A photo that Neil Gaiman took of me at Thanksgiving dinner a few months ago. I like this one, even though my hair’s a bit messed up.

I feel like I’ve been living out of a messenger bag for months now, ping-ponging around the world. Over the past two months, I’ve been in London, Berlin, Paris, Bordeaux, New York (four times), Cannes, Hamburg, Nice, and who knows where else. Oh right, Boston, where I live, apparently, though I’m not there much these days. Been feeling a profound sense of rootlessness lately.

I’ve gotten curiously adept at living out of a messenger bag, and my apartment filled with stuff–vinyl, art, chairs, turntables, vintage cameras, tea–feels decadent somehow. So much stuff. I arrived in New York on Friday, and I was surprised at how much it felt like home again. I lived in New York City for six years, but towards the end, Berlin and San Francisco beckoned, and I thought I’d never want to come back. Now I miss it, strangely, and I suspect I’ll be back there on a more permanent basis in the future.

Right now I’m on a brief visit to my parents’ house in Princeton, dredging up my teenage past in their cellar and finding myself, well, dredged in melancholy. Cassettes, CDs, and vinyl with yellowed Princeton Record Exchange labels. Books of poetry, dusty textbooks. Notes, diaries, and sketchbook scrawls. I’ve been thinking too much about the past lately. From here I head back to New York, and then back to my crazy sculptural treehouse-house in Boston on Tuesday. I’ll be back there for about ten days, before New York again, and then the West Coast in April.

On April 16th, I’m giving a talk in Seattle titled “Brian Eno, Cybernetics, and the Studio as Musical Instrument” at the Experience Music Project’s annual Pop Conference. The focus of the conference this year is music and technology–two subjects near and dear to my heart. From there, I head to Los Angeles. I’ll be speaking at Cal Arts in Pasadena on April 19th on art school, cybernetics, creativity and process, and, well, Eno.

In May, it’s looking likely that I’ll be back in the UK and Europe for a spell.

Later on in the horizon: I’ll be doing a reading at Joe’s Pub in New York on June 2nd with some of the other authors in the 33 1/3 series. On July 25th, I’ll be doing a conversation on sound art at the DeCordova Sculpture Park and Museum in Lincoln, Massachusetts – more on that once I know more.

While browsing through magazines at the gift shop in the Palais de Tokyo in Paris a few weeks ago, I came across this very nice review of my book in the February issue of the Wire. It felt surreal and wonderful to read a review of my book in a magazine, from halfway across the world.

I’ll be speaking at the Goethe-Institut in Boston on Saturday. Please come!

Electronic Music in Berlin: Film and Discussion

Electronica: Film and Panel Discussion
Saturday, February 13, 2010, 4:00 pm
Goethe-Institut Boston, 170 Beacon Street, Boston
Film has English subtitles; the discussion will be in English
Admission: Free

Panel Discussion with Tobias Thomas (DJ, Music journalist, Kompakt label), Tony Cokes (Brown University) and Geeta Dayal (music journalist)

Electronic music emanating from Germany is the focus of great attention worldwide. As part of the “Together Boston – The New England Electronic Music Festival,” the Goethe-Institut Boston takes a closer look at the electronic music scene in Berlin with the New England premiere of the film Berlin Calling and a panel discussion.

I’ll be in Berlin next week, a city I have much fondness for. Here’s an essay I dug up about Berlin, that I wrote when I was 25. I was a little more wide-eyed and optimistic then, sure, but the general sentiment still holds strong.

——————–

Berlin

(circa October, 2005)

So, Berlin. What to say? I lived there for a few months, during which time I realized how much raw potential there is in Berlin to do what you want to do.  A one-bedroom apartment in Berlin can be had for four hundred bucks a month or less; it’s amazing what becomes possible when that’s the case. Suddenly it’s a totally viable career option to be a DJ or a freelance writer or an artist. I knew people who made as little as a thousand bucks a month who were living pretty damn well. And that’s the sense of vitality that I loved about living in Berlin, this sense that anything was possible. And that’s something that’s very hard to get in New York, where everything seems to have a price tag attached. Yes, I missed New York City terribly. I missed Chinatown. I missed Brooklyn and Queens. I missed spicy food. I missed the amazing confluence and clashes of diverse cultures and people and commerce and hip-hop and reggaeton blasting from cars at 4 a.m. and misery and rich and poor and disco and that view of the skyline you get when you take the N over the Manhattan Bridge. I missed how late things were open in New York. I missed 24-hour diners. I even missed the people in New York who were just trying to make a fast buck. But I also realized this: in Berlin, you could build the life you’ve always dreamed of living. You could drop everything and take a train to Warsaw, or fly to Paris for a weekend on what it’d cost to take a taxi from Brooklyn to the Bronx.

Berlin at night is quiet. So quiet. It really freaked me out, actually. Sure, there are people on the streets, hanging out at bars, cafes, going out to clubs. But street life is quiet. People don’t just loiter on the streets, really. You don’t see people with boomboxes so much. You don’t see people blasting their music so much or breakdancing in subway stations or shouting on the streets or yelling “Fuck you!” so much. And I love that about New York. There’s this strange, stiff sense of politeness to day-to-day affairs in Germany. The most-used words, as far as I could tell, are “bitte” (please), “danke” (thank you), and “genau” (exactly). Yes, please. Thank you. You’re exactly right. Goodbye. Have a nice weekend. I liked that everything had a thin veneer of civility, but I also wanted to see it stripped bare.

Pretty much all the nightlife, cafes, all the stuff you’d want to do if you’re reading this blog are centered in a few different hip areas of the city: Mitte, Prenzlauer Berg, Friedrichshain, and Kreuzberg. I lived in Prenzlauer Berg–which is where a lot of New York and British expats live–mostly because I found a nice apartment on Craigslist and that’s where it happened to be. But after a while, it wore on me. It was nice, yes, and hip and funky, yes, full of cute green parks and indie boutiques, yes–but it was also full of stroller-pushing hipster parents shopping for organic produce, sort of like Park Slope in Brooklyn. Not that I’ve got anything against stroller-pushing hipster parents and their impressionable young offspring, but there were just too many of them. It felt a little too white-bread for me. I found myself increasingly drawn to Kreuzberg, home to the majority of the city’s massive Turkish population–the only really visible minority in Berlin. I love everything about Kreuzberg; it’s just so beautiful. The sky looks brighter in Kreuzberg, to me. The colors of the graffiti look more oversaturated. I love the way the murky river looks, snaking through parts of the neighborhood; I love the mossy green overgrowth of everything; I love the loud Turkish markets. Walking through Kreuzberg in summer is like tripping on acid. Kreuzberg is also home to Hard Wax, the legendary techno record store owned by Basic Channel.

I spent my last night in Berlin by myself, trying to reconcile my feelings with the city. Berlin and I, we’ve had an on-and-off relationship for years now. I fell in love with the city when I first visited it as a teenager, on that night train from Amsterdam to Berlin. That train landed me in Zoo Station in the West, and in my first rambles through the city, I landed in Kreuzberg. It was the first “alternative” district I experienced in Berlin; it was where i had that first delirious feeling that I’d landed on something that was both pretty punk-rock and somehow mysterious. I remember going to the SO36 on Oranienstrasse when I was a teenager; I remember the Turkish drag queens; I remember walking across the street to the funny French cafe, La Bateau Ivre, which is still there…I remember walking along the glittering path of the U-Bahn through Kreuzberg 36, after the trains stopped running, following the train stops–Gorlitzer Bahnhof, Kottbusser Tor, Schlesisches Tor. On my last night in Berlin a week or so ago, I traced my steps from when I was 18 years old. I walked along the same path under the trains, thinking and thinking. Thinking how my life had changed since I was 18, and how Kreuzberg was still there, and how much I already missed it. I walked over to Hard Wax–in the back of a brick alleyway, up a few flights of graffiti-covered creaky stairs–and bought a few techno 12″s. I wended my way down Paul-Lincke-Ufer and through the Kottbusser Damm, which probably has the most heavy concentration of Turkish people of any thoroughfare outside of Istanbul. Streets jam-packed with people trying to sell you anything and everything, much of the action happening in little makeshift stands. Sickly-sweet baklava, funny ceramic pots and plates with groovy blue curlicues on them, silky cloth, big creamy blocks of feta cheese, the surreal greenness of vegetables. People yelling, 1 euro, only 1 euro, their voices echoing through the hazy summer air.

It was in Berlin this time around, too–my third time in Berlin in the past twelve months–where I felt really moved by art and architecture again, and started to really appreciate it again, in a time when I think we’re all a little too desensitized to the power of art and amazing buildings and spaces. More songs about buildings and food, as they say. It’s been a while since I’ve been blown away by a gallery opening or a museum exhibit. It’s not that I don’t like them, but it’s been a long time since I’ve seen one that really made me drop to my knees and think yes, this it it, this is exactly it–this is mind-breaking, this is what I’ve been waiting for. The art scene is so omnipresent in Berlin. Art almost gets prosaic and dull that way; it becomes something you expect, like you’d expect indoor plumbing or coffee in the morning. After all, when it’s affordable enough to be an artist, everyone wants to be one. So it follows that Berlin is awash in art, much of it good, much of it bad. New York has that problem too to some extent, but it’s more tightly constrained by the iron rules of commerce.

Some of the best art in Berlin is street art. The funny wheat-pasted murals hidden behind Friedrichshain alleyways, the moss-covered psychedelic graffiti clinging to wet stone walls in Kreuzberg, the deliciously overthought design and typography of some of the tags left in random bathrooms. I went to a cool street art exhibit in a Kreuzberg museum, but I liked seeing the street art in its original context–that is, on the streets–better. One of the graffiti pieces in the exhibit had a sign on it that read “Do not touch.” Someone I was with said, “That sucks. What’s the point of graffiti if you can’t touch it?” He was right, of course. Graffiti isn’t just about the visual; it’s a tactile sensation, too.

The art project I saw there that moved me the most was called “Der Berg,” wherein a group of artists built a giant mountain-like structure inside of the crumbling, decrepit East German parliament building. I wrote about this in that Times article I linked to earlier on this blog, but that article didn’t really get to how I felt, to the enormous maelstrom of feelings I found myself lost in. So, back to my long-term relationship with Berlin. The Palast der Republik (Palace of the Republic)–that crumbling, massive building–will be razed soon to make way for a dubious and expensive government development project, and it’s hard to see it go. The first thing you had to do when you walked into the Palast der Republik and into the “Der Berg” project was that you had to walk over the area of the building that used to be the premiere East German theatre. Now it’s empty, and there’s a real sense of faded grandeur to it.

You walked over these dodgy industrial metal rafters and looked down into the theatre and saw giant cast-concrete letters that some contributors to the “Der Berg” crew put there, that read “Ceci n’est pas une montagne.” Word to your mother, Magritte…

…this was all while hearing music. Music from the opening of the Palast in the ’70s, old East German dance music, quotes from when the Palast first opened, and audio clips of an old man in a gruff old-man voice–the original architect of the building–talking about the painstaking process of how the building was built. You could call it a stab at cheap ostalgie, that weird misplaced/displaced sense of nostalgia for the days of communism and the old East Germany, but it wasn’t. It was just sad. Sad and beautiful, in its own ungainly way.

Then you made your way to Der Berg, the mountain itself, and chose one of three paths to scale the mountain–the way of the mountain climber, the pilgrim, or the philosopher. Like a “Choose Your Own Adventure” book come to life.

Over the period of about two weeks, I embarked on all three ways up the mountain at least once. “Der Berg” was part comedy and theatre routine, part obstacle course, part Rube Goldberg device. It was also one of the most inventive uses of space I’d ever seen.  There was no way anyone would allow this to happen anywhere except Berlin. There were too many safety risks involved. (This, of course, made it more fun.)

Back to the building itself. Seeing this glowing and grand mountain construction inside the Palast made me love art again. And seeing the Palast–ugly and boxy and industrial, ’70s and orange, but beautiful and modern and heartbreaking at the same time–made me love architecture again. Standing in front of the hulking, hollow shell of a building and seeing your own face reflected in its pockmarked copper glass facade was a powerful and oddly moving feeling.

I knew Rem Koolhaas had talked a lot about the Palast in the past, so I wanted to interview him for the article I was writing. It took me several days to track Mr. Koolhaas down for an interview, and when I finally did, it was nighttime–me in my office in Berlin, exhausted and pining for dinner, and him in a car in Rotterdam, in between business appointments. He was on a cell phone, and he called me on mine. The Holland-to-Germany phone reception was terrible, and his voice cut in and out, crackling through layers of digital static. I was nervous–who wouldn’t be, interviewing Koolhaas?–and I could hear my heart beating faster. The interview questions I’d prepared suddenly felt stupid, and sounded so flat as I said them.

The interview ended up going fine, even if it was a bit stiff and formal. At the end, I asked him how he felt when he first walked into the building. He said something like, “Let’s turn this around. How did you feel when you first walked into the building?”

I was utterly unprepared for this. I was interviewing him; this was an interview about him and about the building, not about me! I didn’t know what to say. “I…”

I faltered. I knew how it made me feel. The building made me want to cry.

“I never felt so…overcome by a building before,” I said into my cell phone. I felt stupid as the words spilled out of my mouth, but I couldn’t stop them from spilling. “The minute I walked in, I felt…I never felt a building’s power like that before. I never felt so affected by a building before.”

“Yes,” he said. “That’s exactly it. That’s how architecture should make you feel.”

For a brief fraction of a second, I suddenly felt a deep connection between me and the famous Dutch architect at the other end of the line. That we understood each other, somehow.

Then the interview was over, and I hung up the phone.

An essay I wrote for Rhizome about Sonic Warfare, a new book on sound as a weapon by Steve Goodman, a.k.a. kode9.

And a heads up: I’ll be in London next weekend (16th to 19th) and then Berlin from the 19th to 22nd. From there, I’ll be in various points in France for about a week, and then Vienna, before heading back to the U.S. Get in touch if you’re around those parts, too.

Happy New Year, all. This year, I only made one New Year’s resolution–to spend more time traveling. This month, I’ll be in London and Berlin, and perhaps a few other cities in between. Get in touch if you’ll be there too.

Some miscellaneous things I’ve done lately:

A long interview with me at KEXP in Seattle on Brian Eno and the creative process.

A recent article I did for Print, the graphic design magazine, on the Swiss ban on minarets.

“What I do in my films is very … I think they’re the films of a woman. And I think that their characteristic time quality is the time quality of a woman. I think that the strength of men is their great sense of immediacy. They are a now creature. And a woman has strength to wait. Because she’s had to wait. She has to wait nine months for the concept of a child. Time is built into her body, in the sense of becomingness. And she sees everything in terms of it being in the stage of becoming. She raises a child knowing not what it is at any moment, but seeing always the person it will become. Her whole life, from her very beginning, it’s built into her, is the sense of becoming.

Now in any time form, this is a very important sense. I think my films, putting as much stress as they do upon the constant metamorphosis, one image is always becoming another — that is, it is what is happening that is important in my films…”

- Maya Deren

“Art and Science are two different streams which rise from the same creative source and flow into the same ocean of the common culture, but the currents of these two streams flow in different beds. Science teaches, Art asserts; Science persuades, Art acts; Science explores and apprehends, informs and proves. It does not undertake anything without first being in accord with the laws of Nature. Science cannot deal otherwise because its task is knowledge. Knowledge is bound up with things which are, and things which are, are heterogeneous, changeable, and contradictory. Therefore the way to the ultimate truth is so long and difficult for Science.

The force of Science lies in its authoritative reason. The force of Art lies in its immediate influence on human psychology and in its active contagiousness . . . The stimulus of Science is the deficiency of our knowledge. The stimulus of art is the abundance of our emotions and our latent desires . . . Nothing is unreal in Art. Whatever is touched by Art becomes reality, and we do not need to undertake remote and distant navigations into the subconscious in order to reveal a world which lies in our immediate vicinity. We feel its pulse continually beating in our wrists.”

-Naum Gabo, The Constructive Idea in Art, 1937

I am thrilled and humbled to announce that I won $30,000 from the Creative Capital / Andy Warhol Foundation, in the Arts Writers Program. It’s a big honor. The list of recipients includes several writers and scholars I know and like, including the philosophy professor Christoph Cox, who writes often for The Wire, and the film critic Ed Halter, who used to write often for the Village Voice in happier days. I’m still floored, and I’m still trying to process the news.

In other news, I just got my hands on a copy of the intriguing new anthology The Resistible Demise of Michael Jackson, edited by Mark Fisher, which includes an essay by me on Michael Jackson and Bollywood cinema. On the Another Green World front, I’m glad to see that my little Eno book seems to be doing well. I just saw that my book is in the Pitchfork Holiday Gift Guide, which must be a good thing. I talked about some of my favorite Eno rarities for the music blog Largehearted Boy. I just did an extensive interview with KEXP in Seattle about my book, which will be out soon, along with an interview for the Vancouver radio show/podcast Books on the Radio. But the best book-related news of all was getting a very nice email out of the blue from Ed Park, who was one of my editors at the Village Voice way back when. (Ed now edits The Believer, and wrote a great novel called Personal Days.) Ed said he loved the book; I had no idea that he had even read it. He wrote a blurb for my book — I didn’t ask him to — which reads: “Dayal’s lucid, elegant deconstruction of Brian Eno’s most beguiling album is also an inspiring, delightful inquiry into the nature of creativity and constraint. Anyone interested in art making needs to read this.”

Right now I’m writing a big piece for Rhizome about the history and uses of sound as a weapon, incorporating a review of Steve Goodman (a.k.a. kode9)’s intriguing new book Sonic Warfare, on MIT Press. And I’m making plans to head back to San Francisco — in part to escape the biting New England cold — for a few days next week. And plans are under way to do a book reading in Brooklyn at the end of this month; more details soon.