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[readfelice-blog]

Why I have given up art

Hi, I’m Felice Zhukov, the former artist.

Since I can remember I’ve been introducing myself as an artist, since pre puberty,  well over half my life now.

But I woke up some time before Christmas, I don’t remember what day, and I realised that this belief of mine, as to what I am, as to what I will be, as to what I have been, as an artist, has been ruining my life, nearly from its inception.

As an artist, I went to art university, I didn’t gel with my peers particularly well and didn’t understand the business of art at all. In my scheme of things art was innate and internal, it was not something dictated by the zeitgeist, or a culture of wealthy patrons plugging money into their fantasies or into a black market that guaranteed big returns. From this artist’s perspective art was independent of the commercial world, it was a place to shelter the strange and illustrious minds that don’t fit into a conventional system, who have a vision of a world which does not support mass culture, hyperconnectivity or the attention economy. Art is a place you can dwell in quietly or jump up and down in and scream at the top of your lungs, art is not netflix, amazon or coca cola.

I love art to much, wrapping myself around my art, unable to distinguish where I as an artist and I as a person begin and end.

It all became the same thing, I couldn’t market what I was doing, it would be like trying to sell my organs for profit and I kept seeing casualties, great artists either killed by their careers or flattened out by the expectation of the art world. Though some flourish with elegance, I’m name checking Hito Steyerl here as one of those people, Sophie Calle, Olafur Eliasson.

But what these 3 artists share in common is that they do not reveal themselves in their art, they are masked by their pursuits: by digging into form and intellect, they are not their art, they are artists.

My entire adult life I have stubbornly taken badly paid service jobs with a view that this toil and suffering is part of an artist’s life, that my value is in my work and that I cannot make money or instigate a career in any other place than with my art. So I have made nothing but I have accumulated a string of debt, of relying on others kindness, of coming to view myself as some kind of noble charity, not capitalising on this per se but rather excusing my inability to contribute.

But the truth is I will never be able to contribute because what’s happened with my art in the last few years has been so absolute and extreme that it cannot be sold, I can’t even really explain it within an artistic context anymore.

What have I been doing?

I have ripped apart my life and displayed myself to whoever will listen, it’s not been a huge audience but I know people have sat at their phones mouths agape watching me painting my face in marmite and screaming, or dancing with eerie life size dolls made from bin bags, or throwing the contents of my life away and very very openly writing about it on the web. It’s almost as if what I’ve been doing is slowly gouging the art out of my veins, because now that I’ve come to close the chapter on my last project and take note of what’s happened to me, now that I have space to breath, I can see without the tunnel vision my art has been giving me.

I artist, have been all ego, underneath the umbrella of my name, Felice Zhukov, I have defined a character that is both exotic and repulsive, a terrifying, but somehow intoxicating creature, my art has seen me navigate relationships with hysteria and confusion, it has shot out at people I have never met and sewn them into this allegorical rampage, for years everyone I know has been made part of my art, has been woven into it, there is no person called Felice Zhukov. This schizophrenic way of approaching the world has been damaging me, as I unlink from it I wonder where it came from and with a little digging I begin to hear the voices of Courtney Love, Carrie Bradshaw, Edina Monsoon, echoing in the chambers of my mind, sat together inside me, insinuating a lifestyle I should be reaching for.

So if I am to become a person, I cannot be an artist, I want to start from scratch, to be anonymous, to not introduce myself through my art anymore.

Too many artists accept the conditions of their lives and suffer because they have no means, this might be noble but the truth is its crippling, everyday has a question mark hanging over it when you live this way, I nod to my peers in this situation with admiration and I wish them the best, because the world needs artists to counter the excrement that is so easily accessible from all corners of the globe.  I promise I haven’t deserted you comrades, I still love art more than I love myself, but I want to try existing as a person, making art in private, not exhibiting myself. Should I ever want to share again you won’t know it’s me, I will never be Felice Zhukov the artist again, never never for so long as I should walk this earth, amen.

( ……. Saying that I have 88 drawings to sell this year, but I’m calling that business……..

………. and I have a lot of work to catalogue, I have a platform to build and a new career to start on.....)

I love you art, always and forever.

[readfelice-blog]

Moominland Chronicles achtzehn: Gran Torino

Hello, let’s just jump straight in shall we?

Oh, no wait, firstly,  have a look at Colin Self’s Siblings (which is surprising and delightful in certain places, I’m only on my first listen though so havent got to its core yet.)

https://colinself.bandcamp.com/album/siblings

And something a bit more Italian for you, Franco Battiato, who was the essence that was channeled vicariously in the naming of LA LUCE AL BUIO,

-Un’ora Con…

….Makes for very interesting listening, there's a clangers track in there, though I’m not sure if that's what Franco was going for it definitely made me smile:

This is fetus (a track off the album but it's hard to source online so might be a spotify / google play search tbh) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Cd_59SCLlZY

Well then, Turin’s right nice.

I got a plane at 6:30 in the morning, the wing of the airport I was leaving from was closed when I got there.

This time I got a seat on the bus to get to the airport. My seat was directly in front of a mentally disturbed man who was walking up and down the aisle for the entire journey. He eventually got blocked in by other passengers boarding, he had a strange distant smile, I can't say it wasn’t disconcerting, but it was also curious and strangely beautiful.

He disappeared when we arrived at Tegel, I doubt he was getting a plane, though who knows, perhaps he was some fractured billionaire burnt out from all the money he was juggling.

After customs took their seats and sent me through the barriers I sat to wait for the cafe to open, wrote my diary: which is another thing im doing now, in case you're not content with one ‘Felice’s tell all story’ - theres now a rawer instagram only version charting my journey through ‘восем acht ocho’ as well, its totally unedited bile and thoroughly embarrassing - I’m not re reading / editing it, but it’s the best way to keep track of all these publications being haphazardly launched around Central Europe.

The airline I was flying with was called Lauda, some subdivision of Ryanair, who I bought my ticket through, all the staff had Ryanair uniforms on and the plane was a Ryanair plane.

Last week I was a bit mad on death, I read Michel De Montaigne’s essay ‘To philosophize is to learn how to die’ and then put its message into practise - looking for and becoming acquainted with death wherever I went, envisioning it in the lamp light of darkened streets, the glass eyes of dolls and even under the toilet seat.

Lauda was death, a Ryanair flight would never crash, not in my mind, but a Lauda flight could….

We left Berlin in fine weather, we travelled to a sunless sky framed by thick blocks of grey. As we went along the turbulence was unbearable, I am not an easy flier, perhaps I've not done it enough, but also I’m riddled with anxiety before I even get in the sky, one small shake is ok, but a continuous rattle for 20 mins and the safety belt signs coming on whilst still mid journey does not fare well with me. I was utterly convinced at one point that it was the end of my relatively short but eventful time on earth and glad I’d written my last requests before I left, though much more scared than I wanted to be.

Breathe deep, it does work.

Just as we descended and the spectre of death rescinded I suddenly realised how incredible the view was outside my window and eagerly attended to the sight of clouds upon clouds, a dense celestial cacophony lit by the golden rays of the sun. We passed through this heavenly land, everything becoming hazy and disappearing into the fog of vapor.

When we landed the plane applauded the pilot, clearly I was not the only person on board so terrified that if I’d clenched my fists any tighter they’d have snapped off my wrists.

Our pilot deserved those claps, he flew us close to death but was strong enough to skim it rather than be sucked in.

The airport was the same as last year,

no wait no it wasn't because I flew to Milan

and then had two train rides to Torino (Turin), the second train was very pleasant, trains are nice in Italy, they have power ports under the seats and are 2 floors like double decker buses. I think some of them are like that in Germany to.

This year I was officially in Italy, joyfully attached to my window, taking in the edge of decay that skirted wonderful quaint yellow houses, one glass fronted building bursting out of another which contained hundreds of lamps in different shades and sizes. Studying the people, handsome and somehow and open, there was a vividness to their faces that arrested me.

And I was in Italy when I got off the train and walked on to the streets of Torino, it wasn’t Paris or Berlin or Helsinki or Cork, it wasn't the setting where I would be saved by a man I’d never met before.

It was captivating and full of heart.

Firstly, my ableton tote that held 3 publications needed attending to, I neatly veered towards Piazza Statuto, reputedly a potential gate to hell, this little trip would chart me walking from dark to light.

It was raining as I stood under the jagged rocks and mangled bodies of the Monument, I’d been panicking that the rain would ruin these labored over gifts , where would I leave them?? Not in toilets, especially not disgusting piss sprayed italian cafe toilets, they were worth more than that, as with much of my life I stepped back a little from this worry and just trusted that something would present itself.

A couple approached me after a short time of being stood in front of the gates of hell, they asked in Italian, then English, for me to take a photo of them, I talked myself down from chucking my parcel in their direction and then launching myself the opposite way. This turned out to be sensible, as the opportunity then presented itself, in the form of a thick tree stump, under the gaze of the tortured stone faces. It had once been a pair of trees, but now in the wet air of the afternoon, it was one tree and one monument of a tree, the remaining oak sheltering its lost compadre with thick branches still full of leaves.

They were off the beaten path, in truth I wondered if it would be found, the person that might spy it would have to be observant and sensitive: children would find it, but I don't want kids to find these books, there's some art smut not for children's eyes bound inside the covers.

The act of leaving this gift was much easier than I envisioned, it turns out you can do all sorts of things in plain sight and most people won’t even bat an eyelid, at least not in Torino that day.

I really like Italy now.

I left it, then I zipped off to a nearby cafe to have a cup of tea (coffee is to strong for my delicate disposition these days). Last year I spoke to no one for days, but after months of not being able to speak German in Germany, not being able to speak Italian in Italy wasn't quite such a big deal.

The cafes I visited remind me a bit of Amelie, who I couldn't find in Montmartre, she had somehow transferred herself to Torino.

This one was brightly lit, glass cases of cakes and thick sandwiches hugged the floor, then the bar followed round behind them, I blundered through asking for tea, was given a pot of water and a tray of teabags, i just took all the teabags unthinkingly and then considered the inadequate ratio of tea bags to water.

D’oh,

They were returned to the counter and I parked myself outside to start my diary.

When I went in to pay at the end I found out that it was the lady, on her own little island aside from the bar, nestled amid nik naks and sweets, who was the person i should give my money to. I chuckled a bit to myself for my lack of common sense, the staff had big smiles on, it was a happy place I left, it was a happy place I had entered.

Then to Piazza Castello, but via Dama art fair.

In the rain it suddenly struck me how incredibly sensible and kind all these covered footpaths were, graced by arches and gorgeous decorative embellishments, they sheltered the people of the city and provided ample space for outside seating, whatever the weather. Because, the people of Torino like to be outside even when they’re inside, lots of cafes have glass paneled structures adjacent to the main building, so you can always eat on the street.

I sidestepped the main street, a direct passage from dark to light, to go to Dama art fair, a smaller less commercial affair than Artissima, set inside a baroque palace. It announced itself calmly, no fanfare and the first room you entered was empty, aside from sound, then into a journey, maps stretched across the wall, details of the passage overhanging the main plots, drawings and observations, in monochrome.

Dama art fair was elegant, but not arrogant, against the gorgeously decadent furnishings and trimmings of the palaces rooms quiet art pieces, drawings and sculptures mainly, investigating and working with form, sat just ebbing and pulsating in the atmosphere of the surroundings they inhabited. On arrival upstairs, after dumbly staggering around a courtyard for about 15 mins with a wealthy and well dressed man and his companion, who were also very friendly.

He “Its the most secret art fair in the world”

Me “You have to work for your art”

On arrival you were greeted by ‘THE END’ : woven fabric around big wooden words hung from the ceiling between two large blue speakers.

“How do they know?” I wondered to myself - “How do they know that this is my ending, here in Torino?”

No sign of a beginning though, I guess I will find it somewhere else.

Then back out onto the street again and walking past high street shops to the Piazza Castello. On my straight line from dark to light.

I’m glad my bag is light, you don’t need much to travel.

It’s raining and overcast, but the Piazza Castello is opening up in front of me like a beacon of light, it’s not an angel that stands in its centre, which I expected to find, but a man, I feel like he's a logician, an academic, an emblem of reason and enquiry. I haven’t done my research because I like to work with impressions and weave my own kind of mysticism into what I find as I walk around, so I don’t know who he is.

The piazza is huge, on my left to horseback riders announce a big art gallery where curious visitors stand in bunches waiting to go inside, on my right are white fronted buildings, all majestic and grand, there is so much room to breath here. But where do I leave my publication? I circle the statue and then spy what looks like a plinth, a kind of chalice almost, I imagine it’s filled with the elixir of life but as I get closer I find it’s actually an ashtray, its covered though and as I take a turn about it I notice that the wise man in the centre of the square is pointed towards me.

It might be an ashtray but it’s the right place, I’m more confident this time as I prop my publication on its rim, take a photo and then walk away. I’m noticing though that I barely take in the surroundings I find when I’m doing this and then I get panicky and run away, I make a note to myself that after all this work I need to sit where I lay my gifts, I need to draw them and understand them, be able to describe them to myself for years to come. Quick photographs don’t give enough time to what I’m doing.

I then arch off and look for food, because I’m hungry. Lots of people seem to be gathering about a nearby pizza shop, like a chicken headed tourist I join the crowd, I’ve decided I’m allergic to lactose and wheat but hey, I’m on holiday, when you’re abroad your hysterias change.

I get myself a ‘Gran Torino’ and then I eat it there on the street, wrapped in paper, there’s a man sat down nearly opposite, the first homeless man I’ve seen here, we don’t interact but I pay him mind, I don’t want to make him invisible to suit my view. As I’m just stuffing the last of the delicious breaded cheese feast into my mouth I enter another cafe, pulled in by its ample outside seating and its corner position, I don’t want any more tea but they have freshly squeezed orange juice, yes please.

Whilst sat outside I am approached 3 times at my table, twice by Italians looking for somewhere to eat, who are very friendly when they find out I’m not Italian and go on their way cheerily. Once by a woman pushing a very young girl and braced little boy who very aggressively asks for money, her young son and her stand and shout at me for a few minutes whilst I refuse to give them anything then go off into the surrounding city, they shout in Italian and I think to myself that it’s probably not the best way to ask for charity, but maybe it works for them sometimes.

I’ve already experienced more interaction with people in a few short hours than I did in the 4 days I was here last, who am I this time? I’m not the same person that traipsed miserably up and down these streets 12 months ago.

Nowhere is this more profound than on my walk to my air bnb, the wet warm air and clouds hug incredible views down each street that I walk past, as I look to my left I can see the glorious green hills that surround the city, I can feel the magic that is rife here, and I notice the Italians going about their daily lives so full of energy and vitality. There’s a spring in my step every cm of the way that I walk.

My air bnb host is a superhost, I’d actually settled to stay alone but my trip was cancelled a little while before I went to Paris and her place was available, I’d taken it because I wouldn’t be alone, because even though my stay in Paris was not great I’d appreciated having someone there when I got to my accomodation and I’d wanted to repeat that more sensibly this time, with a private room rather than a sofa bed in common space.

The house is spotless, she is a compact and very handsome older woman, it feels safe, I feel like I’ve been here before. We can’t really communicate, she cant speak English and I can’t speak Italian, it’s frustrating but we manage somehow. I have my own private bathroom in this house and a little tidy bed with soft pillows that make me realise the one I have in my room at home is far to hard and unfriendly.

I have a nap, which I’ve promised myself since getting aboard the plane, I get into my pajamas and lie in bed for 3 hours, half awake. Whilst I’m spread out in my little bed I listen to the noise that surrounds me, the young family that live next door chatter and argue and laugh, the birdsong echoes outside my window, the sound of cars and the church bells fill my ears, they are resonant, like a chorus. I find my demons lurking inside me, but I just face them and then have a little stretch and turn over, we are a multitude of traumas and triumphs, not just one but several people and in order to rest we must be able to live with all these voices inside us, come to terms with them and pull them together to fight for us.

Because life isn't simple or easy all the time, no human is not inflicted at some point in their lives and it's very important when you face problems to be able to know who you are, so that you can love yourself whilst you receive the madness of the world.

I get up when it’s dark, thinking I’ll order a taxi to the AC Hotel, I shower and furnish my face with glitter, put on my blue velvet dress. I’m not excited, but it's what I must do and so I will go to the AC Hotel with my last publication stowed under my arm, to the garden where last time I had invested so much hope, though I know logically now that it's not the key to this trip, in some ways I’ve already lived what I came here for, but I must re walk these steps to release myself from the past and move forward.

I end up walking because buses and trams are to complicated and the taxi doesn’t come.

Before I get to the hotel I want to eat, the cafe I went to last time is closed but there is a gelato shop on the opposite side, with a hot pink table, totally empty. I’ve still not had any gelato in Italy and as I used to work in a gelato shop it's something I’d like to try.  

Its an old couple that own the shop, I get the most gelato I possibly can: fior di latte, amaretto, pistachio, in a great big cone, I’m treating myself because I’m not drinking and I need the energy. Though I worry it’ll make me puff up I eat it enthusiastically at the hot pink table whilst looking out at the rainy streets of Lingotto, considering the other desserts in a glass case by the window.

I’m quite a sight tonight, in blue velvet and glitter, my red tousled hair brushing my shoulders, I can tell its made an impression on the owners of the shop, who buzz about, welcome a customer that seems like a friend, go about their lives surrounded by all these delicious sweets.

Once I’m done I consider leaving my last publication there as well, but think better of it, sling it over my shoulder and continue to the AC Hotel.

Everyone’s so good looking once I get inside the hotel, a smorgasbord of chic sportswear and chiselled faces, I don’t look anyone in the eye whose not a member or staff so I manage to kid myself that people are who they are not to suit my fantasies. I go upstairs to an ‘installation room’ which is some led lights and a person fiddling on a laptop, the room is filled with people socialising, I go downstairs to try and see if I can get into the secret rooms, but the hostess, after flirting for about 15 minutes and ignoring me, gleefully tells me there are no rooms left, except lust at 21:40, its 20:00 ish, I don��t know what I would do whilst waiting for that room and actually of all the rooms lust is not whats in my heart right now, I do think about just taking it to prove a point but really I’m not petty enough to sit in this place bored for over an hour waiting to go upstairs.

Clearly the secret rooms will remain secret to me.

I don’t get a drink because I don’t drink (alcohol).

I go to the garden, there’s a lot of people gathered around the door and I push through them to find space and to consider where to leave my publication, it's still raining.

This garden is not the Garden of Eden tonight, perhaps it never was, now its a concrete courtyard with a tree and some grass in the dipped area, and rain streaked white seats on the raised platform I’m standing on. It's not the Garden of Eden, its a hotel courtyard. Where do I put my publication?

Just past the crowd, behind a shrubbery, there's a window sill thats large enough to perch on, which is sheltered from the rain, it's quite hidden but it seems like the place. I sit in the cove and have a cigarette then I get out my book and place it where I’ve been sitting, take a photo and scamper off. The last of the 3 now placed in Torino.

After this is is a kaleidoscope of moments: wandering around a shopping centre, which is called 8, going up escalators to unravel the triple 8 scrawled on a door before me and see where the seeds were sown. The venue and Aphex twin and all his lasers, scurrying from room to room through intolerably long hallways to watch a myriad of vocalists, dancing about in various places, realising that the toilets were never that bad, as long as you manage to effect a good squatting position. Finding out that question marks are not always doorways that open to fantasies being realised.

I stand and wait for a taxi for an hour behind women with artist badges around their necks.

I Get home after a 20 minute detour because my taxi was invaded by impatient people.

I Sleep.

In the morning I wake up in good time despite not getting my full 8 hours (or anywhere close to this) I wander out and make tea, I try to talk to my host but it’s very difficult, though I’ve noticed the traces of her in the flat, the handmade lemon body wash, the single malts, the honey. Eventually after starting a note to her I just use the paper in my hand to write what I am saying, my London accent is always a problem wherever I go but she understands written English. This works:

“It took me 90 minutes to get home last night.

12:30 > I’m going to shower, my aeroplane is at 3:30 (15:30)

So hopefully I have time

I like to have a lot of time

Biggest stress

Lots of people don’t understand my accent because I mumble”

Me and my host have a strange connection, she is another angel, she sees my fragility and the sadness that sits at the basin of my eyes, she offers me food and shelter, I can feel her heart wrapping around me and giving me warmth. I go to sit outside and wait for my taxi 20 minutes in advance, she comes and brings a sock I’ve left in the flat, as we embrace its tight and full of love, not like the hug of strangers, like family. Later she tells me via email that I am always welcome, that I am a friend now and friends don’t have to pay to stay with her.

I will go back to that house and those church bells, though I can’t say exactly when.

My ride home is flawless, as I sit on the mezzanine over looking TXN airport, a beautiful well proportioned space where you can look out at the snow capped mountains, I listen to a man playing drukqs by aphex twin on the piano below me and I let go of Turin, of last year and all the residual pain that I brought here when I came before.

There’s no need for me to go back to that festival again, there’s other places and new journeys I must embark on.

I enter Turin a mangled and not very good musician, I leave Torino a curious and dignified artist, that sings. I let art return to me and realise it never really left, I will always be an artist whatever I do.

That's just me.

85 publications to go….

#aphex twin #torino #turin #travel #self growth #dama art fair #piazza castello #piazza statuto

[readfelice-blog]

Moominland Chronicles Siebzehn: infatuation is not a gift

Blog guide: all italics are my wednesday edits.

Before we begin:

Anyone who suddenly might be unexpectedly flush, my crowdfunding campaign has less than 24 hours left

https://www.indiegogo.com/projects/acht-ocho#/

Well then, hello, no more letters lets return to moominland.

You might remember in my last chronicle that my bloody tale of woe was still in action, after many pills and spending time with a really wonderful gynaecologist who spoke about death with me - following my lead, (she didn't open an appointment with a death chat, I don’t think doctors are normally allowed to even think the word) it was finally determined I have chlamydia.

Surprise!

What fun eh?

I’m on antibiotics now, it should be gone by this weekend, and the bleeding stopped about 2 weeks ago after I started a combination of blood clotting pills and the contraceptive pill. My suspicions are it was stress, hormones and chlamydia that caused the gushing of blood, it would be an act of suicide on chlamydias part to deprive itself of so much iron, which it needs to survive.

So as inferred previously, the NHS would of caught this sti months ago, I would not of cost my insurance company thousands of euros or been subject to various ultrasound spy dildos and gleeful practitioners telling me I was pregnant rubbing their hands together in anticipation of jumping into my vagina, or surgeons hysterically clutching scalpels, so overjoyed to be operating again.

BUT, if I had dealt with my insurance issue diligently, and gotten a proper gynaecologist much earlier and done my research carefully, AND LEARNT GERMAN, this would also not have happened, so I can't deny my own responsibility in all of this either. I still retain my idiot abroad status, which I need to work on to be a proper functioning expat.

So, I’m lying in bed a bit nervous because I’m printing my first copies of my publication tomorrow to fly them to italy at the weekend: it’s Tuesday as I type this horizontal on my phone. As I'm away and just embarking on the next chapter of my project, the making it really real bit, I thought it best to get this log drafted and up before I go.

They’re done, some of the pages are wonky, but they look great actually.

Follow the diary of this project here:

https://felicezhukov.net/bocem-diary

(Because death lurks round every corner, it’s best not to have any unfinished business.)

It’s been quiet, I’ve been napping a lot and taking pills and cutting down salt, my social life has utterly ground to a halt aside from the occasional quick drink and my trips to the studio to practise the live element of this project, which has been revealing itself to me and making me consider myself in a new light, somewhere between a musical performer, a stand up comedian and just all out weirdo, but I’ll refine this at a later date.

What I want to talk about this week are the letters to Nicolás Jaar, but not as a letter to him. As thoughts directed into the macrocosm of the internet.

Because I finished ‘I love Dick’, at first I wrote a very clumsy synopsis and realised many of the critical details had passed me by, academic references sifting out of my mind like flour and swirling away into the air. It has made me realise I need to study what I read, but again that's a thought to refine later.

Still, I was left with a very strong impression which fermented inside me like kimchi and whilst sat in my kitchen earlier between courses, my eyes resting on candlelight, it struck me, the protagonist of the book, Chris, was bullying dick, suddenly it was crystal clear that her infatuation was never weathered by Dicks resistance, that Dick could be curious and still also be anxious about her attention, that victims make mistakes to. But she ploughed on, regardless of his protests, for a long time.

Now, my letters to Nicolás Jaar only lasted a matter of months in comparison, and did not include any colluders, but they were still deeply personal and troubled. Week after week I decried the suffering in my life, the cruelties I was facing, the emotional carnage of my break up and my alcoholism, addressing them to someone I’d formed an infatuation about solely on the impressions of his public persona and his music.

When I was 15 I was obsessed with the doomed relationship of courtney love and kurt cobain, as a the eternal odd one out with nowhere to go in the countryside I entertained myself by creating a character called enigma, who lived in New York. I drew hundreds of drawings of her in different attire that looked more like fashion illustrations than anything descriptive, my mum used to get frustrated at this waste of talent bound to repetition, and enigmas neck was always to long.

Enigma had a lover, called jake, chiselled jawline, a genius musician with a tortured soul, he seduced and slept with all of New York’s cultural elite, but he loved enigma. Though they stayed plural and their relationship was often fraught, they were absolutely bound together, forever destined to explode and then reassemble.

Jake didn’t kill himself.

That fantasy has taken new form, enigma looks like me now, but it is the foundation of every infatuation I develop.

Nicolás Jaar was in the middle of a grueling international tour, I mangled what I read about him into some kind of twisted connection between us, he was travelling the world to the backdrop of me destroying every last vestige of my life,in all senses of the word, selling and trashing my life’s work and possessions, leaving my husband, leaving my home of over 10 years.

Then In its closing chapters I retold and fictionalised a very unsettling story about murder and submersion, the whole thing taking an unsavoury twist with me paralleling beauty and the beast, what if the beast had killed beauty?

I was the beast.

But aren't we all the beast sometimes?

I can only imagine how tiring and unsatisfying months of touring can be for someone creative who wants to innovate and explore in their work, it would be my personal hell, that rotation of groupies, hangers on and gargantuan crowds, barely a moment to breathe and personal space so diminished that you stop knowing who you are any more. In the midst of this to be receiving unsolicited attention from a mentally damaged stranger on twitter, sometimes 2 or 3 times a week, could only serve to heighten the stress you're already experiencing and cause you to disassociate yourself from your inner core even more.

In my mind I was pleading to be saved by devoting all my attention to him, in my unhinged state I felt like by baring everything to a man I’d never met he’d be so disarmed he'd surely empathise, find solace in my garbled stories of misadventure and anxiety.

But now I see how selfish it was, to project on to another human, after all dick was just a human to, with all his own baggage to cope with, though infatuation can amplify its object the reality is noone is really built to cope with that kind of attention, not Dick, not Nicolás Jaar.

Though it was an interesting exercise in some way and will always be part of my oeuvre, probably more definitively so because it exists on the internet, so if the walls don’t come crashing down it is relatively protected, it wasn't kind. I was not trying to help Nicolás Jaar, or create something nourishing, it was selfish. Infatuation is, at its core, selfish, the object is merely that because there is no connection, or at least in this example. There was never any exchange between us, just me pouring all my illness into him blindly.

And I know this well because I have suffered with others becoming infatuated by me on more than one occasion, it’s not pleasant.

In Turin, on stage, he seemed so broken and at odds with himself during his set, he appeared to be really unhappy, my most noble act in this whole enterprise has been to stop writing him letters and focus on myself. I do feel angry with the former me though there is no use regretting what has already passed and life moves on as surely as the sun and moon pass each other in the sky.

In the end i cant punish myself, to err is humane, to forgive divine, I must forgive myself as well.

I’m glad im returning to Turin a more advanced and thoughtful person, I’m going to order in a restaurant this time (well, maybe, but I’m definitely going to buy chocolate) and have a nap before I go out on saturday, I’m going to go to Italy this time, not to stand wretchedly at the feet of a man who owes me nothing and asks for nothing from me. Because as someone grappling with their own fears about performing: this kind of incident is one of the key aspects of what I am terrified to illicite, so i say to you my readers, that I'm sorry to Nicolás Jaar and I will never repeat this journey with any future influences in my life.

I wonder if Chris Kraus has ever apologised to Dick, I’m going to give it a google now I think then try to get some sleep.

Goodnight all, next week I’ll regale you with my Italian trip and who knows what else.

Should ever our paths cross, I don't think I could be like chris, I feel like I’m done exposing him, so it may very well be that whatever ending this story could have, this here will be the end in terms of its written account, I might never type the words Nicolás Jaar on tumblr again.

And by the way, I’ve already uploaded my album, because actually I detest exclusivity, it’s free to download and publically available on 2 of my music based accounts, it’s not hard to find, trust me.

#nicolas jaar #infatuation #i love dick #self growth #Berlin

[readfelice-blog]

Dear Nicolás Jaar

Dear Nicolás Jaar,

Hello, how are you? It’s been a while.

In case you’ve forgotten, you might remember me from such notable moments last year as the girl who wrote you all those delightful letters you never responded to, ( http://felicezhukov.tumblr.com ) but at least they weren’t scrawled in my blood and hand delivered to whatever hotels you were staying in at the time eh? 

I guess that’s one of the wonders of the internet, it gives strange people going through even stranger things a space to upload, though I sincerely doubt that without the internet I’d have developed such a lively preoccupation with you in the first place, not many handsome talented men also post such difficult cryptic tweets, they were a joy to attempt to unpick and frankly kept me entertained for hours.

Plus yes, you are very clever, but I’ve said that to many times now.

You’ll be happy to know I’ve moved on, this letter does not denote a new stage of spiralling downwards into a mire of obsessing over the bottom of the ocean and feeling some twisted connection to stories in the press about journalists being murdered on submarines  (that’s what that little narrative twist was just before I flew over to Turin by the way - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Murder_of_Kim_Wall ).

Gosh, I’m embarrassed, but I’m also proud, or at least bemused: I’m typing this with a smile on my face, I’ve debated for the last couple of weeks about writing you another letter but here I am at my laptop tapping keys to you, so I guess this won out.

Scrap that,

I don’t guess,

I know why, it won out, because those letters were a thing that I did and I want to own that thing that I did, since then I’ve come into contact with various people in the music industry, who may very well have come into contact with you, and I’ve been terrified they’ll find out about these letters, but I can’t hide from who I’ve been as much as I can’t hide from who I am, and I won’t censor my past. I wrote you letters for several months, written into the void of the information highway we all peddle along every day, written to the universe as much as they were to you, so I’m embarrassed,

but I’m not ashamed.

They were weird though.

But ‘I Love Dick’ is  a cult novel for a reason.

Now then to business, I’m not just writing you another letter to talk about writing you letters, we’d find ourselves in a monochrome feedback loop if that were the case, black helvetica on white, round and round and round.

This is a small update for you, a sort of preening bounce around on my little tumblr stage, saying things have gotten a lot better.

Before I start though, well done you, I think it’s brave to resist the momentum of your popularity and to remove the elements in your life that aren’t working for your benefit, from my perspective getting rid of your management and flowing gently into the streams of thoughtful projects that take place underwater, in Cathedrals, as experimental dance projects, is much more nourishing.

Out of the nightclubs and into the world, light over darkness.

And pomegranates is getting some love this year, most pleasing.

Oh,

And the hardcore ambient mix is worthy of the word genius, I feel like everyone I know should listen to it, you sort of surgically removed poetry from the trappings of culture there and really gave it a voice, good job.

So now I’ve patted you on the shoulder let’s take a turn around this walled garden and I’ll fill you in on my life.

This time last year I was exasperated, I was worried and I had no clue what was going to happen to me next, except that I would come and I would go and then I would retract. This time this year I still have no clue what will happen to me next but I’ve finally created another large scale project I can be proud of and I’m going to distribute it out there, in the world, rather than in here in a world inside the world. (Its this: https://www.indiegogo.com/projects/acht-ocho#/ ) It contains drawing, but also, music, because I’ve been steadily and clumsily playing with ableton for the last 12 months. I’ve just pigheadedly slung myself in and so therefore they’re not structurally sound and I don’t find it easy to talk about what I do, but I started painting this way, the technicalities come as and when they’re needed, so let's see how my musical journey goes.

I live in Berlin now, my very last apology letter was written on the cusp of me coming here.

Im installed in a little yellow apartment, my front door is nestled between a bakery and an ice cream shop, opposite a park where from 9 - 20 (its the 24h clock now, it just makes more sense) every day, little people run around pretending to be airplanes, hanging off monkey bars, jumping up and down in puddles, leaving their myriad of vehicles strewn about the place. Its bliss. Old Felice, would of found this intolerable, but she’s packed up her bags and left, I call her the princess now.

I had to stop drinking again, but this time it’s fine, I’m never tempted really, I don’t work in bars, that helps, I live by myself, that helps, I like myself, that helps.

I have a plant, well actually I have 2 plants, they don’t have names but I talk to them every day, they’re healthy, I’ve killed every plant I’ve ever owned but these leafy friends are plump and happy. Plants are a theme to, I finally got to the botanical gardens last week, the succulents are now floating around me, their fleshy green bodies whispering in my mind, begging me to translate them into paint and pencil, we travelled all over the world in those gardens, it was magical.

It was there, between the giant cacti, still digesting coral behind glass,  in this dilligently trained jungle, that I realised how little I've seen. I’ve never been to the desert, or snorkeled alongside a reef, or walked through a jungle, these are only imagined plots of the world in my mind. It tugged at me there, next to the petite sardinians who were my companions, that my life is precious and the world is still a mystery that I want to unfurl, outside the walls of a European city.

But back to Berlin, where I am now.

It’s a thing here, cultivating jungles, there’s blumen shops everywhere, so many households have a beloved selection of sub tropical species, it highlights  a sort of tenuous divide in the city, between hedonism and the holistic. But actually these two things are not that far apart, the people that own the nightclubs are social innovators, I worked for someone in the Holzmarkt development (https://www.google.co.uk/amp/s/amp.theguardian.com/cities/2017/apr/30/berlin-clubbers-urban-village-holzmarkt-party-city ) for a little while and was delighted to see how gentrification had been fought off, or at least siphoned into something with a humane face.

Since I saw you at Club to Club last year I’ve had quite the journey in terms of experiencing music, it was something that was always an indulgence in London I couldn’t afford, but because I have time and my sensitivity is restored from not getting drunk on Friday nights, I’ve been drawn into live performance, a place where I can just melt into the sound waves and become one with everyone around me and the person on stage, not necessarily in a euphoric sense, but in a collective nonetheless (I don’t fight my way to the front anymore, because I figured out you can see the stage from other places in the room). I’ve watched Lucrecia Dalt twice, Amnesia Scanner, Sophie, Robin Fox, Astrid Sonne, Cabaret Voltaire, OPN, I’ve watched lunatics spasmodically twang their instruments in basements, friends test themselves gracefully despite broken equipment, a man I have a deep respect for stand on a chair during his set and sing a song without reverb or backing track, alone and perfect in its nakedness.

Really sound has been what I’ve been striving for in Berlin, not just a specific music scene, though that has gravity, but also sound in the trees, or crunching under my feet, the sound of my nephew discovering his vocal chords, splashing, crying, finding artists that treat it in a wider context and songwriters who make poetry or test what a musician is somehow. Since being here I learned about Ivor Cutler ( https://www.theguardian.com/news/2006/mar/07/guardianobituaries.artsobituaries ), I think maybe I’m not that far from him. There is absurdism and humour to what I make, as I learn myself I get a wider and wider vista of everything that comes under the umbrella of music and sound, it’s really a never ending route of discovery. I am refining something that’s always existed inside me, that drew me to you in the first place and started me writing those letters.

For years I have mindlessly consumed music, with tatty iphone headphones and google play as my library, it's only since following you I started to examine and deconstruct what it is about sound that is so intoxicating, its presence transcends matter (that noisy neighbour), it brings people together like no other art form because its effect on the nervous system makes it nearly impossible to resist, music is primordial and innate. And it doesn't come with visual stimulation necessarily as its counterpart and there is something humble and pure about that. After years of working with aesthetics it's such a relief to diverge from them.

And singing, is a glorious stimulating act, unlike painting I am completely removed from myself and able to soar away into a new world.

Some of the greatest moments of my year have been inside music venues, I bore witness to the immensity of Atonal, the love of music so resonant in Kraftwerks walls that it was overwhelming, I lay on the floor of Saal 1 (http://www.funkhaus-berlin.net/p/studio-1.html - I’m sure you’ve been inside Saal 1 more than once, these links aren’t necessarily for you)  just recently with the Monom team gleefully testing their symphonic sound system around me. This is counterculture, this total unwavering love is counterculture, counter netflix and silicon valley and coke zero. And sometimes its sponsored by red bull, which I'm still getting to grips with.

I still call myself an artist, it feels strange and misleading to say I'm a musician.

Berlin is perfect for me right now but I’m scared that it’s fleeting, they want to build an autobahn through treptower park and I don’t know once my tenancy comes to an end whether I’ll be able to find a place to live. Perhaps I got here to late.

I’m still looking for my perfect room, maybe I won’t find it here, maybe I will, I’ve received so much in this city to be thankful for, people and places that have given me new life, but I must go where I can exist, to make my work and not become a cog in the machine. I think once I find this feted place it will be essential to address how difficult it is for weirdos like me to function in this world, how our choices are diminishing, how we are being pushed out of the cities we help to build and have fewer and fewer places to go.

But we can’t fret to much about the future, just prepare for it and counter it where we can, right now I’m working minimum hours as a cleaner and making a lot of art, cleanings not exactly my ideal job, it may have been a factor in going partially deaf for 3 weeks and bleeding for 5, but its still better than working in a bar and I am afforded the time to pad out how I can make income in a way that works for me in the long term. There’s many options but I’m a terrible one for speculating and so let’s just skip past what that future could entail. It’ll suffice to say, I’m working on it, the art has to pay now, I don’t feel hopeless anymore, I feel like I have a future, that’s a major step forward for me.

There’s so much more Nicolás, pages of unwritten text on the adventures I’ve had or am having, on the people I’ve met, the unicorn dancers in Friedrichshagen, the Ruuski duchess of session / arrangement view, the rose quartz angel that looks out for me and just so happens to be my boss as well. But to be honest, that's enough for now, maybe I’ll write again in a few months, or longer, maybe I won’t.

I’m coming back to Turin, this time you won’t be on stage but Aphex Twin will and the festival has been named vicariously by you, ‘La luce al buio’, ‘light over darkness’, like everything, to make life more fun I enjoy planting little art hacks that give seemingly incongruous things meaning, to me this theme is a signifier, I must come to Turin, I must go to the Piazza Statuto and the Piazza Castello and Dama, I must return to the AC Hotel garden, I must do these things because ‘light over darkness’ does not just mean a tussle between good and evil in this case, but a cryptic invitation to step into the light and become accountable for myself and strong enough to walk on to my own stage.

Obviously not in Turin that weekend, but in the near future.

Anyways, that’s me for now, this was a small sojourn to say hello but next week I’ll return to writing to noone and chronicling moominland.

Take care Nicolas, if our paths cross one day I hope you don’t just turn around and run screaming in the opposite direction.

(I’m not that far through ‘I Love Dick’ yet, I don’t know how it ends.)

(Sunday edit: I'm getting further through ‘I Love Dick,’ and, despite Chris being relatable and honest, quite frankly I’m getting a little frustrated with her, the book is like the art speak Bridget Jone’s, which just leads me to spend my time thinking:

“Pull yourself together love and stop bloody whinging. Maybe instead of jim beam and percocet have a sandwich and make yourself a cup of tea.”

But perhaps Alan Watts can say that in a more refined way:

“… vibrations can go so high on the scale of pain that we have to go into zero, and the way can be made richly horrible by thinking to ourselves, “this ought not to happen” - “it was all that bastards fault” - “i am being punished for my sins” - “ how could god let this happen to me?” When you say the music is abominable listen to the sound of your own complaint. Above all, simply listen.. “

I guess my name is Felice Zhukov, not Chris Kraus, and this is my story.)

Ciao.

#nicolas jaar #self growth #self care #berlin #funkhaus #monom #kraftwerk #music

[readfelice-blog]

Dear Reader

Hello.

Are you at your laptop or curled up with your phone, is there a cup of tea or a snack in arms reach? Are you on a train? Waiting for someone? Are you wearing matching socks today?

Who are you? That reads my blog. Are we friends or family? Have I ever met you before? Have we ever made each other laugh, or had an awkward pause?  

Have you ever suffered from an illness? Has it been ongoing or chronic? Do you have to take medication every day? Do you and your doctor spend a lot of time together?

Did you cry today? Did you laugh? Are you hungry? Are you full? Are there a hundred things loading up in your mind that you have to deal with but you just don’t have the time?

I hope you don’t suffer.

I hope you try to hold on to the idea that life is not something happening to you, because its happening to everyone, it is what it is.

You're invisible to me as I type this dear reader, curled up with my phone and my pig, in bed, listening to Olafur Arnalds.  

Did you click on this link with a kind of morbid curiosity? Wondering what travail I shall be telling today? What silly mess I'm cleaning up now? Is the reign of blood over?

(I'm sick of my pity party for one, were going to skip it this week and I’m going to restrain myself and stick to my guns, ignore the €1000 health insurance bill I just received, not get into a rant about inequality, and stand up rather than stoop.)

When I write these blogs I hear myself in third person, my voice is unwavering and self righteous, it actually sounds a lot like Morgan Freeman in The Shawshank Redemption. I am the entity I present, I’m also the ghost writer in my own life, watching things unfold, trying to connect the dots, refusing to get angry when I encounter a series of unfortunate events, remembering the fabric of life is highly complex and it’s not all about me, (”it is!” • “NO. It’s not.”) everyone else is living as their own ghost writer to. The lady sat next to me on the tram could have been bleeding for a month as well.

Or that man at Templehof who was so energetically pushing his wife and daughter in a wheelchair could be ill to. But he is propelled forward with fire in him anyway.

So it’s in this spirit I want to readdress what I do as an artist. Why I’m asking for money, and particularly, what value my work has.

Really in essence being an artist is an extremely indulgent thing, even being able to contemplate it makes me privileged, because there are so many who cannot break the cycle of poverty, of violence to turn to art, who couldn't even afford the pencils or paper. So does that make me a big cry baby princess?

I’ve wrestled with this as long as I've had intelligent thoughts because that’s pretty much how long I’ve been calling myself an artist.

The answer is: yes, maybe a little, but then I have to see myself in the context of the world that surrounds me.

I believe we should all contribute somehow, with action of some kind, but there are many aspects to life that make up how we spend our days, so the actions we can choose are myriad and each of us chooses our own way through a series of trial and error, spurred on by what ignites our hearts.

It is how we live that I am so concerned with, porridge with honey tentatively taken at 7am, travelling to work on a carriage filled with drowsy faces, that first morning coffee from the cheery girl at the backerei, the beginning, the middle and the end of our days.

My art is a great big mirror I hold facing myself, but behind me I see the other people that pirouette past, I hear their stories to, I observe the trappings of their lives, I notice the correlation to mine and I notice the patterns that make me worry about them. I notice netflix, 9-5’s, stiff upper lips, iphones (yes I'm writing on one right now), I feel their sometimes isolated moments and the suffocation in their lives, I notice netflix, user generated content, walled gardens, ticket barriers, alcohol on friday nights.

What do I make my work about? What is my art?

A curator / gallery owner / man that has passed through my life, told me whilst we were exchanging emails which had started when I requested if he'd be my reference for my application to the royal academy, he bluntly asked me what I did, despite me having put on an exhibition in one of his project spaces and renting a studio from him for roughly a year. He didn't know what i did.

It upset me but they are the instances that really help you encounter yourself.

For the last 3 years I've been coming to terms with myself, through my own process of individuation:

An innate need for self-realization leads people to explore and integrate these disowned parts of themselves. This natural process is called individuation, or the process of becoming an individual.

According to Jung, self-realization is attained through individuation. His is an adult psychology, divided into two distinct tiers. In the first half of our lives, we separate from humanity. We attempt to create our own identities (“I”, “myself”). This is why there is such a need for young men to be destructive, and can be expressed as animosity from teens directed at their parents. Jung also said we have a sort of "second puberty" that occurs between ages 35 and 40: outlook shifts from emphasis on materialism, sexuality, and having children to concerns about community and spirituality.

In the second half of our lives, humans reunite with the human race. They become part of the collective once again. This is when adults start to contribute to humanity (volunteer time, build, garden, create art, etc.) rather than destroy. They are also more likely to pay attention to their unconscious and conscious feelings. Young men rarely say "I feel angry" or "I feel sad." This is because they have not yet rejoined the human collective experience, commonly reestablished in their older, wiser years, according to Jung. A common theme is for young rebels to "search" for their true selves and realize that a contribution to humanity is essentially a necessity for a whole self.

Jung proposes that the ultimate goal of the collective unconscious and self-realization is to pull us to the highest experience. This, of course, is spiritual.

If a person does not proceed toward self-knowledge, neurotic symptoms may arise. Symptoms are widely defined, including, for instance, phobias, psychosis, and depression.

(Source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Analytical_psycho...)

My art is the way I express who I find under the skin, behind the eyes. I used to make paintings that were more like decorations, to assuage myself, but their message was unclear and increasingly they just felt like products. My paintings were always full of characters, fragments of me. Another veil.

So I started painting more roughly, then I started dressing up as my characters, then the boundary between me and my characters began to become fuzzy.

When I decided to throw my life in the bin: I made a plea online much like this one, to a largely invisible audience again, but somehow I could see their contorted faces aghast at my outpouring of perverse sexual videos and garbled writing and drawing.

But that was me facing my life and refusing to be pushed into a place I could not flourish in, I did all those worrying odd things because I was combing my psyche for all the traps I’d become stuck in, for my inhibitions, for my fears. I made that work because it scared me to do so, and when I pled online for people to take my things from me, so I wouldn't have to throw them in the bin, I honestly believed it would be the last time I would have to plead. Though I threw a lot away so much came from my photic project, people gave love and support from corners of my life who on occasion I barely knew, and they did so because it struck a chord in them, because they could relate it to struggles of their own.

This is when i discovered the immense benefit of parading and making a spectacle of the trauma I was living in.  It helped me, it gave me hope.

When I was a teenager, way before Nicolas Jaar, I was infatuated with Courtney Love.

What always drew me to her was how surreally authentic she seemed to be, I rewatched her escapades at the VMA’s when she was throwing her makeup at Madonna, Madonna so sleek and turned in like a cat, her eyes briefly betraying the true anger she felt at the untethered baby doll dressed oaf, Courtney, spilling herself all over the camera. I stayed up late to watch her MTV2 takeover, I video taped it, staring wide eyed at the bizarre woman on my screen having a breakdown after no sleep for 24 hours. When I watched these things I felt like they counteracted the hypocrisy and the falseness of celebrity culture, I loved her so much because I really felt like she was telling the truth.

I got a little older, I peered at a drunken Tracey Emin talking about her mum on the South Bank Show, I walked round a gallery and read her handwritten account of her rape as a teenager, I felt less alone.

Not that long ago I humbly observed the breakdown of Bjork’s marriage, as tortured poetry to wonderful and surprising music.

I am not alone.

I moved to Berlin to try and make my life better, I thought I’d find the avant garde.

And things are better, a lot better, I don't even crave alcohol anymore, I can look after plants now, I’ve sung nearly every day. I don't want to kill myself anymore.

So as things are better I’m strong enough to finally thank my ex husband, after leaving him, lamenting the abusive cycles we got ourselves into, the oppression we were both wound up in.

But it's an album, its music, I’m thanking him by singing and creating something new to put into the world, it’s strange and sometimes heartbreaking music, but it’s worthwhile because its so full of gratitude and love.

And of course like everything I do it's a little absurd.

It has value in this world.

And I’m drawing 88 photos from my life that tell a story, of my entry to berlin, of sexual misadventure, alcoholism, confusion and delight. Set against the backdrop of my little nephew and my ex husband, who share the same birthday. These drawings are laboured over, painted, etched in ink, scribbled in pencil.

They have value in the world.

Because out there someone will find them, and they will feel less alone.

My art is my life told on my own terms through a series of creative hacks, as I get older I think it will necessarily change but the byproduct of all of this is a stream of songs, drawings, films, undiluted and unconstrained that chart the journey of a weird girl just trying to understand how to live in this world. Like we all are. Like you are dear reader.

The world needs artists, yes it is indulgent but its vital that people inhabit this world who don’t approach it as they should, who veer around the normal and ask big questions, or just spill their guts out for all to see. A world without art would be colourless, who would be there to throw their toys out of the pram and cry that they don’t understand? We are all coordinated by the structures we grow up in, art is one of the primary aids of resistance, or tools of celebration.

Because my art is my life it’s somehow formless, I don’t work with the bigger picture as my landscape and I've always found it very hard to put some numerical value to what I do.

But if I want to flourish I have to start doing this, or I’ll be a cleaner for the rest of my days.

So to begin with I will try crowdfunding, though grants, residencies and institutional funding must also come for me to get to the next stage of my career. For now I’m making an appeal to anyone that has ever felt touched by something I’ve made, to spare a little money to help me along my way. I wouldnt of turned to this if I hadn't of gotten ill, it’s not premeditated, but I'm not asking for pity money, I’m asking for funding to help me assemble and distribute my art in Berlin, rather than online or alone in my studio.

If you can help, and I know not everyone can, then please follow the link below:

https://www.indiegogo.com/projects/acht-ocho/x/19564227

I’m not going to mindlessly post this on social media every other day or message every one of my facebooks friends with a copied spiel, I’m just going to use the channels I already occupy, to try and make sense of why I’m asking, not just for you dear reader but for me to.

I lay down to write this blog all muddled and worried, as I type the last words here I feel a release ebb through me, like I do with every blog i write. I feel like I understand myself a little bit more.

I’m now going to press stop on my music, turn off my light, and close my eyes.

What are you going to do now? Is there food cooking you need to turn over? Has the kettle just boiled? Is your washing machine chiming? Is the train pulling in to the station?

Goodnight, whoever you are, wherever you are.

#courtney love #tracey emin #carl jung #individuation #art #self growth #Berlin

[readfelice-blog]

moominland chronicles Sechszehn: bloody tale of woe continued

Sunday, Monday, Happy Days,

Tuesday, Wednesday, Happy Days,

Thursday, Friday, Happy Days,

The weekend comes, my cycle hums

Ready to race to you

These days are ours

Happy and free. (Oh Happy Days)

These days are ours

Share them with me.(Oh baby)

Goodbye grey sky, hello blue,

there's nothing can hold me when I hold you.

feels so right you can't be wrong,

rockin' and rollin' all week long.

Saturday, what a day

Groovin' all week with you

It’s Wednesday // now its Sunday (I couldn’t finish this on Wednesday, it was still to close).

First off I’m asking for money, I will go into more depth next week because I’m facing the crisis of what the value of my work really is, for now this is my Crowdfunding campaign:

https://igg.me/at/bocemachtocho/x/19564227

Please support if you can.

Music….

Just listen to these, they’re both little slices of genius that deserve your time:

LYDIA LUNCH Queen of Siam

https://www.discogs.com/Lydia-Lunch-Queen-Of-Siam/release/392276

NICOLAS JAAR Hardcore Ambient Mix

https://soundcloud.com/otherpeoplerecords/nicolas-jaar-harcore-ambient …

Here’s the recap and then what happened next on my fine romp through the German Health service…

MONDAY 1/10/18

bleeding

First clot plops out, come into contact with rude receptionists, no one will give me an appointment

TUESDAY 2/10/18

bleeding

Horrible morning cleaning, go to TK and sort my insurance, go to emergency doctor who tells me to go to a gynaecologist

WEDNESDAY 3/10/18

bleeding

Home all day making work, have a little singsong at night. (national holiday - no doctors open)

THURSDAY 4/10/18

Bleeding

Go to job, go to gynaecologist who's not there / will be going on holiday, ring more rude receptionists, fall into the office of a gynaecologists pleading for help, take my pants off, get ultrasound spy dildo inserted up me, bleed all over the doctor. Am told I am pregnant, am told I am not pregnant, am told to go to hospital and go to my insurance. Go to my insurance, get my letter, wander round seemingly abandoned hospital, go home broken.

Oh, ask for help- email my boss / mentor and tell her what’s going on. Email all my clients and cancel all my jobs for the next week.

FRIDAY 5/10/18

Bleeding

Wake up and get a taxi to hospital.

Beg to be seen by someone.

Female gynaecologist sees me this time - take my pants off, get ultrasound spy dildo inserted up me and am roughly routed around in with alarming metal objects and no warning that it will hurt or being asked whether I am in pain. Am told it’s not a baby its a polyp, am scheduled for surgery, spend 2 hours filling in forms, waiting, am given appointment for 9.30am Monday morning and turfed out. Leave, realise I can’t get the note from my doctor (they’re all closed) I need before the weekend, go back, cry at admin assistant, have minor breakdown, am settled and sent away.

Sit shakily on bench in small square by U Bahn on the grounds of the hospital, talk to Moon, go home, tuck myself in and bleed.

My mentor says she’ll come to see me at the hospital, what do I like to eat (I have to stay overnight).

SATURDAY 6/10/18

Bleeding

Move very little, bleed very much, buy some food.

SUNDAY 7/10/18

Bleeding

Much like Saturday but I write and publish my blog.

My mentor asks me what time to come see me.

First wave of friends that read blog get in contact,

“Felice ….. now im sneakily reading your bloody ( literally bloody this time) blog to find out whats actually happening with you. I hope you��re okay!, and if you ever do ask for help I will do my best to help you.”

MONDAY 8/10/18

Bleeding

Get up 6AM, have shower very slowly, am in a lot of pain (its worst in the morning), sit outside my house and wait for Taxi, get taxi, tell the driver I miss free healthcare, he tells me he misses his family in Istanbul. Am deposited outside doctors (to ask for note), wait for 20 mins to get slip of paper and give the receptionist a hug.

Get another uber to Hospital, he leaves me at the gates and I walk to the Frauen Klinik, not sure of where to go I wait at registration then am directed up to my ward and power off with 45 minutes till my surgery, the admin assistant tells me “alles gut”.

Up at station 35, the nurses are friendly, I go to another registration office, back to wait in overcrowded little patient room, fill in a tome of forms in German using the camera on Google Translate to try make sense of them, hand back the forms and slyly observe the small Russian family to my right, the son talks expansively, the mother is softly spread from middle age and fairly tethered to the father, she beckons him to join her but he’s brittle and stands by the window instead, I don’t know what's wrong with her.

30 minutes after my scheduled surgery, 10am, then 45, I am called in to a nurses office where she tell’s me, as if I should know, I’ve been rescheduled for 12:50, she's nice and she tries to speak English, she asks what becomes some kind of pass code,

“Have you eaten on drunk anything today? Do you have any allergies?”

The nurse will take you to your room now, but go back and wait first.

I encounter a gorgeous young elfin nurse and ask if I can go a cigarette on my way to the patient room, where more people are piled in now, she says yes 5 minutes, I promise thats what I’ll do.

Inhale cigarette run back upstairs.

She’s there again, she didn’t know I was scheduled for surgery! Tell them when they take you to your room, just in case.

I stand in the corridor for 20 mins, there is nowhere to sit in the patient room.

A nurse comes and deposits me in my room, it's like places I’ve stayed in generic expansive hotels, a Holiday Inn perhaps, charge my phone, hug my pig because of course I brought him. A nurse enters roughly 30 mins later and tells me to change, its the young elfin nurse, I bundle my things in the cupboard and lock the door, give her the key. Then I change and wait.

In comes another nurse, high cheekbones and a wide smile, I climb into bed but manage to get her to listen to me when I say I’ve had a cigarette, a gasp, she calls down to surgery, a moment where I’m not sure if they’ll operate, but its ok and off we go. I am wheeled to the lift, she touches my shoulder often, she's forgotten all her notes and runs back to the room leaving me lying by the lift, she comes back, still no notes, they’re under my pillow. We continue.

It's like a hospital drama from first person perspective, I’m scared, I’ve never been wheeled around in a bed before, the viewpoint is totally new and robs you of all your independence, I am just a body, unable to move, looking up at the people that flash in and out on my journey down to surgery.

“Have you eaten anything today? Do you have any allergies?” Repeated over and over again, I tell my surgeon I’m not sure sure how much I love Berlin after the last week, I tell the man that doesn’t introduce himself to me and has a strange smile on his face that makes me feel uncomfortable, that I’ve lived here for 6 months, I repeat “No I’ve not eaten anything, No I don’t have any allergies, I’m wheeled next to the operating table, my clothes are removed, a drip is stuck inside me and I’m given a mask, I precariously climb onto the table and then nothing….

I wake up blearily, to be told there was no polyp, its low estrogen, blinking, moments of consciousness, they explain what’s wrong me, or not in this case because they don’t know, there was a lot of blood, I feel like it’s my fault. I ask for the blood clots they’re removed, because I want to see them, but they’re never brought to me.

My nurse takes me back to my room, there’s another woman there now, I’m so frustrated that after an hour or so of sleep I stubbornly dress and go for a smoke, despite the head nurse on the ward saying “if you pass out, I’m not coming down to collect you.”

Then back up, more sleep, my rose quartz angel (mentor, but this is her true form) comes to visit, she brings lilies and salted chocolate, I tell her they didn’t find anything, I am still bleeding, now in my hospital pants rather than my own knickers. She leaves when the nurses bring in dinner, 2 slices of stale bread, 2 slices of plastic cheese, 4 patties of butter, cheese, to be honest I’m not sure. I eat them but am glad I have the chocolate to.

I’m still high on the drugs they’ve given me, I buzz up and down for cigarettes and feel strangely lucid, I text and read the books the rose quartz angel brought me, I try and pretend to myself that it’s all ok now.

My roommate is Russian, she speaks in German or Russian on her phone constantly, but she does not understand English, so we don’t talk. At 21:30 the head nurse administers pain killers and offers to freshen my back “no thanks” then my roommate turns off her light, so I do the same.

But I can’t sleep, so I just toss and turn, 2 hours or so later I wake and patter off to the kitchen to look for food, I’m starving, I find a container of muesli and some milk, I sneakily pour it in a cup alongside a cup of soup, then I craftily return to my room feeling like I’ve subverted the system somehow. The water isn’t hot enough for the cup of soup to melt so there’s fatty globs of it still in the cup, I eat everything anyway, in the dark, then I try to sleep. Another few hours and I manage some shut eye, my body is craving touch from another though, it’s desperately shouting at me.

Good Omens is funny isn’t it?

Eartheater has played and is now probably at some hedonistic afterparty.

TUESDAY 8/10/18

Bleeding

My roommate wakes before me, but I’m half awake, people come in and out (nurses to attend to her requests), she talks on the phone, at 9:00 they wheel in breakfast, 2 slices of stale bread, a piece of plastic cheese and more patties of butter, plus some questionable conserves.

This bread is tough.

A doctor comes in whilst breakfast is still at my side table,

“So you can go whenever you want, we told you what's wrong with you right?”

“When I was high on the drugs you’d given me yes.”

“It’s a hormonal imbalance, you need to go see your gynaecologist so they can give you the IUD.”

“Ok.”

There was no polyp, or alien baby, but I wasn’t conscious so how do I know.

I pack up and exit like a rockstar, but maybe the kind of rockstar your dad becomes at a disco after a few beers rather than Iggy Pop. Before I exit the hospital completely I go see the admin team about my insurance one last time, to ask if I have to call my insurance, because apparently this little hospital holiday will likely cost up to 30k, the woman tells me its ok and I give her a big hug, lilies still in hand, then I dance down to the street, I must still be high on drugs.

i sidestep to the office of the woman I cried at on Friday, because it wasn't her fault so I drew her my lilies to say sorry, she doesn’t have her flowery crocs on today but she's still oddly special and her eyes are crystalline as I run off.

But I’m still bleeding.

I go home on the U Bahn, via the gynaecologists I’ve now crashed into 3 times this week, but my welcome isn’t so warm this time. I need to see the doctor, maybe not today but this week, I hand them my referral note and my operation notes, she goes to talk to him. I get the impression I’m becoming an annoyance now, as if this is all my fault.

“He can see you in 10 days”

“I haven’t stopped bleeding, I need it to be sooner than that.”

She is still kind faced as she ponders this, “ok Thursday morning 8:30?”

“Thats my birthday but yes.”

I finally get home after making some heady announcements via email and facebook that all is right with the world again (drugs still? Who knows).

My rose quartz angel brings me a ton of leafy greens, soups, nuts, tea, yoghurt, chocolate, the care package from heaven and she sits in my little yellow kitchen briefly not drinking her tea.

“So did they take hormonal tests if they think its hormones?

Are you not scared?

I don’t think you should go back to this doctor, I think you need a second opinion and I think he’s a tool, get some more contacts and I’ll do a call round for you tomorrow, see what I can find.”

She had botched surgery before she moved to Berlin, there’s a hole in her mouth now, she called and emailed surgeons all over the world to consult with. She sat opposite a friend of the surgeons, another surgeon, who told her that her investigation could ruin his friends reputation, he didn’t give his opinion.

Doctors are humans to.

After she leaves I’m thrown back in to a land of exasperated worry, I trawl the internet to find more English speaking gynaecologists, I phone the doctor that discharged me, who is not happy to hear from me and through gritted teeth tells me there are no hormone tests, any medical professional would just know that it was an imbalance.

I go to bed worried, the bleeding is getting heavier again.

WEDNESDAY 10/10/18

Bleeding

After a very goog nights rest I receive a call from my rose quartz angel, shes got me an appointment way out at templehof in 2 hours. I dress and get ready slowly, all the connections are seamless, I feel like my angel is with me, I get to the doctors in good time.

Walking through the leafy grounds of the hospital with crisp autumn sun shimmering through the leaves that are a spectrum of warm colours. Not in a panic because my rose quartz angel has sent me a map as well. I walk in exactly on time, have a little tussle with the receptionist about my insurance card, am seated, wait on a white wicker chair reading Alan Watts. The waiting room is airy and feminine, the staff wear pink t-shirts and German pop echoes out from the speaker just to my right above me, I pour myself water and have a little cup of tea.

When my doctor comes out I look at her for 5 minutes before registering she's asking for my name.

Then I repeat my bloody tale of woe to her.

She doesn’t want to just bung me up with an IUD, it will cost me 300euros to do so (or there around) and it won’t solve the problem. She wants to have a look in my uterus as well, so I climb on to her chair and have the spy dildo inserted up me for the 3rd time in the last 7 days, but shes gentle, she tells me it might hurt and to let her know if I’m in pain.

“Well they did a good job of cleaning you out at least because there’s nothing in there now.”

Clothes back on, my ovaries look fine, she’s going to check with her senior doctor to see what he thinks.

I’m back in the waiting room, then in her office.

“So, pills to clot the blood and stop you bleeding. You don’t have to go on the pill, what do you think?”

“I think I want to cover all my bases.”

“Great, me to. Once the bleeding has stopped call us, then we can do a smear test and try to find out whats going on.”

I walk out to a really beautiful autumn day, the kind that framed your first weeks back at school or college, when everything was so fresh and exciting. Whilst I wait for my pills I have coffee and cake at a small cafe that serves the passion cake my mum makes, its the only place I’ve ever found that does so and I’ll be back there again next week.

THURSDAY 11/10/18

Bleeding (getting less)

It’s my birthday.

The bear messages me that the doctor agree’s he's showing symptoms of chlamydia, he's been given antibiotics and I should go ASAP (but no test results as of yet).

“I’ll talk to my gyno next week, its my birthday today and I’m sick of clinics and hospitals this week.”

STI tests are not covered on my insurance.

Ok, no more days need to be charted now, the bleeding is nearly stopped I’ll be back to leafy Templehof at the earliest convenient time next week.

If it is an STI after all this let me just quickly cite what would of happened had I been in the UK with the NHS:

I would of gone to the sex health centre at Homerton Hospital, the same time I went to the emergency doctors on my first visit, around 3 months ago. But I would have had the whole spectrum of tests, rather than just doing 3, because I couldn’t afford the chlamydia test and it would cost 300euro if it came back positive anyway.

A week later I would of received an automated message telling me if I had chlamydia, I would of gone to collect my antibiotics and nothing more would of come of this.

It would of cost the NHS at least a 10th of what its costing my health insurance provider in Germany, because it would of been solved, no carousel of ultrasound spy dildos. No being wheeled down to surgery.

I’m not saying it is Chlamydia, it could be hormones, it could be cancer (but lets brush that one aside), but if it is Chlamydia then this glaring discrepancy of costs and stress is almost mind boggling, all because I would of had access to free testing and treatment.

Anyway I’m done for now, though will update again next week, hopefully in less detail as I’m hoping now I have a diligent and thoughtful doctor I’ll be able to start getting better, and as I say the bleeding has nearly stopped.

My birthday was fantastic, I got to lie on the floor of Saal 1 at Funkhaus and let sound wash over me, bless the folk at Monom, I’m off to Treptower now to see friends I haven’t seen in a while then to a dance studio I’m renting, to sing my heart out in peace. It’s another beautiful day and I’m really looking forward to seeing these friends, I’ve missed them.

But just before I round out this tale of madness for now, I want to say that during the course of the week so many people have been in touch from Berlin and from home to offer support and anything else they can do, it’s really a beautiful thing, there are so many fantastic people in this world and I’m so grateful, thank you. I put all my dirty laundry on display, I don’t really know why, but I get so much from doing it and I don’t think I’ll be stopping anytime soon.

Happy Sunday all.

#self care #Berlin #nhs

[readfelice-blog]

moominland chronicles fünfzehn: felice vs the german health care system

Hello you, 

It’s 4am on Friday morning, I’m lying in bed with one of my 3 flowered ikea lamps burning away, holding my cuddly pig tight to my chest whilst I tap out this blog on my iphone, balanced on a pillow.

I cant sleep.

I’m going to get a taxi to hospital in 5 hours.

Before we start all that please administer any of the below music to yourself as an accompaniment, I’ve been dipping my toes into the clear water of pop shoals this week, I might be the last person to have listened to blond (an article in vice insisted upon me lining it up on my google play - still no cd player, I know):

Frank ocean

Nikes (song, always a fan of a big opener on an album)

https://vimeo.com/179791907?ref=em-share

Blond (album, yes you've probably heard it already)

https://www.discogs.com/Frank-Ocean-Blond/master/1046042

I'm also late on the train for Mitski I’m sure, but the words, restrain in her voice and divergent harmonies (discordant, is that better?) are searing through me, might listen again in the hospital tomorrow.

Though perhaps as she grows older she wont long for that kiss quite as much as she does now, because prince charming will never save her really (though she does acknowledge that from time to time on this album)

Mitski

A horse named cold air (song)

https://youtu.be/ce3m-o1pZqY

Be the cowboy (Album)

https://mitski.bandcamp.com/album/be-the-cowboy

And just this one song, which kind of speaks frankly from my heart a little, or at least I sympathise with, though in a fuller sense my situation is very different and it’s only my little brain that identifies with the lyrics.

SZA: the weekend

https://youtu.be/PALMMqZLAQk

So then.. youre suited and booted musically, lets press on shall we? After all I mentioned hospital, it would be cruel just to taper off now.

Heres my small brain again:

Fuck the fucking german health system, fuck all those uptight bigoted cunts that put the phone down on me this week, fuck my insurance for charging me since july and slyly adding it to my bill, fuck the man at the tk queue yesterday who aggressively shouted at me for talking on the phone with my sister, about my illness, at the first opportunity that day after a very strange experience with the gynaecologist.

Ok, 

I’m breathing, my small brain is retracting, lets continue a bit less aggressively now.

Health health health, we’re jumping back on the theme from last week, because sometimes illness doesn't go away, and as this blog is my warts and all document of the weird happenings of my life, I am going to be very very open about whats happening to me this week.

So I’m bleeding, like all pre menopausal women do who dont take contraception that inhibits it, thats what was happening in Paris, thats what has been happening for 3 weeks.

I’ve been bleeding for 3 weeks, yes.

I had really bad period pains last time round, which is unusual for me these days, I took buscopan plus, i soldiered on, then it stopped for a week, then it returned, light some days, heavier seemingly at the weekends. I pigheadedly pushed through physically exhausting weeks of cleaning, travelling, working, I’m a freelance cleaner, I don't get sick pay or holiday pay, I have to work or I can't pay rent.

I wrote a blog about it last weekend. But that was just before the blood clots starting coming, when the first one fell out it plopped in the toilet, I was so shocked I fished it out and curiously studied it (warts and all, I’m sick of skirting the weirdness in my life: its there: get used to it). I thought it was a dead baby, it was monstrous and displayed a horrid kind of plasticity as it eerily shifted round the jar in my hand I was gently coercing. It was an alien, more like rosemary's baby than my cherub cheeked nephew.

That was MONDAY.

I thought, ok the babies fallen out, now it’ll surely stop.

On sunday the bear got in touch, he'd been trying to phone, he was annoyed he couldn't get in contact, he was horny. I told him I was still bleeding, he insisted I go to the doctors, in his very forthright way, he sent me money to go even: because i was clueless about my insurance at that point. I knew i’d been getting letters I couldn't read from tk (die teckniker, german health insurance provider)  for months, since I stopped working at the hostel, but I’d just carefully ignored them.

I didn't have the money to pay for health insurance.

I botched my first attempt to see a gynaecologist, I made an appointment online but the transfer the bear made was not in my bank so he asked me to phone them and check payment methods. When I did the receptionist point blank refused to speak English to me, my quandary was simply, “Do I need cash today?” But she was haughty and unsympathetic, another colleague took the phone, who even through garbled understanding felt kinder but it soon transpired that my appointment was for November 1st not October 1st.

“Im very ill i dont think I can wait that long.”

I phoned Meoclinic to be told by a woman with razors in her voice who suddenly became sickeningly sweet after she’d told me it was €400 just to see someone. I felt like the pleasure she was deriving from me tripping over my words and despairingly saying that was to much money for me, was enough for her to take home and masturbate over later, in her silky agent provocateur corset, on silk sheets, with a flute of champagne on the bedside table.

I gave up for the day and decided that tomorrow I’d go to the doctors I went to for my sti test a few months ago, they were very nice. They spoke english, they had open appointments the next day at 18h.

TUESDAY

More clots started coming, big, gloopy, just pouring out of me, they were announced by a tirade of blood, I was soaking through organic pads at an alarming rate.

So that wasn't the baby on Monday then.

I went to clean first, I cant afford to not clean for reasons stated above, at an office where the woman who employs me talks to me through gritted teeth as if our every interaction is painful to her.

Lowly pauper girl, know your place.

Anyway due to logistical issues she had probably not envisaged, I didn't do the whole job and left early. I walked out on to the money lined streets of Uhlandstrasse, Cara Delevine’s svelte androgynous eyes staring out at me from various glass paned monoliths, and sat on a moth eaten bench, very upset from the shift, feeling utterly worthless, responsible and at fault, bleeding.

Then I had a cigarette, collected myself and went to tk: Round 1.

I waited, gushing out blood, in line for 25 minutes to see the receptionist, then a further 10/15 to see the sales girl. I dont have to pay them straight away but when november comes I will have to pay them 720+€ , plus from then on 180€ a month, from an average wage of 800€.

In retrospect I was probably fully within my right to protest starting the contract from July 1st, but I was so grateful for someone health related to be talking to me in English and perhaps it will stand in my favour now the hospital bills will be tallying up.

I left with no card or proof of insurance.

I went home, lay down, then showered, laced my trainers and went back into the world depleted, to Mehringdam to see the emergency doctors, it was raining heavily outside.

They were different this time, I had no proof of insurance but I had the bears money so I was paying cash, I waited dutifully and wrote in my diary.

It was a different female doctor, a more boxy and less vital woman than the previous medic I’d met at the same clinic. About halfway into my bloody tale of woe she stopped me panic stricken.

“You know this is a doctors surgery, you have to go to a gynaecologist.”

“Ok, so you cant help me.” - i start putting my coat back on.

A pause.

“Can you at least refer me to one? I’ve had a hard time trying to find a gynaecologist, I can't really speak German, people have been very rude to me so far, I came back here because I remember people were kind and tried to help me, even though I wasn't sure it was the right place.”

We go out to reception where I stand in front of 2 receptionists who speak in German and totally ignore me, the doctor hands me some measly bits of paper with contact details printed on them and hurries away. Shaken from my bloody tale of woe I imagine she just sits in her office for 10 minutes alone obsessively sterilising her hands and shuddering.

I continue to look at the 2 women in front of me who carry on as if I am invisible for a further 5 minutes, I tell them I’m going to the toilet and then coming back, they brush me off. More blood pours out of me. I return and finally they allow me to pay them, I plod back out into the rain and miserably wait for a bus, head home via the shops and climb back into bed.

WEDNESDAY

Is a national holiday, so I can't sort anything, my client offers me the day off, I take it. I make 9 drawings for my project, bounce the rough edit of the album I’m working on, pull myself to the dance studio I’ve started to rent to practise my live show. Have a long overdue singsong, though I can't really dance i can still sing.

Sunday edit: I’ve since missed 2 bookings at the studio because of this infernal bleeding, hope I can go back soon, it was utterly riveting to finally find a place I could sing as loudly as I wanted.

It's a glorious day even though blood still rains, I’m not cleaning, I’m doing what i really want to do.

THURSDAY

I need to be at my clients early, but I go via the apotheke on the way, there a pharmacist advises me on the best way to take iron and vitamin supplements, sells me ibuprofen and alerts me to the gynaecologist upstairs, but she’s only open till 13h, my job is supposed to finish at that time.

I hum and haa as I hobble to my clients and when I get there decide to finish the job early and see if I can get an appointment.

On the way into the building there's a system of doors, I enter alongside an elderly gentleman with a walking stick and we have quite the time not understanding each other, me holding doors for him, him very jovially propping them open with his stick. I have no idea what’s being said but something tender and wonderful is occurring between us that puts a lightness back in my step.

This reception is slick and clean, the receptionist is neat and elegant. But the doctor isn’t there. They wouldn’t accept my tk insurance anyway, they’re going on holiday till November.

Ok,

I leave and just flop down on the street outside, I’m supposed to be doing a double clean today but I have a 2 hour window before my next job, which is only a 15 minute walk away. I’m getting closer to seeing someone. Still crouched down on the street, still bleeding, I dig out the contacts handed to me, one is for a doctors I’ve called before. I call 2 numbers from the 4 sheets I have, both go through to hard voiced women who utterly refuse to attempt to speak English to me and relish the goodbyes they bestow before they coldly put the phone down. To the second one I say in English:

“I’m really sick, but if I don’t speak German I am just going to continue to be sick, is that what you’re telling me?”

I found a list on google, theres a male gynaecologist just up the road, a man rummaging in my lady bits is a bit disconcerting but truly I’m beyond pride now.

This reception is more modest, I place my cleaning bucket on the floor and then just start with

“I’m losing a lot of blood, can you please help me.”

He’s in.

These receptionists are gorgeous humans, they speak to me in broken English, they’re shocked I’ve been bleeding for 3 weeks, yes he will see me, please take a seat.

He’s a big warm man with no sexual energy, I tell him everything, I feel so grateful just to be able to see him that I’m bowing as I say thank you. I get sent to a little room, remove my trousers and knickers, get let into another room, climb on the chair, he inserts the spy camera dildo (ultrasound) device inside me, then on the screen we look at a ball like thing inside my womb.

Hes glowing when he tells me its probably a very early pregnancy, he’s so excited, though it’ll most likely be a miscarriage, but he paints a future where my little fetus determinedly survives the bloodletting and in 9 months time arrives in my life.

I cover everything in blood, which freaks him out.  

“You’re really bleeding a lot.”

He gives me the ultrasound photo, then after some confusion I go to the nurses and deposit a urine sample on the counter of another room.

“Thank you so much for seeing me.”

“Of course: you have been bleeding for 3 weeks.”

As I wait in the reception for the test results a new future, inconceivable before this point, rolls out before me, where I have the baby and take the government stipend to look after it as a single mother, I thought I didn’t want kids but something seems so precious about this vision. It’ll just be me and my little ball of love, together in some warm cosy flat in Prenzlauer Berg, surrounded by all the other Berlin mothers.

The test is negative, a jolt of dismay passes through me, the vision is shattered, I have to go to the hospital he says. They give me the bill, without proof of insurance I pay in cash, thanking the bear silently. He also tells me to go to my insurance and get a letter, because the hospital will really cost a lot.

So I go home, breathe and collect myself, go back out. Spend over an hour wandering around looking for a photo kiosk for my insurance card (not blind> I’m using google maps to try locate one), finally I find it nestled into a dark part of the s bahn station, it costs double what the machine costs but I just eat the charge, earlier I’d spend 30 minutes wandering around the crossroads outside Leopaldplatz: the fotofix on the map was apparently invisible, I need a picture. I then wait for another 30 minutes to have my photo taken.

When I get to the u bahn where tk is there is a fotofix booth right there, to my left as I walk out of the station, I really hold myself back from screaming and kicking over all the chairs arranged outside the cafe before me. I finally manage to call my sister and it's a glorious funny loving chat, cut short by the aforementioned man in the tk queue.

I tell him in english which he insists he doesn't understand, that I am having the day from hell and that was the first time I’ve managed to speak to that person, he abuses me again in German but then stands very far away from me, the shame weaving around him, I curse him, but its a little thing, just that I hope he gets eaten by spider babies.

Don’t take yourself too seriously.

I retrieve my letter from the receptionist, the same sales woman I spoke to on Tuesday who doesn’t recognise me at all.

It’s getting late in the day, I call back my sister and head to Charite Campus Mitte, as I get there it dawns on me this is where I was an extra on an art video shoot around 3 weeks ago.

There is no discernable entrance, it seems mostly deserted. I travel up in a lift towards the gynakolgie department, but when I exit the skybent box that is my vehicle there is no clear signage towards it, just a door to an emergency exit staircase, wind billowing behind it, with a note in fluoro yellow fixed on its metallic facade and a bridge / corridor leading to empty waiting rooms.

I give up, decide I’ll go to the address given to me by the doctors tomorrow. I’ll go home and sleep now.

Home, I eat then I crash, I get into bed at 19h, I’m still here its now 6am and I’ll try sleep a bit more before I get a taxi at 9am.

I’m scared

It’s like some sick version of the night before christmas, black humour and absurdity have been welcome companions but armour fades in bed, so writing this in the knowledge I will share it with the online community has been the only thing I can do to douse the fear.

I’ll probably have to beg receptionists later but I just hope I get to someone who can start to mend me, because the blood is still coming, for the first time since it started it stained my sheets last night but I’ve wiped them down a little.

Sunday edit: the sheets are now in the wash.

Saturday edit: they did see me, I’m having an operation on monday at 9:30, the saga continues because I have to rush back to the gynaecologists first on monday to get a note so I can be operated on : as by the time I got out of hospital on friday the gynaecologists surgery was closed and nothing is open on the weekends.

And on the anaesthetists form where it asked me who would be collecting me or looking after me for 24 hours after the procedure I stubbornly wrote noone. Though my mentor will be around as I swallowed my pride and asked her.

And, of course, I just expect more bullshit: that was my dads very astute advice:

“Expect more bullshit Felice.”

So then, yes I should speak German, yes I should of sorted my insurance, yes I’ve been irresponsible.

Saturday edit: I’ve been utterly irresponsible and disrespectful to the country I live in, I MUST learn German and make more of an effort to learn their culture, right now I’m truly an idiot abroad.

I might cancel all my jobs next week as well if I’m really sick, I might not be able to go to Krakow and watch Eartheater,

Saturday edit: All my jobs are cancelled, one of the days next week is my birthday, which I’d scheduled a double clean on so perhaps it’s not all bad.

But I’m not going to see Eartheater, if you’ve heard irisiri though ( LISTEN TO IT, I IMPLORE YOU, MORE THAN ONCE, on the first listen it’s quite harsh: https://alexdrewchin.bandcamp.com/releases) then you’ll immediately understand that not going to her show because I’m having my uterus forcibly wedged open and something cut out of it, is utterly appropriate, it’s like missing formula one because you got hit by a ferrari.

I hope I’ll be better by turin.

Saturday edit: very much.

I will still finish this project whatever happens.

Saturday edit: Now I have a week off it should help.

But I’m not 100% sure how I will make ends meet this month.

Saturday edit: Perhaps the polyp they cut out of me on monday is really an alien and I get paid hush money not to leak the story to the press.

I really miss the nhs, its a big soft Pugsy bear I just want to hug and hold and thank for everything it’s done for me over the years.

The german health system is an amalgamation of all these callous female receptionists, ignoring you and filing their niles whilst you just bleed out in front of them.

But still, I’m stubborn, its a test and i will overcome it whatever it is. I am not leaving berlin, I am standing taller, stronger and more powerful than before. I’ve experienced completely new angles and feelings this week, it’s been abhorrent but kind of sickly enjoyable as well. Life is always entertaining as it energetically throws its bounty of strangeness, cruelty and beauty (etc) at you.

It’s all good fun, even the dark days.

I’m going to try get a bit of shut eye now, might move my alarm back a little see if I can get 2 hours before i wake up to get a taxi.

Take care everyone, if you made it to the end then I guess thank you for reading as well, it’s a long fraught one this week eh?

#die teckniker #german healthcare #idiot abroad #self growth

[readfelice-blog]

moominland chronicles vierzehn: beau paris

I want to keep this short but we’ll see, there’s quite a lot I need to do today, reimagine a track that the moon made in a more innocent time in our lives, gently wash my clothes, hoover my floor, do yoga, it’s my first proper day off for a while and it’s lovely outside, but as always creativity beckons. ((evening edit: The track is a nightmare, I ended up having to lie down because I was in so much pain. I'll get there though.))

First off, musical accompaniments, these two were hearty companions on Friday night, quite diverse but I highly recommend either  or both, the Lotic album I’ve now listened to a few times and think its crept up my favourite albums of 2018, I’m still kicking myself a bit that I didn’t go see her at Monom when I had the chance, but she’ll play again I’m sure:

Lotic - Power

https://loticmusic.bandcamp.com/album/power

Julia Holter - Have you in my wilderness

https://juliaholter.bandcamp.com/album/have-you-in-my-wilderness

(wasn’t sure on first listen but actually it’s playful and unexpected in several places, you can hear a strong kate bush inflection but, don’t panic I’m not jumping back into copying again, we all have our influences)

I have had a very ugly stressful, painful week to be honest, firstly I went Paris Monday - Tuesday and it was disgusting. 

I was ill before I left and panicking, a big hot mess of red hair and itchy skin, sleepless nights anticipating all the things that are now unfolding and will be in the next few weeks, my pelvic floor in agony (ovaries/womb and bowels a jiggly unfriendly mess). 

Hang on, silence is lovely but I’m going to play something, ok, downloaded this at Orly waiting for my flight home and I’m treating myself to it now : https://www.discogs.com/Areski-Brigitte-Fontaine-Le-Bonheur/release/3873926 . 

So I wasn’t in the best way, lots of build up was being expressed in my body, as it always is, every time I get some large project in my teeth I get ill, alcohol has masked this on every occasion but now sober it's still happening, so it wasn’t just the booze after all.

I boarded an ugly and surprisingly busy tram at 6am near my house, this was exchanged for a bleak bus connection to Tegel airport where I stood hunched over in what I thought was a chic Paris appropriate coat of blue wool I found behind a sofa outside Berghain in the summer. I got to Tegel, a miserable airport, and sat in the corner of a cafe in front of a bin writing in my diary for the first time in quite a few weeks. I boarded an Easyjet flight, sat in a feat of engineering / airborne tin can that shook from the wind, got off muddled through the airport and eventually after squinting at a ticket machine in the razor sharp sunlight managed to buy a ticket and get on another squalid bus which I exited before the main stop to jump on a train, which was delayed and stopped at every stop for 10 minutes, after sitting all squashed into myself in aforementioned coat which was becoming less and less comfortable at charles de gaulle-etoile for 20 minutes, watching my fellow travellers ashen faces lose more and more blood as they despairingly lost faith that they’d ever see the light of day again, I alighted and walked blearily into the day bound for the pompidou centre via Irkam where I was convinced I would find Sophie Calle.

I stuffed in a brie baguette under some rather kooky fountains outside Irkam, one featuring a mosaic clad mermaid shooting water from her nipples, then was siphoned into the musuem, having my bag checked and every step of the way being ushered and given the once over. There’s queues in Berlin but they’re for nightclubs mostly and they’re fun, they’re judgemental but they’re not suspicious and there’s always an element of chance bound in there, the Paris queues were untrusting and exist to funnel humans into thoughtless channels, this is true on the metro also where there isn’t just barriers but doors at the gates you have to push through as well, I hope this never comes to the city I live in, in Berlin there are no barriers at all, its glorious. And somehow everyone still manages to buy a ticket.

Pompidou was amazing, the gem in my trip to Paris, all glass vistas on to the city and unusual travails through its expansive rooms up and down escalators which lift you into the sky, closer to the pearly gates. There was no Sophie Calle, fittingly it was Mike Kelley I found at Pomidou, frenetic and dizzying strands of documentation, ugly paintings and projections that jittered over the assembled pieces, it was perfect for that trip.

Then my air bnb, which was a very uncomfortable sofa bed in a rather underwhelming and unattractive living room, hosted by a comedian who was disappointed when I refused his weed and his wine, it took me longer than it should to have got up to him as my phone died outside his house, then the asian supermarket refused my request to plug in my charger, but the opticians across the road were more than kind when they said yes. I navigated myself back to the flat past the wiry men that harrassed me for lighters and had the glint in their eye meant for confused female tourists.

I went to the gig I went there for, it was a barrage of nauseating dystopian animation, hanging pop horror skulls and overbearing sound which obliterated all the tonality of the music being performed, I’ve stood through some pretty intense sets in my time and have no issue with something being unpleasant, but sandwiched between two middle aged men, one who kept stealing glances at me whilst the music played, with my eardrums bleeding I got up before it ended and didn’t return to my seat, instead choosing to watch from the sidelines with earplugs firmly stuffed in my ears.

Then an awful freezing nights sleep at my air bnb, handed a few measly sheets rather than proper bedding, with wretched unflinching pain in my neck forged from all the other bodies that had mangled the springs underneath me I woke up early enough to avoid my host, washed my body in his depressing bathroom and left to go to Montmarte to find Amelie.

By then I was really suffering in my coat but to stubborn to remove it I let it sting the back of my head with its hard woolen collar and push down on my tired shoulders. I got to under the sacre coeur and just sat there, with a big bottle of water and pain killers, looking out over the city in a sort of half dazed trance, this was after being cursed by a beggar witch who aggressively asked me for change on my walk over and being put off entering the cafe I was walking towards by a comical frenchman that accidently turned the sign to closed (I could hear him shout after me that it was open but by then I was taking any hint to avoid potentially bad new experiences).

I left the hill and on my way down was trapped by an african shaman, who, after beguiling me and weaving some tatty bracelet around my wrist tried to extort 20 euros from me, i got angry and eventually managed to retrieve 15 of the note I stupidly gave to him, though that bracelet was promptly cut off my wrist, there was no wish wrapped in it, just the symbolism of being bullied on the street. After I got away from him I bought a crepe at a cafe I wasn’t allowed to sit at, stuffed it in on my way to find the idea croissant I’d planned to eat and then sat for a while again, al fresco, at a very parisien cafe sipping a lovely green tea and sort of just letting my body relax.

The trip turned a bit after this, I got my croissant, I sat in a stupor watching tourists take photos of themselves under the arc d'triomphe, stood dutifully in line at the theme park like macdonalds on champs elysees for the toilet and hurried home, my last beverage in paris being bought in a dingy cafe where the male staff desperately tried to get me to sit in a smoky pocket amongst weathered tobacco stinking men, though I didn’t, I sat opposite the dog club and watched poodle puppies cause ruckus in the window.

Orly was very nice, my trip home was long and delayed but when I eventually fell into my bed at 10pm on Tuesday it was like heaven.

The coat got put outside, I couldn’t even look at it anymore.

Then back in Berlin, I, by necessity of no holiday pay, went into cleaning robot mode and over the course of 3 days cleaned for nearly 21 hours, cleaning my own house for a visitor around cleaning others houses. I also manically designed a web page, edited photo’s, worked out the premise and tidied the details of my new cleaning venture.  

Cleaning, cleaning, cleaning.

Alongside the barrage of bathrooms, kitchens and wooden floors I was dutifully making pretty my body was getting more and more bloated and painful, dousing it with medication and slow breathing I just plodded on blinking, pushing up the hill.

Then on Friday, a little delayed on my clean I went and photocopied 33 leaflets, bought clear film wrapping, hummed and haa’d over ribbons and gemstones and after I got back from the big light filled room I was dusting down I worked for 9 hours, hunched over, individually hand painting, sticking and wrapping the leaflets, making them into cake like objects to pass out on Saturday > yesterday. By 3am my neck was a nightmare and I hobbled to my bed and heavily flopped over, totally unable to take in my achievement.

I woke up yesterday, still in pain, showered and put ribbons in my trainers, decided on my sea shelled gucci shirt over my white lace jumper, sprayed the last of my perfume on and then carefully packed up my little cake leaflets and took them out on to the streets of Berlin. There I approached chic looking women and experienced an even split of rejection alongside thank you’s for my little parcels. Quite a few women wouldn’t even take them, which surprised me. It was humiliating, approaching strangers and trying to give them this little thing I’d worked so hard on, humiliating but also joyful at times, certainly educational.

I ended my day in Ka De Wa, a faux art deco shrine to the wealth of the city, pawing fur coats that I’ll never be able to afford, watching hard nosed socialites and excited tourists brush past each other, I was going to leave one or two there but there was nowhere to leave my little parcels so I tucked my tail between my legs, bought some food and went home, with many still left that I need to distribute in the coming weeks.

Hellish, non?

But you know what throughout the pushing and the bloating and the stinging pain I never felt hopeless, when I got into bed last night I fell asleep so deeply and peacefully, wrapped up in my duvet, grateful for this little yellow house and totally uninterrupted by worry or anxiety of any kind.

It struck me then and it struck me when I woke up and stretched out in my bed lavishly and it strikes me now as I sit here at my laptop, that the stress, the suffering, the illness, they’re not necessarily such an awful thing. By now you might have gauged that Alan Watts has become a bit of a guiding light on this current chapter or self growth, but I’m going to diverge from him and probably the majority of spiritual teachers, contemporary and historical and say, the stress, the pain, the times of pushing against your health and your desire to just lie down, are actually useful and invited, at least for me. I kind of love the suffering, it's a nice change from carefully looking after yourself and being joyful and diaphanous. 

There’s the sunlight, the flowers and the tree’s, beauty and kindness and ribbons and ice cream.

But once in a while its good to go through moments of being in badly lit rooms stuffing in stale sandwiches and scratching incessantly as you repeat mundane or dreary tasks, as long as they have a cause and this isn’t just something you have to do eternally, I’m not saying that being sisyphus is good, there has to be a top of the hill so you can rest that boulder and take in what’s below.  

I’m so fervently working towards a better life, trying to upend and change my conditions, I want to deserve it when it eventually comes and so to be suffering now feels correct, necessary, its ok by me. 

I’m still not finished and even when early November comes round and I can close the chapter on this heady burst of creation it will not be over because I’ll be tirelessly practising to bring what I make to a stage. And even once that’s done this pattern of weeks spent making myself ill through work and desire will never go away, it will be the way of my life, I’m sure. 

And I like that, because right now with the fresh autumnal sun lighting up my bedroom, about to start on a little yoga and another day of making I feel relieved, insatiably happy in fact. I’ve drained all the stress away and removed the cobwebs for now, it’s wonderful. Though I’m still ill I am 100% alive, I know this because the pain balances out the ecstasy.

It wasn’t short was it?

Haha.

Enjoy your Sunday my mostly invisible audience, may the moon rainbows be with you.

Oh, by the way, paris might have been gross this time around but actually Parisians in general, the crowd at the gig, all the people i talked to who weren’t sexually aggressive men, were really really lovely. There’s a big soft French heart at the beating centre of the city and I’m sure I’ll return and have a wonderful time one day in the near (ish) future. 

#paris #lotic #amelie #sophie calle #ka de wa #mike kelley #workaholic #self growth #pain #suffering

[readfelice-blog]

moominland chronicles dreizehn :: copycat

Its Friday, im on an u bahn, but it's sunday for you and who knows where you are..

There's a lot of babies on this u bahn, im counting about 6 right now, baby bahn: maybe there's some baby convention in wedding.

Quick round up: i'm still a girl from hackney (via suffolk) who says no, I've been grappling with my camel toe this week, singing sad songs, playing like a child on a xylophone (except insert midi on ableton here), not listening to much other than myself, it's a big gushing flow of creativity that surrounds me in this little yellow house, i dont think ive really given pause to being lonely.

It's all happening.

So lets back track a bit because right now i am compelled to readdress this copying thing, one of my favourite tweeters this week called out kanye west for lifting a design he created some years back, its right to name and shame, so good on him. He was small fry when he made the thing that someone else stole, still bigger than teeny weeny me, but not the tweeting guru /design wizard to music's brightest stars, that he is now.

It’s the most wholesome wonderful, transcendent thing, making stuff, for yourself and for the world, tapping into certain disciplines to funnel thoughts, feelings and the energy that surrounds you. I wouldn’t have myself any other way, I’m assuming aforementioned tweeter is probably the same. But there is this underlying paranoia and anxiety involved in the process, for me anyway, as previously stated: this irrational fear that you’ll be consumed by someone hungrier and at a higher advantage. I hate the deep ocean now, post mermaid project, but this whole conundrum draws me back to that place, to marine snow, a concoction of dead animals / shit / ‘organic matter’ that continuously falls and sustains the ungodly freaks that live below it. That’s the natural world, that’s life.

You see I have really good ideas, there's no shame in knowing this, I can tell when theyre good because I start to tingle in my mind and then the tingling soniferously journeys across my body, its a drug of its own kind. But that high is short lived, its only when you make it a reality that the truly ecstatic pulses start to shoot through you, and to get that done frequently means a drawn out and meticulous process of invention.

I can see the influence i bestow on others, it used to be exciting and life affirming, but then things started taking longer to compose and thats when it became more of a burden, I’m not yet at a point where im synonymous with my work, there's still room for someone to rock into my life, unwittingly lift all my influences, cobble together a creative endeavour that feeds off of mine and then get recognised for it. Thereby i become the one shadowing them and then I fade into the ether, because no one wants the leftovers.

But it has dawned on me that this bleak and resolute ending to my artistic life might not have to be the catastrophe it so viciously insinuates itself to be. Maybe I can premier a facet of an idea earlier, maybe it will mean others might follow, though I bloody hope they won’t, but maybe it won’t mean that when in November Bocem Acht Ocho is ready for the world, it will not be swept aside by waves of mimickers, maybe I’m being a bit to paranoid and just need to calm down. I can’t just give birth to and store up all these big plans in this little house and not let them free. This little yellow house will become a zoo, I’m not a trained zookeeper, it’s just not sensible.

When one idea is set free another grows.. I have had more than one good idea since birth, some of them have not been properly attended to, that film i made in the basement is currently languishing on a hard drive stowed away in the moons cupboard in london  /  there's the gorgeously detailed illustrations of wild shows that have never seen the light of day / i have a bric a brac shop of concepts just stewing away in my brain cupboard. It took darren aronofsky nearly 10 years to get black swan made, the sagrada familia is still being built 136 years after it was started, Brahms first symphony took over 20 years to create, there's still time.

Because its not just the idea, its my mind that is the precious entity in this scenario, which these days in Berlin is totally free and unrestrained by societal norms. I’m allowed to be a weirdo now, because nearly everyone else is as well.

And you know what, I am almost certainly derivative myself, because we live in a time where the anals of what has come before us are vast and spread thickly like butter on warm bread: across the channels of information we spend a large portion of our days on. I’m copying other people, inadvertently, I call it signs rather than the c word, but I’ve stood with myself in my little yellow bathroom this week gazing at my reflection and leafed through aspects of my current state that might be borrowed, polished and given light in a different way > there are several. Though i work intuitively our unconscious is a vast web of entertained moments we draw from, even to the point where i dont realise I've previously ingested something because I wasnt paying it full attention at the time, but it got stored anyway.

So this project has a dual aspect, because the way im delivering it is going to correlate with a technique I’m also using to upend how im being treated as a cleaner. This incorporates actively marrying all the strands in my life together: to find a better path in terms of reimbursement and security. As technically I’m still an impoverished cleaner, i need money; so I’m doing the cleaning rerouting before I release my publication and album.

I just have to do it, let it free , and recline and say to myself, fuck it, the power at the heart of what I’m making lies in its authenticity, in the quality of the delivery and content of the delivered objects. If someone else copies me and both of us manage to lift ourselves out of the cycle of servitude, maybe that's not such a bad thing.

It's the circle of life, it's something I’ll probably be jousting with for the rest of my days, so better get used to it I guess.

Big Fish

Little Fish

Cardboard Box

Righty, off to clean a house full of paintings now, then laugh at myself on ableton, best to keep it light and bright. Don't take things to seriously.

Righty part zwei, I’m editing this on Sunday, I’m flying to Paris tomorrow morning, but laughing at myself on ableton still beckons.

Big Fish

Little Fish

Cardboard Box

#self growth #copying #little fish

[readfelice-blog]

moominland chronicles zwölf :: no more no poo

It’s not late today, I’m actually up fresh and early on a cold and clear Sunday morning, just listening to the new Aphex Twin EP ((Collapse)) (no bandcamp though, it’s warp, so here’s the best link: https://warp.net/news/aphex-twin-collapse-ep-out-now/ ) I’m playing it through my little blue bose mini, I got sick of hearing everything on my laptop speakers, its, hang on, it’s very hard to concentrate when listening to Aphex I’ve never heard before actually, I think I’ll change to Mary Lattimore (https://marylattimoreharpist.bandcamp.com ) or some calypso and leave this for later…

Very weird :slash: perfect, just wandered onto Bandcamp and they have a feature on Calypso on their home page, so rather than Robert Mitchum’s palatable western reincarnation of this musical style I’m going to listen to the genuine thing. Here’s the link, have a look yourself: https://daily.bandcamp.com/2018/09/14/calypso-classics-list/

Gosh I love that about life, little serendipitous moments that guide you along, there is serendipity on the internet to.

Ok, back to whatever I’m babbling about today.

I’m torn this morning as I sit in front of my laptop, do I talk about accepting my femininity? Do I talk about Hackney? Do I talk about saying no? Or do I talk about being an apothecary? Let’s go with the latter, it’s a nice tie in with last week and all the witching biz and Shakespeare quote. I will still be a feminine girl from Hackney that says no in 7 days time.

When I first met one of my Berlin mentors it was a typically unusual affair, I rolled up to the glass fronted roastery in Kreuzberg and discovered that our hair was not just similar, it was in fact identical, if you know me then you know that’s an extremely rare occurrence. I then proceeded to sit on a table by accident which collapsed, she laughed and I guess it was an icebreaker. She was wearing a gold necklace, some symbol I didn’t recognise, it sat proudly around her neck and as we wove our way around art and life it was hard not to notice that me and this woman both came from the same shimmering forest kingdom, two creatures chipped out of rose quartz meeting for the first time on the heat lashed streets of Berlin.

This meeting was supposed to be an interview by the way, it was my introduction into the sun.

What’s this got to do with being an apothecary Felice?

Well, on our verbal travails we of course touched on the subject of our hair, I can’t really remember what condition mine was in then; but her’s was defined, luscious and plump. She told me she had gone no plastic for several months and during this period had started to make her own beauty products.

“But doesn’t your hair get dirty?” I asked bewildered.  

“I just wash it with bicarbonate of soda when its dirty.” She responded

And so began my curiosity in mixing up your own broths for all sorts of things, the chrome browser on my iphone suddenly became riddled with a myriad of womens battle cry, imploring me to try the no poo method, it makes your hair shinier! More luscious! You won’t recognise it! But first of all you have to go through 3 months of shit hair, before it magically recombines itself, as if it were a pokemon that would evolve, my jigglypuff hair could become wigglytuff hair, it just needed exposure to the great moonstone that is bicarbonate of soda.

Now months have followed this, in those months I have become a much more whole person, part of my time has been spent though not throwing clear jar’s away so I could store all sorts of unsavoury botched mixes within them.

First off, when I was ready, I took myself to the middle class mecca that is LPG Biomarkt on Kollwitzstrasse, for the first time,  a wonderland of exorbitantly expensive tempeh, alkolholfrei bier, modest vegetables in wicker baskets and a rather large section dedicated to organic beauty products. I hummed and haa’d over coconut oil, (do I get the liter of cooking oil that costs half the price of the one next to the face creams? - I did) shea butter, wild honey (what is wild honey? Is this 4euro jar in my hand wild or not?), I touched and explored the scents of essential oils for the first time, nothing seemed good, but I love that rose argan pflegebalsam that cost 15euro I bought a week ago, let’s say I’m a rose girl.

Now I know to much rose scent makes me feel queasy: perhaps because I’m made from rose quartz, like asterix I can’t drink the potion.

Then there was the matter of soap, the eternal hunt for pure castile soap, I know I can buy it on amazon but I am stubbornly determined to find it in Berlin, alas LPG was not its keeper, so after nervously asking the shop assistant several times I settled on some pure soap bar instead, then I bundled up all my belongings and returned home.

Pure castile soap is already liquid, a soap bar is fat, so when I carefully spread my plunderings out across my work surface and started hacking at the soap it dawned on me that my body wash was going to be a little different, I spent a stupid amount of time melting it, putting it in a little food processor, returning it to the pan, in the end it smelt weird and didn’t look right, but stubbornly I poured it into what used to be a gherkin jar, let it cool, then screwed the lid back on and placed it in my bathroom, officially an apothecary now.

And I used it until it was finished, which took a while, always curling my nose up a little when I opened the lid, having to buy a loofah to spread it over as it wasn’t something I could casually lather myself up in. I’d also made some strange yellow goo out of beeswax and oil which felt waxy and also didn’t smell quite right, this was my body butter, to go with my body wash.

Time moved on, the cleaning job was awful then fantastic, then transcendent, I’d wash my tired sweaty body with this lotions and potions, never settling on quite the right smell but also adamant that there was nothing for me in DM (DM is the superdrug of Germany, but better, for anyone not familiar with German proprietors and confused by this reference) and I’d get this medley right in time, its a process, I get my art right with a little work, I can get this right to, Rome wasn’t built in a day.

Whilst this was all going on my hair was getting tattier and tattier, wiry, distressed, flat on top and scatty at the ends, but again, this is the interning I must do so one morning I wake up to gleaming locks, so full of body and rich in colour that others will fall back in admiration wherever I go.

Several saturdays were spent mixing up bicarb and water, scooping it into my hair and scrunching up my face because the salty mixture stung my eyes.

You can also make your own home cleaning products, did you know? Well apparently you can, vinegar, bicarbonate of soda and that elusive liquid soap, just spread it all over everything you own and hey presto, your house will look like it’s never been used.

So then I started to make really horrid mixtures to take to other people's houses, this was the beginning of the end really. For a week my poor clients were subjected to all sorts of strange concoctions and smells, yes it works, but the thing is its not some kind of miracle brew that you are making, its just odd smelling gunge that’ll make things shiny. And nothing, absolutely nothing, will mellow out the smell of vinegar, there is no essential oil on this fair planet of ours that can tackle the sickly nausea inducing fumes that enter your nasal passage when you spray vinegar all over everything, so I was in Wedding in a bathroom feeling like some kind of pioneer pretending that it wasn’t disgusting being bombarded with vinegar molecules left right and centre.

Vinegar makes your hair shiny, let’s try that then.

Then the bear enters my life again, because I invite him back in, because I miss his body and his mind and because I think I can balance him in my life now, there’s so much going on he won’t be the focal point anymore. He comes in, we lose ourselves together in the folds of passion and lie prostrate on my bed in the golden rays of late afternoon sun sinuously entering my little yellow bedroom, curled up together like lions.

Before he goes he remarks on my hair, like he always does, I make some comment about how the vinegar isn’t working and he smells it and agrees that it smells strange. The aroma of my hair has been an ongoing thing with the bear since we first met, it was also with the moon as well, as I use coconut oil and that tends to make its bouquet….. organic.

Actually vinegar made my hair sticky.

And that was the last nail in the coffin, officially, it had been dawning on me since one of my favourite clients looked a bit alarmed at the little tupperware box I pulled out of my bag, that perhaps it’s ok to use things other people have made.

You see the thing is, there are companies, good ethical companies, that have grown and been developed because they have a passion for what they do, because they have the time and resources to invest in developing something, they are the apothecaries.

I’m an artist / musician / cleaner, between these things I don’t really have time to brew strange things in my kitchen and then obstinately use them. Sodasun makes a gorgeously scented orange alles reiniger, frosch has a anti kalk spray which transports you to childhood: to a local newsagents where you’re tenderly picking rasberry sweets up and depositing them in a little paper bag, there’s a delicious verbena soap at bio company that I can’t stop inhaling. I think I’m ok with putting my trust in someone else to do these things for me, in fact I think that’s healthy, I make my thing, they make theirs and we exchange, because I don’t have all the time in the universe, I’m not a chef, I’m not a barista, I’m not a tinker, tailor, soldier or spy. I can customise and arrange and enjoy, but I don’t have to exercise total control over everything that comes in and out of my house from now on.

Though 3 stripes, leaping cats and big ticks are not things I need either, I can just put ribbons in my trainers myself and I don’t need 10 products that essentially do the job of soap and oil.

So I went and bought shampoo and conditioner after I met with my mentor, at that same roastery in Kreuzberg, this time we met to discuss the future of my cleaning, I needed her advice and support and she gave it to me, she has given me the wings I need and unlike Icarus, life has taught me what happens when you fly to close to the sun.

Right o, today I’m going to make some techno, have a stretch and clean my washing machine, its going to be a sublime carefree day of rest and creativity.

(Oh, by the way, I switched to Mary Lattimore in the end, spending time with an adept harpist whilst I write this has been lovely.)

#no poo #exchange #self growth #self care #felice zhukov

[readfelice-blog]

moominland chronicles elf . its not you, its me.

Double, double toil and trouble; Fire burn and caldron bubble. Fillet of a fenny snake, In the caldron boil and bake; Eye of newt and toe of frog, Wool of bat and tongue of dog, Adder's fork and blind-worm's sting, Lizard's leg and howlet's wing, For a charm of powerful trouble, Like a hell-broth boil and bubble. Double, double toil and trouble; Fire burn and caldron bubble. Cool it with a baboon's blood, Then the charm is firm and good.

It's late today, well i mean there is no set time, but im slow, on this gorgeous early autumnal sunday, i dozed till 15h, getting up intermittently to empty my washing machine, tug at my hair (vinegar makes it sticky? I'm trying to find the perfect all natural solution to shampoo because I’m no poo now : https://www.nopoomethod.com , in fact i’m practising a very loose version of alchemy in my house, trying to find drinks that energise but don't make me anxious, cleaning solutions for my body and for my house that bewitch the nostrils and incinerate grease / kalk. Essentially I’m just concocting weird stuff, hunched over materials collected around the city, boiling my hell broths in ikea pans, surrounded by recycled jars).....

Lets press on…...

Yes, my morning, my intro to the day, I was up so late because I was up last night so late, till 4am, painting and listening to sweet feminine soundwaves in my kitchen, getting it done in my way, step by step. Because now I’m working a 5 day week again, my days are 3 hours long, 5 at a push, 6 in the most extreme cases, so now I’m back to burrowing out time where i can find it, because now i have my teeth dug in to a big project, a big project that will be realized, for the first time since may May last year.

May last year:

I killed myself, artistically, me artistically is the majority of me.

My whole life has been sewn into my practise, my method, my way of understanding and redistributing everything that comes into my life, and May last year I moved out of the house I shared with my ex husband , moon, and into a shared flat, to embark on a restorative journey. Me and moon were not doing well in our little cramped caravan, we were at each other's throats incessantly, already broken up, him with a new partner, me in full swing of frantic madness, fuelled by bottomless bottles of booze.

Day in day out in my studio, I slowly turned my 450sq ft basement into a mermaids cave, drunk on 8% cider, night after night, sticking black bin liners to the walls with double sided tape, hanging spirals of bubblewave to the ceiling, spray painting floor tiles, screaming at the camera on my iphone half naked, making terrifying life size dolls and cry singing to myself, emphatically paranoid and fractured, writing letters to a man I’d never met who I thought could save me. It was my last great project, I created a film I can never show my parents and documented myself throwing my life away, in my wedding dress, shadowed by the virgin: a wreckage, a car crash, a lot of footage I haven’t been able to edit because I haven’t got the equipment to do so.

It's all stored on a clunky hard drive bundled up with the moon, he saved it for me, without him I would of lost it because my laptop, his laptop, broke in the middle of me editing it and since then its been untouched. I’m afraid the hours of video that follow me dancing around everything i’d ever owned up until that point, rigorously chucking it all in more black bin liners. When I can find a place to edit everything and the capacity in my mind, then I can piece it back together and show it to the world.

Since May last year, I have totally uprooted my life, moved out of London, had a very strange, sometimes beautiful, sometimes harrowing time with my family in Devon, rolled through Turin, Cork, Helsinki, chasing the man I’ve never met, blocking the man I’ve never met at the behest of my friend in Cork, defending and understanding my art more deeply in Helsinki, and finding Tove Jansson. Her bronze bust on the door of the studio she used to hold, her gorgeous expanding black and white prints in the mumin cafe that towered in the sky under artificial light, her room in the museum of Modern Art, her soul in the botanical gardens amongst the families having lunch together.

It's been a glorious invigorating illuminating intrepid journey (I’ve been writing a hip hop song recently, can you tell?) but its not been anything monumental in terms of creation and since May last year is the longest time I have gone without a major project in my life, for possibly my entire adult life, bar being at uni, where conversely I was more orientated towards squat parties than art making.

So here I sit now, with a great big juicy exciting idea inflated in a giant balloon, ready to be released into the atmosphere, the only snag is that it needs to be manifested into real material, which means a lot of work, and so, I find myself back in a place I’d forgotten about.

That's the very good thing about having such a long break, is now I can totally observe what happens to me when I’m in this phase: it’s quite extreme from a fledgling perspective.

Not fueled by booze this time, but instead concocting things to give me a buzz that I can buy in the supermarket (don’t drink to much valerian, it gives you a bad tummy, im not drowsy or euphoric I just feel sick from the after affects and rancid smell) and developing my cleaning routine to be the most streamlined and creative that it can be, to give my art sustenance.

But if I could I would lock myself away from the world in a cabin far up on a mountain and painfully draw out everything in a more concentrated form, the cleaning is fine for now but it's hard to concentrate when I have to go to peoples houses and deal with their kalk as well, it might be one of the factors in why the whole thing is so stressful, but I have the suspicion that it will always be stressful, even if I ever get the luxury to entirely dedicate my day to working on my art.

The big thing I’m noticing is incessant, almost intolerable paranoia, that someone will steal my idea and present it to the world before I’m done. I notice it now and then I turn and look at my past and see its infected traces throughout my history, it's a big driving force in getting the work finished and I’m starting to see that I cannot share or talk about what I’m doing when I’m in the midst of it, but all i want to do is share and talk about it, hence why that cabin would be a better place than a city I’m not fully established in.

I know it’s unreasonable, untrusting, maybe even unkind of me, to believe that someone would steal something like this from me. I know that sharing ideas is healthy and loving and makes the world go round, but this paranoia is totally immovable and so I just accept it and try to satiate it, hoping by feeding it homemade remedies that it won’t make my life worse.

But these big idea’s, they come upon me, I don’t choose them, all the strands of my life and experimentation ferment slowly and then one day I wake up and I know what I have to do, then as I start to do it it grows and morphs, develops, things come and go from my wall, until I have reduced and finelined the parameters of a project, that's where I am now, all the mental groundwork is laid, its just the creation that's left, I’m now half way through the musical aspect of it but not halfway through the visual and I need to amp up, because it must be done by November the second, so I can take it to Turin with me, so I can deposit it at the gates of hell, so I can complete a cycle, so I can be free to make blue music and who knows what, maybe try something formless, kind and organic - that's not for me to know yet though.

Once it rears its great dense head, I am in its power, I am in the throng of obeying my art and that's a lonely place to be. It's lonely being an artist, some of us are collaborative and collective and have communities, but I’m not among those right now, this project, lets just call it by its name for here in : восем acht ocho : is not something I can share and make with others, it is a process of me picking up the pieces of my life, of giving praise to the moon, who has saved me and supported me so many times. I must give praise to him finally so I can move on and give praise to myself.

So I sit in my house and dutifully work back and forth between paint and ableton, singing and faux performing in my hallway in between, performing to my very tolerant invisible neighbours that must think I’m some kind of banshee from a deep buried part of the world. I sit in my house alone, I reject all the invitations extended to me, I retract from the life I am building to some extent and just hope the friends I have been finding will be understanding, though it's hard to explain to someone that I can’t come because of something I am choosing to do myself. It's not work related in terms of my bread and butter, Its not health related, I’m not resting, I guess a lot of people won’t understand which is perhaps why I feel compelled to try and somehow explain myself in this blog today.

I must make this work, it is not a choice, I am in my house alone because this idea has bound me up and demands my care and attention, because for the first time in over a year I can make work again and make it with diligence, create something on a large scale. It means that Berlin is working, this is the change I was looking for, because I feel like I have a future again, whilst the 100’s of drawings, paintings, books, trinkets from my life decay in some junk yard close to London, I have the space to bring new art into the world. It’s really a glorious turning point in my life so far.

I am still terrified that it will all collapse in on me at any time, but there are ways of fighting this paranoia, careful planning, creative problem solving, and probably just not talking about the details of what I am doing anymore until it is finished.

Phew, nothing enlightening this week, more of an attempt to bridge the gap between myself and the life that flows around me. I’m now off to edit my most current track on ableton then do some line work and probably make up some mixes of citric acid / bicarbonate of soda cleaner for the week ahead.

We just have to do what we must, and be grateful when we know what it is we must do.

#big ideas #realisation #self growth

[readfelice-blog]

moominland chronicles zehn SOPHIE the plastic fantastic

For those who do not know any of the below names here’s a few albums that’ll help:

Eartheater - Irisiri

https://alexdrewchin.bandcamp.com/album/irisiri

Lucrecia Dalt - Anticlines

https://lucreciadalt.bandcamp.com/album/anticlines

SOPHIE - Oil of every pearls un-insides

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AC8h4HnWyys

Shygirl - Cruel Practice

https://shygirl93.bandcamp.com/album/cruel-practice

I’m about 100 blinks from sleep but ideas are fermenting inside me so it’s time to write them down.

Another week has passed into the cabinet of spent time and as I lie here with my laptop, my plush pig and my jar of rosehip tea i turn over the experiences I've encountered. Strange lonely people with bedrooms dedicated to their cats, vast wood furnished homes that hark back to my childhood memories of perceived americana, candlelight and spells backlit by eartheaters transcendent irisisi.

And a lot, a lot a lot, of music, in sweaty dimly lit basements, in peeling rooms of creative enquiry, in packaged venues patrolled by security teams that outweigh the audience. This is where i pause, this was last night and it softly horrified me.

I go alone, nearly always, I am now part of a predominantly male group of people that are not searching out company when they enter a music venue, but instead some clue, some key, something to unlock an idea or an emotion or a technical curiosity about the artist they are seeing. I want to translate what I imbibe on my headphones into a shared space and let the creator of that sonic piece transport me to their world, the stage design and lighting is ulterior though not unconnected to the individual or band of people on stage. But what comes out of the speakers, the waves that glide invisibly into the room, how they move me, they are the treasure I embark on my quests to find.

So yesterday night was Friday night, the queue to Berghain was probably 2 or 3 hours long at its zenith, gorgeously bespoke a lined hipsters were waiting in droves patiently outside griessmuehle and the more discerning tourists stood swaying in line at Tresor: what I’m saying is there were a lot of people queuing and a lot of people dancing.

But as I ended off my night, at 3am, a conservative time here to go home, I left a nearly empty room.

A couple of weeks ago I went to a Crack open air event at Else, there I felt a great sense of togetherness and celebration amongst the crowd, thoroughly enjoying an Olaf Drejer DJ set and being tickled by Omar Souleyman and his legion of wonderful fans. So when Crack announced a night they were putting together at Festaal I bought a ticket promptly spurred on by the line up including SOPHIE and Shygirl.

SOPHIE in particular caught my eye as I have been listening to her newest LP ‘Oil of every pearls un-insides’ quite regularly, at first finding it grotesque and frustrating but then reforming my opinion during a clean in my favourite household, which affords me the opportunity to plug my phone into very capable speakers and let the music I usually just pour directly into myself churn around me and become diffused by the various objects in the room.

It is a curious thing, ‘Oil of every pearls un-insides’ it is roundly drawn out of the western/ global, zeitgeist, but, naively, I haven’t much looked in to how it was made, or why, just listened, with surprise and wonder at how it chops so quickly from sugary pop to mean fabricated pulses and heavy distortion. I had an inkling of SOPHIE, a vision of her as a songstress, a performer, so I was looking forward to seeing a solo female producer meld her vocals into a live electronic set, and her hair is like mine, which is a shallow reason to be attracted to something but made me feel a sense of sisterhood with her.

Queues, queues, queues, it’s the mainstay of Berlin nightlife, I have never queued as much as I have done here, I’m not sure if I’m just seeking the queues out now and they were always there in London, or if there are more queues here, but now I always expect one when I go to a night in a larger venue. So I left my sister witches house at 23.15h in a bit of a panic as the facebook event said get there early as entry was not guaranteed, there has been so much hype, publicity, surrounding SOPHIE that I felt like I might not get in at all, as I waited for a the S41 at Ostkreuz I speculated on a near future of me panting up to find that capacity was filled and then standing there, smoking a cigarette and waiting for an uber to sweep me back to my little yellow house. This was all carried through when I got to Arena and, like one of the drowsy late summer wasps that feature here at this time of year, confusedly bumped up and down the street cursing googlemaps until I found correct passage and rocketed through Kreuzberg (haven’t got that A-Z yet, it’s a process unlinking your i-phone, though I got to curious fox and today I’m using a bound thesaurus rather than an impermanent one).

There was a queue, but it was minor, I listened to the tired sounding fashionistas behind me surmise that this was a marketing trick of the promoters and exhibit surprise at there being any kind of queue at all before showing my qr code, getting stamped and being ushered on to have my bag generally ignored by the second of a three tier security system at the entrance. It was ugly, I realised this on my way there when I checked my ticket and thought properly for the first time about what I was going to and connected the dots of it being linked to a fashion fair run by Zalando in the neighbouring warehouse Arena. The crowd I was expecting were there, taking selfies at a small planted wedge of wall and lighting meant to recreate entrances to large public events, where celebrities duly stand and pout before press cameras. 80% of the audience were in crisp high street threads that looked newly bought, emblazoned with branding and preserved whites on their footware, not much a line black, it was a little London in fact, you couldn’t even smoke inside.

It was also a prison, I associate Festaal with their generous decked garden area and outside bar, but that was inaccessible, instead it was one large room, bar on the left, red booth seating on the right and then floorspace front of stage, occasionally interrupted by rectangular plinthes columns and hugged at the back by the audio technicians booth. Around the upper part of the room stretched out a mezzanine area, which was the backstage space I quickly found out when looking for the toilet, a hi rise for the elite to watch undisturbed by the plebs, I’m writing this with jealousy though, don’t misread that. And the decor was empty scrawled white graffiti words around an angular stage, it was theatrical in its vapidness and a very far cry from everything I’ve been to in the last few weeks, including the open air at Else, due probably in large part to it being connected to the Zalando shopping event. But still, SOPHIE, I was excited.

Skip through Octavian and the energised grime audience that I’ve missed since getting to Berlin, skip through the 5euro non alcoholic beer in a plastic cup, skip through being very angry with my expensive eco deodorant for being totally useless and resolving to not dance with my arms up any more that night. Slowly cruise past observing a back stager and his hangers on to my left, hanging on to whatever made him so attractive with all their might, entertaining and calculating him, all appeasement, hot booty and expensive suits. She takes a while to appear, there’s a shifting in the crowd, all the happy clappy grime lovers replaced by very young faux trendy people, and me apparently, oh and the fancy people from upstairs.

She appears dazedly, blinking out at the audience as if she doesn’t know where she is, as if someone has pushed her on stage, there’s a microphone which is promising: though worlds apart, I imagine she will probably manage herself amongst the synthesisers and performance, as Lucrecia Dalt did stunningly at Atonal. How wrong I am though. She looks like shes been cut out of a magazine, jutting cheekbones and an almost fleshless chest, in a pale pale teal co-ord and a perfected calmer, shorter version of my red tinged curls. She starts, its not live, it’s all pre-recorded, I’m not even sure if she’s actually mixing it or acting, I liked these songs when they didn’t have context but standing here watching her thoughtlessly put headphones on, pout, casually prod the knobs and levers before her, I find them frustrating, false, grotesque again. Its an hour long, not once does she even touch the microphone, I flick between being convinced she is so adept at mixing that it looks as if she is barely doing anything to being annoyed that I have paid 15euro to watch someone conduct a masquerade to an audience of tweens.   

It’s all artiface and roving strobes and dull dull people taking photos on their smartphones, it’s all so hollow, a surface timbre pushing it above the water, a kind of ringing crunching synthetic spectacle that dips into moments of brilliance but deported with laissez faire indifference. 20 Minutes before she is supposed to finish she strolls off stage with a simple wave to the crowd, but you see in her eyes that she knows she’s coming back, its part of the pantomime, a palatable reenactment of a real performance, no mess, no spillage, no mistakes.

I stand beestung for a minute or two after she exits, hanging next to my fancy neighbours and then buy a cola and have a smoke outside, where I have gleaned I can actually smoke.

I’m alone smoking, not trying to make friends, so I read, I read about SOPHIE because I realise that I know absolutely nothing about her, I’ve never read an article or a review or anything and now I know my perception of what she is is totally incorrect I wonder what she deems herself to be. I find this wonderful and detailed feature about her in Crack:

https://crackmagazine.net/article/long-reads/sophie-earthly-pleasures/

She’s very smart, clearly, and industrious, prolific, I should imagine very knowledgeable on programming music, I doubt she refers to her tutorial e-book on ableton 3 or 4 times a week to further her understanding of the software. I think I understand what she is doing, but I question now if I like it or not, if it sits right in me, there is certainly space in this world for the plastic arts, but its product is so unsatisfying, it’s a big mac. I am so driven by this desire to distill and catalogue truth in my work, its drawn from a genuine need to communicate with others what I cannot say in words, I can hear it in many of the artists I like, it might not be personal truth: it might be big idea’s they are pondering, it might be ideals they are encapsulating, it is always something full bodied woven in the frequencies they create.

SOPHIE is my i-phone, she’s what I’m striving against, she’s a sleek inorganic version of me, I am very happy I saw her and came into contact with something that challenged me rather than something I knew I would adore. We learn through being challenged and having our convictions brought into question.

And I still got to watch Shygirl, who was sheer lacey feminine beauty, who hooked me and pulled me down into a subterranean world of meshing drawls and bassy unkempt eruptions. That set was made for red lights, it was music brought back from a brothel in the underworld and though I relished the empty dance floor for giving me space to strut my stuff, it was a shame she wasn’t playing to the crowd she deserved, I guess the zalando crowd want plastic, not black velvet.

This music thing is quite the adventure, I never went to 4 exhibitions in one week, that would of been exhausting. Berlin is an oyster, but the pearl is real, not synthetic and though the shell is only just opening I’m starting to get a glimpse of the endowment nestled in the pink curves of its heart.   

#sophie #oil of every pearl's un-insides #crack magazine #festaal #female producer #music #performance #felice zhukov #shygirl #zalando

[readfelice-blog]

moominland chronicles neun : time to turn off the i- phone

So perhaps I should be abstract if I mention others but today I’m very literal because I want to pad something through, by typing in a public space.

There’s this little piece of plastic and metal that I carry round with me every day, which, whilst stretching out in bed this morning hugging my plush pig, I realised is another layer of stress that I have to unpeel from my life.

Yesterday morning it woke me up, not because of an alarm, but because I wanted to know what it had to say, who had replied to my messages? Who hadn’t? What did my emails say? Was there something vitally important on its little pulsating screen that I needed to consume?

It’s not easy living, neither is it particularly difficult when we strip away the excess and bloat: we all need the same things, love, shelter, nourishment. As complex structures of cells and gas though nothing is that simple, in the modern age and perhaps always you have to be resilient to what will come, life constantly catapults the unexpected at you. This week, on Wednesday, of course, there was a big explosion as another chaotically woven part of my life soared to its zenith, I am fascinated by disorder and by the unusual, I pursue and stroke things that more sensible people might shy away from, my feeling is that life is a gorgeous patchwork and to truly enjoy it you have to embrace the oddities, its fun. Of course after an explosion there is then a bomb site strewn with detritus and as I picked up the pieces, turning them over in my hand, watching parts glimmer and others dully ferment, new thoughts and ways of approaching issues in my life became apparent.

What do I do?

I read, I listen to music, I make music and I write, I draw, I eat, I dance, I like to watch people doing any of these things, especially making music, I walk around and I experience the sensations of all my senses, I love flowers and vanilla and blue pencils and velvet and lace, I’m beginning to embrace the femininity I have kept at bay for so long and as I delve deeper into the practise of making and constructing music I am starting to think about how I own things.

Because everything that I do can be translated into a digital format.

So back to this little device, which I’m examining as I write this, it’s sleek, almost innocuous, it sits in the palm of my hand, as I hold it I feel something strange come over me, a relief, it’s now perched next to me to the left, it’s in the line of my site and I know I’m aware of it as I type this. I’m always aware of it, I’m aware of it when I sleep as much as when I’m conscious, I know this because as I wake my first thoughts are with it. It rests above my head on a shelf as I slumber, its wires crisscrossing behind me.

I want to start mixing and DJing, it seems like a natural accompaniment to making music and I go to nightclub’s for DJ’s, the company and social aspects are an aside to the dancefloor and the skill of the person I’m listening to. (At Atonal I was blown away by Tutu https://www.residentadvisor.net/dj/tutu most recently) It’s one of the first reasons I became infatuated by Nicolas Jaar, and I think with enough preparation and practise it is something that will become part of my life. But I don’t own any music, when the bear was here some time passed he was surprised by my setup and by my sparse itunes library, I played things off Google Play because my brother has a family account that we all share, but its impermanent, I cannot and do not want to mix low quality tracks ripped from youtube and I you can’t DJ off Google Play, in fact it’s a horrid thought.

It’s all just stored on a cloud this little device has access to, and I have access to it for a fee, I have not held music that I own in my hands for years.

I read, I love books, I love words, you can probably tell, and again it’s a world that lately has ballooned and gathered resonance in my life. But when I moved here with just my adidas bag and a tote containing my plush pig, there wasn’t much room for books and now on my shelf there just sits michel de montaigne: how we weep and laugh at the same thing (which I haven’t read but I brought with me, was compelled to do so), the new testament and the book of mormon (both found) and I love Dick: Chris Krauss (which was leant by a friend and I have just brushed due to its proximity to my life in terms of narrative).

So I don’t really own any books, I found this app called scib’d, what initially I thought was a magical thing because it suddenly meant I could download and read all the books I wanted, thousands upon thousands of juicy new titles I could amass on my little device and scroll through. In the first month of having it I sang its praises to everyone that crossed my path, now though the free trial has ended and most of the titles I have are half finished at best.

There is something so satisfying about watching a book become worn, about closing it when you finish the last chapter and returning it to your shelf.

My next point is a bit of an arc: I don’t have the network of friends I had in London, though this is now starting to happen it’s taken time and care, but for a few months I was alone in my little yellow house, this device, it was the gateway to everyone I’ve ever met and also all those I’ve never seen before.

I’m now actively stopping myself from touching it, its moved slightly but its still to my left now even more in my line of sight, just bear with me I need to put it somewhere I can’t see.

So yes, twitter became a compulsion and whats app became a disease, this is where the moon and I are connected, banded together, I text him my every thought, my every whim and get a response almost immediately, nearly all of the time. I am never alone, I can go on my emails, my facebook app, my twitter feed, my whats app, my messenger, my telegram, even just plain old messages and I can type and send whatever comes into my head. I can collect everyone I meet and keep them on a bank of people stored beneath a little f icon enshrined in periwinkle blue.

But somehow I am still alone.

I moved to a new city, I don’t know the streets as well, I don’t know the transport system, I don’t own a map. But I am a cyan dot skirting around the city when I turn on Google Maps, and my route is suddenly prescribed for me, I still don’t have an idea of the u-bahn or s-bahn plan in my mind, it is constantly a surprise when I step on a train as to where I need to get off, and I don’t look up to check, I look down at my cyan dot moving on the screen, at the list of stations I can neatly tick off as they hurtle past.

I think I’ve made my point here and I think you’re probably all with me.

There is this giant store of things, this gargantuan library that we have but we don’t own, all this tat. It feels in a city brimming with new age hippies and alternative thinkers, now is the time to de-link from this data storm, because there is a deeper relief in having less, in accounting for everything that is in my pockets and my bag, A-Z’s aren’t that big, CD players aren’t that expensive, there’s an english bookshop in Neukolln called curious fox that I’ve been wanting to visit for some week’s now, I’ve barely ever stepped foot in a record shop and I’m getting better at picking up the phone when someone calls.

I can plan small things like where I need to go before I leave the house, I have the time to spend a few more minutes deciphering German from a phrase book, I have the luxury of being able to invest more in what I do.

And I can still go on the internet on my laptop, which is a far more focused and in depth way of siphoning through the information I find. I won’t stop keeping these hives (soundcloud go, all the social media, blah blah), but they will be more like a locked safe in my house, rather than a portable anxiety inducing reminder of the superabundance I will never be able to entirely wade through. I will allow serendipity and chance to permeate my life with open arms, even now that Michel de Montaigne book is starting to vibrate in my mind, as I realise its title suggests it correlates with my growing interest in absurdity and humour being integrated with honest intellectual and spiritual enquiry.

Coming with nothing has really helped me evaluate what is truly important, this medicine that I have given myself, it doesn’t work straight away, it’s slowly released through the veins, it gently presses and stimulates my synapses.

Happy Sunday, I’m off to make some tea and continue to dissect and reproduce Gravel Pit, I’ll probably prance around my corridor and sing loudly for 45 minutes or so as well, thank goodness I have understanding neighbours!  

#iphone #enlightenment #personal growth

[readfelice-blog]

moominland chronicles 08 opening a door

There is no winning blog

Im blogging about my life, I’m opening a big door with blinkered eyes, maybe I’m just removing a silky blue embroidered eye mask with gold trim lashes like holly golightly as I drift to turn the knob, but there are other people in the room with me that I invite you into. Until this week I didn't solidly face the fact that this information affects the slew of characters that waddle across my stage, not just me.

Someone I have formerly mentioned was subject to bullying (my perception of the story they told me:: not their words, DISCLAIMER) because of information I exposed about them. So what was in essence a little aside in a larger lattice of symbols had a cause and effect, it travelled into the world, this fabric of letters leaves me, I feel like its just in my head but it’s not because I am typing right now. And apparently I have an audience, hello you.

There's this dynamic, in creating digital content that has no solid form, it feels like an illusory action, so much of what I do exists only in a version you meet on a screen, but this screen can be wriggled into from nearly any point in the pockets of civilisation on this planet. That’s a comforting thought to me, in order to preserve the link to my home I feel like I want it to be accessible to the masses on the internet, to everyone I don't know. There’s a kind of urgency behind this to, I feel like it's impermanent, it could disappear in a hot flash, destroyed by a solar flare or lost in a heavily policed internet dystopia.

But let's not talk about dystopia now, I feel like I'm seeing a lot of experimental utopias in Berlin, proto-types that have fought off gentrification and re claimed land. (read this for a little more insight : https://www.theguardian.com/cities/2017/apr/30/berlin-clubbers-urban-village-holzmarkt-party-city ) Shamanism, community and unity, love, forgiveness, all infuse languidly here, in parks, clubs, ice cream parlours, as a collective voice they combat the acrid suicide impulse that lies like a parasite on the zeitgeist. There is an alternative to suicide circus.

I wrote and rewrote last weeks blog post, on my phone, on my laptop, as scraps in my notebook. But I never posted it because ultimately I was afraid of the responsibility of creating and owning those words.

When I wrote my piece on a bad tinder date I got an unprecedented amount of feedback, friends and acquaintances of varying shades referencing it, wanting to talk about it, as if they felt like we’d had the conversation already because they had read my scattered lament on the pitfalls of online dating. It actually scared me a little, I felt like I’d set myself the gauntlet of having to reproduce whatever that blog contained that excited others so much. It also unsettled me, imagining that I’d removed any semblance of veil I might be trying to hide in.

So in future i need to be careful, for myself and for others, it needs to be so abstracted that its resonance vibrates more in a parallel universe than in my lived one.

I need to be regular though and keep up a weekly rhythm with this blog, to pursue the fantastical, you need grounding or you lose your footing totally. I wholly am invested on a journey towards self expansion, but in order to get to a greater self I have to let go of my past. This is what i'm facing right now, my relationship with the moon, the reasons I left london, the memories of last summer: a parable of pain that charted me getting entrenched in multifaceted trauma i'm now disassembling and examining with caution.

I’m not the only one: we’re all cobbled together from baggage, perhaps pointing forward but still vessels filled with our past lives. It’s good to remember the world isn’t just happening to you.

I am not a victim.

Enshrine autonomy.

#unity #berlin #self growth

[readfelice-blog]

moominland chronicles 07 so fresh and so clean

Friday morning the sun creeps in between my spotted curtains, I stir, the light is golden and warming, I stretch, I start to feel my body slowly come alive, my little toes wiggle, my head soaked in my pillow begins to observe the feeling of the cotton on my skin, the smell of the bakery wafts through my open french doors. Something is wrong. My head is trapped inside a bubble, its dense and thick, acrid, everything is muffled around me, the chattering blackbird sounds so far away, I am in a thicket of half baked silence. This is fine, I just need to pop my ears, hold my nose, close my eyes, apply pressure. No pop. I’m moving my now open eyes from side to side, not sure what logic I’m following but it does nothing also.

Oh yes. I spent 6 hours producing yesterday, barely a break, an effect was catching at the end of a clip and causing some aggressive feedback, like being hit in the head by a hammer, over and over again in my ears locating the culprit, you silly cow. I was home from dogged dreary work, body aching and fatigued in every pore, after yoga nearly falling asleep on the rug on my hallway, dragging myself up to go to the mental sweet shop that is ableton and apply all the new and exciting things I’ve learned not 2 days hence, become better, brighter, more effective. But my ears were itchy, and I found some method on duck duck go to clean them with oil and water, I’d done it last week, there was a dull ringing after but I think that’d always been there. In a kind of unconscious stress laden half state, make them less itchy, clean them, hear better, brighter, crisper. It’s all about being bright and sparkling and clean, no detritus.

I’ve not been out on the weekends and really let loose for weeks, there’s a swelling inside me combined from all the excess baggage and that dogged dreary awful work, in ceramic bathrooms with flaxen eyes rubbing mirrors at 6am. Clean my ears, clean off the age of the firefox, it turns out it was a road that led nowhere. Brighter, remove all the dirt. No need for the last step with rubbing alcohol, it stung and its weird, I’m sure that was an error on the recipes part, my ears will dry naturally, I can just give them a little shake. You silly cow. When there is no alcohol or drugs to turn to what does the fatalistic human do, how can it self harm? It can attack its body.

We all need to party sometimes. Flashing lights, heavy bass, swaying people, smoking areas filled with affected bodies, not for 10 minutes, not for an hour, like anything in life it’s only rewarding if you commit to it for a long duration, let it remove the barriers and trickle into the baggage, its acidic grip melting away the gloop between the crevices that makes a mountain out of a molehill. Let the music shake up all the bits inside you, draw out all the ghosts, you can all dance together, then leave in a gaggle tired, heads leaning on each others shoulders.

Stick some cotton buds in there, the internet doesn’t agree but they’re wet and loosened by the oil, surely the liquid will just be absorbed by the bud and I will be so fresh and so clean, so so very fresh. And so clean. Back to the happy grind, EQing is a new world, my voice is razor sharp, I can hear each word, its like I’m dusting the track, clarity, sparkling, clean. Just another hour, just 30 minutes more, it needs concentrated energy, I’m so close, fiddle, knock my audio technica headphones gently, my pride and joy, my dearest purchase, my key to sonic islands untravelled before. My party for one.

I met him at a party, I don’t even remember how we started talking, maybe I sat next to him, because I was sitting with him and his friends, he’s not coming back here anymore, I closed the door of my little yellow house to him, I closed all the doors I could, I’m to sporty for him now anyway, I wear turquoise cycling shorts and I talk about yoga.  

They’re still not popping. Skip forward to Wednesday, Tuesday, Maybe that detail isn’t important, Wednesday is my go to day anyway, so let it be Wednesday. Walking home from a cleaning job on Wednesday along shaded tree lined avenues, cobbled ground beneath my feet, dizzy, still half deaf, still in a bubble, but my sight, my smell my sense of touch are all heightened, I’m not Mozart, I don’t know what partial hearing will do to this dream of mine to expand audibly. But hey, let’s make the most of this, the positive family clan mentality of EVERYTHING IS OK, if not sound then just stick to visuals, it’ll be a shame to never hear music again, but come what may. EVERYTHING IS OK.

What does a person previously dependent on alcohol to meet men and have adventures do when the well dries up? How will she ever meet a man again? Maybe it’s time to invest in a rabbit.

I’m getting really into looking after the plant my landlady left when she left last time, me and moon joke that he’s my new boyfriend. And I’m walking through the corridors of Funkhaus, it opens out into a carpeted palm decked paradise, it’s like another world, palms are plants, I’m inside a fantasy, people are starting to get less droney, look more awake, more excitable, twinkle, I have to go home to go to work tomorrow, but I take the image of that room with me as I go. I take Cabaret Voltaire to bed with me, and the ascending heart I had shimmying to the soundwaves, that was a party I didn’t even have to apply for.

Maybe meeting men isn’t so important when you’re half deaf because you’re to busy straining to understand what the person is saying to you. My californian supervisor in the Great Court, was half deaf, on one side, my nephew is half deaf to, people live without the full spectrum of their senses everyday, we live in a state of closing our senses down, especially in the metropolis, because otherwise, like Buffy when she could read peoples minds, we will go mad eventually, immediately, imminently.

I can be a half deaf person I suppose. But cleaning in silence is awful when its imposed, it’s just me and another bathroom, a dirty work surface, it’s just me and 2 privileged oh so cultivated young women in Kreuzberg, the bathroom like a white ceramic cave I’m tethered to, bits of lychee soap splattered everywhere, all over the walls, the bath, the shower, everywhere, on the floor, congealing in my mind. So very fresh and clean, I can’t really hear her properly when she tells me what she wants me to do, everything, transform the house in 3 hours, 3 2 1 , duck duck go.

You have to take your time.

And not put steroid cream in your ears, that doesn’t work.

The old adage, a watched pot never boils, is a truth so often found in the folds of life, I stop watching my ears, I let go about the worry of whether I’ll ever meet a man again or if I can save enough money till March for that feted room.

My hearing starts to return. Music briefly robbed from my life now reborn. Did my heart love till now? Forswear it, sight! For I ne'er saw true beauty till this night.

Track 31. Now to Moon (needs to be completely stripped and all the elements tweaked) Track 32 Divine Enshrine (needs more more more reverb on one vocal track) Track 33 P P P Paradise (needs building, recording in my bathroom, molding like clay)

Track 34-38 will come, I let them go like a nitrous balloon, I know they will float in to the ether and return to me.

Just don’t put steroid cream in your ears, so fresh so clean - so stripped of everything.

#clean #deaf #female producer

[readfelice-blog]

moominland chronicles 06 my trip to ableton

Just quickly before i begin, ableton make software and hardware you use to make music

https://www.ableton.com

BCR / berlin community radio is a forward thinking and diverse online radio station

http://www.berlincommunityradio.com/about

It’s Friday night, though it’ll be Sunday when you read this post, I’m lying in bed in my pjs, its nearly 21h and I imagine a lot of the sexy young things that swell the streets of Berlin are out at the lake or alternately gearing up for Griessmuehle or Berghain later. Not me though, once it gets dark hopefully I’ll be able to fall asleep, I could of slept at 15h today but there’s a demanding heatwave lashing the city which expects attention, so I’ve just been wandering around my little yellow house eating and fiddling with a track I’m working on.

All my songs are about the moon these days.

There is zero,null, none, void romantic or sexual intrigues in my life in this moment: No booze, no sex, no men, now vegan, just 3 steps away from enlightenment perhaps. It sounds dreadfully unexciting but conversely I’m finding it to be rapturously liberating, I have an enormous girth of time to focus and recalibrate, to add the padding of my own space back in to my life and shine a light on all the things which fulfil me and aren’t centred around whether he will call or text or Facebook message me, what he’s doing right now, or how many other girl’s he doing it to (5? 10? 15?).

What does a young woman in a cosmopolitan city write about if it’s not boys and sex?

She writes about what she likes, that’s what she writes about…..

I went to a workshop put on by Ableton and Berlin Community Radio on Wednesday, I was racked with nerves during the lead up to the proceedings, envisioning getting in there and them sussing me as a fraud straight away.

It would play out like this:

“ You don’t make music! You don’t even know what a hi hat is! GET OUT CHARLATAN”

I am forcibly removed by a stocky man in sunglasses, Courtney Love is standing at a window above the courtyard I’m thrown onto, she looks down and shakes her head, then she fades into the dusk of the room behind her. And I just huff and puff, all fours on the concrete, a wheezing in my lungs and kick myself mentally for pretending I could pretend.

CHARLATAN.

And the gates to music are firmly shut for the rest of my pained life.

It wasn’t like that, surprise.

It was built as an inclusive space for women and non binary people working in music production, specifically on ableton, it was never going to be like that.

I walked from my little yellow house because it wasn’t very far and a lovely walk through the gentrified streets of Prenzlauer Berg and into Mitte past my favourite organic shop and lots of al fresco cafes where gorgeous shiny people were spread across tables, swilling expensive drinks and smiling beatifically at each other

I like getting stolen looks from men on those streets, it makes me feel special.

At first I walked past the entrance of Ableton and trundled about glued to maps trying to work out where my little blue dot was supposed to go, (the arrow frequently points the wrong way, I’m like a lemming with no semblance of orientation), it took me a hot minute to get my bearings: 

‘Go through an archway nestled casually between buildings, through the first courtyard and into the next.

You have reached your destination. Congratulations, goodbye.’

There wasn’t much outside seating aside from one modest wooden bench, so I perched on a wall and had a cigarette before going in, I still smoke, I’m not totally organic yet. The day was thick with heat, so hiding from the sun was a legitimate pastime, I chased some shade, inhaled and exhaled and then headed to the front door, which I approached in conjunction with a slender young brunette, clearly another member of my party.

We rang the bell, introduced ourselves, got confused at the first floor due to lack of any clear signage for reception and fooled by the meagre interior of the hallway. But the thick weighted door gave way to a carnivorous airy room with bare brick walls divided by screens, there was a reception, and plush waiting area, a kitchen and then ubiquitous tables that looked multi dimensional in purpose.

Me and the brunette sat down amongst the other girls, the receptionist (office manager?) was a bit fractious because most of us were early and her assistant was directed to make us drinks which were uniformly accepted. We were 4, then 6, then about 10 of us, which is when I gauged that I’d been selected and it was a privilege to be at this workshop.

“GET OUT, c h a r l a ta n.”

The majority of our trope were casual, dressed in the obligatory heat swayed sleeveless top, au natural or barely any makeup. All engaged in the awkward pre event chit chat, where do you come from, how long have you lived in Berlin, what are you doing here. My internal voice tends to become splattered in these scenarios, so I struggled to make nice but everyone seemed kind and curious. Despite being uniformly downtempo, we were quite the motley crew assembled, jazz singers, pop princesses, understated producers.

A woman appeared among us and quietly slotted into the circle, she seemed to be a student but then in a very uncanny way introduced herself as one of the BCR crew and shortly thereafter we were led through the door into another scant corridor and then in to our place of study where neat square desks with a Dell pc and ableton push were arranged in a very orderly fashion. The focal point of our gaze was directed to our teacher Chagall, who was sporting an exotic dress with a curving tropical print, curly long pale blonde hair brushed against the green of the leaves. My fear of being spotted as an interloper was sliding off me like grease in the heat and, with a screen in front of me, I started to relax into the swing of things.

Chagall was nervous to, in an approachable and personal sort of way, it opened up the room and she got us to introduce ourselves,

“I am/ was a visual artist (disclaimer).”

Then she set about presenting herself. She was a creature totally in her element in music who had been doing it her entire adult life and seemed like a woman unrestricted by her gender, overcoming technological quandaries by interrogating them herself and not deferring to a man in her life to fix them. She presented a project she had been working on as her day job to us and we watched, mouths agape, as she seemed to give music a physical prescence, distorting and extending her voice with her body, it was something quite beautiful, to see this unfold first hand.

It indicated a utopian vision of the future where creating music would be accessible and intuitive to a increasing volume of the populous.

Then we got to the crux of the lesson, she wanted us to make an instrument with our voices.

“How do you make an instrument with your voice on ableton?”

Perplexed and again worried I’d out myself as a total dope, I tried to work it through by myself. First off during the cigarette break where I encountered ableton’s detailed instructions on how to use a toilet brush in my white stall, then when back at my computer having gulped down a little bottle of sparkling water. I recorded myself rather indiscreetly at my station on my phone and played around with audio effects I hadn’t considered before, but this wasn’t an instrument, I poked the midi tracks in a ham fisted way, pushed buttons on the push, at the best of times I’m conspicuous but when I’m confused I pulsate and send out waves, I caught Chagalls eyes accidentally a few times and embarrassed went back to my silent blustering.

But with grace she manifested (almost like I dream of genie) by my side and asked if I needed help: Thank goodness. If she hadn’t I was one step away from googling how to make an instrument on ableton, and really what would have been the point of going to the workshop at all then? Chagall sensually guided my hand across the interface of ableton, her aura mirroring an ebbing waveform, gently brushing over my total ignorance of Midi.

Midi is a thing I can use it turns out, I can sample my voice and make instruments out of it, most of you don’t care or understand probably, but for me it has opened up a world of new possibilities. Once upon a time I sat at my laptop and marvelled at the mystics that could make a song longer than 3 minutes. But as if I’m being let in on a universally sacred secret, it makes sense, and like all things it’s about understanding and then customising the process.

The first part is getting the raw material down, the second part, the bulk of the work, is in the details, akin to me me writing this blog on a Friday night and then editing and ignoring it throughout the weekend to post on Sunday.

Afterwards we were asked to volunteer to share and a handful of the group took the aux cable and presented what they’d done, the most accomplished and quietly confident girl in the room played a stimulating rich bodied ambient stroll that was met with starstruck applause. One of the most gripping pieces of sonic material came from the girl behind me, who had created a short looping clip that was addictive in its playfulness and bubbled away, panning gently in a manner that coalesced the spirit. She was one of the trained jazz singers and it was clear this had opened a new door to her also.

It was the end before it really began, but then I could of stayed in that room for months. We packed away our things and wound up the session, I was still nervous but the staff and participants were so friendly and lacking in artifice, my anxiety was disarmed. I ended up standing with a young woman from the team in an oversized t-shirt dress, who was Russian and had her own ex husband.

I felt safe there, the second time in Berlin that I’ve felt really safe amongst relative strangers in an engineered environment, the second in my life in this context (the first was at room 4 resistance at about blank afew weeks ago).

I exited the building with a kind of full spirit calm floating over me, breezing down the streets of Prenzlauer Berg teeming with how best to direct this new energy and play with the tricks I’d been introduced to. Excited, very very excited. When a creative thing grows and you’re given new skills to hone, its like you’ve been endowed with magical powers (WITCH!) that can unlock parts of your soul. I count myself as one of the army of undiagnosed asperger's sufferers that work in the creative field, so any new method of communication that does not entail actually talking is a welcome part of my social artillery.

Unwrapping music is becoming a passion which I slighted in my teenage years.

When I was 15 I wanted to be a rockstar, but my mum having borne witness to the countless instruments encountered and discarded throughout my childhood, told me to focus on one thing at a time and I went to art school. My sister was the opera singer and the writer, I was the painter and visuals girl.

Now I’m 31 I’ve been making art for over half my life and I haven’t ever really felt comfortable with the idea of being utterly immersed in the art world, at least not in London, there was always an element of distrust and tainted, unmerited arrogance that had to be accepted implicitly in order to function. I’m not naive enough to think that the music scene is any different to this, at least in certain areas, but I have barely come into contact with that yet. All I’ve met thus far is interested people who want to collaborate or to include me in things: with my small contribution I’m receiving more interest than I did in 16 years, after my art education, after countless uploads onto a myriad of social media and having had about 6/7 studio’s.

And what I’m finding particularly positive about this new adventure, as I progressively learn the tools I’m using, the hardware, the software, the instrument inside me, is that this fixation I’ve had with male musicians for my entire life, is starting to fade away, as I become more competent and able, the mystery of their creative gifts to the world unravels and I start to see these men as human.

After having very recently gone through a fixation with a certain producer, who was so significant in terms of my public breakdown, I can say with curving upward lips that he now just seems like a man, not a divinity, like the man he always was, I don’t really think about him anymore.

It makes me wonder about groupies, about these women that fervently followed men in the 60’s and 70’s, in the now tee’s, who actually, maybe, were themselves talented musicians but because of a fear to step on to stage and take ownership of the medium they loved so much, they instead projected this on to (male) individuals that they identified with.

Marianne Faithful anyone?

I was once all the parts of a groupie except being present to the people I ardently adored, now I’m getting closer to being a peer..

So I think I’m still an artist, I mean, I’m doing all the visual stuff to, in my spare time now, but my concentrated outpouring has become devoted to fades and audio effects and working out how to record my voice without feedback, and heavy breathing, and singing in the shower. And fantasising about good monitors.

And coming to terms with the material aspect of music, or rather, its lack of fixed form, its transcendent invisible nature which permeates our lives everyday.

And how to deconstruct a song.

And how to write a song.

And how to make sheet music that isn’t notated, my own variety.

And and and. You get the picture.

 To quote Kate Hudson // Penny Lane in Almost Famous:

“It’s all happening.”

#ableton #berlin community radio #chagall #bcr #female producer

[readfelice-blog]

moominland chronicles 05 a n x i e t y

 It's been a while, things have chopped and changed in the fashion i have now become accustomed to, if you’ve ever made a big transition you’ll know that nothing corrects itself quickly.

The princess crashed down to earth on a comet, so a lot of detritus was left in her wake and as she walked out of the charred remains of her interstellar vehicle she was dazed, confused and a little but concused.

This week i think i need to speak openly about my issues with anxiety, they have been a fairly major theme of my days.

It's not easy to describe anxiety whilst you're in the midst of it, i know i am among many that battle with it every day of their lives. It's a noose wrapped around your neck, slowly hoisting you up, making you a strange fruit, its the snake that tempted eve, coiling around your mind, driving you to exasperated spells of utter turmoil. It is invisible but it grips like thor.

Over time i have developed a lot of ways to combat this affliction, predominantly through my creative outpourings, aesthetic beauty and grand narratives are fountains i can pour all of this stress into, i forget the incidents that torment my day. I stop projecting on loved ones and friends and i manage to catch my breath.

But last week was traumatic, something became unhinged in the rigorous itinerary of my routines, i unravelled and through that unravelling i saw the snags within the fabric of my armour.

Perhaps it's useful, necessary, to break sometimes.

Various factors led to this unkempt state: I started a new job, which takes place whilst the majority of the city is asleep, as the sun edges in to the sky i begin my passage to work, it's been a journey trying to adapt and last week i was exceptionally tired. The bear returned briefly, a sort of guest appearance, re entered my little yellow house and all the residual invisible parts of him, his dust, reappeared in my days. I started keeping my accounts and realised a slow decline has been taking place into shopping addiction, a restless, urgent compulsion that I’m now trying to deal with, and possibly the subject of next week’s blog.

But I won’t talk any further on the bear, and this week I’m talking about anxiety, so let's just scoot past these things for now.

I guess it’s easiest to describe one day, one moment even, in detail, to really get to the crux what has been going on. So i’ll choose wednesday because that was the apex of my hysterics:

I slept, but I woke up at 3am, i don't know how long I slept for, but it was probably under 6 hours, as my eyes blearily started to move and I climbed out of bed the panic was already setting in, I was terrified of going to work, to a glossy cage, where I would flail, flap and suffer, a useless human, a terrible cleaner, a waste of cells and energy.

“How could the age of the firefox let me down?”

Silent wails to myself whilst mechanically gripping the toothbrush.

The girl in the mirror returned an unhappy gait, looked out at me, the failure, all the joy accumulated throughout the past month just evaporating from her eyes, now just a memory in a shaded part of my mind that I couldn’t focus on.

The beat of your fixation just spins round and round, an eternal loophole.

She, reflected, walked away, out of the frame of the glass and I left the house.

On the tram sheer panic set in, sitting edigily on a double seat staring out at the dregs of the night and other half awake employee’s, not taking on anymore than a vague inkling of the hues of their faces, so entrenched in the terrible scene that would occur on my green carpeted balcony.

The glass jar ashtray would be caught by the thick rays of the sun and light would refract through it in an intense burst, which would cause the carpet to catch light, first just twisting smoke that would quickly become white hot flames, my wooden french windows would be engulfed and it would enter my little yellow house and destroy everything in its path, I would have no home and my landlords investment in her future would become null and void.

My feet are kicking together as I look down, a brief reprieve from this vision.

The trams gets to the station.

The tiredness drags my sides downwards, as if bungee cord is sewn into my skin and fixed to the floor.

In the office, just departed from the stainless steel lift, sitting not smiling, attempting to cover up the screeching racket inside. Averting eye contact wherever possible, the floor, the wall, the river outside just ebbing gently, but leaving no imprint. Nothing soothes this state of fortified unrest.

I am cleaning the kitchen, well, the offices that surround the kitchen, trying to throw myself into a corner and be out of the line of vision of all humanity, “don’t look at me, please”.

I am wiping already clean surfaces, hovering immaculate carpets, my face is twinging, bulging, my shoulders are hunched above the crown of my head, my body is strung like an elastic band pulled to its limit, I am going to snap. Again, look out of the bar windows, see the river, there is a faint resonance, some recognition of its beauty, in the back of my reality I understand it is the universe, I am a microcosm of this macrocosm before me, try to breathe, just try.

It fails, you failure, you utter disappointment.

I am having coffee with my colleagues, with a friend who is also a colleague, and another colleague who is a colleague, I don’t want to be sitting on that seat, I don’t want to be ordering coffee with the fragrant barista, arranged at a table on the street outside with a man I don’t really know. Grating teeth, nearly in tears, not even caring that I don’t really know this man, admitting to my friend as the sun catches the turquoise of her eyes that:

Its not ok, its really not ok,

I’m turned so my body is in no way participating at this convention of post work bonding, my voice is cracking a little bit, palpitations that are somewhere between the base of my neck and my cranium, faster and faster, like a drum roll.

Its not ok, I’m really not ok.

She looks at me and tries to hold my hand, to steady me, but I recoil in horror, literal shock reverberating through my system, triggered by human contact. Please don’t touch me, the warmth of another is just something else to agonise over.

I left my key in the office.

F u c k

I jump up, I have to go back, I have another job and I am torn between a rock and a hard place, my friend comes with me, we head back to the office, my words are all inside out, I don’t want the receptionist to think I’m the terrible failure we both know I am, she’s so soft and warm, but she will be unimpressed, ney, whats stronger? She will be disgusted.

The key was in a brown envelope, it had my name written on it in squirly feminine writing, I think there was a heart where the dot should be above the I.

I took the key and I left it on the table, in the kitchen, by the popcorn, but I didn’t pick it up.

Don’t tell her.

It’s in the cleaning cupboard, I just forgot it.  

It’s not there, the envelope is, but its empty.

F u c k

Stick my hand desperately in the basket I find it in, something chimes, metal, it is there, brief relief. Get out, a moment of pause, the cascade of self admonishment stops, a little light shines, but it is a flash in the dark only.

On my way to the next job. A move out clean, I’m late because the journey is a total nightmare, bus, tram, bus, tram, u bahn, tram, etc etc. Some I wait for, some I find alternatives to: waiting 20 minutes for a tram just seems like to much.

I’m in the suburbs, there are dirt tracks, and so many trees, the ground crunches beneath my feet as I walk towards my destination, further and further away from the center.

And scene.

To really reflect the hyperventilation of the day, as I go on writing this, I realise its perfect descriptor is fragmented, is broken and somehow nonsensical, because anxiety, or my anxiety, is not a body of words that create an illustrious narrative structure. It is unfiltered garbage.

5 ½ hours to clean.

Slung out of windows.

She has a list, shes petite and organised.

The dirt is thick on the glass.

I cannot stay here for 5 ½ hours.

Roll into the room shes quietly working in.

“I cannot stay here that long, I’m sorry, my body will break.”

She and another colleague treating me with kid gloves, like I’m antique bone china.

Frantically scrubbing the bathroom in half light.

Departing, exit onto the street, the sun is so hot I cannot breathe, catch my breath at a bus stop, have a cigarette, an old german lady sits down beside me. I am in Berlin, but its not my Berlin, she’s waiting for a bus, all my things are spread all over the seat.

Enschuldigung, I move my things, I jump up and say in English that I’m not actually waiting for a bus. She has kindly eyes, I feel our souls connect there, then I careen off to the tram stop, another lady, middle aged this time, asks if this is the right tram in German, I answer in English and check the route with her.   

Another 20 minute wait.

I am so far from home.

I ring the moon, in between trams.

England are playing Croatia later, it’s such a gorgeous day, but I have to crawl into a cocoon and hide, I have to get home.

I say all the things to him I shouldn’t say, I voice my deepest fears, I whine about him embarking on a path where he will have a home I cannot visit. I cry, my sunglasses are on so no one can see my tears, but they can hear my voice, pulled  tight, again the elastic band, he reacts, we fight, on our plastic devices across a sea from each other, he is violent and I am broken.

I cry some more.

It takes so long to get back to my little yellow house, every step is drawn out, until I’m inside my door I feel so far away.

But then I’m home, I take off my sweat ridden clothes, I put on my pijamas, I curl up into a ball on my bed and shudder, I am not going to watch the football.

I go on a muesli bender, my second on 2 days, I don’t even care that my house isn’t pristine. I don’t do the washing up, I just roam backwards and forwards to the kitchen and insert anything I find in my fridge into my mouth and it blocks the pain, a little bit.

I finally sleep.

Now, I’m not sure if you’ve managed to keep up with what happened on that Wednesday, but it is sufficient to say after 5 weeks of being on a physical and mental high it was a fairly extensive crash in my psyche.

Anxiety can be tackled, by organisation, by tidying your house, by breathing, by investing your time in your future and in your intellectual pursuits. I am at my most mentally healthy when I am maintaining myself, when all the arrangements in my abode are neat and I am clean, when my body is well cared for and a half finished painting or comic page sits on my desk.

I am finding that calm is a routine that gives you time, anxiety is the reduction of time, it diminishes until you feel like there is no time between you and anything you do, that every action has an immediate negative effect and all the perceived interactions you make are harmful to the not you’s in those scenarios. It is the contraction of distance, everything is close, pushed up against you without any space to move.

Calm is sitting at my kitchen table, lighting my little tealight, with a plate full of colourful food before me, making a prayer to the universe which entails gratitude and experiencing the myriad of sensations in each bite. I clawed it back by sleeping and continuing my commitment to not drinking alcohol, to yoga and to myself. I managed to right myself in a few days, by forgiving myself, by doing the washing up and wiping the kalk off my taps, by tinkering with ableton and building links between the strands of my practise to create the foundation for my current project.

By marrying moominland to the moon, acknowledging the bear and investigating the princess.

It’s fine now but it won’t be again at some point in the future, I just have to bear this in my mind so it’s not a shock when it happens again.

It is ok. I am ok. We are ok. She is ok.

He is fine.

Don’t panic.

Listen to Alan Watts.

#anxitey