I'm lazy.

Aaah sorry for having been so lazy with the blogging! I had a huge presentation last Thursday and I was pretty much camped out in the library. Luckily, it's kind of a lovely place to have to spend an absolutely ridiculous amount of time. Newly renovated and everything. It even won the Architekturpreis Berlin 2009 in October! Robart's, it is not.

The presentation went pretty well..it was on transitions in Croatian historiography dealing with the experience of the Ustase-regime and it was for one of my favourite courses, so I didn't want to screw up.

The weekend before, I went to a crazy Israeli gay party in the basement of a little bar near Rosenthaler Platz...it felt a lot like being in Israel again, except with more Madonna and Eurythmics, and pretty, slender boys dancing with each other. But the whole very chill, unmistakeably Israeli vibe was still there. The dozens of Israeli flags hanging from the walls also helped...

We arrived a little late - the dance floor wasn't packed anymore - but the party just kept going and going. And it was all very relaxed..Definitely want to go to another Meschugge party soon! Read more here. (In German, but have fun with Google Translate!)

I also went to see a film at Berlin's first Arabic Film Festival the night before. There was a Yemeni movie showing at Babylon, and a friend/former colleague of mine really knows her stuff when it comes to these kinds of events...unfortunately, I missed the later screening of "Salt of the Sea", which I'm sure was amazing.

Will post again tomorrow...am exhausted!

R.I.P. Daul

1989 - 2009

Source: I LIKE TO FORK MYSELF

My week so far...

FRIDAY
Seeing as the weather was so lovely on Friday *cough* NOT *cough*,
I took my bike down to Warschauer Bridge to check out the newly revamped East Side Gallery.

Which, if you haven't heard of it already, has nothing to do with geopolitical hip hop rivalry.

Instead, it's a stretch of the Berlin Wall that was maintained in all its graffitied (not an adjective, spellcheck??) glory after the wall officially came down. It's open air, of course, and showcases some really famous images that are political, subversive, and really just fun to look at. And it's just been repainted!

I'm sure you've seen some of these before...enjoy!
First, some views from the bridge:


And here, the wall begins:

Questionable syntax, but interesting nonetheless:

Oooh, controversial:



TRUE. LOVE. FOREVER AND ALWAYS:



Peeking behind the Iron Curtain (har har):

Berlin imagined as a metropolitan nexus in a globalized world:

Now, for some of my favourites:
Brilliant.
(Translation: Thank you, Andrei Sacharov - Soviet dissident and Nobel laureate)








Heh. Heh.

Requisite head-scratchy picture by a Canadian artist:

Any favourites?

Also, there's currently a big debate on whether universities in Berlin should introduce tuition (as far as I know, the only provinces in Germany where you don't have to pay tuition right now are Berlin, Hesse and Mecklenburg-Vorpommern.) Understandably, students are none too happy about the prospect of having to shell out the big Euros (the current tuition proposal is something like 500€/semester), so last Friday, they organized a massive sit in at my university. The Free University, (which, I imagine, has its name to defend), experienced an even more massive student reaction.
Some pictures:

Say hello to...

...what I had for a mid-morning snack today!

A pomegranate...

P.S. It made a huge mess. I looked like Patrick Bateman afterwards. Srsly.

What I'm listening to right now....

Pretty Killer by Alex Beaupain & Les L!ly Margot

My week so far...

MONDAY:
...was meant to be the most epic night for pictures.

The official reunification celebration stretched all the way from Brandenburg Gate to the Potsdamer Platz. I heard later that over 2,500 people were out last night. It was pouring rain. International celebrities and political figures like Lech Walesa, Jon Bon Jovi and Hilary Clinton (also: Thomas Gottschalk? Really?) were all there to commemorate the fall of the Berlin Wall twenty years ago.

Unfortunately, I have no photographic record of any of this. Not the dominos falling. Not a screenshot of Obama's speech, or of Jon Bon Jovi. Not the silky sheen of Thomas Gottschalk's bleached blonde hair. Not even a decent shot of the Brandenburg Gate that used to symbolically divide East and West.

My camera batteries died on me halfway through the evening.

Which isn't to say I didn't get pictures. It's just that I don't even know if the term 'pictures' is appropriate in reference to these rather loose appropriations of questionable artistic merit.

For posterity and general...I don't know, befuddlement?...I leave you with the pictures I did get. Make of them what you will:
(Or, even better, try to deconstruct them, just for fun!)

We begin with an artistic shot of a truck driving down the street:

Followed by some blurry shots of umbrellas:



I actually kind of like this one.
Can you make out the Brandenburg Gate in the background? I know I can't.

At least this one's not blurry:

Things just go downhill from there:

Well, you know what they say, right? Dabei sein ist alles.

Also, despite all the camera mishaps and everything, I'd just like to say that, as a German citizen born just months before the wall came down, I was very moved last night, especially when I think that I had the good fortune to be born just in time for the end of a very difficult chapter in German history (and, arguably, the start of another difficult one).

I also think we have to keep in mind that commemorating the fall of the Berlin Wall also carries with it the responsibility of recognizing similar cases of division today. Walls dividing people from their neighbours still exist, whether in Israel or Korea. We have to try to make an effort not to let the lessons of the past go unnoticed, and be cautious before proclaiming "the end of history" or pretending that Berlin signaled the end of global separation. Last night definitely cemented in me a desire to do something.

How did you perceive the commemoration last night?

My week so far....

SUNDAY: Arctic Monkeys concert...
...which was absolutely electrifying!

People were singing along and everything...didn't know the Arctic Monkeys were so popular in Germany.


(Sorry, Mark :P)
And a little bit of Alex Turner for you:

All in all, a fantastic night!