The Day Before

The first thing I found out on the day before, was that David Bowie had died. I read it first in a tweet by a friend and then went to a newspaper site. The shock announced by my friend’s message came to full expression when I read the news article.

Mind you, it was not a shock that paralysed me, or brought tears to my eyes. It was a feeling of contraction in my breast, an immediate notion of sadness. I read the news with the same nervous expectation that I have, when looking at a replay of a match lost by my favourite soccer team, but the news didn’t curl back on itself. He died.

I sang for the rest of the day. I didn’t sing in a loud voice, though sometimes the songs in my head bursted into loud hums and lalaas. They were all Bowie songs. I felt surprised at this reaction. It made me also realise how big an impact the man must have had. Or should I say how big an impact FMradio and MTV had on my auditive memory? Name a band or a singer and I immediately sing one of their songs.

He died when the earth casted a shadow on the Moon, and made it invisible. It was a black Moon night. Probably elsewhere on the planet people were looking at the sky and thought of ‚starman’ and ‚major Tom.’ In the reactions I read, people expressed how important he had been in their lives. Such confessions told me more about the social and emotional backgrounds of the places where those people grew up. Their world must have been a grim place back in the early 1970s.

Of the songs I sang in my mind, no song was made after the year 1983. Maybe he had been innovative and spearheading a generation before that time. I can hardly imagine that the more obscure artists, that emerged in the post-punk era, and those who started experimenting in the outer margins of that genre, thought of David Bowie as a source for inspiration. After the year 1983 the name ‚David Bowie’ became a brand and rightfully so. It was time to cash in. Before those years Bowie became an icon, because his fans hoped that he would be the voice of a generation, and as such add sense to their existence. The invitation to dance defined the end of that era. He lived on in his greatest hits, and sometimes somewhere along the line of life that proceeded slowly to the year ‚NoW!’ I read, saw or heard that he was considered a great artist, which, obviously, he was not.

But his fans and followers who through all those years had been waiting at his door like a hungry dog were convinced. And that’s how surprise number two started shining into the day, as I read how everybody bowed in reverential respect at the way he had chosen his moment to die. It was the perfect ending; it turned his whole life into a work of art. And my surprise grew even bigger, when a lot of people started to see signs and messages in the videos and songs of his last album Black Star. Suddenly it was very obvious that he had been dying. I think David Jones got seriously sick of ‚David Bowie’ before everybody else would. If you create a fictional character then you can also get rid of this fictional character. That’s why ‚David Bowie’ had to die.

Those songs and videos also tell a different story. Have a look at a short film, especially the first minutes of it. It is called SYMPTOMS IN SCHIZOPHRENIA and it was made by James D. Page in 1938. It is archived at the psychological Cinema Register of the Pennsylvania State College and on the web at Archive.org.

The abstract tells us that this film describes and demonstrates four types of schizophrenia. Filmed at various New York institutions, it shows patients singly and grouped in large, outside recreational areas. Some patients are blindfolded. Symptoms shown include: social apathy, delusions, hallucinations, hebephrenic reactions, cerea flexibilitas, rigidity, motor stereotypes, posturing, and echopraxia.

In an extra note it is said that the patients were blindfolded to safeguard their privacy. David Jones has always been very careful about his private life. The fact that he appears blindfolded in his videos, might indicate that he appears as Jones alongside to his alter ego ‚Bowie’ who is not blindfolded in the videos. Both Jones and the Bowie character mimic gestures of the patients, and even transport some situations into the videos, like the man at the window, who brings his hand to the nose and makes the gesture ‚thumbing the nose.’

Is there something to explain when it is so evident that the videos show the schizofrenia of the Bowie/Jones construction? There is only one cure. He has to liberate himself from the fictional character ‚David Bowie.’

If you know that he has been married to a muslim woman, who never gave up her belief, it is easy to assume that David Jones must have expressed some interest in the Quran.

Compare the quotes from the Quran down here with fragments from Lazarus and Black Star, and discover what I have been doing on the day before, apart from singing Bowie songs in my head, while sweeping the terrace and read some news articles.

Allah is the Light of the heavens and the earth. The example of His light is like a niche within which is a lamp, the lamp is within glass, the glass as if it were a pearly [white] star”

a solitary candle”… „at the centre of it all” … „I am a black star” – in Black Star

Or [they are] like darknesses within an unfathomable sea which is covered by waves, upon which are waves, over which are clouds – darknesses, some of them upon others. When one puts out his hand [therein], he can hardly see it. And he to whom Allah has not granted light – for him there is no light.”

… describes the situation of the blindfolded man who suffers from schizofrenia.

Do you not see that Allah is exalted by whomever is within the heavens and the earth and [by] the birds with wings spread [in flight]?

Look up here, I’m in heaven” … „Oh, I’ll be free
Just like that bluebird” – in Lazarus

At the end of the day I wanted to believe that David Jones had converted to Islam.

His father-in-law was a diplomat for Somalia. To change the name and get a new passport must have been a piece of cake.

Maybe Sean Penn will trace him on his 80th birthday so that on 8. January 2027 The Rolling Stone will have only three words on its front page:

HE IS
ALIVE

The Day Itself

On the day itself it was sunny again. January was well on its way and, still, there was no sign of winter. It was warm in the morning sun. I put my table and chair outside and had breakfast on the terrace. The winds had cleaned the horizon. The coastline of Sicily appeared in full gloom and Mount Etna rose majestically above it, even more beautiful now that the top was covered by snow.

An hour later I took my backpack and started my walk uphill to the village. It is a walk passing onion fields, a farmer’s house and an almond tree in full bloom, between walls of reed and at the side of a large road that after a couple of curves ends at the village. There is nothing special about the little town. No tourist would take up residency here. No house seemed to be finished and no house seemed to be the same. Some of the older houses made of sandstone still stood, but you could see how the weather and vegetation slowly made them crumble. It would be a lovely place if you’d tear down a couple of buildings and liberated the view. The volcanic island Stromboli was just behind an ugly apartment block. I needed to go to the post office. I walked right in front of the oldest bar in town and noticed how the old lady of the bar leant forward from her chair and waved her hand to say hello. It was an invitation, of course.

The first time I entered the post office I looked in wonder at all the bullet proof glass, the double door with the space in between that served to hand over bigger parcels. I asked myself why this was needed in such a small, apparently sleepy village. But this thinking didn’t need much time. Most of Calabria’s youth would leave their hometown, go north or abroad to find a better future. There were not many opportunities here, not for work, not for hanging out. The strongest subculture was that of crime. The post office held the bank and it was the place where the older inhabitants collected their monthly state pension. People came to pay the bills. I had learned pretty fast that the best hour to arrive was shortly before closing time to avoid endless waiting. The bullet proof glass was needed to protect the safe. The wild west was invented here, in Calabria.

No postman would find the place where I lived. And that was okay by me. I got two huge envelopes from Canada and a smaller one from Ravenna in Italy. I gave a smaller packet in return, destination the state of New Jersey in the US. I did my shopping at Gianni’s small supermarket on the square. With my backpack filled and an extra plastic bag full of vegetables I crossed the street to the bar. It is a bar like I think a bar should be, where it is clear to see that nothing has changed over the last forty years. Well the lady of the bar, now in her eighties, must have changed over those years. We talked about the weather just as long as I needed to finish my coffee, and so I heard temperature had reached 23ºC last weekend.

On my way back I kept my eyes on the Gulf of Gioia in front of me, the street of Messina that divided the main land from Sicily. The Sun had changed a big surface of the sea into a plate of sparkling silver. A car stopped beside me. It was C. He offered me a ride. He talked about the weather, the nice days we were having. But he announced the arrival of winter. A massive front would bring in the cold directly from Siberia. People in the north were alerted; it would be harsh up-there in the mountains. We would be okay, temperatures would drop to 5ºC in daytime, like last year. He advised me to prepare myself, get some wood. I assured him that I was okay.

Many Days Before

I met Anne-F Jacques for the first time in Berlin. It was the Winter of 2009. She had come over to play the CTM-festival. I can’t recall the exact reason why she wanted to meet me. Maybe it had something to do with the ‚das kleine field recordings festival,’ that I organised around that time in unusual bars, that I spotted during my bicycle rides.

Setting up an evening of easy listening music with a narrative and natural feel about it, that would not exceed the volume of people talking, was fairly easy in the last years of the noughties. Most of the time I walked into the bar, explained what I wanted and the prompt reaction would be, that the barowner took out his or her agenda and offered a date.

It was a cold and uncomfortable February day. I had chosen a bar not far from Görlitzer Park, on Skalitzer. Someone had recommended it to me. It was one of those bring-in-the-furniture-from-the-street-and-thrift-stores-bars, that appeared like mushrooms and added a stylised version of squat esthaetics to the town, without changing its down-and-out character. It was uncomfortable as well: the furniture was puppet size, which didn’t seem to hinder Anne-F, because she was just over 1.50. What did we talk about? No idea. Probably it was things you talk about, when you first meet. She was from Canada. I am sure, it would have helped a lot, if I had known more about Canadian culture. As I see it now, it is all about being friendly and helpful in an enormous country, where every family had arrived only yesterday and had to learn how to cope with long, biting cold winters and a new sense of space, which was enormous, of course.

In the years that followed, we knew that we existed and, when needed, we would help eachother as much as possible. Occasionally we exchanged tapes per post. Her envelopes were filled with little things, that I would never throw away. She was there, at the outskirts of my existence; her image evoked a sense of compassion and modesty. But there was also something about her, that reminded of small animals in a children’s book, who became your companion and could talk. They too appeared and disappeared, whenever they wanted. In fact, if you listen to Anne’s soundwork, you will allways hear nearby sounds, as if she tries to imagine what an ant hears, when it shuffles through sand, or how a bee listens to itself when flying around. If mysterie exists, she must be capable of becoming miniature size and hear the world around her with different ears.

I finally made it to Montreal. On the occasion of my arrival she had organised a Tape Run. She had good hopes to finish it during my stay. That would have meant an absolute record, because the tape would travel from artist to artist almost at the speed of one track a day. I met Nicolas Dion and Martin Tétreault who were numbers 6 and 7 in the run, as the hand-over of the tape took place. It was a few blocks up from the book store where Anne worked. „She knows everyone in Montreal,” Martin said. He explained his track which was based on a gold disk that was sent into space. Engravings in picture language explained to the receiver out there, how life on earth was organised. In a next voyage the Montreal Tape Run will be part of the message.

I made good use of my days and drove around town as much as possible, albeit on a miniature sized bicycle. The bike figured in one of my 140character impressions.

“On a 9km/hour bike (20cm below my size): enter the fairy tale railway station with the phantom hall, where no-one leaves and no-one arrives.”

One of my favourite places was the island where the expo 1967 had been held. I stared at memories of a black and white era, got on a little stage where The Supremes performed, and, probably, the iconic president Trudeau had held the inaugural speech. I saw Buckminster Fullers geodesic dome and rode on the racetrack, still at my modest 9km/hour, thinking of the Formel 1 cars that drove 40 times as fast. Moreover I had to think of the enormous roar that would be heard in every part of the city.

“Long bridge, turn to the park, mysterious rumble in my headphones, riverside & city view, then this 1967`s naiv optimism”

I had seen a lot of the town, but when I saw the map, with all its rivers and islands, I realised that there was so much more to explore. Most of the little things pass by unnoticed. They become precious once you get to know them.

The Envelope

The tapes came in a big white envelope. My address was written by hand. I liked this, because I could envision someone who actually sat down at a table or a desk, took a pen, and from a piece of paper copied the address, taking care to spell it properly. A sticker in one corner showed the pre-stamped address of crustacés tapes. This, too, was the result of an hour at the laboratory and, apparently an insignificant work, carried out with care.

In the other angle three stamps, almost a relic from the last century – strawberries, the westcot apricot and a region in Canada called Point Pelee. Every time I brought some packets or envelopes to the post, I observed with regret, how the postman put one after the other on a scale, turned to the computer, hit a few keys, looked at the screen and fed the scale with an adhesive paper on which the price would be printed, a barcode and what did I know, and still it took ages for the post to arrive.

A big part of the envelope was covered by a page from a book on flowers and wildlife. It was page 113 and it showed three pictures. The description of the darkest picture was partly covered by my address. From the French text I understood, that it showed a bird which flew low over the surface of the water to catch, yes, to catch what? I didn’t want to risk to destroy the composition of the envelope, tear of my address and find out. The picture itself didn’t tell me anything; it was all black and blue and blur. No matter how I turned the picture, I saw bird nor river. The other two pictures were clear. Moreover they told a story Anne-F could not have imagined.

The first one was a parade of floating plants, the giant Victoria Regia. It was a picture of them in the wild, taken somewhere in the Amazon region. Now this Victoria Regia had a claim to fame. I learned from the story of this plant from a book by one of the best Dutch writers ever, Jan Hendrik van den Berg. The book was called ‚hooligans.’ It was a bazaar of stories, pictures and prophecies. One of the stories was about the construction of the Crystal Palace for the Great Exhibition in London, in the year 1856. The Crystal Palace was a glass house of enormous proportions, four times the size of the Saint Peter’s Cathedral in Rome. More glass houses were built in the years following, but, somehow, this dreamlike architecture disappeared completely after the Great War.

Joseph Paxton, a gardener, became the architect of the gigantic glass house. Well, the Victoria Regia, also the Victoria Amazonica, was the largest of the family of water lilies. Mr. Paxton was heard saying that the lily, with ribbed undersurface and leaves veining like transverse girders and supports, was his inspiration for The Crystal Palace. Anne-F had taken the page from an unwanted book. She had been working in the second-hand bookstore until last year. They were given boxes and boxes of encyclopaedias, atlases, dictionaries, that nobody wanted even at 1$ in the street sale. So she started bringing them to her studio and use them, and included a memory to my long time girlfriend as well: a picture of an orchid, a species that grew without roots.
The father of my girlfriend had been a well known breeder of orchids. He even came up with a new kind that was named after him. His idea was to travel to South America with her to find orchids in the wild. It would have been the present for her twenty-first birthday. They never went. The father embarked on a different voyage, to a place where no envelopes arrive, be they with tapes and pictures from Amazonian flora and fauna or not.

Paperwork

The envelope was full of little surprises. There were four tapes, each in their own wrap of paper, but I took also a green and a blue piece of paper out of the envelope. They were postcard size and also postcard weight. One was a very pale green with thin blue lines on it; the other was a very pale blue.

The top line on both of them was a bit thicker and of a red colour. In older days, when the pale was not yet so pale, the card might have been in use in public libraries, to write down the period within which you were allowed to take a book, followed by your membership number. So, for those who read faster than they can imagine or remember, these cards were very primitive time machines, that could implant imaginary or real memories into your brain and make you experience the calm and silence of a library.

Anne-F had used the cards for a very basic information, for which she had used letter stamps. I am sure she found them somewhere, and judging from the way each character appeared on the paper, it needed a bit of manual work, to get the letters in the right order, so that they spell out the required information like ”LA REVOLUTION EST EN PLEURS” or ”DÉPLACEMENT RENDEZ-VOUS”. The cards also had the address on them, with the clear invitation:

TO RECEIVE A TAPE
SEND A GIFT OR
POSTCARD TO

CRUSTACÉS TAPES
4555 PONTIAC
MONTRÉAL, QC
CANADA H2J 2T2

I tried to find the same font, but couldn’t. I don’t have an experienced eye for this. The ‚O’ and the ‚5’ have a much nicer appearance, that makes you think a bit of a yellow toy-duck in a bathtub, where you would expect it the least. I mean like the pope’s papal tub, that, coming to speak of it, is made out of marble, carved, back in the days, by Michelangelo himself. Don’t be surprised to find a small radio-cassetteplayer within reach.

Another great feature was a ‚crustacés kit for infinite sound matter.’ These words were stamped on an ordinary white envelope. From the dust accumulated on the top fold, I gathered, it was an envelope that had been stored for a very long time. Probably Anne had found it at a ‚street sale’ and saved it from an anonymous form of recycling. The content of the white envelope was again a card, white with squares, the kind of pattern that those among you who were not good at mathematics don’t like too much. It showed a stamped pictogram of a tape.

On the backside, stamped again, and now I am getting curious, but something tells me not to ask her nothing, not about the kit she uses and not about the procedure to get these words in such a word-like fashion stamped on a piece of paper, well, as I was ready to tell, on the backside were five-step instructions on how to make a simple loop cassette. A piece of magnetic tape was part of the kit. If you want to receive a crustacés kit, just write to the above mentioned address.

You might also get one of the crustacés tapes.

Crustacés Tapes

In his critique of the Montréal Tape Run, Ed Pinsent, one of the more imaginative reviewers around, says: „I also like the fact that so little is “explained”, that there are no printed biographies of the creators that can sometimes seem so self-serving and pretentious, and not a web link in sight. Hand-made cassette tapes, sounds recorded without use of a laptop, and a typewritten note – it confirms to me that I’m right to stay in love with the “old” world of tangible objects!”

There is no mention of the paper that Anne-F used to wrap her crustacés tapes in, simply because the MTR is wrapped in a piece of bubble plastic. The others weren’t. One tape, for example, was wrapped in pages of a falling apart edition of Arbres Indigènes du Canada. The pictures, use of colour and the lay-out had a very clear last century feel about them, the time when tons and tons of books landed on the shores of our knowledge, each one serving as a footnote for things, we were equally happy to know and to forget about. Anne used also the back leaflet of a Canada post customs declaration, an old receipt booklet or Chinese ”ghost money.” The tape called „”Déplacement Rendez vous” was wrapped in paper with six round holes in it, that she found in a yard sales.

The paper around the six holes and the receipt from the booklet had a very specific smell. Caramel for the one and a notion of vanilla and cinnamon for the booklet. How could this be possible? The receipt booklet unleashed a whirlwind of images. They ranged from vague recollections of the life in the harbour of 19th century Boston, as described in the opening chapter of Nathaniel Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter, to a nostalgia for the early twentieth century years, which I encountered for the first time in the silent movies made in Hollywood. But the paper, with its decades old perfume, made me also think of coffee: one of the best cortados I ever had. I found this coffee in a small cafe not far from the bookshop where Anne-F worked. It was one of those new bars, custom-made for the laptop generation, surfing on the new wave of coffee gourmet bars, where special offers with vanilla and caramel flavours abounded.

I once had an in-depth talk with an Austrian friend, Christian. He was born in Vienna, and as such your existence was troubled with Wiener schnitzel, the sausage that’s simply called Wiener, the Waltz of course, Sachertorte, Freud, Adolf Hitler and The Anschluss, the third man and theme from third man, but also with Wiener Melange, which is a special blend of coffee. Now this guy knew how to make the second best cortado I ever had. He had especially bought a professional espresso machine from Italy. It was one of the classic brands whose name I can’t recall. He had studied the art of coffee-making to extremes, simply because he liked to drink good coffee.

The best coffee he ever drank was in Antwerp in a bar without any pretensions. Mention Antwerp and I remember Austerlitz a book by Sebald. In it he describes very extensively the train station of Antwerp and its potpourri of architectural styles. When I read the first part of the book, I waited with anxiety for the moment, that the characters would start to walk and end up in the cafe, where Christian found the best coffee he ever had. It didn’t come. Sebald went to visit a fort, where you drank coffee from a thermos. Which brings me back to the words of Ed Pinsent. I also like it very much that so little written information is provided. This information would have become the interface, the anonymous point where sender and receiver of the tapes would meet, and disappear. In a global sense this interface is called news media. It lures us into a state of mind, that makes us forget about the beauty of futility.