Apparition on tour/Berlin stories/Karl Bartos "debate" preparation

On Saturday I left on a little tour in order to attend Apparition screenings in Aarhus (Denmark's second largest city if I haven't mentioned it), Indianapolis and Santa Cruz, and between Aarhus and Indianapolis to attend the gathering of the Radical Faeries in the wilds of Tennessee for novel research, spiritual battery recharge, and fun. I write from Berlin, where I'm staying alternately with my San Francisco friends John Borland and Aimee Male, who coincidentally expatriated here the day I arrived, and with an old SF flame, the Finnish choreographer Tomi Paasonen and his Greek dancer boyfriend Jorgos. I've spent the past few days getting to know the city and learning how to tzpe on a German kezpad. Actually, I haven't done much typing, with the exception of a long e-mail to Apparition cast member and prime inspiration Albert Fuller, who was hospitalized with pneumonia last week and is recuperating well, according to a mutual friend who is looking after him.

In Berlin I have mostly been riding a rented bicycle around town, consulting my plasticized city map every five minutes and finding half the time that one of those great traffic spokes spun me off in the wrong direction. With John and Aimee, I've been to see Tomi and Jorgos's collaboration "D.I.D.: a choir piece for one man," at a cool little performance space up in Prenzlauer, and to hear the organ in three cathedrals--the Berlin, the French, and today, St. Hedwig's, where the organist played a Bach favorite of mine, the d minor prelude and fugue, and the Symphonie-Passion of Marcel Dupre, which I know from the CD that first introduced me to Messiaen's organ works (Kalevi Kiviniemi playing the Poulenc Concerto and several other pieces including M's Celestial Banquet). It was lovely to be in St. Hedwig's and to hear the organ there, and to hear in the flesh those two spectacular pieces for the first time, and yet...there was something lacking in the experience. The organist managed to play for thirty minutes without delineating a single phrase. I've heard more significant musical feeling from a Cingular Wireless ringtone.

While in Berlin I also tried to barge in on the office of the director of the Berlin Film Festival in order to press a copy of my movie into his influential hands, but his secretaries and assistants weren't having any of it. So much for Berlin. Now I have to focus on Aarhus, and the task ahead, which apparently involves both speaking in public about the movie at its two regularly scheduled screenings and participating in a "debate" with Karl Bartos (Kraftwerk) and two Danish professors after a separate screening of my movie and an hourlong address by Bartos to the "Convergence of Image and Sound" symposium. I hope the address is in English, or I will have to limit my responses to observations about the weather.

I don't actually think they'll expect me to debate the professors, per se, if for no other reason than that the topic seems so uncontroversial. Image plus sound in the movies: I'm for it! But I do have a lot of thoughts swirling around my head about this movie and about Messiaen in the specific context of image and sound, and I've been reading up about Messiaen's experience of audiovisual synaesthesia, which is something I've always known about him without knowing very much about it. So I thought I'd update this blog, shoving that dismal technology saga (resolved with a PowerBook hard drive transplant, courtesy of the AppleCare Protection plan) down into this blog's archive, and try to focus some of those thoughts in advance of Friday morning's forum. Let me start off those notes in a separate post.