An evening in Berlin
Jan. 28th, 2007 01:27 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
imomus5pm: To Jannowitzbrucke to see what's on in the row of cave-like art galleries that hide under the S-bahn, bordering the Spree. There's a noticeable South American flavour; videos by Marcellvs L. of poor people walking along the side of threatening highways, seen in extreme telephoto. And a few doors down Javier Téllez has red flags, banners and videos from a Mexican popular uprising. "Long live Mexico! Long live the Socio-Political-Cultural Movement of our country! Independence--Peace--Freedom! Peasants let's join our efforts!" say the banners.
6pm: To the Café Moskau. It's Berlin Fashion Week and Ideal-Showroom is hosting an event. People who design clothes are showing them to potential buyers, and there's art too, tucked away in the back rooms. We finger clothes designed by Makin Jan Ma (of Jan Family) with admiration. There are other interesting things, sort of padded hooded tops with scribble patterns, acid yellow lines, slashed kimono sleeves, and pleasantly unnecessary folds, gatherings, rouches... I give a video interview to the roving camera crew. "What, to you, is the one indispensable thing?" the blonde interviewer asks. "My passport," I decide. "Brecht said a human being was more easily made than a passport. It's certainly more fun making a human being, though."
7.30pm: To the badeschiff, where Hisae and I sauna and bathe naked, flipping through the free fashion magazines we've picked up at Ideal. Luckily the bademeister who usually throws me out of the pool isn't there, so I do my usual inept swimming -- and don't drown, this time. Nobody interviews us here.
9pm: Thoroughly refreshed from our bathing (although Hisae feels a bit ill after swimming so soon after eating), we head to nearby gallery Peres Projects for the opening of Folkert De Jong's show "The False Prophet". This Dutch artist has made lurid resin sculptures of famous characters from the history of painting -- Otto Dix's lesbian journalist Sylvia von Harden, for instance. We team up with our friend Sunshine Wong, and meet some Japanese girls, one of whom approaches me with the line "My boyfriend loves your blog!" (It used to be "I love your music!"). Meanwhile the Peres photographer is snapping away. These Peres openings are without a doubt the best in Berlin. There's a real buzz here. The air hangs thick with smoke, and people jabber away in Dutch, German and English, quaffing free beer (while supplies last).
10pm: An hour in the Barbie Deinhoff bar across the road. It's very pink in there, with comfy sofas.
11pm: To a Vice magazine party in Mitte. The place is heaving with people puffing on cigarettes and wearing American Apparel tops as if they're some kind of uniform. I meet my friend Mario, who's making the official video of the evening on a tiny camera, and films us. Then I get interviewed by a Norwegian journalist for some new style magazine. "Are you here to see or be seen?" she asks. I can't think of anything clever to say. "A bit of both, I think." It's hard work having to be interviewed everywhere you go, and come up with a memorable soundbite at 2am. Can't a man just relax and party in this town?
6pm: To the Café Moskau. It's Berlin Fashion Week and Ideal-Showroom is hosting an event. People who design clothes are showing them to potential buyers, and there's art too, tucked away in the back rooms. We finger clothes designed by Makin Jan Ma (of Jan Family) with admiration. There are other interesting things, sort of padded hooded tops with scribble patterns, acid yellow lines, slashed kimono sleeves, and pleasantly unnecessary folds, gatherings, rouches... I give a video interview to the roving camera crew. "What, to you, is the one indispensable thing?" the blonde interviewer asks. "My passport," I decide. "Brecht said a human being was more easily made than a passport. It's certainly more fun making a human being, though."
7.30pm: To the badeschiff, where Hisae and I sauna and bathe naked, flipping through the free fashion magazines we've picked up at Ideal. Luckily the bademeister who usually throws me out of the pool isn't there, so I do my usual inept swimming -- and don't drown, this time. Nobody interviews us here.
9pm: Thoroughly refreshed from our bathing (although Hisae feels a bit ill after swimming so soon after eating), we head to nearby gallery Peres Projects for the opening of Folkert De Jong's show "The False Prophet". This Dutch artist has made lurid resin sculptures of famous characters from the history of painting -- Otto Dix's lesbian journalist Sylvia von Harden, for instance. We team up with our friend Sunshine Wong, and meet some Japanese girls, one of whom approaches me with the line "My boyfriend loves your blog!" (It used to be "I love your music!"). Meanwhile the Peres photographer is snapping away. These Peres openings are without a doubt the best in Berlin. There's a real buzz here. The air hangs thick with smoke, and people jabber away in Dutch, German and English, quaffing free beer (while supplies last).
10pm: An hour in the Barbie Deinhoff bar across the road. It's very pink in there, with comfy sofas.
11pm: To a Vice magazine party in Mitte. The place is heaving with people puffing on cigarettes and wearing American Apparel tops as if they're some kind of uniform. I meet my friend Mario, who's making the official video of the evening on a tiny camera, and films us. Then I get interviewed by a Norwegian journalist for some new style magazine. "Are you here to see or be seen?" she asks. I can't think of anything clever to say. "A bit of both, I think." It's hard work having to be interviewed everywhere you go, and come up with a memorable soundbite at 2am. Can't a man just relax and party in this town?
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(no subject)
Date: 2007-01-28 12:56 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2007-01-28 01:09 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2007-01-28 01:02 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2007-01-28 01:13 pm (UTC)http://www.tursky-hartmann.de/images/fotos_falckenstein/378_petra_tursky_hartmann_hotel_falckenstein_barbie_deinhoff.jpg
http://www.vaginajones.com/images/strassenfest4.jpg
(no subject)
Date: 2007-01-28 01:42 pm (UTC)the artist formally known as ten a day
Date: 2007-01-28 01:06 pm (UTC)You are testing me.
It would not happen in Schottland
(no subject)
Date: 2007-01-28 01:20 pm (UTC)How do you manage to stay here so long? As I stay here longer, I am more and more keen to stay here.
Also, how does one begin to publish in the press? I'm a former provincial from Alabama, where the only publishing is about weddings and cakes and unusually large vegetables, and none of those topics interest me. Your writings, however, are much more interesting, and not all that different from the sorts of things I write. Hence, I ask you for guidance.
(no subject)
Date: 2007-01-28 01:49 pm (UTC)Well, it helps being European -- no visa issues! I've been here four years now and feel at home. Lots going on, and the cheapness really does give you liberty. (That's a nice word, one Benjamin Franklin liked to use -- that's him in the first resin sculpture at the top left of the photo.)
As for getting published, you should just send articles to the editors of mags or papers you like, and whose style and subjects you vaguely fit. That said, I get all my commissions from people who've read my blog or heard of me some other way, so the only answer I'm probably really entitled to give is "Get slightly famous, then people will come to you." It works for lovers too.
(no subject)
Date: 2007-01-28 02:28 pm (UTC)The cheapness of the city is really, really nice. I'm ashamed to admit, though, that I eat most of my meals at the Burger King around the corner. I'm writing my Master's Thesis right now, and it's too much trouble to hunt down good restaurants. I still haven't struck into the heart of Kreuzberg, and I've been here since the last day of September.
I was wondering if you had ever been published in The Believer.
(no subject)
Date: 2007-01-28 02:39 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2007-01-28 03:25 pm (UTC)http://www.believermag.com/
(no subject)
Date: 2007-01-28 04:43 pm (UTC)Hope they weather the storm (http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2007/01/27/MNG9DNQ8TM1.DTL&hw=berkeley+publishing+group&sn=001&sc=1000).
(no subject)
Date: 2007-01-28 09:08 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2007-01-28 11:09 pm (UTC)People like me use technology to produce books, but a few of us use the technology in an inefficient, "non-modern" way, going over things in painstaking detail, adjusting kerning pairs and text wraps "by hand" instead of slapping everything own on a grid. It takes twice as long, but it's worth it.
To discard a perfectly good medium simply because of its age is a very 20th-century sort of thing to do. Let each medium do what it does best; if technology can outdo print, then so be it--but it has a long way to go until that can happen (I would like to see books that are grown rather than printed). Technology doesn't mean we have to settle for a second-rate reality.
(no subject)
Date: 2007-01-28 11:32 pm (UTC)With books I think the medium of print should be taken to the extreme - with the book being a work of art in itself. With information, journalism, etc., going online, the physical object of the book should be an entire experience like the words within it.
The internet has made information-in-itself kind-of obsolete in physical form (say, black words on white), so if you're going to go with print, I think it should be as rich and worth it as budget/imagination allows.
(no subject)
Date: 2007-01-29 12:02 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2007-01-29 02:27 am (UTC)We're not discarding the medium simply because it's old. We're discarding it because it takes up space. With a book or magazine, you're stuck with a physical object to manage once you're done consuming it. What am I to do with this object? Am I to pay for its storage by making sure my housing can accommodate it?
Same for CDs and DVDs. My bookshelf contains 34 books, five magazines, 46 CDs, and 20 DVDs. And that's too much. The next time I move, I hope I can pare the collection down further (why do I need CDs when I've ripped all their contents?) I don't want to be responsible for these physical objects.
Yes, my G4 is a physical object too, but I don't mind making sure my apartment is big enough for it and carting it around when I move because it so gracefully provides access to the rest of the world.
Put the books in the museums where they belong. Or, err, maybe that's going too far the early 21st century, but just wait.
(no subject)
Date: 2007-01-29 10:41 pm (UTC)Several house moves -including two trans-Atlantic- have caused me to query the wisdom of transporting packing cases of books, LPs, CDs, videos and DVDs hither and yonder.
That said I tend to agree with Whimsy's point on the charm of books in their physicality, there is something wonderful about the serendipity of finding an old sought-after edition in a dusty secondhand bookshop or in thrift shop, about building a book collection, about looking at the spines on a shelf and considering what next to read.
It depends on how you choose to live with media, I tend to be a collector of things, perhaps I belong in a museum also..I can think of worse abode.
Regards
Thomas S.
(no subject)
Date: 2007-01-28 09:05 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2007-01-28 09:19 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2007-01-28 03:51 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2007-01-28 03:57 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2007-01-28 04:21 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2007-02-03 07:55 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2007-01-28 07:32 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2007-01-28 08:28 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2007-01-28 08:50 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2007-01-28 09:37 pm (UTC)Thomas S.
(no subject)
Date: 2007-01-28 10:12 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2007-01-28 10:26 pm (UTC)It just irks me. It may often be friendly enough or done out of sheer nervousness, but yeah. What do I know? I who have only rarely met people whose presence dazzles or intimidates me (isn't it always that way?) but I often wonder how quickly it would take me to turn droolingly stupid if I met, for instance, Scott Walker.
This is why all dorks rehearse these scenarios. Oh, how I do reveal myself.
♥
(no subject)
Date: 2007-01-29 12:55 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2007-01-29 02:07 am (UTC)Tee hee, Momus, I've only heard a few of your songs ("Orgasm Addict" comes to mind) and maybe I should hear more before commenting, but as I've mentioned before, I truly believe your best talents lie in your writing and graphic sense.
I don't think of your LiveJournal as a blog, but more of a classroom.
You are changing the world not with your musical catalog or even your Wired pieces, but with your daily writings on global culture, here, and I hope Click Opera inspires others to emulate you.
NOT A SYCOPHANT,
harriet
(no subject)
Date: 2007-01-31 02:44 pm (UTC)tschussi!
A
(no subject)
Date: 2007-01-31 05:30 pm (UTC)