#i fugging love the camera on my phone

[thealienstud]

🌌🌙✨️

[clausvonbohlen]

24 Deligianni Street, Athens.

24 Deligianni street is where I live. It is a πολυκατοικία – an apartment block. Literally, this means: ‘many (πολύ) – relating to (κατά)  - the home (οίκος) ,  a ‘many-home-dwelling’. Oίκος  is the archaic root that resurfaces in English words such as ‘economy’ (the management of the home), and ecology (the study of the home, in this case planet earth). It is a good example of how, in Greece and in Greek, the ancient and the modern, the old and the new, are interconnected.

  My building is located in Exarcheia, beside the archaeological museum and midway between Exarcheia square, to the south, and Pedio Areos park, to the north. This was once a very desirable neighborhood, but in the 1960s and 70s many of the more affluent inhabitants moved out of the centre and into the suburbs. Immigrant communities were drawn to Exarcheia because of low rents and good transport links, and now it is very diverse, with many Pakistanis, Bangladeshis, Nigerians, and, more recently, Afghans and Syrians.

  The archaeological museum is next to the National Technical University of Athens, the Πολυτεχνείο,  famous for the student uprising against the military junta in 1973, in which 23 students died. Exarcheia has been an area of politicised resistance ever since; the mantle has now been taken up by a broad group that define themselves as anarchists, though this appears – at least from the outside - to include anyone with any kind of grievance.

  My building dates from 1930. It has an old cage lift built by Schindler lifts, a company founded in Lucerne, Switzerland, in 1874. This lift is not much newer, and some of its important looking cables are patched up with yellow insulating tape. To step into it is, firstly, to feel a little bit nervous, and, secondly, to step back in time.

  My apartment is on the fifth floor. It has a terrace on which I have  recently started to grow bougainvillea, jasmine, wisteria, solanum and fragrant rhyncospermum. My mornings now begin with a round of watering, and then the sweeping of leaves and petals that the night breeze has shaken to the ground. It is a fine way to begin a new day, and reminds me of life in a Zen monastery.

  The terrace overlooks the the archaeological museum, which houses the gold mask that Schliemann unearthed at Mycenae in 1876. Caution was not Schliemann’s guiding principle; upon finding the mask, he telegraphed King George of Greece to say, ‘I have gazed upon the face of Agamemnon.’ Subseqent archaeological research has concluded that the mask predates the period of the legendary Trojan war by about 300 years. Nevertheless, when I sit on my sweet-scented terrace and feel the life-affirming tingle of inspiration, then I sometimes wonder whether I might be picking up the energetic emanations of an ancient warrior-poet, relayed to me across the ages through his gold death mask, just a stone’s throw away.

  On other nights, the terrace is an excellent place to watch the clashes between anarchists, who throw Molotov cocktails, and the riot police, who mostly stand around smoking and looking bored. The clashes happen once or twice a month, and they have now acquired an oddly scripted quality, as if everyone involved is playing a role in which they no longer believe. The only exception are the journalists who pullulate behind the police. They are immediately obvious because of the luminous rectangles of their film cameras, and because they wear elephantine gas masks. Sometimes I feel as if I have box seats in an absurdist theatre.

  My mother is coming to visit me next month. She will like the fact that I live beside the archaeological museum. When I was a teenager, she once told me that as a young girl she dreamt of becoming an archaeologist. But she never went to university, since from a young age she was a pawn in her parents’ acrimonious divorce, both of whom refused to pay for her education. She ended their ugly game by becoming a stewardess, thereby gaining her total independence at a comparatively young age. But it was a significant moment for me when she told me that she had wanted to become an archaeologist, because it was the first time that I had thought of her as a full person, with a life before I was born, and with dreams and ambitions of her own. I remember feeling a rush of tenderness for her then, as I do whenever I think back to that moment.

  My landlady, Κυρία Φητίλης, lives on the floor below me. She is eighty years old and lives with what I initially thought was her mother, but I have since found out is the family’s former servant. This lady, whose name I do not know, is 99 years old. I don’t think I have ever met a 99 year old before. She is not surprisingly rather shrunken, with tremendous hairs sprouting from her upper lip and chin. She is very hard of hearing, and forgetful, so I have to shout to re-introduce myself every time I enter their apartment to pay my rent. However, she has a bat-like sensitivity for the sound of doorbells, and should her sonar pick up on the ringing of a bell, her tremulous cry of πιος είναι ? – who is it? – reverberates around the entire πολυκατοικία.  But what I find most astonishing is the thought that she was already a young woman when the Nazis came goose-stepping through the centre of Athens.

  Shortly after I moved in, I shared the lift with another tenant, this one in her sixties. Having confirmed that I was the new tenant on the 5ht floor, she then asked me if I was married.

  ‘No,’ I replied.

  ‘Ah, you must meet my daughter. She works in the university museum in Plaka.’

  Then she noted down my phone number. A couple of days later I received a bashful message from her daughter, offering me a tour of her museum. I took her up on the offer and she gave me a very thorough tour of a rather uninspiring museum.

                                 *

  24 Deligianni is pressed up against its neighbours. The buildings must share some of the inner stairwells, since from my own kitchen I can clearly hear the family who live in the next door building, when they are in their kitchen. Most often I hear the mother, whose accent is deep and African, and whose vocal range is impressive. She likes to chat on the phone while cooking; at least, that is what I infer from her long monologues, punctuated by laughter, and accompanied by bubbling and splashing noises.

  In my mind’s eye I can’t help picturing her with a tea towel around her head and a big white apron, like Mammy in ‘Gone With the Wind’. That does, I fear, make me a racist, albeit an unconscious one. In my defence, I did grow up with a much-loved cuddly toy golliwog, and I remember collecting the rather natty little ‘Golly’ badges that came with jars of Robinson’s jam. It is not just Κυρία Φητίλης’  centenarian servant who has seen changes in their lifetime.

  My direct neighbours are a young graphic designer couple who live on the same floor as me. Their apartment is similar in size and shape, but while I have tried to preserve the style and spirit of old Athens, theirs is contemporary and cool and decorated with bright pieces of pop-art furniture. It seems we are all attracted to the unfamiliar, though that means different things for different people.

  I was reminded of this when I met Zoe, a Greek girl who has set up a small artists’ cooperative in an old villa, not far from my apartment. She took me for coffee near the cooperative, in an elegant and minimalist new cafe that serves artesanal coffee. ‘Some Swiss contemporary artists came to visit recently,’ she confessed to me, ‘and I brought them here. They were horrified. So inauthentic! they kept saying. So gentrified! Well, I pretended to agree with them, but the truth is that all my life I have been longing for Athens to get a little bit gentrified, and now that it has – even if it’s just one small cafe – I’m delighted!’

  For some people, Athens is a city with longed for pockets of gentrification.  For others, it is ‘the new Berlin’. For me it is a time-warp to a slower, more peaceful, analogue past. Once again I am brought to the realisation that we all seek out what pleases us, and ignore the rest, and thereby create the reality which we experience, and which we mistakenly assume to be the same for everyone.

                              *

  If I walk directly north from 24 Deligianni street, I soon come to the Pedio Areos park. Many homeless people live here. During the day they mostly sleep in the park, screened from view by bushes and trees. At night they congregate in front of what is now a boarded up building, but was once a tea salon. When I walk past this area in the early morning, on my way to swim in the Panelinios Atheltic Club pool, it is a depressing sight. Some addicts lie passed out on the steps of the building, while others scour the pavement for lost drugs. Small fires smolder, kept alive by pieces of broken furniture. Food remains litter the area and are fought over by dogs and pigeons. But by the time I return from swimming, the street cleaners have swept everything away.

  A few weeks ago I stumbled back this way late at night, rather drunk. I loitered for a few moments and was soon approached by an Afghan  dealer, from whom I bought a small quantity of refined opium. I was reminded of organic farm-to-table restaurants in San Francisco, though happily my Afghan dealer spared me a lecture on the precise location of the poppy field where the opium poppies had been harvested. A bearded hipster waiter in San Francisco would not have been so reticent.

  I also bought what I thought was crack, but turned out to be crystal meth. Service was excellent and the meth dealer even threw in a new glass pipe, for free. Then I went home and smoked my purchases. The alcoholic fug exploded instantly and I felt great. I was way too wired to sleep, but not in a jittery way, since the opium made for a dreamy wakefulness. I stayed up all night and read a book from cover to cover.

  I was still feeling pretty good the following day, but when the crash finally came, it was worse than I have ever experienced. I know that you only ever borrow energy - the loan will always be called back in eventually. But I was not anticipating that eviscerating intensity of inner emptiness. It lasted for four days, during which I scanned every new room for places that could support a noose. Having come through safely on the other side, I can confidently state that this experience marks the end of my intermittent 20 year relationship with recreational narcotics.

  The memory of that wintery narco-weekend has faded. We are now in άνοιξη – spring, literally ‘the opening’. The fine days are here again. And so, on an afternoon with a sky so blue that it hurt, I strolled up Pnyx, the hill where the ancient Athenians held their assemblies. In front of me two dogs were playing, pointed ears bouncing up and down above the meadow flowers. Their owners were two Greek girls whose limpid laughter reverberated in the clear air. Behind me was the βέμα, the speaker’s platform carved out of the rock, from which every Athenian citizen had the right to speak on matters concerning the polity. And beyond the girls and the meadow, hovering in the distance like a vision, was the Parthenon itself, sanctuary of the Goddess, icon of Athens, and symbol of Western civilization.

  As I walked back home, I remembered the line attributed to the Emperor Marcus Aurelius in Ridley Scott’s ‘Gladiator’: ‘There was once a dream that was Rome.’ Perhaps the Emperor overslept; five hundred years earlier, there was a dream that was Athens. It excluded many, but it was a dream nonetheless.

  I opened the heavy front door of 24 Deligianni street and took the cage lift up to my apartment. I went out to the terrace. A pale moon hung low above the archaeological museum. For a few moments, my own life here seemed unreal to me. But perhaps that shouldn’t come as a surprise; it is, in a sense, a dream within a dream.

[djscrewhead]

Screwhead - In Memoriam

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It's been a year since you left us. I got that final phone call that they were stopping resuscitation attempts at 4:20 in the morning, Valentine's Day, and had to laugh; it was get-laid-day, at smoke-weed-o'clock, two of your favorite things!

We had all sorts of times, both good and bad, in my 36 years of knowing you.

You got me into reading. I don't think I was much older than 8 or 9 when you first gave me Dune, Salem's Lot and Pet Sematary to read through. I’d read It and Tommyknockers before the TV Miniseries aired. Read through all your Dean Koontz before I was 12. All those small Conan reprints by Sphere.

You got me into comics, and what always stood out for me were those comics with the Jack Kirby art; Kamandi, Devil Dinosaur, and all those Marvel Treasury Edition reprints of Avengers, Thor and The Fantastic Four.

I still remember the day Superman died; you gave me a note to bring to school, telling them I had a doctor's appointment in the afternoon and that you were picking me up at lunch time so that we could make sure to get to Hero Comics and buy a few issues before they sold out.

We'd pull the same thing two other times; first for Batman Returns and then Jurassic Park both came out on the last day of school, so you'd given me a note that we were going away on vacation and had to leave early, and I would only make the half-day. You picked me up at lunch time so that we could catch the first showing of them while everyone else was still stuck in school.

You just barely missed Doctor Strange and Iron Fist, and you would have loved them! The Punisher would have absolutely blown your mind away. First episode and there was a fight scene set to Tom Waits and I couldn’t help but think you’d have gone absolutely nuts seeing that. Defenders was pretty good, too. You'd have loved Guardians of the Galaxy 2, if just to see throwbacks to Kirby art in the visual style of a ton of the effects. Black Panther comes out this week and it looks fucking amazing.

You got me into movies, even horror movies, a genre you weren't a fan of. Poltergeist was the first movie you rented when we got our first Betamax, and it’s the first movie I ever remember watching. You saw Steven Spielberg on the box and figured it couldn't be THAT scary!

For my 11th birthday, I was bugging you to rent a horror movie because I always wanted to see one, so you said OK, as long as you pick the movie. We made it up to the dog scene in The Thing before turning it off and switching over to Close Encounters of the Third Kind, but I spent weeks getting nightmares from that, and it's now one of my favorite movies of all time. Apocalypse Now, The Killing Fields, The Deer Hunter, anything with Harvey Keitel in it, The Usual Suspects.. So many incredible movies that you recommended I watch that I probably wouldn't have watched otherwise.

And of course, Ghostbusters. I was 3 in the summer of '84, and Cecile was working for a newspaper and she'd gotten a bunch of tickets to an early showing of the movie, and she'd already seen it and said it was a great movie, so she gave you a couple of tickets to it and holy shit was she ever right!

But out of everything you'd introduced me to that helped make me who I am today, music probably had the biggest impact. You had a huge record collection and you were always listening to something different. Then when you had some money, you started getting into the audiophile gear, I learned to really listen to music, and not just hear it. The little details that most wouldn't notice, like the faint rustling of the robes of a choir, the two dogs barking at each other at the start of Amused to Death. You taught me not to just hear music as a fun distraction, but to really listen and appreciate the artistry of it.

Aside from that brief stint of wanting to be a Ghostbuster, which, if I'm being completely honest, I'd still absolutely love to be if it were a real thing, I don't think I've ever wanted to do anything with my life that wasn't firmly rooted in music. You got me my first guitar and amp. You helped me out getting a laptop and soundcard/ram upgrade. When I wanted to start DJing, you got me my turntables and mixer, and let me order 200$ worth of records from Chemical Records on your credit card. Any time I wanted to do anything that involved music, you would help me out and encourage me. Any time I'd make something, even if it wasn't the kind of music you were into, you'd still listen to it.

So, this is me, as a DJ, trying to find some way to put something together with all the music that was important to me that you introduced me to.

↓Track List follows ↓

Frank Zappa - Willie the Pimp

I don't think this one needs any explanation, especially for those that knew you. If you had a theme song, this was it. Frank Zappa was your favorite singer/musician, and was the one act you'd seen the most live in concert, back when you had a nice camera and a fake press pass to get into every concert you wanted to see.

The Fugs - CCD/I Couldn't Get High/Saran Wrap

I mean, it's hard not putting the whole Golden Filth album in this thing. In hindsight, I was probably listening to some music I *REALLY* shouldn't have been listening to! The FBI's File on The Fugs called them “The Most Vulgar Thing the Human Mind Could Possibly Conceive". The benefits of a Coca Cola Douche. A lesbian dwarf tomato orgy leading to doing more drugs than a human should ever do. Using saran wrap as an impromptu condom. None of my friends at school believed that I wasn’t just making up songs when I told them about these until finally you weren’t home one day and they came over and I put the album on.

King Crimson - 21st Century Schizoid Man

You had many stories of going to concerts with a camera and a fake press pass to get in for free. You’d always tell me the one about that first time you saw King Crimson in this tiny venue, and at the very end of their set they turned on a strobe light. As the song progressed, the time between the flashes of light got longer and longer until the room was pitch-black for 5-10 seconds at a time in between brief camera-like flashes of light, until one by one the band members disappeared from the stage while they kept playing their instruments, until finally everyone was gone from the stage, and on what would have been the last flash of the strobe, they abruptly stopped playing and all the lights in the venue came on.

In ‘99 you got me tickets to their side-project, ProjeKct Two, and later in 2000 or 2001 to a proper King Crimson gig, but that ProjeKct Two show was mindblowingly amazing!

Dr. John - I Walk on Guilded Splinters

You listened to a lot of music, and I heard a ton of stuff growing up that most kids never heard. This was probably the first thing I can remember really thinking that it was SO much different than anything I'd ever heard before. It wasn't really rock, jazz, blues, funk, or anything else.. There was something weird and different about this one in a way I couldn't explain or understand until much later. It's that voodoo swamp vibe and I don't think I've ever heard anyone else do anything even remotely similar to it since. It's like listening in on a secret voodoo ritual going on deep in the swamps of New Orleans.

Tom Waits - What's He Building

Another one of those weird tracks, a bit of a theme going I guess. No one tells a story quite like Tom Waits, and I'll get more into why his music means so much to me a little later on. But this is another one of those that, as soon as you got the album, you knew I'd love it, but specifically this track, and you were totally right. I even did a bootleg remix of it a while back!

Dire Straits - Money for Nothing

Back when we lived on Davignon, any time ground beef was on sale, you'd get a whole bunch of it and spend a whole Sunday morning making chili. This was our making-chili album, but we'd always start on Money for Nothing. You had those huge Cerwin Vega speakers and you'd crank the music up so loud that those synth chords and tom-toms had so much power to them I was almost scared that one day we'd bring the walls down with the power behind that intro.

Roger Waters - The Ballad of Bill Hubbard/What God Wants, Part I

Any time you got a new piece of stereo gear, whether it was a new amp, speakers, or even just new cables/interconnects, this is the first album we'd listen to from start to finish, but it's those first two tracks that were the real test; at 11 seconds in, the dogs barking to each other. The mixing and mastering on this album is easily the best I've ever heard. No other album manages to give you what feels like a full surround sound experience from two front speakers, and no one writes a concept album quite like Roger Waters. I'd already understood that religion was an absolute crock of shit at a much earlier age than this, but this album was the first time that I'd ever heard anyone else really saying the same sort of observations about religion and the world that I'd been making for nearly as long as I could think and observe people and current affairs.

ZZ Top - Viva Las Vegas

You often played ZZ Top and I’ve always loved their music. When I was 12 or 13 they came to Montreal for a concert and I wanted to go see them. Before getting tickets, though, you wanted to make sure that I understood that their concerts weren’t going to be like their music videos or album artwork; it was going to be the band playing, and there weren’t going to be any scantily clad women dancing around. I told you I understood, and you got the tickets. The night of the concert, again, you reminded me that this was a concert and not to expect any scantily clad women dancing around.

Then Viva Las Vegas came on, and lo and behold, a parade of scantily clad Las Vegas showgirls came out and started dancing on stage and we spent the whole song laughing!

Green Jelly - Three Little Pigs

We were watching Much Music one day and the music video came on. As soon as it was over we went out to HMV so you could get me the cassette!

Motorhead - Ace of Spades

I remember this like it was yesterday. I was 11, and while going through your records together, you jokingly said that this is the best record you could ever use to wake someone up with. I don't remember you having ever put it on before, so I don't think I'd ever heard it, but, that weekend, I woke up before you did, got the record out, cued it up, and turned the sound system aaaaaaaaaall the way up. You (understandably) woke up COMPLETELY freaked out, ran out of your room, saw me in the living room laughing and realized how you'd absolutely set yourself up for that. We ended up going for breakfast at that place across from Center 2000 and spent the whole day laughing about it.

KISS - Domino

Another one of those "probably not appropriate for an 11 year old to be listening to", but it was a great and catchy rock song that we would often blast in the car as we would drive around. I’m pretty certain this is the first time I’d heard any Kiss. Before this, the only thing I knew about Kiss was that you had the first issue of their Marvel comic.

Marilyn Manson - I Put a Spell on You

Another one that I remember like it was yesterday. It was boxing day 1996. I was living with mom at the time, so for boxing day I went to meet you downtown. We ate at Bistro Duluth, had some coffee at Deux Maries, and then we went to HMV because, amongst other things, you'd given me a gift card for there. I'd started going goth about a year or two before, but other than a couple of KMFDM tapes that Fuzzball Mike had given me, I really only listened to Bauhaus, Sisters of Mercy, Dead Can Dance, and similar type of goth music.

I had never really gotten into music that was too heavy or aggressive, but stuff like Type O Negative and Nine Inch Nails was starting to slowly seep into what I was listening to. I was looking through the more industrial-metal section, and couldn't make up my mind on what to get, since I didn't really know any of the bands I was looking at. You came by and saw Marilyn Manson - Smells Like Children, and in your typical joking-but-dead-serious tone, said you'd heard of Marilyn Manson and that I should get that one because it would probably piss off my mother.

So I did!

At the time there was still Magic and boardgames nights every friday at the Croissanterie across the street from McMagic, so we parted ways and I decided I would walk there since it was only a few metro stops away. I put on the CD and instead spent the next two or three hours walking through the streets of Montreal, from around 7-9pm as the snow was gently falling, getting my mind absolutely blown away by these sounds I'd never heard before.

A few years later, you watched Lost Highway and immediately called me to ask me if I could make you a copy of the soundtrack. You thought his cover of I Put a Spell on You was one of the best and truest covers you'd ever heard, making the song even creepier and more sinister than the original. Also, you liked the Rammstein tracks, because they weren't the same sort of "headbanger thrash shit" that you normally thought of whenever someone mentioned metal.

Bohren & der Club of Gore - Midnight Black Earth

By this time I was completely into Drum and Bass, and you’d listened to some and didn’t really like it much, but you knew that one of my favorite things about DnB was the deep bass. You discovered this album when you still had your house up north and your stereo was still in full working order. I came over one weekend and, after we’d eaten supper, you said you had something to listen to. You turned off all the lights, and we sat down in the living room and you put this on and we silently listened to the whole thing. It immediately became one of my favorite albums of all time. Because of my tinnitus, I can’t sleep without music playing, and this is one of the albums that I put on whenever I go to bed.

Tom Waits - Big Joe and Phantom 309

There was only one place I could put this song, and it was right at the very end of this mix. 1991 was a pretty rough year. I'd been living with my mother, but constantly getting into arguments and fights with her until finally I moved in with you. You were living with Claudine at the time in a small 3 1/2 in St-Leonard. It was one of those tiny "we turned the garage into a rental and just added a B to our address because it was too small to get a real address" type of deals. We used Bobone's address to keep me registered at the school I was at in Laval so that I wouldn't have to change schools and have to make new friends.

Every day we'd wake up at 5am so that we could both be ready and drive all the way from St-Leonard to Laval for the 8am bell. Being a garage-turned-3 1/2, there was only one bedroom, a living room, and a kitchen/diningroom combo. But you still had those huge, beige foam sofas that were 100% foam, no wood or any sort of support structure within, that weighed nothing and were SUPER comfortable.

Every night when it was time to go to bed, we'd move the sofas and pouf around to give me a little nook up against a wall that I could sleep in. For those first few months, every night that I went to bed, you'd sit at the foot of my little nook, and we'd talk about how my day was, how I was handling things, and you would always reassure me that, even though things weren't ideal right now, everything was eventually going to work out.

Then, as you saw that I was starting to nod off, you'd take out Nighthawks at the Diner, and put on this track, and sit with me as it played through and I drifted off to sleep. Every single night until the lease on the 3 1/2 was over and we could move to a new place in Laval that I could have my own room in, you were there to make sure I knew I was loved and cared for.

You didn't really know of any stories that you could tell to help me fall asleep, so you entrusted the telling of my bedtime stories to the greatest storyteller in the world, Tom Waits.

So this is where I'm going to end this mix; with the hope that somehow, somewhere, all this music and what it means to me reaches you. Sleep well.