past adventures, future plans

Some weeks ago, me and my friend Laura drove off to Berlin to attend the incredible CTM festival. I was mostly looking forward to see WIFE play, and also d'EON. But this festival had so much more to offer! The visit was more about discovering new artists, which worked out pretty well. We were not only impressed by artists like Holly Herndon, Forest Swords or Kuedo (oh my, KUEDO!) but also the location itself, Berghain, which I had never been at, before. This place alone would make me wanna move to Berlin..maybe someday I will put these plans into action. 

But that was not all of the awesomeness we experienced. We also took part in a photo-tour through an abandoned sanatorium near Berlin, called Beelitz Heilstätten. Usually, trespassing is not aloud in this place, but there are guided tours which you can book here and you're allowed to take pictures within a generous timeframe of 5 hours. But you should probably choose a time in summer, to not freeze your hands off, like we did. ;)

Here is one of my favourite photos, make sure to check out the rest of them here. I'll keep uploading some more day by day until I get tired of it, I guess. ;)

Unfortunately, because I am a noob with DSLR cameras, I took most of the pictures with my mobile phone, so the quality is very low, but I am more practicing perspectives right now, and I guess the pictures are still worth looking at. :)

And as the headline already inclines, there are some more plans. I am going to England in March, more precisely, MANCHESTER! Huzzaah! And yes, I might take some pictures there, aswell. But the main reason for my visit is this.

Before last week, the line up was only HOLY OTHER and WIFE and "Special Guests". So I was wondering who could possibly add more awesome to this already perfect line up. I did know TOURIST before, but BEARCUBS is a completely new discovery and fits perfectly to the sound of HOLY OTHER and WIFE. It's just going to be superamazing, and would you look at that price please?! And may I remind you that I paid more than double the price to see HOLY OTHER play as support for Beach House here in Munich!?

I really do live in the wrong place, don't I? 

limitless.

I know, I announced this regular blog feature "introducing instagramers" and then totally neglected this blog. What a tease! But I really wanna catch up with it, so here's the next awesome instagram photographer.

Today I want to show you some incredible photographs by Evan James Atwood. There is not much I know about him, but the fact that he has a "365 challenge" which obviously seems to refer to the "a-shot-each-day-of-the-year-idea" and those compostions of him are among the most creative ones I have found on instagram. I really love the mood of his pictures, some of them are pretty creepy aswell. But just look for yourselves.

Check out all the other shots by @evanjamesatwood!

itchy feet.

I wanted to do this for a while now: showing you the reason(s) why I am in love with instagram, or more specificly its users. So I collected some pictures from my favourite photographers and I am going to introduce them to you in the following weeks.

The first artist I want to give an introduction about is @miltoncross and he pretty much already delivers what I love about following so many different strangers on instagram: the WANDERLUST. I, myself haven't been able to travel much in the last few years, but I have this constant desire of travelling as many foreign places as possible. My parents never shared this desire, so our holiday trip destinations never went across the german border. (ok, we were in Austria once, but come on!) When I was a teenager, I had the chance to see London, Paris, Budapest and Copenhagen without my parents. But not much has changed since then. I was always so jealous when my classmates in school were talking about trips to Spain, Egypt, Greece a.s.o. But hopefully this is going to change in the near future. Meanwhile I keep enjoying the many terrific moments captured by those pilgramers (as they call themselves) on instagram.

Check out all the other shots by @miltoncross!

ascension.

Last week my parents paid me a visit and we literally walked through the whole city. I took some pictures and wanted to share them with you. It actually looks like I've been on holidays, too, right? But the lake on the pictures is actually in the middle of the english garden in Munich.

I am also trying to improve my nutrition-style, encouraged by a friend of mine. Trying to reduce food to veggies and fruits (no raffinated sugar, no bread, ha, but I can tell you the last thing didn't work, yet) So I went to this market selling fruit that has already been sorted out by the supermarkets and bought lots of stuff for few money, and I took some prickly pears, because I never tried them and made the mistake, touching them with my bear hands. Yes I had heard before, that these little bitches sting, when my boss told me a story about plucking them with his bare hands, but I thought, they would be ridded of their prickles before sale, no? That's probably too demanding, huh?! Well, FYI, i can still feel some of them prickles on my hands, and I can assure you, the taste wasn't even remotely worth the pain!!

 In other news: I opened an account on instacanv.as where some of my Photos from Instagram are for sale. I thought, why not try it, and earn some money on the side. Click on the image below to visit the gallery.

lately.

You might have noticed, it has been a bit quiet around here the last weeks. I already mentioned, there soon might be some changes in my life, and to achieve these changes I had to invest some time, but on the weekends I still tried to enjoy my free time. And I wanted to share some impressions with you, I captured via Instagram. 

glow.

Yet, another eventful week has passed, and I am going to share some impressions with you sweethearts. Saturday last week I spent some time with my BFF and her sister again. First we went shopping and afterwards we enjoyed the evening sun at the Isar. We had hoped that not many others would be there, since there was a football game taking place at the same time, but it was crowded as hell, with wannabe vikings singing Manowar songs and other rather unpleasant people. But still it was a nice atmosphere. 

Then on monday I got an invitation for a hiphop show, once again, one of my friends, Laura, won tickets and she asked me if I wanna come. Sure I do! I had lots of fun with the main act, Gonjasufi, the atmosphere was great with all those people celebrating one of their musical heroes which I had never heard of before (shame on me!) But I was even more intrigued by Sun Glitters, the guy from Luxembourg who played as support act. Very nice tunes. But then again, it was rather sad, that the audience seemed not to be open-minded enough to enjoy an artist outside their favourite genre. 

Then, I don't know why, but people keep bringing me awesome foods, like cake and stuff, and I just can't refuse their offerings, can I? Oh, and apparently, right now I am enjoying clumsy times, I'll probably report about a huge mistake I committed, in my monthly review in a few days, but here I show you what happens, when you live in a really small place and have no space to put things, and then you put them in dangerous places and then shit happens. So the only wine glass I had (which I, by the way, stole from a bar that sold me a ridiculously overpriced drink, so I suspected the glass was inclusive, uhmmm yeah) broke into a thousand pieces.   

And here is a picture of a littly buddy, who went astray in my hallway and was my guest for several days. He didn't move an inch the first 48 hours, and I got a little worried. I opened the windows and hoped he would fly away but then he just moved from one wall to another. But finally, today he found his way out. I named him George, by the way. Farewell, Georgie! 

hexagons.

What an exhausting but awesome weekend that was! I had been looking forward to this for a while. Been excited since the day I heard of munich's light installation artists from Lunaland, planning their anniversary party in a special location, a factory where sleeping cars once had been built. (Among these, the famous Orient Express!) And I shrieked a little when I heard that ESBEN AND THE WITCH would be the headlining act to play on friday night. Some of you might remember that I declared their gig last year at Atomic Café in Munich as concert of the year.  And with this kind of venue and all the light effects I wouldn't have been surprised if that concert would be even better.

Another surprise was, that the band played lots of new tunes for the first time ever. There were three more bands this evening, all more or less from the shoegazer faction, but my attention was rather limited to EATW, I have to confess. 

While friday was pleasure for your ears, saturday was dedicated to the visuals senses. Next to two dancefloors there where lots of exhibitions by several local artists in the different parts of the factory. Among these were some psychologists who introduced a light therapy that was supposed to dissemble the perceptions of a mind under the influence of LSD. I tried an innocuous demo of 2 minutes (on friday), but I thought it was rather unspectacular. I wanted to try the longer and more intense version a day later, but the room was flooded with people and I couldn't imagine all of them watching while making this new experience. All in all I thought it was more amazing to watch, then to actually sit on the chair and have this extremely bright and flickering stroboscobic-like light on your eyes. And watching other people sitting there with that light just felt like you are right inside of a Lynch movie. Crazy shit. 

On sunday it was time for some music again. A little bit more quiet, this time. The team from innen.außen.raum invited three solo musicians, Woodpigeon from Canada, Halo of Pendor from the Netherlands (former Sweden) and dear Carlos Cipa from Munich. Carlos opened the evening with a simultaneous record release party and was stunned when people asked him to sign their copies. I also thought it was kinda sweet that his parents came to see him play. 

Then the swedish (dutch...whatever) guy played his sad songs, and messed up a little, with his loops but it was pretty easy to forgive him due to his cuteness. ;)

And the canadian guy was a little tired, and I still don't know why he kept checking his iPhone after every song, either was he checking the results of the football game that was running at the same time the concert took place, or he had his setlist on his phone, I dunno, but it didn't make a good impression.

Anywho! Here are some impressions of the weekend. If you weren't there you are probably a square, but at least you can imagine what you were missing! :P

To see more and fullsized images check this. All the images tagged with lunastrom10 are relevant.

surprise.

Now that I am highly addicted to instagram I want to share some photos on a weekly basis with you.

Up there you see the kitteh of my housemate who visited my apartment because obviously it was no good weather for playing outside.

Also, I ate a lot of cake this week. There was even a third piece I didn't take a picture of. Just for the record, it was a walnut tarte.

On tuesday, I went to the BEAR IN HEAVEN concert, which was, of course, amazing. I must be on a winning streak, I dunno, but again (as for the last concert with OBERHOFER & WHITE ARROWS) I won tickets for the show, very last minute style. More by accident, I found a contest online and wrote an e-mail, and 15 minutes later I got a notification, that I had won the tickets. That's pretty convenient considering all the upcoming shows in june (What's going on anyway, Munich?). So, because I saved some money with the tickets, I thought I could invest in the sweet bag shown above. 

And then yesterday, I had a suprise day off. I didn't know there would be yet another bavarian feast day as there already had been lots of them the last weeks. So I fixed a date with my BFF and her sister, and we spent some time in Munichs famous recreational park, the english garden, with it's surfer boys, some unbelievable red trees and a satisfying amount of FroYo.

brightness.

So this morning started a little moody with some self-doubts and stuff...until I found this on my work desk:

¡Arriba! ¡Arriba!

So yesterday I had a reunion with my BFF and we decided to have some cocktails, because drinking wine all the time is kinda boring, right? So we thought about what we could mix and Tequila Sunrise was the drink of our choice and so it happened that we accidently, without knowing it, celebrated Cinco de Mayo, haha!
Here are some photos from the evening, I wanted to share!

Before...

and after!

And as we both share a certain passion for glamourous cosmetics, we used the evening to unbox both of our monthly glossyboxes (this box full of surprise cosmetics) and of course had to test the goodies immediately. (Prepare for classic duckfaces, bitches!)

Excitement!!

Gracias por su atención! Or..you know, how it might be spelled correctly in spanish. :)

okay.

Oopsie, already a little late, am I? So what happened in the month of showers, besides...uhm..showers?

In a city, or rather a whole country of precaution, mistrust and paranoia (and unfortunately all these characteristics are a big part of my own personality) I was recognized and approached by a stranger, and not a drunken idiot mistaking me for a boy (oh, yes that happened) or a lusty old man...but by a like-minded individual!

But April also was a month of mobile phone apps. Next to instagram - which, after one and a half years of its apple exclusive existense, finally got released for the Android world - I was literally drawn to Drawsomething. Chances are good I might do an extra post about my favourite drawings!

Alright let's get right to the consumed goods of April 2012:

MUSIC DISCOVERY OF THE MONTH:

THE BOOKS I HAVE READ:

COLLISION by STEFNE MILLER

This one was a present by a dear friend, and I was a bit confused in the beginning, because of the mention of that shady organisation called The Invisible Children. Part of the book also takes place in Uganda, but as I continued reading, I was relieved, that this was not a missionary book at all, but  a story about two very different characters whose personalities first collide and then grow slowly towards something big and special. What I really liked about this book, and what made me rate it with the highest score was the narration style of the author and the way she put so much life into a story, I didn't at all think, I would be interested in. Well done. (5/5)

THE SCORCH TRIALS by JAMES DASHNER

The second book of the Maze Runner trilogy (I wrote about the first part in the March review) is packed full of tension and cliffhangers as the first one was. Until the last pages of the book you are not sure wether to trust this certain person that is literally mentioned as "the betrayer". And that kept me  just as riveted like it was with the first book. Nevertheless, all the why and who and what for questions still stay unanswered and I keep thinking, the third book better comes up with a conceivable explanation.  (4/5)

THE FAULT IN OUR STARS by JOHN GREEN

There should be only one sentence about this one. Best book ever. But as hyperbolical as it may sound, this wouldn't even make the grade. Oh, all the praise I think I am not even able to put into words. I already mentioned it some place else: I'd love to buy a dozen copies of this book and give it to every single one of my friends, so they won't miss this magnificent experience. I absolutely loved the sense of humor among these tragic figures. Two weeks passed after reading this book and I still miss Hazel Grace and Augustus Waters like they were my own friends. Perfect, perfect, perfect! 

(6/5 just because..)

WITHER by LAUREN DeSTEFANO

I must admit, it's probably not very easy for a follow up, after having read an amazing book as TFIOS. I thought about waiting for a week to start with the next book, but I had so many books I wanted to check out and the list isn't getting shorter. So I picked Wither right away and it was an easy read, dystopian themed again, but I just didn't find a way to sympathize with the main character, and the quite undeveloped storyline of humans not growing older than a quarter century, because of nasty genetical experiments committed their ancestors, was well...nothing really new and spectacular. (2/5)

THE MOVIES I HAVE WATCHED:

KING OF DEVIL'S ISLAND

A norwegian movie about a reformatory school in that existed in the 19th century. A very congenial main character who has a big influence on his fellow inmates who unlike him, seemed to have already accepted their fate with abusive and relentless wardens. (7/10)

TOMBOY

A story about a girl who wants to be a boy. Sensitively realized. I was especially impressed by the role of Laure's little sister.  (7.5/10)

UN PROPHÈTE

A very raw and rough impression about a young kid that seems to be born into a life that can only be delinquent and still he is trying to find his way out of it. Very intense, but worth watching. (8.5/10)

MARTHA MARCY MAY MARLENE

An interesting storyline about escapism and brainwash, I thought, but I believe the filmmakers could have made more out of it. And yes, the end was a little confusing. (6.5/10)

LES AMOURS IMAGINAIRES

I was stunned to hear, that, Xavier Dolan, playing the main character in this movie, also directed it. Friggin' 23 years old, he is! Say whaaat? I had my difficulties in the beginning, but liked it more and more towards the end. This movie is giving me the feeling that I am not alone with my doubts. (8.5/10)

RESTLESS

Once again a very good job by Mia Wasikowska, reminded me a lot to the story of John Greens "The Fault in Our Stars" but didn't touch me as much. (7/10)

CRACKS

A story about stubborn boarding school girls that envy their new classmate from spain, who seemed to have much more life experience than they could collect while being locked behind the borders of their school. Oh yeah, and Eva Green plays a role, too. (6.5/10)

X-MEN: FIRST CLASS

Ugh, I dunno, I thought this one was just reeeally ridiculous. Why do filmmakers always add the  character of the evil Nazi-villain to their stories? And Kevin Bacon talking german..being a native speaker, I didn't understand half of what he said. And Michael Fassbender...uhm bending that huge satellite receiver..? ughh.. (6.0/10)

AMERICAN BEAUTY

So apparantly I missed this classic. Very good acting by Kevin Spacey. But I have to admit, the main reason why I decided to watch the movie, was Wes Bentley...yeaahh..I know.. (8/10)

EASY A

Well..you just gotta like Emma Stone and her quirkiness. Cute movie, and her parents were just as adorable. (6.5/10)

tumbling backwards.

So here's a review of today in instagram pictures. (I actually wanted to boycott this app, when it was released for android, because of this douchebaggery but then I thought pissing all of this people off by using it, actually pleases me.)

So there was this big fleamarket (bavarians biggest, they say) in Munich, today, and I went with my best friend and her sister. I expected to end up going home with a handful of books, as usual, but I didn't find any interesting ones, only some that are already in my private library. But I was also looking for a picture frame for this WEEKEND movie poster Maria gave me as a present, and when I almost gave up, because the shapes and sizes and colors didn't match, I found the right one, yay!

Through the filters it looks a little yellowish, or even wooden, I guess, but it's actually golden, and I really really like it. I wasn't sure, at first, if it would match to the movie poster colours, but I think it's perfect. And from today on, it's the first thing I'll see when I wake up!

And the same vendor that sold the picture frame gave me that little cutie owl on the picture below for free, when I asked for the price. I still didn't figure out what kind of material it is made of, it looks very wooden, but it's really soft and fluffy.

As you can see, he is a little injured, missing half of his left eyebrow, but my ever growing owl family gave him a warm welcome.

Another thing I bought, was this rucksack. I kinda needed a new one (got my current one from the fleamarket aswell, last year, but I ruined the leather with a huge grease spot, hmpf). I feel a bit less guilty with this one, since it's not (fully) made of leather.

And then, also on the same day and spot in Munich there was this spring fair with all these carousels, and it got me kind of nostalgic, because I loved carousels when I was a kid (well, who didn't, right).
So got tempted and took a picture of the flying swing.

All in all an exciting day and I am pretty exhausted now.

heavy water.

Happy easter, to everyone who is celebrating. I'm just glad for four free days in a row, thanks to the jesus dude. I'm trying to use that time to revive my social life, especially with the friends that are too far away to spend enough time with them. So I am writing all the mails that stayed unanswered for a while now, always being ashamed that I never really find the time to answer right away. Girls and boys, I hope you know I feel very sorry about it. 

And on I go with the next entry for my art week project. Today I want to show the the Silver Prints series by Timothy Pakron. Again, you'll get to see a bunch of faces or versions thereof, I seem to be fascinated by faces and hands, you might have noticed that, if you have checked out my tumblr once or twice.  

The technique is very interesting and it is shown in this short documentary. 

guide to an escape.

Ignacio Torres is the name of the artist/photographer I want to introduce today. I absolutely fell in love with his STELLAR series. The basic idea behind this project is the following:

"This project began from the theory that humans are made of cosmic matter as a result of a stars death. I created imagery that showcased this cosmic birth through the use of dust and reflective confetti to create galaxies. The models organic bodily expressions as they are frozen in time between the particles suggest their celestial creation. In addition, space and time is heightened by the use of three-dimensional animated gifs. Their movement serves as a visual metaphor to the spatial link we share with stars as well as their separateness through time."

But see for yourself:

black diamonds.

Today's post is about a photographer. I guess you could call him a tumblr celebrity. His name is Billy Kidd and I love his expressional work. I think his decaying flower shots are my favorites.

♥

[...]

Matthew Kristall for Out Magazine

creatures of the night.

it was the best night eeeever! *

thank you for an awesome evening! 

pictures taken by Ricarda Klinkow and Yoko Miura

* Marshall Erikson

lindisfarne.

some interesting portraits via http://thiscitycalledearth.tumblr.com/

lovers.

share your love. not only today, but every day.