More info soon.

The story behind the ‘Keep Calm’-posters, found on broadsheet.ie. Also do I want to live in Barter Books.

Image by Joe Carr. More brilliantly bleak Dublin pictures are here.

With Sunday being a hangovered Sunday courtesy of Gaststätte W. Prassnik, I was really looking forward to a mellow acoustic evening celebrating life and music of legendary protest singer Woody Guthrie. The good guys over at the ExBerliner Mag had put me on the guestlist for what had been announced as a ‘Woody Guthrie 100′-show, and I was especially looking forward to see Tom Morello a.k.a the Nightwatchman play his solo show in honour of Woody (who’s 100th birthday is this year). However, the show at the Kesselhaus in the Kulturbrauerei turned out to be the final show of the 2012 Berlin ‘music and politics festival’, a weeklong festival with panels, discussions and music promoting all sorts of leftish political songwriting. This being a German political event, I was one of the youngest people in the crowd. I’m 34. With rows of chairs set up in front of the stage, it seemed to become the quiet evening I was expecting, so I took to observing the stage and the crowd from the safety of the bar.

Opening act were the 4-piece ‘Woody Sez‘, a very likeable group of musicians who are named after a column Woody once wrote for a socialist newspaper in California, and who retell Woody’s story by playing his songs in chronological order using instruments like a battered accoustic guitar, a kazzoo, banjos, accordeons and fiddles in a proper 1930s setup.

Next up was German ‘Liedermacher’ (or songwriter) Wenzel. Allegedly a very famous musician in the former GDR, watching him perform for the first time he struck me as quite pretentious. Announcing his songs in a artificially hoarse voice, he and his backing band played songs of Woody in German translation (Wenzel has published an album of Woody Guthrie songs in German in 2003), and a few Wenzel-songs in between. What he did not do was to honour the one instrument that Woody used to write his songs: the guitar. Wenzel mostly used a squeaking 70s-keyboard as main instrument to interpret the songs, and in all fairness: if nobody would have told me in advance that he was covering Woody, those songs may have well been played by Heinz Rudolf Kunze (or Chris Rea, for that matter) at a local beerfest. Especially his variations of Woody’s children songs (’TICKY TOCK TICKY TICKY TOCK’) made me cringe. The pensioner next to me liked it, though. She whirled her handbag over her head and started shrieking whenever Wenzel looked in our direction.

To my relief, Wenzel stopped after about 45 minutes to make way for one quarter of Rage Against The Machine, or The Nightwatchman. Tom Morello had been booked for this single Berlin gig only and had flewn over from Los Angeles, but stormed the stage with no apparent jetlag. Tom was the only musician on the bill who I could identify as actively supporting political movements, having played at Occupy Wallstreet and for other protest movements, so his set was more aimed at participation and interaction than he initially received from the seated audience in front of the stage. But after a few foot-stompers like ‘The Fabled City’, ‘One Man Revolution’ and ‘Union Town’ he finally got the crowd to their feet for the last few songs – some of them seemed to remember their past and even flashed peace-signs at the stage. Also was Tom not playing any Woody Guthrie-covers beside ‘This Land Is Your Land’, which he performed as an encore with all other musicians on stage, all venue lights on and a somewhat jumping (more hopping) audience singing along.

Oh, and he played RATM’s ‘Guerilla Radio’ with only a guitar and a harmonica, with an energy that would have made Woody proud. I just wonder if somebody told Tom that the ticket price for the event was 30 Euros, not really a bargain that would have interested any political protester without a job. But I reckon they had better things to do anyway.

You are on your holidays, just had a wonderful dinner and went to bed with a full belly. You dream. You’re staying in a holiday cottage somewhere in the woods, near the sea. One evening, it’s already dark outside, you return from the beach and switch on the light in the living room. Something feels not right. In the living room, there’s a large window and a back door leading to the terrace, but with the lights on you can see only darkness outside, like a black cloak obscuring your view. It’s so unnerving that you decide to lower down the roller blinds outside. You step close to the window and lower the roller blinds, but they get stuck three-fourths of the way down. You bend down to find out why, and in the light of the living room you see someone sitting on the plastic chairs outside. You can only see the person’s feet and legs and hands, holding something like a cup or a mug. The person is dressed in black and not moving at all, as if waiting for something. You decide to switch on the exterior lighting to get a better view on the person sitting on your terrace. The moment you switch on the lights, you wake up. You sit up in darkness and switch on the light on your bedside table, but something feels not right. The darkness outside the windows.

The laughing woman in the picture is my grandmother. She was born 1923 on a farm in East Prussia as one of eight children, so she was 16 when the Second World War started. She lost one brother who was shot down as a fighter pilot on his first flight, and two more were executed for opposing Hitler. In 1945, she was kidnapped by Mongols in the vanguard of the Red Army and spent the next five years in a labour camp in Russia. She then returned to West Germany and met my grandfather. I’m quite sure that I’ll dedicate a lot of my time this year to research her story and try to write about it.

“Advice? I don’t have advice. Stop aspiring and start writing. If you’re writing, you’re a writer. Write like you’re a goddamn death row inmate and the governor is out of the country and there’s no chance for a pardon. Write like you’re clinging to the edge of a cliff, white knuckles, on your last breath, and you’ve got just one last thing to say, like you’re a bird flying over us and you can see everything, and please, for God’s sake, tell us something that will save us from ourselves. Take a deep breath and tell us your deepest, darkest secret, so we can wipe our brow and know that we’re not alone. Write like you have a message from the king. Or don’t. Who knows, maybe you’re one of the lucky ones who doesn’t have to.”
— Alan Watts

Stolen from the boss.

Back in December, I flew to my hometown Solingen and not only played a show with my old band Stuck in a place called Cobra, I also introduced my little book to a German audience in the very same place. And to cater for my mom, who does not speak English (and all the other lovely people who showed up in droves and bought my book and showered me with affection), I decided to read a few pieces in German. My favourite encore or ‘cover’ when doing a reading is Neil Gaiman’s poem ‘The Day the Saucers Came’, but as all poems from ‘Fragile Things’ are sadly missing from the German translation of the book, I decided to translate it myself and see how it goes.

Here’s a little video from that night – see for yourself how it went down:

Phew. So I made it. Crisscrossed Europe in a small and overloaded Japanese car, with the constant fear of getting crushed by my complete household whenever I brake too hard. Thankfully there was no snow and all ferries were running on schedule. Right now I’m sitting in my new apartment in a 1920s building in the Berlin district of Wedding, a former communist stronghold in the 1930s and the place where Erich Mielke was born. These days, it’s one of the poorest districts of Berlin, which means I can get a kebab for 3 Euros and a beer for 1.50 if I dodge the street gangs and drug addicts. Just kidding. The food is cheap here, though.

I’ll catch up with my writing soon, in general and about Berlin – for the beginning I already scored a few writing gigs. Watch out for a guide to renting in Berlin and more coming on Slow Travel Berlin this week. More soon.

I am currently sitting in my messy apartment, filled with half-empty packing cases, plastic bags with clothes for charity shops and dismantled bookshelves and again curse myself for moving in winter. But it seems I have to stick to it – next week I’m getting a car, will pack all my belongings, board a ferry and will say goodbye to Ireland for good. Here’s a short text I wrote about aforementioned apartment, one of the best places I lived in, so far.

I live behind the workshop. To get there, I have to unlock the front door that was set unto its hinges in the year when the French started guillotining aristocratic heads, with the lower part of the brass letter box flap almost completely erased by 219 years of letters slipping through. I walk through the corridor, past the fin-de-siecle pantry where the tenants collect the post and past the 1930s bust, either a relative of the landlord or a find in a bric-a-brac shop on the quays. Descending three steps, I open the door to the workshop, a longish room filled with old wooden tiles, metal shelves filled with boxes full of screws, nails and bolts, disused fans and hairdryers, mirrors, wooden wine crates, paint-splattered paint pots and dusty cutlery. There’s a small path through this cemetery of DYI, which I follow to another door that leads to my yard. On three sides are the rising grey backsides of Georgian Dublin, and in front of me a gate leads to the small lane behind my house. To my right, there’s a yellow wall, covered with overgrowth from the neighbours hedge and with flowerpots in different colours in front of it. Some days, there are some stray cats from the empty house down the lane lurking through the leaves and flowers. On the left is my home, an apartment that has once been the servant kitchen and the coal shed at a time there were still servants around. It’s a nice place with wooden flooring and a low ceiling with roof-lights, so I can hear the rain and the footsteps of the cats when I sit at my desk and write. Sometimes, there’s also the crunching sound of the black cat devouring a pigeon behind the flowers.