Sliding along with champagne, nostalgia and...jelly doughnuts, of course!

These are the foods of the season, after all.

Instead of wishing you 'happy new year' here, everyone says 'guten rutsch!' (good slide!) as in, slide oh so well into that new year.
so
Good Slide everyone, hooray!

Extenuating circumstances

BERLIN or BARD? or Berlin or Bard or Berlin or Bard orBardorBerlinorBardorBerlin or...Berlin?

Another Night at the SO36

The SO36, on Oranien Strasse has traditional dancing every Sunday, with a short intro course for beginners who can’t dance, (like me!). I go with Berlina, Felix and Clare and we try to learn the hrhuhmbahhh (which must be pronounced just like that, accompanying a sway of the head). Traditional partner dancing is in (again) in Berlin, especially with the Kreutzberg queer scene. Nothing compares to watching some immaculately collar shirted and dancing shoed men spin their partners around. Or alternately, playing the guessing game while sitting on the side (which I often do, not knowing the dances) of who’s man/woman/once a man/once a woman/leader/follower/friends/dating?
When we arrive the room is split into leaders and followers as the teacher shows the next step. I realize I can’t tell which side to go to… there is an equal number of women and men on both sides and it’s almost impossible to figure out who is whom…no one ‘looks’ any more like a follower or leader than the other.
Figuring out the steps—which foot, forward, back? oh I have to count and, wait where are my feet supposed to be on the turn?—makes me feel ungainly and pleasantly comical, laughing as I lose the step direction for the oom pah pah umpteenth time.
We leave a moment to go across the street where the Kreutzberg Nose-Flute Orchestra is whining out 50’s pop tunes…novel, but not as melodious as it sounds. Back at the SO, the night continues with a short variety show and then more partner dancing music until some point at which the place turns into a regular disco (here that just means club really). This means music good for single dancing (unless, of course, you can figure out the partner dance steps to Billie Jean…which some people do…)
This dancing is thrilling…if you know the steps and/or have a good partner. It’s also a lot of fun to watch from the side if people have some fancy footwork, but in the end I’d rather dance myself, even all by myself.

The Bethanien

We go to the Bethanian Rauch-Haus because Örjan says there’s a documentary film showing, in celebration of its 35th anniversary as a commune. As the story goes, it was the first successful squat in Berlin. (The film is old and has quirky technical failures that are not quite charming. It is hard for me to understand the people in it and I’m not sure if that hangs on my german or theirs.) From what I gather, it started out as some kids who were trying to find a free space to hang out or live. They found four floors of an apartment building and fixed it up as their own. The group grew to almost 300 (?) people and so they needed to move to a bigger place. Nearby was the beautiful old Bethanian hospital, which had been long abandoned. 'That’s the place!', they said. Then follows a resistance story like many resistance stories. There were demonstrations, some riots. The commune tried to declare their own land, Bethania. City hall was fought, and both sides won, a little. (This is where the film’s sound started having seizures). At least, in the intervening 35 years a compromise was reached and people still live there legally today. Mostly it houses a load of galleries and art events. The building is still a grand graffiti covered castle.

here you can sell your soul

On Fridays there is a Turkish market by Kottbusser Tor, one of the many markets you can find just about any day of the week around Berlin (and, I think, most European cities). This one, running along the south ‘Ufer’ river bank in Kreutzberg is the place to go for olives, nuts, dried fruit, rolls of fabric, rose flavored ground cow bones (ok, ok, actually just the gelatin of turkish delight), grape leaves, spices and lots of kakis (a persimmon fruit that I have been obsessed with for the last month. They are the most amazing experience ever if you can pick a good ripe one.
Unlike persimmons that I’m used to, they don’t need to be soft to be ripe; certain varieties can be still pale yellow and crunchy and be ready. But unripe, OH they are so astringent which, if you don’t know, is just awful….where was I, ah at the market).
I like how it is almost too crowded to walk down the row of stands. Not that there are that many people but the space is comfortably narrow and I am cramped between the bags of rice and grains on one side and on the other, milk white stacks of cheese behind glass. I can’t really tell the difference between the French sheep cheese and the Bulgarian sheep mountain cheese; it’s all feta to me, but I go with the mountain cheese.
The fruit and vegetable stands are green and so much orange. Besides carrots, there’s clementines and satsumis and oranges and more oranges and kakis and mangoes and papaya and pomegranates and humongous slices of butternut squash. The stand owners call out, ‘best price for sharons, here here’, or ‘scarves, gloves, everything, one euro one euro’.
At home I am surprised to realize I bought almost exclusively tropical fruit, walnuts, and three small squares of turkish delight, rose flavored.

In the Oven

Coal scuttles? Yeah we have one of those. The house animals, or otherwise ceramic ovens, need lots of love and attention and feeding. This necessitates frequent trips to the cellar, so you can find me, every so often, black fingered and puffing after hauling a crate of coal up five flights to the apartment. Really, it’s not as difficult as I imagined. At least it’s not the top floor, and at least I’m not a miner (think about how many times you can use that last phrase every day).
The funny thing is, coal isn’t shaped the way I always imagined; in little irregular pebbles. No, this is Modern Coal. It is angular and oblong, looking like compact cars and specially formed to be easily stackable.

When you forget how to tell time to go at your speed

Walking into the lecture hall one tuesday...
hmm, this room is not as full as usual, I thought.
wait, this is not language philosophy, I thought
I bet I...
No, I couldn't have...
Oh yes. I did.
It was Combined Transportation System Logistics
What?
It was too funny not to stay.
Actually it was interesting
Maybe because I never think about those things.
Like how my gloves get here from china.

A moment

captures Michael Ackermann…haunting moments, in photographs that are disturbing, often repulsing but... Maybe it was the grainy dusk outside, maybe the scratchy radiohead playing inside, but I stared so long at frightening eyes and what could have been dreamscapes.

Meanwhile…
Gluwein stands have appeared on every corner, next to the guys with the currywursts. The Weinachtsmarkts are getting into full swing now. I get waffles with cherries on top and chestnuts while marveling at all the bright little objects displayed under the endless rows of green kiosk roofs. Everything is light and stars and woodsmoke.
Mmm…Ich liebe es!

Moving in Triangles

Moving again, somewhere. I love my room so much. I wake up to blue and auburn and..stale cigarette smoke. My housemate smokes a lot. and in the small kitchen a lot. and doesn’t believe in opening windows or airing out rooms. I’ve lived with smokers before and never been bothered, but…
It's back to
‘hallo, ich ruf wegen den zimmer an…’

Meanwhile
Maybe it’s just that good exhibits inspire exaggerated love for the artists shown, but after seeing a collection of Robert Häusser photographs I was moved to name him my favorite photographer, at least for now. The show was at the Deutsche Historisches Museum which has a newer part designed by I.M.Pei which is gorgeous and which I was obsessed with for a while just from the outside. The inside is fabulous, with triangle themes popping up and down everywhere, as in the rhomboid elevator.

Thanksgiving 2: Felix's Birthday

I spend a good amount of time with the people in Berlina’s WG. They range in age from about 21 to 33 and could all have graduated from the ‘old’ Bard. Pasana, vegan meals cooked together, button curtains, contact dance…its all just part of life. I think it is funny to have found contact dance people here. Maybe not unusual that this is here, every kind of thing is here, but interesting the way certain types of people find each other. Maybe we send out waves of some kind like a signal. Lighting bugs do it…
After dinner, for which Askhan cooked a vegan ‘turkey’ (a big stuffed butternut squash), we sat around the dance floor making lanterns out of paper, tape, pomegranate shells, feathers, a green pepper. We dressed in robes and carried our lights in a silent procession up the dark Kreutzberg. I wondered if I had been there before, maybe many times, when I was small. It all seemed almost familiar, but it may have been the familiar that comes when you believe you should be accessing vague memories.
So we all stood shivering slightly on the windy tower top reviving ghosts. Or we were the specters ourselves. The spectators. Surveying the berlin lamplights spread northwards below.
It was the first time I could think of that I had seen such a nighttime overview of the city and it gave me an unheimlich feeling. As though being at this remove and having such a broad perspective on the land momentarily brought a stepped back, distanced, consideration of my life. Extro-intraspection. I thought of seeing paris from the steps of monmartre, I thought of seeing ny from buildings and boats. All I could think of was ‘what? what is this place? where am I, and how, and how, and for?’

Later that night, we flipped through incredible graphic books that Felix and Clare had created. Felix has volumes and volumes of drawings and collages and comics printed out…it was overwhelming. People create such amazing things.

German and Italian

I tell Elena the story of the Pied Piper, since she’s never heard it.
She says, the subway station walls remind her of a pool.
I say, I’ve gone to concerts in an old pool.

She says, I need something sweet
I say, chocolate croissant?
She says, cookie?
Berry cake?
She says, that?
The apfeltasche?
What’s an 'apfeltasche'?
It has apples.
You like apples?
Yes. Let's get it.


Elena and I go together mid morning to find those fabled ‘black brothers’ and try to discover anything we can about the camera, jacket and key.
Surely, and strangely enough, there is a noticeable divide in the population of the park. In one half there roam the baby carriages, the joggers, and the dog walkers. Then, turn a corner, pass some trees and there is a cement plateau and benches and suddenly not the hint of a soccer mom. This part is predominated by guys, listening to music or just hanging out who seem to have grouped themselves together in general accordance with ethnicity. After some strange minutes talking to one and then another of these men, all of whom only try to pick us up, the experience brings nothing but a phone number we will never use, an exchange of cigarettes and declined offers of ‘the best stuff [weed] ever, right here’.

Turkeys and Strange Turns

I did not expect to have much of a celebration for this holiday (which is maybe my favorite back home…I thought I would be sadly reminiscing instead) but Askhan, one of the people in Berlina’s WG (an American who just graduated from Vassar, funny enough), invited me to a celebration with some other people on his internship program. He is an amazing cook, and the whole thanksgiving was a good time. Berlina comes as well to join the fairly international group. We all head home to sleep happily on distended stomachs, dreaming dopamined dreams
Though, just before I do get to sleep…
On my way home that late night I happened to run into an acquaintance sitting with another slightly dubious character. While talking, the subject of my camera came up (I had made posters and everything that week).
“Wait, did it look like this?” asks the second man, and indicates with his hands the approximate proportions of my camera.
It turns out it may be being sold in the nearby park here, for 50 euros.
Really? I wonder.
“Sure” says the man “just go into the park and ask for ‘the two black brothers’, and then one of them, named D___ has the camera. Say you’re a friend of C___.”
“They’re just in the park everyday?” I asked.
“Yeah, in fact, you could go right now, they’re there” (this was about 3 in the morning).
“OK” I said, “I’ll go there now, alone, in the dark, to a park I’ve never been to, and ask for ‘two black brothers’ who may or may not be selling a camera ….”
Then he wanted me to pay for his beer (in exchange for the info). Yeah, right.
Dubious as he was, I am sure he was telling the truth about the camera. Of course, it still might not be my camera, and if it was it's probably sold, but it’s the best lead I have. I don’t know how to go about this at all but I’ll have to do it soon.

Bärenort: The Exhibit.

So I have curled back this weekend, into the red brick shell of Bärenort. I realize I have never seen it this time of year, but suddenly everything blends into the rustling rust and gold landscape.
The exhibit is hypnotic. glass pieces sparkle in the windows, candles reflect bronze, white porcelain curves around gold clay pieces. kinetic sculptures hang from the ceiling wearing lights shining through feathers and jagged metal jutting out like wings which revolve dangerously around the room. I think of feather filled caves, of spirals in sand, of Aughra's planetarium. (do you know the dark crystal?). They whirr faintly, mechanical hearts purring.
I spend a lot of time with Mathilda. She is worried about the dogs. I carry her towards the woods. She falls asleep on my shoulder.

She is just about to tumble over the edge of articulate speech; in wordless understanding. what a mysterious moment.

Finding and Losing

The story goes that I do find an apartment…a peaceful and beautiful large room with sunny windows. Right by the willow trees bending over the river bank. So close I wonder if I can jump from my balcony into the still water. But also very conveniently next to a train station. My housemate has two dogs and lived in LA for three years. She smokes, but I don’t think this will be a problem.
So that’s all good, but then a terrible thing happened. On the appointed day she helped move a not quite ready me into the new place, chocolates on the pillow awaiting. We carried all my stuff at once between the two of us, bags, violin, heavy suitcase. An hour into unpacking and being in the apartment, I realized my jacket…wasn’t…anywhere. It must have fallen out of my bag while we were walking on the short (and dark) stretch of street from the car to the door. Panic.
It was nowhere on the street, just gone. Gone. I searched longer and asked in all the nearby cafés and bars, but to no avail.
I am devastated: my camera, my beautiful camera, was in the pocket (ironically the safest softest place, I thought).
And, so were my old keys.
I had kept the keys because I wanted to go back that night and make sure everything was super clean, and because I wanted to give them up to alex personally or leave a nice note at least. I went the next day to explain what happened to him and he was…really angry. He railed, and raged. Insultingly so. Absurdly so and.. it's just not an episode I care to dwell on. (things are alright now)
So I found a place and...lost my camera.
After an eternity spent at the police station waiting to make a report that I already knew wouldn’t bring anything, and exhausted from the emotions of the last two days (moving out was confusing enough itself) I was ready to crawl back into the shell.
So I did. Or back Bärenort I went—where I had been planning to go anyway because Ulrika had organized an exhibit themed Sun Moon Stars. I met up with Andreas, a family friend, and we spent the four hour drive mostly silent through the night, with the occasional babble from Mathilda, his two year old in the backseat, who fell asleep just before we arrived, mesmerized, midnight, to so many candlelit windows.

Momentary Maxim of Idolatry

Maximilian Hecker. Roter Salon.
Oh, to hear, so ethereal, such a voice breathing lyrics, so schmalzily nonsensical, and nonetheless so beautiful. Excuse my brief lapse into starry-eyed fanhood but this was perhaps the best concert I have ever been to. Never mind the mass of people making the womb of the dark Red Salon nearly unbearable. Melted into one, the intimate crowd, enclosed by burgundy walls and moving fluidly through and around itself in the dim light, awaited those sounds like a first living breath. I stood at the edge of the platform light and laughed and awed and danced and ummed and wanted nothing more than here.
Ok. I’m finished, but seriously, the band is really good. And not above a satirical rap song, or the extremely effective use of a glockenspiel.

Twenty Planes

One evening on my way to visit the Musee d’Orsay, (or Carnevale, I hadn’t decided) I passed the open door of a large Église. Inside it was dark: little light came through the windows—it was already getting late—and all the walls and arches and columns were painted in various colors and patterns. It was stunning. it seemed to me unbelievable that this building was just a step off a street, and that people passed it by all the time, just as I might have passed by, and never see the tapers in the corner, the green eagles perched above the arch.
By the time I came out I realized it was getting too late for a museum to be worth it, and, as I stood in a moment of indecision, a bus stopped nearby: 95 destination Monmartre. Well, that sounds fine, I thought, and got on.
If I ever make a list of traveling recommendations this will be one: just ride buses around a city.
I got off at Sacre Coeur stop, and just kept walking upwards, hills, steps, until I found myself in an strange alley with a prehistoric looking rock and an unexpected view over the city, the Eiffel tower doing its disco sparkle in the distance.
Then, higher, yes, I saw the cathedral, ivory stone, yes, gazed down the steps, over all the lights of Paris, yes I oohd, and sighed, and listened, and breathed.
There is a frightening oasis of a ‘tourist monmartre’, where everything seems to be in miniature. But once outside of this haven, walking around the dark, slightly menacing streets was some of the best time I spent in the city. I felt for the first time that this was the irreplaceable paris; that this could not be berlin, or new york, or new orleans or any and every other place I’ve been.
I walked into a time capsule of a tumbled about closet, actually a clothing shop with silk top hats, dancing shoes from the 50’s, dresses, gloves, purses and jewelry.
The time for the shopwoman seemed stopped as well, alongside the coats and capes.
I stopped to pick out flower tasting tea cakes, lavender, rose geranium, orange blossom. All bright fuschia and violet.
But it was time for me to wind my way south and so, remembering the word for ‘lost’, I used it copiously with other ruins of my high school French.
Less lost, near the Opera I caved to the aroma of roasting chestnuts. Having finally gotten used to asking directions in French I appealed to one man, who asked me, ‘Portuguese...?’
‘mm, English?’ I said.
‘Deutsch?’ he responded.
‘Ah yes’ I said triumphantly (in german) ‘I speak that’.
and so we talked, for a few minutes, with intermittent english and spanish and portuguese words and, somewhere in between the five languages, had quite a pleasant interchange.


There were more moments of reveling and revering over the next few days, but then thursday, stepping onto the twentieth plane so far this year, I flew from the French sky blue back to the German gray, suspended an instant between dreams and monuments.

rêve à la cannelle: quatre lunes en Paris

I am in Paris unexpectedly, or sooner than expected because, though I wanted to visit Christine anyway (whose resplendent rendition of her Paris life you should read at http://www.uneannee.blogspot.com/) , two friends came from ny, for only one weekend. A one time deal. So off I went, and here I find myself…here.


What can I even say? Paris is uniformly exquisite. Wrought balconies, finessed facades, everywhere you turn something just too refined. The people, like all the buildings and parks around them, are dressed up and made up with a certain attention to detail that makes for a more subtle beauty. It is pointed out to me that the men wear the collars of their black wool coats up around their ears. Anywhere else, this would look arrogant. Here, it is elegant. The delicate perfection is so thorough that I wonder a moment whether the homeless man sleeping against the cathedral side is just pretending. Even with his pants half way down in the frosty night.

The first night there is a full moon. There is a blackout in the labyrinthine 6th district, so bars revert to candlelight, and I find a small rickety shop with bonsai trees shelved on one side, and strings of pearls hanging opposite.

In Paris I am barely footing it…the bill that is. I stay with Alyssa, we change hotels, take cabs everywhere, try the best hot chocolate places, eat every kind of bread and croissant that the bakery offers… Perhaps I have gotten too used to broke Berlin, but I am in mild shock; this place is expensive.

Wandering around the second day we stop in the pantheon, it happens to be free. Inside, it looks at first as though the ceiling, having melted, is dripping over us. Really it is a sculptural installation.

Paris is mostly dusk to me. The sun is always just setting, the sky still holds some light and the buildings and sites are already being illuminated.
Jet lagged, or otherwise used to a different schedule, we walk around in the empty night, looking at closed doors, leaning buildings and forgetting the century. It is hard to find places open late enough.



We do do some big tourist things, and the city does not disappoint. I find out that the Eiffel tower is actually gorgeous in person. The day we go there, somewhat brouillard, turns out beautiful and my boots get heavy climbing the steps. So I take them off and trip the rest up barefoot. The metal is cold, it is November, I remember.
The view from the top is not as anti climactic as I’ve heard. It is gratifying to see the city stretched out under you, flat as a living map, and realize as you gaze at the maze of streets, why no one seems able to give directions around them.

The nice thing about traveling places off tourist season is that you don’t have to wait. At the Louvre we get in directly: no delay to ogle masterpieces. Moving through rooms, it is impossible to give works the time they deserve. Especially the paintings. Some we pass are massive. I like the feeling they give me, of being swallowed up.
We take our time idling at the front of the small crowd by la Jacond. We try to complain about the ridiculous way that the painting is displayed, about the entire cultural obsession around it, about the piece itself. But in the end, we can’t deny that it is a pretty picture after all. We move on; the people behind us were beginning to murmur.
Too many Watteaus, Caravaggios and [insert ninja turtle name]s later we emerge. I am left with the blurring impression of painted eyes and stone wings.

German Gyromancy

I'm moving. again.
Alex is flying sooner than planned back to Sydney.
and around we go.
I will divine the place to stay by walking in circles till I fall.
dizzis. I mean, diz is ze place, I will say.

Timing is Everything

The bad thing about not wanting to take the train, and also not having a bike, is that I have to walk everywhere.

The great thing about not having a bike, and also not taking the trains, is that I walk. Everywhere.
Even though it is always with an extra jacket—which I always realize I don’t need, thanks to global warming gracing the city with yet another unbelievable sunclear autumn day (until night when the temperature plunges ten degrees in ten minutes)—and extra books (German dictionary?)—which I already know I won’t take out because I won’t be sitting long enough to want to read—I get off the train early and walk the rest of the way to the university. Afternoons, after lying a moment on the university's grassy square, I wind my way back home, each time taking a slightly different path (translation: I get distracted and then slightly lost every time). It takes a long time to walk around even just the middle of this city. But if there is anyone who has enough time and inclination to walk distractedly around Berlin, I do.
Today I got distracted by….BONBONS. Ok, really, I wandered into a hinterhof and found steps down to a bonbon shop-cave where you get to see the bonbons being made. It was magnificent. The bonbon maker had to knead this enormous mass of sugar, the bonbons-to-be, which was so hot he had to wear gloves and then use a huge leather blanket to knead in the flavoring (in this case anise oil). The leather was also to keep the bonbons-to-be mass from cooling too quickly. You see, if you are kneading bonbons-to-be and stop working (because, perhaps you have to answer the doorbell) you can quickly end up with one..big..bonbon. Fun as that might be, how would you give it to kids? I imagine you’d have to set it up somewhere and let kids have their chance to lick it, one by one. Or it would be your personal lifelong bonbon, which you took out when you had the yen for a sweet, and then put back into (clean) storage. Or you give the bonbon to a dinosour?
Have you ever tried a sticky-warm anise bonbon?
Have you ever tried to say ‘bonbon’ twenty times in a row?

Still somewhat sugared, I happened to pass Denkraum, an exhibit on, or themed around, Hannah Arendt. I had meant to go see it but hadn’t known where it was. Well, there it was. And there happened to be a lecture in just half an hour about Hannah Arendt’s language. Timing is everything.
I had actually heard the woman giving the lecture (which was a beautiful lecture) at Bard last year, giving a different lecture on Hannah and Heidegger. Coincidences.
The exhibit was many rooms; recordings of Hannah in interviews, large clear plastic sheets hanging from a ceiling with extracts of her writings in German and English, clay figures, film, a reading room…I needed more time to go through the exhibit. More time to get frightened at Arendt’s description of the States, er, I mean, of a state becoming totalitarian.
There is so much returning-to that I intend to do here, and never get back around to, but I hope I do go back to this.

ECLA and School Systems

(this is an informational entry.)
Today I visited ECLA which is a one year university program started because there are so few places where students in Europe can go and have the experience of a liberal arts education. Unlike what we are used in the states (bursting with small liberal arts colleges) that type of integration of subjects is exceptional. Normally, studies are very delineated. When you begin at universities you choose a certain program and you can pretty much only take classes in that area. On average, because of the structure of the school system, students are a little older in Europe when they start universities, but still they don’t have this ‘discovery time’ where they can try out all different areas of study (like, oooh I’ll take gamelan, and environmental ethics and acoustics and revolutions…).
That’s the way it’s been, but attitudes are changing all around Europe, coming concurrent with a shift of the degree system (in Germany anyway) to include BA’s: towards more transnational system.
So
I visited this Central European University, which happens to be in Berlin, since that is the center of Europe, and liked everything about it immediately. Maybe it reminded me of bard (small, slightly isolated and strewn with drying maple leaves) except with less awkward architecture and generally in miniature. The 39 (!) students come from all over Europe (a few from Asia). They all take essentially the same ‘core class’ and then a couple electives. Everything (except language classes) is conducted in English. I sat in on one seminar, (which was supposed to be about Thucydides but ended up being more about translation ethics and why Sappho is married). I was impressed, and depressed. Everyone spoke intelligently and it’s hard enough to talk in a seminar, so imagine everyone is doing it in their second (maybe third) language. The German boy sitting to my right had such a perfect British accent I was convinced he was English for almost the whole class. Why can’t I speak four languages? Or even two that fluently?

Two things found out, first, the school is technically a non-profit company and also, students have their credits recognized by, and are provided with an extra transcript from guess who…Bard. Leon’s long fingers far reach.

Swimming

I visited a real class, finally.
Lead by a striking woman with cat glasses, ironic smiles and...dressed professor-chic in plum velvet.
So I got my first look at how the humanities classes work (or don't) at Humboldt. More on this later.
Oh, right, and the class was zur Philosophie der Gefühle.

Then I went and did the most tourist-y activity EVER.
I took a boat tour around the middle ‘museum’ island. Sightseeing by ship. It was actually fabulous. I had to admit I liked it, and highly recommend it to anyone who visits. (So now you will have to excuse a few tourist pictures, which you can easily find instead on postcard stands citywide, or the internet sites about Berlin.)
The announcer man, who talked all about the history of the buildings we passed, would surface on deck every once in a while and pretend to get hit repeatedly on the head by the low bridges crossing the Spree.
The Spree is the river that flows through Berlin. It splits and creates a little island where there are a bunch of museums near Unter den Linden, where the stadtschloss (the prussian palace) used to be located. When the original was destroyed during the war the Palast de Republik was built, a great rubiks cube of reflective bronze-orange glass. Considered a bitter reminder of the East after the wall fell, and an eyesore, it is being torn down, as you read this, so that a faithful new replica of the original palace can be built. With all the zero money that the city has.
People are, of course, complaining that the old newer palace was itself a landmark and have plenty of nostalgia for its bronzed glass, fallen victim more expensive and abstract nostalgia.

Then I just walked. for. hours.
Used to the overwhelming, but highly concentrated ny, it isn't easy to realize just how spread out this city is. But I am finding more and more that there is such a lot of space.
not least where you can't see it, as in hinterhofs...but more on these later.

Berlina and Orjan and Naima in Berlin

It’s harder to find people who speak German here than you might expect. I could imagine living for years here without ever having to learn. In fact, I know people who have.
What’s really fun is when your second language is the common [second] language. I spent last evening with three Swedes and a Deutscher. We spoke mostly German, mine being second best [brag brag], and occasionally english. Sometimes swedish slipped in and three languages flew around at the same time.
It was, in general, a lovely night. Swedes are wonderful. I will generalize. It made me miss olds friends with whom I’ve sat on pillows on the floor around candles, food and wineglasses. But also more optimistic about the idea of meeting people the world over with whom it is easy to laugh, in meager words.

oh yes, and I met up with Berlin! I mean, Berlin in Berlin, I mean Berlina, as she is called here, in the city of Berlin. Berlina (the person) of Berlin (the city) formerly Berlin (the person) of Bard. She had just gotten back from Morocco (the city). But this is all only interesting for those at Bard (the college) who knew her.

Eleusis or The Winery

Wandering around the next night I discovered the Weinerei (which had actually been recommended to me, by a former philosophy professor, of course). On a corner near the imposing Zionskirche. It’s a festive and happy place, a cafe by day, run by an organization after 10pm. For one euro you are given a glass and can try as many different wines as they offer that night (maybe 12?). You drink as much as you want and there is food cooked by the same organization which is free for all. Then, as you leave, you pay again giving whatever you can afford, or think you ought to (i.e., if you were an ungrateful mooch you could throw another 50 cents in and leave). Fantastic! It was packed with laughing gesellig people, but I could also imagine it being a dangerous place! It can be easy to lose track of wine consumption from this Bacchian fountain of sorts, so you need to watch yourself. Well, I guess that goes at anyplace.

Flug by Night

Berlin is getting colder. The sky is starting to match the cobblestone gray, the sidewalk granite blue-gray, the old building brown-gray, the stone still chipped from bullets steel gray. There must be more words for gray, but I don’t like the sound of puce.
This area is decidedly nocturnal. After the business people leave their apartments at sunrise, passing the remaining stragglers of the night before, there is no one around until almost five, when the businesspeople get off work, and everyone else has finally recovered. There is this element probably in all cities, its true, but it seems especially marked here (whereas new york breathes people steadily, all hours of the day and night, save for a small inhale at maybe 4 in the morning). I can’t speak much past this kiez (area) for now, my experience of which has been almost entirely after dark.

On the first Friday night I wandered out of a photo show opening somewhere in mitte and got distracted by brightly lit streets, where people sat outside under those colorful Thai parasols, found myself in more galleries and a beruhmt graffitti’d artist space and former ss headquarters that lead up up up to a lookout over a sand bar (really, sand) with a film being screened on the building side. Back on the street I strolled into a salsa club and danced with polish girl, who I sat with, with bright red high bootlets, whose name I never even asked and who will always be that polish girl with the bright red bootlets, then, home? No,what lights? another gallery. found myself in a small room with space enough for three cramped people, absolutely covered, walls and ceiling and much floor, with what looked like dio de los muertos inspired painting and sculpture. It smelled like sage and candlewax. Then I stopped to talk to some hippie kids, one from Chile spoke english, we all sat down on the sidewalk, more friends of friends came to sit. there was a girl with a viola, which I played a little until a fight almost broke out nearby and we worriedly put it away. Two englishboys stopped, some of the people sitting had met them earlier that night on the tram. The bleachblond one pranced around like rambunctious drunk puppy, playing ‘I will survive on guitar’ for a moment before bounding off to something else. The sweet quieter one was there for a festival/conference on characters, where he’d been invited to talk/give presentations about his work, about which he was in a crisis, debating the superficiality of a life that was essentially drawing cartoons and designing figures. We talked. I was promptly smitten. Alas, he had a presentation again early the next morning and then was flying back to…Manchester? My chest hurt. “and I’ll never see you again...” he ran up the train steps. Manchester. I hope he got home ok.
Oh eartbreak.

Babylin? also, Aussie Alex

To his credit, and my relief, Alex did clean the whole rest of the apartment. And well. He had just been very very busy with work…so, it’s forgiven. Oh yes, Alex. So, introductions last, Alex is my housemate, (‘mayte’ ) a social and slightly distracted video/media artist from Sydney. We get along fine for now. I think his somewhat superficial friendliness will grow on me as the fall and winter progresses. We never talk about anything earnestly for long, which is sometimes better, I think, than sharing important views...earnestness in close quarters can get precarious.

The first thing I have been noticing is that Berlin is crawling with prams. Sometimes I think they are more dangerous than the bicycles that hurtle past you at fatal speeds. If I judged only by the nearby area, I would be convinced that the city consisted entirely of very cute toddlers in striped caps and their very hip mothers, who look, for the most part, to be only just this side of thirty.
Before I moved here, the subject of pregnancy came up a number of times. Not a lot, but enough to be remarkable. Either the joking warning not to get pregnant, or the perfectly serious suggestion (from a friend whose baby I was admiring) that I could easily get my own newborn since ‘it goes pretty quickly here’. At the time I was scandalized but…now I get it.

Chaos and Eternity

I arrived at the apartment on Pappelallee after traveling for six hours (it felt like) in a van, in the middle of seven people I’d never met. Two parents and their five kids to be exact. Big family.
It was nice actually, in the end it felt a little like it was my own family moving me into the new apartment. The mother squeezed me fondly— call if you need anything!—goodbye. It was a good thing because an hour or so away from Baerenort I started..to..panic inwardly.
Now, I’ve lived semi-alone, or been alone, been to Berlin by myself, gone plenty long periods without seeing family, or without seeing friends, and it’s not as though I didn’t think about this move a lot…but somehow I just suddenly wanted to go back. To say, no wait, I changed my mind…and to perch again on my window overlooking the birch trees. All the moments I’ve spent in that house con fuse together and stretch out into an eternity in my mind. It is out of time

Perhaps it is not really Alex’s fault, but the apartment that day was appalling. The rooms in various stages of disarray, the dishes and cups in various stages of being encrusted and covered by little flies, the bottles of cremesoaps, shampoos and toiletries in various stages of falling over themselves onto the soiled bath rug. And I walked through the rooms in various stages of dismay. I couldn’t handle it, in fact, so I walked out. I stuck two hours into the cracks between oversized granite sidewalk stones and fifty year old thumb holes still in building walls, and sniffed around asia markts, the nearby pharmacy, the chocolate café, feeling my way around the street-car vibrations, the female sex toy shop, the second hand stores, the sandy playgrounds.

Playgrounds in Berlin are the best. They still have all those dangerous playpieces, high rope webs, towering slides, wooden castles or ships with fading paint, round metal spinning plates that dizzy children fly off of …things that in America I’ve either never seen or have been replaced by trashy plastic lego-like jungle gyms and banal corkscrew slides in the name of insurance costs, I mean, kids’ safety. There are these spielplätze and then also newer more innovative ones with elements like strangely carved and curving bridges around poddish elements. I sat on one of these a moment and then, it was time to go back.

Returning to the chaos, I think I have never seen so much dust, but somehow it all was conquered and now my room is…barren but beautiful. Not quite mine yet, but it is getting there.

some beings

The sheep or otherwise dissappearing
and what we are looking for.

Bear Place

(A warning. this is a month of catch up, so it might be a long post!)
I might as well start with the house.
Until now I have been staying in Bärenort, which translates roughly to Bear Place. In winter it is truly a place to hibernate, but we (the bearenorters) think it was really once Beerenort, which means berry place, because the woodland and wilds around the house are full of blackberry brambles. I think sometimes they could be the remnants of a spell covering the house with vines, because there is something fairy tale like about the whole place. I remember when my father first bought the house, eight years ago maybe. It could have been a shady ruin. Cold damp brick, dark moss, rotting birch trees, stark white but fallen.
It has life now and is peaceful and bright. The sun catches in all the room corners possible, and most hours find me sitting high up on the kitchen window ledge where I can see the coming and goings of all the people in the house and hear the birds racket from somewhere in the near woods.
On one side of the house the area is marked as wildlife preserve, and on the other a road goes up, past the sheep field on the right, the neighbors on the left, the abandoned factory, across overgrown train rails and finally up to the street which cuts through the small town on it’s way toward the Teutoburger Wald.
There are six permanent residents in the house altogether, and others (including me) who come and go seasonally. Besides my father and I on the second floor there are Tina, his niece, and her family in the apartment across the way. Laura, her daughter is just a month older than Dante and can produce the most shrieking high-pitched ear-shattering notes if she feels threatened. Steffen, the husband, smiles all the time and recently bought a ‘mini’ car to fix up as a project. It looks like a toy car, but is actually just British.
The downstairs floor is owned by the silver haired Ulrike, a petit potter on whose oversized sweaters there is almost always the trace of clay dust. While I was there she spent two weeks on a Grecian island, and came back, head still in the sun, with amazingly smooth white glittery beach stones.
Her older daughter, Gesine, soft spoken and all heart, lives in Fulda but her son Hannes (around my age or a little older) just moved back from Hamburg and was there all the time that I was away. The details of his leaving Hamburg are a little fuzzy but include a (manic?) psychotic episode precipitated (or worsened) by his, er…green habit.
This is not something you would ever guess of him; he’s the most mild-mannered darling boy ever. A good soul.
The last person in the house is Christoph, who rents a room downstairs from Ulrike. He’s a young blond southerner. He’s very active and friendly and has a really nice girlfriend (wife?) Lena, just barely older than me. My father and he don’t always get along. Ulrike and he have stopped talking entirely. I think he won’t be here much longer.
Sometimes Christina, one of our neighbors, a young mother visits bringing Anna, an amazingly intelligent two year old. And Anja, long-time friend of the family’s, comes over, with her huge black dog Pablo, for coffee, or when we grill, or to cut our hair (which she used to do professionally).
Now you know all the people and some of the drama. This is where I’ve been for…all time. There is no time here. The slow signs of fall, the browning of the birch leaves, the wind growing stronger, the first rainstorm, even these seem like a continuation of the summer I spent here last year. Even though I know, for example, that Hannes spent most of the past year in Hamburg, he is in this house now and that’s the way I’ve always known it, and where I’ve always known him to be.
The house is changing too, there is a lot of construction to be done on the top floor. My father is putting roof windows and solar panels in. But it still seems to change like mountains change, like people change when you are always watching them.
I’ve been here longer than I’ve stopped in any place since the end of school. So it is really a home, (though not for much longer).

how we began

next to me on the windowsill, below and above