Well, it took a lot longer than anticipated for money to be transferred from my American paypal account to my German bank account with the result that the previous week has been pretty lean. I’ve been holing myself up a little, practicing German with my Rosetta Stone, which I think is the key to getting a job, as most places I’ve applied to are pretty insistent that I have good German. Brighter news on that front; The Oscar Wilde pub is giving me a 2-day try out on Tuesday as a barman.
I am missing sunny Boulder and its sunny people a lot – they crop up in my dreams and linger in the mornings.
My manuscript was reviewed by a New York agent and he said it wasn’t enough of a page-turner. Nevertheless he gave me some confirmation of what I needed to do to make it more publishable, so food for though going into the second draft. I do gain some encouragement from the fact that my manuscript made it past an initial hurdle of actually getting an agent to read it, and surprisingly quickly at that. In effect, what he read was a first draft, and my only regret is that I perhaps should have waited until the manuscript was more refined before sending it off. I do hope I haven’t shot myself in the foot in that regard.
Today I went on one of Stuay’s tours – it seems there is no end to the big man’s talents. It was an ‘Alternative Berlin’ tour, taking in a lot of street art and interesting spaces, and peppered with Stuay’s ingenious and informative raps. Of particular note was the studio space at Tachelles Kunstmuseum in Mitte, which is in a bombed-out building in the heart of a now gentrified and commercial hotspot. There was not a solitary inch of the place that had not been griffiti’d several times over. A well-heeled woman took a few steps up the dark staircase and murmured ‘I don’t want to stay here, I don’t like this place,’ and promptly went back to snap photos of the Reichstag. The building’s upper floors house many artist’s studios that are open to the public. The art on display was much like grafitti itself; hopelessly cluttered, overwrought with symbolism, looking like the creator had simply vomited out a puzzling cacophony of noise in the hope of justifying his tenure in what I am quite sure is a highly-prized studio location, that, knowing Berlin (slightly) is probably awarded on some sort of dubious merit rather than the standard landlord-tenant monetary arrangement. A similarly unorthodox institution could be found in Weisseman House Squat of Kreuzberg, another tour highlight . The building is encased in four full-length satirical murals, depicting the downside of capitalism and the commonly held misaprehensions of former DDR inhabitants who idolized capitalism as the solution to all life’s problems. Taken over by squatters in the seventies, they were granted amnesty by the mayor in the nineties and allowed to legally operate a squat, with the proviso that they operate a open doors policy to any homeless who seek shelter there, and provide concerts to the public in the basement of the building. I may find myself knocking at their doors at the rate things are going, and won’t be just as an ironic statement.
‘Post-irony’ is the byword of my trendy German friends. In all matters of fashion and taste, the correct path is to dress or gravitate towards items that are eccentric and absurd, as a ‘post-ironic statement.’ It is within such a paradigm that fixed-gear bicycles have been discovered to be too hip, and the trend is now moving towards fin de Siecle penny-farthing cycles, a wholly impractical but nevertheless perfectly ironic state of affairs. The one exception to this rule of course, is the Nazis and any sort of Bowie-like salute to the SS is strictly verboten, unless, of course, you are an Irishman, in which the case of my wearing of a black Bundeswahr tunic could be positively interpreted as another highly spphisticated take on post-irony.
Still relating to the Nazis, on Saturday I went to view the monstrosity of creation that is the Templehof Airport, a behemoth structure the largest building in the world (Wikipedia it*). Dark and industrial, built during the war by the Nazis, its sheer size almost defies perception. I dragged along a stray American to the sight who was singularly the most unattractive character I’ve met in my entire life, I’m quite sure. This man had spent the last four years in Berlin and was about to move to Japan. What made this man so repulsive was the fact that, in the previous four years of his life in Berlin, he seemed to have done little else than to hack into bank accounts or information systems(exact details deliberately obscure on his part) and had not even heard of Bar 25 or Berghein, smoked two packs of cigarettes a day and daily ate a doner kebap from the local kebap shop for dinner. His one friend in Berlin he had seen two months ago, an acquaintance from Starbuck’s who invited him to a barbequeue. His wife is in Japan, and he seemed to have mainained their marriage status simply for tax purposes. She was, however, demanding a child out of the bargain, and his concession to this idea was to suggest that the embryo be created in vitro and screened for biological superiority. He seemed to stand for everything that is wrong in the world, of how not to live life. It was so uncomfortable talking to him that it was, in fact, interesting.
Saturday brought what perhaps is about to become a typical Berlin night in that we went to several private parties attended by bored dilettante intellectuals before ending up in a mind-blowing club playing deep dub-step. About Blank, and I’m coming to the conclusion that I far prefer the intimate conversational atmosphere of homely houseparties to the post-technological creations of manic German scientists who are hangoblieben – basically took some self-engineered psychadelics and never made their way back. I retired at four A.M., much to the amazement of my German contemporaries.
Finally, we kicked off the week with Essi’s twenty-first birthday, and I finally got to see inside a genuine soviet-built apartment building. For 400 euros a month, Essi has access to 70 square meters of a fourth-floor balcony apartment that overlooks the peace and quite of a residential project in Weissensee. It reminded me of the kind of atmospehere one might find in a small to mid-size French town close to Switzerland. Both the exterior and interior of the building was very impressive, and Essi put on a very tasteful sushi dinner for us. Many bottles of fantastically cheap champagne later, I was feeling quite content listen to the alien babble of young and happy Germans, and the Kate-Moss-in-drag dress I wore with my Cavalli snakeskin pants and military shirt was a big hit. Did someone say post-ironic?
I’m living in an idea right now, a very powerful one.
(* I have not Wikipedia’d it and can’t substantiate practically anyting in this blog.)
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