an alpine rendezvous

ingredient list:
50 academics/pedagogists/PhD students
3 teachers
3 nervous undergraduate students
a team of cute submissive students
1600 wires, any color*
a wide diversity of ideas (5 or 6, max)
7 handfuls of laptop
5 cups of meta
a buffet
30 clementines
a bootful of snow, boot included
1 part "i'm not advocating for the destruction of schools, it's just..."
6 more than 2 many cigarettes, handrolled

the recipe:
add 12% german people in authentic bavarian dress. mix with beer and pour into a boot. then spit in it and pour it out of the boot into your throat, toe up (this is the trick for splashing it all over yr face/being a true bavarian man). vom it all back up and add the rest of the ingredients. put it all into a seminar room. mix until thoroughly beaten and sufficiently nebulous. pour in all other ingredients. if the 1 part radicalism is still chunky, extract grant money from the bootcider. climb a mountain. find a torch. drink gluhwein, sprinkle liberally with jokes about blondes, bitches, and whores, untranslatable words in french/spanish/german/portugese....and have a rendezvous. add web 2.0 if desired. enjoy with contradictions!

deLICious.

emily and i arrived here, in garmisch-partenkirchen, on tuesday morning by train and then a long walk down hauptbahnhofstrasse. garmisch is a tinyish town, super touristy/expensive looking, full of ads for permanent anti-aging makeup and hats for ruddy aryan men and their sons. we-ord yo. the hotel perched, full of precarity, on a hill by a ski jump. this guy named gerhardt gave a pretty sweet lecture on "cultures of participation" and how the education/university system produces this discontinuity between passive learning and then the expectation of self-motivated learning/living. lots of graphs and shit here. they're kind of pretty i guess...still amazing to me that people do this stuff full timeish. (that is, transcribing, coding, studying cooperation and collaboration in technology/educational settings...etc.) and i think i forgot about how just absurdly some people can question and jest about women's intelligence and all these smart smart people being so dumb dumb in some ways. don't try to tell me that "that's what she said" is a feminist joke, asshat. that night at the bar almost made me sick/cry, i didn't know what to do and then people were turning to me, "so how do you feel about this? what's the difference between sex and sexuality? why? how do you tell if it's time to clean the kitchen? is this a sexist/racist joke? if i tell a racist joke it means i'm NOT racist, you know? do you hate men? oh don't talk about that now there's a feminist in our midst."
dumb dumb dumb. come on. i forget to expect this from the world sometimes.

i do like the mountains here though. looking at them, that is. and there's a fair amount of snow; when we climbed up to the top, there was a ton of snow and lots of free food. i still stick things in my pockets, collect clementines and rolls for later or maybe tomorrow...mmmmm.

the workshop-y stuff today was kind of cool and kind of exhausting. my presentation is over and i survived. i have a lowlowlow tolerance for sitting still for a long time, so i squirmed a lot, slept a little bit, and had a lot of cigarettes and munched in the lobby with the student organizers from LMU. i've slept like 4 hours in the past 2 days...was up till 5 or so last night finishing up this presentation. blech blech blech.

but now it's done! i'm in a working group on "design principles for a utopic educational setting" tomorrow and then head back to munchen to hang with christian for another day and then to homeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee. this presentation was freaking me out--> not sleeping, kind of panicking all the time about how much i have to do. in lieu of weed [zum kiffen] to manage my stress, i've been breathing a lot and collecting moments of ecstatic calm...now i have a lot to write/do but blah blah blah.

wow i loved reading the baohaus housemeeting notes. you guyz. i'm missin you allz (official baohausers and otherwise)...speaking of which, where's corey?

xxxich-will-auf-dein-gesicht-spitzenxxx
that squiddly dutched-up batface homofreak


*must be produced by Mac

plenum und barbaren

hello fellow squids,
i find myself on a couch in schwabing-west, afloat in my head up to my ears.

i made it to the airport on friday in high spirits. the stewardpeople on lufthansa just kept offering us glass after glass of wine and then brandy/bailey's...absurd. e, my travelbuddy and "colleague," fainted twice on the plane for mysterious, possibly malarial reasons but we landed without catastrophe. couldn't find a way to call our couchsurfing host, christian, so we just showed up at his house which worked out okay after all.

that night, we went to the ludwig-maximillian-universitat where the students are striking, occupying the main student center (which is fucking echoingly huge) to demand free university education, democratization of education. in the plenum, they were also talking a lot about "bildung" vs "ausbildung"--something like self-edification/intellectual nourishment vs job training. tons of universities across germany, austria, and some of the university of california schools are occupied.

this place had been occupied ("besetzt") for about 2 weeks and this weekend i happened to walk into the international students' plenum on education reform. classes are stopped and apparently the students have a right to protest there (or so i was told), which is why they haven't been forcibly removed. i talked to a lot of people about their participation and why there is little organizing of a student movement (at uchicago, or among lots of schools, or internationally) in the US. of course a lot of it is privatization--how much can you protest when you've paid, or someone has paid, so much money for you to be at that institution? the accountability of administration and investors to the students and faculty is also clearly quite different at private US universities as compared to here in munich.

anyway, it was a pretty amazing thing to see...so many signs, people (a huge lecture hall full...maybe 300, 400? more?), lots of crusty-looking freaks and queermos and lots of "normal-looking" and impassioned kids...and all of this discussion about the facticity of science and what the purpose of the university is, whether happiness matters...happening openly, in the main lecture hall of the school with no "adults" in sight.

so yeah, that was cool. then some band started playing and e, jeanne, christian and i danced on the desks and drank and talked to kids. we did a radio interview...i'll let you know if i can ever find it online.

today, sunday, e and i slept till about 3p.m. and christian made pfannkuchen/german pancakes and then we wandered to this huge art/market festival (tollwood...some kind of semiannual thing) and i liberated So Much. it was the perfect setting--huge crowds, tiny booths, overpriced beautiful things...mmmm. i have some new little instruments for our house. then we found our way to this place that was doing reggae/jazz-improv (lelz you were basically there with me but you would have been able to jump onstage). also the walls in this place were fucking sick...there was a huge octopus (picture forthcoming), vomiting panda bears, lots o little buddies and tags [howyousayuhhhh] out the wazoo...

all in all, it's great to be speaking german, great to talk to other people who are traveling or working or doing cool stuff, push away some of my anxiety and come face-to-face with other anxieties (hrmhrmfinals, these things "queer" and "radical," what is awkwardness, the place of art in my life). i am missing the baohaus like woah and my attachments to people in general. i have so much of you inside of me.

love,
eliot

more info on the LMU occupation if you're interested
someone at the plenum talked about this site for int'l student movement