It was smoggy today in Hong Kong. The sun never really made it out from behind the curtain of moisture and smog and clouds and yet, today was the first day when I could see into the distance. Well, not the literal distance but the theoretical distance, the possible future, the likely ‘whats-next.’ Each discussion I have illuminates new perspectives and challenges and opportunities and slowly but surely the scope of my work here is revealing itself. It’s not going to be a small job and it’s not going to be dull. I took a huge leap of faith when I abandoned my nice life in Tirol for this unknown but with each passing day I feel more confident that I knew what I was doing :)
I managed to shave my commute down to 35 minutes from over an hour because I stopped being a dumbass and because a nice colleague showed me the MTR station right next to the office. Duh. Part of the fun is the not knowing and then the next stage of that fun is the eventual knowing. Its my pattern to wait until I’m all-about-the-knowing but by then I’m also usually going…the irony….In any case, my commute allows for fresh air (tram), book reading (MTR) and a (walk) past a (coffee joint). It’s ideal. When typhoon season hits I will only have a few spots where I’ll be exposed to the elements and I imagine that this will also come in handy when the summer comes and decides to steam this island up to unbearable degrees.
My brain is a little frazzled with all the “what-ifs,” “ah has!” and “dude….i totally need to do-thats.” It’s a bit of a treat that I have a 3 day weekend to absorb all the info and ides swirling and try to relax a little. Or at least try to. The cats are finally settled but I feel like there are pieces of me that haven’t quite arrived yet. Like I’m somehow still in transition, that static person shaped blob that isn’t quite beamed up or down yet. I’m getting there but, often throughout my days, I am still surprised to see such a new landscape. My hair and skin are going to need a new routine as well since sticky, humid, salty, smoggy air is a new environ. Lots of adjusting going on here at 2bean…
In honor of the fact that I am just now beginning to see the light…
It feels like Lego Land on Kirschentalgasse today. Boxes on top of boxes stacked near boxes waiting to be filled. The sum total of a life fully lived doesn’t necessarily equal more stuff and I am surprised to see that I don’t actually have that much to pack. I think I’m going to be able to squeeze everything that I’m storing into 10-12 boxes and will probably only need to ship 5-6 east. The cats are starting to realize that something is about to happen to them and so is their Alpha Kitty. If everything can be packed by next weekend then it is quite possible I will be able to enjoy my last days in the Tirol with my friends so I’m feeling motivated.
On Friday I was lucky enough to have 2 photo shoots…one for a financial services company whose preparing to plaster my work on billboards and bus stops all over the Tirol. It’s a new kind of work for me and I underestimated the effort it would require, but it’s challenging and (hopefully) lucrative. I’ll be in Asia when the campaign goes live but I’m hopeful some friends will snap some pix and send some newspapers so I can see how it looks.
The second shoot was the polar opposite to the first…freeform instead of careful calculation. I got to participate in an interview and subsequent rock show with Damo Suzuki, a 60 year old Japanese man who was very important to the Krautrock movement and has been on tour forever. He was a gracious and interesting man and I’m looking forward to reading (and sharing) Brad’s interview for MOLE when it’s published. Here are a couple images from the night…if you’d like to see them all, click here.
Damo Suzuki & mord @ pmk
Damo Suzuki & Mord - Innsbruck, Austria
Saturday entailed a whole lot of photo editing and some big denial about the packing that I promised I would begin. I decided to procrastinate the inevitable with some whiskey at Innkeller and decided that as soon as I assemble a band to back me and my uke I am going to call us ‘Unexpected Whiskey.’ In my experience it is often the best variety. Unexpected whiskey often leads to late nights as was the case last night so today, Sunday, didn’t get rolling until well into the afternoon.
Magically, NPR woke me with some tunes that had me packing boxes like a championship box-packer so what might have been a wash was actually a productive day. Don’t see the link? Click here.
Back to Lego Land for me…I may have just taped Doozer into a box of art supplies and need to stop multi-tasking.
Last Thursday morning I hopped in my car after grabbing a latte and headed towards Wattens. A song came on FM4 that caught my attention and, for the first time in 2009, I told myself I was going to go buy that CD that night. Those of us that see tons of shows every year absorb lots of music though it is both rare and lucky when something really gets your attention. This was the case with the song ‘Mornings’ by a band called Portugal. The Man. I arrived at my office with the song in my head and not more than 10 minutes later saw a FB update from a friend regarding a concert that very night. Low and behold…Portugal The Man was playing Club Weekender the same night. Synchronicity is one way to see it…dumb luck another. An hour later I had a press pass and looked forward to the show all day.
The band surprised me with thier awesomeness. Weepy, wonderful Eddie Hazel inspired guitar licks spun around catchy melodies and cosmic noise makes for an eclectic and addictive sound. I have been listening to thier album The Satanic Satanist (silly name) all weekend and haven’t tired of it. The last time I got this excited about a new album from a new band was, I think, when I heard Black Mountain. I showed up a little late for the set due to a date with Bruno at the Metropol (meh…) but was sucked immeadiately in. Here are a couple of my favorite shots of this excellent band, but click here to see the whole set.
Portugal. The Man @ Weekender
Portugal. The Man - Innsbruck, Austria
It was a total surprise and I feel compelled to share. Here is the song that I heard while driving that made me stop and listen (click here if you dont see the player).
Friday was the 5 Year anniversary of my beloved pmk so it was a no-brainer that I would grab a camera and head to the bogen. A stage outside from 8 until 11 was a nice change of pace and the rain held off long enough to let the party get going. I shot 3 bands that night, the last of which was my favorite…a group from Vienna called Bulbul. The guitar player was impossibly sexy so please forgive the bajillion photos of him in this set. Here are a few of my favorites from the whole evening…
5 Jahre PMK
Beana & Stefan Lachinger & their perspectives on PMK
Sexjams - pmkBulbul - pmk
Just before 1am the rain got heavier and my patience for slow beer lines and damp crowds waned and I headed home to lose my mind in the endless Six Feet Under marathon that has occupied my free moments in the last 2 weeks. It was a great night all in all…made me proud to have been a part of the last 2 years at pmk, for sure.
Chris & Ulli Rock - Happy Birthday pmk!
Saturday and Sunday were a mix of snow showers, rain, sun, fog, winter, fall and summer so laying low and doing very little took almost no effort. I manged to get my apartment clean (kind of) and to have some QT over chocolate cake (thanks Uschi!), Bananarama (thanks Michi!), red coconut curry (thanks Albi & Alex!), a walk in the park (thanks Beate!) and some delicious noodles and mushrooms (thanks Becky & Luca!)…lucky Bean, eh? Yeah, I thought so too. here’s a couple more snapshots from the weekend’s fun with the Business Edition…
thefutureisstupid
snowinsummer
window in a rainsoaked castle
Just because I genuinely care for you (you didn’t doubt that did you?) I’m going to kick down one more track from my new favorite band Portugal. The Man. This one is called The Woods and had me dancing in my living room until the wee hours…(don’t see the player? click here)
I’ve been back from holiday for a week now and more than 8 people have said to me, “welcome back to the real world!” I know that the intention is good and this is a an acknowledgement that I was in another kind of reality for the last month but these words have been echoing in my head since thier first utterance. The real world? Is that where my life is located? What does that say for the billions – yes, billions – of people located all over the Earth that have a reality different than mine? A world where water is still the primary concern followed shortly by shelter, food and community? Is that not the real world? I would make the argument that this holiday I had, this vacation, was into the real world and not the opposite.
Getting Water
Only 5 days into my normal routine and I can’t shake the fact that everything I’m doing is somehow floating above the surface, mired in an ocean of static and electricity, the tasks are like turning the gears of a clock in a world with no time. I am making and writing and shifting and doing all with the purpose of being able to do the same thing tomorrow. Like the Doozer’s living in Fraggle Rock, I am building things simply for the sake of building them. Need is irrelevant. Good design is optional. Cooperation is a luxury. The Western way, the capitalist way, isn’t as concerned with the output as the money made from the output and I can’t understand why I have always been okay with this relationship. I haven’t just been okay with it but have educated myself to maximize it and, with it, my own personal benefits.
Skin - All They Have To Sell
I refer to myself as Sisyphus all the time, the 21st century variety, and that is true but if I recall the story correctly Sisyphus was in hell. I am not. Or at least, I would like to choose an alternative. It took a journey to the East to gain some perspective on the West and now I am grappling with that new view. Don’t get me wrong, I like comfort and am deeply grateful for the gifts and luck I have had that allows me to live the life I am living but I am seeing something else now…life with purpose, concern for the output rather than the money made from it and comfort are not mutually exclusive. It is possible to take the same skills and same passions I use for perpetuating the daily grind to turn the gears of a different machine…one that impacts the ‘real world’ in a ‘real way.’
Sisters - UB Girls in the Country
Since my return I have been combing through my images, watching zillions of TED presentations, looking in the mirror and asking myself some very clear questions. I am full to the brim, overflowing in fact, with inspiration and I am considering carefully where to direct this new passion and energy so as to help reconnect me with the ‘real world’ and also maintain the flexible freedom that I have worked hard to achieve. A garden would be a simple beginning – reconnecting literally with where my food comes from – while the opposite end of the specturm would be dropping everything and heading to Africa to dig wells. As you can see, it is a big arc that I am mentally traversing and I am curious to see where on it I will land.
The honest truth is that I don’t know yet how, and how much, I want to change or how radical that change should be but I can say that the thought is pumping through me like my blood.
My skin has been tingling for the last 24 hours and I can also detect an elevated heart rate…normally the hypochondriac in me would diagnose any number of ailments to explain these facts away but at this moment I am 99% sure its just the call of the wild. 24 hours and counting until I head East…
There aren’t too many moods a little Townes can’t lift or sing to sleep. This article in the NYTimes had me thinking of both him and the amazing night I spent at Amsterdam’s Paradiso shooting Steve.
I keep singing the same song over and over again in hopes that the music will somehow swallow me whole. Absorb me, envelope me and consume me completely. Turning up the volume hasn’t seemed to do the trick so I learned the chords and strummed along with the uke in an effort to facilitate my consumption. It felt good, to be sure, but I remain un-consumed, un-enveloped and totally un-absorbed.
The wheels are spinning tonight with a surprising weekend behind me, a ridiculous weekend before me and a monster of a trip looming large on the horizon. It’s a lot to digest and I’m trying to be cool, calm and collected but i’m pretty sure that combination is not in my nature. Choose any 2 and I think I can manage that but all three together? That’s sounds like somebody else.
I’m just being dramatic I think but if I’m being honest I will admit that as strong as a couple years alone makes a person, it can make her equally as weak. Like a weight lifter so focused on his biceps that he forgets his skinny, chicken legs I am feeling a little out of proportion at this moment in time and space. It could just be restlessness or spring fever or the first signs of swine flu but right now…right this moment…I am feeling a little like a little kid. Small and uncertain in a big and certain world.
It’s silly, I know, but that’s something you should know about me. Sometimes I’m silly.
The “problems” that are making my wheels spin and my thoughts swirl right now are hardly problems…or if they are ‘problems’ they are the good kind…the kind that make me see myself as I am. Tonight I am a mess that can be worn with pride…Tomorrow? Maybe a super hero.
Chatting with a friend last night about transit we discussed how sailing is one of the few means of travel that allows your body to arrive to your destination at the same speed as your soul. In tact. In real time. Unlike air travel where it always takes some hours or days, depending, to find yourself truly present the wind appears to move at the speed of life. I was thinking about this conversation as I woke up today, in tact, in real time on my 33rd birthday.
The speed at which I arrived to this place in my life can look like something that lights up as you pass through it, Star Trek style or it can seem like the infinitely slow speed of molasses flowing in winter. Like the wind has been at my back blowing me forward through the days I feel no surprise to wake up 1/3 of the way through (perhaps).
33 of me
I was never the type of person to expect things of myself by this age or that age. I dreamed of no scheme that would have projected where I would find myself at this point in my life with career or man or kids so I find myself exactly in the spot where I guess I oughta be. I’m free. I’m happy. I’m healthy and connected to a solar system of super stars…people that inspire me and guide me and laugh with me and make this whole damn trip something to talk about.
Though I file myself squarely in the “all good” filing cabinet of life, it is natural that questions arise and that once in a while you need to decide where to go next and chart the new route. Reading the wind, checking where the sun is on the horizon, the color of the sky (red sky at night…) and considering those places where you hear the siren’s call should make the next harbor easy to chart but not always. Truth be told, I have found myself in a place where I can go just about anywhere and do just about anything and I have no idea what to do next. No idea where the wind will blow me next or if it will even move me at all from my current perch.
It’s a beautiful and humbling place to stand and, for the moment anyway, I’m just looking forward to the stories and adventure in store for this Spring with hopes that the wind, perhaps in the Gobi, the Adriatic or the Achensee will whisper something in my ear and give me a little hint about what’s to come. Each year begs bigger questions, weighs a little more and is a chance to do the things in life you want to. It’s only then that you need to be careful what you wish for.
No short list tonight. No answers or insights…just a Bean in the world thinking about what makes her happy and what she wants….
The desire to comfort a dear friend last night with old pictures saw me open up an archive I haven’t looked at in years. Beginning with my touchdown in the Big Apple through my take-off almost 8 years later, it is a digital catalog of a thick and truly epic chapter in my long (and strangely short) story. I can’t help myself but scroll through and giggle and think and flinch and scratch my head and wonder how I always manage to land ‘butter side up.’ Not just older and wiser with better stories to tell, but surrounded with fun and love and adventure and people that make me a better Bean. It’s like my story writes itself. Maybe its the big 33 that has me taking my time to reflect…slowing down…looking backward or maybe it’s just a coincidence. Actually, that’s bullshit. It’s not coincidence. One more trip around the sun is as good a reason to look backward as it is to look ahead. My theoretical rear view mirror is one of the main reasons why when I do forge ahead it’s deliberate.
I was supposed to head to Vienna tomorrow night to ring in the b-day but some cosmic debris (in the form of a shifted meeting and a kaput Skoda) side-swiped me and have changed the plan. I envisioned writing in my journal on the train ride and listening to Mogwai while the motion of the rails lulled me to relax. Spring and cement and libations and friends, sounded like a romantic way to wake up a year older, doesn’t it? It’s okay, I trust that Vienna will wait for me…
I am a proponent of the notion that things happen for reasons so, though recalibrating my plan of attack, I am not letting the switch back sidwswipe me, as it were. Innsbruck you say? I say “ok.” There are some fun things on tap, not to mention that extra day off and the air here tastes like what I would imagine the words “sunshine buttercup” would taste like if they were edible so I am going to surrender to the flow and enjoy myself.
Something about all those images scrolling through my mind has me overflowing…really mushy and gushy and grateful. With only 1 1/2 years under my belt in IBK I can already wander through the pictures of my life here and tell some amazing stories…and see myself surrounded by dear friends. Is it normal to always feel so damn lucky?
Anyway, enough of that. I still have a whole 2 more days before my birthday and I feel a short list coming on so I’ll save my optimistic philosophy for when I have a point.
p.s. thanks for hurmoring me with the Billy Joel tune. i had a song class in 7th grade and chose that song as my ‘final’…i haven’t sung it in years but was (obviously) thinking about it tonight as i bid farwell to vienna. one for the uke??
i had an incredibly unsatisfying conversation just now…so unsatisfying, in fact, that upon signing off i felt a strangely deep sadness. Mesureless melancholy, actually. Sometimes even no expectations are still too many expectations. Painting a prison built on materialistic greed to be a perfect pleasure dome, though its easy to do, makes me sad.
I had to learn memorize this poem in 10th grade and i’ve never forgotten it. I’ve never forgotten it but tonight was the first night in years when i remembered that i hadn’t forgotten it.
Waiting for my cold medicine to kick in and spin me into chemical-induced, dreamless sleep I figured that I could do a little spinning of my own while my eyes stay open and string some thoughts up here on 2bean. My whole flat is restless tonight and were it not for this Nyquil, I imagine that I would not find sleep for many hours to come…
Doozer and Walter are in the midst of one of their WWF-style kitty smack downs and there are things falling and breaking all around me as they fight for the coveted role of ALPHA kitty tonight. What they always forget is that I am the alpha kitty and all their hair pulling, rug flipping, cat growling insanity can only ever get them to second place. I dream sometimes of video taping them when they behave this way or of making them little kitty-friendly mexican wrestling masks and shiny capes…I have other strange kitty notions as well. Sometimes when they do the little figure 8 between my legs when im trying to feed them breakfast and circle me like sharks i envision making them little hats with dorsal fins…Landshark! Candygram!
I bet you’re imagining that a) the cold medicine is working and b) perhaps i took too much but in both instances you would be mistaken. I am simply putting out into the world some funny images that have lived in my head for a long time. Sometimes buried treasure chest, sometimes toxic waste dump there’s a wealth of random tidbits in there and sometimes I gotta set them free…even the ridiculous ones about turning my sweet kittens into landsharks. Especially those, I think.
All the work and congestion and snow in the Springtime and longing and waiting has me feeling all stirred up inside. Like i’m rattling my own cage trying to break out and fly away… This feeling comes over me often and is usually followed by a credit card bill and airline ticket. Im never quite sure if Im running away from myself or straight into myself. In a matter of a couple months I’ll be able to contemplate that exact question from a felt ger in the middle of the Gobi desert.
Music has a way of setting me free in the moment…those moments when I have to stay put and do what i’m supposed to so that I can, eventually, fly off into my dreams and see the world like the child I know I am. Patience is something im learning with age. This song has debuted here before but here’s a new incarnation…it makes it ok for me to sleep and wake and work again and again and again waiting for those moments of freedom and real, life-affirming adventure.
“How the hell can a person go to work in the morning, come home in the evening and have nothing to say?”
Its a good fucking question.
My head is starting to clear up thanks to chemistry and with that opening is coming a simultaneous closing. Closing up shop. Im tired and needing to close my eyes and sleep. Its true that believing in this living is a hard way to go which is why its good to believe in more. Tonight Im gonna believe in free, rambling men….the truth of the Gobi…the strength gathered from routine….the strength gathered from breaking routine. I gonna believe in something I can hold onto and close my eyes a happy woman….
