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!

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.

My Life: the 80s

My activities kind of exploded in the 80s. In 1982 I finished school (with quite good grades) and started studying German literature, philosophy and political studies at the Regensburg university.

My enthusiasm for the movies goes way back and by the end of the 70s I had already systematically started studying film history and theory and watching as much as I could. Turning 18 and being of age I went to the cinema at least 3 times a week.

In Regensburg there was a film club at the university that changed location in 1982 and became officially embedded (and subventioned) into the city's official gallery and musuem buildings. At that time they had a little room for projecting 16mm films and a small office, and the club had a great program of film classics and independent productions. Within a year I turned from regular visitor to a full member of the film club organizing retrospectives and film seminars on my own. On top of that I kind of slid into the office work doing 8-hour days there and then projecting the movies at night. In no time I was one of the main members of the club, and after nearly a year it was decided that I get a salary for the work that I had been doing for free till then.

It wasn't much, but it allowed me to move out from my parents' home and have an apartment of my own. I was 24 by then. I'd say the moving out was the main turning point of becoming adult (I guess my family thought so, too).

Although I was doing well with my studies at the university I must say I hardly had any time left for that, and I dragged them along till way into the 90s till I finally quit.

Here's a pic from a festival in the Filmgalerie (unfortunately small):

The members of the film club were mostly a wee bit older than me and all politicized left-wingers from the 60s and 70s, so the program we presented very much mirrored that including a very distinct intention to 'enlighten' the audience.

You may imagine that this very well suited my own intentions, but very soon I got estranged with this attitude, because it included some anti-American resentment, a closed-mindedness towards popular culture and - worst of all - a tendency to censorship.

Among my many activities at the cinema was also recruiting new members which I managed very successfully. One of them came directly from one of my film seminars ("How to Read a Film") and became a friend as well as a member of the club, Walter Harteis. As a movie enthusiast he introduced himself with a well-prepared suggestion for a retrospective of early Hitchcock movies which I also fully supported, since it consisted of many rarely seen works. The idea, however, was immediately rebuked with the comment: "We don't play Hollywood shit!"

It might seem irrelevant, but this one rejection was a watershed that set the goals to my future. Needless to say that I fought this discussion out and we DID show the retrospective.

The rebuff was uttered in pure aggression by one my my (till then) best friends who thought (and probably still thinks) he was a fervent Nouvelle Vague fan. There's so much wrong with that one sentence, but here are the important points:

- early Hitchcock movies were German and British productions and had nothing to do with Hollywood
- the Nouvelle Vague adored Hitchcock as one of the greatest artists of cinema; they also admired the Hollywood classics
- why should you reject anything just because it's from Hollywood?
- the whole thing revealed a shocking ignorance about cinema in its entirety

As a result I decided to form a sub-group within the club to enforce a program containing all that cinema rejected by the rest of the club: genre movies, B-pictures, avantgarde flicks, etc. This was not really that new a idea. It was loosely oriented on Amos Vogel's book "Film as a Subversive Art" and was much in the vein of what the more recent documentary "Midnight Movies" displayed.

I managed to get the permission to run an independent program on weekends at midnight, and we managed to continue it over a period of more than 15 years with enormous success, but also with constant aversion and attacks from the leftist 'establishment' inside the club and from similar groups all over town plus all the conservative powers. You must know they are just as conservative in their own way as their supposed political opponents. But we managed.

Out of the core of this cinema group we called Lyssa humana (human rabies) we founded a band. Inspired by our avantagrde favourites The Residents, Borbetomagus and the industrial bands like Throbbing Gristle and Whitehouse we built our own 'instruments' out of scrap metal and spare parts, amplified the sound electrically and made what by today is officially called 'noise music'. Although this was really nothing new or very innovative we did succeed in shocking nearly everybody and managed to end sold-out concerts to a nearly empty auditorium. At least we became something like a local legend.

Lyssa humana was not simply a band, the music was just one small part of it. We organized the film nights on weekends (later once a month), exhibitions, concerts, even seminars and published our own magazine. It's not like we earned money, but it was fun. Besides that we were friends who spent a lot of time together and visited as many independent rock concerts that we could. We probably saw a few hundred bands, some of them meanwhile legendary.

By the end of the 80s I was active in all these things: organizing the film club and doing most of the screenings (as the projectionist), our activities in Lyssa humana, being active in the record collectors scene and doing many different and changing day jobs to earn a bit more money, too.

There would tons of stories to tell, but there's just not enough room here for that.

My Life: the 70s

1971 we emigrated to Germany, don't ask me why, it's still one of the mysteries in my life, but it was definitely my mother's decision. My dad flew over 6 months before the rest of the family (Mama, my sister Andrea and myself). We went to New York City (I remember seeing the WTC under construction), stayed with friends and then we took the ship over the Atlantic. Here it is, the TS Bremen:

So, in July 1971 we arrived in Regensburg in Bavaria, and I've been living here ever since.

There's so much to tell. I was still a child when we emigrated, but by the end of the 70s I was nearly an adult. One thing I can say about this whole decade is that I was horribly homesick for the States all those years. That only changed when I finally became an adult.

This was not immediately the case: at first it was thrilling to enter a whole new (well, at least different) world and to get to know my German grandparents better, who I loved very much. I did already speak German, but the first say 2 years I needed to get it perfect and, which was more difficult, to deal with the Bavarian dialect, which is quite different. Today, Bavarian is more or less the tongue I speak most of the time.

Unfortunately, I don't have too many older pics scanned (and our scanner isn't working at the moment), but I'll try to include pics where possible.

The rest of my childhood consisted of school and living with my German grandparents. The German school system is divided into several kinds of schools with different education levels. My mother wanted to me to attend the 'High' German school (called 'gymnasium'). You can only go there, if you pass a test in elementary school in the 4th grade, so it was decided that I restart with 3rd grade, although I already was so far in the States. Here's a picture of my elementary school, St. Konrad school:

Well, I managed the test, and from the 5th grade on I went to the Werner-von-Siemens-Gymnasium which was downtown and quite a ways from where my grandparents lived, so I needed to take the bus. 5th grade starts with your first foreign language which was English, in my case, so that was real easy for me. In the 7th grade I got Latin which was OK, I think I would never have managed French (which was the other option) with my newly learnt Bavarian accent.

The Gymnasium goes till the 13th grade and the last years are equivalent to what you call undergraduate college. So I went to school till 1982.

As long as my German grandmother (called Oma, grandfather is Opa) lived - she died in 1974 of cancer, age 62 - I was fully in the choke-hold of a strict Catholic upbringing. Oma was extremely pious, going to mass (and communion) every morning at 8am and attending all other services which we had to join, too. So more often than not we'd be called in from playing with the neighbours' kids and forced to go to church for the Rosemary and similar stuff. For a kid like me it was like hell, and as soon as I was of age with 18 I declared to quit Catholic lessons at school, too.

My Oma was beyond that incredibly superstitious and believed in nearly anything 'otherworldy': stigmata occasions, ghosts, flying saucers, alien abductions, natural catastrophes as God's punishment, etc. The horrible Managua earthquake in 1972 was due to the people's sins there to her, and she was tireless in describing those sins to us. She also knew everything about the stigmatized Therese of Konnersreuth (near Regensburg) and had a book full of gory pics of her bloodletting.

You can imagine that it was complicated to get an impression of the real world amongst such a raising, but then I must say that my Opa was quite the opposite to his wife. He was a devout Catholic, but with ratio: he'd never believe in anything unreasonable and was much more tolerant to worldy things. He once told me he found an 'oh-so-holy' prayer book among Oma's things, he took it to Church the next Sunday and deliberately 'forgot' it there telling me "so that some other old holy witch can find it".

What you might not know, the 70s in Germany were a pretty dark age, and I was very early confronted with the reality in contrast to the supernatural world my Oma lived in. To this day I really don't know how she coped with what really happened in the outside world. Only 3 years after we arrived in Germany my Oma died of cancer at the age of 62.

So I grew up in a new strange world, terribly homesick for the States, the death of both my grandmothers (my American grandmother died of Alzheimer in a very slow and horrifying downward spiral of losing her mind) and the terror that occurred in Germany.

The first event that knocked me onto my feet was the massacre at the Munich Olympics, this happend just 80 miles from here where I live. All Germany was enthusiastically celebrating the Olympic games (just like the football championship), and all of a sudden it was destroyed by the hostage taking of the Israeli players and then the catastrophe in the attempt to free them. I was 10 years old, but from that day on I started reading the newspaper on a daily basis.

In my childhood innocence I would never have imagined that so much malice was ever possible. And neither my grandparents nor my parents were able to explain it to me.

Munich was just the beginning of my long quest for enlightment. Reading the news and digging a bit into history it didn't take long to find out that I'm living in a country that just a few decades before committed some of the most hideous crimes in the history of mankind, and the German state at that time was not too keen on being remembered about the Third Reich and its repercussions into present day Germany.

The 70s was also the time of hippies and political radicalism, especially here in Germany, because of its recent history. Starting in the 60s mostly students became very radical founding what they called an 'extra-parliamentary oppostion' (the German abbreviation APO) culminating in demonstrations, rallies and later on in violent acts. You've all heard of the Baader-Meinhof gang and the German RAF who very much dominated the political atmosphere in Germany of the 70s and early 80s.

Of course it was terrorism, but it didn't start out that way. There were justified causes for protest (especially former Nazis in high positions in the state), but the government ('establishment') and many of the older citizens did not accept the protest and stroke back violently in the process provoking the radicalization, too. In the 70s there was a cutting down on civil rights, legitimized police brutality with new laws to enable their activities and a witchhunt against anyone who said something 'critical' (or had long hair, for that matter). You were very quickly labeled as a "sympathisant" of the terrorists, one of the most-used words in the German 70s. This political conflict culminated in the kidnapping and murder of Hans-Martin Schleyer and the subsequent (supposed) suicides of the RAF leaders in jail.

As we were recently discussing teenage rebellion elsewhere I'd say about myself that my only rebellion with my elders was a political (and religious) one, otherwise I was a 'good boy'.

In those years I became a Marxist, read all the relevant philosophers and theoreticians and participated in diverse political organizations, events and projects, nothing really special, though, but I was to be labeled as 'sympathisant', too.

I'm just mentioning this, because - among other things still to be told - it very well defined what kind of plans I'd have for the future in my life, and I still see a straight line from there to me now.

Woodstock was my real introduction to rock music. In the early 70s we had an Armenian friend, a fugitive from Lebanon who joined the American army to speed up his naturalization as an American and was immediately accepted and stationed to Regensburg. His name was Krisdapor, we had a lot of fun together and he gave me 2 cassette copies of the Woodstock album.

Till then I didn't know much more about rock music other than the Beatles and the 50s/60s/70s major hits and evergreens and was already sick of the local German top 40 music which is probably the worst of all mankind. But the music on "Woodstock" immediately made me homesick for the States, at that time Regensburg was way behind the times, and there were no hippies until later in the 70s. Yep, they kind of appeared here when punk started and punk arrived even faster, say about 5 years too late. "Woodstock" got me addicted to 'old' rock music and kind of spoilt me for Punk and New Wave, too, which I hated at first hearing.

Needless to say that I built onto this introduction. I was immediately a Jimi Hendrix and Neil Young fan, and I started buying and reading books and magazines on rock music systematically collecting the essential albums of that era. In fact I became quite a serious collector, founding my own mail order and organizing local record collector's conventions. In the 90s I even was co-owner of a store selling cds.

If I don't count my childhood Beatles addiction Frank Zappa was the first artist I really did become a fan of, and very literally so.

This was something that was way beyond my small teenage world, a music that I had no grasp of. The music was deliberately cacophonous, the lyrics and jokes obscene and appeared completely desultorily. It took me a few weeks, before I found some kind of understanding. I became a fan and also an admirer of Penderecki and other modern composers in the bargain.

Of course, as a fan, I loved nearly all of Zappa's work, managed to get my friends to become fans as well. And in our days organizing record collectors' conventions and gatherings we did get a reputation for being those weirdo Zappa aficiandos. To this day some people still ask me about him. In reality my enthusiasm simmered down by the mid-80s, since Zappa started repeating himself too much, and I had already found much more unusual music out there. Still, it is very sad that he died so early.

My affection for 60s American rock music very much ruined me for the punk era, I really hated the 3-chord stuff. But very early I did find out about the more unusual and innovative bands, such as Pere Ubu, the Residents and the re-founded Red Crayola. That got me started on finding ever more music outside of the mainstream and to this day I'm still at it.

My Life: The 60s

[Recently some friends had asked me to tell them about myself, so I'm workung on a cursory 'autobiography' divided by the decades, here's part one]

I was born in Munich in 1961. My Dad was stationed as American soldier here in Regensburg, got to know and fell in love with my mother (who is German) and married her a half year later. Since the next army hospital was hours away in Munich, my mother was brought there (through a heavy snow storm, it was December). We moved back to my Dad's hometown Kirkwood, Missouri the next year. This is where we lived till 1971.

I have very fond memories of my childhood in the States, I even think it was the perfect place to grow up. What you might not know yet, both my parents always had jobs, so I spent most of my childhood with my grandparents, first in America, then here in Germany. I guess that influenced me a lot, and I can say that all my grandparents were very good people (and strict Catholics). I only saw my parents in the mornings and evenings, for supper and my mother reading us bedtime stories.

I could tell so many things, but I'll have to be cursory:

I loved the hot summers (couldn't stand them now anymore, though), our house with a large garden and those animals to be found everywhere: turtles, snakes, rabbits squirrels, etc. Collecting lightning bugs in a jar and using them to secretly read in bed under the blanket.

In school (3 grades in the States, school run by nuns) I was the class' bad boy: constantly being sent to the corner, having to stay after school. Once the teacher glued my mouth shut with tape, cause I was always talking back to her...

My Grandpa's basement stock full of wondrous things, a child's, MY paradise: books, magazines (hundreds of National Geographics even from the 1800s), stuffed animals and animal skulls, a pool table, a large bar and party space. I spent a lot of my time there.

American TV: Amazing. Now if that wasn't formative! I saw hundreds of monster movies and ALL the 60s TV series. I'll always have a love for B pictures. Furthermore my Dad took me to the movies very often, so I saw a lot there, too: most memorably 2001 - A Space Odyssey right when it was released. My theory is to watch this one as a kid, it'll have so much more of an impact. It opened up a whole new world to me.

The music: another formative part of my childhood. My Dad had a large singles collection of 50s music, you know, Elvis Presley, Brenda Lee (my favourite at the time), and so many others I forgot the names of. Although it was the 60s I was listening to this older stuff all the time until my Dad got The Beatles' Sgt. Pepper's and Magical Mystery Tour which I played thousands of times. This music had so much in it, you could discover something every time you played it. And of course the everyday American top 40 music in the radio. That's where my love for music comes from.

Here's me (in the foreground) 1966 during a visit at my German grandparents' house, the 2 other kids were the neighbours' kids I played with: