intellectual properties

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

please me have no regrets

it sort of feels like when i decided to stop going to church.  when i decided i understood enough, had gotten what i needed, had seen behind the curtain, and that i did not need to go anymore. but i could not just throw it all away, all those hours and thoughts and emotions and time, such a large part of my formative years, and so moved on to studying religion, to tracking its history, to seeing its parables and metaphors and literary tools for what they were, developing a different kind of appreciation, one that i carry around deeply with me to this day.  will i ever go back to a church, sit in its pews on a sunday morning, and return to the beginning of my journey?  i cannot - it’s impossible.

and so it is with burning man, that special place where a community belief and value system is set out in plans, preached, acted out upon, put forward in signs and banners and songs and dances while the revelers let their eyes see the sky and their mouths speak in tongues. where am i with this? did i get enough to continue to pay it forward without going back? will i ever return to those morning worship services even though i know they will never be the same? i cannot know until i have moved on whether my heart will simply look back or long for return.

we leave for europe in 11 days. i will turn 33 in 23 days, on the other side of the planet. in my 34th year, i am to learn many things, see many places, live many lives, and that journey started with this, collecting what i have and moving forward, not taking the path already tread.

the final countdown

we leave for our european adventure in exactly 30 days. (!!. !!!. !!!!!.)
sept 19-oct 17.

seeking tips on places to go/things to do, eat (vegetarian suggestions PLZ!!), see + who/what/where to avoid (and why) in:

Amsterdam, Netherlands (this is where we fly into, direct from SFO!)
Berlin, Germany
Prague, Czech Republic
Vienna, Austria
Budapest, Hungary (this is where we fly out of, back through AMS to SFO)

we’ll be there in the off season, which should be very nice. no Prague plagued with summer tourists!

we plan to spend approx 5-7 days in each city, and wouldn’t mind getting out into the countryside or visiting smaller towns nearby, but we won’t have a car, so we’re only looking for suggestions for places fairly easily accessible by public transit. also, if you’ve done any sort of adventures similar to what we did in mexico (guided outdoor excursions of the adventurous kind) in any of these countries, i’d *love* to hear about those.

yay!

revolutions: saying yes

this post was meant to be the first post of 2009, but it has been started many times and has taken a number of twists and turns. i’ve written some of it while angry, some of it while frustrated, some of it while hopeful, some of it while happy, some of it in one of my many other moods. i’m going to attempt to make all the pieces flow but it might seem a bit disjointed and it’s definitely as polished or coherent as i’d like it to be. i’m tired of working on it though, so here it is.

ariel wrote recently about coming into contentment around her age. i admit i have also been struggling with the aging process, but larger than anything superficial, although there’s that too, for me, it’s not so much about my age and what that means physically or culturally, but about how much time i have left. it’s also very hard for me to accept “i am where i am” when i’m not really where i want to be, and i feel like every day is a missed opportunity in a limited number of opportunities to get there. the problem is, i don’t know what “there” is, and every January 1 that rolls around gets a bit harder in that respect.

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peel off the layers until you get to the point

WANDERLUST - Björk + Ratatat Remix / Video

live to tell

sometimes i feel like all i do is go to work, go home, eat, sleep, and party on the weekends, rinse, repeat. but it’s not, i do a lot of other stuff too. perhaps because they are short and non-repeating, they seem to take up less of my life than the things that i do over, and over, and over again. anyway….

tuesday, we went to see Wanderlust @ The Marsh, a 90-minute monologue by Martin Dockery (not a lot on the web about that guy, so no good link), who is an old friend of Reagan’s, and, as it turns out, one hell of a storyteller.

the story started with a meditation on his 10-year non-career as a temp, including a very long temp position at the NYSE. similar to the “We are what we pretend to be, so we must be careful what we pretend to be.” vonnegut quote i posted a few weeks ago, if you’re at a temp job for several years, isn’t that your job? isn’t that what you do, even if you are temporary? he had a blunt realization that he wasn’t just pretending to work in a cubicle at the NYSE; he WAS working in a cubicle at the NYSE. holy shit.

so that combined with inability to commit in love (”wanderLUST” does not only apply to travel) prompted him to take off for West Africa in search of his Big Meaning, the experience of which was not unlike our first attempt at doing the same in Thailand : the world is the world no matter where you go, and, it’s true, as they say: no matter where you go, there you are. attempting to run away for yourself never works, and expecting the other side of the world to somehow be more mystical and magic than the part of the world you live in is a high bar to reach. as it turns out, life is life all over. the end result was a realization that what you experience along the way is the magic: constantly searching for the Big Awakening while being bored with the “pony ride” you’re on just leads to never ending search: unquenchable wanderlust.

so obviously i identified with this very much, both because of the EXTREME travel-related wanderlust i’ve been experiencing for…years….which is now coming to a head with the “big plans” we have for 2008, and also because of general feelings of ennui with my current idiom as a whole. learning to be happy with what one has/where one is at…. that’s the greatest challenge of life. it does not mean i think we should not seek, but seeking endlessly despite the magic around you is just plain tragic.

wednesday we went to a benefit/celebration for my friend jayeesha’s budding NGO, mind power collective, an organization for “progressive educators” who believe teaching is a social justice action and that teachers have a responsibility to a) fight for justice in the educational system and b) teach their children about social justice issues and how to fight against inequality. good hip hop, good times.

and then last night, miranda and i went to the 48 hour film project - san francisco screenings to see the film produced by my friend danielle of missing piece SF. the 48 hour film project works as such: each crew is given 1. a prop (in this case, a jar of coins) 2. a line of dialogue (”Call me when you hear anything.“) and 3. a genre (horror, action, romance, etc.). everyone then has 48 hours to a)write script b)shoot footage c)edit d)submit. i’m sure many of them write generic scripts ahead of time that they then just try to adapt to the genre (which was VERY obvious in a couple of cases), but it’s still a hell of a challenge. many of them were decent, and i hate to think that i’m biased, but i do think Missing Piece’s film was the best. hopefully she’ll post it online soon and you can watch. it was great to see so many inspired and creative people in the theatre, all totally geeking out on the 48 hour film idea and supporting their friends in these ridiculous artistic endeavors.

so back to my wanderlust: i fully recognize that i live in an amazing city and am surrounded by this constantly-inspiring community of writers, artists, designers, singers, dancers, and all that a true bohemian wants and needs to keep body, mind and soul nourished. yet, still, there’s a big wide world out there i’ve never seen. will i, like martin dockery and The Alchemist, wander in the Sahara only to find that what i’m searching for is here? probably. but the trip will still be worth it, if nothing else, for the stories.