schnoidlblog

the one I specialize in getting down to. have been pushing hard to finish up the learning chapter, get my notes all typed and sorted, and pull together whatever ideas i can manage. Of course, in my typical drive for completeness, the overthinking chapter brings us well into almost summer, oops. am trying hard to keep the wheels turning, but the game of inches thing is all up in my face, and what better atmosphere could there be for massive creativity. It’s all Shambhu can do just to get through the day; I want to be optimistic and encouraging but it’s getting very thin. I feel like i am letting her down hugely. I’m trying, hard, and she knows it, but…it’s looking bad for us. and in 30 days my next big quarterly insurance payment is gonna be at the door, and i bet it’s going to be a fucking grand this time (up from 880…which is up from 660 2 goddamn years ago.)(fucking cunts).

Other than that, not a damn thing to report. I live at my computer, when would i have time to do something else to report about?

goddammit. I need a new computer. And thousands of euros. What the fucking FUCK!!!

the wonderful little MrBlackbirdSings that is just everything, so love to hear them here. found this fine recording on youtube, take it and loop it and just laugh and marvel at what can live in a tiny brain. or whatever drives these magics.

I am going to see about working some samples out of this. slowing/pitching them down will be artifact-y, but worth a shot. neighbor is going away a bit and said i could use his monitors there; Liquid Sky has two compilations due soon and i missed the last one. but first, job/money part. hurry up!

also, SUMMER IS HERE. a week ago there was still snow around, today I could wear shorts.

looks like Bhu’s hoped-for new job is a wash. she was booked for tonight; they called 11pm last night and said “where are you?” They gave her the wrong goddamn date. Had big hopes but so far they are fucking up.

Light it up, baby.

Alert the media. we are going to go dancing, did our disco nap, off to see my friend play noon to 4. Verified!!

finally finished typing my 100 or so hand-scrawled pages of notes, during which process I realized the futility of not having the app in question open while sifting through the tutorial video. Couple few euros at the wood cutting platz in the hardware store, few sanded edges and some screw action, and now i have my laptop on a shelf over my mouse, so the tutorial videos are on the right at eye level, and the actual app is open full screen on the main monitor.

told you it was sexy.

have been struggling the last few days to put together a bunch of old and new ideas for a new portfolio piece. of course the final result was about 4 pages of dense type, which is sort of good but also sort of fuckall too goddamn much. but part of the process was lining up a do-list of remaining issues to master, so now I’m doing that.

fuck, I really do need a large job to land, so I can postpone all of this hurry-the-fuck-up forced creativity until after I’m not so damn broke.

slight problem with the Gulf Stream this spring here: it’s snagged hard somewhere out in an ocean full of melted freshwater ice. Whoopsie. Sure do hope we get a summer here! Fine if it doesn’t reach its usual 85˚ of OMG hate my life swelter, but I really am counting on a bit of spring this month.

got a real DJ booking, though it isn’t until July 8th. The lil Monday night gig I screwed up hard a couple of years ago, I bugged him to give me another chance, then bugged him several more times until finally he went oh fucking why not. One of the guys that played before me that first night is opening berghain this weekend, so even though my path isn’t ever going to go into that exact valley, it’s still a bit encouraging.

on berghain, I finally wrote another letter to the bosses, via the general email address (i.e. they might not see it), telling them that, a year later, they are still suckyturds for the spineless way they shitcanned my sweetie, oh and also all how they fucked up by losing one of their wildest dancers and future DJ stars. Coulda had this, fuckers. In my imagination, I accomplished something with this letter. of course, that’s a joke, but I still hope the assholes read it.

remember when i was all, heh, winter, sure puff and blow but spring is damn near? no? well I did.

too soon. Winter has come back for a bonus round, and laid down a crispy coat of white over the whole thing. Then it did it again. Today was cold as hell and dropped a couple of inches.

hey winter, fuck off already.

me, I am figgerin figgerin, trying to see which way is up or out. Bad enough I have to pay 200/month against back taxes, but apparently me and accountant man miscommunicated or something, because tax office came back with an extra 200 due first of April. Sure, I am absolutely positive there’s plenty more blood in my stones. Fucken hell.

Would you guys please reform the for-profit prison system, end the drug war, and shoot all the fundamentalists, Tea Party tards, and the insane rich fucks that pull their strings, right in the face so i can come home? Not entirely sure I am doing it right here.

oh, also, in another few weeks it’ll be a year since my sister fell into a coma. few weeks after that will be a year since Bhu got the rug pulled out from under her by her shithead ex-employers. Made her a super-cute image of the place roaring with sky-high flames. I would like it very much please if this year could go a hell of a lot better than that last one. Pure potential so far, yessirreebewb.

it just dawned on me, living here is a bit like in Scooby Doo where they realize, the fuck, it’s an old slave/Indian graveyard. This place has been bombed so deep into grief; tons of families and freaks saw futures ground into ash, and lovingly crafted buildings and finery crashed to wet filth. Ewwww.

of course a big magic extravagabonanza like that is going to be tacky, so I guess we would be silly to be surprised. wouldn’t make sense if they do something mind-blowing then just stand there looking smug. But still, how silly it was. Except for the mindblowing parts, holy shit they were pretty damned wild. But after awhile, it’s just variations on making somebody disappear or change into somebody else, even if it is at holyshitwtf speeds. One guy was genuinely outrageous, MAD respect: put a big cylinder on a cylinder at angles, then a stack of stuff on that…then a board, then balanced. from 4 meters up.

my poor girl is going to melt down and I don’t know if there is anything to be done about it. Nobody responds to her requests for work. Attempts to keep her optimistic are pretty much pointless anymore. This welfare office is absolutely criminal, so very shameful. Nice enough to play frisbee today, and I am leaving her in the dark bedroom to wait for the calendar to go by. It’s not a solution to bigger problems, but for today it will have to do.

I am still busy typing up notes. Trying to move this into the next phase, of, you know, actually making something, but it seems silly to have done all of this studying but have no organized result to work with. 55 more pages of scrawl to unravel. Most of it means zero to me.

yeah, frisbee, asap.

my new shoes came today.

also, by a fluke, we are going to the huge gaudy vegas thing here tonight to see a mega-epic magician/illusionist, for free.

see? by selective editing, it can be made to appear as though things here tending towards favorable.

it is warm enough out there to play frisbee. that’s good enough news, I will just stop right there.

four years ago today I slid past customs like it wasn’t there and strolled out into Berlin.

discuss.

am studying wordpress, the massive organism I summoned to make this blog. found the button to make it 50 posts visible per page, and started drifting back over a few years. In a couple of weeks, March 3, this is 4 years here. I am grateful to still be here, oh very quite, but I am not seeing that backward look of great pride that I would like to see in the mirror. It’s been mostly one big muddle, barely holding on, lots of promises of creative development but so little in the way of results. Yep, that was just the pep talk i needed I guess. but I’m still here, and I am still trying.

lawyer sent a wtf-do-your-damn-job letter to the barnacles at the money office today. hope it will get a rise out of their dead pension-craving asses.

has to be told. Bhu has been in the welfare system since six months, trying to get some money. They keep making her omg 2 days to respond or die, and then stall. Finally yesterday an officer was frank with her and said, yeah, that on-site mailbox out front, where we tell you to leave your papers? It’s basically a trashcan, leaving things there is a sure path to being told too late that it was never received. He looked at her file and said, hmmm, this basically looks like an untouched virgin case, no work done on it whatsoever. But…did this bastion of integrity actually do anything to help her? sorry NO, so, re-apply, kiss off the 6 months of money you should have gotten, get a lawyer and hope keeps you alive. Bastard. Tomorrow the lawyer.

I am physically stunned to know of a mindset like this, like, spasming. It’s people’s fucking lives, their apartments, their families, and because the idiot barnacle officers feel overworked (or perhaps it’s top-down instructions to just fuck with people, who knows), they just push the paperwork in front of them until it’s too late. It is nothing less than evil. Yesterday when the truth became clear, I retreated to bed and had a small anxiety episode until I could sleep. This is fucking enough.

I have been trudging forward through all manner of video tutorial since months. mainly they serve to further clarify the hopeless degree of my ignorance, with pretty much zero hope of any practical return on my efforts any time soon. but, since this stasis in my skillset has been normal for too long, hell might as well. god it hurts my brain though. mostly. some of it is fun. tons of great ideas, just trying to get an image of how much left I should learn before drawing the line.

pffft, so, it’s 2013? that’s a weird name for a year, but shurr let’s go with it.

NYE was…ok. got to DJ in the room Bhu was working, tried not to get hopes up and glad I didn’t…was empty. then, after midnight, act on stage started warming up so I stopped, then they stopped…??…so I went back on, and voila, i hada nice lil party bumping for about 30 or so, unexpected and fukyahhhh. Continued, and then around 6am went on in dwindling main room…and completed the dwindle. I gotta sort out my sound, it was dirty and hard to contain. oh well. then we slept, a lot, and that brings us to days later. Light it up.

More fascinatingly, Bhu’s Mom is in town. Last time she was here was two years ago, when Bhu and i had just started up, and i didn’t meet her. She and Bhu have a very colorful history together, just the two of them against the world. The few stories i know of her I wouldn’t put online, because i might get called to testify in a felony trial at some future date, but boy are they ever a hoot! In the photos, she is a sleek sly svelte bit of flexible danger, moving through the various layers of the underground Paris of 30 years ago. In the present, she’s a smiley grey-haired cherub, an easy dumpling of gentle charm. Completely priceless to meet her, and especially to be able make her proud that her daughter met a good guy who adores her (plus the whole making Bhu proud to be with me, that part was also nice too as well). Sad that her health is really pulling the wrong way, but her spirit is fully charged. Tomorrow, shopping!!

in March we signed up for internet, might take 3 weeks, hope we can wait that long. Some time around August, the unbelievable clusterfuck of stupid relented, and we had our own internet, finally!

for two days. then it went off. when we finally got someone to check it, needing to be German as they were, plus the other extra few steps, turns out the company wanted payment of the previous 6 months or some shit before they’d turn us on again, though with the promise of credit against future bills. easier to just go with it, other than the whole 160€ part, but whatever. So, it’s been a month since then, still dealing with dumbasses who can’t sort it out.

the fuck?

new modem should be here midweek. hope that’s the charm. what a joke. neighbor who has been giving us internet since a while, finally cut us off, and I don’t blame him, but he gave in once we cried pain. after about a month of hating life.

moving on.

Bhu worked at a new club tonight. too tired to finish the story but it was a good change from fuckall nothing. now to cough and spit up all the vastness of various dusts we inhaled, and hope it doesn’t domino into something worse and lasting. we’ll see.

after Bhu got fired in such a low-rent common-ass way, I wrote a few nasty emails to the bosses, indirectly via the support@ email. I kind of expected for them to close their doors to me but never heard anything about it. Last Friday my old pal and shining-light of awesomeness DJ Olive did a DJ performance there, and I asked one of the security guys if he could get me on the list. I guess the list went past the office or something, and he informed me I’m no longer allowed there. As it was, I had decided not to go there anyway, not even to see one of the people I respect most in the world, but shit…would be kind of nice to still have the option. It was a great place for me, in its day. I met my fine ex there, had my hopes of ever being a decent techno DJ hopelessly crushed over and over, met lots of good people, including my fine sweetie Bhu, and eventually even came to think I might have reached a skill level that would be good enough for it. For almost a year and a half, I even walked proud as a bit of family, boyfriend to one of the highest-profile employees there. Really loved being a part of it.

and just like that the cover closes on that book.

don’t care about now, don’t want to go there. but shit, so much for every techno DJ’s someday dream of maybe playing there. FUCK THAT!! I WANTED THAT!! assholes, petty, shitty, spineless greedy little shits. Fuck you Norbert.

scheduled a meeting with visa office end of month. fingers crossed they don’t boot me; due to various links in a chain of fuckups, I am pretty overdue, but still under the 90 days that I expected would be ok. barely. oh shit. I have all my papers in order, have filed taxes, just finished a German class…will just be apologetic and respectful, and bring the nicest German guy I know to assist, and hope for the best. shitass I don’t know what i could possibly do if they say gyit. Visualize that nice new visa, wrapped in honey-golden light, warm and cozy. More!!

got the mastered versions of Bhu’s tracks from her live show last week, just waiting for the band to go over which ones they want online. She got a nice surprise; a corporate party has booked the band for 10 days from now, that doesn’t suck!

wasn’t encouraged by soundcheck, but I bit my tongue. Holy fucking shit, the show was solid. She is really, really something. She knocked tears out of my eyes like somebody smacked me on the back of the head, and drove surges of confusion through my arms and legs, moiré pattern goosebumps rippling. there was probably microscopic fusion and/or lightning happening. Visceral. 100.0 percent, hell the fuck yes. Report ends here.

poor Bhu, she’s been sideswiped several times this week, top off that tank of blues nice and square for her show tonight. But, in typical form, she’s rallying strong, and is ready to step into her best world. we are so broke it’s a joke, but hey reality i know you gotta crush on me, don’t front.

about an hour from now it’s gonna get big in that club.

PROUD OF MY AWESOME GIRL!!!

British officers in direly foreign lands dressed for breakfast, bolted some familiarity into their day. Which should I do, maybe just take a baseball bat to two random things each day, just so I won’t worry about losing things? uh-guggah. so much to do, and no matter how much I get done, i watch tasks fall past Friday again undone. made great progress on the music video, just one or two more 24 hour goddamn renders and it’ll be sorted. Painting studio seems to be about online, just have to go stand in it next. Great great news is coming annnnnny day now, any day now…

seemed like Bhu had found a great new home, but wait, no, seems like they went and hired too many people, and their “friends” aren’t getting enough shifts, so…see ya, no job for you. She’s ready to fold and give up.

This sucks.

(really?) pronounced like esht, but the sh is further back, closer to where you make a K sound.

huh. so that’s 3 weeks of class done? what a thing!! If I really focus in class, i get maybe 90% of the teacher’s chatter, though if I’m not really paying attention, i don’t hear a single clear syllable. Today I had to give a little talk about Manhattan/NYC, just to practice speaking, and the teacher told me I was talking too fast! A good sign. Since I first started learning, whatever words I know come pretty fluidly, and my pronunciation is generally pretty solid. Words you don’t know though, just forget it. Most German words are built out of too few roots, with the whole array of prefixes stuck on, and very often the meanings are super specific. Um- means over or around, -bringen means to bring…umbringen means to kill. jerks. But I’ve finally managed a decent mental chart of the various cases: “the” can be der, die, das, den, dem, or des…and almost any other word used before a noun has to have an ending to match. And if you don’t know the gender of the word, just forget it. But in most situations, you can just mumble a vague d– something and it’ll be ok.

I get home afterwards, have some food, and pass the fuck out. My head is just so saturated.

Machen wir weiter!! (we go through/forward: we continue)

our little packet of life was getting closer to the spinning sharp things; in Germany you only have to be one day late on rent twice a year, and we goofed once already, so wondering where September rent was coming from had a special charm. Just got a nice $2,500 job from a client in NYC, due Wednesday, gonna be a nice thick hustle between now and then. The pretty red balloon is back up in the breezes! Waft you!

going to go get some materials to knock out a quick extension for my desk so i can work standing. It’s been found that sitting too much is a major health risk, so I’m eager to get my butt pointed at the wall, not the floor.

Bhu has two shifts at the new club this weekend, very psyched. hoping to get some bookings doing chillout in the outdoor court sometime. She’s angling to get the upstairs bar to herself soon, that’s a chillout area too. Would be so nice to doubleteam with her.

(maybe it goes better)

two classes down. it’s hard, but everyone else in the class is struggling too, and the darling pixie leading us through the wasteland does her best to keep it light. Suffering makes you shiny.

Bhu had a shift at the new place this weekend. It only amounted to about 3 hours of actual work in the outdoors bar, left early, but several of the staff were pretty happy to have her on board. One of the managers is the guy who took her promo pictures last year, that’s good too. She got a call today for 3 more shifts, which is right on time, September rent coming up fast.

we’ve both been a bit despondent these last couple of days; when things are going good, we’re nice and fluffy, but when we think the wprld hates us, let’s just say it’s a bad synergy. We fold. Glad she got those shifts today.

now let’s see if I can get some DJ gigs at her place, that would be sweet!

I better go do my homework!

found a good school about 10+ minutes walk, signed up for 8 weeks of A2 level course. It’s not a guarantee that the visa meeting whenever will go well, so best to play it safe. Starts August 6 I think? School is much spiffier than the other I went to check. Sat in on an hour of class to check out the teacher and also let her evaluate my level. Win: she’s a cute lil stylish Asian woman, with a little flip of bob of hair usually over one eye. Big smile, really bright, very enthusiastic, and if I have to be stuck in a classroom for 7 months, she won’t make it any worse. Good level of students too, all motivated. Oh my, this is a big change.

marathoned 3 years of taxes last night. got it all about done, a few more things to double check.

things will probably pick up in September, but it’s looking like August is sure going to be a tiiighht game.

A friend has kindly offered to bankroll 4-6 months of German classes for me, including books and stuff, no strings attached other than the courtesy of canceling if I don’t stick with it. A few friends liked a big busy place walking distance from here, so I’m going to check out the available classes, then wander up and ask the students always milling around there which teachers they loved/hated, and probably go for it. I’m generally not such a huge fan of the language, but I am realizing a lot of that is accent. The girl i used to date here had such lovely German, she said she spoke “hochdeutsch”, ie High German, and my other friend i was with last night says he does too, and I noticed for the first time his German is actually quite gentle and even mellifluous, no stinging consonants, lots of easy vowels. The grammar is odd, lots of things broken down into separate phrases, that go in kind of an inside out order, but I once took a course in HS on “transformational grammar”, where you learn the hard rules for English sentences, so maybe there’s something like that for German.

I have been trying to motivate myself to learn on my own, which works for some people, but I have had zero luck. Might as well. Damn, four nights a week again. Shit. But the other option is to just apologize over and over again. I am getting tired of my little “I can speak a little but understand not so much” sentence; it was cute at first but it’s gone stale.

oh and here we are again at those bare beginnings of whichever future will come.

we had a visitor tonight, a bright woman who used to handle a lot of the bookings for the resident DJs at berghain. she quit not long after Bhu was canned; she’d been struggling with increasing institutional incompetence for too long, and it was only getting worse, so she walked. Good for her, but yet another beacon to those still watching of how merrily and mindlessly the place is dancing toward the drain.

she was here to discuss options for Bhu’s musical future, and had some good ideas, and especially, seemed willing to get involved and throw some effort at it. she seems very competent, though her field of influence is mainly DJs, so there isn’t much overlap, but at least she’s a player, who wants to help.

and she also said she’d check out my mixes and stuff. her agency is small and she’s not looking to add anyone else just now, but hey, if she likes what she hears, maybe she’ll put in a word for me with somebody else. fuck, would be great. I had that booking end of May, and nothing else since…and nothing showing up on any radar, anywhere. well, fuck.

here at the barest beginning of hopefully something coming to be.

went with Bhu Friday to check out a club, for a possible job for her. Hated it, ran home fast. Both went out again tonight to catch a friend DJ at 8pm. Club was closed, I guess because it was deemed too cold for an open air party. Well shit. Long mellow walk home, something to do I guess.

we have both had room-clearing farts for two days. Really. We get up and leave the room. No idea why. Otherwise, slow day.

Oh, except we got a freezer. I looped a towel through the straps on top of the box and humped that bitch on my hips right up the stairs. and then checked out. But it’s here; left it open to get rid of New Freezer smell yesterday, and am about to plug it in. Somehow we get by on the typical German barbie fridge, which technically has a little freezer bit big enough for a shoe, but it’s always solid with ice. Took some convincing, us being fuckall poor and headed for certain doom and all, but I thought it was a good move. Frozen bananas and fruit for smoothies, big bag of brown rice pre-cooked, etc. Lots of ways it can save us money and add function.

that, and the farting.

there is a little closet to the left of the kitchen sink, with a sunny window to the courtyard. the ceiling clears my head by a few inches. it used to hold a bunch of dusty neglected boxes up to near waist height, but in a fit of motivation a few months ago, we got it cleaned out. I got the silly idea it would make a nice mini-painting studio, but no more had been done. The other side of it is the neighbor’s shower, ie water pipes, so I am wary of drilling any holes; it’s plaster, so i can’t exactly be popping pushpins into it any time I want.

Well, I solved it. Get a piece of chipboard, paint it white, and screw it in by the corners, far from any pipes, with a little shelf across the bottom, and a bigger shelf at right. I bought some little pieces of plywood a few months back, and am thinking I can duct-tape a scrap of wood on the back to use as a handle, with a loop of wire for hanging.

I have fallen into a pattern of waking up in the early morning hours, head spinning. So, head, if you must, then let’s think some shit out. I’m about 25€ away from a new functionality. Finest.

Making good progress on the music video; finally got the motion all blocked out, now just have to do the actual creativity part, micro-managing all the colors and flutter.

A buddy bought a little painting from me yesterday, just $200, but that’s enough to buy us a little freezer, about 65 liters. 16 gallon jugs’ worth of freezie seems like a good spend to me. I used to keep my freezer in Baltimore jammed up tight, damn convenient, and a good buffer for those days when the money doesn’t return my calls. I like having a big bag of brown rice available at all times. Peas, brussel sprouts, spinach, soups…and ice cream.

Finally put up two broad shelves next to Bhu’s work area in the living room. They are her new DJ center, holding her huge collection of CDs. She’s a damn good DJ, selection and flow wise, and if I can just get her to fall off her thumb and sort out a good sequence for a demo mix, wouldn’t at all be surprised if she starts getting way more bar gigs than me.

taught the first of 3 sessions of my After Effects class at Games Academy last week, got another one coming up Thursday. Good kids, very interested and motivated, unlike the usual lumps I got at my other schools. Used to go through the first class, everybody good, right, off we go, then the next week realize we have to do it alllll over again, and usually the third week was more of the same, made it pretty hard to stick to the schedule which was already crammed in deep. At this school, I get only 3 8-hour days, which is SO not enough, but it is what it is. Looks nice on my linkedin page to say Instructor, Games Academy Berlin.

Time to fall off my thumb and get started on that music video. My big push for video contacts resulted in 3 fellow droids saying hey let’s get a beer, which I need to follow up on, but other than that it’s summertime doldrums, so, tis the season to make the most of the downtime.

Bhu did her first day at a new job last week. She isn’t expected to get a lot of regular shifts until maybe September, which isn’t quite the answer she was hoping for, but management was super happy, said even for a slow night the receipts were high: people like her, and came back and bought. Go Her! She has two other possibilities at other clubs, just got to get her to the interview. She got her last big check from the losers, so we are afloat for a month or so, a nice bit of ease…while it lasts. She loves to sew, does all her clothes, and one of her machines, an “overlock” type (trims and finishes edges) is pretty tired, so I am trying to drag her to a shop to buy a better one for herself. I hope to pay her back for it when I am paid from GA, we’ll see if there’s something she can use.

Big meeting with visa office will be coming up sometime in August, so it is time to start that scramble. Main thing is to get my taxes together, which is currently all potential. I should have enough income for this year to date; that and a letter from Bhu saying I live with her and we manage together, maybe it will be enough. Then, I should get another 2 years. Just gotta make a big neat folder of numbers for Accountant Man.

Shit, it’s mid June and I’ve only played frisbee once. Unasseptabow.

Bhu’s Amsterdam show really needed to be a big win. It wasn’t. Her good friend who was doing a lot of the organizing nearly died from meningitis last month, and has been way out of commission, and the guys on whose heads the job fell just didn’t get the memo. Her slot got pushed this way and that, and eventually ended up after 3am, at which time most of the guests were done, and the few that were there were all at another band, with nobody announcing hey go give this other band a chance. What she did get though, is seeing herself rise the fuck up anyway, and hit her notes with all her power and heart, and the 50 or 60 people lucky enough to attend the royal fucking audience got a show to remember. Still proud of her, but it just drives home the point of how bad she needs real professional management. She has something very special, and she really deserves to be out there giving it her all, pouring it on from deep, for real crowds.

There were some seriously overkill robotics things, wild fire and steel things, like I used to see at Burning Man. In fact one of the popular artists there brought his latest HUGE iteration of his one-liner idea, a rotating wheel of sculptures of frames of an animation, sync’ed to a strobe light, which I had previously seen in carousel form. Now, it’s an upright wheel (cf: Ferris), with skeletons poling their way across some unseen mudbog. Stunning, MASSIVE. Other stuff was outrageously complex, but less overwhelming, like this crazy dragon with flexing tail, wings, and head, which sputtered and clattered back and forth, looking like a bunch of spazzy hydraulics and not much else. Hey, whatever keeps the needle out of your arm.

Me, my contribution, after the first night’s running down of every question/issue for Bhu, was mostly limited to swollen eyes, bricked sinuses, and asthma, all from whichever local dust/pollen/fucker that hit my buttons. Luckily, i thought of putting a wet sock over my nose and mouth, so was able to at least get some sleep. Asthma? I’ve never even had that before! Ffffffuck!

We stayed in the biggest wagenburg I have ever seen. Vaagen vaat? There is a thing here called a circus wagon. I suppose its original purpose was in fact as part of a circus, but I think it’s become something more. Two axles, but at the far ends of the trailer, rather than under the center. Often, a raised center strip in the roof with skylights down the sides. When you get a bunch of them, and whichever other camping trailers, found-wood shacks, and some handy robust hippie-punks together on a piece of land, you have the outdoor form of a squat: wagenburg. There’s one in Berlin I’ve been to that’s not a whole lot more than an artsy slum, but some of the people at ADM really have skills, and a hell of a work ethic. I bet there are 200 wagons at this place!! This, maybe, appears to be the view from above (use the satellite version), so feel free to count them yourselves. Wild to be in the presence of productive people again, after the casual fuckoff stasis that seems to be the norm in Berlin.

anyway, i have so been craving my bed since hours.

grinding away at compiling an updated list of potential work leads today. holy crap is Berlin ever the center of design, SO many people at it here. Quite a spread in quality though; i see some things that make me feel like a rustic relic, with no business showing my face, and then I see other stuff so klunky that you have to wonder just what voodoo they are using to stay in business. spent a good while updating all of the videos on my site; many were compressed using an outdated format, and took a long time to load. Had read that the best time to contact people is between 10 and 10.30, Tu-Th, so I’m going to be getting together a masssive folder of emails, and at 10.01 Tuesday I start clicking send.

looking forward to being hundreds of kilometers away from our life here, when we go to Amsterdam on Thursday. Bhu promises that the event will be huge fun. We could use some fun, it’s been not such a hopeful place here at home. The club that promised her work, turns out they are pretty flaky about communication, and tend to put way too many people on the roster, such that nobody gets enough shifts. I would have bet cash that other clubs would have sought her out when they heard she was available, but so far, yeah not exactly. Outside of berghain, the party scene in this town is a bit ordinary. Lots and lots of it, but the quality is the same as everywhere else.

when I was at my sister’s, i found a letter my Mom had written us, 14 handwritten sides about whatever random patches of her history came to mind. I wish it was 10x longer, but it’s still a real treasure. here and there are sweet bits, like, my Dad didn’t have a car for a long time, so she would ride the 30 miles to pick up him and other guys, and how she would sit on his lap the whole way home…how sometimes she would visit him at his mother’s house for a week. I remember she had told me if his sisters had a boy on the living room couch, Gramma would just toss a blanket over them, so I guess it’s not a stretch to say Mom n Dad were doin’ it before they got married, and good for them. She also hints at how she worked to get him, encouraging the other waitress at her restaurant that was seeing him to dump him, stuff like that. She was a shy bit of girl, but went after what she wanted.

And worked so goddamn hard. I think she was very lonely, and she hitched her heart to another guy who just never gave her the love she deserved, then broke her heart and married someone else. My sister knuckled down and got a job as a hairstylist, but me, I was pretty worthless, just a drain, though I know she was super proud of me. Her whole life, all she did was pull.

I don’t know that I inherited much of her incredible determination, but then again I don’t have two hungry little shits bugging me for dinners. Allergies have been hitting me hard this last week and i am about ready to just fold.

have a maybe nice gig this weekend. was originally scheduled for a large room in the city, was psyched about that, but has moved well outside the ring (the loop of train the surrounds Berlin), to a much much smaller room. I play 7-8am on the techno floor, then again 9-10 chillout in the open air floor outside. It’s a birthday party for a woman who used to run several techno clubs here for like 15 years, and she’s my new biggest fan, so it means a lot to be invited. I’m guessing the crowd will be her friends who are all long-time veterans of the techno scene, so it will a privilege to get at them with my best.

off to a picnic or two today, so far the weather seems pretty mellow for the day. bringing a frisbee…

in a week and a half, we train it to Amsterdam. Bhu’s band is playing at Robodock, a long-running festival of haywire robotics and industrial castoff mega-re-glomitizing. They play right after the main act on opening night. Can’t wait to see her rule that crowd.

went to Berghain last night, last night meaning 10am Sunday, to see my favorite DJ DVS1 play. Bhu really didn’t want me going, her wounds are still raw from the firing, but I have missed him twice now and just had to. I’ve been up all weekend working, so didn’t have much energy, but the place has really changed for me and I just could not light up. I used to feel such a great charge going up those intentionally magnificent stairs, now it just seems like an empty charade to me.

Tried to avoid going upstairs, where her old bar is; went in the main part of the bar but only snuck a distant glance at hers. Management thought she bitched too much about lack of support from them, but every other bartender who’s done a single shift says no ordinary human can do that shit F and Sat every week. It’s back by the bathrooms, where people do their drugs, and also crash on couches because they’re too fucked up, that’s the usual crowd there: a mess. Great decision, change it from your top money making bar to the place of rotating employee dread. It’s costing them 2K or more per weekend for the luxury of not having her there.

and with that, my days of going to berghain are pretty much over. will go back in September to see my buddy Brendon Moeller play, but until then likely not at all.

a couple small jobs have dropped in the last two days, one other that might end up being around a grand (though for wayyyyy too much work), and last night a cousin i haven’t seen in decades expressed some interest in my art, and seems committed to picking up about 2G of work, and already sent me $500! fuck yes, we are in the game again!

gonna be sitting in this chair a lot, i am once again loaded up with work. just ordered some L-Theanine yesterday; it’s supposed to make caffeine a good thing, take away the negative effects and make the good ones better. I really need to be able to regulate my energy better; i sleep so much in the daytime, then am up all night. daylight, want more of that please.

it’s now been two weeks, and we are still in shock. Bhu should be able to get a little help from the German dole, and some unemployment, but so far I haven’t been able to get her to move towards any office. a few friends are helping out financially, and believe me every bit helps. We made a big push to contact a ton of her friends last Saturday, and ask them to keep me in mind, help me make some connections, but so far, out of maybe 40 people contacted, we have gotten exactly zero responses, not even a “sure will have a look”. Not quite the puff of optimism she needed, but we’ll try some more stuff soon.

I made this page to list my skills and stuff; if any of you know anyone you can forward it to, now would be the time. Thanks.

and send a virtual hug or two our way. game of inches here, every bit.

my girlfriend has worked at the big techno club here since 7 years, even since it was at an earlier location. She is, no exaggeration, an institution in the scene, a true icon. Not perfect, she can be a bit bitchy when customers get out of line, though most do deserve a bit of a spanking. But charisma, she’s got it. She has been stressing all week because they called her into the office today, no idea why. Tried to keep her calm, it can’t be bad; maybe they’re just finally going to sit down and address the growing list of fucked up problems she’s been having.

Wrong. Fired. No warning, no notice, no chance to go away and cool down and return for second chance, not even ease out and bid farewell to the regulars over a month (though really, most of the regulars have given up on it a long time ago). FUCKING ASSHOLES. Poor thing is so totally crushed. Maybe it was time to bring things to an end, but they didn’t need to be so goddamn cruel and heartless about it. Most likely the new social-piranha manager did it to get the pants off one of the incompetent barbacks that’s been making her job a pain. Management there is becoming a bunch of political gossips, hiring cronies with zero charisma or drive.

right now, she is completely despondent. I expect she will be sleeping for several days. I am so going to miss seeing her reigning over that little bar; it’s when she was at her shining best. GODDAMMIT. No doubt, with considerable effort, we will arrange a sufficient bounce, but motherfuckers this really catches us flatfooted.

And since she’s out, i can now name the club, and say what I want: Berghain. Supposedly the best club in the world, and once I would say yes it was. But in the 3 years I’ve been going, I’ve watched the vibe there slowly go from brilliant to over, and nothing could ring the deathknell better than the loss of my gem darling. ASSHOLES, you are BEIGE!!

people, please send me some After Effects work. fucking hell I need for that phone to ring…

looks like I’ll be front-toothless for the next few weeks; dentist moved the process along to the next part, which included grinding the remainder into nothing, then trying to glue a temp crown in place. First attempt didn’t work, so he tried attaching it to the teeth on either side. Yeah no, that lasted about three bites. So, grin you bastard.

Going to Poznan, Poland again in a few weeks, my first road gig since I went there a year and a half ago. No idea what it’ll be, but it’s the birthday party for a social DJ there, so maybe her friends will show up. And yeah, I’ll be gap-faced then. La.

got a nice compliment the other night; the woman whose party i am playing end of May, the one who was right in there for much of the history of techno in Berlin, told me I am the only DJ she’s heard in the last maybe 15 years who gets her to where I get her. I am trying to gently coax her into working some of her network for me, maybe even finding me a booking agent; gosh that would be swell. If I contact anyone direct, with my non-existent dancefloor pedigree, i won’t even be ignored, will just bounce right off the glass as if I didn’t exist, forever. With her word behind it, I expect someone should have the good sense to take the call. My new mix is outstanding, so hopefully that will get the chains to jingle.

Also the other week I was at Berghain, and said hi to the girlfriend of one of my favorite DJs; she introduced me to her friend, who said, oh, you’re the DJ? I have two mixes of yours, and: you are really something special. Doubly nice that she said it in front of that DJ’s babe, game of inches and all.

So, yeah, a few lights flirting on the horizon. Good thing, because I am feeling a bit despondent of late. I gotta get my creaky ass to the frisbee field already.

being the sensitive person she is, it would be very easy for her to get sucked into the emotional vacuum of the chemistry-challenged vibe of her band. She rose above it. Way above it. Fucking hell, when she hits the gas, the motor is happy to be that motor. All the guys got to see what the game is really about: you wanna be in a band with this wild force, then that’s the level you oughta be playing at, not dinking around with jockeying with each other. NEXT!

the creeping crud has finally subsided/mostly fucked the hell off, so am mad busy trying to look busy again. Tonight 28, Bhu’s band is playing, should get a hundred or maybe 2, then I DJ after, start gentle and haunting then gradually try to turn the party on. In full pit crew mode, trying to keep it all on the rails and moving towards the goal. Friday we go to Geneva Switzerland, where they headline before supposedly 2,000: THIS I so wanna see. then we buzz down to Zurich for a couple of days and come back on Monday. Switzerland huh, sounds fine by me! There’s still very impacted tension gunking up the vibe of the band, mainly in the person of the absolutely brilliant guitarist; fingers extra crossed that he’ll have a good enough time playing there that he is inspired to sort out his priorities in a way that puts valuing the vibe of the band high enough up.

Got a nice note from my sister tonight, so very not, that the shop where a lot of my stuff is stored had some water damage. No idea what is affected. All the paintings I saved are there. Great. Also, she’s going to be fixing that place up soon, so needs it emptied out, and doesn’t have room in her house for my stuff, so can I please make some arrangements? And come and deal with it? Goddammit. I don’t have the time and omfg certainly not the money, and I *REALLY* don’t want to set foot in the US anytime soon. Plus, my MD license is expired, leaving me rather paralyzed. But, there’s acceptance, and everything else. One way or another, i guess there’s a big chapter coming down the river. Really sucks. Whatev.

First time i played at our new location, a friend came with two women. One of them was super supportive of my set, thumbs up over and over, big smiles. Turns out she used to run a series of excellent techno clubs here since the early days, and has pretty much seen and heard the best of them. It seems she is a big fan of my mixing. Coming from the average dancer/guest, that’s a fine and welcome thing, but coming to it with a history like that, damn, that leaves a mark, innit? She is planning a 50th birthday party end of May, and I am invited to play. Everybody else on the bill is a who’s-who of early underground Berlin techno, very choice. Yep, them and one rising star. This is the sort of news I like, indeed.