june has by far been the craziest month in a long time. i have finally reached a point to feel comfortable enough to set up a desk and computer in my new flat and have pumped out a couple new joiners to get back into the swing of things. here they are depicting my working class heros; my friends who helped me clean and fix-up my new place.
thanks to everyone that helped, but the job isn’t done yet!
snap! just talked to that music-making poser we all know as the garagebandher0 and he slipped me this bonus track to the discarded companions guide to emotionally immediate computing, which was released on this weblog. show this poor chap some pity by lending your ear for 5min and 4sec to hear him out, would yah?
i am thinking about making a category for entries called “excuses for posting inconsistently” because this post is yet another one of those. writing this to whomever reads this seems a’lil impersonal i am sure from both your point and mine but in one respect, all that’s been on my mind lately are my interpersonal relationships; the people i love and care for specifically, whether we are in consistent contact with one another or otherwise. my connection with family, friends, places, etc. you know, all that stuff. i recently got into a bike accident (just two days shy of my 28th birthday) and.. well i guess this response to a letter my buddy david recently wrote wishing me a happy birthday can paraphrase my feelings in the past two weeks best:
thanks man! you are always good with the birthday greets and i loves you for that. shit. my b-day was weirdo. got into a bike accident. broke my bike and top two front teeth on someone’s head. woke up with blood and teeth in my hand, between two bikes and a man. went to two hospitals in very nice B-class mercedes benzos, had my two teeth shards glued back into my head with uv hardening epoxy. the doctor told me not to look into the light cause it could blind me. life is not a bore, as i find out again at 28. miss you very much good friend and hope to see you soon!
jef
but i know that ramming your face into another persons skull at over 20km an hour in a foreign country is not an excuse for inconsistent posting. neither is having to move or not having internet an excuse for inconsistent posting. i realize that i write these blurbs down in this log, not to try to mass communicate to all the people i care about but don’t bother with taking the time to write or call individually. i write these crummy posts because i have to remind myself of what the hell is around me. more often then i should be, i find myself day dreaming of people and places (and food) i miss. so when i use words to send my anonymous love to my anonymous loved ones, it is to at the very least, have that conversation with the part of you that i carry in my life from moment to moment. i guess i am trying to say to many people all at once is that i miss them. i miss you very much and hope you are doing well. i wish i could tell you that i am happy so far..
so far..
so far, so good
*achtung! Before proceeding, please consider the possibility of eminent hard drive failure and back-up all your important data immediately. This is your third final warning in this particular post. As a side *achtung! I also promise to not get emotional.
A couple days ago I was waking up in the kitchen (I “wake up” by drinking warm, caffeinated beverages. No, flat room temp. coke is not considered a warm, caffeinated beverage and no, I did not literally wake up off my kitchen floor. I have the floor in my bedroom for doing that), and had a black tea and a bowl of lemon yogurt for that meal between lunch and dinner, dunch. As I was chatting to smarch on skype, I experienced an abnormally long wait for what is widely known as the spinning beach ball of death. Using macs and computers in general for a number of years, I decided to execute the best know fix for such a predicament; I pressed and held the power button to initialize a hard reboot.
Curious about what was going on behind the apple aesthetic facade, I decided to boot the machine in verbose mode (command-v) to watch the start up echo and analyze why my computer was hanging. While it was initializing the swap partition, I was presented with the first clue:
Disk I/O error. Hummm… ok. I let it run a little longer to see if any other errors came up in the boot process. Usually a memory error on a mac chimes a drum roll, or something like that at the boot rom faze. i did not hear this so I was fairly certain it wasn’t my ram gone rotten. After listing its’ failed attempts to create a swap partition, I was faced with this error.
Fairly straight forward so far. I suspected that it was a hard drive failure. I placed my ear up to where the hard drive would be on a 12-inch powerbook; on the lower left side of the notebook, under the left side of hand-rest, beside the battery, and listened. Fulfilling my fears, I heard a consistent, rhythmic ticking sound emanating deep from within the powerbook’s 1-inch body, which incidentaly reminds me of a techno party i went to in berlin. Anyone who has had any experience with rhythmic ticking hard drive sounds would know that this symptom was, colloquially put, totally fcuked up.
Ok. At this point I started to freak out a little, but only in the inside ;). It was 17:30 so I still had some time to run to conrad, grab the proper screw drivers (a torx T6 and a philips #0 40mm) and a fresh hard drive, stop off at the atelier to grab a couple external 2.5 inch hard drive enclosures (6 pin firewire and a 4 pin USB2 one) and rushed back home to be with my ticking sweetheart.
Making a worktable out of a couple a-frame stands and an old door that uli picked up somewhere outside, I set up a quick and dirty workbench in our living room, looked up a howto on the internet, put some rubber gloves on (oh wait, techno party again) and proceeded to jump into the machine.
The procedure was a lengthy and trying process. I had to remove the battery, memory, keyboard, most of the housing and a sh!t load of tiny screws of various lengths and diameter.
After some digging I finally got to the heart of the problem, a 5 year old 30gb Toshiba hard drive. “You little bastard” I called it, as I plucked it from its cozy place. I wonder if heat affected its lifespan. There were quite a few layers of sticker insulating the area of the powerbook that the hard drive was contained in… hummmm… mental note…
Before installing the new hard drive I picked up earlier that day (an 80gb, 8mb 4200RPM fujitsu, for long battery life) I attempted a series of recovery methods to try to salvage any data I could from the hard drive.
I tried to connect the hard drive in question directly to a parallel ATA port on OS X, windows XP and debian GNU|linux machines. I tried again in firewire and usb hard drive enclosures, as target mode for os x, mounting in linux, even installed macdrive on my XP machine but to no avail. Tried a knoppix disk too. I tried to shake it a little. even tried sweet-talking. Nothing. i wasn’t able to initialize the drive what-so-ever. I guess the main problem was simply one of mechanical failure.
After putting the faulty hard drive in the freezer (some long lost, hard drive recovery mojo that smarch bestowed upon me, most likely found on some ancient tomb of a forum, babelfished from some eastern European server), I installed the new hard drive and screwed the poor thing back together with all the care a lover would screw that special someone, although it really doesn’t fit the same way like it did the first time.
Barring some magnetic storage forensics miracle (and boat loads of money) here is a list of the data I lost off the top of my head, forever.
80 or so high resolution photocollages / any photograph I took in the last five months, including new year / 4000+ emails / a whole bunch of new contacts / 2 new proposals for exhibitions in Germany and the Netherlands / all the music I ever made on gameboy and garageband, including all samples, recordings and loops / my CV / some freelance work for a fashion company masterpiece cleaners is working on / a whole buncha other stuff that will be sorely missed.
an ever increasing loss of faith in salvation through science and technology
*This list is more for my personal mourning, but i also hope it scares you into backing up all your stuff right now. That’s right. Stop reading and go back-up. Now.
let this be a lesson to me (again!). back-up, b a c k – u p , !!!BACK-UP!!!! Hope you get the message too. Please back-up regularly (as in, more then every half year) and safely (as in, mirror your hard drive and put it at your mama’s house, or wherever it would be safe from your own house burning). 30 gb of data is really a lot of stuff.
good luck!
Here is a follow-up to the first zhaus article I posted a few days prior.
After some days of sleepless nights, i have finally finished poopooshoping the joiners for zhaus: the living room exhibition. Sometimes i feel as if i muscle pixels around for hours, just to get some extra interestingness on flickr and provide some twinkle-twinkle to the normally drab candor that occurs on this weblog, but I digress…
The opening of the show featured quite an intellectually digestible lecture regarding the Turkish Diaspora within Vienna and how various case studies within the community show correlations in identity towards Turkish or western homogonous culture based on the way Turkish Austrians decorate their living spaces and the items of art they choose to display and contextualize themselves with.
The living room is a place where one goes to relax, but it is also identified as a place of social meeting; where one would entertain guests. The art items that are chosen to be displayed in a host’s home provides a situation with which the guest may observe the socio-cultural context or displacement of the host. It’s kinda like putting away that funny looking vase of yours; you know, the one with no flowers in it, when your parents come to visit, because you don’t want your mom and dad associating funny looking vases filled halfway with water and no flowers in them as your own personal flair for interior design.
Along with a lecture for the opening, there was also screenings of videos from participating artists and much of the work was observed in the company of friends and colleagues. At the closing, another zhaus artist spun electro records cross-legged while sitting on a pillow.
Because of the nature of the concept, the gallery space and living space were intermingled, and I often found myself shifting seamlessly from conversations of an artistic nature, to didactic discussions, small talk, etc. never once shedding the feeling of being at a friends place for a party that focused on art in various social, political and cultural contexts, and the consuming of wine. Designers like beer more, apparently. Or was that sekt? I met many intriguing people in those three days.
There were three main rooms that housed all the artworks; the living room, dinning room and toilet, or WC. The bathing room was not available to the public.
And like any home I am comfortable in, I spent most of the time during the opening and closing in the kitchen, close to the booze and cheese supplies… i mean supervise… to supervise the booze and cheese supplies.
Trying very hard to not sound like an alcoholic (but seriously, I’m not) zhaus has been a success of an exhibition in every sense of the word. Not only did the show facilitate a multidisciplinary collection of works and discussions, but also provided a platform for people to freely exchange ideas and email addresses, while fusing the characteristics of both the home and gallery space.
Since zhaus is an international phenomenon, I encourage you to get hold of the zhaus people through their webpage and organize an exhibition of your own when situations allow, in your respective city. I can already think of some super creative peeps i know in toronto that may be interested in the potential to organize using a self-directing, thematic, international exhibition concept. There is already a standardized publication format that you can use and modularly add your zhaus documentation to, contributing to the existing publication. Pretty much roll your own with a tinge of cult identity.
I hope to be able to contribute my skills and eventually make live a weblog and forum for zhaus, depending on the reception and response of the community, and hopefully get one going in berlin when the time is right.
I look forward to participating in the next zhaus:vienna some time this summer, and big ups to Mimi and Karin for organizing such a splendid and creative forum.
Originally uploaded by smallcaps.
on friday i found a treat in my mailbox and it wasn’t the easter bunny (and if you see that dude, tell him i’m not into white chocolate). some time ago i submitted some work to a publication from berlin called I/O MAGAZIN. one of my polaroid self-portraits shares space with great works from photographers, artists, designers and illustrators from around the world. also appearing in the mag are works from good friends, Lam Thuy Vo and Karin Aue so do yourself a favor and
pick one up for they are well worth the 8 euros.
oh, mom and dad.. i got you guys a copy so don’t worry about ordering one. i will send it over asap!
On April 7th 2006, my two good friends and colleagues Kristen and Uli, got hitched in the presence of family, friends, love and funk.
The ceremony was held at 15:15 in a beautiful villa in Ahaus, Germany, with a funkadelic party held from 5pm to 5am in a friend’s country home just outside of the city.
A love that was already consummated at first sight, Kris and Uli have been quite down with each other for as long as I have known them and for me, this was really a superb reason to get all our loved ones together and celebrate their love for one another and the people around them, the coming of spring, a new cycle in our collective life journey, but most of all to have a super-cool time together.
After a successful show in Vienna (I will post something about Zhaus soon for I am still editing the photos in poopooshop) and a relaxing time together in Amsterdam (er.. self-explanatory, I surmise) Karin and I came to visit Ahaus a couple days before the wedding to help where we could with preparation and just get some extra time with friends already there.
Karin and I dutifully spent time with parents… all of the parents, drinking coffee and eating fine pies and cakes, and generally spending time with them while Kris and Uli ran around making sure everything was going smoothly.
The two of us also put many a courgette to the slaughter and made around 150 vegi-kabobs with two, count’em out loud… one! Two! Two special-secret-super-recipes for your basting pleasure. Yes… brush it on, real slow like… er… ah… they tasted yummy 🙂
The ceremony was casual and relaxed, nevertheless a buzz of excitement charged the space. most of the ceremony was in german so Kristen had martin to translate for her. The bride and groom were joined by the best men and woman and the ceremony beurocrat around an oval wooden table with friends and family watching from all around them.
After the wedding, guests were ferried by horse drawn carriage to Katrin’s woodland cottage. The ride was cozy and jan managed to bring a case of champagne to keep us warm on the brisk spring afternoon ride through the countryside.
Needless to say the rest of the evening was filled with eating, drinking, laughing and dancing. Congratulations and thank you to Kristen and Uli! I wish the both of you health and happiness!
right now i find myself in vienna, austria (not australia) to participate in the first of many zhaus: the living room exhibitions. the concept revolves around the paradigm of the home, and how to define a home. each exhibition features a collection of works dealing with the theme, and will occur in homes around the world, the first one being held in vienna, austria (not australia) if i haven’t made that allusion clear already, if not then my bad.
for this exhibition i have (consciously) chosen to do my first performance in order to deal with the theme. my work will evolve ideas of the home in relation to death, suffering, torture and food preparation. ah, it is a performance so please don’t read to much into what i am saying here. visually it will involve myself reeking pain and suffering to various vegetables using an inquisitions’ arraignment of tools in front of an audience of artists, designers, musicians and social engineers/scientists. I will try to get up a video of the splash damage when I can.
Ok. I know right now the performance is quite a bit vague but i will put down the schnitzel and figure it out before friday. which reminds me of the show; it will open this wednesday and there will be a program of lectures and film screenings. the space will then be open on the following thursday and close on the friday, which is the day of my performance. I know it seems like the show is kinda short, but it’s because it will happen in the flats and homes of actual real-life living people (not the real-life living zombie undead), so if I was one of those persons I would want you to get the hell out of my house asap, especially if you are here to mutilate veggies. where am I going with this… better then tell you with my faulty language, here is the flyer for you to grab and read for yourself. please come by if you are in the neighborhood. smarch i know you are gonna be there, son!
just to let all you faithful readers know, the weblog of the future fuckupayme.org site is up and running. the primary use for the weblog is to showcase creative-types and the work they do. hopefully it will act as a social network for any and all to register to. once you register you may begin posting anything you wish, which in a sense is like asking for trouble. here is a quote from the fuckupayme.org weblog:
Hiya jerks and friendlies,
If you already haven’t figured it out yet, this is the weblog for the future webpage of the fuckupayme.org community. It is completely open for registration so if you want to be an author and discuss how this webpage should be used, by all means please go ahead and put yer foot in your mouth. Once you register you will have absolute blogging rights to do as you like. You may post sappy poems, bad screenplays and rants (rants probably being the primary use, since you all have lots to say regarding everything i am sure, albeit unintelligently in most cases), throw-up the chicken scratch you call drawings, upload photos of your cat, even podcast so we can hear that annoying squeak you call a voice, or some shitty jingle you made in garageband. And for all you trolling sunova(bitches), this blog is completely open for your flaming pleasure– and I am sure you are here on this planet to be really annoying anyways. Alternatively, use it for your own shameless self-promotion and prove that you and what you do doesn’t suck. Go ahead, I dare you to do as you like, to get a voice, to use your limited imagination and make something of your puny, pitiful life (i know i will), you pussy.
So after all that abuse, do you still want to join in the fuckupayme.org flame war? Register your dumb sounding nick by clicking here and burn all you want in this weblog hell. Log in here if you haven’t already figured it out, stupid. Oh and please, invite your friends if you got some.
now go register, post and ultimately direct the future of fuckupayme.org. see you online, suckas!
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