I get in touch with Christain and he arranges to meet me outside the tourist information office (of all places). I stand there, nervously eyeing the junkies and dossers milling around the station. I watch as this bloke starts an argument with a guy who is off his head.....Bam!! The junkie is on the floor. Blood starts to flow...Here come the police..jeezes...Welcome to Hamburg!

Christian shows up as the police escort the guy away. I decide not to mention the incident. I figure he knows the score anyway. Christian takes me to Ponton Media Labs where he works. He gives me the guided tour. Cool place, good people doing good work and lots of toys to play with! Christian takes off early. We head over to his flat so that I can drop off my gear. We take the underground and wind up on the Reaperbahn, which like Amsterdam's Red light District, is famous for its sleazy bars and prostitutes. So here we are walking up the Reaperbahn and I am keeping my head down, eyes straight ahead when I hear Christian say "this way". He disappears into the doorway of some sleazy club with some bare-breasted chick in lit-up pink neon. I stood there for a second thinking, "Fucking hell, what's going on here?!" Oh, well what else could I do but follow? I quickly make sure that no one's looking and duck into the doorway... Christian is already halfway up the stairs. I go after him. He opens the door to his flat and we walk through. I scope the place. Cool, it's a normal flat, not some pimp-daddy sex den.

Christian is already taking my bags into his room and offering me a cup of tea. He has the archetypal hacker bedroom, complete with computers, warez, toys, stereo and tons of videos. A unique thing about his bedroom however is his view. Projected on the brick building opposite his bedroom window are slides of semi-naked women in various poses...I dont think they've bothered to change the slides for a couple of decades though, every once in a while you spot a super-fly 70's afro flicker by....right next to the projected slides stands a billboard of Beevis and Butthead, heh, now thats what I call strategic marketing!

Over the next few days (I think it was 3) Christian and I went all over Hamburg filming various people from the Chaos Computer Club. In between shooting we managed to make it to various parties, pubs and even the big market in Hamburg. When we finished for the day we would watch videos at Christians: Lenningrad Cowboys go to America, The King of New York, various Mont y Python [No one expects the Spanish Inquisition], Tron and Point Break were some of the titles pulled off the shelf...mind you its a bit of a wind up watching Keanu in all that beautiful surf when there is half a foot of snow outside.

On my last day of filming we went back to Ponton to check out the place properly when no one else was around. I think the robot camera was the coolest thing. It's all controlled by the touch tone on your home phone. Press 6 and it pans left...press 4 and it pans right. Press 2 and it tracks forward, 8 to track back. They have another peice of equiptment that transmits a picture every two seconds over your modem line so that you can basically make a video phone for a reasonable rice.. the casing they have designed to look like a piece of Swiss Cheese! Christian showed up at Def Con II (94) and gave a demonstration of the now infamous cheese. After the Con he and a couple other freinds from Hamburg visited me in L.A. while I was logging the footage for Unauthorized

Access. I took them to the Dinosour Restaurant in the desert out near Joshua Tree, I think Christian was as surprised about the crazy walk-in dinosaur gift shop (it is inside the Brontosaurus) as I was by the fact that Christian lived above a sex shop in Hamburg! Nothing like a good cultural exchange, eh?

[ Continued... ] [ UA Home Page ]

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