Berlin, Day 1 and 2...

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I’m here, and stoked! My friend Phil Skaller (composer, pianist, and fellow PhD student in Integrative Studies at UCSD) and I have sublet an apartment in Berlin for August. It is a 100 plus year old building, our flat is owned (and decorated) by someone who is obviously both a devout punk rocker and a devout catholic(!). It is in the beautiful Kreuzberg district with cafes, pubs, stores, full of artists and musicians. It really is nice. (On a total side note, I am very intrigued by the security technology of our apartment, with these funky old giant skeleton keys to get in and out, you unlock from one side, and in unlock mode, the only way you get the key out is to push it through to the other side of the door, and then turn it again. Try figuring that out with jet lag…)

BTW, flights over here were, eh, flights, fine and uneventful until take-off from London (in an Airbus 319) it was nuts. 60 seconds in the air and we hit big turbulence, followed by a huge drop that elicited screams from passengers, then the pilot slams on the throttle and the jet jumps…never experienced anything like it. The cowboys of Southwest Air have nothing on what I presume are former RAF fighter pilots of British Airways. Regarding the Airbus, my landlord, a professional jet pilot, says, “If it ain’t Boeing, I ain’t going.” I felt that way in that Airbus thing.

Anyway, I’m here to work and gig…work involves preparations for my qualifying exams, and I’ll be gigging with my friend Roy Carroll, Phil and hopefully some others. Then comes September 1 and I move on to Amsterdam for three weeks, which will include, in addition to my STEIM residency (more on that later) a trio with Michael Moore and Michael Vatcher, which I am also very much looking forward to.