squirm

a flower blooms in moabit

R I A S

news you can use

good news for book fetishists - or actually - fetishists of all stripes. next week that purveyor of exquisitely bound, yet moderately priced, filth - taschen - will be opening their first berlin store in friedrichstrasse! poor but sexy indeed!

but the little girls understand

in a procedure which may seem outlandish to most but will be familiar to those of you who suffer the same despicable book fetishism as myself, each trip to visit my mother occasions a descent into her cellar to rummage through the cartons containing the remains of my library. the expense of moving to berlin necessitated selling off a large portion of my collection and putting the rest in storage, thus every time i fly back from a visit i find myself retrieving a few of my little darlings. add the books i purchase while traveling and others that my friends find fit to burden me with and soon i've stuffed full the suitcase which i bring empty each time expressly for this purpose. last week, as i made my way down the narrow stairs to the cellar door, my quarry was a copy of siegfried krakauer's from caligari to hitler. i was sure it was somewhere in the dozen or so cartons and was determined to pry it loose and bring it back to a more comfortable resting place here in babylon by the spree. unfortunately, after going through hundreds of volumes the seminal survey of weimar era film still eluded me, meanwhile the time left before my flight was growing short. (sadly, united airlines doesn't warn its customers in advance when planning a five hour delay). however my labors were not in vain and i was able to lug back a heavy bag filled with the following tasty delights:

edmond & jules de goncourt - pages from the goncourt journals
e.m. cioran - anathemas and admirations
georges canguilhem - the normal and the pathological
laura frost - sex drives
georges bataille - the accursed share
alan clark - barbarossa
bernadette kester - film front weimar
georges bataille - encyclopedia acephalica
henkel & merz ed. - der potsdamer platz
stephanie baron ed. - exiles + emigres
serge nazarieff - jeux de dames cruelles
henry lafarge ed. - lost treasures of europe
georges bataille - on nietzsche
alexander nehamas - nietzsche life as literature
rebecca solnit - wanderlust
pierre klossowski - sade my neighbor
julia kristeva - powers of horror
friedrich nietzsche - on the advantage and disadvantage of history for life
georges bataille - the tears of eros
georges bataille - the absence of myth
jean baudrillard - the transparency of evil
friedrich nietzsche - my sister and i
pierre klossowski - the baphomet
valerie steele - fetish: fashion, sex & power
bruno & ferber ed. - german experimental film of the 1990s
fritz arnold - simplicissimus and the weimar republic
robert kaplan - balkan ghosts
willliam ewing - love and desire: photoworks  

the cruelest month

yesterday, attempting to kill time at lunch, i decided to stroll through the kleine tiergarten, a leafy environs bookended by two churches - one built friedrich schinkel, where the local drunks argue the finer points of philosophy. reaching the far edge of the park, enjoying the sun and still averse to returning to the office i thought i'd take a gander at the spring greenery in the nearby wilsknacker strasse graveyard. the small cemetery marks the mass grave of over 300 locals killed during the final, desperate battles fought here in april of 1945. it also is home to the headstone of albrecht haushofer - author of moabit sonnets - executed by a roving ss death squad hours after being released from prison as the russian beared down on the neighborhood. wandering over to his headstone i was taken aback when i saw the date of his death - exactly sixty four years ago to the day! coincidence or something more?

nine euros per month

 

the first sunset of spring over westhafen

 

Ticket to Writhe

an early morning visit to the ausländerbehörde yesterday. despite the best of intentions i arrived huffing and puffing at the office of my designated bureaucrat on the third floor of the ominous cuboid structure on friedrich-krause-ufer - a full five minutes after my scheduled appointment. having been subject to a teutonic brow beating before here for exactly this transgression, i flinched and cringed as i knocked and opened the office door. the guardians of the great german bureaucratic system have the strange (to this ausländer anyway) habit of working behind closed doors, expecting visitors to just knock once and then throw them open at the previously scheduled moment. coming from a land where you wait for someone to answer the door after knocking, i can never escape the feeling of being rude and intrusive. though that may be exactly the point, to throw the petitioner off balance at the very start of the process and have them realize what a meddling, annoying interruption to the proper flow of paperwork he or she really is! why the nerve!

despite those fears my entrance into the inner chamber was uneventful and, after handing over my thick wad of paperwork, all carefully collated and triple checked for completeness, i was given a number in the high three digits and told to go wait in one of the buildings many waiting rooms. i double checked which waiting room i was being sent into, since greater men than i have disappeared forever into the office's labyrinthine bowels when they wandered off in search of the wrong room number. once comfortably perched on the extruded plastic found wherever people are forced to wait upon their fates, i whipped out the readables and hunkered down for the long crawl. before i could delve into a report on the secret sex life of the pink iguana, however, my attention was drawn to a familiar drawl drifting through the waiting room. it came from a tall gentleman, who, as it turned out, was a pastor from illinois trailed by two young americans. i snickered inwardly as he, complaining of their more-than-an-hour-long wait, walked off to investigate the delay. moments later he returned, bloody and beaten by the merciless tongue lashing of one of the bureaucracy's cerberii.

i stared blankly into the iguana's beady black eyes as i eavesdropped on the pastor's conversation with another american sentenced to our purgatory, the latter an 'artist' who joylessly enumerated the advantages of living in berlin as the pastor attempted to steer him into a discussion on the fate of his eternal soul. the pink iguanas were looking ever sexier in their rocky sun-drenched garden of eden as the artist, the pastor and one of his young charges proceeded to exchange the dreary pleasantries that pass for conversation whenever americans run into each other outside the tsa's security perimeter. just as i though i could take no more and was thinking of obscenities to shout from atop my extruded plastic perch the bell rang. i looked up to see my high three digit number blinking yellow on the board, efficiently directing me to the appropriate room number. a few minutes later, after a bit of bowing and scraping and parting with a fistful of euros, the pink iguanas and i were cheerily wandering down friedrich-krause-ufer, away from the bureaucrats, the artist, the pastor and his charges - our sweaty fingers clutching our passport, inscribed with a residence/work permit now extended into the grey mists of 2011....

history's long shadow

the city's decades years of cold war division continue to impact Berliners down to this very day, as shown by recent newsworthy events casting city residents onto the sharp horns of a dilemma - whether to venture west to see our new baby hippo at the Zoo, or to turn eastward and head out to the Tierpark to see another thick skinned toddler, our newest elephant offspring. decisions, decisions, .... damn you stalin!

the writing on the wall

it's not just the local saplings that must fear being attacked by chalk wielding literati...