…is Polish for ‘Attention Attention’. Not that I have anything urgent going on that I need to share with the world, I just like the sound of the word. I also suffer usual guilty conscience because I haven’t blogged in a while. Life got in the way, as usual. I’ve started a creative writing workshop with an amazing bunch of writers organised by The Reader Berlin at Berlin’s best English-language bookshop Another Country (which you should both try, in case you’re into writing and books) and spent an amazing week with people from all over the world at the ITB and related events in Berlin. And next week I’m flying to my preferred dirty old town for some shenanigans involving catholic saints, green face paint and craft beer. Erin go bragh.
I also had a few articles published in the meantime in case you care for a read: a piece on Slow Travel Berlin about a former GDR watchtower turned memorial, and another covering Berlin waterways for Europe Cities, just in time for spring. Which will be here any time now. I’m sure.
In addition, I’ve started working on turning In The Dark Night into a book. I’m scared.
I came across this little video about Dublin by filmmaker Matthew Johnston yesterday. Matthew, like me, lived in Dublin for a long while and now moved away, and has turned his feelings about leaving the city into this great little film, of which every second reverberates in my chest. I really do miss the dirty old town every single day.
The music is by Caoimhín Ó Raghallaigh, the words are from Dublin by Louis MacNeice, which is one of the best poems about the town and I’ve added the words below. I really miss my city.
Dublin
Grey brick upon brick,
Declamatory bronze
On sombre pedestals -
O’Connell, Grattan, Moore -
And the brewery tugs and the swans
On the balustraded stream
And the bare bones of a fanlight
Over a hungry door
And the air soft on the cheek
And porter running from the taps
With a head of yellow cream
And Nelson on his pillar
Watching his world collapse.
This never was my town,
I was not born or bred
Nor schooled here and she will not
Have me alive or dead
But yet she holds my mind
With her seedy elegance,
With her gentle veils of rain
And all her ghosts that walk
And all that hide behind
Her Georgian facades -
The catcalls and the pain,
The glamour of her squalor,
The bravado of her talk.
The lights jig in the river
With a concertina movement
And the sun comes up in the morning
Like barley-sugar on the water
And the mist on the Wicklow hills
Is close, as close
As the peasantry were to the landlord,
As the Irish to the Anglo-Irish,
As the killer is close one moment
To the man he kills,
Or as the moment itself
Is close to the next moment.
She is not an Irish town
And she is not English,
Historic with guns and vermin
And the cold renown
Of a fragment of Church latin,
Of an oratorical phrase.
But oh the days are soft,
Soft enough to forget
The lesson better learnt,
The bullet on the wet
Streets, the crooked deal,
The steel behind the laugh,
The Four Courts burnt.
Fort of the Dane,
Garrison of the Saxon,
Augustan capital
Of a Gaelic nation,
Appropriating all
The alien brought,
You give me time for thought
And by a juggler’s trick
You poise the toppling hour -
O greyness run to flower,
Grey stone, grey water,
And brick upon grey brick.
In case you like to discover new things and experiences with the help of the interwebs, there are worse places to start exploring than Gidsy; a platform that lets you find things to do, organized by real people all over the world, and for every budget. May that be a cooking class with a home chef, a DIY workshop with a pro, or a walking tour with expert Berlin locals like Slow Travel Berlin.
And I’m delighted to announce that Gidsy is since yesterday also available in German, especially as yours truly helped with the translation of the platform. So German speaking urban explorers can now easily book & organize activities all over the world auf Deutsch.
Helsinki is many things. It is cold. It is dark. It is full of unfriendly Finns who never say hi when you meet them. It is expensive. It does look like in the final episode of Night on Earth; filled with snow, grumpy bearded taxi drivers and sad stories.
Last weekend, the Analog Girl and I went to Brussels. We spent a night in a run-down hotel from the 80s with cold bacon and slushy eggs for breakfast, and went to see some art and walked shivering around the Grand Place and had chips with mayo and Sambal Oelek-sauce and drank beer made by monks and took an elevator up to a large building built on a place were people were hanged in the Middle Ages.
Brussels is like the dirty little sister of Paris: she wears no high heels but old boots, and she drinks beer and burbs and demolishes a cone of frites after a night out, but it’s great fun every time you go out with her. And she’s only two hours away from Cologne.
And just because I cannot get enough of walking around shivering in cities in winter, tomorrow I’ll be going to Helsinki, thanks to the kind invitation of a few nice people, including Visit Helsinki. It’s not Reykjavik, and I’m afraid I won’t see any Northern Lights, but hey, they’ve got metal on the radio all day, every house has a sauna and they do good beers. I think I will like it.
It’s surprisingly busy at the house of pain these last weeks, despite the fact that everyone should be winding down for turkey and wine at Christmas. But before I finally switch everything off here and head to holidays myself, a last post in 2012 seems to be in order.
A few weeks back, I contributed a very short story to Joanna Walsh’s book game at Dialogue Books in Berlin. A group of authors including yours truly had written specially commissioned 5-part stories that were hidden in books on Dialogue’s shelves. Customers had to find five ‘bookmarks’ of the same colour to piece together a new and exclusive story. And here it is now, as some kind of pre-Christmas present. I hope you enjoy it. I’m off.
Winterwood
The old man trudged through the deep snow at dusk. The only sound he heard was the faint echo of his crunching steps reflected by the frost-covered trees; like someone walking at the same pace hidden from view. But there was nothing except the way ahead, his billowing breath and the fading light. He had walked a long way and was alone. Was he?
‘Traveling is also a futile guerilla war against oblivion, the rearguard on the march; one stops to observe the figure of a rotten trunk that is still not quite completely gone, the profile of a dune that is crumbling away, traces of lives lived in an old house.’
The guys at storymap.ie have recently published their 80th Dublin film, based on a short story by the mighty Roddy Doyle and lovingly animated by Sarah Maria Griffin, Ruth Farrar and Ray Keogh. The result is, basically, quintessential Dublin in 106 seconds. I hope you enjoy it as much as I do.
(This is a cross-post from In The Dark Night, as the guys behind the film are currently running another round of fundraising on Kickstarter. Please help.)
I often thought that all contemporary witnesses I met during my trip should have their story recorded, in their own words and their own voice, and that these stories should be available in some kind of database (akin to the Shoah Foundation); both for scholars and as a memorial to what happened to men and women in camps, in war and peace and after their return. I was delighted to find out that Russian filmmaker Marianna Yarovskaya and American academic Dr. Paul Gregory are doing exactly this: conducting as many interviews as possible with women who survived the Gulag camps, before the voices of these witnesses vanish forever.
The two are currently seeking founding over on Kickstarter, and you should definitively contribute to this amazing project, with funding going towards both a feature documentary about the women and an upcoming book by Paul Gregory. Did I mention that you should pledge over on Indiegogo? Do it now!
Marianna kindly answered a few questions regarding the project.
My friend and long-time collaborator Kai Mueller a.k.a. as Stylespion (with whom I realised Sonic Iceland, amongst other things) went up to our favourite island in the North Atlantic this summer to cover the Eistnaflug metal festival for Leica Camera. He was accompanied by a camera team, and the result of the trip is this compelling video portrait of his work. Kai also answered a few questions for the Leica blog, in case you want to know more.
