update, water, video, tech

bonjour.
imagine the following: you go into your bathroom, at night, wanting to brush your teeth and go to sleep, when you notice a strange smell. you tilt your head upwards and find, to your amazement and horror, a huge dark patch of moisture has formed up on the ceiling, and several small ones on one of the walls.
the very sight i had last night. over the course of time until now, the patch has grown to occupy most of the ceiling, causing the wallpaper [why on earth must there be wallpaper on the ceiling?!] to ripple curiosly. the patches on the wall have more or less united to ...one big wet wall, which is, as i am writing this, beginning to turn yellow.
clearly coming from above, the cause of this doesn't seem to be found easily. in the flat above mine, nothing seems to indicate the water's source being there, were it not for the clear layout of the house making quite sure the source has to be there. in about half an hour, the plumber will be here and then, i hope, we'll sort things out.

good news:
i have updated a section of my website. in the course of this, the former unused and empty section music has been remade media to include not only music, but also video. as usual, you can access it via the navigation on the right side of this blog, or simply surf to the mainpage and make your way from there.
so far, two videos garnish the newly born section. one of them is tarüven karas, which i presented in my previous post, and the other is vochnahi, another poem i recorded yesterday. feel free to check them out and, of course, share your thoughts.

furthermore,
i have become an iPodBitch; thankyouverymuch. a few days ago, my shiny ipod touch 2G arrived and has since then become one of my best friends. well, unanimated friends. you know, i can be lonely here.
instead of loading crap music on it and flinging it around everywhere on the streets, i intend to use it as a pda to, among other things, help with translation. for that, it has already proven very useful. so far, i have a grand offline chinese dictionary and an online-fed dictionary that supports hindi. all i need now is sanskrit and tibetan; but of course, that'll be a bit more complicated to get. i am pondering the app wedict, but then i don't know of the availability of any tibetan or sanskrit dictionary files in the stardict format. so i'd have to gather and convert some. we'll see.
furthermore, obviously, i'm all for cool apps. meaning: innovative music creating and the likes. bloom has already given me a wonderful time, but obviously i'd love something more... substantial. rjdj is already on my radar, but so far isn't supporting the ipod touch 2G, but if you have any suggestions or news, not only regarding music apps but innovative ones in general, please share them here!

i guess that's it for now. have to get back to translating and preparing for tomorrow evening's poetry reading. moist greetings.

tarüven karas

as may be obvious, i acquired a little camera and am having my first bits of fun with it these days.
inspired by the great hexocain's video performances of own poetry, i here try the same game myself.

also, classes have started again on monday, and that takes me deep down the rabbit hole again. amongst the usual classes of tibetology, tibetan, hindi, sanskrit, etc, i've begun chinese language classes at the department of sinology. my monday has already been blessed with a first language laboratory class. oh the fun of rows of students sitting with headphones and blabbering their first chinese sounds. sadly though, my two other chinese classes this week have been cancelled due to the teacher being ill...

moreover, there is even more poetry around the corner. next thursday, our institute blesses itself with an evening of sounds of love, presenting love related poetry in the languages of vedic sanskrit, classical sanskrit, malayalam, hindi, nepali, and maybe urdu.
obviously, every work will have a translation so the fun of the evening doesn't just consists of the tea and samosas afterwards. a dear friend of mine is going to present excerpts of a famous poem in your mother tongue, malayalam, and together we're preparing the german translation, which i'll be presenting.
would any of you be there, you might find the evening delightful and interesting, but since none of you can, there is actually no reason why i'm advertising this here.

cheers, more later.

intermission

All my bags are packed, I'm ready to go,
Cause I'm leavin on a jet plane,
my yesterday was spent at the airport. coming there at noon, i was told an airplane had plummeted off the runway and thus caused the whole airport to be shut for incoming and outgoing flights until the site was cleared. they told me to listen to the announcements, while waiting at my gatenumbereleven, for our flight might be delayed, or cancelled, or we might be taken to another airport.
as i sat and waited, a great variety of flights of different airlines were cancelled, and some others taken to different cities. about the flight to budapest, however, no information was to be heard. around two, they told us we'd get information at three. at three, they told us to wait for news at five. before five, we finally got food vouchers, after having waited for hours already. shortly after that, while i was standing in the infinite queue to get something to drink or eat, our flight was announced to have been cancelled. it was five pm.

now, instead of spending the last days of my summer holidays at sweet love's place, i'm back in essen for a few more days. as all flights for the next few days are full, i decided to take a train to vienna on monday. the finally last long train ride of this summer. in this moment, i am all alone at home. all friends have other plans, family is out and this is when the pain of not spending the much anticipated weekend with my loved one hurts the most.
Already I'm so lonesome I could die.


otherwise, i'm in my grieg period, piano wise. having learned lyric pieces' first song arietta a few months ago, i decided to try and learn the opus from beginning to end. in the last weeks here, i made my way through the first waltz, the watchman's song and have now reached alfedans, the dance of the elves. what a stunning little song, that sends my fingers breaking off my hands and flying across the room every time i practice it. learning it will be a long way.

[lyrics: John Denver - Leaving on a Jetplane]

summer to autumn

this is fiction.

the doorbell rings and i'm in the cellar, searching for a glass to store the mint that dried outside. summer is waning, and soon autumn will creep into the dried leaves; better find a container to store them before that.
crouched before an old locker, a bathroom locker put down for ever in a dark corner, and searching its innards in the vain hope of finding a forgotten preserving jar, the doorbell rings. and i know who has come.

cellar leaves a fine dirt under my socks, which i've never inspected though often imagined. i open the door and there she stands, sil, in all her very usual appearance. she greets, shying a moment of awkwardness away, and i react according.
"such a beautiful weather" and "everything is redecorated", she exclaims into an uneasy silence as we proceed to the living room. me, carrying a tray of tea, her, carrying a bag and a red sweater; we both tiptoe past the history that lingers behind our foreheads. sitting down into an uneasy situation, i busy myself with the tea.

"i had a dream; there was a rosary. someone must've lost it right there on the floor in front of my door. and i left it hanging on the knob, thinking the person might come back and find it there. the dream forwarded and i stood in the little shop on the corner, carrying a pot full of soup, and asked the guy wether this rosary - at which it dangles from my hand, unbelonging and completely out of place - by any chance belongs to his wife."

she never shared her dreams. once in high school, i remember, we had an argument about people telling their dreams. never, she said, would she share her dreams, for they are too personal to her and besides, they're so chaotic she doesn't understand them herself. so why tell them?
so why tell them. where does this come from; why now does she tell me her dream? i sip my tea, she sips hers, and a silence muffles everything around. like this we sit, each trying to appear deep in thought. the uneasy silence has found us, and my thoughts drift back to the dried mint, the preserving jar, the old bathroom locker in the basement. autumn has arrived, summer has ended.

one hemisphere of nirvana

imagine

not quite yet

it never stops feeling peculiar and strange, getting back home here in germany. even though i've put a lot of distance and development between myself now and back before i left, it still entangles me very much.
nowadays, though, it feels different. maybe, finally, i've become so else that the things don't seem to fit to me that much, anymore; don't seem to affect that much. rather, they hunt a self i was what now seems a long time ago, and it seems i have gained distance from that me. i'm glad.

sorry for not beginning with the promised chronicles yet, but somehow writing doesn't seem that fluent these days, and besides being lazy about preparing the pictures i don't spend a lot of time on the pc. last evening my mother and i went to a splendid organ concert, the majority of which was very inspiring - most of all reger.

..............................................................................
wow; my blog has had a visitor from kazakhstan! come out, come out, wherever you are and share yourself - talk to me!

coming soon

heute saß ich am klavier, nachdem ich eine endlose ewigkeit von mehr als zwei wochen an keinem klavier war, und da schlug wieder einmal die ganze riesige unbegreifliche schönheit des instrumentes über mir zusammen.

today, after an endless infinity of more than two weeks without a piano, i sat at mine; and at once the vast and unbelievable beauty of the instrument washed over me.


i'll be updating soon - in the next few days - with the chronicles of our journey. so be patient and stay tuned until i sort out the pictures...

gearing up

Wandel; ein Trugschluß Statik; eine Illusion. zu benennen vermag es der jenseits von Beschrei- bung Gegangene.

since about two weeks, i'm in budapest at sweet love's place. while he works, during the day, i myself might either sit at home or meet with friends. when being here like this, there is nothing only few things better than having a permanent metro-pass and being as mobile as i want to.

so, after my arrival, we went to buy me a student discount monthly ticket, which is cheaper than a non discounted 14-days ticket. at the ticket office, my charming hungarian interpreter asked the girl on the other side of the glass if i, as a student from vienna, am applicable for the student discount. at this, she leaned sideways, looking for something. as mon traducteur later told me, he thought she was checking his very question while it turned out that the thing she actually did was checking wether vienna is part of the european union or not...


these days, i spend most of part of my time with looking at train schedules, rail connections and hostels. you, dear reader, might have guessed right: we're going interrail!
since i [paranoid sauerkraut-eater] didn't support our plans to go to istanbul anymore (at least in the current situation), sweet love [brave puszta-rider] reluctantly agreed to do this instead. and now, next tuesday, we'll kick of our journey from vienna to venice and then further up and higher until we reach oslo. on the way, hopefully, we'll meet up with friends and make some new acquaintances as well as not die from exhaustion.

it might not seem like, but i'm getting really excited about the whole thing and i dare say the count at my side also begins to feel a little bit agité about it.
our itinéraire, as it stands now, is the following: from vienna (austria) to venezia (italy), from venezia to fiesch (switzerland), from fiesch to paris (france), from paris to ternaard (northern netherlands), from ternaard to københavn (denmark), from københavn to røyken near oslo (norway) and finally from there back to budapest par avion.

in venice we'll hunt pidgeons, in fiesch the aletsch-glacier, in paris crêpes, in ternaard the sea, in københavn the tivoli and in røyken fairies. of course, this plan is open to change and enhancement...

anybody sitting lonely in one of those locations? now is the time to speak up or stay quiet for ever (or at least until one of us gets his hand son interrail tickets again).

for now je vous embrasse, but i might write again before we leave.

memories in songs

recently, i've been thinking about the songs i play on the piano, an instrument which i play since about eight or more years. due to never having had lessons, in contrast to my sister [her being the reason there was a piano in the house, to begin with], my development was quite different to that of a normal student of the piano.

there are several songs which i've been playing since almost the beginning of my endeavours. having them under my fingers for so long, developing each by nuances, they have a thousand implications to me. a song, thus, is not just an entity in music, but a kaleidoscope of memoria and emotion to me.

in the beginning, almost all of the songs came from games of the final fantasy series. i played them not only for their musical value, but also for their personal emotional imprint. each time i played them, i remembered scenes from the games and how i had played them with friends.
with time, i learned more songs from other parts of the musical universe, and the memories connected to them range from strong emotional anchors and cues to small things like sentences someone said or the weather on a day i played the song. by all this, the songs have become larger than themselves. as a matter of fact, many of them i do not play for themselves anymore - as they might feel to kitschy or simply not so much my taste now - but rather for the things they carry. for the journey i take when playing them.

this journey is each time a careful tightrope walk between music and thought. even in the pre-piano days, when i had lessons in playing the recorder, i always had quite a handicap in reading score. though this has gotten somewhat better lately, it had a large impact on my development on the piano.
some people thought, i'd be talented enough to play everything from audio-memory. much less exciting and talented, my way was always moving through the score of a song at snail's pace and very quickly memorising it by heart. learning to play it at normal speed would then function mostly from memory. looking at score while playing a song mostly disturbs me so much that i fail to carry on playing.
now, i'm not telling this to boast about my memory, but because the fact i play every song by heart means that my mind is relatively free to wander while i play. this, though, is the ridge walk: i have to let my mind wander freely, to some extent, in order for my fingers to play properly [from their own memory]. but the moment my mind wanders too far and i start actively thinking about the things i think about, the memory of the song is disrupted and often i have to start all over from the beginning [or beginning of a passage] again.

thus, my journey during each song is mostly a movie being played by my subconscious, with the conscious mind carefully being silent. and that is the ground on which all kinds of memories and associations come up and float by my inner eye.
in one song [phillip glass - opening; koyaanisqatsi ost], at a certain passage, i remember telling my ex about how i like this part [and certain triad] to which he replied that he already noticed that. with another one, i remember a close relative telling me, on hearing the song [which then i only played with my right hand], that i should play it on the person's funeral; it being a funerary song [nobuo uematsu - aerith's theme; final fantasy VII ost].
i remember places that i've played the individual songs in, or the persons who ever listened to me playing them. i remember how sometimes my fingers trembled, and then my fingers tend to begin to tremble once more, just from the memory.
also, i look back and see each song today as a long development over all the years. some, for years, i couldn't learn properly and only somehow completed. nowadays, having learned their score from beginning to end, finally, the songs have come a long way.

much like my book of thoughts [i do not keep a normal diary] which my sister gave me for my 18th birthday, four years ago, i often wish to finish these episodes and move on.
the book, after all these years, still has a great many empty pages. but all the things it holds, though dear to me, often are an unwanted weight on me - something i'd like to finally close and put onto the bookshelf, to only take when nostalgia strikes me. each time i write in it, today, i desire for a fresh start, a fresh book, but of course i'd never leave the rest of the pages remain white and unwritten.
so, just the same, the songs stick to me like a skin with many carvings, and only very slowly i add new songs to my repertoire for which maybe, slowly, an old one might fade from memory. it is a process slower than my own growing, like a retrospective view in slow motion that i carry around with me, willing or not.

do you play? what does it mean to you, and what do the songs you play hold for you?

out of elba

now
i'm back in germany since monday and am slowly recovering from the iceshock. honestly; after incredible 14 days of italian sun and heat we came back to 12°celsius and rain.
seriously; death! after the initial torpidity, i moved on to depression and considering hibernation. the temperatures, on the other hand, climbed up up up and reached something between 20 and 30 celsius these days, sprinkled with thunderstorms and everlasting rain. oh, bright new european summer.

then today, coming home from the countryside with my mother, where we visited old friends, we had the infinite pleasure of meeting a summery hailstorm. oh, the noise of hailstones bigger than golfballs hitting our car, the storm shaking and shaking it, the rain whizzing by horizontally and the water on the highway rising to the height of the tires.
you might imagine our situation, you might imagine the fright with which we sat, awaiting the windowpanes to crack. just less than an hour before all that, we were on the highway in traffic jam, the asphalt shining with heat and the sun warming the polluted air around us as we walked between the cars standing, waiting for traffic to move again.

oh, summer.

now now; there are good things, of course. there is music, there is my flute and the piano. paolo conte sings in my ears like a voice from some distant planet; having been the music of our trip to italy this year. un gelato al limone, gelato al limone, gelato al limone...

also, my dreams are interesting lately. besides sex with friends and others, i had a curiously peculiar dream about killing an evil wild boar that had the body of a huge fish with an evil long-teethed head on each side of his body, instead of any fins. due to the fact of him being unable to move on his own, as the dream was set on land and the fish being able to breathe air since he was a wild boar, i had to carry him around though being in a fight with him and with my mind set to kill the monster. later, my best friend seemed to hold the monster while i took a snake, lying around on the ground, in the neck [so as to not me bitten] and used her as a whip... in what ever way that might have helped me against the boarfish.
finally, i think i must've killed the evil boar somehow, though i don't remember. and before that, he told me some strange things about a little nearby brook running with blood instead of water on some day in the past.
better than endless dreams about old friends and misery - which might have finally left me, after all these years.

in paolo's words:

(what do you expect look your life your life is just like like a blank sheet to fill, turn a page over and listen to what i say) pretend, pretend, pretend, what are you asking from life the ship flows smoothly on the sea the thirties run on the century you read a smile printed on somebody's story walking on somebody's dream just called from somebody's wish what you want what you want pretext, pretext, pretext how many trees in your mind a jungle that you like to cross a way to reach yourself disguised if its first class call me and i will be leading call me and i lead the way call me and i take your hand if you please if you please pretend, pretend, pretend what are you asking from life the ship flows smoothly on the sea the thirties run on the century you read a smile printed on somebody's story walking on somebody's dream lust called from somebody's wish what you want what you want

ciao.