intellectual properties

castles everywhere

DSC02714, originally uploaded by obi-J.

for centuries, the Bohemians did not resist the invaders and militaries that rolled through their lands, making Praha the glorious seat of the roman empire, their pacifism protecting them from being decimated by war like so many other ancient cities, especially during WWII, when bombs tore up cities across the world, and many buildings built 700, 800, 900, 1000 years ago still stand, and there are castles everywhere.

public option – berlin 2009

when doing things with our friends in which we are feeling awesome, like rock stars, particularly when we have a posse roaming around in cities other than our own, we like to take that to it’s logical conclusion and form bands, giving ourselves band names and discussing the details of our latest album release and tour and how hard fame can be and maybe even going as far as trying to get special treatment at hotels, restaurants, bars and clubs. you may recall that we formed Tapestry for our tour of Las Vegas in December 08.

Europe Tour 2009:

the band: Public Option (bandmember Anita Drink not pictured)

the album (album cover above): Sportsplatz (released on Intelligent Records, 2009)

the single: China Box, #1 in Berlin September 2009

the rest of the photos can be found here.

AMS>BER

here it is our last day in berlin, and it’s been quite a time. this might ramble a bit because i’m exhausted, but i want to write things down before it all becomes too much of a blur….

we were unexpectedly welcomed in berlin by a posse of friends of friends, via our friend melvin, which has kept us busier and on the more local tip than if it were just the two of us sightseeing. it has been very nice meeting up with friends of friends in both in amsterdam and berlin and getting the inside scoop on everything from transit to shopping to clubs. we’ll be meeting up with justin in prague tomorrow (right justin?), but since he’s a tourist too we’ll probably be doing a lot of wandering lost together there. after prague, as far as i know it’ll just be me and jay in vienna and budapest. maybe then we’ll get some sleep!

but back to amsterdam and berlin: we’ve been lucky finding our way around – no missed or wrong trains or getting too lost as of yet, but amsterdam and berlin have both been very easy for traveling, so we’ll see how it goes when we get to more distant places that don’t have excellent public transit or speak english. as for food, i found it a little tough to eat in amsterdam, as they have kind of weird schedules for restaurants (they close earlyish) and during the day mostly eat only bread and cheese. but here in berlin it’s been just fine as it’s a huge city and there are all types of restuarants everywhere.

as noted, amsterdam was much more provincial than i thought it would be; reports are that they’ve been cracking down/weeding out the types of things that the city is famous for (besides windmills and tulips) like the red light district, hash bars, etcetera, and what remains of those things has become just touristy and from my perspective less decadent than vegas or even some of the things we have in SF. so the nightlife there was fairly uninteresting, at least what we could find, but the city itself is beautiful and fun and we spent most time just touring around in the daytime, enjoying the parks and canals and historical buildings. the last day in amsterdam (wednesday) we went to Vondelpark (like Central or Golden Gate Park) and rode around on bikes and it was a beautiful autumn day and sunny and a perfect end to our stay in AMS.

we took an early train out of AMS to Berlin on thursday 9/24, and the day after we arrived in berlin we were greeted by a facebook message from our SF friend melvin, who was also visiting, and who has friends living here, and so then instead of being total tourists we’ve been doing more local things like going out to bars and clubs and hanging out in the park, and haven’t been too much doing the historical sights thing. friday day we went up in the super tall TV tower (asparagus TV!) and took a look at the city from 300 meters and also did some shopping – best store in berlin is a shop called Born in Berlin (even though the clothes are made in Italy?), and we went back there twice during our stay.

friday night we hooked up with Melvin and went to see Modeselektor at WMF (club), which was very much like going to 1015 in SF except there was zero security and everyone was white, which was kind of strange. we were there until 5am, went to bed around 6, and slept in as late as possible. later saturday afternoon we tried to go shopping but everything closed early, and so then we went to the Berlin Wall then met up with the posse again that evening, first a bar, then a whiskey bar (Madonna Bar), then to Berghain, this crazy amazing former-powerplant-turned-disco that was insanely beautiful inside with the a minimalist interior and an open vaulted ceilings and cement pillars and pipes and knobs and iron grates and suspended platforms that you could swing on. the music however was house-y, and we were getting tired and so we didn’t dance much but were still there hanging out (i loved the atmosphere so much i could have stayed there for days, really, and some people apparently do, as once you get stamped in you can keep coming and going for like 48 hours or something like that) until 4/30 am and got to bed at around 5/30am.

then yesterday (sunday) we had to get up at 9:30 after 4 hours of sleep to check out of one hotel and into another (moving around the city gives you more of a chance to see different neighborhoods, but it does come at the expense of being a pain in the ass), but it was beautifully warm and sunny and not to be wasted on napping and so after we relocated we met up with the posse for brunch, which lasted all afternoon with us wandering through parks (Sportsplatz!) and a very awesome squatter community (Lohmuhlen – map) that was a cross between the domes at UC Davis and a trailer park and the more cyber-punk parts of burning man, punk rock blaring from the sound system in the make-shift bar and a flea market of goods for sale, and ended with us drinking on a floating raft in the river at Club Der Visionaere (map), a sort of river-front cafe and disco, where we sat on large wooden rafts drinking until it was dark. there we met a dutch man who did a burning man installation in 2008 (the American Dream year) called Dreamyourutopia that was a border-crossing checkpoint, where once people entered they might be detained for hours and hours before being allowed to exit or pass through to the other side, if successful with a passport to the land of their dreams. he said the role-playing guards sometimes detained (willing) people for up to 8 hours, interrogating them about their lives and dreams. he is going to be putting that interactive installation up here in Berlin for the 20th anniversary of the wall coming down, i think it might be a little intense. we had dinner, then promptly passed out in the hotel and slept for 10+ hours last night.

woke up this morning to a cold and gloomy day, but went to the Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe, a stark and haunting labyrinth of undulating cement monuments of various heights on rolling ground, causing you to feel disoriented and lost and once you step inside, and the Brandenburg Gate, a gate to the city built by the Prussians in 1788, the statue attop stolen by Napolean and taken to Paris in 1806 and later returned, and where Ronald Reagan stood in 1987 and famously stated:

General Secretary Gorbachev, if you seek peace, if you seek prosperity for the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe, if you seek liberalization: Come here to this gate! Mr. Gorbachev, open this gate! Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall!

it’s the 20-year anniversary of The Wall coming down this year, and so the city is preparing for many festivities and celebrations and tourist attractions. i got a fake passport page with all the various DDR (Deutsche Demokratische Republik) border-crossing stamps from a fake checkpoint attendant on the street. it’s sort of weird though, being here now, trying to imagine what it must’ve been like. we have stayed in east berlin almost the entire time, yet it feels like anywhere else in the modern world in a city, and where the wall used to stand, where the dividing line used to be so definitive, so intense, so extreme, so present and seemingly immovable, it is now nearly disappeared underneath new buildings and shopping plazas and only the scattered memorials and tourist sights remind those of us who are too young to remember that there it once was a hugely different world here. i’m sure it must be even stranger for those of older ages, who were here during WWII, to see the city now, to see it modernized and rebuilt into a whole different place.

we’re on our last day in berlin here now, leaving for prague early tomorrow morning, and i have to admit that we’re both pretty exhausted. it’s 5:00pm here now and we’ve come back to the hotel after a 1/2 day of shopping and sight seeing because we’re just too tired to keep it up. i’m pretty sure jay’s upstairs sleeping as i sit in the hotel lobby writing this. i know there are a million more sights to see in Berlin, but the crowds are pretty big to get inside a lot of the more famous places and it’s physically and emotionally exhausting to keep doing it all. i guess that just means we’ll have to come back.

3 more weeks of this….wow. who knew doing nothing could be so exhausting?

not sure how much internet we’ll have in prague and other places, so the updates might get fewer…..i think jay will post some of our berlin photos later today, so keep checking flickr.

AMS

things are going well here in amsterdam. not too exciting, really, despite the city’s reputation. or maybe it’s just that i’m getting old(er) and getting really high and going to touristy/springbreak style clubs is utterly unappealing to me now. the autumn weather is gorgeous. i love the non-car culture – so many bicycles! wow! the dutch are very chill, and we have just been poking around cafes and museums and historical sites, although we did go to a little music festival in a town about 90 minutes away right off the plane the first day we got here, and to see The Orb last night, although i think jet lag finally hit me pretty hard yesterday and i was so tired when we went to the show i only lasted 45 minutes. that and with their live drummer and MC it kinda reminded me a lot of one of those bad disco-jamband shows we used to go to in like 2000-2001, and i wasn’t really that into it.

we’ve been posting photos and videos to jay’s flickr account, and i’ve also been twittering little updates every day if you want to follow along. whee!

SFO>AMS>BER>PRG>VIE>BUD>AMS>SFO in 30 days

the supposed plan is to arrive, or at least be on the way, to SFO international airport at approximately noon tomorrow, September 19th.

we will then take a flight direct from SFO to Amsterdam at 3:12PM, arriving in AMS at 10:20 AM on sunday morning, and go to our hotel, Hotel V, which i found by googling “hippest hotel in amsterdam”. yeah, just like that.

we will hang around Amsterdam and do Dutch things for 3-5 days.

we will then make the rest of our journey by train, moving next to Germany, visiting Berlin and maybe some smaller towns for 4-6 days.

then on approximately the 29th of September, we will meet up with Justin in Prague, where we have rented an apartment, and we will celebrate my and Justin’s birthdays for several days straight. i will turn 33 years old in Prague.

sometime after Justin leaves Prague on the 4th of October, we will go to Vienna, where we will stay somewhere for 4-6 days, then moving on finally to Budapest, where we will spend our last days possibly staying with friends families before flying out of Budapest at 10:10PM on Friday, October 16th, back to SFO via Amsterdam, arriving back at SFO on Saturday, October 17th at 1:05 PM PST.

those are all the plans we have. i didn’t want to schedule every stop, every day, every location, hotel and activity. i want to wander. i am looking forward to new streets/restaurants/cafes, sleeping late, being lost, staring at countryside and cityscapes through train windows, marveling at strange customs, not speaking the language, having to adjust, feeling as if in a dream, taking in museums, learning histories, and generally just wandering. i may post blogs/photos, i may not. i don’t know. i like being unplugged.

“We have advantages. We have a cushion to fall back on. This is abundance. A luxury of place and time. Something rare and wonderful. It’s almost historically unprecedented. We must do extraordinary things. We have to. It would be absurd not to.”

— dave eggers

mistakes i know i am making

i’ve been lazy again this week and riding the bus instead of biking to work. the upside is that i get offline reading done in the 20-minutes each way that i otherwise don’t find/make time to do. i finished A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius, and reading dave eggers on the bus every morning put me in a thoughtful and contemplative but good mood. now i’m reading The Informers, and reading Bret Easton Ellis on the bus in the morning does not so much put me in a good mood.

anyway, i know i am going to europe for the first time TOMORROW and so should write something maybe about that today also, but before i forget, in the appendix/addenda to AHWOSG, written later after the first publication, called Mistakes We Knew We Were Making, Eggers discusses the inevitable position that non-fictional, autobiographical writers get into, which is that, because we do not live solitary lives, we write about OTHER PEOPLE. and those other people may not like what you wrote about them, or the circumstance, or how you remember it, EVEN IF IT’S TRUE. or, maybe, i should say, ESPECIALLY IF IT’S TRUE. which i can understand, you know, from their perspective. your “dirty laundry” being published for the world to read. it might sting. it might put a huge brick-heavy damper on relationships. and this is something i’ve been faced with recently, what with my whole huge extended family joining The Facebook and realizing that i’ve been writing about my life here for, oh, 8 years now, and even though i try not to say too much about other people and personal things, i have done so, sometimes without really remembering and suddenly these ghosts from the past pop up and people are angry, disappointed, hurt. so just after a recent bout of this, i was reading the very end of the addenda of the book, and Eggers wrote something that made me feel, not…justified, but encouraged? to continue to be open and share. he says (more than once in the prelude and appendix, actually):

“We feel that to reveal embarrassing or private things, we have given someone something, that, like a primitive person fearing that a photographer will steal his soul, we identify our secrets, our past and their blotches, with our identity, that revealing our habits or losses or deeds somehow makes one less of oneself….

…Because secrets do not increase in value if kept in a gore-ian lockbox, because one’s past is either made useful or else mutates and becomes cancerous. We share things for the obvious reasons: it makes us feel un-alone, it spreads the weight over a larger area, it holds the possibility of making our share lighter. And it can work either way – not simply as a pain-relief device, but, in the case of not bad news but good, as a share-the-happy-things-I’ve-seen/lessons-I’ve-learned vehicle. Or as a tool for simple connectivity for its own sake, a testing of waters, a stab at engagement with a mass of strangers.”

and i agree. so while i do deeply respect and recognize personal boundaries and have taken great care over the years to not represent anyone but myself (and honestly the family-related post that recently upset someone i didn’t even realize was publicly published – BLOGGER FAUX PAS), i also do not believe in covering up, hiding the parts that aren’t pretty. because i too believe that it does not make you less yourself, less valuable, to show your flaws. those with flawless facades are difficult to believe. they are hard to connect to. possibly this is why there is so much Schadenfreude in our human nature: because in the mistake we see others make, we see ourselves. and so sometimes i admit, when i hit that “publish” button, i know it might be a mistake, but the feedback (even if negative), the connectivity, always makes up for it.

(semi-related note that i couldn’t work into the text above: sometimes even people you don’t know get really offended by you writing about your own life. dooce.com, blogger of epic flaw-revealing proportions, has started publishing her hate mail and monetizing it. SUCH a good idea. haters suck.)

lighten up

last night at a taqueria in The People’s Republic of Berkeley, jay and i noted that almost all of the flyers posted on the bulletin board had something to do with meditation/hypnosis/manifestation/consciousness/peace action, some in such abstract language you couldn’t even tell exactly WTF the flyer was trying to get you to buy/do (if there are so many people trying to create peace in the world, why does it seem like nothing ever changes? jay said after scanning the wall of flyers. they’re doing it wrong, i snarkily replied.). some of my friends recently had a long discussion/debate about the merits of a very popular west coast “life coaching” program, and then someone else recently shared her experience with an irritating hypnobirthing counselor. the discussions of all of these things pretty much boiled down to this same idea:

at certain points in our lives, many of us we learn/discover/admit we need help with something – relationships, addictions, behaviors, difficult experiences. however, many times, the vehicles for getting that help, particularly on the Left Coast, are presented in formats/within ideologies that many of our personalities have habitually rejected: new-ageism, group therapy, structured coaching. for many people, the BIGGEST PART of the help/therapy came from being able to get past the presentation, look at the information, and apply and absorb it as needed. because, really: this is a new whole way of dealing with the world for some of us snarky haters who walk out of anything that superficially seems to oppose our aesthetic sensibilities, or who will automatically dismiss something that initially appears to be too….something….for us to deal with. (this relates back to the “separate the people from the problem” post about relationships, and is also very true with politics). learning to do this, to not have a knee-jerk response to the aesthetic of something and really take a minute to discern the message, can be challenging, especially if you live in a city INUNDATED, as the bulletin board at the taqueria evidences, with all kinds of new-age, alternative, non-traditional approaches to life that seem, when taken en masse, to be nothing more than an alternative form of capitalism – selling you something you don’t need, repackaged to target a different set of human desires.

so slowing down, taking time to think about what ideas and methodologies lie beneath the mantras and the spiritual psychobabble can be an obstacle to possibly finding a path or the help you’ve been seeking (oh crap, now i am starting to sound like one of those flyers!). taking that lesson wider, it’s the same with certain art/music scenes and communities/ways of being. how easy it is to be come so jaded against the presentation, when the core of what is being offered can be so beautiful…..

anyway, i’m not about to start rubbing crystals on myself or anything, but i’m definitely done with being as bitter and jaded as i have been. i just want to be open.

in preparation

i have nothing coherent to write about because for a while now my whole brain has been filled with to-do-lists and plans and dreams and fears and details both work and personal due to the fact that we are leaving in FIVE DAYS to go traipsing across europe for a month.  i think i have to admit right about now that i am pretty seriously overwhelmed to the point of incapacitation, because i don’t really want to do all of these things, like laundry and shopping and packing and doing a month’s work of work for my job ahead of time – i just want to GET THERE, i don’t care if i’m barefoot when i go.  i just want to go.

so instead of writing any more pointless blather about that, here is a picture of me when i was a little girl at Christmastime.

peace offering

(this note was originally posted on facebook, as it was regarding a specific facebook-related incident, but relates to things i write here too.)

yesterday, i offended some people that i love.

so for anyone who might have been offended by the “don’t be an idiot” remark about the healthcare debate yesterday, i apologize for my word choice. my comment should have only been only in support of the bill and not a derogatory comment on those opposing it. i am all for strong opinions, freely held. i don’t ever want to be seen as polarizing or offensive. i want to be seen as informative. and i know you can’t please everyone, but sometimes you have to remember who might read what you write if you’re gonna post it publicly.

i’m not surprised that some people were upset. i have all kinds of friends from all walks of life here, and i know some of us disagree on a great many things. there are a lot of my friends and family who write things that offend ME here too, but i don’t defriend them or get angry. i just don’t respond when they write things that offend me. i just let it go. i try to remember we’re coming from different places and mentalities, and that reading things they say that i disagree with only makes me know them better and remind myself that there are other ways of looking at the world.

i definitely don’t always think i’m right, and i have changed my mind on a lot of things because of great debates with friends and family, and it’s one of the reason i love being connected to people online and off. we learn from eachother. you can’t know eachother better or learn anything or change any minds if you just close yourself off to the hard debates, cross you arms and walk away with a “we’ll never agree, i’m not listening to you anymore” and only keep friends who agree with you. if it’s too hard for people to do that, to keep the connection but ignore the parts you don’t like, i guess i understand.

and finally, no matter who’s ever right or wrong, if someone else’s experience of a conversation with me is that i’m judgmental, confrontational and condescending, i need to do something about it. i’m truly sorry that some people got hurt or offended, but if nothing else at least this has been valuable because it’s caused me to have some moments of self reflection and i’ve been questioning and re-evaluating the ways in which i’ve been communicating online. every now and again, in all my years of blogging etc, this happens, and i have to recalibrate.

thank you.

(the)

“truth is rarely pure and never simple.”
–oscar wilde