(Explanation: this blog entry was written over several days so don´t get confused, I started Saturaday, continued on Sunday and finished it now Monday morning)
And a very special welcome to my congregation, Hi! to Emily, Josara, Julia, Cord, Daniel, Andrew, Scott, Bill and Jan from an extremly tired author. Fucking hell, I got up Friday morning at 5.50am and had one hour of sleep Friday night but due to caffeine I am still technically awake. Let me emphasise that it only technical so if the following doesn´t make any sense or isn´t as brilliant as usual it´s due to my lack of sleep...
Firstly I want to thank all of you who liked my childhood paintings and now that I know why I didn´t like them initially I am changing my mind and making my peace with my early artworks. Several of my readers asked me why I had such a negative attitude towards my own childhood paintings and that got me thinking, why indeed do I have such a negative attitude towards those paintings. I mean I was just a child when I did them, so where did that attitude come from? All I could remember from kindergarden time was that I hated handiworks and paintings and I always tried to finish as fast as possibly to be able to go "playing". So I went and asked my mum if she could remember my kindergarden days and she told me the tale of the brutal murder of my young and innocent artistic talent which I will share with you...
Well, my first experiences with early "education" was a day care centre. My parents were among some like minded parents who founded the first privat day care centre in my hometown. As this were the early 70ies they were guided by antiautorical guidelines and it was very much like "let the kids do what they want". And what I wanted was playing not handicrafting or painting... I started going there when I was three but at the age of five I had to go to the kindergarden which was of the catholic persuation and more guided by the good old classical principles of education.
There we had to do what the kindergarden teacher told us and when say wanted us to paint we had to paint/handycraft and were only allowed to play after we have finished the tasks. So as little Jan didn´t like to paint/handycraft too much, I reckoned that the faster I finished the paint/handycraft jobs the faster I could play and didn´t put too much effort into the works.
That attitude seemed to have anoyed one of the kindergarden teachers and one day she took my collected "artworks" and in front of all the kids she tore them to pieces and explaining that that´s how you deal with rubbish and that I didn´t have an talent and all I do was "Geschmiere" which is a german word that has no english equivalent. It means roughly something put onto the paper by a deranged or someone without any talent what o ever...
So even though I have no memoriy of this incident, probably repressed, I can now pinpoint the moment my artistic career was killed and I have someone to blame. Well, I could have become the second Picasso or Dali or Hieronimus Bosch. The story continues, when I told my mother about that she went and took this kindergarden teacher to the cleaners like a lioness and complained with the right people so the teacher was fired in the end and hopefully died in poverty from an embarrassing desease...
So now I eventually made peace with my children´s paintings and start liking them but enough of the stories from the past and let´s move to the report of my attendance at the flea market.
From April to September each summer there is a flea marked one one saturday each month at the "Promenade" in Münster. The Promenade the ring around the inner city where the city walls have been in the olden days. Now it´s a bicycle/walking street with lots of trees and it´s quite nice there. The last time I sold stuff there is something like five years ago and I thought, well, it starts Saturday morning so it´ll be sufficient if I get there around 5.30am but friends of mine told me that if you don´t claim your location by Friday around early afternoon you won´t have a chance to get a stand. So I got there around 1.30pm on Friday and claimed my stand.
Funny enough, on the other side were four people sitting and the one girl looked over at me and I thought "I know her from somewhere" but couldn´t say from where but then she asked "Jan, is that you?" and it turned out that it was Judy who also worked at my old company.
So we sat and talked and passed the time until 6pm when you were finally allowed to build up your stall.
Before 6pm, everybody was just waiting...
Frauke came over to visit me, with Gaby and Frank who brought some coffee which was much appreciated...
And at 6pm the promenade filled up with the flea market experts who gave your stuff a calculating inspection even while you unpacked your cartons
My stall and some of the shit I had for sale... The flea market in Münster has apparently changed from a Saturday morning market to a Friday night market. Between 7pm and 11 pm it was crowded with people and I sold much of my extremly ugly stuff. But from 11pm onwards the stream of potential buyers slowly faded and as the night continiued it got first freaking cold and second boooooring...
Some night impressions...the people either covered their stands with plastic foil and went home for the night or slept at their stalls or partied the night away...
I decided to stay and if it weren´t for Gaby who was a real lifesaver and provided me with a warm sleeping bag I would have probably frozen to death. At 4.30am I had a nap for an hour and then I went for on the search for coffee (successful).
This was my neighbor to the left, he did chinese art and was a really nice guy.
This were my neighbors to the right and they were fucking drunk assholes. They were already drunk when they arrived on Friday afternoon but when they came back in the morning, man...fucking hell. I´m not easily pissed off but when these guys started insulting the bypassers and kept on shouting abuse I contemplated to call the security and get them removed but luckily they realised that they are too drunk by far and went home quite fast...Summary, apart from the freezing and the drunk neighbors t was quite a fun experience. I made some money which I used to pay my cell phone bill but all in all if you break the earning down to a hourly rate is was not profiable at all.
While I was freezing in Münster the kitchen at my parents place was dismaneteled and removed by the guy who won the eBay auction. When I came back it looked like this:
27 years of use have left their traces especially on the floor and previously my parents have tried most of the cleaning stuff but without avail so they had a professional tile man coming who tried the good stuff and voila, with some decent cleaner and much elbow grease it was possible to get the tiles clean again. That guy offered to do the whole kitchen floow for Euro 500 but I said, hey let´s just get our hands on the profeesional cleaning stuff and I do the elbow grease part. Stupid me. Well I couldn´t back off now, so I first did the coarse cleaning and discovered that the tube for the kitchen ventilation was apparently used as a nesting place by some birds...
An old abandoned birds nest was located in the wall but as the grill on the outside wall is quite narrow the only birds who could have used it as a nesting place could be a wren. The cleaning itself was quite successful bt a pain in the ass...important safety tip, use decent foot wear as he stuff is quite agressive and managed to dissolve the soles of my shoes.
Bad quality safety shoe, next time get decent shoes from Blackwoods...lolOk, that´s it for today, I hope that all of you guys who have the swine flu are getting better by now, have fun, take care and cya...
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