Rearly Yeview 2025 Part 2: 2025

I spent the majority of this year undertaking the sisyphean task of laying infill brick on the internal walls of the big house.... alone. With fingers heavy and swollen after each days toil, I was unable to ticky tacky on my keyboard without producing enormous welts betwixt my fingers. And so the blog sat dormant, neglected, waiting... For now! Those days are behind me, and my lithe fingers are sprung, and flit spastically across the keyboard from ` to / and back again to produce this unreadable nonsense and fill a small space between the beginning of the post and its contents. And for that, and for - despite my best efforts - all ten of them, I am eternally grateful. These photos are in no particular order. clicky picky to make it biggy. 

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Yearly Review 2025 Part 1: 2024

I didn't post a review in 2024 because blogger would rather you *trigger warning suicide* killed yourself than upload more than one photo at a time. Clicky piccy to make it biggy.

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It's all a facade

Courtesey of Dan

Started this mid 2025 now getting around to posting it. I cannot be held accountable for the views held in this piece as it was a different time. Everyone said things like this back then, it was normalised. But it was wrong then and it is wrong now. For the sake of the historical record these views have not been edited because to do so would be to claim that they had never existed. 

The hut I live in now didn't always look this good. You know how terifying a face looks without skin on it? Oh you didn't watch those videos when you were younger... Well it doesnt look healthy. And that's all to say that with the guts of this building on display it didn't look great either. I've been re-evaluating a few opinions recently. Confronted with a German visa process that requires you to specify exactly what you are, i've had to do just that. Jake of all trades has been the working title for a while, but that just won't cut it out here. Here you're a carpenter, or an electrician, or a stonemason, or a plasterer, or a toe tickeler, and nothing but. This means that the quality of work is high but also parochial. I had a conversation recently about how language shapes the individual, and it's hard not to draw the a line between the precision of the german language, and the specificity required in so many facets of german life. For example in english you might say "I saw them fall on the stairs" when describing how you saw someone fall on the stairs. In german the same sentence would not be complete unless it described whether they fell up or down the stairs, where you yourself were standing when you witnessed the action (at the top or bottom of the stairs), the colour of the stairs themselves, and of course the date, weather, and your age the day it happened. I wish i was exaggerating. They get off on this level of precision. The more precise you are, the more likely a german is to respond 'Geil' which literally means 'horny', or 'i am horny and want to fuck'... don't let them tell you otherwise. How did we get here? Re-evaluating opinions? well in all honestly the specificity of the german language has nothing to do with the facade, but it is important information, and remember the geil thing when you're here. The opinion I was re-evaluating was actually to do with facades in general. When i was at Uni and a wanker, i was all about 'honesty of form'. That basically just means not finishing my work. I think 'finishing' as a concept is a little misleading because in my mind these things were finished, but in a sort of confrontational, fuck paint, fuck sanding, sort of way. It meant that if it wasn't functional, it wasn't neccesary. I wasn't trying to hide what i'd made behind a beautified facade, because that felt like a form of deceit that actually alienated people from the process of making. When you can see how something is made, you can begin to understand it, and perhaps engage in those processes yourself. It was around this time i got super into transparent enclosures, often seen on electronics in the 90's. I guess having written that all out, I do still agree with myself to an extent. But the truth of the matter is that finishing, to a large degree, is actually functional. Wood is sanded, painted or stained, to protect it, and make it nicer to handle. Metal is oiled or blued to prevent rust. A facade is placed on a building to protect it's innards. Florid decoration is perhaps another matter, but my opinion is changed there too. Decoration is fun. it's an opportunity for free expression that more easily crosses the boundary between craft and art. Perhaps precisely because it's functionality is less apparent, and more closely aligned with the undefinable qualities of feeling that art taps into. Perhaps this is also why, ironically, the less functional a piece of design is, the more intriguing and 'art worthy' it becomes. I'm thinking of marc newsoms lounger, and that stark teapot.. I don't think i'm naive enough not recognise the tradition that these objects come from, particularly the lounger which has a kind of eileen gray one off visionary energy to it. I imagine it in the woodlined office of a 30's airline magnate with a coked out flapper lying on it. a vision of the future from the past... jesus where's marc newsoms dick when you need it?

Boy would i love to make tea with this chair!

boy would i love to sit on this teapot!

What happened there? Anyway the facade is a prototype for the big house so I tried two different widths on the front board. I prefer the wider board as it's just the standard 14cm width cut straight down the middle. It also does a better job of covering the nails that are holding the board underneath on. I'm very pleased with the metal work, and the window frame frame. Neither job is particularly complicated but I certainly made it appear otherwise. This is the burden the generalist has to bear. It takes a long time to get good at something you don't do consistently! anyway lets look at some photoes.  

Cute yeah, but also an example of the green shit the hut was wrapped in before i moved in.

Rat proofing

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greenhouse and an acceptable level of bodge

I tried so hard, I came so far, but in the end... Does it even matter? Who knows? Staring down the barrel of another portfolio I remembered without ever forgetting that the blog was supposed to replace all that. direct people to the blog, give people the blog, show people the blog, wipe your ass with the blog. No more posts about how i should be making more posts. 

How about posts about making a greenhouse. Boy I've been slacking. Daan and I finished the greenouse months ago. He probably did more work than i did. He definitely did. But i did plenty too. What to say about it... lots of glass. glass on glass. Insulated glass. I like Daan's flow. He doesn't get caught up on the minutae. When the beds started bulging Daan did not rectify the bulging beds, so now the beds buldge. But that's not really a problem. Does it piss me off sometimes? I guess all of these slight bodges do grow malignant somewhere deep in my psyche and reveal themselves during confusing bouts of unpredictable violence, but that's fine too. I realised today whilst working on the facade for the hut, that there's a level of bodge (poor work) i'm ok with. There's even an aesthetic bodge, craftmanship anti-style. But most of the time i look and i think "what are we doing here?". Take the time to do it right and the time it takes to do it right will take less time next time.. yaknow? that's my thinking. Might take a lifetime to get there though. and sometimes you don't have that long. So whatever, in this greenhouse there's an acceptable level of bodge. Some make-do's, some improv's, a screw projecting from a beam at head height. that sort of thing. Humble, human, how's about we see some pics.

head scratcher

washers to hold uprights

Daan's Door

Stupid way to hang a light

clever way

spring light

spring chicken

good night!

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Unfinished Business

If you like them i wrote them. If you don't i've been hacked...

-

I feel like I’ve been hired as an actor on an enclosed facility for demented people. As a labourer in a fake town dedicated to giving my boss the impression that he's a successful architect, instead of a man whose brain resembles Swiss cheese. We’re all facilitating this lunacy by being here, and by all of us I basically mean Christoph and I. Up until recently I was under the impression that he thought all of this was normal, and that this Sisyphean task somehow spoke to his prior life as an artist. But yesterday in broken English and clandestine DeepL correspondence I found a brother in arms. Or perhaps another inmate. “He’s unable to let go” he writes, I write back, “one man’s dream is another man’s nightmare”. And so the days drag on, in the midst of confusion. I’ve taken to calling the site, the gym, because all I seem to do there is pick heavy shit up and put it down again someplace else. Sometimes I move the same thing three or four times as though I’m rearranging a room for the bastard whilst he fantasises about the ways in which we might reincorporate a literal ton of rubble back into the building, totally ignoring the fact that the building is itself just a slightly more coherent pile of rubble. During my ‘interview’ he points to a precarious brick arch in the building more than once, it’s clearly a favourite. His voice softens imperceptibly when he talks about it. On my first day of work I knock it down. It being the only entrance to the full bowels of the site. It’s the first step I would have thought obvious to an architect. The next is covering the building once the roof that has been rotting for three years is pulled down. A point I try and make subtly whilst the clay walls in my backdrop literally wash away. In a bizarre attempt at compromise I build a roof that covers the top of the westerly walls but prevents the possibility of restoration, foreshadowing the ultimately pointless nature of my work. I’m saving what, for whom, for when? I’m a human digger, Imitating the noises. relying on parasocial relationships with the hosts of the endless podcasts I consume as I work, in lieu of actual company. Felix offered a week’s respite. He wasn’t getting paid so I took that as an excuse not to work too hard myself. I didn’t want him to feel guilty. Drinking beers and smoking cigs around the scarily large bonfire we lit every single night to clear the waste wood, he tells me it’s not so bad. Three beers deep on the job it’s hard not to agree. He’s older than me and tells me that having the place to myself, and managing the site, that I’m learning more than I expect, I’ve got it good. Well not good, but we’ve spent the past three hours throwing gasoline on wet timbers, daring the shocking ignition to leap back into the gas canister and blow us apart. It’s certainly getting more common for me to have some likely premonition of imminent injury before I do something that would totally justify it. I’m expecting to lose a finger in the coming months at least. I suppose it’s better than being in an office. 

-

Something dark is happening in the city tonight..

“Ich brauche Hilfe!” , he shouts into the open door of the bus to which the Slavic indifference of the drivers “no no no” blunts his desperation, and he runs off into the estate with a friend to what, I don’t know. Why were we even stopped there? not a hundred metres from where we were picked up two hours late, the recent amputee and I. He lost his lower leg in a traffic accident, and I wonder how long it has taken him to get back on the horse, to Frankfurt and on to Basel. For both hours, he sat in his wheelchair staring into the road, lighting the occasional spliff, and answering my questions cryptically in English that sounded better than it was. I even left to get a pint because the silence was overbearing, and found him exactly where I'd left him, a lighthouse lit between his lips. Now we’re both careening along the glitterball highway and I can hear the truckers talking to each other in my teeth, and when I do fall asleep I’ll be awoken by some jolt in the road bouncing my head off the glass into Paris and I’ll have to face my irrational fear of the French.  

He’s staring at the back of my head the entire way to Frankfurt, unless by coincidence he happens to be looking straight at me every time I turn to check if he is in fact staring at me. “yes, yep” I think as I whip my head back around towards the seat in front. He seems to be rawdogging the whole trip, and the back of my head. He hasn’t looked at his phone once, and I'm not convinced he actually has one. I know he’s not a bad man, although by all accounts a very unlucky one, and we whisper a cordial, “goodbye”, “good luck” to one another as he hops down the bus stairs and into his mystery.  

-

Talking to Peter about my camera, and he’s just listening to the lens whine out, and then in, as he presses the on/off button. “Do you mind if I do it again?”, he says as he holds his ear up to the camera. “That’s all I need”, he says, grinning and stoned. Me too actually. Stoned and grinning that is. Peter tells really good stories, and because I like and admire the man, I try to tell some too. Mine are never as good, and betray a need to feel entertaining when I should just enjoy feeling entertained. What follows is not a story, but rather a rambling collection of thoughts I had reflecting on a journey I’ve taken with photos. 

I used to take photos and never get them printed. Just negatives and scans. Until, just over a year ago, I started going to a different developer. Admiring the skylark printed seven times in as many formats stuck to the window, I decided to start getting my pictures printed. Standard photo size. 4x6”. This was definitely a step in the right direction. Although I didn’t realise it at the time, it seems clear to me now that due to the logic of the medium, the result should be physical, not virtual. But I didn't go far enough. The printed pictures still sat in the same little folder I got from the developers. Always the same, regardless of developer, since at least the eighties, regardless of decade. And in there they sat, faring no better than the scans on my computer. I must have gotten the idea of photo albums from my grandma. I often instigate, and never tire of flipping through a photo album with her as she points to grandpa's dad, my mum when she was my age, someone’s wife who’s the son of someone else… “They’re dead now”, she’ll say. 

I was going to flea markets a lot last summer, rifling through another countries' junk, and finding a lot of photo albums. But not a lot of empty ones. I suppose it is quite understandable that the seller isn’t interested in literally disposing of their own memories. But it is a little awkward for the buyer who, the seller must presume, will be binning their family later, or worse, ‘treasuring their memory’. I was never able to bring myself to purchase a photo album full of someone else’s memories. I wouldn’t want to have to burn them. Not whilst knowing full well that one day my album will sit suggestively in a crate, posing the same question. In the end Grandma gave me an album. With sleeves ‘standard photo size’ and no room for captions. I didn’t expect to like it, but fewer choices means less pressure, and I’ve enjoyed filling it out and seeing the photos full bleed next to each other, becoming more than the sum of their parts.

-

A Polaroid attached to the staircase of a bar  with two men drinking what appears to be whisky sours. Both incredibly handsome, although one slightly more so, winks at the unknown viewer. The man on the left has a slightly reddened face, which upon first glance, appears to be from inadequate sunscreen, but is actually due to a gluten intolerance and previously consumed beers. A picture of an unknown woman’s mugshot hangs to the right. The caption under the photo of the boys reads, LIAM + JAKE 4 EVER. They would never meet again.

-

Chess club is being held at the official club room, instead of the wood panelled cafe this Friday. We enter the small dimly lit room with chess themed inspiration posters on the walls, that say threatening things like, “In a noisy world make your moves silently, until it is time to say checkmate.” All of which are in English, and probably indecipherable to the children the club caters to. Wilhelm von Ottos’ booming voice is disagreeing matter of factly with the teacher's assessment of the computer's analysis of the game being projected on the wall. W.V.O* as he is affectionately known behind his back, is worthy of initialisation largely due to his otherworldly presence. The subject of legends whispered in hushed voices at the back of tournament halls. Rumoured to have beaten a man by opting not to wear his false teeth and drinking a large coffee, his opponent unable to focus on anything other than the large wet stain emerging upon his shirt under his regularly wetted and dripping moustache. I can personally attest to his twice yearly shower, having experienced both the musty regularity of his person, and the eye-watering intensity of his aftershave after a wash, obviously intended to last the next six months, and strong enough to literally telegraph his presence through walls. He is of course, very good at chess, 1700 ELO for those that makes any sense to, and by his own admission does nothing else but watch, play, and analyse chess games. And yet he is not the clubs best player, and is regularly bested by a socially well adjusted doctor that drives a BMW.

My own chess playing is characterised by an ability to blunder any conceivable advantage away. Blundering in chess, as in any other facet of life, is a move with zero redeeming qualities and obvious negative ones. I play them to keep myself grounded. 

* in German this is pronounced phonetically as vee fow oh

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More poems

Another year of poems, and i'm not sure if they're getting better. more serious maybe. Last year was about the hof, and being in this new world, and trains, from here to there and back again. This year, or at least the latter half of it that i can comment on from memory, has been about the forest. These poems are pretty much arranged back to front, the first poem being the most recently written. The last poem is really a faded snapshot of a period this year that i didnt enjoy. The poem is perhaps the best thing to come of it. However in it I see what has become a compulsion to write about the countryside. It is nothing more than a desire to describe this place, and to give in a small way to anyone that cares to listen, how it makes me feel. It makes me feel like a full, and bulging balloon. Like a courting pigeon with a puffed breast strutting through paradise. I cannot believe my luck in having found this forest and in being totally free to explore it all alone. In this perfect loneliness i talk to all of you, and i wish you were here to see it with me. Or i take this loneliness as a blessing and i'm with the crows and other shy friends that write to me in the dirt. The winter is rolling in, and all I know is that things are changing. I won't be able to keep my fire lit, and the single paned windows will suck my room dry. The cold will  get into my bones, ill jangle along to the toilet where the water still runs, half man, half icicle, and i'll jangle back again to thaw off, pressed agaisnt the glass of the oven. Nothing will dry! I will shower once a week, i'll forget how to talk, i'll smile sparingly to conserve energy. And then when the fresh leaves spring from beach trees, and you all come to see me, you'll see what a pale imitation this all is in light of the forest. I'll be reborn, having learned again the essence of seasonal myths, and will smile giddily at purple fir cones, erect on their branches, in ecstasy under the checkered rays of the sun. Until then..   

Birthday poem 

28 in the wg

UFO out the window 

We are not alone! 

Pigeons crows and kittyhawks 

25 pushups by the mouse traps 

Put on my birthday suit for a scalding hot shower 

For the woman in me 

2 in 1 Sport dusche for the man 

Shoes shined 

Chin tanning 

You can see me from space

Nothing better! 

A walk on tempelehofer 

Nothing better!!

Man cycles past with a stogie strutting from his lips 

Dogs rolling in shit 

Making it look so good 

I might join them 

And the wind sock’s got a chub on 

Head long into it 

It’s pulling tears from my eyes 

That rollerblader makes it look like the tarmacs moving 

Whilst she stands still 

Don’t imagine it 

I’ll tell you 

It’s not all sunshine in this world 

Not now 

Not ever 

But I’ll nurture my piece of it 

Have to

Can’t not 

In light of darkness 

Happiness is the small resistance 

Gravity is the weakest force 

Honesty is a sword 

And sincerity is a shield 

Don’t let me spell it out for you 

Tell me if I’m teaching you to suck eggs 

Have a birthday 

Treat yourself 

-

Love permeates 

It oozes through you 

And love reciprocated 

The sweetest kind 

Is soaked up 

Like a sponge pushed hard against a bowlful 

And slowly let go 

-

If you’re looking for god

Look in the lightning 

Now as then

Blooming faster than the eye can see across the clouds 

Nothing happens in a concrete box 

But outside where the trees sway, 

And confection is lamp lit in the flash 

The fire breathes heavy in fresh water and casts it wildly around 

Until the ribs of trees remain glowing thirstily in the rain

-

A thousand leaves fall

And put the forest to bed 

The field lays fallow 

Beneath clover 

And the wild boar wallow in it 

Nothing turns grey 

Even the dead stems of grasses pull hues of golden blue from the light 

And what’s left of the beeches coat 

Clings to it 

Against the wind 

When will the last leaf fall?

Green still, orange and yellow 

Cascading down branches fluorescent with moss 

A breeze urges a single leaf onto its tide 

And it takes the stage

It flips along the air, dancing to thin birdsong 

On its way to greet the earth below 

To be played by my boots 

The belly of the beast is rumbling down there

Never sated 

Forever hungry 

Stay there I say

Come no closer 

-

ill ill ill 

push through my bones 

So my marrow sloshes around 

Like the sand in an hourglass 

My head 

If it is still my head 

Flops forward and backward 

Like the natwest bulldog 

-

A bowl

Round like the earth

And made from it 

Is

Already filled 

And impossible to empty

-

Wind come find me on The Rennsteig 

As the horses lead each other by the tail 

Dare me to push on against you and I will 

The bay and black mare stand amongst 

Their freshly mown lawn,

The trees cling to their green leaves 

The crickets ring their bells 

Tonight among thousands

As if nothing ever changes

-

I’ve had to stop and look 

At that slope

mouth spilling over

The buzzard circling over its brow

Until it stops where it chooses 

Letting the wind blow over its still wings 

Keeping it afloat

And motionless

The wind and the bird

And the trees and the shrub and the grass 

Blowing in it too

A westerly

Dragging the manes of the horses 

And its fingers across the heads of wheat tops like the velvet on piano cushions

It pushes leaves against each other in the tree tops 

And the cascade 

Can you hear the individual leaf rustle among the thousands 

The winds instrument playing to you 

And there the lone fox is hopping

Towards the young broilers adjusting in the barns endless night 

Soon to be strutting around their cage 

Behind the counter 

For the hawk and fox 

Who don’t pay for their food yet have expensive taste

Bums for the finer things in life

-

I slide the cup of my foot

Onto your cool calf 

And roll it over and back again 

To soak up the cold side of your pillow 

And my knees thigh rests below your cheeks

As the fan sings  

To the heat of the night 

-

Panna Cotta fields  

Yellow top and blue stems 

Poppys red in purple fields of wheat 

Uckermarkt fields 

Bachelors button, chicory ultramarine 

On a navy sweater 

‘Blau Blumen sind normalerweise giftig’ 

Ist das wahr? 

‘Isst du!’ 

He says over and over 

The bosses son 

Grass and daisy’s 

She collects a light bouquet for Mutti 

‘Tot tot tot total langweilig!’ 

Just grasses and yarrow 

Thin, and of course perfect 

Unexpectedly lacking in colour 

Held tight to save the arrangement 

Because a bouquet must be carried 

Held from the moment it’s picked

To the moment it’s given 

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