squirm

my favorite megacolon

relaxing at charite's medical history museum

Tower of Bookish Power

as noted earlier this year, each trip back across the ocean to the ole' homestead occasions a new foray into the cellar to rummage through my archived library. after a good chortle and gape, i take to fondly stroking their spines until eventually extracting a few volumes to bring back to berlin in the belly of an aircraft. lucky for me, my fellow passengers and the airline, the sturdy canvas bag i use for this procedure has but a limited capacity. even so, this time i was able to stuff it full of an impressive 40 kilos of wordy goodness - and a couple of dvd's came along for the ride. among the new arrivals:

barbara maria stafford - body criticism: imaging the unseen in enlightenment art & medicine
jennifer pearson squiers - peek, photographs from the kinsey institute
eberhard roters - berlin, 1910 - 1933
torsten neubauer - the weimar republic through the lens of the press
robert held - inquisition / inquisicion, a bilingual guide to the exhibition of torture instruments from the middle ages to the industrial era presented in various european cities
barbara miller lane - architecture and politics in germany 1918-1945
peter krietsch - pathologisch-anatomisches cabinet
h.m. pachter - weimar etudes
peter levenda - unholy alliance: a history of nazi involvement with the occult
maria tatar - lustmord: sexual murder in weimar germany
guido knopp - hitler's women
cees noteboom - all souls day
thomas powers - heisenberg's war: the secret history of the german bomb
steven heller - the swastika: symbol beyond redemption?
william s. burroughs - my education
william s. burroughs - electronic revolution / die elektronische revolution
william s. burroughs - the cat inside
william s. burroughs - naked lunch
david e. murphy - battleground berlin: cia vs. kgb in the cold war
norbert wiener - god and golem, inc.: a comment on certain points where cybernetics impinges on religion
f. gonzales crussi - suspended animation: six essays on the preservation of bodily parts
z.a.b. zeman - twilight of the hapsburgs
dave flitton - the occult history of the third reich
joseph roth - the wandering jews
denton welch - a voice through a cloud
denton welch - i left my grandfather's house
vincent michael colapietro - glossary of semiotics
jean baudrillard - simulations
werner herzog - of walking in ice
walter ruttman - berlin: symphony of a great city
paul leni - waxworks
brion gysin - the last museum

through a window, darkly

an ill wind blows atop devil's mountain

spent a few hours yesterday creeping around the abandoned cold war listening station atop teufelsberg. energetic vegetation overruns the remains of the western allies deepest penetration behind the iron curtain, now the playground of graffiti artists and local dopers. the site's spacious domes once sheltered the most sensitive of technological ears as they eavesdropped on enemy communications, but today the entire site is dominated by the sound of the relentless wind tearing through the industrial textiles and prefab structures as they fall to ruin.

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