15.11.08

She’s dreaming this dream wherein I’m leaving her for good. She’s saying ‘why? why? why?’ I’m saying ‘It was wrong from the start, it was wrong from the start, it was wrong from the start’.
She wakes up, tells me the dream.
I hold her. I shower. I pack. Another Ruhr-trip.

18.11.08

I wake up after a short night.
Outside dark.
Inside cold.
We pack our bags. 
Make some coffee. 
Walk outside. It’s snowing.
We buy a train ticket and wait 20 minutes until it arrives.
It brings us to Düsseldorf. We’ve been here before.
A number of times.
You buy a döner. I rest in peace.
 
Last night we had another Jägermeister night. We drank and played games and said goodbye.
You asked me to help you out with your text. I tried my best to not look at you.
You were busy caressing your loved one. 
I watched your hands moving. Your ring. The side of your cheek.
We had pizza.

 

The night came to an end. We went to bed. 
After 5 minutes you walked in. 
I got up. 
We went down to the kitchen. Had another drink. Talked more. 
Hugged and said goodbye.
Now I am here. The place of my love. Her virtues surround me. 
The air is thick with time and darkness. I like it here. 
She is about to come. 
The music is on.
I cough from too many cigarettes, make some tea and smoke another cigarette.
I speak to you on the phone. You sound old. You sound like at the end of your road even though you are trying your best to be at the very forefront.
 
The Avant Garde of today shops at H&M and sends collective emails to each other.
 
The machine has taken us in for better and worst. We sit at computer tables. We drive automobiles. We talk on the phone. We reach out by closing up. We go from dot to dot to dot and in-between love seeks where to crack in. We the receivers, the senders, sit at our tables, in our rooms, look out the window and stop thinking. Stop growing. We make plans, we write curricula’s, we confirm appointments. We suck. We fucking suck.

22.11.08

We are taking pictures of an unemployed Gelsenkirchen ex-proletariat with blue glasses and a blue jacket. He is friendly and talkative, and carries a shopping cart on wheels. Now and then he picks up a half-liter Stauder from his coat and takes a small sip. The text on the gray building behind him reads: ‘my number’, followed by a phone number, and then an arrow that points to the words ‘sex in bett’.
A woman of around 60 walks by. She is small and fat, has sparkling eyes and bright pink lips.  She starts an unasked monologue, sometimes addressing us, sometimes the man. ‘He’s a shame to our streets. Drinking beer. You’re a shame to our streets. What will the Dutch think when they see this in the newspaper? It used to be beautiful, this street, my street. Sauber, clean. Now the streets are dirty, the people are dark or drunk, the houses black. The only white house in the street is mine. Take a picture of that.’ She picks her nose and pulls out a little black thing. We say goodbye to the nice ex-proletariat after writing down his name, which is Ernst Jedamczyl. ‘What a disgrace’, the pink piggy continues, watching Ernst continue his daily walk. ‘Everything is multi-cultured, multi kulti, nicht sauber. The real Germans are old. They get no kids. There will be no Germans here anymore in the near future. There will be no Germany. It will be Turkey soon.’
With our snapshot camera we take a picture of her narrow eyes and narrow mind. We get really close to her face, and Ohad tells her it’s for the porn industry. She laughs in an uncomfortable way. ‘I got to go now’, she stumbles, ‘don’t write anything bad about this street. Or about me.’

 

25.11.08

A guy with a big heart eats.
The lady besides him drinks.
Us, the people watch.
We are what we are.
We the rulers.
The lovers.
The losers.
I like her.
You say.
I like her a lot.
We walk.
The street changes below our feet.
From city to city we draw a line.
Point by point.
We stop.
We talk.
We take pictures.
Sometimes we know what we are doing.
Most of the time not.
But what we do know is that we are here.
We are walking the streets.
We take the pictures.
We talk.

26.11.08

Bahnhof Süd, quiet coffee place on top of train station Essen South. No music, 20 people, split up in groups of 4, 3, 1. Everybody is talking on a middle-tone level. No one shouts, no one whispers. Monotonous Germany.
There is a context for almost every moment on almost every level. I look for the moments when this context is unclear, vague, a mere guess. I find it here. Alone. It’s these kind of moments. A new place, a familiar mood, an open mind, a notebook, a pen, a stream of consciousness, unconsciousness, some new sounds and scents. 
Last night I got drunk. Really drunk. At the kitchen table of my temporary new home. With my new German friends. One of them told me I am acting like a shrink. I told him I feel like one. I told him everybody in this room is a shrink. In fact, everybody on this globe is a shrink. He looked at me with empty eyes. I repeated what I’d just said. He offered me another drink.
I’m hardly ever lonely when alone.
I’m often very lonely when with people.
I hardly ever fight my loneliness when alone.
I fight my loneliness all the time when with people.

 

28.11.08

I’m dreaming this dream in which I receive the death penalty. I don’t know what for. On a dark train station in the Ruhr area I await my execution. I’m tied to a pole on a platform but somehow find a way to loosen the ropes and free myself. I jump into a dirty trench, only wearing underwear and a snapshot camera. I cross railroad tracks, jump over fences, run through alleys and gray Ruhr neighborhoods. I reach the mountains. Weeks pass. Months pass. Everyday I run for several hours, deeper and deeper into the wilderness.
Suddenly I’m back in a city. I find myself in a center for homeless and junkies. I tell a gigantic doctor I’m a fugitive. He says that I won’t survive the winter without any money. He then suggests that I start taking pictures of my flight that he might sell in the visual art scene; pictures of a fugitive - there is definitely a market for that!