Tuesday, October 18, 2011
Monday, October 17, 2011
Fulbright Personal Statement
PERSONAL STATEMENT
Elizabeth Skadden, Poland, Filmmaking
Growing up, I was extremely interested in music but lacked money to buy records. The dubbed cassette tape became the most important vehicle to my education and experience with music. I was a fan of the 90 and 120-minute tapes, putting as much music as I could on each side. My experience of this music was not related to any of the promotional materials for the bands, as I had no money for music magazines, albums with their cover art, posters, or band T-shirts. These tapes allowed me to access music cheaply, quickly, and with maximum contact with other people. This is a unique and rare way for someone growing up in the United States to encounter music, as there is no media influence as to how the music should be experienced. This experience helped launch my career working as a musician and creating visuals for and about musicians, as I was not influenced by media hype, preferring to trust my own taste.
While at the University of Texas, I worked as Program Manager and DJ at KVRX, the student radio station, and became interested in music subcultures. My friends were record collectors and our language was a mix of album titles and promises for future mix tapes. Plain or decorated, I remember distinctly the cassette tape boxes: magazine images cut out and used as inserts, personal notes, and explanations for why certain songs were chosen (“this is our cover of Sonic Youth’s cover of Sister Ray”). The images created by the hands of people that I knew became my visual image for the music, personalizing my experience. Each cassette tape represented the end of a search for an album, time someone spent putting the tape together for me, and my love for the music.
Being in my own band, “Finally Punk,” gave me a deep view into the network of underground music across the United States and Europe. We toured every year from 2006 to 2009, always meeting more bands and becoming a part of the subculture. I had many jobs making documentaries about the bands I was now friends with, and worked closely with the Flaming Lips, a band from Oklahoma. Enrolling at the Rhode Island School of Design while still playing in Finally Punk allowed me a double life: a tour life where I slept on floors, screamed into a microphone every night, and drove 18 hours between shows; and my RISD life, where I participated in an elite art school and created art about obsolescent media and abandoned spaces. I always actively kept both worlds separate and only in the last two years, with the dissolution of the band, my graduation from RISD, and my work creating visuals for other musicians have I started to connect my interest in music subcultures with my artistic practice. A documentary about the cassette tape culture of a bygone country is a marriage of my interests in music subcultures, obsolescence, and video making.
In this Fulbright application, I am applying to create a documentary about the cassette tape subculture of the former communist Poland. Listening to Western music was forbidden and teenagers experienced the Doors and the Dead Kennedys through dubbed cassette tapes from a black market supported by secret music fanatics. Poland’s development of their own music scene and relation to Western music was unique, as a network of people developed it without outside influence. By creating a documentary of this self-created system, I hope to bring the story of their ingenuity in listening to music from the West by circumventing normal routes to the attention of the Western world.
Elizabeth Skadden, Poland, Filmmaking
Growing up, I was extremely interested in music but lacked money to buy records. The dubbed cassette tape became the most important vehicle to my education and experience with music. I was a fan of the 90 and 120-minute tapes, putting as much music as I could on each side. My experience of this music was not related to any of the promotional materials for the bands, as I had no money for music magazines, albums with their cover art, posters, or band T-shirts. These tapes allowed me to access music cheaply, quickly, and with maximum contact with other people. This is a unique and rare way for someone growing up in the United States to encounter music, as there is no media influence as to how the music should be experienced. This experience helped launch my career working as a musician and creating visuals for and about musicians, as I was not influenced by media hype, preferring to trust my own taste.
While at the University of Texas, I worked as Program Manager and DJ at KVRX, the student radio station, and became interested in music subcultures. My friends were record collectors and our language was a mix of album titles and promises for future mix tapes. Plain or decorated, I remember distinctly the cassette tape boxes: magazine images cut out and used as inserts, personal notes, and explanations for why certain songs were chosen (“this is our cover of Sonic Youth’s cover of Sister Ray”). The images created by the hands of people that I knew became my visual image for the music, personalizing my experience. Each cassette tape represented the end of a search for an album, time someone spent putting the tape together for me, and my love for the music.
Being in my own band, “Finally Punk,” gave me a deep view into the network of underground music across the United States and Europe. We toured every year from 2006 to 2009, always meeting more bands and becoming a part of the subculture. I had many jobs making documentaries about the bands I was now friends with, and worked closely with the Flaming Lips, a band from Oklahoma. Enrolling at the Rhode Island School of Design while still playing in Finally Punk allowed me a double life: a tour life where I slept on floors, screamed into a microphone every night, and drove 18 hours between shows; and my RISD life, where I participated in an elite art school and created art about obsolescent media and abandoned spaces. I always actively kept both worlds separate and only in the last two years, with the dissolution of the band, my graduation from RISD, and my work creating visuals for other musicians have I started to connect my interest in music subcultures with my artistic practice. A documentary about the cassette tape culture of a bygone country is a marriage of my interests in music subcultures, obsolescence, and video making.
In this Fulbright application, I am applying to create a documentary about the cassette tape subculture of the former communist Poland. Listening to Western music was forbidden and teenagers experienced the Doors and the Dead Kennedys through dubbed cassette tapes from a black market supported by secret music fanatics. Poland’s development of their own music scene and relation to Western music was unique, as a network of people developed it without outside influence. By creating a documentary of this self-created system, I hope to bring the story of their ingenuity in listening to music from the West by circumventing normal routes to the attention of the Western world.
Fulbright Statement of Purpose
STATEMENT OF GRANT PURPOSE
Elizabeth Skadden, Poland, Filmmaking
The Democratic Revolution of the Cassette Tape in former Communist Poland
“When you think of Poland and the 1980s, music was the only thing that mattered; literature was terrible, and theater was dying,” stated Robert Jarosz, tape archivist and author of the book Generacja, in an interview with me in September 2011. Until the 1960s, recording equipment was extremely expensive and heavy. Within Communist Poland, this meant that the state had complete control over the production of audio mass media. Polish bands required permission from the censorship board to perform and create albums, and bands from outside Poland were censored based on perceived anti-communist sentiments. With the advent of the personal cassette tape recorder, individuals took it upon themselves to develop a structure for copying and distributing recordings of both unsanctioned Polish performances and albums smuggled in from outside the Soviet Bloc. This form of media, which could be manipulated by the user and not by the state, democratized the way in which citizens created and distributed audio content and politicized them through everyday resistance.
I am seeking support from the Fulbright Commission to spend the 2012-13 academic year in Warsaw to research and create a 30-minute video documentary about the cassette tape subculture unique to Communist Poland. This subculture began in the 1970s and continues to influence Polish music and artwork today. The video will present interviews with former band members, artists, scholars, and people in the contemporary music scene and tape collectors. It will also explore the histories of individual cassette tapes as an entity in their own right. The medium of video is perfectly suited to capture the physicality of these tapes, as well as the quality of the audio on them. Footage will also be shot using super 8mm film, an intimate, also obsolete medium that conveys the feeling of the time period in which these bands were active.
By creating a video documentary, I will investigate how the distribution system of illegal cassette tapes contributed to the underground resistance against the Communist Party by creating an artistic community outside of both the Soviet and Western paradigms. Highly portable, easily copied and disseminated, it enabled a unique access to Western music and Polish musicians who did not have state approval. Though several countries from the Soviet Bloc participated in music sharing, Poland has the special distinction of being the country with the heaviest trade of live recordings from their own country. Inspirational to the Polish counterculture, this music acted as an audio media form of the political newspaper or book. Although the subculture was creating the tapes, almost every Polish citizen at that time was taking part in listening to them. By trading and listening to these tapes, citizens were defying the political system and thus gained power of resistance. In 1981, martial law was declared in Poland in an effort to subdue widespread strikes. My interview subjects described this time as very prolific. Unable to attend school or work, counterculture activists created bands and listened to music to a much wider degree. In the two years of martial law, the number of bands in Poland increased from around 100 to almost 3000 countrywide.
The relationship between video and music is an integral part of my work. I have been creating documentary films for over ten years, exhibiting at the Sundance Film Festival and South by Southwest as well as working commercially for record labels. In the last year I have also toured both Europe and the United State creating and projecting live visuals for the band No Age. My experience is unique in that I understand both the academic and DIY band worlds. This was made apparent in September of this year when I gave a lecture and made an art piece for the Connected Communities Symposium at the University of Newcastle about cassette tape culture in former East Germany. While interviewing subjects from the former East Germany, I noticed how familiar our experiences were, even though our backgrounds were very different. After giving the lecture, I was pleased that members of the mostly academic audience commented that they were surprised at how interested in this subject they found themselves, even though it was not a topic they followed.
I plan to be based in the capitol city of Warsaw as the majority of bands began there; many of my interview subjects either live in Warsaw or pass through there frequently. I also require frequent access to the 3,000 cassette tapes in the archives of Robert Jarosz. I will spend at least eight months interviewing subjects about their relationship to the music, about their band, if they were in one, and finally asking them to discuss one record or tape of which they have a special memory. I have already interviewed Tomek Lipinski, the lead singer of the influential band Tilt, and Tomek Wiśniewski, the former manager of the band Dezerter. On the basis of these interviews, I have also been promised further interviews with self-organizing cassette tape distributors, music fans, and members of formerly banned music groups. Kuba Kosma, a film producer in Warsaw, has offered his support in navigating the film community in Warsaw; and Sławek Pietrzak, the owner of S.P. Records and former member of the band Kult, will allow me access to his contacts and information about current artists in Poland. The last four months I will devote to editing and finishing the film with creative support from Marta Dziewanska at Museum of Modern Art and Marianna Dobkowska at Center for Contemporary Art in Warsaw, and Marta Szymanska at Lodz Photofestival in Lodz.
I have conducted interviews so far in either English or German, both of which I am fluent in. I am very interested to be able to conduct my interviews in Polish as the quality of the conversation becomes better when conducted in the interviewee’s native language. In the year before the beginning of the grant I will take Polish classes at the Berliner Volkshochschule and study privately with Ania Pabis in Berlin. I am confident in my linguistic abilities, as I have learned both German and Spanish to fluency. To further my linguistic abilities, I propose to spend the first academic semester attending language classes at the Polonicum, the language center for Warsaw University. I am in contact with Leszek Kolankiewicz, head of the Institute of Polish Culture at Warsaw University, about my project and endeavor to learn more about Polish culture at that time. In the second academic semester I plan to meet with Thomas Ferenc, Chair of Sociology of Art at Lodz University, which is located one hour outside of Warsaw. Thomas is engaged in research on the archeology of images, which is related to my own studies in media archeology, a field that examines obsolete media in an attempt to better understand our relationship with the technology that shapes our lives. Other possible avenues of support include the Adam Mickiewicz Institute and the multimedia department at the Academy of Fine Arts in Warsaw and Ewa Ciechanowska at the Lodz Film School in Lodz.
The legacy of Poland’s cassette tape culture can be seen in music sharing websites such as Soundcloud, Bandcamp, or even Youtube. These websites bypass the mainstream structure of record labels, promoting a close culture of relationships formed around a taste in music, where fans and musicians have direct access to one another. I look forward to the opportunity to showcase in a documentary how the Polish underground band community circumvented the mainstream in order to gain access to a culture they loved, and in doing so, discovered their own creative force.
Elizabeth Skadden, Poland, Filmmaking
The Democratic Revolution of the Cassette Tape in former Communist Poland
“When you think of Poland and the 1980s, music was the only thing that mattered; literature was terrible, and theater was dying,” stated Robert Jarosz, tape archivist and author of the book Generacja, in an interview with me in September 2011. Until the 1960s, recording equipment was extremely expensive and heavy. Within Communist Poland, this meant that the state had complete control over the production of audio mass media. Polish bands required permission from the censorship board to perform and create albums, and bands from outside Poland were censored based on perceived anti-communist sentiments. With the advent of the personal cassette tape recorder, individuals took it upon themselves to develop a structure for copying and distributing recordings of both unsanctioned Polish performances and albums smuggled in from outside the Soviet Bloc. This form of media, which could be manipulated by the user and not by the state, democratized the way in which citizens created and distributed audio content and politicized them through everyday resistance.
I am seeking support from the Fulbright Commission to spend the 2012-13 academic year in Warsaw to research and create a 30-minute video documentary about the cassette tape subculture unique to Communist Poland. This subculture began in the 1970s and continues to influence Polish music and artwork today. The video will present interviews with former band members, artists, scholars, and people in the contemporary music scene and tape collectors. It will also explore the histories of individual cassette tapes as an entity in their own right. The medium of video is perfectly suited to capture the physicality of these tapes, as well as the quality of the audio on them. Footage will also be shot using super 8mm film, an intimate, also obsolete medium that conveys the feeling of the time period in which these bands were active.
By creating a video documentary, I will investigate how the distribution system of illegal cassette tapes contributed to the underground resistance against the Communist Party by creating an artistic community outside of both the Soviet and Western paradigms. Highly portable, easily copied and disseminated, it enabled a unique access to Western music and Polish musicians who did not have state approval. Though several countries from the Soviet Bloc participated in music sharing, Poland has the special distinction of being the country with the heaviest trade of live recordings from their own country. Inspirational to the Polish counterculture, this music acted as an audio media form of the political newspaper or book. Although the subculture was creating the tapes, almost every Polish citizen at that time was taking part in listening to them. By trading and listening to these tapes, citizens were defying the political system and thus gained power of resistance. In 1981, martial law was declared in Poland in an effort to subdue widespread strikes. My interview subjects described this time as very prolific. Unable to attend school or work, counterculture activists created bands and listened to music to a much wider degree. In the two years of martial law, the number of bands in Poland increased from around 100 to almost 3000 countrywide.
The relationship between video and music is an integral part of my work. I have been creating documentary films for over ten years, exhibiting at the Sundance Film Festival and South by Southwest as well as working commercially for record labels. In the last year I have also toured both Europe and the United State creating and projecting live visuals for the band No Age. My experience is unique in that I understand both the academic and DIY band worlds. This was made apparent in September of this year when I gave a lecture and made an art piece for the Connected Communities Symposium at the University of Newcastle about cassette tape culture in former East Germany. While interviewing subjects from the former East Germany, I noticed how familiar our experiences were, even though our backgrounds were very different. After giving the lecture, I was pleased that members of the mostly academic audience commented that they were surprised at how interested in this subject they found themselves, even though it was not a topic they followed.
I plan to be based in the capitol city of Warsaw as the majority of bands began there; many of my interview subjects either live in Warsaw or pass through there frequently. I also require frequent access to the 3,000 cassette tapes in the archives of Robert Jarosz. I will spend at least eight months interviewing subjects about their relationship to the music, about their band, if they were in one, and finally asking them to discuss one record or tape of which they have a special memory. I have already interviewed Tomek Lipinski, the lead singer of the influential band Tilt, and Tomek Wiśniewski, the former manager of the band Dezerter. On the basis of these interviews, I have also been promised further interviews with self-organizing cassette tape distributors, music fans, and members of formerly banned music groups. Kuba Kosma, a film producer in Warsaw, has offered his support in navigating the film community in Warsaw; and Sławek Pietrzak, the owner of S.P. Records and former member of the band Kult, will allow me access to his contacts and information about current artists in Poland. The last four months I will devote to editing and finishing the film with creative support from Marta Dziewanska at Museum of Modern Art and Marianna Dobkowska at Center for Contemporary Art in Warsaw, and Marta Szymanska at Lodz Photofestival in Lodz.
I have conducted interviews so far in either English or German, both of which I am fluent in. I am very interested to be able to conduct my interviews in Polish as the quality of the conversation becomes better when conducted in the interviewee’s native language. In the year before the beginning of the grant I will take Polish classes at the Berliner Volkshochschule and study privately with Ania Pabis in Berlin. I am confident in my linguistic abilities, as I have learned both German and Spanish to fluency. To further my linguistic abilities, I propose to spend the first academic semester attending language classes at the Polonicum, the language center for Warsaw University. I am in contact with Leszek Kolankiewicz, head of the Institute of Polish Culture at Warsaw University, about my project and endeavor to learn more about Polish culture at that time. In the second academic semester I plan to meet with Thomas Ferenc, Chair of Sociology of Art at Lodz University, which is located one hour outside of Warsaw. Thomas is engaged in research on the archeology of images, which is related to my own studies in media archeology, a field that examines obsolete media in an attempt to better understand our relationship with the technology that shapes our lives. Other possible avenues of support include the Adam Mickiewicz Institute and the multimedia department at the Academy of Fine Arts in Warsaw and Ewa Ciechanowska at the Lodz Film School in Lodz.
The legacy of Poland’s cassette tape culture can be seen in music sharing websites such as Soundcloud, Bandcamp, or even Youtube. These websites bypass the mainstream structure of record labels, promoting a close culture of relationships formed around a taste in music, where fans and musicians have direct access to one another. I look forward to the opportunity to showcase in a documentary how the Polish underground band community circumvented the mainstream in order to gain access to a culture they loved, and in doing so, discovered their own creative force.
Wednesday, October 12, 2011
Tuesday, October 11, 2011
Sunday, October 9, 2011
Saturday, October 8, 2011
Tuesday, September 27, 2011
Tuesday, September 20, 2011
Friday, August 12, 2011
Saturday, July 30, 2011
Griffin quote
some guy told me hes organizing a "witch house nite"
im about to "accidentally" spill beer on about 500 micro korgs
im about to "accidentally" spill beer on about 500 micro korgs
Saturday, July 23, 2011
Crave
I have been practicing every day this week with Jonny. I started a Soundcloud account with our practice tracks. I love practice tapes and so far that is all this band is. A bunch of practice tapes that I play in my head till he comes over we go to the studio. After a two year break from being in a band I can't get enough.
Sunday, July 10, 2011
No Age at Gaite Lyrique
So four hours after Oozestravangaza was over I hopped onto a plane to Paris to meet No Age for the once in a lifetime opportunity to do video mixing in 360 degrees at the Gaite Lyrique. I was in control of 8 projectors which I had six hours to program and map out the patterns for. Benoit at the club was one of the sweetest most helpful people I have ever been lucky enough to have helping me. Thanks so much to Greg and Clemence at Super! for changing plans at the last minute to include me. Highlights below:
Saturday, July 9, 2011
Oozestravaganza
I had the pleasure to participate in Based in Berlin this year with the artist Chris Kline as part of Oozestravaganza. I created visuals for two of the bands playing that night in a whirlwind, shooting videos for 17 songs total. The studio was a total mess of confetti and my harddrives almost doubled with video files. See the results below:
Hush Hush
Mirror Talk
Hush Hush
Mirror Talk
Tuesday, July 5, 2011
Monday, July 4, 2011
Friday, July 1, 2011
Fun day in the studio
Skye came to the studio with me while I did some camera tests for the visuals next week. We brought the microkorg and he unconsciously made a music video.
I have been thinking a lot lately about the Roland 707
It doesn't get as much attention as the 808 or even the 909, but it's the one that Big Black used and I can't get them album out of my system. Just as catchy as a boatload of Britney mp3s: Kerosene, LDopa, etc. I went to Peach's house last night because I am going to make some visuals for his show next weekend and he recently bought one. I made this patch on it and worsened his headache.
Thursday, June 30, 2011
Wednesday, June 29, 2011
Monday, June 27, 2011
Tearist Interview about Disposition video
My favorite line:
"No. I was like, 'This is just a camera. How could this look cool?' I didn’t even know that it was going to be black and white."
Superslice
"No. I was like, 'This is just a camera. How could this look cool?' I didn’t even know that it was going to be black and white."
Superslice
Monday, June 13, 2011
Friday, June 10, 2011
Sunday, June 5, 2011
Monday, May 30, 2011
Berlin Weekend
The weekends in Berlin have had a certain magic in the month of May. Everyone has had its own special brand of magical realism, where something fun is happening every minute even though noone is actively trying to have fun. I went from stressing over medical bills on Friday afternoon to dancing in a field an hour outside of Berlin til the sun rose. Then Saturday, Abe Vigoda came to town and we ended the night at the weird old factory complex in Friedrichshain, hanging out in a squat bar with an unfriendly dog and an assortment of crust punk hairdos. Sunday, I went to a tour at Hamburger Bahnhof to see the Steiner Tapes, Bror's 7th birthday party, and saw John Wiese and Matmos play. One of the guys from Matmos really reminded me of Steve Albini, probably mostly because I have been watching kerosene on repetition.
Sunday, May 29, 2011
Wednesday, May 25, 2011
Tuesday, May 24, 2011
Liverpool Cathedral
My friend Jackie likes to tell the story that within the first hour of moving to Liverpool she came across an unattended car on fire, right next to the train station. I was watching an excellent documentary by the BBC about British synth bands and came across this image of debris burning in front of my favorite place in Liverpool, the Liverpool Cathedral. It reminded me of Jackie's story, just a pile of burning trash with noone attending to it. This angle is also unique because it is the same angle I most commonly looked at the Cathedral from during the two months I lived there while at a residency. I took a picture of myself standing in the barren dirt pit where the fire in this video is burning. Annoyingly I can't find it, so I just have this memory of taking this photo, to accompany this video still of whatever used to be in that space burning down.
Monday, May 23, 2011
Sunday, May 22, 2011
Parents' First Trip to Berlin
My stepdad was a hidden Jew in Holland during WWII so if it wasn't for me living in Berlin he would never have come to touch German soil. A lot of people who come to Berlin like to get tripped out by imagining the sounds of Nazi boots in the streets. In his case, this memory is real, although he admits that it gets mixed with the hundreds of movies you see on the subject.
When a kid in Rotterdam, he was standing outside when hundreds of young German soldiers gently parachuted down into the town, occupying Holland and consequently ruining his childhood. Last week, while my parents were researching for the book he is writing about his life, he saw footage of this same event, and was shocked at how closely it mimicked what he remembered. I was a bit worried, I thought he should never watch this again so that the film does not erase his true memory. "Well", he said, "the memory and the film were so close. We bought the DVD, I can't wait to watch it again."
Saturday, May 21, 2011
Wednesday, May 18, 2011
Monday, May 16, 2011
Sewn Leather
Sewn Leather and DJ Dog Dick came to town this weekend. I didn't shoot this video, but it pretty much sums up how Griffin killed it this weekend. Best live show of 2011.
I did an interview with Griffin in the stairwell of where they were staying after hanging out in Haseheide and eating Vietnamese food. This was my favorite line from the interview, really excited to edit the whole thing.
I would say the appeal of Sewn Leather and ultimately Griffin is his high energy approach to life. Spending ten minutes with him makes you want to ride a train, drink some mate, and possibly end up trapped in Idaho for three days.
I did an interview with Griffin in the stairwell of where they were staying after hanging out in Haseheide and eating Vietnamese food. This was my favorite line from the interview, really excited to edit the whole thing.
I would say the appeal of Sewn Leather and ultimately Griffin is his high energy approach to life. Spending ten minutes with him makes you want to ride a train, drink some mate, and possibly end up trapped in Idaho for three days.
Friday, May 13, 2011
Wednesday, May 11, 2011
TEARIST - In Black (Disposition)
Released on Altered Zones
From TEARIST s/t EP released on PPM
Production by Pastor Alvarado
Location Take Off! in Van Nuys, CA
Much love and thanks to Will, Yasmine, Pastor, Genn, Jordan, and Luis
From TEARIST s/t EP released on PPM
Production by Pastor Alvarado
Location Take Off! in Van Nuys, CA
Much love and thanks to Will, Yasmine, Pastor, Genn, Jordan, and Luis
Saturday, May 7, 2011
Tuesday, May 3, 2011
Isn't this cheating?
Did youtube create this music video meme of people just reediting obscure movies into music videos? Is this a new meme, or has it been around for a while?
Wednesday, April 20, 2011
Internet Mention
Tearist were interviewed in Nemesis and the unintentional music video I made for them was linked as part of the interview. "TEARIST do ambience. 'Ashes To Ashes' - David Bowie, deconstructed. Minimalist but strangely unsettling video by Skadden." I like two things about this: 1) I can become a one name entity like Cher or Madonna 2) BEST description of that video. Does it make me strange that I don't find it unsettling at all? Even more excited to get this second video out the door and into the world.
Monday, April 11, 2011
Cartier Foundation - No Age
Flew to Paris today to meet No Age for a show at the Cartier Foundation. The space was beautiful, the setup was beautiful, the show was beautiful. Truly an amazing night ended with a mad dash through the metro and dancing all night at a house party at someone's parent's house.
An example of the visuals I made for the night. Song is Sleeperhold.
An example of the visuals I made for the night. Song is Sleeperhold.
Thursday, April 7, 2011
Sunday, April 3, 2011
Christiane F
Alex and I went to have a look at the Gropiusstadt housing estates. Famous to me as Christiane F's former home and named for the founder of the Bauhaus school, these buildings are an example of the Communist architecture style as it exists in the West. Built like a fortress, we were met first with the parking lot entrance and went around to the back to find the enclosed living area. Dinner was celebrated at B47, the Kneipe in the shadow of the Gropiusstadt. I had a massive schnitzel, while Alex finished off a streudel.
Friday, April 1, 2011
Vietnamese Mall
Today Florian was true to his word and took me to the Vietnamese Mall in Lichtenberg. As we took the tram out, Florian whispered "not a hipster in sight." It's easy to forget that there are people living in Berlin who are not fashionable artists and musicians, just doing whatever the German equivalent to American who drink beer and watch sports is, probably drinking beer and watching sports. There were four large warehouse style halls that had small shops dedicated to nail accessories, shoes, clothes, housewares, plastic bags, underwear, etc. I took pictures of my favorite. On the way home we jumped off the tram to say hi to the Russian supermarket. I bought a very beautiful package of salt, some rye soda, and tiny vodkas in flavors like birch and honey pepper.
Monday, March 28, 2011
Sunday, March 27, 2011
Cyprien Gaillard KUNSTWERK
Last night was an opening at the Kunstwerk, my favorite arthouse. We went back to high school as we perched on top of a mountain of blue cases of bottles of beers. Only things missing were shotgunning beers and crowd surfing. It was like a bar, if all the lights were on, there was no music, and all the beer was free. Utopian high school.
Friday, March 25, 2011
Sowietesches Denkmal
Kevin from Babies and Woods has been hanging out with me the last couple of days after Babies' first Euro Tour was over. Today we passed by the Soviet Denkmal before hitting an overtone singing class with Arrington de Dionyso. I found it really similar to weird vocal stuff I use to do to pass the time as a kid. We then hit the Hamburger Bahnhof opening of brutal Land Art with Matt from Ducktails and then saw him play at my favorite place, West Germany. Kevin told me it would be like Ariel Pink, but I thought it was much better. The first days I was back here I thought I would like to go right back to LA, but Berlin is slowly wooing me back. So many future plans.
Monday, March 14, 2011
Wednesday, February 23, 2011
Tearist Music Video Shoot
Got the opportunity to shoot a music video for Tearist in Jordan's new store Take Off in the Valley of LA. After all his stories of his growing up years, I was scared of crazed teenagers roaming the streets to do me harm, but it was a typical Valley day. We ate at In and Out Burger, looked for large items that could be broken apart at the thrift store, bought 5 strobe lights at Party City, and smashed a few mirrors in front of Will and Yasmine's faces. They were good sports.
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