squirm

when it comes to modern art

everyone's a critic.....

crime solo

Berlin police are offering a reward for a valuable violin, thought stolen last December. The rare beauty was built in the early 18th centura by italian violin maker Camillus Camilli of Mantua and disappeared as it was being loaded into a vehicle outside the Messegelände in Masurenallee. Also missing is the bow, a 19th century Voirin und Thomassin. Since the Hertha BSC / Bayern Munich game had just ended police suspect that one of the spectators may have made off with it.

the uncrowd

stranger things have been known to happen but you'll understand my raised eyebrow this morning when i found myself surrounded by zombies. not in the flesh of course - nothing happens in the meatspace any longer - but nonetheless surrounded. first it was my note about the upcoming gathering of the undead here in the hauptstadt. then, first thing this morning i found this remark about brain eaters in budapest sitting in the inbox. amusing, but things assumed weirder proportions when this morbid collection assembled by dennis cooper showed up in the feeds. certainly enough to make me sit up and take note. so it is hardly a surprise that when ben posted this i felt a chill - albeit a sexy one - run down my spine....

hope springs eternal

despite life's myriad disappointments...

meanwhile down at the gym

i am still working on acquiring those rock hard abs!

crumpets

and coffee saturday at a villa in berlin-dahlem. here i would meet my first actual anglicans - they seemed almost normal! of great interest was the vacant lot next door at number 24. a hillock of clay and a dozen small rosebushes huddled together providing the only evidence that the lot had once been the site of a luxurious villa, home to swedish chanson and film star zarah leander. the following day found us wandering through friedrichshagen, marvelling at the lakefront villas before venturing into the waterworks museum, which provided a look into the murky history of berlin's water systems. afterwards by tram and ferry to a late lunch in rahnsdorf where, at twilight, mosquitoes the size of small birds emerge from the pines.

Eighteen

is the number of titles i've read which appear on this list from the Telegraph of the 50 best cult books. Their selection is not quite optimal though, as it is missing some seemingly obvious texts - such as Ballard's Crash, the Illuminatus! trilogy by Shea and Wilson, and Big Bill's Naked Lunch.

for those about to font we salute you

here is a delightful little 'guess the font' game for those of us who have spent too much time staring at letters. i am ashamed to admit i actually scored over thirty percent correct!

The Machine Age

first le corbusier gave us the keys to our brand new, basic white, bachelor pad (a machine for living). then president joe gave us his scheme for a savior machine (they called it the prayer, its answer was law). later alice brought it to bed with his blueprint for a woman machine (brain's a tape that fills her head, she knows more now than all the dead). now roger kusch, former justice minister of hamburg, provides us a rowboat across the river styx with his sleek ikea style suicide machine. i ask you, can this modern life get any easier?

Sheer Art Attack

today for my mittagspause i pedalled down turmstrasse to the Galerie Nord in order to check out their controversial ZoG-Surrend exhibition of work by danish political provocateurs surrend.org, which reopened this month. It had originally been closed in response to vague stone throwing threats by from even more vague 'muslim groups' six local youths who objected to the appearance of the ka'aba in one of their political posters. surrend artists are expert at making "fun of the world’s powerful men and crazy ideological conflicts" and in this collection direct their graphic attentions toward bush, putin, israel, iran, burma, and the npd (one poster suggests giving a german state to the sinti as reparations). i hadn't been in the gallery for thirty seconds and was still getting my bearings when a woman suddenly begin screaming at the top of her lungs, delivering her judgement that it was a "filthy nazi exhibition". a staff member approached her to confer and another helpfully held out an informative brochure but it soon became obvious that, not only had she had missed the point of the exhibition, but she was also a bit unbalanced. eventually - to a chorus of raised eyebrows - she was escorted from the building, and stood outside bellowing her criticisms for the benefit of passersby...i suppose satiric irony is not everyone's forté...

long night of the museums - frankfurt edition

this week found me lodged (like a crab in the gullet of an albatross) outside frankfurt in the humble village of neu-isenburg. thoroughly unremarkable - like most of the landscape around that most dull of german cities. the most exciting event was a power failure in the middle of my meal at a balkan steakhouse named el paso. i had initially decided against the joint - why enter a steakhouse if one doesn't eat steak? - but as i roamed those mean neu-isenburgian streets i found no other eatery - only a few globing orbs hinting at a future full of clones sporting track suits - and so retraced my steps to this oasis of meat. actually the plunge into darkness added a frisson of danger and romanticism to an otherwise negligible meal of potatoes and putenbrust.
   determined to make the most of my forced exile in Hesse the next evening i made my way downtown. Frankfurt's museums are open late on wednesdays and so i arranged an itinerary of forced marches. first off - the german film museum for an exhibition tracing the history of anime. while my delight in anime didn't make it past puberty i was touched by scenes from Astro Boy and Speed Racer with whom i spent many a cookie filled afternoon. most of the exhibition was made up of cels from popular genres and series, following the history of the medium from its roots in post war japan. unfortunately there seemed to be no hentai in the house....
   then next door to the german architecture museum to revisit the Poelzig exhibition recently arrived from the adk in berlin. i was thrilled to see the architectural models and drawings in their new arrangement but, while many of the items now had english descriptions, the exhibition was spread over three floors with poelzig's painting and film work definitely given short shrift. the end result was a fractured and less powerful exhibition.
   leaving Poelzig behind i had to hoof it quickly over the slow flowing main to the museum of modern art. i arrived with mere minutes to spare and threw myself at their exhibtion of sculptures by Hans Josephsohn. Adolf and Joe would not have liked Herr Josephson's barely representative work - heavy clumps of textured dreams in plaster. i took them in quickly i raced around the museum to check out the greatest hits of modern art in this oddly over architected space. i pity the poor suckers that have to clean this joint with its way-too.many stairways and oddly placed pillars. lots of warhol, liechstenstein, as well as other popart stars (with the velvet underground playing gently in the background) and a bueys and richter or two. unfortunately i was a bit early to catch the exhibition of photos by miroslav tichy - an old hairy czech lecher with a pinhole camera - though i was able to see a handful of his smudged prints of girls in bathing suits. a photo of him shows him every bit the cliche of the obsessive outsider artist...bearded, ill kempt and vaguely threatening... stepping out as they locked the door behind me i was pleased to come across the exhibition of katherina fritsch's tischgesellschaft at the zollamt across the street. she always makes me laugh and her sculpture of two dozen clones at dinner was no exception.
   a pitstop in a bad chinese restaurant to fill my belly with some not-spicy-enough kung pao chicken and rest my weary bones. then it was back up and at 'em. into the schirn - truly the best of frankfurt's museums - to check out All Inclusive, an examination of modern tourism and its malcontents. lots of cibachrome prints, hawaiian shirts and clever collage. and then across the hall to their exhibition of four female impressionists - that is - four women painters of the 19th century - Berthe Morisot, Mary Cassatt, Eva Gonzalès und Marie Bracquemond. The similarity of the subject matter - mostly portraits, garden landscapes or interiors was set off by the contrasting use of colors and brushstrokes. having long been a fan of Mary Cassat (not to be confused with Mary Surratt - conspirator in the Lincoln assassination) i enjoyed seeing her luminous paintings - well set off by the dark violet walls upon which they were hung. then as the museum closed its doors it was into the cool night air and back to neu-isenburg to rest my overworked eyeballs....

honor among thieves

four impressionist artworks were stolen at gunpoint yesterday from the E.G. Buehrle Collection in Zurich. three men in dark clothes and hoods (one speaking German with a Slavic accent) loaded Van Gogh's Blossoming Chestnut Branches, Degas' Count Lepic and his Daughters, "Monet's Poppies near Vetheuil, and Cezanne's Boy in a Red Vest into a white car and sped off into the void. Buehrle, one of Switzerland's richest men before his death in 1956, was the German-born owner of Oerlikon Machine Tool Works and made his fortune selling a 20mm anti-aircraft gun during WWII. The blood soaked cash was used to build one of Europe's greatest private art collections. After the war at least 13 of the items in his collection were found to be on Douglas Cooper's list of Nazi looted art. charming....

oh now look what you've done

you've left, and made a fool of everyone (especially paul and ringo). goodbye sexy sadie....

through the looking glass

it seems that the Burroughs-Gysin Method has become fully automated, now enabling the intrepid logonaut to chase the cutups right down the wormhole. while i would prefer to think it some sort of art-magic machine engineered to liberate us from our overseers in the grey towers it is perhaps more likely just a widely thrown psycho-net, trawling the electronic seas gathering click-thru advertising revenue.... but perhaps that is just the sort of mirroring necessary to present in this most real of all possible worlds....

Pimpin'

last night's screening of The Last Pimp the story of Düsseldorf's larger than life fancy man Bert Wollersheim was well received by the audience which applauded throughout Ingo Hamacher's film as Bert described his life philosophies and insights into the business of sex. beginning as a hair stylist, his extravagant personal style and ability to cut the latest hair fashions brought him to the attention of the sexy underworld of seventies west germany and before long he had his own brothel which he grew into a world renowned sex emporium in the course of his long career in the skin trade. today he's a local pimp celebrity (prostitution being legal in Germany at present) and auto collector and the new documentary follows this rise to stardom.
   during the question and answer session after the screening Bert made it clear that he considers prostitution to be one of the most difficult professions and wouldn't recommend it to anyone if they have any other options. he also pointed out that the underworld in which he came of age no longer exists due to the globalisation of crime. the questions and answers soon narrowed to a discussion of the current state of prostitution in germany and its legalisation which, while originally hoped to improve the working conditions for prostitutes, has created a liberalisation of the labor market which has resulted in reduced prices and increased competition - a difficult situation when your capital resources are your own body and psyche....

return to babylon

the simple pleasures of the rural life are soon dissolved in the degenerate cesspools of the modern metropolis. imagine the assault on my moral uprightness last night when i found myself at the opening night of the 2nd Annual PornFilmFestivalBerlin. oh the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune! after a short introduction by organizers Jürgen Brüning and Manuela Kay the festival opened with advertisements from BlueMovie, a festival sponsor, then a short in which poker faced actors read through the dreadful dialogue of a porn scene. These were followed by the evening's main presentation, "5 Sex Rooms und eine Küche", director Eva Heldman's documentary examination of a frankfurt brothel. pleasantly straightforward, the film followed the women as they described their experiences and opinions on relationships, sex, and prostitution. there were also a lot of sexy shoes in the film as the director has a bit of a shoe fetish. following a short Q&A with the director and lady tara, owner of the brothel, everyone (or at least it seemed like everyone) piled into a chartered double decker bus for the jaunt down to kreuzberg's L.U.X. club for the festival's opening party. entering the club to the smooth sounds of DJ Vaginal Davis (who, in a performance years ago, called me a 'little white deathrocker' - is it that obvious?), we soon found ourselves face to...er...face with performance artist Mouse, whose naughty poodle performance caught the imagination of the clubgoers. emerging from her backstage doghouse in pink poodle underwear (which disappeared in the first thirty seconds) the naughty little doggie proceeded to push a plastic bib from out her softer regions which she then tied around her neck, replacing it first with her fist and then a few plastic doggie bones. after messily eating a can of dog food, she produced several long sparklers with which, audience members assisting, she turned herself into a double fountain of sparkly light. no doubt aware of local safety regulations she removed any llingering fire hazards by filling first her femaleness with soapy water (cleanliness is close to godliness after all) and spraying the audience, then repeated the process from her behind, resulting in a general re-adjustment of audience position as not everyone had remembered to bring their umbrella along. now clean and serene Mouse gathered her playtoys and, after a few hearty rounds of applause, left the stage while the assembled clubgoers drifted along, now damp and happy....oh the simple pleasures of babylon on the spree.

Too Much Information

this weekend. to wit

- 19th century french paintings from the met
- jim jones and the peoples temple
- piranesi's views of rome
- uli richter's fashion from berlin
- georg cantor driven mad by contemplating infinity
- eine armee gretchen
- the love letter of a portuguese nun

i can only begin to imagine what devil's brew these are cooking up in my delicate psyche....

goodbye scythians

yesterday, after spending the afternoon pacing a black mare around the riding hall and musing over the bulky sculptures of henry moore, we spent an hour or two wandering through the gropius bau's exhibition "Under the Sign of the Golden Griffin - The Royal Tombs of the Scythians" gawking at the golden treasures. a far flung empire of horse riding wanderers, the scythians roamed the steppes from central europe to eastern asia centuries before the rise of christianity, warring against each other and the peoples that bordered their extensive realm. as my psyche is being trampled beneath hooves in preparation for my trip to transylvania next week, i noted with interest the close relationship between these nomadic tribes and their steeds, many of which were found buried in elaborate graves, complete with golden bridles and elaborate headgear. even the star of the exhibit - a scythian warrior mummified by burial in ice for a thousand years - was not without an equestrian tribute, as he had an ornate tribal image of a horse tattooed over his right shoulder. today is the exhibit's final day, it will be pulled down on tuesday (in part by my good friend Ulf who helped build it back in July), so if you didn't get a chance to see it - well, you're shit out of luck.

Bastards!

i had the opportunity to see our cute-as-a-button mayor this week when i attended the opening of the neue heimat exhibition at the berlinische galerie. 29 artists contributed works to the show, framed as a meditation on the mobility and movement of artists and others who have made Berlin their home in the years since german re-unification. i found myself attuned to the exhibition's spirit, having made berlin my neue heimat as well. (In fact, today marks three years since i lowered the landing gear, touched down and taxied into the hangar. while being so far from family and loved ones has been difficult, my delight and enjoyment of life here in the hauptstadt only grows with passing time. if only my ability to jabber berlinerisch grew as rapidly!) wowi was on hand to open the festivities and to thank directress Ursula Prinz for her many years of service as she leaves for greener pastures, presenting her with the official white berlin bear. crowded with the usual mix of arty types, politicoes and cultural voyeurs the museum kept the exhibition open for us to peruse while waiting for the speakers to speak and the bar to open. much cleverness on display though it was soon too crowded to properly view, though i can recommend the large inflating tank and the spiky orb of plastic chairs, a return visit is necessitated to delve further into the subject. i was also pleased to wander upstairs to the grafik im licht exhibition, consisting of works on paper - usually kept under wraps - from the museum's graphic collection. due to the museum's limitied purview - art made in berlin - they have grown into geniuses of presentation, shuffling the same works into multiple combinations, like the bits of colored glass in a kaleidoscope.
   as the evening wore on i made my way through the milling kulturicrats outside to my waiting steed, planning to take my usual swim before returning home. to my horror i found that some degenerate had parked next to me and, mind fogged by entartete kunst, had actually locked their bicycle to mine! Bastards! or should i say - Buggery Fuck! it took but a moment to realize that, without an detachment of heavily armed gunmen, it would prove impossible to survey the crowd, find the miscreant, and force him to undo his doing before a summary execution would prove his own undoing! i stared in disbelief for a few moments, then walked away muttering in the direction of my gym. obsessive as i am, it was blocks before i could actually accept the incompetence of this wheeled stranger. thankfully my long swim and sauna routine wrung the hysteria out of me and pacing berlin's streets on a chill september night does have a charm of its own. as i approached the museum upon my return shortly before midnight i was disappointed to see the galerie glitterati still gabbing about, though it appeared they had already sucked the bar dry...and was that our mayor i spied, three sheets to the wind and strutting across the tables behind the coat check? ah berlin....happily my miscreant and his rude vehicle were nowhere to be found and so i mounted my trusty steed and drifted off into the nacht und nebel....

give a fella a hand wouldja pal?

Took a jaunt up to Wismar over the weekend in preparation for the longer trek through the Carpathians next month. Not on horseback this time, but with Deutsche Bahn, taking advantage of the very reasonably priced 'Schönes-Wochenende-Ticket'. Drag up to four of your friends out on a daytrip to a remote village for only thirty three euros! The Carpathian connection stems from the filming of Nosferatu (both Murnau's and Herzog's), which used the medieval harbor town as a backdrop for the Vampyre's nocturnal mischief. The day was spent between the town's renowned brick churches, medieval market square, and eating ice cream by the harbor while watching sailing ships (with real sails no less!) ply the narrow channel. The city museum also made for a bit of edutainment when, upon lifting the white cotton light protection covering one of the vitrines, we were confronted with this pair of severed hands! Once belonging to a sixteenth century murder victim, insult was added to injury when the hands were presented to the judge to establish a case against the accused murderer. Perhaps it was felt that if the accused were truly guilty he would be inspired to confess to his murderous deed when the mummified fingers pointed toward the dock!

yesterday found us back in the grunewald at the riding stables, pacing a large four footed creature around the barn. this time we bribed the beast with carrots which she ate greedily but still seemed unconvinced of our authority. these horses know exactly what they can get away with - and while they occasionally deign to follow the instructions of the riding students their only real obedience is reserved for our riding instructor, Herr Cz., who has little patience for their antics. His irritation with the misbehaving steeds is rivalled only by his irritation with us, the incompetent students, and while we have often proferred him carrots and apples as well, we seem to have gotten better results with the bottle of birnenschnapps.
returning to comforts of the city we made our way to the gropius bau to catch the last day of the Ré Soupault exhibition. her photographs witness the last years of europe before the storm, their subjects hovering for a moment before disappearing in the maelstrom of history. she and husband Philip were pursued by events from paris to tunis to algiers to north and south america and then back to paris...sexy surrealists on the run...
speaking of south america, this weekend provided the opportunity to watch gregory peck unleash his inner madman as dr. mengele in 1978's thirdreichsploitation flick The Boys From Brazil (unfortunately we'll never know what mengele himself thought of peck's interpretation as he died in sao paolo shortly after the film was released). also notable was a young bruno ganz, playing an an austrian microbiologist who must explain cloning to aging nazi hunter liebermann (laurence olivier).
continuuing my tour of germany's worst smelling cities, tomorrow i visit Limburg home of the malodorous cheese made notorious in my youth by its frequent appearance on the little rascals....

It's Good For You!

please allow me to introduce myself

a little work i have started doing, combining two of my greatest interests: berlin and cold hard cash. recently started contributing to gridskipper - a travel blog which is part of gawker media, an online publisher of gawker, defamer, wonkette and - my favorite - fleshbot. i am quite pleased as this is the first time i have gotten paid for creative work. i am writing brief snippets regarding things to do and places to see here in babylon on the spree and then they toss some pocket change in my cage - getting paid to blog - who da thunk it? i also recently 'arranged' for german press credentials and am finding out just how easy all those journalists have it - a land of milk and honey indeed! anyway you can check out my stuff here if you'd like - though the format is somewhat limiting it is still a good exercise for my writing skills - brevity being the soul of wit and all that...

up up and away

hideously awake and creeping out of bed early this saturday to help a friend move. the morning was threateningly sunny but after a few minutes of nico's 'frozen warnings' the clouds have moved in and the day has thankfully drearified and drifted into an existential grey.....

ear of squirm: Nico 's Frozen Warnings (Alternate Version)

just reality mother, just reality

poor robot

by Andrew Huang

floods in papua new guinea

and pigs perishing of blue ear disease in thai binh. as a news junkie i can't get enough information regarding disasters in places i will probably never actually visit. that's why i depend on the good folks at the budapest based National Association of Radio-Distress Signalling and Infocommunications, Emergency and Disaster Information Services (EDIS) to provide me with an up to the minute disaster map. full of threatening icons and multicolored alert levels, the map puts me at the center of the ongoing catastrophe we call planet earth. now if i can hollow out a mountain for my command and control center and hire a team of sexy clones in track suits i can finally put my master plan for world domination into motion!

stayed up late

reading Spengler and watching video girls attempt to seduce me with obscene suggestions involving my telephone. the decline of the west indeed..... in the section 'what is world history' i came across this quote from goethe which speaks to a particular illness of mine, my constant craving for a programme of action - "what is important in life is life, and not a result of life"

clever Clément

Clément Rosset has noted "Niemand entflieht einem Gefängnis ohne Mauern." (no one escapes a prison without walls)

separate but equal

another illustration

of the inspiring beauty of the american dream realized....

candy may be dandy

and liquor quicker but, in europe at least, incest is best!

ear of squirm: (Radio Nova) 's (Radio Nova) -

the weekend submerged

after taking in the collections of false eyes, hearing aids, pigs ventricles and titanium joints at Charite's medical history museum exhibit of Leben mit ersatz Teilen / Living with replacement parts sunday afternoon (followed by lunch - all those surgery videos gives a fella a powerful hunger!) we made our way down to the river to relax. To swim and sweat at the winter Badeschiff, which resembles nothing so much as a retrostyle spree bound space station. the usual naked people of all shapes, sizes and styles, wandering dazed between the saunas and the pools. monday i took off from work (because i got it like that yo!) and enjoyed a selection of italian divisionists at the Deutsche Guggenheim. These fellows seem to be the italian version of the french neo-impressionists, lots of nature scenes in pixelated paint strokes - the only familiar name was Camille Pisarro. I was so inspired by their colorful dot extravaganzas that i proceeded to the wash salon and did my laundry - to get my own dots out! Afterwards i made my way around the corner to the lichtblick kino to catch 'Berlin Ecke Schoenhauser' - an east german juvenile delinquent drama from the fifties which was filmed up the block. Strangely fascinating to see one's neighborhood fifty years earlier, in splendid black and white, with cool commie cats jazzing it up on the corner beneath the U-Bahn. The concerns of youth always transcend the bonds of time and political persuasion - girls, clothes and avoiding honest work!

in a cold february

i often need a little pick-me-up to keep warm and help me make it through this short midwinter month. thankfully bedazzled has assembled this cozy collection of vintage erotica designed to help us all make it through the coldest of nights. a special favorite of the moment 'Paris Topless' - the passion, the scandal, the beauty of the city of lights has never before been shown this boldly...

out of pocket

we crossed the border just after dawn. the guards, bored already, tossed their questions into the dusty air without enthusiasm, then slid our passports over the counter without looking up. sweet black coffee in a white plastic cup. we kept to the coast road all morning, the natives watching us pass with one eye. the new development was going to make their prospects better, so they'd been told. the mercury lengthened and the shadows in the sand drew in - growing compact like hate - and we left the coast, pushing up into the mountains. a landscape of stones and sand arched beneath a cloudless sky. the air grew cold with the altitude and white patches of snow still clutched at the earth as we neared the lost city...

i've just read

that a full twenty five percent of americans believe this year will occasion the second coming of jesus christ. talk about setting yourself up for disappointment! using an approximate US population of three hundred million souls, this would indicate that a full seventy five million of my countrymen are betting against seeing Super Bowl XLII. while this is good news for gambling establishments of Atlantic City and Las Vegas (more than one sucker a minute!) it is actually an indictment of the american educational system that seems to be producing idiots at an astounding rate. naturally this failure of reason serves the interest of some parties so we can expect it to continue indefinitely. if i were a more stout hearted man i might nurture the ambition to somehow use the inordinate credulity of my my fellow citizens to my own advantage, but as it is i can only hope that this quarter of the masses will correspond to the victims mentioned in Pat Robertson's Night Journey wherein The Lord Thy God tips him off to a 'mass killing' later this year. sigh....

and this morning

snow. granted, i woke late after a silent morning interrupted only by the yawning of cats. seeing a glaze on the roof of a house on the corner i assumed at first that the night air had simply occasioned the frost, but spying a bit closer i spotted the tiny snow specks drifting down from our refrigerated sky. and now it has begun to lay a thin blanket upon the autos, the heaps of dirt piled up by workers and the abandoned bicycles in the street, the snow gods having decided that the solstice and christmas are safely past and the winter can begin in earnest. it eases my heart which had begun to doubt the possibility of snow in this greenhouse world into which we have shut ourselves - pulling fast the door and listening for that doomladen 'click' - like a lone child trapping himself in a dead refrigerator thoughtlessly abandoned on the street.
a few days ago i thrilled to see Unheimliche Geschichten (Tales of the Macabre) at the Babylon. Richard Oswald's 1919 film adaption of five strange tales (authored by Edgar Allan Poe and Robert Louis Stevenson among others) stars Conrad Veidt, Reinhold Schünzel and, most importantly, Anita Berber. I was especially excited to see the film since finishing Mel Gordon's biography of Berber and becoming better acquainted with this dark goddess of Berlin. Berber is presented as 'die Dirne' (the Harlot) in the film's introduction, her portrait hanging in an antiquariat between those of Veidt's 'der Tod' (Death) and Schünzel's 'der Teufel' (the Devil). At the stroke of midnight the portraits come alive, spring from out their frames and, after squirming about lasciviously, begin to read from the dusty volumes which are everywhere in the shop. The five stories which follow are tales of desire, madness and death. a man kills his wife, his crime only to be discovered by her lover, a mysterious lovely perishes of the plague, a man murders his friend for the attentions of a dancer, a mysterious club produces suicides in its members, and a baron is plagued by ghosts after importuning the delicate wife of a nobleman. Conrad Veidt is excellent as Death - his lank figure and skull like visage is bone chilling at first glance. Anita Berber is of course dreamy in this, her seventh film. She had already worked with Oswald several times and had played the lead in his film Prostitution. By 1919 she was the face of the erotic madness which was sweeping Berlin. Her naked dances were performed to acclaim (in the third tale of this film she is the dancer that drives men to murder, mad with desire, and we can witness her amazing talent), her scandalous personal habits were becoming legend, her life of drugs and drink had not yet taken its toll and her fame as an 'incarnation of the perverse' was growing night after night. Though in less than ten years she would be dead of tuberculosis, she was earning the lasting honors and fame which still attend to her memory and which still drive we humble imps of the perverse mad with dark desire...

for the children

a very special christmas message from a very special elf!

"His dress sense was very uncool, but I do remember that he used to wear very tight trousers."

very tight trousers. most excellent my good man. and as police investigating the serial murders of five british prosititutes have learned it seems that Tom 'The Bishop' Stephens was also a fan of Hong Kong Phooey - whose creator Joe Barbera died just this morning - coincidence? i suggest investigators look into possible links between the man who, along with his partner Bill Hanna, created so many much beloved cartoon personalities (including Tom and Jerry, The Flintstones, Yogi Bear, Top Cat, the Jetsons and many more) and the strangling deaths of those five down-on-their-luck women who lost their lives servicing the needs of the IpswitchIpswich locals.

it's all about

teen sex here in Germany today! First off, notorious sex bestie Mario Mederake was sentenced by a court in Dresden to 15 years (plus detention upon his release - whatever that means..) for kidnapping a thirteen year old girl, holding her captive for five weeks in a wooden box, during which time he repeatedly abused her. The victim was rescued only after she was able to smuggle out a scrap of paper on which she had written a note pleading for help. Mederake had previously been convicted of raping a fourteen year old girl in 1999 - a crime for which he was obviously not punished appropriately. One hopes that the authorities might consider following California's example and provide Herr Mederake with a compulsory lifetime prescription for Depo Provera, that is if he doesn't suffer an unfortunate 'accident' while incarcerated. Meanwhile a new study conducted by the WHO indicates that the average age at which german teens lose their virginity is 16.2 years, making them only six months slower than the industry leading teens in Iceland, whose average age is 15.7 when they give it up. The spiegel article on the study goes on to note that the age of consent in Germany is 14 (a fact to which Herr Mederake obviously paid no heed). Perhaps he should have relied on a soy based defense - recent hysteria surrounding the isoflavones in soy products and their estrogenic qualities would have us believe that all that tofu, textured soy protein and soy milk is turning all the little boys gay and causing their sisters to reach puberty at age five!

TEEN SEX UPDATE: the madness continues! In Regensburg today judges eased the sentence of a 33 year old teacher who seduced a 13 year old student after plying him with beer and whiskey. She said he reminded her of her first boyfriend! and wept in court!

finally something useful!

on this damn intarnet! the all purpose, all occasion Evil Clown Generator!

Yes Virginia, there is a Santa Claus!

not being a born winner (just ask the blackjack dealer at the Casino am Alex) i was as surprised as any when i found a notice from Supervert in my inbox yesterday, informing me that i had won a book in their holiday daily drawing! Of course, there remained the difficulty of choosing between their two fine tomes - should I take Necrophilia Variations and delve into the world of those whose love is so strong it conquers even death itself? or should i join the space race (after all a moon base is in the works!) and read Extraterrestrial Sex Fetish? In the end i decided that as i might have to carry the chosen volume in public i should select the one which best matched my wardrobe. But after sending my address and my choice of tome to Supervert, they informed me that to make my winter a bit warmer they would go ahead and send me both! Ah, i ask you, without the comfort of strangers, where would be?

Vergangenheitsbewältigung

in german it means 'overcoming the past'. tis a cruel trick of providence that allows us, in our youth and folly, the ability to create a past which, for the remainder of our lives, we must struggle to overcome. though i suppose it does keep us busy...

dragged

myself out of a warm bed this afternoon and made my way down to the Berlinische Galerie on Alte Jakobstrasse. I had been looking forward to checking out a new exhibition of works by photographer Sasha Stone detailing everyday life in Berlin during the second half of the twenties. The photographs, thought lost for sixty years, were originally shot for the book "Berlin in Bildern", and were recently discovered in the possession of an Austrian private collector. The gallery has put together a calendar with a selection of the photos, the sale of which will hopefully raise the cash for the purchase of all 78 photos. Also on exhibit are works from the gallery's permanent collection - an exhibition i've seen before but which is always worth another look. Like most museums in the city, the Berlinische Galerie charges an entrance fee and if one is an incorrigible museumgoer like myself the costs can quickly mount, so i went ahead with something i had been contemplating for a while now and paid the eighty euros to become a member of the museum's fellowship - a decision which was made easier by the fact that not only do i now have free entry into the museum for a year (as well as special previews, etc.), but also free entry into the Jewish Museum, the Berlin City Museum, the Bauhaus Archiv, the Haus am Waldsee, the SK in Köln and the Kunsthalle in Emden! I suspect I should be able to squeeze eighty euros worth of usage in the next twelve months, especially now that i've discovered that I can make it down to the BG simply by taking the U8 five stops...

surfing the doom

   Friday morning passing through Invaliden Friedhof I remembered that it was the anniversary of Ernst Udet's suicide. Though it had slipped my mind I had entertained the idea of leaving flowers on the grave of the aerial joy boy gone bad and was touched to see that someone had placed a few white blossoms on his ivy covered resting place. A few minutes later, at the foot of the Putlitzbrucke (upon which the annual floral remembrances of Kristallnacht still adorn the Jewish Deportation Memorial), i was stopped by the cops who had set up a bicycle traffic stop. The kindly bearded man in green informed me that riding with headphones could get me a 15 euro fine and that i was riding on the bike path on the wrong side of the street. These Germans seem to have constructed a very complex and multidimensional set of bike path regulations, for the best of all concerned no doubt. After walking my bike to the other side of the street and riding out of sight i popped my headphones back in to listen final moments of BBC's The World Today.
   Saturday I made my way across town to purchase a new suitcase as i must fly down to Munich tomorrow. Finding the address of the Kofferhaus Witt on the Rimowa website i noted that they were founded in 1923. To be in business in Berlin, through three successive governments over the course of eighty three years they must be doing something right (or something terribly, terribly wrong...). After a friendly greeting, the opening and shutting of various suitcases and much goldilocking on my part, I finally left, my new Bolero Cabin Trolley by my side. Later that evening - Diamanda Galas at the Passionskirche - clad in black, her voice inhabited by the doomed souls of centuries, she presented her 'Songs of Exile' as the closing event of the international women musicians festival. While it has been years since i had last been exposed to her aural exorcisms and diabolic decibels she has lost none of her ability to raise hairs on the back of one's neck like a snake charmer and the darkened apse of the Passionskirche was the perfect setting for her mournful moans and satanic screeching.
   finally, yesterday i finally made it to see 'An Inconvenient Truth', Al Gore's cinematic presentation of his global warming slide show. While i am familiar with many of the factoids which made up the presentation, seeing them assembled in one place accompanied by the effective graphical representation of the statistical data proved to be quite disturbing. glad that my apartment is on the highest hill in Berlin and i know how to swim....that should allow for an extra couple of days before the final cataclysm....

up on the rooftop

google might know if you jumped or you fell off...

what friends are for

good friend Ulf sent me this delightful poem by Gottfried Benn (from first book 'Morgue and other poems'):

Schöne Jugend

Der Mund eines Mädchens,
das lange im Schilf gelegen hatte,
sah so angeknabbert aus.
Als man die Brust aufbrach,
war die Speiseröhre so löcherig.
Schließlich in einer Laube unter dem Zwerchfellfand
man ein Nest von jungen Ratten.
Ein kleines Schwesterchen lag tot.
Die andern lebten von Leber und Niere,
tranken das kalte Blut und hatten
hier eine schöne Jugend verlebt.
Und schön und schnell kam auch ihr Tod:
Man warf sie allesamt ins Wasser.
Ach, wie die kleinen Schnauzen quietschten!

something to look forward to

reading over this list of "The 100 Most Significant German Films" i find that i have only seen around thirty! time to dust off the old library card so i can spend the dark months getting a proper edumacation!

and now

the FBI is trying to get us to do their work for them!

off with their heads

looks like Idomeneo is gonna get staged at the Deutsch Oper after all. The production, which includes a scene featuring the severed heads of Muhammad, Buddha, Jesus and Neptune, was originally cancelled due to security concerns, causing an uproar by the chattering classes. Now it seems that it is back on the bill after a more optimistic 'security assessment'. The scene involving the severed heads is apparently a recent addition to the Mozart opera, inserted as a protest against organized religion - that scourge of modernity. i don't know shit about opera but my two cents? Let's Roll!

you may not see us....

but cute, voyeuristic techno-utopians on bicycles are everywhere!
your urban arousal is their industrial challenge!

Holy Father Suicide Bomber

as seen on Invaliden Strasse ecke Brunnen Strasse at the Foto Shop

always one

to keep my promises, i shall proceed to relate the remainder of my birthday extravaganza. wherein the perversions of the big city form a stark contrast to the healthy fresh aired, salt of the earth, brandenburgensian landscapes. after resting the old bones for a few minutes after our return from the mark brandenburg, we made our way down south through kreuzberg to the southwest corner of tempelhof airport. here, in the club insomnia was the opening party of the first annual PORNfilmfestivalBERLIN. after dropping our things at the garderobe (not all of them...) we wandered the small venue, taking note of the long couches, slings, beds, and racks distributed throughout - there was even a hot tub and showers!. having arrived late we unfortunately had missed the planned entertainment of the evening (a bondage exhibition and some drag performances) but there was still plenty of amusement in watching our fellow patrons disport themselves upon the dancefloor. As is so often the case there was a naked fat man with an unnatural urge to be trod upon by females, a few scantily dressed ladies and an assortment of fetishists bearing the burdens of their passions. As the evening grew late (and the naked man moved ever closer) we took leave of our fellow fantasists and hopped a cab back home upon arrival to fall wearily into bed. The next day would find us again amongst the refugees of love. After rising late, lounging lizard like about the house while consuming coffee and cake, we eventually climbed back into the saddle for a long ride westward across town to schoeneberg where we had arranged to take part in a japanese bondage workshop. hosted by renowned bondage auteur matthias grimme from hamburg, the workshop presented to the twenty or so participants a brief history of the art, a few anatomical notes and the knots which would secure for us entry into the kingdom of heaven. the two hours passed quickly and by the end the room had grown just a bit hotter....after a leisurely ride back east, we stopped to have a delicious dinner at the cafe sanddorn, which caters to such sensitive eaters as the protein allergic, the lactose intolerant and other neuropaths and malingerers of the empire. and so the curtain falls on my birthday observances the year of their lord 2006...

another year older and deeper in debt

it had to happen sometime - i got older! every year around this time the bony hand of fate reaches out and slides another marker across the table. to solemnly observe the occasion in my fashion i slept in late, later taking my trusty steed the bicycle out into the mark brandenburg. caught the regional line east at Berlin Lichtenberg and debarking a few kilometers short of poland (poland - ha - a historical fiction!) we pedalled our way through the village of Gusow, taking a right at the fork in the road overseen by the bust of Theodor Fontane. the day was sunny and the brandenburgensian landscape glorious yellows and orange bordering the yet green fields of various vegetations. arriving at Schloss Neuhardenberg we gobbled down a tasty potato soup before wandering through their current exhibition which consists of thousands of swinish collectibles. happy swine, wealthy swine, nazi swine, military swine, jewish swine, lucky swine, prussian swine and sexy swine. Smaller exhibitions took up the topics of the two hundred year history of Schloss Neuhardenberg, the Neuhardenberg family and fate of Carl-Hans Graf von Hardenberg (involved in the resistance, failed suicide attempt upon his arrest by the gestapo, survived Sachsenhausen, Schloss expropriated by the GDR, lived in Hessen until his death in 1958) as well as surviving works by Schinkel in poland (poland - ha - a historical fiction!). leaving Neuhardenberg the sun hung low above the plain. we found an old decommissioned bike path through the forest and back fields to Wulkow (the signage indicated it was no longer to be used but we were urged onward by an old man with a collie and old blue bicycle). darkness thickened in the rutted path between the pines and by the time we emerged onto the road to Trebnitz the stars were creeping into the sky. It should be noted that Trebnitz was once the home of Melchior von Pfuehl, a renowned alchemist and necromancer of the late 16th century. arriving breathless at the train platform (just past the stork's nest that crowns the chimney of the abandoned coke ovens) we found we had missed the train by minutes and would have to wait hours for the next departure west. the evening was growing colder and as i was without a jacket we made our way to a local kneipe - Gasthof zur Ostbahn - where the locals gave us the hairy eyeball but remained at a comfortable distance. Later aboard our train back the big city - we perused the pages of the eight volume set of Fontane's "Wanderungen durch die Mark Brandenburg" which i had presented to myself as a birthday present... but wait, birthday not yet over...next episode - die Perversionen der Großstadt!

better the second time around

the Babylon premiered Einsturzende Neubauten's new concert film last night. Shot at the Palast der Republik almost two years ago, the film was a nostalgic bit of celluloid for me (or plastic or whatever DVDs are made from these days). I was at that concert, still feeling the full psychic shock of my relocation, still without a job, prospects or my own flat. I remember it was cold inside the Palast and i was tired and depressed. Yet the opportunity to hear the blessed blasted noise inside the historic shell drew me in and kept me on my feet. Last night's cinematic re-living shared much with the original - the visuals were bad, the sound was phantastic and the band was playful - but happily today the venue was warm and both it and i are much more comfortable. after the credits Blixa and cohort took to the stage to answer a few questions - most importantly - what is their opinion of the destruction of the Palast? "being west berliners there are no tears shed over its demolition, but rebuilding the schloss is an urban atrocity" and what do they have against Wedding? "culinarily desolate!". they did indicate however, that they would be glad to come out if someone would whip up some tasty italian dishes for them.....

final destinations

yesterday's reading at the otto berg funeral home was an odd success. Luci van Org alternated between reading her ghost stories and singing ghostly songs while playing a soft guitar. unfortunately, once inside the coffin room, the dim lighting, poor acoustics and my weak grasp of the german tongue limited my comprehension of the actual text. but the candlelit atmosphere, tastefully displayed caskets, urns and sprays of flowers made the mood wonderfully morbid. i had expected to be surrounded by adolescent goths and death rockers but the vast majority of the audience were gray haired couples and ladies you would expect to find at the grocery store - which just made everything weirder! afterwards we all made our way downstairs to the viewing room where they served us chili con carne, drinks and dessert. quite perverse these germans, munching away on cups of urine colored jello topped with a red cherry sauce, in which was embedded what appeared to be a human ear or fragment of kidney. and while enjoying our tasty repast w