About Time

I realise what a slacker I am when I have to get up before sunrise for the first time in ages. But the rest of Berlin seem to be slackers too, the streets are deserted. Then I remember it’s a bank holiday, Tag der deutschen Einheit. Both my shoestrings have snapped and something from New York is stuck under the right heel of my shoe making a scraping noise at every step. I am wearing my mother’s grey coat from the early 80s and carrying her old pigskin leather weekender. Both, I think, are older than me. The pig’s biography probably expired sometime during the late 70s.

I am always late. I have to finish writing my presentation for the conference on the train. The text is about the Israeli choreographer Noa Eshkol who died in 2007 and whose students still practice at her house every day. Most of them are over 70. She never used music for her compositions, only the ticking of a metronome. One of her students, John Harries, wrote a book “About Time”.

It’s about time the train arrives. My seat faces backward, back to Berlin and into the rising sun. I printed the ticket on the back of an already used piece of paper and as I turn it around I see it is part of a proof of Friedrich Kittler’s text “God of Ears”.

“The Great Pan, it is said, is dead. Yet gods of ears cannot pass away. They return under the mask of our amplifiers and P.A. systems. They come back as a rock song.”

These lines are followed by the lyrics of a Pink Floyd song, “Brain Damage”. Even so, what I am remembering right now is the beginning of the song “Time”.

“The sun is the same

In a relative way

But you’re older”

There is a song on the new Chicks on Speed album that begins a bit like “Time”, though with the clicking of heels instead of the ticking and chiming of clocks. I hope that I am getting the lyrics right, it might be a hallucination:

“Ripples licking the past, washing memory, refuse,

Replaced by fresh layers of experience,

Holding breath, tumbling in the surf on Eva, ether,

Trusting in the oxygen supply in my bloodstream,

It’s gonna feed the minutes.”

http://vimeo.com/37241531

About Time

I realise what a slacker I am when I have to get up before sunrise for the first time in ages. But the rest of Berlin seem to be slackers too, the streets are deserted. Then I remember it’s a bank holiday, Tag der deutschen Einheit. Both my shoestrings have snapped and something from New York is stuck under the right heel of my shoe making a scraping noise at every step. I am wearing my mother’s grey coat from the early 80s and carrying her old pigskin leather weekender. Both, I think, are older than me. The pig’s biography probably expired sometime during the late 70s.

I am always late. I have to finish writing my presentation for the conference on the train. The text is about the Israeli choreographer Noa Eshkol who died in 2007 and whose students still practice at her house every day. Most of them are over 70. She never used music for her compositions, only the ticking of a metronome. One of her students, John Harries, wrote a book “About Time”.

It’s about time the train arrives. My seat faces backward, back to Berlin and into the rising sun. I printed the ticket on the back of an already used piece of paper and as I turn it around I see it is part of a proof of Friedrich Kittler’s text “God of Ears”.

“The Great Pan, it is said, is dead. Yet gods of ears cannot pass away. They return under the mask of our amplifiers and P.A. systems. They come back as a rock song.”

These lines are followed by the lyrics of a Pink Floyd song, “Brain Damage”. Even so, what I am remembering right now is the beginning of the song “Time”.

“The sun is the same

In a relative way

But you’re older”

There is a song on the new Chicks on Speed album that begins a bit like “Time”, though with the clicking of heels instead of the ticking and chiming of clocks. I hope that I am getting the lyrics right, it might be a hallucination:

“Ripples licking the past, washing memory, refuse,

Replaced by fresh layers of experience,

Holding breath, tumbling in the surf on Eva, ether,

Trusting in the oxygen supply in my bloodstream,

It’s gonna feed the minutes.”

http://vimeo.com/37241531