to see s. posing as a cook. am i afraid of ghosts? you bet!

been at the office from 10 to 22:30 and i have copied about 1000000 dvds that will be used for the extensive american film screening this semester. i thought that staying in the office so late (i had to show a film to a couple of students) would at least allow me to read some more of those terrible novels that elaine and i picked for our utopia seminar. fat chance! i jumped back and forth between three computers on which i was digitalizing and copying films.

it's bloody cold in my little shoebox because i left the windows open all day long. listening to "heal over" on repeat. of course the best part is when at 2:56 the song folds into minor chords, the other instruments set in and the beautiful coda melody starts to bloom.
sorry - pretty pointless entry.

paula posted this song today and i got hooked immediately:
http://www.sendspace.com/file/b1ykaa

apparently everybody is acting kind of weirdly today. you come back to haunt me, and people living in towers are giving me shit suddenly and act seriously bitchy. "you have to show a film to the students on wednesday night? this sounds like a bad excuse to me! who has to show films on wednesday night in the university! can't be! i think i'm not gonna ask you for anything ever again!" well, suits me!

i will have to knight alice "lurker of honor" : she provided me with literally hundreds of email addresses and contacts of labels, online music magazines and other stuff! now i only have to finish the bloody info.

also yesterday night i discovered by chance that jodie had a couple of photos from the gig at the connection on her digital camera.
"they're not very good..." she said "...that's why i never send them to you!" but they are good. they are very good, in fact! they're exactly the kind of images i was hoping for! i added two of them to images-section of 200lurkers.com.

oh yes, and please mind the commentary.