Party?

So... We couldn't make it this year but what about having this party next year?
It'll be fun: we can have some wine, have some crisps, rent Conan the Barbarian, fall asleep on the floor and make out in the bathroom. Robby was suggesting the 11th or 12th of January. Location would be somewhere near Düsseldorf I presume, but the happy comment box below is open to all suggestions, remarks, questions, policy designs and indecent proposals. Shoot!

POETRECYCLING: it's alive!

Well, in the words of the Chemical Brothers: here we go! Click here to join the action.

Christmas

A few days until Christmas I'm struggling to finish everything before the year ends, and it looks like even if I stop handing stuff in now I will still pass, but nevertheless I am working on and on feeling saturated with literature analysis, like eating chili con carne every day for a month: you still love chili con carne but please feed me something else for a couple of weeks.

Speaking of Christmas: wouldn't it be funny to meet up somewhere between Christmas and New Year, rent room 337 in Hotel Burial and go sip some wine in celebration of the holidays? Sign in here at the comment box, the more the merrier and the smaller the personal share in the € 250,- room rent!

New Pictures

Hey everybody,
I´m uploading the pictures Stefan took from the Duisburg gig. They will show up in the slide show to your right, as soon as I finished the upload. They reflect the show really good, because there are pictures of every piece (except the hoodles) :-(

Cheers,
Robby

Me bloggy-bloggy

So, finally, I´m at home. At least for a few days. Since my desk is full of work, I don´t know yet, if this is good. Maybe it´s kind of a monday thingy.

I don´t have a lot of photos from that strange magic week, but the one photo I did take, I´d like to share with you.

It shows a window reflection of Chris playing guitar at the Arnhem Show.

I hope that one sunny day we will all meet again. Me liky-liky.

Love,

Sebastian

Poodles + Photos

It was a pleasure to take photos of your show in Duisburg.

I uploaded a small selection as a preview. Robby got the hole set of 170+ photos. He can add them later to the Slideshow on this website.

BTW is there a recording/video of the Poodle Dance available on the net? It is still in my head :- )

Noz-z-z-z-z-z-z-z

Trashing the night away .. Now I've experienced before how easy it is to go insomniac when your girlfriend can't get any sleep and is restlessly thrashing through bed and making large knots of bedsheet in order to find a confortable position to sleep (which is, of course, reverse confortable for yourself b/c you'll get cold feet and whatever)

I wonder now, is there a phenomenon according to which, just by the sheer knowledge that your partner is not getting any sleep at the moment, you stay automatically awake?

Simone is returning to Europe tonight in an extra-shittily transatlatic flight via Detroit to Düsseldorf. And I'm shure they'll torture her with dry crackers and tomato juice and atomic fart lasagne and a movie of the 'ben stiller: one nicht at the museum' kind just any minute now.

And I sit here although it is high time to get some rest and feel like too-much-coffe-man (see picture). I'm so bored and I'm so excited.

By tomorrow mid-day, we'll be in Luxembourg. My body will certainly arrive safely, meanwhile my mind will have died of exhaustion.

Cheers, roland

Go See Buddy Wakefield!

All right, so Buddy Wakefield is touring Europe. Buddy is one of my favourite spoken word poets, the real deal (you can find out more about him here). He does not cross the ocean that often. I went to see him in Oxford two days ago and he was mind-blowingly good, and the two girls who are touring with him - Andrea Gibson and Katie Wirsing - are great as well. Funnily enough, even though Buddy has performed to crowds of 10 000 people before, there were about 35 of us in the club that night, which only made the whole thing even more intimate and magical.

So my point is: you should go see him! He has another few dates in the UK (including London - are you listening, Myriam & Clarissa?) and then two gigs in Germany. The whole list is here.
Don't miss it!

Duesseldorf blues

And all of a sudden I am
Back in Amsterdam
Back in college and
Back in a household
Back where the sound
of the microwave
Makes me get up from the couch
Where I was watching the A-team
Makes me go to the kitchen
And eat my unhealthy
lazy man's meal
Makes me feel pathetic
Slave of a consumption society

Back where there us stuff
That I didn't do
That I had to do today
Stuff I didn't do
That I had to do yesterday
Where there is stuff
in the hallway called
Empty bottles
Where there is stuff in the hallway called
wastepaper
And this stuff will not
be removed
by Oksana
after breakfast

Oksana, who folded my towels
I never fold my towels
Who cleaned my room
Ah I really must clean my room
Oksana, I even miss you
Even though you put my stuff in funny places

around the world | around the world

Hello evrybody,

there re many common things going on around the world, and maybe some we don t know yet. In that case post it here, especially it s you whos going 'round.


sooo.. what s going on?!?

IDEA: Poetrecycling - There's Still Plenty of Use in Those Words

At one point during Connect we got to talking about how when we write a lot of stuff gets edited out. I seem to remember Daan and Sebastian being present, but I think most people who write produce lots of bits and pieces - you know, all the orphaned lines and verses that you came up with and then, as the poem takes shape, discarded, because they didn't seem to fit anymore. Still, you hardly ever get rid of them completely because, well, because you still like them. I have a folder full of these on my computer, and more in random handwritten notes.

So I thought it'd be cool to get those assorted fragments from a a few poets and then remix them into poems. We could either do that only in writing or - maybe - record the authors reading the bits and pieces on video and get VJs to remix them? Or do the same with sound files? Or remix the text first and then only record the relevant bits read by their respective authors? Of course, the coolest thing would be to get a few different remixes of the same material, done by different people - not necessarily poets.

There's all sorts of issues to solve here, obviously, including the language question - do we translate our poetic overspill into English/another bridge language? Do we keep the originals? Also - who exactly will do the remixes? How will we make the results available to the general public?

And the best part is that the raw material is already there - we don't need to write anything new... What do you guys think?

Connect 2007

Hello everybody,
I hope everybody has arrived well and the everyday life didn´t catch you too soon...
Bohdan had the great idea to set up a forum where we could all meet from time to time: "to discuss ideas, let the others know about projects and tour dates, brainstorm, share youtube clips and recordings, tell stupid jokes, etc. Something like our room at Zakk, only in cyberspace."
So: here it is! Since I wanted to find a quick solution, I just a grabbed a blog here at blogspot. I hope this will do for now. When I can find some more money somewhere I will try to set up something more fancy :-) And after Connect worked out so well for the second time now, there is a great chance that this will work out as well. So feel free to post whatever you want. I invited everybody of you (from connect 2005 & 2007) to write in this blog. If you didn´t receive the invitation by mail, let me know and I´ll send you another one.

I really hope to see you guys soon again. Let me know, when you are around Düsseldorf.
Cheers,
Robby

P.S. It would be great if you could send me the pictures, texts etc you made during the workshop!

P.P.S. As some of you know the design for Connect was made a design class of the university of Essen. Some of you asked if they could see pictures of the other desgins, we didn´t take. So here is one of them: