summer

insistingly present.

morning II (postscript)

the one that didn't make it onto the blog
made 'explore' on flickr.
oh, ok.

happy sunday!

postscript to the postscript: the pictured spread is from
'the weekender' magazine.

morning I

morning!

confessions before breakfast may be hard to stomach,
but here goes:
i love slide.

that being said,
a 100 ISO is a tricky beast in winter.
darkness makes you look closer though,
doesn't it?

p.s.: at sgaminegg.

corbusier (II)

that day, marion and i first went to teufelsberg, then stopped and paid our respect to monsieur le corbusier. i think, if i'm not mistaken, we had five or six cameras between us: marion the rolleiflex, her LC-A, and my praktica (this was the day after georgette went on strike on karl-marx-allee); i had my nikkormat, a disposable, and possibly the zenit, which i can't recall for sure. i believe though, these were taken with the zenit. in any case, this is the slide roll, and it worked its crystally magic.

urban walk (I)

there was some slide film in my camera, and we went for a little walk through mauerpark. had coffee at bonanza's too. i love how quiet the city is in summer. now, school has long started in berlin, and we are almost back to the familiar urban buzz. still, summer keeps lingering, and i'm enjoying every single moment of it. (marion's lomo LC-A is a little beauty.)

le bleu

care for some more summer on a monday morning?

that incredible blue of the mediterrean, the salty air, the glaring sun, the sound of the engine, and the "oh look, les cabanons!" when i first saw the little beach huts perched precariously on the rocks. like a bird's nest.

have a good week, all of you!

five words

i'm late, very late with my five words. it's hardly saturday any longer, is it? well, i've just scrambled out of the rabbit hole, where i spent considerable time finishing a translation project. i hope you'll forgive me.

---

When I woke up this morning, I held the fine end of the thread of my dream in my hand. I had been standing in the grand hall of a museum, talking to some person I can remember neither face nor name of and said: „I so badly wanted to buy a Carsten Höller, but they were all gone. Then I saw those two deer, and I just knew it had to be them.“ – Can I remember whether the deer were live? No, I can’t. And where would I have put them? Are there people running stables for artwork? Surely, there must be. And what does it tell me in the blue light of the morning? Is it the sure sign of an art related inferiority complex? Is it the deep wish to touch the silken ears of a deer? Am I attracted to artists dabbling in biology? All I can clearly remember, is one of the deer turning her slender head towards me, twitching her ears and looking at me with those brown eyes. Then I woke up. It makes me wonder. Wouldn’t you wonder? Later that day my stiff neck makes me sigh, and somehow the fact that the rain has turned the yellow leaves -- rustling on the sidewalk and street just the day before -- into some undefined brownish slush leaves me sad. They are driving around in those big orange trucks again, sucking up the leaves with big flexible snouts. One is driving, one is walking, holding the snout, moving it around so as not to miss the odd pile hiding under a parked car. I can see bits of traffic queuing up behind them, the driver surely drumming their fingers on the steering wheel. I’m riding my bike around them, down to the baker’s for a sourdough and to the Asian grocer’s for some noodle soup, some fresh lime and some sugar snaps. I must not forget to add plums to my shopping list for the next day. A friend is calling, we say to meet up on saturday. I have to finish some work, and I keep thinking about things that don’t seem to lend themselves to easy answers. Are thoughts flying higher in summer? Is autumn the season of rumination, of dark plum compote, of deer and other illicit thoughts finding their way into my dreams? I should imagine so.

blue
 // wonder
 // sigh
 // illicit
 // imagine
thank you, enia

five words

feels a bit like i made myself jump in at the deep end here, you know. while writing the first story - stories, which by the way might turn out to be miniature three-liners, rather short or longer ones - i realised how many details do bug me intensely. i'm posting this anyway, hoping it will give me that little push which hopefully makes up for the embarrassment, which is more or less inevitable whenever you go out on a limb. so really, this is very much work in progress, a way to make me write regularly, because i'm the greatest procrastinator when it comes to that.

oh, and one more thing: i will take my pick from the five words you have given me in no particular order and credit them at the end of the story. thanks for being part of this!

//

Going back in my mind, I can see it quite clearly. We had gotten up in the wee hours, when a bird pecked on the window. The unexpectedness of that sound had startled me, I am used to the tram going past or the faint sound of the shopping trolleys of the supermarket next door clanking. There was a breeze when we stepped out, quietly, so as not to wake the others. There was a faint rain of pine needles. Where the bird had gone, I don’t know. After the hundredth tree we took a left, then a right after the next twenty-three. We came to a lake. No crystal clear waters here, greenish-brown instead, with a hint of golden specks, where the light fell through the trees. I sat on a small rock, trying to make out how long it might take me to swim to the far end of the lake. Ten minutes, fifteen? It was too cold though. We shared an apple, which i had brought in my pocket. I wondered why we had come to spend this weekend together. For some of us the need to step back from questions that seem unanswerable, for others some vague notion about going back to nature. As if we knew what that meant. For me it was the need of holding on to the familiar before the big unknown. I had initiated the change myself, but it still scared me. 'Make a move?', I whispered. We walked for another good hour, past a clearing of young birches, now almost bare. The slenderest tips of their pitch-black branches swayed. We saw some deer in the distance, heard them first, by the rustling of leaves and the crackling of small twigs underfoot. We crossed a small stream, stepping on rocks. A light drizzle had set in. We kept on walking for a good thirty-minutes. He had been looking on the ground mostly, now lifted his head a little and said ‚Call it a day?’ And it meant all kinds of things.


breeze
// golden
// whisper
// crystal
// sway
thank you, emily vanessa

unrelated

two favourites from france - unrelated. one taken in avignon, the other one on the terrace in st. rémy.

yesterday i had a funny day, where nothing worked out as planned. as if the wiring of that day was somehow wrong. today, i'm feeling a little under the weather: a stiff neck, pressure on my ears, light-headed. hope it's passing.

p.s.: feeling much better today, thanks for your kind words!

a very good day

one sunny day i drove to avignon to see the cy twombly show at the collection lambert and to meet mary. what a perfect day it was. i so enjoyed the exhibition, i think we needed something like three or four hours to see it, because we stopped everywhere, getting lost in some conversation. i remember we wondered how very different sol lewitt's work and his personal space at home were - would you have guessed a master of conceptual, highly cerebral art would have a study full of memorabilia and an amazing moodboard, and would take serial pictures of his crockery? and we did have such a good time looking at lartigue's stereoscopic photographs. what a cheek he was.

cy twombly's photographs were quite wonderful. i loved the early black and white images he took of the shared studio space with rauschenberg in new york, but his later polaroids were quietly poetic, altogether of a different kind.

very kindly, mary gave me a roll of kodak elite chrome, on which these frames were taken. and she introduced me to fondant au chocolat, which we had in the courtyard, after having successfully missed lunch service due to our chatting away. it was a revelation. thanks mary!

(the graphics on the wall are by douglas gordon. marion went as well, on another day.)

the pool

let's go to the pool, shall we? (back in berlin, outside my window people are walking past in woolly hats, which is worrying. in my mind, though, i can go back to the pool side whenever i want.)

p.s.: first two frames colour negative film, all others taken on slide.

**

i'm on bach rescue drops and arvo pärt. less than a week to go.

p.s.: i know i haven't been reading/commenting much of late - please don't feel i've lost interest, i simply don't manage at the moment.

counting down

only two weeks to go, and i'll be on holiday!
!!!
(not best pleased with the bikini test this morning. harumph. but what the heck.)

my reading list is almost complete (thanks again for all recommendations!). any suggestions for a playlist?

two

and here:
number two.

one

have been playing with different angles and different degrees of abstraction - which of the two pairs do you like better? and why?

here we go:
number one.

sunday morning

a quiet sunday morning. looking through the takes of my last roll of film (two more waiting to be processed, can't wait!), and somehow stopping at these four above, taken at sgaminegg the other day. they seem so quiet. i'm not even sure it was. the place is always bustling with people, most of all on saturdays, when the little market is out front. i love to have places and people who are just there, quietly, to fall back on them anytime.

how is your weekend?

ticking boxes

so much done recently:

projects finished
kitchen redecorated
time spent with friends
coffee and chats
hair cut (a lot)

and you?

p.s.: thank you, so much, for all your lovely comments.

**

easing back into things. i have missed you.

**
a love lost. the trouble is, just about everything i can think of sounds like a bad cliché. so less words, more pictures. slide is a good way to start.

questions, answers, comments

dear readers (known and unknown), this is just to say thank you for your questions, answers and comments. this little conversation we have going here means a lot.

a big thank you to kristina in sweden and all the others for explaining how to customise the html for flickr photos to the size i need. you are the best! - oh, if you want to know how to get bigger pictures on your blog, take a look at the comments to this post. it may sound a little daunting, but isn't really. just a little extra step, plus your images are linked to flickr, which i think is an extra benefit.

yet more thank you's here (not mine, this time), they will make you smile, i promise (and thank you, la ninja, for pointing me to it!).

picture taken at the nordic bakery in spring. it's been kind of too long since i've been to london.

follow my blog with bloglovin

for the love of parks

when i was a child, my parents took us for a sunday walk as long as i can remember. being the eldest of six siblings, i remember many moments when we arrived at our destination and people stopped, stunned, to look at us getting out of the car. we must have seemed quite exotic. those walks were an endless source of fascination for me, we'd be walking around for an hour or two, in some forest or park or along a river. we'd pick up the kind of things you find as a child: sticks, chestnuts, leaves to be pressed at home, feathers, stones. only when i was a teenager, i had a phase were i'd rather stay at home than join my family for the sunday walk. then i went back to being a passionate walker. i know some people who wish i wasn't, since i make them treck along with me for. but i simply love it. living in a city doesn't always make this easy. but there are parks.

these photographs were taken at the buergerpark in bremen, again, holding lots of childhood memories for me, as it's the city i grew up in. would you believe this is in somewhere in the middle of a city?

one of my favourite spots here in berlin is the pfaueninsel (peacock island). prussian king friedrich wilhelm II initiated quite a bit of building work and landscaping there, as he used the island - conveniently close to the palace in potsdam - as a love nest for himself and his mistress wilhelmine enke. there are also stories about one of the prussian kings keeping perfumed cows on the island so he could come and milk them. fancied himself being a farmer, but without the mess, please.

this weekend, my sister and her family are visiting. and there is a high probability we will visit the pfaueninsel, even more so, as until the end of october, you can still see olafur eliasson's blind pavilion on the island.

well now, enough daydreaming, it's back to work for me. have a good day!

follow my blog with bloglovin