Archive for January, 2009
Transmediale
Friday, January 30th, 2009
Berlin wouldn’t be Berlin without a good dose of electronic music. And so, I bring you a mini-review of “Club Transmediale,” a self-proclaimed “festival for adventurous music and related visual arts,” a week-long extravaganza that takes place in various locations across Berlin, with lectures and workshops in the daytime and concerts and performances at night.
The venue was hidden away by the side of the river, hardly noticible at all from the street. It was mostly obscured by trees and at first glance I assumed it was an abandoned warehouse.
Inside was a large, dark space, with a few bars here and there and a spacious stage for the musicians. There were screens all over the walls where the video art (to go with the music) was projected. The visual artists, or VJs I suppose, had their own nice setup across the room from the musicians. Judging by the languages being spoken around us inside, the spectators at the event were as international as the performers. The Friday program alone had musicians from France, America, South Africa, Quebec, England and Germany.
There were also some art installations around the building. The festival seems to have a yearly theme, and this year’s theme was “structures.” Angular sculptures adorned the walls, with projections on them that traced their outlines or lit up a few facets at a time. This, combined with video projections that lit up pieces of frosted glass hanging around the bars, made for an ambience that felt a bit sci-fi. Cool, eh?
The building had smaller rooms in the back, where one could find video art and cooking demonstrations (maybe? It was too crowded to really see what was going on) in progress, as well as a screening of the film “Dub Echoes,” a documentary about the Jamaican origins of the dub echo and its influence on music around the world. I learned more in that night about Dub than in the entire rest of my life put together. In another room, someone had constructed a strange couch-like sculpture out of long, black tubes, which snaked around to form seats before reaching up around the ceiling like dark tentacles. The end of each tube was plugged up with a white light.
Being a wimpy pseudo-Berliner, I only made it through about three sets of music before I found myself wishing I could go to bed. But I did not miss Filistine, who dazzled everyone by teaming up with a cellist/violinist and making extremely crazy noises with a metal shopping cart. His visuals were quirky and interesting, using bits of old films and footage to make you wonder what the rest of the story was.
Birthday greetings
Sunday, January 18th, 2009
Happy birthday mom! Here’s a picture of us; imagine that we’re saying it in person. :)
"All art was once contemporary…"
Sunday, January 18th, 2009
Yesterday was a day of visiting museums. Our first choice was to see the best thing: giant dinosaur skeletons. Unfortunately the “dino” section of the Natural History Museum is reportedly closed for renovations. (I know, I know… how disappointing!) As a second choice we opted for contemporary art, figuring the “museum island” in the middle of the city would be a good place to look.
There are probably at least a dozen museums there, including a temporary showroom for contemporary art and the Berlin Guggenheim, but the showroom was closed and the Guggenheim had only one sculpture in it. Granted, that sculpture was very large and filled the entire gallery, but since it was visible from the entrance we didn’t feel compelled to spend eight euros on the entrance fee. Instead we settled for the Altes Museum, which holds Egyptian, Greek and Roman works that have somehow been pilfered from other parts of the world.
Perhaps it is unfair of me to simply assume that the vast majority of the sculptures, jewelry, papyrus, gold and such have just been pillaged, but I couldn’t actually find much information about how the objects got to such an unrelated location. Why, for example, is the bust of Nefertiti in Berlin? According to Wikipedia, it was discovered by a German Egyptologist, Ludvig Borchardt. In1907 he founded a German Archeological Institute in Cairo, and I’m sure he found all sorts of cool stuff in Egypt, but exactly how does that work? I mean, could you just go to some other country that has a lot of fascinating history, start digging around, and then simply keep whatever you find? Wouldn’t, you know, Egypt want to keep the remnants of their own history? Did this happen simply because the Egyptians were not equipped in 1907 to stand up to European might?
It’s interesting while walking through a museum like the Altes Museum in Berlin to think of all the contexts these objects have been in over the thousands of years that they’ve existed. I suppose they all began in the hands of an artist, with hammers and chisels, paintbrushes or metalworking tools. I’m sure some resided in palaces, and many spent the majority of their lifetimes in some forgotten, underground place. Some were probably hacked off of walls by European “conservationists”/”thieves.” Now they’re in a futuristic, climate-controlled environment of gray steel and glass, hermetically sealed and separated from one another in colorless rooms. Guards prowl around them with an air of superiority, like ivory-tower dragons sitting on a pile of intellectual treasure. One wonders where they will be another 4000 years from now…
We had our fill of pottery and busts, and made our way to nearby Hackescher Markt station where a little street fair was going on. There was a detour for Bratwurst, a cheap, easy and tasty lunch, if not necessarily the most nutritious, and then we headed to Potsdamer platz to find the nearby Neue Nationalgallerie, where there happens to be an ongoing Jeff Koons exhibit with some of the artist’s famous giant balloon animal sculptures.
The gallery had a tremendous line, wrapping nearly halfway around the building. Furthermore, the entrance fee was hefty. The gallery is an interesting structure; it resembles a giant glass box with a metal roof. We stood there for a little while, looking at the nice sculptures within, until we realized that we might as well just walk around the outside of the building and see the exhibit for free. Photography was forbidden inside the exhibit, but since we were outside, the guards could do nothing but frown at us as we took some pictures through the glass. If they don’t like it, I suppose they can complain to their architect.
I couldn’t help but see the similarity between the two museums we visited. At both, we spent our time looking at valuable objects inside of glass boxes. Only the scale (and the age of the objects) was different. In the reflection of this sculpture, you can see me standing at the window. Hello!
Koons’ sculptures are quite beautiful. Made of ultra-shiny metal, they are sturdy and massive versions of small and delicate objects. I like how unapologetically Pop they are. But I also feel a sort of resentment toward artists like Koons (and others, like Koons’ early idol and influence Salvador Dali, as well as others like Andy Warhol and Damien Hirst.) They are the business CEO’s or investment bankers of the art world—cutthroat seekers of success, Fountainhead-style, their art to a large degree seems to be about “playing the game,” and figuring out how to make the public eat out of their hand. I read that Koons started his art career by investing heavily in marketing himself via advertisements in art magazines, while he worked on Wall Street to earn money. The man employed an image consultant. He ran a studio with 30 assistants to churn out art for him. I guess this is what Warhol’s art was to a large degree all about, and Koons is following suit.
I’m not saying that the artwork isn’t interesting to look at, simply that it doesn’t appeal to me below a purely aesthetic level because it is the product of the same male-dominated corporate machine that rewards and reveres money and success. On a certain fundamental level there’s not too much difference between, say, an artist like Koons and Thomas Kinkade! After all, both make their work to please a certain audience, both are fabulously successful, both know how to “play the game” of marketing, and both have other people make their work for them.
But before I criticize Koons any more, here’s another photograph of one of his beautiful animal balloon sculptures! I find them much nicer to look at than Kinkade’s stuff.
Here’s a Kinkade, in case any readers are unfamiliar.
Apartment shots
Wednesday, January 14th, 2009
As per request, here are some photos of our humble abode. First, a picture of the living room, where you can see just how high the ceilings are. We do have a curtain rod and curtain to put in front of that window, but even standing on the windowsill we’re not tall enough to screw the apparatus into the wall. The little table, a great improvement from Ikea, will have its legs attached once we have some chairs to go with it, but for now it’s Japanese-style. We don’t really mind, aside from the unfortunate fact that this makes it really easy for the dog to try to steal food/lick crumbs off the table.
Next, imagine following through that open door in the above picture, and you get to the kitchen. The kitchen is really too small to get a good angle of. I think the kitchen’s ceiling height and floor length are equal, although the width is quite a bit narrower. On the left is the electric stove/oven (the lid is closed so you can’t see the heating elements) and the sink, and a bunch of empty wall space that’s waiting for things like refrigerators and dishwashers to be put in. On the right, our “counter” space/pantry/windowsill. This room is sometimes awkward because the entrance to the staircase for our building is immediately to the left of that window, so anyone coming in or out can and does look straight on into the room. This space has been improved since this photo by a small shelf unit which we found outside by the trash bins; someone was throwing it away.
There is a second room. This has been designated the bedroom and its window looks out onto the main street instead of the courtyard (like the others). Hoka the hound is posing nicely for this shot:
That’s pretty much it, aside from a narrow entrance hallway and the bathroom. Fascinating, I know. I should be an interior designer with a pad like this.
Dog woes
Tuesday, January 13th, 2009
I came home Friday evening to find that the dog had transformed from a healthily mischevious creature into a shivering lump of fur, whimpering and too weak to stand. After a night worrying and fearing the worst for the 14-year-old dog, we had the vet come to check on him. The vet had brought everything he might need to put the animal to sleep, which didn’t make me feel better.
Fortunately for Hoka, he only had bronchitis, and seemed to be feeling much better that morning almost at once. He was given a shot of antibiotics and some pills, along with directions for a special diet consisting of the goo squeezed out of a pot of oatmeal, some charcoal, and vitamin drops mixed in with his dog food. He is skeptical about the mixture, but is willing to eat it, especially if I put some chopped-up salami in there. Salami has a captivating effect on the animal, as you can see here:
2009!
Friday, January 9th, 2009
Happy New Year, everyone! (or “Sylvester,” as it is called here. Who knew?) I hope my belated greetings find everyone well. I promise, I have some Christmas presents and cards etc. on their way, but they’re just going to be terribly late, I’m afraid.
New Year’s eve was spent downtown in the “Times Square” of Berlin—actually not very Square-like at all, the festive location is a long street that runs between the Brandenburger Gate and a tall statue of a winged being, a monument that I don’t happen to know the name of. The boulevard goes through the center of a large forest-like park called “Tiergarten,” or “animal garden” in good old English. This is the exact same street that was completely full of people when our Presidential hopeful Barack Obama spoke in Berlin.
We started off via U-bahn (subway) at Potsdamer Platz and followed the old wall’s path toward the park. Everything had been cordoned off by police. It was already too crowded with people for any more to fit, so the police directed us further and further down the park so as to avoid a stampede. We wound our way through the park, around icy ponds and patches of thick trees, until we came out to the street itself. There were fireworks going off all around us at intervals, including most amusingly a couple of police shooting bottle rockets outside the door of their police van. I never thought I’d see the day…
The boulevard was lined in Christmas-market fashion with little booths selling beer, pretzels, hot spiced wine (nice on a cold evening. You have to pay for the mugs when you get the drink, sometimes a few Euros, and then you get the money back when you return the mug. “Pfand,” this is called, and it applies to most bottles of water, drinks, etc at the store as well. Germany is serious about recycling.)
Also in evidence were stands selling cheap champagne bottles, noisemakers, flashing LED lights to decorate yourself with, gummy candies in bulk, even gloves and fur hats for people who felt that they were not dressed properly to stand outside all evening.
It was really cold, but without a thermometer I can’t tell you how cold it was. Probably not that bad; I’ve become something of a wimp. We headed “downstream” toward the more crowded end of the street, untill we reached a ferris wheel that marked the end of free movement and the edge of an extremely dense crowd. Signs warned us not to go further. Achtung, achtung!
On the stage (a large TV screen showed us) a show was in full swing, offering the latest local pop talents. Some were better than others, but most I felt a bit sorry for. The back-up dancers in particular reminded me of childhood days in neon spandex at “Dance Dimensions,” and their attempts at pop-star sassiness were undermined because of their need to not freeze to death. All in all the songs were manufactured junky pop, probably thought up by some corporate director somewhere rather than by the poor singers themselves, and didn’t manage to capture the crowd’s enthusiasm.
The other unfortunate part of the story is that they were quite obviously lip-synching, which was made clear by mistakes. For example, someone might do a little dance move, wave their arms in the air, and forget that the voice keeps going even though they have taken the microphone far away from their mouth. Or, worst of all, they might keep singing along as their song fades out, allowing the crowd to hear the true tone of their voice, unrefined by high-tech sound equipment, and decidedly off-key. This happened with one girl, and the entire crowd erupted in laughter. She looked a bit embarrassed, but she covered nicely and went into her next song cheerfully, so all in all she did well considering how the odds were stacked against her. It made me quite glad I didn’t have to be up there.
There was something idiotic about the level that technology has brought us to. There we were, watching a TV broadcast of people a block away pretending to sing to pre-recorded songs that relied on vocoders to get the singers’ voices in tune. Whatever happened to live entertainment?
Our feet were slowly turning into foot-shaped ice lumps, so at about twenty till midnight we bolted and started going in the opposite direction: like trout migrating upstream, it was a fight most of the way, but eventually things started clearing out. We had just come to a nice clear spot with a view down the boulevard when we heard voices all around rise up in the countdown, and a few seconds later the sky erupted in fireworks.
Meanwhile, something was going on at that winged statue I mentioned earlier (I really ought to look up what it’s called) and it looked like warfare: fireworks were shooting off in every direction, emergency vehicles were parked haphazardly amidst the litter of thousands of burnt firecrackers, and the air was perfumed with a strong scent of sulphur. This seemed pretty out of control/awesome to us, what with people shooting rockets off the tops of ambulances and all, and I felt compelled to duck and run across the area to safety on the other side because the air was punctuated with so many loud and ominous explosions. We did take some pictures to try to capture the spirit. Remember, too, that there is an actual street running around the monument, where some traffic was flowing despite the flaming rockets that kept hitting cars.
Well, we were pretty much human popsicles by that point, and we made a dash for the nearby Bellevue train station, and as we walked we marveled at the echo of explosions going on all around us. Really, big fireworks were going on all over Berlin to such an extent that you couldn’t look in a direction and not see some flashes of sparks, and the sounds of the explosions merged into a single, steady rumble. The only place I had seen such a fireworks free-for-all was in Thailand on Loi Krathong (also known as Diwali ) and since Berlin is a bigger city than Chiang Mai, the scale was a lot bigger here.
This last photo is from the next morning, the first day of 2009 when you could see quite a mess on every street corner and square in the city: broken shells, burnt paper, plastic wrappers, and plenty of broken beer and Champagne bottles. All of Berlin became a house party that night. I am not sure who is responsible for cleaning up the mess, but a few days later it snowed so everything got buried in a layer of pristine white. Perhaps it’ll re-surface in spring.
Cold snap
Friday, January 9th, 2009
It’s high time that I write something about New Year’s, but first to get everyone in the mood for that chilly event I’ve decided to put up some pictures from around where I’m living, after a fresh snowfall decided to decorate the city. Never mind that it was pretty darn cold that morning—the sun was shining and the pictures turned out fine!
The first shot is of the large street to the North. Our building is on a corner, so it has two main doors and two different addresses. This street is graced with a big divider in the middle where the streetcars run, lined with trees of some sort, and flanked by little raised beds of lawn in front of the buildings on both sides of the street. It gets really choked up with trafffic at about 5:00 pm, which leads me to wonder why anyone would bother driving (let alone parking) when there is such ample and reliable public transportation available.
Don’t you like how I cropped out anything/everything unsightly, and left you with such a rosy, inaccurate image of where I live?
A block to the South there is a nice little park, with two paths cutting across it on the diagonal. This is a big destination for walking the dog.
…to illustrate that last comment about dog-walking, I offer the following photo as well:
The snow doesn’t look quite as nice anymore, because now it is old, frozen and crusty and covered with the usual grit and grime and gravel that you might expect a city to accumulate. Also, the beautiful sunny days we had there for a while seem to have given way to some more of the usual gray. The cold temperatures, however, have decided to stick around a while longer.
Today when I walked through the park they were busy trimming limbs from the trees. I couldn’t tell if they were just pruning or what, because one tree had been trimmed to the point of having just stumps of branches, but the others were getting just a small bit of clipping. A whole gang of kids in the playground were watching and discussing the trimming process with fascination.
While I’m at it…
Monday, January 5th, 2009
I might as well post a few more Christmas market and holiday decoration photos, since they’re so very merry and all, and the season for these things is ending. These photos were at Alexanderplatz, right in my part of town, where that giant TV tower stands.
Alexanderplatz is in East Berlin, and even though it is surrounded by more picturesque neighborhoods of older buildings, for some reason this area was razed and hideous soviet block-style buildings were erected. Someone told me that there used to be a predominately Jewish neighborhood there, and this explains its transformation, but I should probably verify that fact before I pass it on.
I’ve noticed that I tend to avoid putting up pictures of the architectural atrocities, simply because I am not so tempted to photograph hideous things. It might seem like East Berlin is a little more elegant than it actually is. It gets more extreme the further East you go; once when we went to the very edge of the city to visit some bureaucratic office, I thought for a moment I was actually in some gloomy suburb of Moscow amidst large, dark blocks of offices and abandoned apartment buildings with broken windows and graffiti. I was only in Moscow a couple days, but I remember some areas felt a little bleak.
At the Christmas market there was a more sculptural reminder of the Communist past. This worker looked to me like she just planted a whole bunch of Christmas trees:
Frohe Weihnachten!
Monday, January 5th, 2009
We stayed in Berlin until the 23rd of December, waiting for our long-lost shipment of boxes from America to arrive. Its arrival was much anticipated, not only because we were being charged for it to be held during all the bureaucratic haggling, but also because it would relieve us from our boredom in our empty, internet-less apartment, which until then consisted of two rooms large and empty enough to echo. Happily, the stuff arrived and we were able to take off for Siegen the next morning, and were picked up at the Siegen train station at noon on Christmas eve.
[note: Siegen is not to be confused with Ziegen, which means “goat”, or zeigen, which means “to show.” Heh heh.]
Christmas eve is when most of the Christmas activities take place. In the evening there was a traditional and very German dinner served, including the small roll-like loaves I may have mentioned called Brötchen, sausages, potato salad, hardboiled eggs, and the usual assortment of pickles and mustards. We also had a spread made of seasoned raw beef with onions that I admit I was insecure about eating, but I was mollified by Germany’s stringent food regulations, and it turned out to be not bad.
It was then time to open Christmas presents. I still think it’s more fun to do it on Christmas morning, but who am I to correct the Germans on Christmas traditions? Opening presents is fun pretty much whenever you do it, and the Germans do offer several big advantages: the official holiday where the Christkind brings you gifts is three days (Dec. 24-26th) and St. Nick actually passes by early on the 6th of December to fill shoes with chocolate. So in December the family gatherings, good meals and copious amounts of Chocolate just seem to keep coming. Just looking at this photo might cause cavities:
As a nod to one of my favorite Christmas activities, we “kids” went for a long hike to explore the surrounding woods, and managed to see a deer that took off as soon as we approached it. There was no snow, but lots of frost in the shady spots:
The forest is not particularly wild, and there are plenty of hunter’s platforms which may explain the shy behavior of the deer. We also found a big, round pit in the ground surrounded by old broken logs which turned out to be a bomb crater from the war. While we were poking around, someone’s dog suddenly came rushing over to us, so I snapped a photo of it, only to be dazzled by the result. How did this happen?
