squirm

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

glitchcraft

 

finally made it to staalplaat working space in neukölln last night to see glitchmaster phillipe petit scratch it up with schneider tm and four more dronesters. i've been trying to get more out of staalplaat after hearing them perform years ago at an electronic festival in budapest. that evening's soundscape featured a dozen or so tiny speakers splicing together sounds from at least as many sources with the help of some sort of disturbed algorithmic intelligence. in the charged darkness of the hungarian club it seemed a soundtrack created to accompany the dying dreams of an errant astronaut. but the best laid plans of mice and men to get down to the old staalplaat space on torstrasse came to naught, so i was pleasantly surprised when they resurfaced in neukölln last year. last night's performance was a swelling river of bells, bicycles and digital artifacts drowning an electric violin and guitar in the humming detritus of glitch city. many dreams were hatched and then abandoned as the onlookers watched petit and his fellow pioneers attempt to claw through the chrome creased crust of their own excitatory neurons. the staalplaat store itself is filled to overflowing with inexplicable graphic novels, noise 'zines and extensive recordings on various media. i took the opportunity to snatch up their last copy of romain slocombe's 'japan in bondage', a collection of his paintings on the same subjects he so lovingly depicted in 'city of the broken dolls'. thus, at the end of the evening, i was able to pedal my way northward with not only the crumbling blips and fractured bleeps of the performers ricocheting through my skull, but also the fractured femme fatales clutched close beneath my coat. 

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  

wherein arthur hits me where it hurts

"Buying books would be a good thing if one could also buy the time to read them in: but as a rule the purchase of books is mistaken for the appropriation of their contents."

Arthur Schopenhauer - On the Sufferings of the World