Morning sun

I don't like to sleep and I find beds ugly! (Morning Sun)

I know my body needs sleep to regenerate but I hate my body to be so common. So I made a compromise with my body, I let him sleep few hours and he is never sick. In winter, I give him five hours, in the summer, three should be enough. I have a watch with phosphorescent numbers, so I can see the time during the night and return to sleep when too early. 

This morning, I won't miss my favorite party, the monthly Homopatik. I wake up, it is still dark and I do not have my watch. I stand up and it is 3:30 in the morning, I slept only three hours but I can't fall back into sleep. It is much too early to go to the club, should I go by feet? Google tell me 90 minutes walk, it is feasible but the way is boring, Berlin is so spread out! I will put some electronic music in my phone, watch some videos and walk up to the direct line up to Ostkreuz (East-Cross).

I go alone, but I want to see people. Torstrasse or Friedrichstrasse? It is over five by now and people are still queuing in front of the Kings Club. Maybe a cognac on the classy Frederic of Prussia Street? No, suddenly I can hear from the outside "La dolce vita" from Ryan Paris; that's too trashy for me! The hipster kids think it is funny trashy 80's, but I can't relate to that. I put my headphones back and the music is fantastic,  some jazzy electro called "Warschauerstrasse" from Oliver Koletzki, good, it is where I am heading, The Warsaw Street. 

 Light  in the train is too white, people carry some attaché-case, eat some "Schinken Croissant" and everything looks so normal but it isn't, it is 5:30 on a Saturday morning in Berlin! Some proper kid is asking for money and he will get my small change. From close, teeth are missing, his eyes are circled in black and he looks like a junky,  ... dressed in a immaculate white down jacket...  He can't believe how many yellow coins he is getting, it must be at least 1,47 euro!!! He says: "GEIL!"

It is six and there is almost hundred people queuing. Half of the people are not admitted. I would like to tell the rules to the kids, no back pack, no drinking in the queue, no heels for the girls, but I do not want to jeopardize my entry. A girl is screaming "Not anybody around ever heard of Laurent Garnier???" I pronounce a " "Actually I met him once" but she doesn't see me, she doesn't want to see me and I know at that second that she won't make it at the door, too drunk and too loud!

Inside everybody we know is there, and ... all the others we don't know yet. The kids are back on XTC, they've got that beatitude, "Do the thing that keep the smile on your faces..." and the little bottle of water they are filling at the toilets. The crowd there is bigger than on the dance floor. Everybody speaks all the languages of earth. "No puedo encontrar la puerta" "mais tu te prends pour qui, pour I like to move it, move it?" "I need a fucking joint" "Ich habe  Micha verloren". 

Carlo is on Erasmus and should come back in two seconds, after two minutes, I go. I hear, "Entschuldigung" (I love that word: "Take the guilt out of me" or more simple "Sorry") and someone is excusing for pushing me. Don't worry, 20 other people just did the same, I didn't feel anything. Malte wants to have a drink with me but wouldn't let me invite him, he wants to give two Euros to participate on the cheapest beer. Finally, he ends up drinking my Vodka-Mate. Are you wearing cashmere, in the club? Yes, with silk! So Malte likes it fancy, it seems... 

The fashion  is very 90's but with darker outfits. Like everybody would come out a video clip of SNAP, but in black and white.  There is also the neo-gothics, wearing black stockings and interpretations of samurai trousers with large suspenders hanging directly  on the bare breast. At one moment,  some are even trying to vogue on Terence Trent d'Arby, so many new horizons! All the music is quality, beautiful mixes and great sound system with every ranges of electro.

The kids are getting so high, they all start to smoke everything they find, it is really like the 90's!

My eyes get itchy and cry, it is time to go back home. There were so many Lisa Stansfield tonight, but this one is almost like the original. She sees me looking at her and asks "What are you thinking?"

I answer: "about how I will write about that night?"

 

WATCH ME BITCH!!!

 
or Apple makes you looking smart but won't get you smart!
or The first week with my Chinese Smart Watch

First there is two kind of watches, the ones with French names made in Geneva, Switzerland, and the others, all made in China, iWatch included.

There were times where cheap watches were never on time and then appeared quartz. We could have "made in China" a watch for few francs which would be always exact. Some buttons might get loose, the display could fall off and the bracelet eventually would break but the time would never be wrong anymore. Next step was the smart phone, a device permanently connected to the internet and some "Atomic Clock" on some satellite gravitating around earth.
It is clear, if you own a smartphone, you don't need anything smarter on the top, it would be just a useless accessory. And that's the problem, watches are the only expected jewelry and accessory for a man. You got it girls, save your money for beautiful diamonds on your ears or on your neck, your wrist should be free from anything related to unglamorous work!
Back to the boys, you want to show off, seduce, or impress, can you do it with the iWatch? The answer is yes,... for a little while. I would say six months, and then Rolex will shine again brighter than ever! 2.000 euros for an old vintage and 5.000 for a major vintage in good state. You better start to save those 350 euros you planned to give to Apple, and you will get faster your "timeless" piece of jewelry!
Some would say that expensive watches look like the fake but it is not true, it is YOU who look fake wearing cheap copies! If you spend a fortune on a watch, it shows!
Some would speak about the technology, so I bought me a real smart watch who does 10 times more things than the iWatch, costs a quarter of the price and is available since last year, so two years before the iWatch.
After one week, and the annonce of the Cupertino product, I have to admit I really enjoyed the attention on the gadget, and it is really fun. The battery stays for four days, I put a 32 gigabytes micro sd card and a Sim card (Apple inconditionnels, just dream of that) and after many hours of settings, it worked a kind of well. At the end it does almost as much as my smartphone. I can listen to endless music, watch porns, read sms and even phone. Everything the same but in much more complicated because the screen is too small, the speakers and the microphone too. The sound started to make sense only with the bluetooth headset. It means, if you do not have a sim card in your watch, why don't you hear your music directly from your phone which has to stay anyway always less than ten meters close. On the top, you can't connect a headset and a watch on the same bluetooth cell phone.
So, is there any real use for a smart watch for me when I think a Rolex looks better on my wrist? First I don't have a Rolex yet (but I feel it coming), and then I started to perceive as ugly the omnipresence of the smartphones. Everybody in the street with these screens on the ear and all my friends listening to me with a distracted ear when they are simultaneously grindering, facebooking or just googling. To reinvent the way I communicate, I got me a seven inches tablet with usb, sd card and... a sim card and it will be my new phone. In the competition on the biggest phone, we have a winner: Philippe Claude! No I won't put the huge screen on my ears, I just said it is ugly, I will use the bluetooth headset. The headset is from Sennheiser of course and will be replaced with an almost invisible bluetooth microphone to pin on the jacket when less technology should be seen. Then finally the black tie situations with no room in the pockets for a tablet and even less possibility for a man purse. Only there the watch will make sense because it has a sim; emergency calls (with the pin mic) will be still possible but not welcomed.

At the end, all this advanced technology should make design disappear, your body should be the nicest thing about you. Accessories should accentuate your person, not distract from it!

I remember my telephones

I remember everything.
I remember not having telephone until 1973.
I rememeber the queue at the payphone after 6p.m because communications would be cheaper.
I remember the cable from rotary phone would come directly from the wall. "couper le téléphone" would be done with scisors!
I remembered all the numbers of my friends (maybe 10) by heart, of course it took five minutes to dial each time!
I remember paying 2500 francs for the first answering machine from France Telecom in 1986 and it was as big as a computer tower
I remember my first cordless Sony SPP-50 brought back illegally from New York in 1989
All that to stay three years without telephone in former East Berlin between 1993 and 1996. We would have a note block on the door as an anwering machine.
Cell phones would get popular shortly after that...

The toothbrush philosophy.

If you share your life with a toothbrush collector (collection and obsession are also sometimes very close), some aspect of your life will be different. For example, before leaving for holidays and visiting the nearby drugstore, you will be asked if you have enough humor for German flagged toothbrushes. I answered: “As long as they stay in their packaging, everything is OK, but my humor stop at the second they come out of it!”

Few days later, I read this:

“So, the toothbrush, trivial by definition, because belonging to the intimate register of personal hygiene, with Philippe Starck, comes out of the bathroom, without losing its role over there. Pleasing for the dentist, it stays interesting also for its esthetic.

Beauty doesn't participate to an external essence of the object, it flows and emanate from it. Ironically, the object frees itself from the classical surrounding of expensive and rare to be immediately accessible through its direct, efficient and seductive shape on the intellectual and esthetic level. Triumphing in the most unexpected area for art, the toothbrush works as a manifesto for the transformation of the trivial use in real pleasure.”

(Michel Onfray - Écrits sur Starck)

I read this to the toothbrush collector at the breakfast table and he wonders if Ai Weiwei is close to Philippe Stark in the perception of the common object. I have to tell that it is a totally opposite approach. Ai Weiwei takes a common object (the Chinese stool) and put it in a wonderful frame (the Martin-Gropius Museum) and does a “ready-made” à la Marcel Duchamp. The frame makes the art. Stark conceive a beautiful object (a design toothbrush) and put it in a very common frame (the bathroom).

Ai Weiwei use crystal, bronze or marble (classic materials for art) to design common objects (the cloth hanger), when Starck favorite material is the plastic. 

The German toothbrushes will lose the whole soccer mania aura which surround them once they will be used, so the packaging (the frame) transcends them as an art object.

The packaging of it doesn’t define my humor but my art perception!

My Sunday mornings are better than your Sunday mornings

So like every day, five hours sleep and the urge to go to the bathroom! Then, there is the choice, keep awake or going back to bed. Going back to bed is very difficult! The computer is so tempting, so much to do on the computer at five o’clock in the morning! Except if it is the night of Homopatik. One problem of getting old in Berlin is that they won’t let you in the club if you are already drunk, but you wouldn’t think about going there if you wouldn’t be drunk in the first place. So you wake up sober and everything is so boring that you might take the U-Bahn and then the S-Bahn to see what young people do.

Choices: S-Bahn or not S-Bahn?

The trip to Ostkreuz is not bearable without music; how low is the battery? 30%! Let charge the phone ten minutes and the night is saved, you can sleep on the way back but not going there, you have to get in the mood. Tried MGMT but it doesn’t work, it will be Paul Kalkbrenner again. 

How to make the clothes laying on the floor a pass for the right club without waking up your husband? Underdress and dare…

Nobody will know those ugly boots are Marc Jacobs if your trousers are stuck in it, and this Dior mini trench coat, worn as a shirt, looks totally fine! Put on the top a regular down jacket from your husband and “le tour est joué”. Already on the Friedrichstrasse and realizing that the pockets of the jacket are stuffed with pain killers. Noooooooo! Not jeopardizing my entry in the club with those shit pills, they check you at the entrance. Getting rid of those is the priority! There is so many, it might be valuable; you have to think before throwing away prescription drugs.

Then, just remembering that even with the whole terrorist insanity, there is still lockers on the train stations.

Whaaat? Four Euros for the “Schließfach”? Sure 72 hours of safety are not to neglect! This is the great things about Euros, it is so many coins that at the end you have much more money than you think. It will be “Schließfach” 101; so George Orwell!

There is no pain to be felt but who knows? Taking two pills in advance may anticipate the suffering…

The door is cool and there is no sensitive effect of the pain killers but they ask which party I am trying to attend. Homopatik of course! Whaaat? I forgot again that in the winter the party lasts only thirty-six hours and not seventy-two? It was yesterday! Yes, I do not care about the difference of “crowd”, I can already hear that music is good.

It is 6:30 in the morning and the boys are looking beautiful. Tall, blond, trying to behave like men but not able to do it, keeping at the end the baby face and the insecurity! The girls are, like always, more in control but can dance. I realize that German boys are not automatically bad dancers but they are too used to have a beer in their right hand while they smoke with the left one; it does handicap few moves!  I realize that German boys are not automatically bad dressed but they care less about elegance. Fashion tonight will be black tank top and jacket worn as an apron.

Nostalgia is tempting listening to this Plastic dreams Remix but most of the people here were not born as it was written, so, don’t let yourself go!

It just feels so good to be alone. 

Of course there is all those French people, I guess…, who dance better but who are not looking as good; and they have attitude, cool attitude but still attitude. Yes, you made it; you left everything and went to Berlin!

Sitting at the bar and being almost on the dance floor; painkillers and alcohol are supposed to be fun but I just feel being myself. I am allergic to hair dryers, vacuum cleaners and anything blowing something else than my intimacy. There is this warm draft which is unbearable but if I move I am no more on the dance floor, I will show my age and I won’t be cool anymore. Am I a French person showing attitude? Cool attitude but still attitude!

Yes, I thought I met you before; you are a friend of Camille? Of course, she likes to tell I am special. Did you believe her? And you were speaking about me with Pierre, my barman? Of course I still see him; I gave him his Christmas present at work last night! Let me show you how it works with big boobs girls. Two minutes after, Laura is drinking with me telling me how she is relieved to meet a guy who doesn’t want to get in her pants, or more exactly in her bras. Maxence is amazed. So I do my show and tell him how happy I am to be alone here. It seems he is not pleased to hear I feel alone with him and asks if he should leave. Telling him that not having to play a game and do compromises, like I do with my friends leave him perplex. It is not a game like with my friends but it is still a game.

So you were born in Versailles and your name is Maxence? Then you went to Berlin and you grew a beard? Please, let me call you Max, at least it sounds Jewish!

And then, there is the small boobs girl, I tell him about the girls with the “Fuck me shoes” or the “Marry me shoes”; she is wearing flats! Question of choice!

 I disappear, I am no longer welcome.  

I already decide to write my night but I want the choice, the choice of what? Writing a text which will be there for eternity, even if embarrassing but will exist, or getting even drunker and forget to write… Max is not in the room so I have to go back home to write, I won’t get drunk alone. And then, Max appear, he is scared about the eternity factor of the writing but accepts a last beer.

Alexei, with a black tank top, is doing a parade dance with me and I realize it is not about doing the right choices but about the opportunity of having choices. It is such a privilege!

Philippe Claude wisdom

Everything from Philippe Claude:

I do not smoke; I can't put so small things as cigarettes in my mouth!

When I have the choice, I take the best!

I go down on anything but the price!

I like natural but I prefer supernatural

I speak French in France, I speak German in Germany, I speak Spanish in Spain and in south America but in the rest of the world I speak English!!!

Philippe Claude needed to be 40 to understand finally why there were wars: because they could be won!

The world doesn't need Philippe Claude but the world doesn't need to know!

If you have no idea about beauty, please respect the symmetry, it is the beginning of beauty but very far to be its end!

Beauty is to contemplate not to have sex with!

After 10p.m don't wear glasses, you are supposed to be in a social surrounding and they are a handicap to communication!

Finding himself was finding a stranger, a crazy stranger!

You'll never get rich in Berlin but twice faster famous!

Being lucid should have been an insult, but it was a compliment!

My perception of ART changed the day I realized LIGHT was even more important than the MOVEMENT to express LIFE

Do not apologize to me with Chrysanthemums; it will be soon enough the day to put them on my grave!

You have no excuse not to think when you have time therefore; too many people are forced to use this time to find 
food.
The necessity to compare everything, expresses the fear of new, and denies the curiosity.

Do all the mistakes you can before 30, you can still pretend that you didn’t know!

You never will be totally happy, but you can enjoy “more” and suffer “less”

What is important is what I can forget, not what I can remember!

I think what I do is always good; it is only much later I realize, that sometimes it was not!

When you don't know what to wear, wear everyting!

You have to be ready for the worse and to improvise for the best

Don't call friends people you regret having on the phone when you were drunk and it has been so expensive!

EAT IT BEFORE IT EATS YOU

One day with Madonna

So let’s be clear, you get what you paid for and for 120 Euros I expected a minimum!  I got much more than two grams of fun!

My first Madonna concert was in 2003 and I was so disappointed. I had sitting places. I had to watch the screens to see the show and I couldn’t stand up without people behind me screaming for me to sit! I said never ever.

9 years later my great friend Antonio, a real fan, beg me to come with him. This is no more a question of money but with all the greatest respect for Madonna, I still want the entertainment I paid for and I didn’t in 2003! So, I say „Sure why not, but only if we are standing directly at the stage!“ And we did, but not only this, we did the whole warming up, the cheering of the true fans bringing Martin and  Stefan breakfast at their camping spot in front of the door and later on bringing champagne at night. We got to learn all the assembly of the devoted. To learn knowing all those people from Barcelona, Prag, Milan and Paris was such a beautiful first part of the show. After so much waiting the mystery Ipad girl arrived finally but we were not chosen to the golden triangle. Tears of deception were flowing all over but this is the moment were the group became solid and got a new dynamic. We would stay together and because the early access people were looking like coming from the right side we would run to the left. It is 35 hours ago I brought croissants to Martin and at 8:25p.m I stand on the second raw of people, 50 centimeters from the stage,...and I am so much taller with my boots!

I have to admit that the waiting was then almost unbearable. One hour more still, before a fake David Guetta. Yes,  Martin Solveig is also French, has the same hair cut, has the same speeded up pop djaying way when it stops and finally put some basses and everybody should have fun and at the end is even more boring because somewhere is not as big! The „Do you really want the queen?“ shouldn’t have last an hour because then it was 45 minutes more to wait for Madame! Of course this is a part of it and everything is calculated and the exhausting waiting brings you in a state of total release when she finally arrives.

The stage which looked so small took then its all dimension. Three video panels of each 15 meters high and 10 meters wide are placed in a perspective angle behind the stage. In the front 10 different huge video cubes coming up and down with the same animations as the back create a fantastic 3D effect. And this is it, why the 3D when it is live? Maybe just because it will be a video one day or maybe even better a 3D movie, would it be that surprising?

So this is very important because if you stand very close you don’t need the whole visual effects; you want to see the sweat on the forehead of the queen, you want to see the makeup cracking up and when she misses a lip syncing but still stays astonishing. If you sit, pleeease just in the middle otherwise you would miss one of the meaning of the show.

Aside of the 3D, it is all about defying gravity, a touch of „cirquedusoleilesque“ take your breath away without being too much. Finally, something that people aim to forget is that a Madonna is something very religious and it is her real name, so we have also some  churches, but in odorama, and a new interpretation of the tired redemption theme. This is not „Crime and punishment“, this is „Crime and redemption“!

So I was so happy seeing one of most amazing show of my life when all Germany preferred to see a very bad show on television: the half-final of the European soccer cup!