heading to the ost

eastern europe is the one that is now living quite a huge cultural movement after all the years of socialism: young generations taking the cultural scene by themselves with amazing proposals in really cool spots. work-life-fun-photos-music. like always, all mixed up. the published work about berlin takes me now to prague. an east berlin (kreuzberg)-prague connection which makes a lot of sense.
therefore this beggining of 2010 will be in the republica checa. we´ll see what life brings/images/text come out from the inmersion in the new east. prague will be the next stop of the serie.

mistery train by jim jarmusch

simply beautiful.

post montag

listening to apparat: useless information

de vuelta

hoy hace un sol precioso en mi ciudad. ayer noche traje la tabla de snowboard para aprovechar los momentos libres y subir a los alpes, situados a escasos kilómetros de munich. la llegada, con un poco de nubes sobre una luna enorme y sin embargo no estaba tan frío como cuando me fuí, los edificios con esculturas de águilas y búhos sobre las fachadas bávaras, la música clásica en el taxi que me llevó a casa.
considero importante ese momento que tiene el "hacerte adulta" de elegir el lugar donde asentarte. creo que influye en la elección un "algo abstracto" que algunos sitios tienen que te hace sentir como en el fondo sientes que eres. ese "algo abstracto" se manifiesta de forma muy fuerte al inicio de tu adolescencia y hay unos sitios que lo potencian más que otros, siempre hablando desde mi experiencia por supuesto, ese momento en el que la personalidad deja de ser niña y lucha por convivir/encajar el primer contacto como adulta, en ese mundo tan extraño en el que te sientes totalmente incomprendida, y en el que todos quieren que seas algo que no eres.
con 16/17 años ese "algo abstracto" que va conectado con lo que sientes "eres de verdad" lo percibí muy potenciado aquí y quizás sea la vida, la que con una excusa u otra, te acaba devolviendo a esos sitios.
hasta que llegué a madrid siempre había vivido en lugares dueños de un fuerte componente de contacto con la naturaleza: el mar atlántico en huelva, lo volcánico e isleño de las canarias, los veranos en el campo de argentina; ese contacto parte olvidado tras vivir largas temporadas en grandes ciudades. sin embargo hace un par de semanas, tras pasar pocos minutos en coche desde mi casa, acabé tomando un vino en una estación de esquí de aquellas que suponían enormes distancias para llegar a ellas y pasar disfrutando una semana.
poder vivir cerca de la naturaleza me proporciona aire fresco cuando recién acaba de nevar, el blanco silencioso, lo majestuoso de las grandes montañas que te hace enmudecer, los bosques, los lagos en verano cristalinos. cosas que echaba inconscientemente de menos. no sé muy bien lo que me espera pero si siento una elección tomada conscientemente que incluye elementos geográficos, intelectuales y emocionales para que ese "algo abstracto" se quede tranquilo y poder pasar en paz a lo siguiente.
el resto se irá dando de forma armónica en tanto y cuanto nos mantengamos en sintonía con lo que sentimos de verdad.
aquello que te hace ser tú y no otro.

merry christmas

reality bites

everyday photography

yes yes putting some order in old notebooks, pics, my first home. a place to hang out with all my friends, a bounch of teenagers, barely older than 18. so many memories, experiences, "make a home from a rented house" as feist sings. my personal concept of the 'everyday' through photography. all these visual diaries in shape of negatives, slides, pics, notebooks. our small everyday. as simple and pure as that.




jamie-amaya-emmet-marta-david-alan-beatriz

manhattan by woody

b-day motto taken from mike mills

jürgen teller: "w", 2006

i love Jürgen´s photos. All the amazing campaigns he has been doing for Marc Jacobs, working perfectly with matt-washed-out tones and the locations of the pics. All seems a bit like film stills taken from very unique experiences. There is this enigmatic stuff that catches your attention, there is always a story behind each pick and thats really cool. Sometimes i´ve had conversations where, in order to have a new editorial, the content of the shooting is a MUST. If there is no content what do we have? Its true that beauty could also be a content by itself but is also true that without a visual story to develop what you get is not exactly complete. Or maybe its my opinion because i dont come from fashion but from an editorial work based on telling visual stories with photos and text. Jürgen is amazing at that, all those pages in the "Die Zeit" suplement every saturday in München plus the early work he did together with his then partner the stylist and now photographer Venetia Scott,-whose sense of aesthetics is simply extraordinary-, remains today so fresh and exciting.
Here is the story behind this pick "w", taken in 2006.

" A beautiful woman, alone and vulnerable, dressed in a tight skirt, laced corset and dizzily high-heeled shoes. The outfit signifies either a classic hooker or very high fashion at the turn of the 21st century. And Juergen Teller is the photographer- a raw, young talent whose work first appeared in the grunge music press in London in the late 1980´s and was rapidly welcomed into the fashion world, where his photographs of dangerously thin models with tattered clothes became closely associated with the style of heroin chic. The school is now discredited, in part due to the death-by-drugs of some of its brightest young stars. Teller survived, because his method had little to do with fashion and a lot to do with story telling. Even before he saw the clothes for a shoot, he and his partner Venetia Scott created a scenario, and a character, and thought of the assignment almost as a movie, "a day in the life of that character". He sees his role as the one who releases the viewers into a world they could not reach alone. "I want to make people able to dream through the pictures. They should provide a mean to take your fantasies further. I want you to be able to see not a piece of clothing but a characterisation that´s interesting and inspiring".
From Acne Paper, 2009.

home sweet home

mamá papá empanadas de maiz mandi que ladra el cuarto tal cual lo dejamos las charlas la maleta en la terminal 4 que tarda infinito y más allá y el hogar. por navidad.

el esplendor perdido por carolina serrot hauke

small guide to munich: granno

Sometimes i wonder why life has brought me to Munich. I really do. The fact of being here relies in a bounch of coincidences piled up together: i didnt know the city before i arrived, i downloaded the uncorrect document that i had to download in order to get the position i was looking for, my german was in quite a miserable state after years of not finding anybody to practise it with and my tolerance towards cold is not what it was when i was a teenager. Auf jedenfall, I am here. And will be staying until life takes me somewhere else i suppose. But i dont do ask myself too many questions anymore. Because it doesnt really take me anywhere. Sometimes this points of clarity appear by themselves, i listen to them quite carefully, but after all life develops by itself within its own rythm, steps and times. You cant do anything about it. I must say that Munchen then was a complete surprise, and what i found here, more. Is sort of hard to say how positive a change like this may be but i guess is all for good.
Now it looks beautiful with the snow, this sort of small sized Saint Petersburg, with the white taking away the possible disturbing noises. And is so strange when you are almost awake and can hear by the windows this noise that come from horses´ coaches, this tingle, tiny bells on the top of the horses´s head, pulling coaches with people. And there is a Christmas coach where they play music with accordeons inside and drink gluhwine, this hot-cinnamon-wine that is what you here drink in the christmas markets in the streets. A beautiful scene is really, when at nite, you pass them with the bike across the main field of the Englischer Garden. You cant see nothing but the tiny candles, trembling spots of light, in this deep darkness and the noise of the tiny bells cuddling your ears.
A jump in time. Feels quite scandinavian.
Ive always been old fashioned anyway, so i guess this city suits me.
Here, in this little visual tour that starts today you find the Granno, one of my main spots to hang out and eat something before we go out.

mediterranean landscapes

cool things from the last 2 nites: the xx: crystalised+the snow

and the snow on the alps. cant wait to flight back with my snowboard to start the season. beautiful stations in this side of the globe. beautiful snow, a short trip over the weekend and in less than an hour from home, to fully have this snow resort feeling after so long. cant wait. cant wait! is going to be a brilliant seassooonnnn living between the german-austrian-swiss alps. a dream of a season.

gris-beige-negro

emiliana torrini: big jumps

belgium

Belgium.
What do you know about Belgium? Strangely I was there for the first time in my life this last march, at the EU buildings because of some stuff related to culture but is not the point of this post.
Belgium. What else do you know about Belgium? Apart from the fact that they all speak at least 3 lenguages, is where Jan Fabre comes from, this theater director quite famous all over Europe, is where Martin Margiela comes from, this fashion designer quite known for his love for the incongnito and the coolness of his brand, is where Dries Van Noten comes from, also one great fashion designer famous for his prints of flowers, embrodery -and my admiration for him comes from designing the most elegant wedding dress ive seen in my life-; is also famous for the painter Margritte, is also famous for the chocolate, is also famous for Anne Teresa de Keersmaeker and her contemporary dance company, is also famous for art noveau buildings that Brussels has...It is certainly quite a tiny place, but how seriously they take culture is something the rest of the countries should learn from. This letter of jamie lee byars belongs to the personal collection of a man from Brussels who worked his whole life as a doctor and in his free time was completely involved in developing art residencies to support new contemporary artists from all over the world. That means that the fact of having a "normal life" as a doctor, didnt take him apart from working with people like Gilbert und George, Robert Rauschenberg, Marcel Brothaers or Jamie Lee Byars among many others. Other thing about the few belgians I know is that they love to keep everything that is related to their intellectual mission devoted to art or culture. This could be exhibitions invitations, correspondence with the artists, personal photos, all that fascination involved in working with culture. Where i want to get is that for an artist is really important to feel valued by society, even if is just on a psychological way, this "what i do is good because people loves it and makes them feel better and they treat me nicely throughout my work, therefore i should work harder to make more people feel the same way" sort of thing. I specially admire this empathy that some people has towards culture even more when it comes from the civil society, from initiatives out of the public system, the superstructure. Is just great when normal people decide to invest in the well being of the culture, protect it, admire it, cuddle it. Is when something called democracy is really happening: is the own base the one that is acting in a common way. Somehow this lands -Belgium, and its neighbour Holland-, what we could called the flemish lands/nederland/ have really developed a great system concerning cultural policies and industries.
We should all learn from the small.

the future is here: soundcloud

if you work with music, this is an extraordinary new: SoundCloud. Finally, after all the hours spent sending tracks overloading emails and servers and things from last century, i must tell you that my dream has come trueeee!!! We will be able to work with music on finally, normal basis all over the globe....thank you "scandinavia meets berlin"...this was completely necesary for the music industry nowadays, specially if you- like most of the people i know who works with music- have a work base in more than one city, it was about time to normalize nomadism in the music bizz ;)

Replace a Track from SoundCloud on Vimeo.

Soundcloud
Who We Are

We're a few people who moved from Stockholm to Berlin, found some more cool people there and set up a small company to create the best dedicated music site in the world.

As you might expect, over the years we've grown tired of getting emails with YouSentIt links or FTP log-ins just to be able to check out our friends latest soon-to-be released tracks. Not to mention how annoying it is to try and email a reply with some comprehensible feedback. Music is just kind of tricky to deal with over email. So, we thought we'd change that. SoundCloud is our way of doing it.

listening to adele "chasing pavements"
03 Chasing Pavements by adele by femme fatale

london´s creative office

en los momentos en los que la cabeza supuestamente deja de funcionar, -de pensar, de aclarar preguntas mediante respuestas que lo único que aportan son ruido-, sucede que en esos ínfimos apenas microsegundos, las cosas se muestran tal y como son: simples, sencillas y todo parece tener sentido. tras el blanco llegan unas imágenes llenas de luz, el sí de un todo imaginario, autónomo, naturalmente armónico. es entonces cuando llegar a la recepción supone, todavía con los pies descalzos, pedir con prisa un bolígrafo en el mostrador, kannst du mir bitte einer kuli leihen?, y dibujas unos esbozos -rapidos-sencillos- sobre el papel verde fosforito que se amontona en precisos taquitos sobre el mostrador. la primera imagen visual que llega al cerebro como idea y debe tornarse realidad queda plasmada así para poder trabajarla más tarde con el equipo de gente adeduado. a veces necesitas un papel, otras has necesitado un contestador de un teléfono. en saint martins la conversación gira en torno a ese proceso abstracto, cómo trabajas las ideas, como llegan, se establecen, con cuales te quedas? cuales sabes que debes desarrollar? cosa que me agradó infinito, pues lo cierto es que lo único que obtienes de esos momentos de lucidez es un boceto sobre un papel verde, dueño de movimiento propio en tu cabeza. otra parte de ese proceso es que llegue a hacerse realidad. eso la vida lo decide, si se dan los equipos adecuados, si se dan los tiempos, si, en definitiva, debe llegar a ser real.

un papel verde fosforito. y un boli prestado.
sin los momentos de luz no son más que eso. un papel verde y un boli prestado.
con la luz hay sin embargo una idea. tantas cosas por hacer.
respiro.
buenas noches.

p.s las astillas del lenguaje haciendo daño. me trabo, lamento los tijeretazos en el ritmo. mañana intento editar. hoy bin ich schon zu müde.
ps.2. mañana recojo new fotos.

the notwist: pilot

a nice track from the notwist, the band of the Acher brothers . A local band from my new city, whose work ive admired for years. Is nice to be able to see them in shows with their new projects playing for less than 60 people. Is such a privilege. Some other musical goodies of my new town: the sessions of the kids of "not so berlin", amazing to dance for hours- i love them!- and the boys behind the HYPIE HYPIE parties at the Rote Sonne, cool dancehall played by SCHLACHTHOFBRONX. Finally i have some more time to go out and dance dance dance. Because the year has gone flying but now i feel i want to enjoy munchen with all this amazing music scene. But for heute nacht, first a theater play by Jan Fabre "Orgy of tolerance" and afterwards some friends will be playing music at the Favorit Bar, Onibaba Nacht. So back im Munchen, and ready to get in a dancy mood, to beat the winter cold... i love it. Prosssssst!

gerhard richter+ dan flavin at home

a few pics of my new house, on the walls, pieces of gerhard richter among others, on the bathtube, this really cool green fluorescent from dan flavin; the colors of the walls, confronting the lights of each ambient. a beautiful old german flat.

listening to "sea of love" by cat power

where and when

where the walls of the houses are as blue as the sky

and at 5 am your studio becomes an afterhour, the only and only place in the whole bay where you can have a great gin tonic by the fire

and when you wake up, the morning danach the palm trees are the only ones that give you shadow

all those facts together can only mean that you are in the right place to make a new record.
mal schauen wie ballet klingt.

work-work-work

el mar en noviembre

tiene ese tono medio grisáceo que no llega a ser plata, que no llega a ser azul. el agua buenísima, "está fría, estamos en noviembre" comenta alguien. puff, vivir en munich te hace cambiar muchísimo la perspectiva de lo que está frío y lo que no. aquí es como vivir en el norte de algun lugar tropical, con los cactus, las palmeras, la montaña que tiende a desierto y las horas que se paran.
maravilloso el baño. maravilloso la oportunidad de estar un día cualquiera de la semana trabajando con la música y en diez minutos de decidir tomar una pausa estar bañándome en la playa. la costa desierta, ni dios. elegir donde quitarse la ropa, y empezar a entrar jugando con las olas.
me ha limpiado todo todo todo lo que traía de subidas bajadas. el camino que estoy tomando también estando en munchen. al final todo es mucho más simple. todo el trabajo, los momentos de cuestionarse, hacerse preguntas, seguir, respetar también las pausas, esa dicotomía de ir y venir en la que sólo puedes seguir la intuición, se llena de sentido en momentos como el de hoy. la música es un regalo de la vida. es algo que me proporciona poder expresarme que carece de valor concreto. un juego, un ser sincera como parte de un camino en el que lo único que importa es llegar a compartir momentos e ideas con personas con talento y construir algo hermoso. algo que se haga real, que pase de ser una palabra o una idea a un sonido, un cierre de etapa para pasar a otro. que al final eso es lo que son los discos. cuadernos musicados. que además, pese a lo díficil que pueda ser en determinados momentos, me ofrece momentos plagados de belleza como el de hoy.
y la costa y el contorno de la costa el perfecto infinito plateado hasta que el sol mediterráneo lo llena todo de color y vida. y seca mi piel. con sabor a sal.

success by bob dylan and drake

"A man is a success if he gets up in the morning and gets to bed at night, and in between he does what he wants to do".
Bob Dylan
Well, almost twenty years later the concept of success verges towards this other direction with this new singer called Drake and his song"Successful". i do like the track and its fats beats but what i find really interesting is to confront the different notions of what success means for both of them. Enjoy "Successful"- even when they have erased the word hoes in this version ive found on the web-....

And please, dont forget the lyrics:
"I want the money,
Money and the cars,
Cars and the clothes,
The hoes,
I suppose,
I just wanna be,
I just wanna be successful.
I just wanna be,
I just wanna be successful.
I just wanna be,
I just wanna be successful."

mediterráneo

hay días como hoy, donde llego paseando hasta la playa en noviembre. y el camino está lleno de palmeras y naranjos, y el sol y la playa en pleno invierno tiene gente bañandose, me vienen flashbacks que me recuerdan a otros viajes al mediterráneo con veranos en invierno y los pueblos que parecen medio desérticos. como el viaje que hicimos con paul cuando recién nos conocimos y como volviendo al hotel por la noche en la carretera lo único que se veían eran naranjos y limoneros y no nos chocamos de milagro. y las palmeras y los dátiles y el único bar que encuentro abierto en todo el pueblo por estar en la costa cuando no es temporada porque nunca me ha gustado la playa con gente. todo este planteamiento mar/imágenes familiares supongo que tiene que ver con lo mal que a veces me sabe la distancia con gente a la que quiero pero que no tengo cerca. un paseo charlando, no hace falta más para volver a sentir esa cercanía. y el sol y la playa y el tener la opción de trabajar desde aquí que es maravilloso pero es un poco el siempre estar entre varios sitios a la vez y no estar en ninguno. con la maleta, con los aviones. proyectos que me llevan de aquí para allá. y la distancia. que a veces duele.

paul, un beso grande desde el mediterráneo.

f.

la roux live ;)

I think ive heard this track more than a million times this year since january. I´ve got it first from a 4 track sampler that came from one of our trips to London. Well! i can finally enjoy watching La Roux, playing live, despite of the distance. She is a great-talented-artist, one of the few who fortunately, doesnt play any of the "quite common" femenine roles in the music business:"chic-hot-ultrabitch-12 year old diva- hipster dressed up as in carnival-soo cute- indie and boring and intellectual-girlish-copy of somebody else wearing expensive clothes". Lets give a thankful welcome to La Roux, the one that is gonna kick all this folkie bullshit torturing our ears for the last 2 years (with some exceptions of course). La Roux has bravely taken to a present tense a huge list of really great influences - omd, depeche mode, talk talk, a-ha, human league, duran duran-. Amazing bands whose vinyls i`ve been buying for years always at the "1 euro" box because noboby wanted them. Cool Albion: Mission Accomplished. Again.

back to work, finishing "ballet" @ la casa azul studio

yeiiii!!!!so exciting, such a beautiful place and atmosphere. cant wait to have the record in my handsssss!!!total love to the spanish mediterranean coast in november! ;)