My Life: the recent decade

In a way you could say that the closing of my cinema on December 31st, 2000 was the greatest change of all. It was like the bursting of a balloon: almost every activity that I had been doing the 2 decades before ended on that day.

Almost: in reality much of my social life was very much reduced due to the fact that I spent as good as all my time at the cinema or with Ursula, I only went home to my apartment for sleep. I rarely went to concerts or other cinemas, other than at my own one or at the Berlin film festival which Ursula and I enjoyed visiting every year. And we both had great vacations, especially remembering my last times in the States, 2 trips to New York City.

A new thing started in 1998: I got a computer and an online connection, primarily to promote the cinema, but I very soon learnt the 'other' possibilities and within a few months I started making friends online and around the world. Some of you I met already at that time, and I'm still in contact with them and still finding new friends.

And at that time I also started organizing regular gatherings with my friends, first a kind of round table, later and to this day dinner parties that have been a huge success ever since. (You know, I have reported). Currently there's a dinner party every 2 weeks.

On January 1st, 2001 - for some the 'official' first day of the century - I had to face the fact that I'd need to do something new; there was no way I could go back anymore. For the first time in my life I needed a conventional job for a regular income.

Most of you know it, cause that's where I am now: working for a renown international online shop. At first it was just my thing: selling books, music and movies and all with a basis in the internet. But the company meanwhile has grown into an internationally active American corporate business with all the insignia that it brings along. Today I'm a wage slave working for the benefit of an anonymous entity that will spit me out at any moment it chooses. I must deal with conformity, humiliation and a suppressive and irrational bureaucratic system on a daily basis, and after 9 years I'm even getting less and less paid in the bargain. But currently I have no financial alternatives.

On the other hand I've got a 40-hour week, the rest is actually free time for myself. I never had that before. And a lot of new friends as well!

And then the greatest improvement of all: both Ursula and I were living in separate, very small apartments, mine was a chicken shack-size one, jam packed with thousands of books, almost as many video cassettes and cds. I had lived in there for 19 years, ever since I left my parents. I had agreed with Ursula that we find something for us together, but on the condition it be better and larger than our current 2 apartments combined, and it need to be inside the medieval part of town, the city center, which we both didn't want to leave. We found it! Through an old friend of mine I knew from our record collecting times (that is more than 25 years ago!) who had a much too large place for himself alone we now got the apartment that we have dreamt of: 110 square meters (ca. 1200 sqare feet), huge rooms with wooden floors and right smack in the middle of town, in fact just around the corner of the famous Cathedral.

And so despite all the misery I might have at work I can always look forward to coming home and Ursula is there and we got a place now we truly can enjoy.

And now that another decade has passed there might be great changes ahead once again! A good start was the news that the local arts club Kunstverein Graz is doing a Lyssa humana retrospective, and I will even be performing there as well. There also has been the offer that I might be able to go on with our movie events at their gallery for at least 6 events per year. So: the show will go on!