»columbia«

Had several nervous breakdowns today on our trip to the highlands, cause our driver rides the curvy streets through the mountains, ignoring anything that could be behind the blind corners, like a he-devil on wheels. No worries at all after realizing he got plenty of jesus on his break.

Currently I´m listening over and over again to latest liars record drum´s not dead. If you don´t know or got it yet, buy it, don´t download it. It´s worth. Not only cause of the great graphic design (I have to confess not liking it in the beginning, but loving it now), which is a visual augenschmaus related to mexican technoflyers (Designed by band member Julian Gross, who did also most of the yeah yeah yeahs designs). It also contains a dvd with 3 videoclips for each song (equals 36) directed by band members Angus Andrews, Julian Gross and by formerly Bauhaus student, award winning filmmaker and glitz dj Markus Wambsganss. Also Markus´ clip for liars´ “the other side of mount heart attack” was in my eyes one of the greatest clips in 2005.
There´s so much to write about liars´ work and transformation from hippest dance post punk to avantgard experimental whatever, about consistently being inconsistent and surprise expectations with innovations beyond hype. It´s a record to listen over and over again to get used to and to discover all hidden elements making you wow. But better read the pitchfork review. Or check out liarsliarsliars.com or their myspace site to listen to their tunes. Meantime on my trip through Columbia i´m looking forward meeting some indios, playing them this record to see what happens.

i'm in the middle of nowhere. jungle. rainforest. at the caribbean. we flew here in a tiny 12 seated airplane. wind breezing in through slits in the door. flew over the shore, turned sharp to the left heading the forest, tightly over huge trees landing on something not bigger than a regular street. it's cloudy, foggy and wet.
there are no cars nor motorcycles in capurnaga. horses brought us to our hotel. the village is small and colourfull. runed by mostly black people, smooth in any of their movements. i'm thinking about novels from gabriel garcia marquez and compare the people i see to his characters. hotel is wonderful. all inclusive. hummingbirds on my balcony. tiny, smiling lizzards in my room. mosquitos come over to spend the night with me.
max frisch describes this area and my being here quiet well in homo faber:

"es war unglaublich heiss. wir lagen in haengematten. jede bewegung kostete schweiss. und jeder verlorene tropfen schweiss musste umgehend mit bier ausgeglichen werden."

i finished michel houellebecqs "plattform". not sure if it was the rightest or wrongest book to read here. it makes me feel dirty if i'm having to long looks on the elegant and beautifull women working in the hotel. but at least it makes me drink whiskey the whole day. keeping a nice and gentle level. guess i'm doing fine.

so right now - it´s i guess 7 p.m. - we´re having this french dinner at the nuns convent. my dad runs it every time he´s here in a tradition. and well: mission complete. every sister is drunk. inclusive me. very very drunk. so there two possibilities. stop, fell immediatly to sleep or drinking more. freaking out. i guess it´s freaking out. dude, you should see this, there´s a rave going on and thous sisters got loose hips in dancing. more wine. yeah! ay,pues sí mas vino, ave maria!

So we left Medellin heading for a day Bogota. A sad and touching leaving. Too little time to say goodbye to everyone. Too little time to do all what I couldn´t. Too little time to see and met all the things and people I wanted to. But well so it is. On our way to the airport we took this amazingly street on the mountains driving through deep clouds. So you switch in seconds in a row between sunshine and fog.
My uncle Jairo picked us up and I met my little cousin, now 4 years old, again. The last time I saw him he just had one month. His name is Hartwig David. Yep, you red it right. My uncle named him after my father in a manner of respect to their friendship. Unbelievable. I mean Hartwig isn´t even a popular German name, but the worst is, that no Columbian can pronounce it proper. No way. It sounds like “Hutwhich”. i´m remembering myself protesting 4 years ago and I´m sure he´s going to hate his dad for his name when he´ll adolescent. For sure. But he´s cool and doesn´t like to be called David, so …
We went out to zona rosa in Bogota. The zona rosa is not the red light district. It´s more an amusing bar & club area for rich people. I thought it would be a good idea going there to see something …. looking for the right word ... "normal" would be defintaly the wrong word. "Beautifull" too. …. Let´s say "different", cause I spend the last weeks only in Copacabana (well that’s beautifull) but Barrio Triste, Naranjal, Communa 13 and the barrios populares. So just the slums. Nothing you would visit for sightseeing nor Columbians living in better areas would go to. So I went to zona rosa, passed prada, Gucci and vuiton stores. Things I haven´t seen for ages. But it was more the people giving me a culture clash. Huge jeeps on the sidewalks. The streets crowded by bodyguards waiting for their bosses. Their bosses little men in too big and bad fitting suits wearing horrible ties you should get arrested for. Worse their haircuts. Women wearing bad and too much make up. Looking so cheap and two or three years ago in their fashion. There´s nothing worse, than rich people with a lack of style. It´s the same each Christmas i´m going to Landau (westgerman small town) visiting my parents. I always ask my self: “Why are they all so … metrosexuell?”. But that’s another story. It´s just that my switching between extreme richness and extreme poorness wasn´t that much compared to last time I was here. Last time for example we were invited by head of paedagogical university of bogota to a finca formerly owned by the Escobar cartel now property of the state and the university. Followed by armed bodyguards. Served by butlers and stuff. Weird and scary on the one hand side, fabulous on the other. A huge and luxury mansion containing some crimes of interior design, that only way too rich druglords are able to commit.
So I lost the mood for drinking, just had a burger at "el corral" making me laugh about white trash. Next day I headed DCI Arte store, a very nice Columbian streetart fashion label to spend the rest of my money. It reminds me a bit in Faile, though it´s more about fashion and way cheaper. Besides my allowed weight limit of baggage is already reached. Iberia sucks and during the last days lots of people came over giving me things to bring to my mom, their relatives or friends in Germany. How could I say no. But that means no space for bought food, coffee and stuff for me, and no presents for you. Bad luck.

acensor means elevator.
about the basic culture clash: radio still plays hereos del silencio and cab drivers just play reggaeton. tried to convince them, that wu tang clan is nuthin to fuck with. failed.
question: how do you explain an 17 year old columbian girl from a village, who wants to study fashiondesign, that mullets are so 5 minutes ago, without being shallow?

we filmed in barrio triste cause material is still missing, but i guess it was all crap. nice was to find erica again. she was pissed not being on the cover of my dad´s last book, though she was a main part of it. she kissed me on my mouth and wants me to tell everybody in germany that i´m her boyfriend. so here i did.
and by the way: i guess i´ve been often in dangerous situations or places the times i´ve been here. but today i looked the death in the eye. at least i thought so. i crossed the street between merinas and the river. this is not a street. it´s a three way war zone. the people on the streets have a technic for that. do you remember this computergame in which you´re a frog crossing the street? exactly like that. you have to think in a strategy about when to step forward, when backward, when slow and when fast walking through the racing cars. i was really pissed. i mean imagine how umglamourous it´d be dying crossing the street? but my dad is all about the technic. cool as fuck. and so i ended, to know when to walk and when to stop - yep i confess - crossing the street by holding his hand. sissy but funny and alive after all.
spend the day the rest of the day at patio don bosco. i wrote already about the patios. they´re an institution for kids on the street who can enter, if they leave their drugs and weapons outside to get rest, food or classes. when they saw my camera everybody wanted to have a picture taken. we did lots of posing and breakdance freezes. they showed me some i didn´t know. now i can´t decide which to choose. here just some. ... not the freezes. and if it´s too much for your connection ... your problem.



this is lilliana and erica. lilliana just gave birth nearly 3 weeks ago. call me shallow call me mean but after staying here a day your hair takes the smell of the wastes and your skin starts iching of the dirt. i brushed my teeth twice after showering unable to get the taste of glue out of my mouth.

This is Jesús Torres. Some call him Don Chucho. He is el animero. The soul gatherer. The last of his kind, he says. On midnight 30th of November the animero goes to cemetery, rings his bell and spells a prayer to call the souls of purgatory. Then he leads them through town, followed by other people, who wait at graveyards entry for him. On every corner he stops, rings the bell and prays a father our for the souls of the dead. He´s hooded with a cape skulls printed on, a hat and gloves. Necessary to be safe. As well he´s not allowed watch to the left, right or back. The souls could possess him.
The aim is a trip for the souls to visit their old homes and their relatives. It brings luck, he says. We were three animeros. But my two fellows died. One got poisoned while drinking and the other had a heart attack. This is a tough job. It´s very scary on cemetery. And sometimes I can hear them whistle. And sometimes I cry, because I know the souls of my buddies walk behind me. I miss them a lot. And I´m the last. Theres no one left keeping the tradition. But somebody has to do it. There are a lot of haters out there, who don´t believe in what I do. Drunk people. They yell at me while I´m on the trip. I mean that´s ok. I don´t care. They can mess with me, but they better don’t mess with the souls of the dead. Some of the drunk haters did. Some of them ended in prison. And some of them died. No, you detter don´t mess with souls. I stopped drinking ages ago. I do sports. Lots of sports. Cycling is great. And I stopped smoking, he says while I took a deep drag. He really is in good shape.

I collected tons of stories on my trip. Wrote them down. But didn´t post them. Sad ones. Horrific ones. Some containing such incredible acts of cruelness and violence you wouldn´t believe. I didn´t post them. Though I think they need to be told. But not by bloging. Not in quick dropped lines. Not in quick red posts. It would be a lack of respect to their victims, I think. I think this is the wrong context. I think it would make a wrong impression of this country. Of this place.

But as the medellin diaries are turning to their end I want to write down a last one. A nice one. A story about big bove. The one. The true. The honest. If you might lost you´re faith in it, here´s a true Columbian love story. Collected a couple of years ago. It just came back on my mind.

I was on my trip through the USA. Left NYC and headed Tampa, Florida to visit Alleida and Guillermo Leon. Columbian relatives I never met before. She is my mother´s cousin from her mother´s side. He is her cousin from her father´s side. Alleida might be in her fifties. A woman of an unbelievable natural beauty. Gallant but quiet. Almond eyes with cutest rings underneath them. My fetish. The years didn´t harm her at all. They made her more interesting. Guillermo might be in his sixties. A small bold man with a huge heart. Everything he likes he calls “perfecto”. A person impossible not to like. He is a pretty famous well earning anesthesiologist in Tampa. Huge is their mansion. Tragic their story: Their daughter died in a plane crash on a trip to Columbia a couple of years ago. She was heading a family party in Bogota. Not wanting to go, but her parents wanting her to come. She took a later plane. It crashed.
But as I was sitting and talking to them in their fabulous living room I realized that I never ever saw an couple like Alleida & Guillermo before. Just the way they were sitting in front of me holding hands. The way they treat each other. The way they touched each other. The way they looked at each other. The way they act with each other. So lovely. So nice. So gentle. So adoring. Each sentence starting or ending with “mi amor”. Each view saying the same. So I just had to tell them, that I never saw before a couple in their age where you still could see how much they love each other.
And then Guillermo told me their story:
In Bogota at the age of 12 years Alleida got sick. A doctor was needed but couldn´t be afforded. So a chain of phone calls through the family started reaching my granddad, who knew that his nephew was in town by accident. Guillermo. A medicine student not a doctor yet. Having a scholarship. Studying in the US. Being in Bogota for a visit. So he went over to Alleida´s, took care of her and gave her medicine. When he was about to leave he came back to her bed and asked her if he could get a photograph of her. Alleida was surprised. By her 12 years of age she was not really interested into men yet. But Guillermo said he was surprised by himself, he just would have never seen in his life a girl such as beautiful as her. Alleida gave him a tiny photo and Guillermo left.
8 years later, 20 year old Alleida was sitting bored on a family party. She noticed the unknown gentleman immediately stepping the door, crossing the room, heading her and asking her if she would like to dance. She said yes and while dancing the well looking gentleman introduced himself as Guillermo, the formerly medicine student, who had asked for a photo 8 years ago. By now he was a doctor living in the states being here for a visit. He told her that in all those years he never was able to forget her. Opened his wallet and showed her the photo she gave him. Alleida was pleased. During the same dance Guillermo asked Alleida if she wanted to marry him. And Alleida said yes.
I was stunned when the story was finished seeing both holding hands sitting in front of me. Then Guillermo got up. Opened his wallet, picked out an impregnated tiny old photograph and gave it to me. It was the photo he got when he met her first. Showing Alleida at the age of 12. As beautiful as you can´t imagine.

so i had this date with this girl of extrodinary beauty, dissarming charme, tearing hearts apart with a single view, i won't write about. we got drunk very sophisticated and decided to get married in four or five years. i have to keep my columbian/german legacy.
returned afterwards to convent at about 2 a.m. . actually doors get locked at 9 pm. but i thought i was fine having keys. not knowing that the gates were locked from the inside and i'm fucked instead. thought about climbing up to the balcony, but i was neither in shape to make three floorss nor it would be a smart idea getting confused with a housebreaker. a couple of weeks ago a nun of another convent shot a thieve with a shotgun and all nuns of the country showed solidarity to her. no, you better just don't breakhouse into a convent.
so there was nothing else to do than ringing the bell being aware what kind of scandal this could become. thinking about absurd excuses i rang and rang until 20 minutes later my dad opened in his pyjamas, like: get in quick, i don't wanna be seen in here like this. we giggeled, feeling like teenage kids on our way to our rooms, deciding to make this our little secret.
next morning at breakfast the nuns were like: has anybody heard that ringing last night, or did i dream this? ... yeah, i did, what was that ....
my dad and me smiling each other, not saying a word. like teen partners in crime. der monstershit, es gibt keine competition - wir sind eins, junge!