study for
prophet machine # 4 performed feb. 7, 2012 at eschschloraque
coreographed by patrick faurot

"Faurot's work shifts between theater and dance, the abstract and the mundane,
the esoteric realms of the sacred and the hard rationalism of mathematics. It
searches for contemporary performative method of narrative and expressiohttp://www.blogger.com/img/blank.gifn in
order to build new resonant meanings, necessitated by the dearth created in the
contemporary scene by the philosophical and aesthetic deconstruction following
post-modernism and the usurpation of art for mass consumer culture. In this way,
the contemporary aim of Faurot's work is primary -- that from the ruins of dance and
theater, new work can be conceived and performed that utilizes traditional theories
and techniques but adapts them to have significance today. His artistic investigation
is influenced by his experiences as a mathematician and musician, his travels through
South America and Eastern Europe, the avant garde of Berlin's underground, and the
many painters, sculptors, dancers, and madmen he has encountered throughout the
world ."
there will probably be much better photos here at eriko khalesi's blog

UPDATE TO THE BELOW POST - GEMA themselves did respond to my "GEMA SEEMS to block artists own websites," but according to them: "@GEMAdialog "No, actually we don’t," " via twitter in their defence with a link to:
THIS INFO
regarding a sort of mexican standoff that has been going on since 2009 between them and youtube, or, in their own words:
"GEMA's negotiations with YouTube

GEMA has been negotiating unsuccessfully with YouTube over a new licensing contract for music use in Germany since April 2009.

After contract negotiations with YouTube broke off in May 2010, GEMA and seven other music author societies formed an alliance together.

A legal action was filed at the end of 2010 and delivered to YouTube in April. Twelve music works that should be blocked are listed in the legal action.

YouTube is now blending an announcement in for blocked videos asserting that GEMA has refused to grant the rights to these videos. However, this is not true – the fact is, YouTube has simply not acquired the rights for that particular video up until this point in time. You can find a detailed explanation of our viewpoint on these matters on our blog.

The chronology of these events are detailed in the press releases on this subject:..."

of interest is that its not us its them sort of thing they do with the statement: "YouTube is now blending an announcement in for blocked videos asserting that GEMA has refused to grant the rights to these videos. However, this is not true – the fact is, YouTube has simply not acquired the rights for that particular video up until this point in time."

SO: Going back to my original beef with these beurocrats: Does this mean that - according to GEMA - YouTube would have to get rights to every video ever - even live concert footage posted by the artist themselves before it was visible in Germany?...

BTW: I also noticed that ALL the videos on the official youtube site of popular metal band MASTODON (who just played Berlin a few days ago) are blocked...

GEMA MUST DIE

HOW am I supposed to fall in love with a band and go see them on tour and buy their music if this organization is BLOCKING the BAND's OWN YOUTUBE CHANNEL?
sorry, staves.
http://www.youtube.com/user/thestaves
DEAR GEMA, WIE BESCHEUERT SEID HIR DENN?
GEMA
GEMA NEEDS TO EITHER go away or at the very least wake up to the unintended consequesnces of their actions...
If for no other reason than the fact that it blocks videos posted by the artists OWN youtube site...
Yesterday a friend recommended the band the Staves and send me a link to a video that the band had uploaded ON THEIR OWN YOUTUBE SITE which was subsequently blocked by the misguided do-googer pseudo government organisation GEMA.

GEMA decrees on its site: "Whoever wants to playback or perform music in public in Germany will become, as a rule by doing this, a customer of GEMA."
So, by default, anyone who makes or hears music is automatically a customer and therefore beholden to their rules?

ALSO of NOTE: "GEMA is a legally authorized collecting society – and is in close contact with legislators."
gema muss sterben, WAR ON GEMA GEMA ORGINAZATION NEEDS TO $%#&ing DIE; OR: I FRACKING HATE GEMA

USED UNIVERSE art kitchen
this is your kitchen full of art on iPad.
berlin 2012

I bought The Fantastic Mr. Fox in the UK on DVD which featured "FREE DIGITAL DOWNLOAD" for iTunes, PC, etc. but as it turns out when I retuned to Germany I was not able to get/register the free digital download because it was good only for the UK and Ireland iTunes store... so even though i purchased and own it... there is a stupid loophole... whatever. But the the film industry probably shouldn't wonder why people are still illegally downloading movies if something like this happens, that is I try to be legit but am cut off by liscensing bullcrap. yadda yadda.

YEAR OF THE DRAGON TEMPORARY TATOO
 
 
really great temporary tatoos found at the .55 sent store.

 
just doom it.

whiskey and doom metal nights TBA...

berlin

USED UNIVERSE
THE BEGINNING IS NIGH
Microsoft Paint
2011

New home of the unusual: Sonic Pendulum

bunk vote 2012
used universe

NOVEMBER
I broke my toe quite badly about 3 weeks ago and was stuck at home for awhile afterwards (as I was krankgeschrieben for a week with option to extend.)... If the germans schreib you "krank" then you legally cannot go to work - and I refused to extend because after 10 days I was going ape-shit crazy alone in the apt. Got re-addicted to the internet big time... watched a gaggle of films -mostly silly ones- and missed the typical Halloween craziness - but on the other hand I got a lot of writing done. First draft of book 2 is printed, and although it needs another 50,000 words or so, the paper copy is just good to have in the hand...

looking forward to the massive amount of indoor Berlin winter time ahead, too... (minus broken bones.)

 
USED UNIVERSE
"seals n' junk"
2011

 
USED UNIVERSE
flowerz

 
USED UNIVERSE
"seals n' junk"
2011

Haven't posted and not posting so often anymore... why? Two reasons:

1. I have a new job as of August where I am online all the time so the quickness and convenience of twitter has completely won out over longer posts...

2.I am writing a series of books, that takes up a lot of time.

USED UNIVERSE Masked Mascot attends Ai WeiWei protest at Chinese embassy, Berlin, 2011

thanks to the wonderful girl who took this foto, (unless she says otherwise she'll remain anonymous)

berlin june 2011
here we spend an incredible amount of time contemplating America. or the aspects that most interest us, at least. in parks and bars as years go by since we left... America is always bubbling and reintroducing itself to new and renewed parts of our mind with new and renewed interests... or can it simply not tolerate being unthought of?

we roll on and roll up our sleeves as if we are whitecoated scientists in a lab full of little aspects of it all sectioned off and petri-dished out, stacked up and waiting for comment and observation as they each either grow freakishly, wait patiently for the right conditions or or or simply do nothing at all.



meanwhile, now that the coast is clear the brits are showing up... feigning bohemianism or buying property.

Sometimes it is perhaps better to just simply participate in pop culture... because
somehow I have never watched That 70's Show, (I ended up discovering Mila Kunis via Forgetting Sara Marshall (2008) about 10 years after everyone else... and that other guy via Spider-Man 3) which has made for a lot of awkward converations.
"Oh yea, that girl/guy from That 70's Show...
"uhm... Aston Kutcher?"
"no, you know - XYZ!"
"mhhh... nope."

THING 1:
I made this collage on a screenshot on the ride from London to Cambridge. I had fun doing it. I love Paint (the program). (First things first: the above image is from the band Atlas Sound, not some questionable something else)
EXIT NOTES FROM 3 days in the UK. (And it is never a dull 3 days... it is always just sprinkled with surrealism and absurdity... it is always an issue I re-encounter every time I come here, brain says: "wait, ...I am not REALLY in America even though most sensory input tricks my brain into thinking I am... English: check. wildstyle-rampant-rodeo of capitalism/consumer culture wonderland: Check! People being automatically polite for no apparent reason: check. Constant overbearing police presence everywhere: CHECK." But thannk god I am in an English speaking country again so my poor brain can have a rest from German.

THING 2:
ME:"But that isn't even a liquid!"
Airport Security Searcher scanner guy who is taking his sweet-arse time to scan every piece of pocket lint in my bag: "Its a paste."
"Oh... But that... THAT bottle is only half full!"
"It is the size of the bottle in ml that counts, not the fullness..."
"Oh..." THINKING: "Where these rules here the other day?"
I constantly rotate DVDs from my parent's house - taking them out on loan and bringing them back a few months later. Most of them are mine anyways, but this time...
He pulls out Richard Linklater's Before Sunset. I shrink back and stare at the floor.
He pulls out a special edition DVD of Disney's Peter Pan which I automatically blurt: "That's my nephew's!"
"Sure 'tis, mate."
I wasactually bringing it for a friend's 5-year-old son...
I then watch in horror as he pulls out Dawson's Creek Series one DVD set-
"That... THAT's my sister's!!!"
"SUUUURE 'TIS, mate, SURE it is..." as he collects my shaving cream and shampoo in a plastic bin to have it particle-scanned.
We didn't agree on much... but one thing we COULD agree on: the greatness of Pilgrim's choice extra mature cheddar. (Or just cheddar in general.) Which he also pulled out of my bag, inspecting it with a notably special loving tenderness...
Ugh.

feder und farbe fight görlitzer park 1. mai 2011 VIDEO
this is footage of the color fight which followed the featehr fight in Görlitzer Park on May 1, 2011. Maybe one of the more random and overwhelming situations I can ever recall having been in (as evidenced by my constantly shouting "holy shit!")
Anyhow, I suspect this was actually some kind of guerrilla film shooting since there did seem to be a few organizers... but (with the feathers especially) perople really ended up taking it into their own hands. I have honestly never seen so many insanely happy people in one place at one time at an event which was NOT a music concert.

"It's a new normal and I really do think that global weirding is the best way to describe what we're seeing," climate scientist Katharine Hayhoe of Texas Tech University told reporters.

Casual/bumbling early-morning thoughts on scary weather: I saw one my students (an amazing 8-year-old obsessed with science) reading a book which I believe was/is titled “the Coming Global Superstorm” by Art Bell and someone else. (update: co author is none other than WHITLEY STRIEBER aka "the bestselling author of Communion: A True Story" which we were... coincidentally... just talking abot last night... hurrrrm. (see: previous post on the non-existence of coincidences)
Anyhow, I hadn't seen/heard the name Art Bell in perhaps 10 years. He had a crazy radio show on in the middle of the night which I used to listen to back in my freshman/sophomore years of college in Seattle. I'd stay up drawing listening to his callers phone in about Nazi Illuminati and the like. Topics of debate on the Art Bell show tented to cover – well, conspiracies, aliens, and alien conspiracies… (nephilim and god-knows-what) so seeing that name again was kind of a shock.

Not too long after – probably circa 2000 or so I read T.C. Boyle’s “A Friend of the Earth”… and for some reason reading that just mad me thing: yep… that is what the future will look like. I assume Boyle did a lot of climate model projection research for that one, maybe he even talked to some of the same people Art bell might've had on, who knows... at that time, though, that talk wouldn've still sounded like "the sky is falling" craziness... in 1999, (lest we not forget that the Matrix sites it as the pinnacle of out civilization (and that is the first and last time I will ever site the goddamn matrix but somehow it just seems to fit here);), yea, in 1999 things were... good. The threat of deadly weather and constant devastation… one big endless wild ride... and that seeeeeems to be what is getting going… so… at best it is just another good excuse not to live in America.

Stendhal and so-called coincidence
If there were a better word that “coincidence” then I would use it. Situation: I buy a gorgeous 1946 German copy of Stendhal's “Über die Liebe” (aka original title: "De l'amour") and it sits on my shelf for… let’s say at least two years. The other day – while looking for something out of the ordinary to ready, I finally pick it up and move it to my bedside, reading a bit then placing it atop the stack before falling asleep.
The following morning a co-worker offers me a pile of the last few months work of New Yorkers – which now due to their hard-to-get-ness, I have gone from despising to now reading cover to cover. The New Yorker magazine is a blueprint now automatically building itself as a fantasy world which I will readily pop into from the morning commute here to escape the stillborn (not bad, just stillborn) vibes humming on the backs of the eyelids of my fellow Berliners in the first waves of workers rusing to work, those bound by duty, life mmyself, to get their asses moving and on a train before 7am, the grumpy, poop-faced droves who have not yet attempted to entertain themselves… with music or mini-laptops… (is it a generational gap or do they just need to suffer in boredom and silence?)
If there were a better word that “coincidence” then I would use it because I open the first New Yorker magazine at random and flip to the first beginning of a gull article I come across, and there in black and white Stendahl is quoted on love. (Good article, actually,but not the point of my post). Closer to the point is:
Who even quotes Stendhal? (NOTE: found out I had been misspellng it for years as Stendahl? And what are the chances that I would choose to start reading his book and then within the same 24 hour period encounter a quote by him in a magazine – a magazine that I rarely read ? I honestly I don’t think I had ever seen him quoted in any text ever before… but recently, this – or these- types of “coincidences” have been happening in droves, and those were just the ones I had been able to catch…
During research for Platypus Down – which consisted of me not consciously researching anything but rather blocking out most all electronic media – especially artificially connected/searchable infomedia and just observe and receive any and all bits and pieces of informations, any hints of relationships and routines, activities and possible thoughts.
Perhaps think of it terms of: rather than hunting and romping through the forest you just to and sit doing nothing but watching and taking notes, and after a year of this, well, you feel very very different about the activity in the forest. loose ends blowing in the wind, and just having this endless slew.
The coincidences started happening so often and so regularly that they no longer surprised me, I saw them and they seemed to simply fit well in the natural (naturally chaotic and complex) order of things…
So here we go. As I begin the next book it is: back to the woods, round two.

I attended the Ai WeiWei protest today at the Chinese Embassy in Berlin as the USED UNIVERSE mascot. More to come.
Chinesisches Botschaft berlin bear kostüm maske mask bear animal tier f#tierchen protest demo berlin Sonntag 17 April 2011

Color Card art installation at Schoenleinstrasse U-Bahn Station Berlin this morning.
I didn't have a camera but it was lovely. Intricately placed brightly-coloured paper or cardboard cards decorated the entire upper part of the station. So nicely... Good morning!

A Comment.
Tao Jonesing says:
March 30, 2011 at 1:07 am

“Is a CEO, especially one who runs the company into the ground and then floats off with a golden parachute, really worth more than 300 times his lowest paid employee?”

Obviously, the answer is yes...

Taken from Zeitgeist Watch: Art Critic Questions Winner Take All Society on the blog NAKED CAPITALISM

After the onslaught of recent German headlines
I was / felt compelled to make this knowledge public:

Former German Defense Minister Karl-Theodor zu Guttenberg who just resigned over a plagiarism scandal was clearly NOT a SMITHS fan:

"The words you use should be your own
Don't plagiarise or take "on loans"
There's always someone, somewhere
With a big nose, who knows
And who trips you up and laughs
When you fall"

the SMITHS "Cemetry Gates"

and now he's a "punctured bicycle on a hillside, desolate."

"The whole government is a Ponzi scheme.” -Bernie Madoff

THIS IS JUST CREEPY.

best documentary at the Oscars, director Craig Ferguson, Bernie Madoff, financial crisis,