Beings in transit

“We are more real in our simple wish to find a way than any destination we could reach.”

— David Whyte

There’s a reason some of us like to travel so much. There’s a reason we enjoy the process of going from one place to another.

In many senses, the essence of who we are lies in the journey, the getting to where we’d like to be.

As David Whyte puts so succinctly in his poem, we’re constantly moving closer to finishing, closer to another, closer to losing faith, closer to saying something, closer to success, or closer to giving the whole thing up.

More so than any arrival, we are creatures that exist in being almost there. We’re beings that are on the way.

Because what happens when you arrive? You feel the temporary joy of completion. You relax for a minute. But soon enough, you start looking for your next destination. You need to move on.

That’s why it’s so important to choose the right horizons to chase. We have to find projects worth our time and energy, because life is the journey more so than any destination.

Berlin, Day 4

On the way home from the festival today, some friends and I change trains at Warschauer Strasse, and see a pop up rave happening underneath the motorway.

We grab beers from the store in the train station. I love that these little bodegas exist in the train stations, and also have pretty nice espresso machines inside.

All sorts of people are milling around under the motorway: old, young, locals, travelers. Old school Berlin dudes who see what’s going on and do just like we did -  grab a beer to join in the fun for a while.

This is one of the reasons I love Berlin. People don’t host renegade events in public if they’re depressed. It just speaks to the fact that people in this city are so psyched on life, so filled to the brim with enthusiasm for living, that they would drag a PA under a bridge and a few cases of beer for randoms to go get off their heads serendipitously, just for a laugh, just for a little while.

Berlin, Day 2 - Richie Hawtin and Dave Smith

This place is so much more my speed than London. I feel completely different here — so much more welcomed, so much embraced by the city and people. The cafe culture is divine…. people eating and drinking outdoors—what a concept!

Superbooth is fun - lots of enthusiastic people talking about music and new products they have in their pipeline. A few tents are just piles of classic gear. There’s a DIN Sync tent I walked into earlier has a dream studio inside - Roland 909, 808, 303, 606, plus an old Pro One, a SH-101 and a few other odds and ends. Everywhere you turn there’s electronic squeaks and squeals. It gets to be a bit much after a while.

Which is probably why when an actual DJ starts playing — as one did tonight at around 5pm — it blows the roof off. The refreshing sound of perfectly mixed and mastered tracks being played through an amazing sound system ripped through the park and people immediately converged on it. It was like coming out of the desert and diving into a swimming pool of champagne. I didn’t recognize the DJ, but he was obviously a friend of Richie Hawtin, as he was playing at a sake bar co-promoting the renowned DJ’s MODEL 1 mixer. It’s a sick mixer, really expensive, but I’m sure a ton of fun to play with.

Richie Hawtin himself stands nearby, casually chatting with Dave Smith from Sequential and other artists, instrument manufacturers and festival attendees. It’s a singular moment.

My takeaway — play with your tools and toys all you want. At the end of the day, if you want anyone to listen to it, it has to add up to something that’s more than just the sum of its parts. And if it’s techno you’re making, DJs rule the day.

Author’s note - Just two weeks after returning from Berlin, Dave Smith passed away. No cause of death has been revealed to the public, and it’s all the more strange that he looked the picture of health at the time. Here’s his talk, introducing his final synth - a revamped Oberheim OB-8. Andreas Schneider also gives a very touching account of his final moments with Dave. Rest in peace, you synth god!

London, Day 4

The first day I arrived in London, I tried to use an old ten pound note to buy a travel card from a small shop. I had saved the note from my last trip to London, which was 15+ years ago.

The shop owner told me the bill was no longer good. He couldn’t accept it.

I thought that a bit strange but kept going with my day, not dwelling too much on it.

It wasn’t until today, standing in front of the original Lloyds of London on Fleet Street, the epicenter of financial commerce in the capitol city of England, that the strangeness of that event truly struck me.

Everything has an expiration date - even money. Everything.

Can you grasp the implications of that? Money expires… like old milk.

Use it or lose it. It all falls away.

I get the whole generational wealth thing — that’s fine. But I feel like this was a big sign — you can’t take it with you. Life is a one way street. Money, like everything else, is ephemera. Use it wisely, but don’t expect to last forever.

In my experience…

Personal history is a one-way street, as well — it need only go in one direction.

No, history doesn’t repeat itself, but yes, it does rhyme. Still, need we try to repeat it by re-visiting these places we have already been?

This is something I have done many times - revisiting places I had a good time, seeking a resurgence of the old feelings I had once before. One could argue I’m doing it right now, coming to London, where I had many good times back in my youthful visits to this amazing city. But there’s something missing now. Me. I’m different. I’m not the person I was, and never will be again.

That’s one of the interesting things about travel — the person who leaves is never really the same person to arrive. The very act of traveling changes you.

Time is a one way street. It’s the universe’s way of telling us that you can never go back. Home was destroyed for you the day you left it.

This should never make one feel upset because there are so many places in the world to explore. You have to just keep going keep going keep going keep going.

London, Day 3

I feel like I finally got into a groove with this town. Had a coffee in my regular place, and off I went to the British Museum.

I found myself a bit peckish, and about an hour later had another coffee and a bite in a small sidewalk cafe. This place was a stone’s throw from the British Museum, so the three women working there must have experienced a steady stream of tourists all day long. They were absolutely miserable. These women were so clearly run down by their own existence, it was sad. The Eastern European haircuts, the dull, lifeless eyes, the exhausted way they handled their duties and spoke with the customers—it all spoke of a deep despair.  Life to them was making mediocre food and coffee drinks for an endless stream of rude, blaze’ tourists struggling to speak English. It depressed me so much I downed my food, paid, and quickly scurried away.

The British Museum is a facilitating place, but it’s hard to ignore that it’s also a testament to the horrible brutality of humanity, and western civilization’s endless capacity to rob and pillage all that came before. Beautiful and at the same time revolting.

It’s a little hard to recon with the fact that everything in that museum (like many historical museums), was pilfered from the Near and Far East and from Europe. All stolen items. I couldn’t help but think, “Wow, this is amazing… but shouldn’t it be nearer to the culture from which it sprang?”

The Execution of Lady Jane Grey by Paul Delaroche, (1833) in the National Gallery, London

I understand how ages-old antiquities can easily be destroyed in war torn countries. The reliefs of the centaurs fighting the men in the Parthenon, the reliefs of the lion hunt from Assyria, the aeons-old Egyptian sarcophagi and mummies, the freaking Rosetta Stone for crimminy’s sake… Amazing, but why is all this stuff here, in London?

The short story, I’m sure, is because richly endowed Brits (and Americans, no doubt) went to these countries when they were either impoverished or under siege, and offered their governments a shit ton of money to excavate these treasures and bring them to the museum, “for the benefit of humanity.”

And now I’m contributing to that larceny by attending the museum. So I’m as much a tacit contributor to the cultural appropriation as the next guy. SHAME ON ME.

It’s also kind of weird that here we are, all us thousands of tourists, gliding by room after room after room of fantastically old artifacts. And on we glide to the next room, to the next painting, to the next femur of an ancient farm woman… and to most of these artifacts, we give not much more than a cursory glance. “Oh, another bas relief from the Parthenon. Huh, this one’s more than 2,000 years old. Crazy.”

On to the next, on to the next, on to the next.

I got the same feeling at the National Gallery in the afternoon.

Room after room after room of these priceless masterpieces of fine art, mainly of European (white male) artisans. In truth, each one of those paintings deserves an entire day, or at the very least an hour, of intense study and speculation, just to understand the context in which it emerged, its meaning to its creator and its meaning in the wider context of history.

But we don’t take the time. No one does. We just walk on by.

But what else could you do? It’s overwhelming. There’s so much of it. And for the majority of the people there, we’re only visiting London for a brief period, so the instinct is to cram it all in. Sigh.

Between the galleries I got a pint and a pie at The Guinea, which was amazing. That pub is 350 years older than the formation of the United States! No big deal.

On to the next, on to the next, on to the next…

London, Day 1

The Wells and Campden Baths and Wash Houses of 1888, Hampstead Heath

I arrived in London yesterday and got a room in a guesthouse in Camden Town. It is one of the most threadbare guesthouses I’ve ever stayed in. It reminds me of this place I stayed in Penang, Malaysia on a visa run about 15 years ago. It felt very similar to this, actually - a room that was originally about 20 feet long that was then sub-divided with cheap construction to create 2-3 tiny apartments with only beds in them. No top sheet. No blankets. Just a mattress and a duvet and a bathroom across the hall. Squeaky floors. Thin walls (I can actually hear people farting in the bathroom down the hall with both doors closed). Living!

Legendary Camden Town music venue, The Good Mixer

Woke up jet lagged at an ungodly hour and went into Hidden Coffee here in Camden. It was totally pleasant. Then I headed over to the Barbican to see this exhibit on Postwar British Artists. It was totally and completely depressing. A lot of the folks represented in this exhibition were either refugees from the Holocaust or were deeply affected by the bombings in London, and so all the works were very, very dark. A lot of deeply disturbing paintings and sculpture. I felt like I was going to barf pretty much the whole time.

I’ve been having this really weird feeling all day… a little out of body, having been up for most of the 10 hour flight here, just running on fumes and caffeine. A little delirious, the anxiety creeping up. I have this feeling I might just suddenly lose it… shit myself or puke or explode in the museum or in the streets and make a messy, messy spectacle in the midst of these smartly dressed Londoners.

Next up, the Museum of London, which was also pretty disturbing, but in different ways. For those who have never been, the Museum of London doesn’t really try to give you hard facts about what London was like through the ages—rather it attempts to give you the impression of what happened. So there’s a lot of photos and artifacts and even sights and sounds from the time periods, but it’s a little light on exact events.

You walk through the history of the town, from Roman Londinuim to the modern era. They have exhibits on gladiatorial combat, the Black Plague, the fires, the executions, the wars, the triumphs and the tragedies of the ages. Not sure if it was the vibe from the previous exhibition at the Barbican that set me off, but I was definitely picking up on some darkness there. London is a dark city where a lot of bad stuff has gone down.

Scary children’s toys from the Museum of London

This feeling of darkness all coalesced around the museum’s reenactments of 1800s era London. They had a whole section dedicated to what a pub would look like in the 1800s, what a barber shop would look like, what a pharmacy would look like, what a market would look like, etc… each vignette brought to life by the sounds of people conversing playing on hidden speakers. They did an amazing job with tons of very authentic looking artifacts from that era.

Something about that time was deeply weird to me. The bizarre costumes, the sound montages of people interacting, the horrifying photos of the plagues and the fires, the disturbing children’s toys, the bomb shelters and food rationing, the evidence of Jack the Ripper… I came out positively shook. London is kind of a messed up place where a lot of stuff has gone down over time, and not all of it was good. And that dark undercurrent is still very much there. It’s palpable. When you have all that violence and tragedy that have happened in a place over a long period of time, it has to leave a residue. Just like The Shining… Some places are like people — some shine, and some don’t. In this sense, London is positively glowing.

Anyway, then I went to the Hoop and Grapes, which was a great, ancient pub, nicely updated to be cozy and comfortable. You really can’t beat an old British pub for understated charm.