Friday, June 18, 2010
New Stuff: The Wire
There should have been an ad for our exhibition in this issue of The Wire, but somthing went wrong and we're only mentioned in the events section on page 90.
However, they did put our ad onto their online edition:
http://www.thewire.co.uk/marketplace/
and
http://www.thewire.co.uk/articles/news/?p=9
Thursday, June 17, 2010
Wednesday, June 16, 2010
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!
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!
First Lines: Robert Louis Stevenson - Treasure Island
Squire Trelawney, Dr Livesey, and the rest of these gentlemen have asked me to write down the whole particulars about Treasure Island, from the beginning to the end, keeping nothing back but the bearings of the island, and that only because there is still treasure not yet lifted, I take up my pen in the year of grace 17-, and go back to the time when my father kept Admiral Benbow Inn, and the brown old seaman, with the sabre-cut, first took up his lodging under our roof.
Tuesday, June 15, 2010
New Stuff: Ein Volk, ein Reich, ein Kino
Decades ago I lectured on mainstream cinema during the Third Reich. I just discovered this German release on the same topic and thought I'd like to read some up-to-date insight.
Monday, June 14, 2010
My Life: the 90s
The 90s brought great changes to my life. First and foremost it was meeting Ursula. We met through a mutual friend, a local photographer who actually had also portraited each of us separately , but put both our pics in an exhibition about local personalities, mostly of the independent arts and music scene. So we had seen and known about each other before through different public events.
I think I can say that from our first real meeting, an afternoon at the beer garden (me gobbling down one beer after the other and babbling endlessly about my American grandfather and why The Godfather Part 2 was the greatest movie ever), we were immediately good friends and became more so with every next one. We were soon a happy couple, and to this day I have never been separated from Ursula for more than one day (with the exception of one week early on, when she was on an excursion in Italy, but even I visited her there).
At the exact same time of meeting Ursula many other things were going on in my life. My part in both the film club's cinema and Lyssa humana were undiminished when work was concerned, but I was becoming more and more estranged with the people involved, especially with the film club. I was playing in a second, slightly more conventional band, Flaxman Family/Hammersmith, and for years was preparing the production of a self-written and produced opera which was all done with a whole new group of friends and which was very large in scope. It turned out to become a rather abstract piece of musical theater, but was enormously successful.
And together with some members of Lyssa humana and another friend we were preparing to found a cinema of our own. There was an old cinema (actually the oldest in town being founded in 1918) that had over the years degenerated from trash movies to skin flics and ended as a porn theater and had been closed for 2 years already. After a lot of negotiations we were able to take it over as a group of 4 friends. I'll always remember when I broke the news to Ursula: we kept the project top secret, but I got the permission from my friends to tell Ursula. On an extreme cold winter day (it had minus 20°C) I invited her out to a cafe and spilt the news. Then I took her over the Old Stone Bridge and showed her the place which looked pretty ruined and needed a lot of renovation, which we managed within 3 months opening in March 1991.
The new cinema, Stali, dominated my activities for the next 10 years. I spent more time there than in my own apartment which I more or less only used for sleep. The first year we were prepared for hardship, and I had to do a day job, since we didn't pay out any of us from the cinema's minimal profit. I did all the programming which included negotiations with the distributors and conceiving the monthly program all with the lay-out and print of a several-page leaflet and I did more or less all screenings, at times 7 days a week.
I also still continued my previous activies and even tried to finish my diploma at the university, but it was just too much. By and by I withdrew from nearly everything else till it was only the Stali I worked for, although we also did concerts, exhibitions and other events there as well. Over the 10 years of the cinema I was the only person actually always present together with Ursula who didn't work on a daily basis at first.
It would now be very complicated (and would include many melodramas and stories), but not everything went well. By the end of the first year all friends (except me) feared the financial risk, became hostile to each other or just didn't want to work that much anymore, anyhow they all wanted out. It's complicated since they sold their parts to a third party, a movie distributor, who more or less took over, but with me as leftover...The advantage was that I got an agreement that no matter what, I would get paid, so from then on I had a real income and didn't need a day job anymore. It was nevertheless still at least 50 hours a week of work. The new partner sold his part to another local cinema owner after a few years, but I stayed in. When that partner withdrew in 1998 I finally became sole owner of the cinema (with Ursula's full participation), something I never really had aimed for, but that's how it turned out.
I could tell so many stories about my cinema which included a lot of fights and grief, an extremely straining and hostile competition with other local cinemas (and my friends, the film club!) besides the everyday problems. Ursula stayed with me through all the thick and thin of it and I admire her all so much more and am thankful, because without real love nobody would have voluntarily gone through all this and the final harrowing end of it in 2001.
One part I should mention, though: in the mid 90s some friends and I opened a film store called The Angry Red Planet selling movie books, posters, soundtracks etc, but also a lot of independent music, it was halfways a music store, of course. This went parallel with my work at the cinema, but unfortunately it went apart, not for financial reasons per se, but again personal problems. One lesson I can give you all: never do business with friends!
Since many ask: we did not close the cinema because we didn't make it, much to the contrary, I planned to keep this business as my life's achievement. What happened was: we did not own the building, we paid rent. The owner sold it and the accompanying house to a dubious business agglomeration which stayed anonymous throughout the whole transaction. They first pushed in a company as a front who bought the complex then resold it back to themselves after they had cleared the area. I spent 1.5 years at court to rescue the cinema. The contract was there stating my right to keep and prolong it, but since there had been so many changes in the ownership of the cinema the judges more or less capitulated (even said so), the legal situation was too complicated. So in doubt what do they do? They rather give it to an anonymous obviously not quite legal multi-million business than defending the rights of a simple self-employed cinema owner. In the end I lost, the cinema was torn down and a building with chicken shack apartments was built instead.
I think I can say that from our first real meeting, an afternoon at the beer garden (me gobbling down one beer after the other and babbling endlessly about my American grandfather and why The Godfather Part 2 was the greatest movie ever), we were immediately good friends and became more so with every next one. We were soon a happy couple, and to this day I have never been separated from Ursula for more than one day (with the exception of one week early on, when she was on an excursion in Italy, but even I visited her there).
At the exact same time of meeting Ursula many other things were going on in my life. My part in both the film club's cinema and Lyssa humana were undiminished when work was concerned, but I was becoming more and more estranged with the people involved, especially with the film club. I was playing in a second, slightly more conventional band, Flaxman Family/Hammersmith, and for years was preparing the production of a self-written and produced opera which was all done with a whole new group of friends and which was very large in scope. It turned out to become a rather abstract piece of musical theater, but was enormously successful.
And together with some members of Lyssa humana and another friend we were preparing to found a cinema of our own. There was an old cinema (actually the oldest in town being founded in 1918) that had over the years degenerated from trash movies to skin flics and ended as a porn theater and had been closed for 2 years already. After a lot of negotiations we were able to take it over as a group of 4 friends. I'll always remember when I broke the news to Ursula: we kept the project top secret, but I got the permission from my friends to tell Ursula. On an extreme cold winter day (it had minus 20°C) I invited her out to a cafe and spilt the news. Then I took her over the Old Stone Bridge and showed her the place which looked pretty ruined and needed a lot of renovation, which we managed within 3 months opening in March 1991.
The new cinema, Stali, dominated my activities for the next 10 years. I spent more time there than in my own apartment which I more or less only used for sleep. The first year we were prepared for hardship, and I had to do a day job, since we didn't pay out any of us from the cinema's minimal profit. I did all the programming which included negotiations with the distributors and conceiving the monthly program all with the lay-out and print of a several-page leaflet and I did more or less all screenings, at times 7 days a week.
I also still continued my previous activies and even tried to finish my diploma at the university, but it was just too much. By and by I withdrew from nearly everything else till it was only the Stali I worked for, although we also did concerts, exhibitions and other events there as well. Over the 10 years of the cinema I was the only person actually always present together with Ursula who didn't work on a daily basis at first.
It would now be very complicated (and would include many melodramas and stories), but not everything went well. By the end of the first year all friends (except me) feared the financial risk, became hostile to each other or just didn't want to work that much anymore, anyhow they all wanted out. It's complicated since they sold their parts to a third party, a movie distributor, who more or less took over, but with me as leftover...The advantage was that I got an agreement that no matter what, I would get paid, so from then on I had a real income and didn't need a day job anymore. It was nevertheless still at least 50 hours a week of work. The new partner sold his part to another local cinema owner after a few years, but I stayed in. When that partner withdrew in 1998 I finally became sole owner of the cinema (with Ursula's full participation), something I never really had aimed for, but that's how it turned out.
I could tell so many stories about my cinema which included a lot of fights and grief, an extremely straining and hostile competition with other local cinemas (and my friends, the film club!) besides the everyday problems. Ursula stayed with me through all the thick and thin of it and I admire her all so much more and am thankful, because without real love nobody would have voluntarily gone through all this and the final harrowing end of it in 2001.
One part I should mention, though: in the mid 90s some friends and I opened a film store called The Angry Red Planet selling movie books, posters, soundtracks etc, but also a lot of independent music, it was halfways a music store, of course. This went parallel with my work at the cinema, but unfortunately it went apart, not for financial reasons per se, but again personal problems. One lesson I can give you all: never do business with friends!
Since many ask: we did not close the cinema because we didn't make it, much to the contrary, I planned to keep this business as my life's achievement. What happened was: we did not own the building, we paid rent. The owner sold it and the accompanying house to a dubious business agglomeration which stayed anonymous throughout the whole transaction. They first pushed in a company as a front who bought the complex then resold it back to themselves after they had cleared the area. I spent 1.5 years at court to rescue the cinema. The contract was there stating my right to keep and prolong it, but since there had been so many changes in the ownership of the cinema the judges more or less capitulated (even said so), the legal situation was too complicated. So in doubt what do they do? They rather give it to an anonymous obviously not quite legal multi-million business than defending the rights of a simple self-employed cinema owner. In the end I lost, the cinema was torn down and a building with chicken shack apartments was built instead.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)
Posts
