Recently in filofax pages Category

Friend:"I just looked at what I sent to the publisher last year and it does not feel quite as good as it felt when I wrote it."
Witold:"Wonderful. This simply means that you are moving ahead. Your judgement is growing, you are able to refine your perception. Imagine it were the other way round. You would read some of your older material and it would be much better than your current writing. Now that would be depressing..."

I realized that many of my observations are scattered across many books and sketchbooks on shelves here in New York and in Germany. Some pretty nice pieces are on harddrives somewhere under furniture, some of the material is in the old Apple Mail format that died with System7.
The depressing part is that some fragments of it are much better than what I am writing now, at least as ideas, or at least it feels this way for me. Either way, a slightly depressing discovery. Regressing is not something I wanted to start now. I know that my brain is not the fresh information sponge it was when I was 22, but boy...
What I will try to do now is to add some of the older entries, some of the stuff that was written before there was a world wide web.
Much of the old material is in German, but I will just make it English, at least as much as possible. My handwriting is really so bad at times that I will probably never find out what the past me wanted to say...
Now back to the archives... oh, and I will try to keep things clean. The younger me was, obviously more fascinated by daring expressions of sex and rocks and rolls... To read that stuff, one will still need to get hold of my paper records...
Keeping this point of view under layers of coded images... (Or did you really think I was talking about flowers and animals here?)

(as i was stroking Oliver's hair, to calm him down a tiny bit, i only noticed that they were very short, as if they had been just cut. It was a bit odd. I looked at him, saw his long hair, and yet my hand was stroking a short haired head. Not only were they short, they seemed somehow sticky. It was definitely not my place to check the length of his hair, now in front of the entire class. The feeling was very odd.
It was a week later that I happened to see the back of his head by accident. I also happened to remember how strange it felt to stroke his hair.
His back was mainly marked by a very large S. It was a scar from one of his many brain operations. It looked as if somebody had used skin colored clay and placed it into the shape of an S into a shaved area on the back of the boy's head. His hair did not want to grow fast enough to cover the area, it seemed.
He needed a drainage operation avery 6 months, as far as I remember...

I almost kissed the tree as I was trying to make out its scent. Nature in Baden Baden is still so wonderfully real.
I realize that I know much too little to be able to actually see the world around me. I also realize that at the same time I might just know too much to understand it. How much of my so called "knowledge" of the world is actually based on completely wrong assumptions, lies and results that only came to life because of some political stunts? 30%, 50%, 80%?
Reasoning might be a good way to win a game of Chess. The world here around me is a completely different game. The rules are much less defined, much less clean, than most of us assume.
I feel so lucky that I am alive. Incredibly happy too.
This entry is so confused because I am very much aware that it will remain very private. I do not think that there will be computers any time soon that will be able to read my handwriting. My handwriting is just such a chaotic scribble.
This here could also be that the paper here contains enough acid to self-destruct. The ink might also just fade away.
This make this entry of any importance for me now only. It appears that it matters most that I am able to enter it now, not that it will survive this particular moment.
(I can only assume that I wrote this entry in the hotel right above SWF in Baden-Baden...)

I am somehow completely relaxed. It appears that I am pretty much in demand these days and this is a really good thing. Watched "Unsere Nachbarn" in Polish at 9am. (for our non German readers... Unsere Nachbarn, "Our Neighbours" is German tv programming in foreign languages.)
After that... THis might have been the laziest day of the year so far. I just hung around. Did absolutely nothing.
Okay, I went shopping. But I was not the creator of the shopping list, so it does not count... Tissues, kitty litter and the like.
I have not replied to anybody, did not clean the apartment, did not think of anything new. (Not quite sure if I did any kind of thinking.)
Okay, I drew a little. I drew a gigantic LEGO logo, if anybody would like to know. But who would like to know?
I am pretty much out of the loop. I have no continuity in my drawings.
I am not even sure what will happen next. Not sure how I could possibly continue. I have spent much too much time in front of the Mac. And then there are these 3D animations for Siemens. Please forget about those. Then the cover for the Berendt Book, Hinuebergehen...
It appears that I am being pulled deeper and deeper into this whole design/typography circus.
I would like to do my own stuff, within the constrains of these... but it is pretty darn difficult. I am pretty insecure. I have barely any ideas, know what I do not want to do, but when I do not want to do it in a specific way?... Not sure...
All tough. This is pretty bad.
I need some distance, a better vantage point...
Maybe take a year off, maybe two years.
See everything with a fresh set of eyes.
Why am I getting myself into this whole graphic design thing anyway? What am I thinking? Who needs this computer stuff. "Behinderung durch Technik."

One has to avoid to have any high expectations from one's art. One should not even ever expect to make "art". Work has to be effortless, or it needs to be perfected well enough that it becomes effortless.

Results <=> SemiResults <=> results <=>...

Brian Eno had some quite specific requests... we knew that this shooting would be great fun. We loved his new record, the design looked really great, as far as I remember...
His requests, once he arrived at the studio, were rather brilliant...
And I will never forget how he ended up shooting himself...
What a man...

what is ahead of me appears clearer.
and yet it appears darker and darker...

Do not even remember if I tried to hit my mother. All I remember is the story she told after I might have tried. It appears to be a story which has traveled through generations, leaving a trail of fearful little children.
My mother spoke very softly, my eyes were wide open. It was the middle of the day, but it could have been midnight...
"Once upon a time there was a little boy, just like you. He thought that he could just hit his mom. His own mother!
She only warned him not to do it, but he tried it again and again.
Just a short time after he tried hurt his mom, he died. Nobody knew why.
His mom was very sad and would come to his grave very often, to cry.
One day, his mom noticed that there was a very strange plant growing out of the center of the boy's grave. She looked closer and discovered that it was the boy's left hand growing out of the soil." (I am left handed, that's why she used "left hand".) "She tried to cover the hand with flowers, or to put something on it, but no matter what she did, the hand which tried to beat her, would always grow out of the boy's grave."
We all know that at this point I am holding my own left hand, scared to death.
"The mother did not know what to do. She had forgiven the boy, but obviously this was not enough.
She asked a wise woman what was there she could do to get rid of this hand on the grave and the wise woman gave her the exactly right advice.
One night, when there was a full moon, the mother came to the grave of the boy. She brought a large stick. She beat the hand so hard that it turned all black and blue..."
Not sure if this was the moment when I started crying...
"When she came to the grave on the following day, the had had withered away and was a dry looking thing, like an old broken branch. This branch could then easily be covered..."
I definitely cried here... Very scary story...