A few days back, I met with a dear friend of mine, Aleš Mička, the chief designer and owner of TouchBranding in the bar Los v Oslu.

Years back, he did an awesome job on the end titles of my shortfilm Monitio and designed the webpage. He opened my eyes to graphic design and typography, and a meeting with him is always a very intense discussion. You have to watch your arguments, because if you don’t, he will rip you apart and you will look like an idiot. He’s a design-freak with brains in overdrive mode.

After covering ipods, iphone, computers, hookers, graphic design, girls, how to past 30, girls and again girls, I shared my recent raise of enthusiasm of TOP GEAR. And from the rear spoiler of the latest Lamborghini Murcielago SV we came onto the  topic of Luxury.

What is Luxury? How do you define it? How can you find it?

And most importantly, what Luxury probably ISN’T…

I shared the story, when about a month ago,  I went on a coffee with my nemesis friend Vít Karas. We sat outside at cafe Lamborghini. I was a lovely summer day, but it weren’t the short skirts of the girls, that got our attention, but the cars that drove by. Within an hour I saw an Aston Martin DB-9 a Porche 911 GT2 and a Ferrari 350 beeing parked almost next to each other on the other side of the road. What an amazing sight! Technical ingenuity paired with curvy seduction made of metal. I stopped paying attention to the conversation, not that the noise of the roaring italian horses would have allowed it anyway…

The initial joy faded away though, as soon as the owners got out of the cars. One by one they looked around, if really everyone on the street is paying attention to them. And when they sat next to us on a table, their behavior and speech were a vulgar mess of the very ordinary men. I admit, that the ability to earn enough to afford such cars gave the owners some credit of the success they have in their life. However, the louder they became, the more uninteresting those men were to me. Because every idiot can buy such a car. But not everyone can handle that fact, that he has enough power and money to do so. They obviously didn’, because what was lacking there was style.

It is like watching an amazing girl in a club dancing. There are those, who dance for the eyes of men. And then there are those who dance because they really, really enjoy it. They would still pump the rhythm, even when nobody would be there. I tend to think that the latter girls are much more interesting than the former.

Expensive cars are often driven quite powerfull people, managers, Google owners, ad agency CEO’s. So far so good.

But there seem to be a world out there, nobody speaks about in public. The world of the dark desires of those gentlemen, the one you only hear about. And indeed, there surely is not a rare supply of those stories - One of Aleš’s friend seems to work as a waiter in some sort of high-class establishment, a castle, where some of those top-level sharks meet … to get their asses whipped by chicks in leather suits called Dominatrixes.

I am sure, you all have heard one or two of those stories. About dark, secret places, where the world seems to be upside down. Where your bad-ass prick of a boss gets shouted and spit in his face. Where he has to bow and follow commands. Some of us may have glimpsed into this kind of world watching Eyes Wide Shut. I believe that it is out there. There are just too many hints that these things exist, as I know about another story told me by Anthony Dweyer from Picturehouse some years back. This guy actually knows a girl who is a Dominatrix. And guess who’s ass she is kicking?

I wonder, why those power-driven ambitious guys have to retreat in a secret environment, where they have to submit themselves to a higher power. It may be, that they are under high stress the whole day, and they need to recharge, by letting someone tell them exactly what to do from time to time. I must say, that when I am honest to myself, it seems, that there is a sadist and a masochist in my persona as well. There is something wicked in the ultimate submission towards another human being, as it is in having the ultimate power over someone.

Richness does not mean luxury for me. Luxury is “sans” the feature crap. It is unplugged. It is the less is more principle. It is the contrary of black rappers bowing under the weight of their golden necklaces and noserings. It is the oppoisite of Russian models in Paris, who wear everything what Prada has produced that year at once …

Confidence is luxury. Believe in yourself. If you do, you seldom have to show off your car collection. You do not need to prove, that you can buy expensive clothes. You do not talk much about what you have accomplished, because people talk about your actions already. The English gentleman of the Victorian era. The man, who almost destroyes the engine of his DB-9 on the weekend racetrack, and yet allows a Golf GT overtake him, as he stops at the crossing to let an old lady pass.

Simplicity is luxury. The joy of the pure and simple.

The problem is, that there is always somebody above you. And there always will be. Someone with more money, more power, more women, cars, nobel prices, oskars, whatever…

I am not saying no to ambitions, but when it comes down to the bare metal of life, it is not your savings-account or your small talk that counts, but what you do. In this very moment.

So, luxury is living. Now.

Carpe fuckin’ Diem.

…

Sorry, I have to go, my Dominatrix forbids me to type more…

Now I wonder, why I have not chosen it over Joomla, for my own page…

When it came to rebuilding my website, I wanted to get away from flash, that I used on a couple of websites I had build before. The main reason was maintenance. While flash gives you all of the creative freedom, you basically remain the only one, who can properly update the page with new content. That, unless you are able to hack the admin back-end as well — which of course, I wasn’t.

So I looked at drupal, that I found a little complex to learn and 90% of the themes looked the same to me. At that time, wordpress (2.5) appeared easy to use, but could not offer a certain sub-menu functionality I was looking for out of the box. Joomla seemed to be the best of both worlds.

So I set off with Joomla, with an interesting theme from RocketTheme. I was able to make the site look like I wanted, but I ended up with a quite slow site. I may have used huge images, but I guess, what breaks Joomla’s performance are the php and javascripts. You can install cache plugins, of course, but they are hot-patches to a fault-by-design issue in my eyes.
Keeping Joomla and all plugins up to date is also quite annoying. So does the editor, which seemed to has its own mind, when it comes to html WYSIWYG editing.

Enter WordPress 2.7 and later…

With an entirely new admin panel and the focus of finding the golden middle between a blog and a “proper” cms. While keeping everything simple and fast, WordPress delivers, when you need easy and quick sites. That task will take you days, not months. You will not have an excuse for lack of quality content anymore…

It may not have all the abilities of typo3 and drupal, like strong media management or multi-user management. But is is such a joy to use. Good-looking, functional, focusing on the important things. Very much like OSX.
WordPress is also much faster. It beats Joomla in the frontend and the backend usability.

At the current stage, its media management abilities are quite limited, in comparison to the other tools that are available for posts and pages, but those issues are being dealt with in the development of the 2.9 version.

Automatic updates of system, plugins and themes, catapult WordPress into the realm, where almost every user is able to maintain the site after a very short learning period.

It seems, that the new abilities of the system allow designers to create themes, where you do not expect a “simple blogging” system behind it. From Magazine, Portfolio, Photograph and Videosites — all seem to be doable to a certain level of scale with wordpress.

Here are a couple of examples for themes I like:

• Press75
• Mimbo Theme
• Fhu-Zin
• NeoClassical
• Modern Clix

and more in this WordPress Themes listings:

• Best WordPress Themes
• 100 Best WordPress Themes You Are Going to Use (and Love) in 2009

What all CMS systems seems to have in common, is that their themes tend to be either similar or very flashy. Themedesigners like GavickPro and RocketTheme seem to go berserk lately, and try to put all features into their themes, they can think of. What used to be nice, fast and slick themes are now javascipt monsters, that blind you, just after you aged a millennium after waiting the page to load.

Same goes with WordPress. You have to look very much into finding a proper theme, in terms of well designed, functional, fast and balanced. But once you do, it just is a hell of a ride.

“Excuse me, do you mind to give me 15 Czech Crowns?”

The question came out of nowhere.

I was waiting next to the orange wall of a renovated apartment building in Vršovice, Prague. My editor was descending the five stories down to open the door. My mind was going through the editing task, that laid ahead and and I was not really paying much attention to my environment. The sound took me quite by surprise, it invaded my thoughts and pulled the high artistic intentions down to the harsh reality of the street.

I turned around and spotted a tiny blond woman in a subtle black dress. She might have been in her early fifties. She had huge glasses with low dioptrics. Her left hand was shaking a little bit — a movement she tried to suppress as she noticed my gaze.

As in every metropolitan city, you hear this question twice the hour when you walk through Prague. Mostly on tourist spots, from people, who have been living on the streets for a long time and are dressed accordingly. They often have an excuse, such as the need to make an urgent phone call or some other kind of emergency.

But this woman looked different. She obviously did pay attention to her outward appearance, as much as she could. This caught my eye, because I would never expect someone dressed like her, to ask this question. What was going on?

“What do you need it for?” — I shot back. Curious about how creative she would be.

“I would like to buy some wine.”

Boom! There it was. Pure and honest.

I looked into her eyes and saw how dignity just lost the battle with the demon.

Now it all made sense: The light smell that surrounded her was the sweat of cheap wine. Her sudden appearance came from a 24/7 bar next door, that I did not notice in my dreamy state of mind. She stood there, asking for money to buy food for her demon. She could have been my mother. I tried not to judge her. Alone the fact, that she came up to me, beeing that honest must have been devastating for her. And impressive to me. It was all there in her eyes and it took my breath.

I could not say a word anymore. I gave her half of what I had in my wallet. She asked if I was living nearby, that she would give the money back another day. I asked her to accept it, without worries and that she should drink one on me.

She walked away, but not back into the bar like I thought she would. Her shaky hands stored the money in a purse and I noticed how underfeed she was. And yet she looked like anyone else. An older lady in a black dress walking down the street. Nothing special, nothing scary. Yet, the personification of Lynch’s horror in bright daylight.

This got me thinking, of what I have done. I will not deny that I hate it being asked for money, for contributions of any kind or for “good deeds” left and right, when I just walk down the street in whichever big city. Yes, these people annoy me, they annoy my sight, and some of them seem to be very professional at what they are doing.

I am honest here, because I would be a hypocrite and a liar, if I would say otherwise. I think, that I work hard myself, that what I have, I have earned. I do not want to carry the misery of strangers on my shoulders. I do not want to be manipulated into a feeling of guilt. I cannot solve those problems, this I do not want to see them really. I do not want to feel responsible. I want to shout into their faces, “You have all your limbs, for Christ sake, how about getting up and try to get a job?”

Yeah, like it is that simple…

I know that the government should take care of such problems. I like to think that way. I also do not want to see that social problems. I want to stay in my comfort zone. I do not want to see other people, who were so much less fortunate then myself. All I want, is to keep the right to complain about life, people, everyone and everything.

Of course, I have never been homeless. What do I know? But I know how it is not to have money. Our family fled from a communist regime and had to start from zero in another country after all. But not everyone has the abilities we had to work up to a better place.

So, what to do? I will not help a homeless person, or a beggar by giving him money. This may solve his problem for the day, but not for the next. It’s giving a fish, rather than to teach how to fish. I also do not get my kick by giving a donation and then staying in the illusion that I will “make a difference”, because that is bullshit.

I guess the most one can do, is to respect the dignity of the other. I was trying to behave this way with this woman. I gave her what she asked. I accepted her gratitude, and that was it. Have I done it, because I felt guilty? Because I felt sorry for her?

I don’t think so, because everything happened too quick. I think the reason was, that she was just being honest and I was impressed by the internal struggle I saw in here eyes.

Maybe I was happy, not to have this problem? Till this very moment I don’t know, if I feel good, or bad about it. All I am is confused, as this problem is complex and seems to be over my head. How easy it is, to just go with the pre-judgment and simplify it to black and white!

What I know, though, is that I saw a demon. He looked at me through eyes he had possessed. We looked at each other, and I blinked first and he was laughing. He may still till now, as he scared the hell out of me and made me think.

Maybe this is all he wanted?

Ok, that has been around in every newspaper and blog and twitter. The sales of his albums went through the roof and every club has now a MJ week or month. None of this really matters in this writing. This is about my experience, of being far more shocked about MJ’s death, than I ever would have thought…

I was never a real Michael Jackson fan. Of course I adored his music, his dancing and his music videos. When I was 15 and started to be aware of his roots and the brilliancy of his first albums, he was already at the “Earthsong” stage. I did not really like it. But nevertheless, I did spent hours dancing at the Sunday afternoon parties at Burgblick, Oberviechtach, Germany. I wore a hat and a 3.5 meter long scarf, that my grandmother made for me. Among the hardcore Oberpfalzian natives, I surely appeared as a boy with a very, very troubled mind and childhood.

Then came Metallica, Guns ‘n’ Roses, Rammstein, Dio, AC/DC, Iron Maiden, Rock im Park and their metal tones slowly forged cophosis into my ears, while executing Michael out of them. Ten years later, I arrived at Four Seasons from Vivaldi and the zombies from Thriller did not visit even my worst nightmare anymore. MJ seemed to be eradicated from my memory for good.

Execpt, that he wasn’t.

The minute I heard the news of his death, all those childhood and teen memories kicked back in. I remembered the videos I watched, the recordings of the giga-concerts, I wished to have seen live. The moves, the moonwalk. Everything.

Maybe it is because he was always there. He was already the King of Pop, when I started to listen to music. An era already so huge, that it took very long, to consume it all. Something in your life, like a place or grandparents, that always have been there, and you live along with the naive assumption that this will never change.

Strangely, I never really believed any of the accusations against MJ. Maybe I did not want to. I was on a different music by that time, sure, but I realize now, that I always considered Michael Jackson more as an unreal product, a ghost, rather than a person. A product to be entertained by, to be consumed at wish. You may think, that this just goes along with fame and is the result of PR, but I actually NEVER thought of Michael as a human beeing! And that scared me at first.

I do not feel ashamed though, because I would be a hypocrite, trying to sweat a sensitive vain all in sudden. He was presented to the world as a product. That was part of the game. As an asexual thing, to be turned on and off, twisted and bend. A thing, you put away, if you do not need it, and that you can pull back, if you feel like it.

So why so many thoughts? I may realize, that he was a human after all. That he must have lived a hell of a life, and that he must have suffered. And yet I know nothing. I never will. I certainly am sad, that I will never see a concert of him. That is again, the consumer in me, the egoist.

But deep inside I feel, that an era is ending. A great artist is dead. What has been always in my life is now lost and I feel old.

To put it simple: It sucks!

Long live the King.