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Friday 18 December 2009

DIENST: wie es auch üblich ist...
Montag, 21.12.09


I'm spending the longest night of the year at Kesselberg, which might be cold, but there'll be a big bonfire. Or a fire.

There'll be fire, at any rate.

My function on this evening is not just to hang out with the thirty-odd Naturfreak inhabitants of "Cauldron Mountain", celebrating the re-waxing of days during the passage of their final, waning eve. Not alone by a long shot, that's just a tribute to spinning and hurtling mist-enveloped dirt.

And its relative adherence to heat and light.

No, on this particular evening we ritualize the birth (ten years hence) of a less monotonous, yet always returning event, the name of which invokes the familiar, and the familiar-diverse.

Dienst
(familiar): as in 1. ministry and 2. service to that which is greater than oneself
(familiar-diverse): 1. in reference to a passage, a corridor on a seemingly infinite expanse of ocean, on the one hand; and on the other, 2. the deference of the emerging Gothic column to the Romanesque pillar.

So we'll be observing DIENSTbar, inparticular its decade of submission to the noncommercial ethic, supporting an uncommon visual and aural aesthetic:

That which is submerged reemerges.

In service of DIENSTbar, Markus Schwill (aka Ohmnoise) has been resurfacing in and around Berlin since the 21st of December in 1999 (eleven days before the Y2K Bug destroyed all this plane's digital information only to have it reappear so immediately, that not a soul noticed it had gone).

Likewise, DIENSTbar has plunged into intermission, but one can't precisely determine a pattern of intermittent behavior, with over 240 events at nearly fifty locations over those 120 months. The Dienstleistung boggles (an accomplishment of nomadic administration), and to think I've been rooted locally for three quarters of that stretch. At least temporally. Have I borne witness ?

I will.

I'll be serving CD Kreisverband Friedrichshain for the twenty-eighth time, a figure that also challenges my imagination.

Kreis: a circle; Verband: a union

Monday's DIENST will be the tenth eve-in-a-row, and final night of this decade's jubilee. The details for our appearance are on the lower right of the accompanying digital playbill (just the latest of Ohmnoise's visual creations). For the sound, you'll have to go to Kesselberg, unless you have ultra keen ears.

Bring a sleeping bag.
davidly
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