05/02/09
Was it a matter of time? I am blogging now on a new site, just to see what that is doing...
dagmology* 119 ... if you're so inclined.

03/09/09
Two months off the list for '09 - no particular issue drives me to drool other than the fact that I updated my website and felt this sub-page needed an update, too.  I guess that should suffice.... New photos, new words on what I do and how I phrase it. Just the nature of being, evolution, progress, change. I did write a pretty good nice little tidbit about my recent trip to Alaska and the Yukon Territory here, but the software decided to quit on me so I lost it (I usually save it before I upload, but...). Gone into cyberspace. Too bad. But it was about going with the flow of things so I do. Will write my musings about the nature of the Alaskan being soon, but not tonight. I am done. But you may want to check out the new photos in the meantime.

11/09/08
So here we are, with a new president, a brand-new face with a lot of hope attached. What a year. No complaints. Just got back from Washington, where I watched the people dance on the streets and gather outside the White House the moment Barack Obama was sure to be No.44. After nine years in the US I am finally glad to be here not despite who sits in the White House but also because of who is there. This old world is a new world, is a bold world... and I'm feeling good.

01/07/08
wow... an entry... where did that come from... i guess that beginning-of-a- new-year thing has gotten to me. even though, i have to say, rarely have i felt less emotional about it. no resolution, no goals, no plans. feels okay. maybe because we started the new year in mexico and things are just a bit more laid back there so i can relax about 1/1 as well. maybe that is a good state to be in for a year that has a lot to offer - a new president, a new dialogue about how things are governed on this end. let's hope that that is what these first attempts at deciding who will be the final candidate are all about. it is about time that aquarius spirit starts to make itself felt.... so to a good year!!!

06/08/07
I'm BACK, fast... Just had to put this out on a day where L.A. media go insane again. Hours of helicopter footage on local TV showing a police car driving that in-and-out of jail famous-for-going-to-parties girl around town.... Just stumbled across a quote by Bertolt Brecht today, that seems to fit the times so well even even though it was meant for the 1930s:
A man who has something to say and can't find an audience has a tough fate. But it's worse for an audience that can't find anyone that has anything to say to them.

06/04/2007
I guess 2006 just had nothing for me to write about. It did have a lot of work to do, seems that takes care of my desire to publish random thoughts to a non-existent readership. And it is the nature of random to be just that. Today under the shower I was thinking, yet again, about 2 newspaper stories and felt the need to write. I've come to think that journalism, the very profession I chose to make my career, is in its dinosaur phase. And the newspaper delivered yet another proof. On a day where the "L.A.Times" says good-bye to 60 journalists, among them several Pulitzer prize winners, to cut down costs, dozens of TV outlets set up camp outside a local women's jail to await the arrival of an inmate who got caught driving drunk and didn't respect the ensuing suspended license, which resulted in a 45 day sentence for the millionaire's daughter. I don't want to add to the chorus of puzzlement over this society's fascination with younger women without redeeming qualities. I gotta hand it to Hilton, she sure knows how to make a big buck out of nothing. That is all there is to say. It just is no good sign for the future of journalism, when the resources go where the watchdogs of the bottom line think the public allegedly wants them to. Tabloids have become such a hugely profitable business that there seems to be no arguing. Even the sanctuaries of what journalism seemed to be about have capitulated. Paris Hilton is on the cover of Time, in the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal. It is sad. Call me an elitist. I always disagreed with the argument "..but that is what the people want". Who knows that? It is what you think they want and what seems to work in terms of numbers, of circulation and ratings. And yes, you have an audience, a readership with desires and expectations. But they can be shaped as well and are in a constant interplay in the dynamics of a society. So what was political journalism 20 years ago is different today, but the fundamentals still apply. And it is not a relationship between master and slave.
I guess I as a German have a hard time accepting that paradigm of what people want as the main guideline for what constitutes a story. People wanted bread and games, people wanted Hitler, people wanted war - eat shit, millions of flies can't err. There has got to be more to journalism than just feed "the people what they want" - and what makes it profitable. I always was proud to be in public broadcasting because it exists to figure out what people want AND what the organization of the common good needed. In a democracy, I felt, media give the tools to understand how politics works, policies are made, what the good and the bad of the society produces. Yes, we entertain but we also enlighten and luckily we don't have to make money with it as a public broadcaster. I happen to believe that people are much smarter than what "they want". It is just easier to feed the lowest common denominator to make money. It is a lot of work to explain AND make that entertaining, exciting and compelling. And largely it seems the media have given up or rather the management has lost its spine, desire and creativity - not just in commercial media or in the US, in Germany as well. I find a lot of good journalism in the US, in the papers, on the radio, in special magazines, online. So I know all that I believe in is still out there. But the forces with access to mass communication like to make you believe differently. And you know how to teach them? You have the power to buy the paper or not touch that remote and watch anything they throw at you because "you want it". Have I mentioned that we have a TV-set with rabbit-ears?

10/05/05
It’s in the newspaper. After all. Every morning with the coffee, it’s about looking at the page, the pictures, diving into the story, hearing the paper ruffle, getting lost in the lead. Can’t help it, am a 20th century woman, the better parts of it. And in that paper, the L.A. Times of today, there are two reminders of what it is I long for in my 20th century idealism and what it is I don’t like to accept in my disdain for 21st century ways – even though I would love the age of Aquarius to come along.
Story one. The drummer of the DOORS is fighting a lonely battle to keep the music of Jim Morrison what it is: A musical expression of life. Song for pain. An interaction between the soul of the four who can create the songs and the millions who understand it. John Densmore’s (the drummer’s name) fight? Saying no to 15 million dollars as the latest in a series of Nos. How bad can that be? Well, he has refused to allow the use of the DOORS name or music in any commercial venture. Those 15 million were for a Cadillac commercial, some SUV wanting to roar with “break on through… to the other side” through some breath-taking landscape. Brilliant idea, powerful footage, that song would have been just awesome – and the money more than they ever made. And John says no. For a reason I can just so well understand. As quoted “People lost their virginity to this music, got high for the first time to this music. I’ve had people say kids died in Vietnam listening to this music, other people say they know someone who didn’t commit suicide because of this music… On stage, when we played these songs, they felt mysterious and magic. That’s not for rent.” Wow, yes. Hell yes. You have to respect the sanctity of memory, the ideas of the creator (Morrison was violently against commercial use of the music). And Densmore feels obliged to his will – the other two band members don’t. The argument? It’s an old way of dealing with it. Everyone does it (the Stones, McCartney, Bob Dylan, Led Zeppelin…) It is vital to keep the music alive. It has lost its stench of selling out. It is actually the “normal” way to reach out to your audience. Nobody finds it offensive. The kids of today will forget about Morrison if you don’t integrate yourself in the ways of how “it” is being done today.
Well let them. If that is the only way they now can understand that music, by associating it with an Escalade (a car that I enjoy to despise) – hell no. Let them forget about him and let him be a treasured companion of those times only. That is the way of things. I mean, someone’s gotta say no. How much money can you eat? More people should say no more often. I just was touched and happy to read about someone that says no to linking every piece of art and thought and known property to the sale of commodities. Someone who believes in the spirit of things detached from the capital and material potential this offers. It feels freeing! And it’s not like there is no money being made, the sale of records, radio play and other associated merchandise still brings enough to make a comfortable living. Money isn’t everything. Is it? Story 2 is about a new Disney family film and all I have to give you about this is the statistics: The Chronicles of Narnia, done after a children’s book series that has been published over 55 years and sold 90 million copies thus far. Movie 1 (in a series) has cost 150 million dollars, and will be one of the largest marketing campaigns Disney has ever launched. Companies with tie-ins: McDonalds, General Mills, Virgin Atlantic, Oral-B, Kodak and Taubman Centers (a shopping mall chain).. more than 50 licensees are manufacturing items such as board games, porcelain dolls, trading cards and photo albums. The publishing house is printing 140 editions of the book, incl. six box sets and a video game will come out in November, right before the start of the movie. So where is the magic of that one? The idea to let yourself be engulfed in a story and take it from there? You are just a headcount in a scheme, no chance to say no, it will be everywhere, because the machinery has planned to make a lot of money and I better deliver. I just can’t do that. Haven’t gotten into Harry Potter for the same reason. Or Spiderman. Occasionally I just have to say no. Even though it gets increasingly hard to find out when I myself have tuned into a film or music or clothes or I tune in because those that want to sell it to me have turned me on and have just been more clever. Truth is hard to find. It may just be in the motivation and that is in  creating something beautiful that happens to reach out rather than using something (possibly beautiful, too) to make a lot of money so your quarter earnings look better.

8/05/05
I think I found an answer. My unusually rare online outpourings are actually a sign of a countermovement. Something that makes me trendsetting. And don’t we long for that… Not that I am the fastest adopter, but after reading about it I just got around to exploring the RSS world of information dissemination. I find it highly overrated – i.e. the new phenomenon, whoa. It is a more practical way of checking into different e-mail lists of people that just can’t stop popping it out. Anything from daily to hourly to minutely updates in the most popular feeds these days. Think CNN and BBC popping out a short bleep every minute, or some highly engaged tech geek telling you what he thinks of the latest Microsoft move and how the Linux community is yawning at that. Man, you can spend your whole 24 hours in front of this and read read read until you don’t know your name anymore (because you squeezed out all the room in your brain). And still you haven’t really found what you’re looking for. And you never find an end because there is always someone new, coming up on the hour, on the next morning, the next minute.
The audio feature is nice. You can now download a good radio program you have missed and listen to it at your leisure – it is also called podcasting and somehow is touted as a “new” phenomenon. A little too much of an honor I find, it works for the marketing though. All that it really is is pressing the record button like I used to do in my early radio days, when Gary Glitter and Sweet were finding a welcoming ear every Wednesday night in some small room in Borken, and I had this little mic and a small recorder w/ 5 big buttons, one of them red, to record. Quality was bad, but that wasn’t important. It was to capture something and be part of this great stuff that was telling me about worlds somewhere else. Come on Come on. Damn, am right back there, that is what all this new tech world does to me, it brings me back in my effort to reduce it to the basics. In my eternal quest to just not be impressed. Okay, digitization does allow an incredible amount of storage and distribution in numerous ways. And yet, what is it about? 
While I am writing this the RSS feed from Spiegel online that I just subscribed to pops up informing me of a new news item online, just like my mail program’s inbox telling me Dagmar got 3 new mails. Shut the f. up. That is why I kind of like to write very irregularly, never knowing when I feel the need or there is time or the casual summer in the hills of Hollywood feels like reaching out. It calms me, makes me feel in control. Frees me from this ever constant feed that never satisfies. It is like the mental equivalent to physical obesity. I wonder if that is the next big crisis, mental obesity. How do you cure that? Less blogs, less RSS, more books? No, won’t work. It’s the thrill of quantity that gives you the feeling of being in the know and relieves you from the burden of thinking, of creating quality, heart-felt and brain-drenched reflection on life and all its wonders, strangeness and weirdness. Which reminds me of my current endeavor, heartland studies. Time to understand my host country at its core. But that will have to wait for public display till whenever the next time comes around. All I will say is… Kansas.

2/18/05
Time for a Hail to the Pod – the ipod that is. My Christmas acquisition of the said new techno toy (and okay, I can’t deny it, I have a gadget tick, nothing too serious, but I do like new technology) now is turning up first results. I mean who would have ever thought about what it means to hold 20 years of your own personal music history in your hand and a little twitch of your thumb can start the journey? It is amazing. So far my favorite feature is the shuttle of songs. I have a total of some 2400 songs on there that is I would say about two thirds of the music I own. The rest wasn’t deemed worthy to be put on there or is still in good old Europe. So… you hit the button and there is this nice melodic jazz groove from the early 90s, rebirth of cool, followed by an early chili peppers, dropping into an Ella Fitzgerald heartbreak to go on a Neil Young trip with the “dead man” soundtrack, move your feed to some mid-90s house back to the Beatles’ Abbey Road, the first vinyl I ever owned. Every time I turn this thing on I am transported, not just by the music but also by all the ideas, memories, emotions associated with the songs. I mean I put an MTV sampler of 1983 on it, What’s love got to do with anyone? Henry Rollins Band, Mahler’s Nr. 9, Fanta 4, Tricky, Big & Rich, PJ Harvey, Johnny Cash, Ice-T a.d. 1990, Eric B & Rakim, Jurassic 5, David Byrne, Eminem… So now there is the next level. You put together your own mix of music, for all kinds of occasions. The-slow-easy-evening-mix. The-important-visitor-mix. The-dropdead-workout-mix. The I don’t-want-to-listen-to-music-mix. I-think-the-world-is-a-rotten-place-mix. The Oh-my-god-it’s-1982-mix. Oh heck, why not the I-love-life-mix (if Leonard Cohen is in it). And if you can’t fall back on your college radio DJ skills just open up your in-flight magazine and someone will tell you how to put a great mix-tape together. And if you think you are a genius at it  - or not – send it out to the world. Podcasting is all the rage. All you do is add a little chat in between the songs with your italk mic and … you have your own radio show that people will download from the known websites. Or not. But at least you can feel it. You are what you pod, another measure of social interaction in the 21st century.

02/01/2005
First month has passed in this new year that should lift the slowing down power of Saturn. The year of the rooster. Seems it will be a busy year, it’s Oscar month over here. That usually does it anyhow at this time of the calendar… So there is a new exclusive product at the department store called “perfect pout” – instant full lips without collagen. 8ml for 30 dollars. Be afraid, be very afraid. The normalcy of cosmetic enhancement is just kind of weird. Will I ever remember how it made me cringe when it all started? Watching a lot of movies these days, just to know what they are all about. Can’t complain. The art of making movies isn’t dead. Even though the January Sundance festival seems to be a better place to experience that. So on goes the world, the Tsunami catastrophe a month old, the Michael Jackson trial the order of the day here. Glad to not be involved in that. Is that truly of public interest? Or the 40 million the inauguration cost – compare that to the first 30 million the US donated to the tsunami relief. Or the half billion it cost for half a year to run the US embassy with 3.700 personnel in Baghdad and the additional 80 billion to finance the military over there. I seem to not get passed the numbers. It just is so impossible to wrap your head around that. Spent the morning at my favorite LA radio station (www.KCRW.com) to answer the pledge phone. My one and only volunteer activity so far. Taking down credit card numbers for people who voluntarily donate money to support the program. I like that. People are generous, one guy today shelled out 1.500 Dollar, just because he likes the program. Another woman did a 1.000. Bill Gates donated one billion to child healthcare in Third World countries. And Sharon Stone raised 1 million Dollar in Davos in 10 minutes to buy mosquito nets to stop malaria. Power of numbers. This way and the other. Maybe this dawning of the age of Aquariuis not that far away, even though it often seems so. Just depends on where you look... For a moment in time.

12/31/2004
Death toll keeps rising, aid money as well. Nothing can ease the pain. A lesson from nature. So the year closes, with a one-letter-president re-elected gearing up for the most expensive inauguration celebration in history with the lowest approval rating for a reelected prez in 50 years. Tell me something about these Americans, first they vote for him and then they really think he sucks. But in a country where one of the most celebrated albums of the year is “American Idiot” and comic heroes who subverse the idea of super-heroism are box office gold and the latest country sensation hits it high with “save a horse, ride a cowboy” (which happens to be my very first ever bought-online-for-my-new-ipod-itune-album…) even the so called masses have a yearning for some form of intelligent life. On that note here’s a quote from the late Susan Sontag, something to keep in mind for the next year: “We live in a culture in which intelligence is denied relevance altogether, in a search for radical innocence, or is defended as an instrument of authority and repression. In my view, the only intelligence worth defending is critical, dialectical, skeptical, desimplifying.” Or as my friend Troy always says: PEACE!

12/28/04
This is one of my favorite moments of the year. This time between the years. Those last lost days, after Christmas, before New Year’s. Official business seems to have died down, at least I feel no obligation to be on guard. There is a sense of relaxedness about hanging out. Of disappearing in those days where nothing is going on. Well California decided to pour down some rain. Which is good. The West has been drying out for years now. It wasn’t a good idea to build in the desert in the first place. But that mistake (or progress) was made some 90 years ago. Just read a book about the man with the vision. William Mulholland, the engineer who brought the water out here. And now they are building new homes in Las Vegas, every 20 minutes a new one is ready for their happy owner. How can I picture that? Other than it that it sounds pretty scary. Numbers are weird. As of now, there are about 50.000 people dead in the wake of the Tsunami in Asia. I read that somebody thought it was an incredible number thinking it is way more than 10 times the amount of people who got killed in the attack on the World Trade Center. But then it is only way less than a tenth of the 800.000 that got killed in Rwanda, a figure prominent these days because of the movie HOTEL RWANDA whose main purpose is to remind people of the ignored genocide. And if you want to top that, think of the Holocaust. As if for some strange reason it makes more sense or gives you a better approximation of the terror that all that means by putting it in numbers. There is some kind of resolution in pinning it down to numerics. Some handle on it by measuring it. Something the human mind can deal with.
Thoughts in the lost days. Don’t forget to do your post-Christmas shopping. The deals are good. And have you made your Top 10 lists for the year 2004? What about your new year’s resolution. Take a new cholesterol drug, get on that new diet, join the gym, buy a new car. I don’t know if this city brings it out in me. But the parallels of different degrees of madness are just striking. And then all you do is to pick up your own little private life and live it. What else is there to do? Stop the earth from shaking. Pack your bags and help some village in India get back on its feet. Go to Skid Row and teach someone to read. Stop using your car. Smile at someone you think you don’t like …. I had to come up with something that I could do today.
So there we go, enjoy being lost for 3 more days. And then party or not (which I prefer, I really don’t feel like celebrating these end of the year days anymore) and get these good or odd feelings for something new getting started: 2005, mid-decade. The year of the Yiyou (Rooster).

12/10/04
What can I say, writing for no one is not the greatest motivator. I know it is my fault, I could e-mail everyone in my book to check it out and let me know. But who wants to read another of those kinds of e-mails. It is really tough. But hey, that is the existence of the lonely blogger. I guess I like writing to millions who could but don’t read. Kinda comforting.
Have been out in the west in October and November, working on a documentary about “The Wild & The West”. I have to say the West is my home, I really like it out there. We had a great time, lots of work and a nice photo-page, that tells you more than words can do www.mussil.com/wildwest. It made it bearable to be among the stones of millions of years of earthly existence on November 2… Well, we’ll see what that is good for. Today I read about a few unrelenting Americans who want to be true to their word and leave the US for Canada, just as they said they would if the one-letter-president would be re-elected. Is that the kind of political activism the world needs? Who knows, almost anything will do these days. And then I am finding myself in the season I most like to ignore. This year it started even earlier, with more Christmas song torture and even earlier sales on everything. And like no other year… I can’t think of any gifts to give. I am all spent out. But also that will pass, hopefully soon. At least the sun is back out and it is really warm, helps to live the absurdity of it all. Today I am writing this at a Starbucks Drive-Through and I can watch everyone after they picked up their drink at the window. Better stop. Right NOW. Later.

09/07/04
Back again, already. Must have too much free time. Maybe it is because every time I sit in a friggin Starbucks now, I go online, on my wireless broadband connection (just opened the account, thanks to t-mobile) and surf and search all the things that are hard to get a grip on with 56k connection… Excuses, excuses. But reading the newspaper brought an odd mix of Euro flavor into my LA existence. Whats going on over there? People in Denmark cross over to Sweden so they can live in peace with their non-Danish husband or wife, since xenophobia in Denmark makes that a not very pleasant experience these days. And Germans cross the border to the Czech Republic to bury their loved ones at half price, with Discount Coffins, now that the state subsidy for burials is gone. Poor Germans. The whole article put the discount burial in the context of the hardships Germans are going through now that social reforms start to happen. Everyone complaining about how much they have to pay and how they are surprised that reforms can actually be felt. While I live in a city with one of the biggest homeless communities in the US, in its odd resemblance of a downtown: 45.000 people live there on the street or in hotels. The story really was about kids growing up on “skid row”. Pretty nasty, coming to the conclusion that this city should not force about 500 kids having to grow up with prostitutes, drug dealers, mentally unstable people and the occasional murder. At the same time I just am researching a bit about space travel and about 100 millionaires and billionaires here that have each pledged $98.000 for the pleasure to spend 90 minutes in suborbit, once that is possible. Can’t put a frame around the picture anymore. That is my second theme of these days, the surreal contrasts of the times. More to come…

9/4/04
So here I go. Finally a first entry. On a page not many people will read. A fate befallen by not a few bloggers I assume since they are publishing in the millions. But since what makes no sense always makes perfect sense to me it is a good reason to start. On this sunny and warm first September week-end. THE L a b o u r Day week-end. Official end of summer in the US.
I have to say I felt compelled to write because I went to 2 other blog-sites, my friend Drew’s, who lives as an American in Budapest (http://continentaldrift.blogspot.com) and my friend Sylvia’s who travels the world as a German uploading pictures from Brasil and Argentina on her site (www.squadratm.de). It is just a lot of fun to stay in touch this way. And since the old way of being a family is getting a little difficult this way and yet the shadow of family never leaves us, here an entry from California, from this German escaping her German shadows and working on her own personal Californication. Having just finished The Da Vinci Code (in German it is called Das Sakrileg), I find my own writing curiously filled with symbolism. (The book is all about symbolism, a cleverly written thriller, very educational, everything you always wanted to know about Da Vinci and the evils of the early Catholic church).  But I guess that is always the case, this thing with symbolism. It just depends on how you listen to what people say. And what it really means. And what you understand the words used mean. Or how you manipulate them into a new meaning.
Under that star, this week was a tough one. The Republican Convention ringing in my ear. It is a part of America that I have a hard time to understand. Especially here on the “other” coast. But then, that is no real reprive either, thinking of the former-bodybuilder-slash-a-list-actor-slash-governor-of-Cali who is (not even carefully) planning his ascent to the highest office. The 21st century is really a tumultuous place. The age of Aquarius makes everything much more fishy. I guess it takes a while to arrive at the truth. For now I devote my days studying the devaluation of meaning. I find many things in the public discourse quite Orwellian. Not easy to find meaning in words these days. Wow, I guess I like to stay cryptic. Gives me (and the occasional reader) more to figure out in the time to come. (see, I have been steeped in Hollywood thinking, can't even write without the cliff-hanger to keep my readers interest.)
But I shouldn’t leave without some observations out here from the West. Pamela Anderson has written her first novel, about a small-town girl coming to the big town, getting breast-implants as she rises to tv-star-stardom and dysfunctional rocker groupie. “star. a novel” it is called. And the best thing? It just made the New York Times bestseller list. Talking about the meaning of words. Thank God she will lead a bible study class in her church in Malibu. Some soul-saving going on.