johnpaul

a day in the life

of a geezer. nope, not a skinner day, but a nasty johnpaul. seriously man, it was a blueprint of a shitty day. what a fuckup. 24h to delete, not even acceptable for directors. cut.
it started with herr rossi pissing into my travel-bag. PISSING into my travel-bag?!
no, not my flatmate. his cat.
what herr rossi didnt know and what drives me a little closer to my inner-batemann is the fact that my 250gb harddrive was in that bag. and my white vans half.cabs. ready to go to london to meet pearl jam tomorrow. but thats a different story.
obviously the piss ran out of the hd when i turned it around - onto my couch.

yeah.

whatever.
by the time i got to work i realized that i had to finish a story by today. plus correcting some trying-hard-to-be-an-overachievers-but fails-guys text on gaming for a big german companys annual report.
managed to do both.
played three games of kicker (we got new balls, baby).
left the office at 8.30...
and than boom.
i hit a fucking concrete pillar in our parking garage.
not with the car, how stupid do you think i am?
with the head - while watching a cool porsche gt3 leaving on the other side of this concrete hell.
after regaining seight i realized that fat ass headache waiting to kick in.

and on a day like this you wont find parking. thats for sure. not even for this dam little piece of plastic (the brabus, remember?).
35 (!) minutes and half a mile walking later i got home. to find
a. my piss-dripping harddisc
b. a letter from the tax-cops inquiring about some 2001-bullshit.
c. all washing liquid gone. and a bag full of clothes (my favourite ones - of course) smelling of cat-piss
d. an empty zip-lock-bag

what a bummer.

sneaker sneaker sneaker

okay. its easter-friday and germany seems like on valium. no one is on the streets, shops are closed and everybody eats fish. hey, thats not what jesus died for.
anyway, did anyone notice those ads i put on this site? click on them and make me rich. doesnt the blog look more serious now? naw. to be quiete honest i put them there because i was curious how this google adsense-thing works.
but where are gucci, prada, adidas, versace, bathing ape, red bull, vans, triple 5 soul, nike, powell peralta, stüssy, osama bin laden or the rockstar-headz when you need them? i cant believe google sends me ads for security- and background-check-services.
do i regularly write about fucking sherlock holmes or what?
googlleddammitt.

the final

frontier has fallen. no, not the normandy, fool.
bill is at the gates.
watch out.
what started as a shitty day got worse by the hour. first i realized how fucking late i am writing my portrait on mike skinner, than food in the cantina was a. cold and b. more boring than in years. and now apple presents "boot camp", the end of think different.
After some geeks managed to run windows xp on their intel macs (what a stupid idea in the first place) and now apple takes the lead by offering "boot camp", following the same evil path.
seriously, it shocked me like it did when anakin chose to join the dark side of the force.
obviously its a clever move towards the soulless mainstream, selling millions of computers to users, who can now choose what to boot: os or xp. just the thought of installing xp on my next mac makes me sick in the stomach. isnt the operating system what its all about?
can you see all the xp-users storming into the apple store in soho, asking for xp support?
bill gates eating an apple? eris coming down on earth?
i guess we should all run and find those last powerbooks left out there. the paradigms are about to change. define your positions.
straight edge, brothers and sisters.
once again its time
to
think different.

no time

to blog these days, i have to finish - actually its more like start writing - a portrait on japans design king nigo, the mastermind behind bape. but my old sport jamirojames mailed me about an interesting post on some blog of some lawyer.

think about it for a second.

still refusing to do those silly hyperlinks, haha

----------------------------------------------------

The army of Narcisusses

Just as Marx seduced a generation of European idealists with his fantasy of self-realization in a communist utopia, so the Web 2.0 cult of creative self-realization has seduced everyone in Silicon Valley. The movement bridges counter-cultural radicals of the ’60ssuch as Steve Jobs with the contemporary geek culture of Google’s Larry Page.

The ideology of the Web 2.0 movement was perfectly summarized at the Technology Education and Design (TED) show in Monterey, last year, when Kevin Kelly, Silicon Valley’s uber-idealist and author of the Web 1.0 Internet utopia Ten Rules for The New Economy, said:

Imagine Mozart before the technology of the piano. Imagine Van Gogh before the technology of affordable oil paints. Imagine Hitchcock before the technology of film. We have a moral obligation to develop technology. . . .

But where Kelly sees a moral obligation to develop technology, we should actually have–if we really care about Mozart, Van Gogh and Hitchcock–a moral obligation to question the development of technology.

The consequences of Web 2.0 are inherently dangerous for the vitality of culture and the arts. Its empowering promises play upon that legacy of the ’60s–the creeping narcissism that Christopher Lasch described so presciently, with its obsessive focus on the realization of the self.

Another word for narcissism is “personalization.” Web 2.0 technology personalizes culture so that it reflects ourselves rather than the world around us. Blogs personalize media content so that all we read are our own thoughts. Online stores personalize our preferences, thus feeding back to us our own taste. Google personalizes searches so that all we see are advertisements for products and services we already use.

Instead of Mozart, Van Gogh, or Hitchcock, all we get with the Web 2.0 revolution is more of ourselves.

I’m not so sure. See, we’ve always had ourselves, and always will. A lousy “Blog About Myself” won’t be any more a projection of myself our yourself into the mass consciousness than your sand castle, or the poem I write on the steam in the bathroom window. For the rest of the world it will simply not exist, however theoretically accessible it may be.

But if I can please a crowd, the way Mozart, Van Gogh (posthumously) or Hitchcock did, they will come, won’t they? And will the blog they read be any less about myself than the works of Van Gogh ?

For that matter, why the comparison to artists at all? Blogging is not an art. Even if some kind of writing is an art — I would say that fiction writing is — blogging is merely a medium. It was hardly the blog that made the self the center of writing; that was done by Boswell, if not by everyone before him who wrote in the first person. Not only that, but hyperlinks (in my view, the sina qua non of blogging, as opposed to using blogging software to publish essays or just “musings”) make blogging far more of a dialogue than static writing; Movable Type is indeed in much more motion than Gutenberg ever dreamed.
The author of this article, Andrew Keen, writes:

Elite artists and an elite media industry are symbiotic. If you democratize media, then you end up democratizing talent.

The problem is not what he thinks it is. Elite institutions ceased to succeed at championing elite-quality art, or even “self expression” in an elite vein, nearly half a century ago. At this point why should the gatekeepeers, who have failed so resolutely at earning the right to retain their perches of privilege, have any say in the matter at all?

The money will still follow quality, regardless of medium; it always has. Shakespeare filled seats, as did Mozart and Hitchcock. (Van Gogh succeeded despite rejection from the elites.) In a culture that has long despaired of any meaningful value judgment, elites — if they ever exist any more — no longer have a job as keepers of the culture. Mr. Keen is fighting the wrong battle. One way or the other.

Let a thousand blogs bloom!

--------------------------------------------------

hmm,

1 second,
  2 seconds,
   3 seconds,
     4.
thought about it.
quality sucks.

johnpaul

simple

"a classic is something that everybody wants to have read
and nobody wants to read."

mark twain on books

"a classic is something that everybody wants to have read
and nobody wants to read."

johnpaul on blogs

suddenly

it seems not funny anymore to be wasted and off my hat at 10.45 in the morning. 10.45 am! suddenly my stomach feels like an old garbage-bag and my head spins like some old dirty technics 1210ers.
hold on. another wave of sickness strikes me down, writing nonsense seems to be the only solution. or go straight to bed. back to berlin. rest my head, be good and survive this nasty morning.
what did i think? not very much i guess. being good all weekend and than getting completly hammered on a sunday night - with a plane to catch 3 hours later. great plan. needlessly to say that it was dam close to missing that dam plane once again. needlessly to say that i forgot all my shit in berlin. needlessly to say that i am still high as a kite. sick like a pumpkin. and the storm inside twists me around like a lonely plastic bag in the sahara winds. whatever.

rock´n´roll is dead - and so is johnpaul.

...or...

chicken or egg
punk or pop
power or flower
after-hour or after-work
plane or train
adidas or ape
turn or table
new york or LA
skate or blade
active or passive
666 or 777
high or fi
john or paul
benz or bmw
darwin or god
her or ho
sekt or selters
babe or bird
batman or bateman
gahan or gore
ac or dc
paris or hilton
acid or alkaline
goethe or gonzo
king or kong
ipod or not

with or without
yes or not
follow me my apprentice

diary of a nomad

another airport. another city. another hotel. always the same sound. 24/7.

thanks to bbc, cnn and mtv.

i have a confession to make: i always feel home when/whereever i hear their anthems - or that quiete evil voice of darth vader saying "this is cnn"!
do you know that kind of home-coming-feeling connected to some sound or smell even when you are far away from whereever you call home?
i do have that weird sentimentality with greenery too. whether its on the hectic streets of new york with someone burning one down passing by. or when that fantastic flavour withers away on a laid-back beach off the coast of southern thailand...

isnt it weird that a smell, a certain sound or just the right lines of a fantastic book can make me feel at home already? thousands of miles away from my real existing home - which by the way gets harder to define every time i think about it.
first there was stuttgart.period.
than home became more bipolar when i moved to london.
now it seems multi-polar, lying on this comfy couch in this cozy appartement in berlin i would love to call home too.
maybe this is one characteristica of the modern nomad: home gets reduced to a place where we get a hot shower, wlan-access, a burning spliff and some clean sheets 

william s. borroughs once wrote about the difference between a traveller and a tourist. and i think i finally get his point. home to a traveller is more than a geographical location. its a feeling. and by that home can be anywhere - or nowhere.

in the end this defines the fatal state of globilization: a generation cut off from home, lost in progress, lost in the -isation, stranded at another airport lounge, waiting for another flight into another city with a different name, yet very similar to the one leaving behind.

maybe globalization is just the feeling of feeling lost, diffuse, not knowing where we belong due to the evil thought in the back of our heads claiming that whatever waits on the other side would make us more happy. the grass is always greener somewhere else, isnt it?

or globalization is merely the fact, that some obnoxious cartoons can now be seen by anyone, anywhere, at any time.  thus producing an outcome affecting everyone of us.

 

... and we grew up thinking that coke-cola, gap, mcdumb and starbucks would be the dark side of globali-ss-ation.

the art of living

seriously dude, i hate this word.
LIFESTYLE.
its as nasty and annoying as
organic,
britney,
globali-ss-ation,
condoleezzarice,
frontdeskmanager,
and ...

besides, if there was a river of overly used but totally empty words, lifestyle would swim right in the middle of that smut.
whats it supposed to mean anyway?
2 ferraris, some blonde silicon and the black amex card?
a tropical island, no electricity and an unlimited supply of greenery?
24 hours online, no friends and bad skin?
half a house, no more sex with your wife and a fat 32 year loan?
if you really wanna push it, you can combine them... condoleezzarice sucks
and you can even conference them: digital lifestyle.

dont get me wrong, i really like the conference (dld06) running right now in munich, but i cant stand the name. fantastic speakers, although way too many, very very delcate location, an extremly positive athmosphere and a few highlights i wanna share with you,

folks.

the person of the day has to be stefan sangmeister, the dude on the foto, a true jedi master of graphic design. obviously, the new york based and vienna born sagmeister (www.sagmeister.com - fuck hyperlinks ruppi) didnt really get enough time to show something we havent seen on his or other pages or in his book, but the way he performed is quiete kantian. a real pleassure. and even the unprepared moderator (it looked like some chicks on speed) couldnt spill it.
than there was asimo, a cool robot that walks stairs, waves and dances better than mc hammer. (hey honda guys, teach him how to kickflip ).
more human and far more emotional were boris and david benedek, showing off big time with "91 words" and got the totally unaware crowd right at their balls. a brilliant move. two thumsup!
like the fact that i kicked electronic arts boss gerhard florins ass playing one of his brand new 360 games, fight night, live on stage. in his own game... thanks to pacman, law from tekken and streetfighters guille.
of course there was "burton", presenting their wearable electronics, ipod jackets, bluetooth-helmets and other funny gadgets like that... okay, i have to admit i just write this to get a jacket for free.

and?

my mate bergerac just arrived and i have to stop blablaing about a briliant conference, which was such an improvement from last years premiere. hats off to my mate ruppi running around like a dog on mad cow disease.
check dld06.com for more

and after partying hard for four days (and actually working quiete some hours inbetween) i will turn this beautifull instrument off and take a big shit and call it ....
.... mystyle.

--------------not digital. yet.

have a...

cold coke on the peak of a mountain.
fancy dinner with someone special.
long long sleep.
good dvd in bed.
long and hot bath.
good laugh.
little time to read.
fat spliff.
ticket to a great concert.
brand new pair of sneakers.
wonderfull weekend without johnpaul.

enough of this crap, no news from my desk, although a lot is happening i cant tell you about yet... stay tuned for some gonzo-style adventueres later this month. we will have some alpine-action in laax, switzerland, headbanging in berlin, sarging in los angeles and cheech-style smoking at the coast in california.
sorry, there will be no posts till tuesday, cause i will dive into offline-land to recover from you blood-suckers.

take care