Life imitating art...

Time: Sunday evening
Location: My awesome Spanish-German friend's flat in Humboldthain.
Occasion: A "green" dinner with some of her roomie's friends in the IR Master's program at the Free University.

We played this game:

It was awesome. Michael Jackson, Haribo Gummibärchen and Hannah Arendt were all involved. We had green pasta with pesto verde and white wine, and delicious Catalonian bread with olive oil, tomatoes and salt.

What have you done to beat the winter blues?

Freezing weather and "Operation Kino"

Berlin right now:

(Style.com)
So much for escaping the Canadian weather! Luckily, it's also ridiculously bright and sunny. Which *almost* melts my Grinch-like heart when it comes to winter.

There's also some cool stuff to look forward to. Like the 60th international film festival in Berlin, the Berlinale.

I am super-excited, not least because I've already had a little taste of TIFF madness already, and because of the pre-Oscar buzz that the Berlinale is likely to attract.

I also FINALLY got around to seeing Inglourious Basterds last Friday, with a glass of red wine and good company in a little cinema on Oranienburger Strasse, and it did not disappoint.

A few observations:
1) This movie was pure CASTING GOLD. Tarantino is, among other things, really adept at writing strong roles for women, and his female characters also all share a very strong film noir quality. I think this is why I have a soft spot for him, because every time I see one of his films, I find myself really wanting to be Uma as Mia Wallace, or, in this case, the stunning and vengeful Melanie Laurent as Shoshanna Dreyfus.

Then there's the whole cast of extremely talented German-speaking male actors. I can't even begin to express how much of a breath of fresh air it was to see such talented and nuanced roles for German actors in an international film. Til Schweiger has seen worse. I also found Christoph Waltz absolutely breathtaking - excuse the unconventional word choice - and I'm pretty sure I squealed when Michael Fassbender walked onto the screen.

Also: this is the first movie I've seen with German baddies actually being played by Germans. A lot of makes this film so subtle and perfect can be summed up in its treatment of languages, and second languages, and assumed accents.

2) Stylistically, I also loved the way the film referenced the aesthetic sensibilities of the Nazi era and its inherent, perverse absurdity, especially in the film's constant references to the Nazi-era mountain drama "The White Hell of Piz Palu". It might be kind of ironic that red and black made such a perfect colour palette for the film.

3) On the violence: Tarantino may be accused of aestheticizing violence, but why begrudge him his fun when he does it so well?

Now excuse me while I go reread Susan Sontag's "Fascinating Fascism".

Endless Nights

"Cities, like cats, will reveal themselves at night." - Rupert Brooke

Apparently...

...Chuck Norris is the new HASSELHOFF.
[As always, pictures are clickable.]

Incidentally, the actor in the corner was in Casino Royale AND Enemy at the Gates. Yay for Germans playing baddies!

Also:
I was out shopping for glittery things today for a Bird of Paradise theme party (or, as we say in German, a "Motto-Party") I'm going to tonight. I don't think I've worn false eyelashes since 2005...looking forward to it!

I also took some detail shots of the Friedrichstrasse bridge. The combination of the wrought-iron German eagle and the graffitied Anarchist "A" are somehow very "Berlin."


Have a good one, everybody!

March 2010?

Istanbul//İstanbul//قسطنطينيه (European Capital of Culture 2010)

If one had but a single glance to give the world, one should gaze on Istanbul.
-Alphonse de Lamartine

That's the Sultan Ahmet Mosque, I believe. I just love the sky line and how busy and layered everything looks. It's like there's no square inch of space left.

See what I mean? I've never seen a more enchanting or melancholic blue...below is a view of the Galata bridge.


This is the Cezayir Sokak, also known as "French Street" or the Montmartre of Istanbul, where people hang out to drink Turkish coffee or smoke narguilé.
More on Flickr: Istanbul
Sources: Biennale Istanbul, netfotograf, msnbc, Photoseek, Flickr.

Also: Amsterdam.

Going to the Weinerei tonight, where you pay 2 Euros and then get to sample different wines. It's very cosy and ideal for hipster-watching, which has become a hobby of mine ;)

So...

...it's been embarrassingly long since I last posted. The time that has elapsed between NOW and THEN has shown itself to be vast enough as to prove virtually paralyzing, which is strange as I certainly haven't been suffering from writer's block in other respects. More like not-knowing-where-to-begin-block. Which I'm sure most bloggers (and I hesitate to call myself that) encounter at one point or another.
I'll start with something traditional, and then hope to get back into a groove!

Here are a few things that happened to me since I last wrote:
A place:
CANADA. That is all.

Two weeks of snow, tobogganing, appreciating the subtle differences between Canadian and American accents that become apparent upon hearing "Canadian" again, losing my luggage, losing my luggage again, meeting old friends and realising a better term might be "the friends that count", losing any ability to speak English or German as I adjusted back, hanging out with the fam and...well, a whole lot more. Highlights definitely included NYE in Toronto, a fantastic city, but also hanging out with a number of generations of lovely women in my family.
A film:
Soul Kitchen

Fatih Akin's latest is a Heimatfilm ("sentimental film with a regional background"...thanks, Wikipedia) set in Hamburg, a city known both for its icy Nordic charm and its seedy red-light district underbelly. This film embraces both. Unlike in most of Akin's films, there are virtually no Turkish characters in Soul Kitchen. Instead, the film tracks a Greek restaurant owner (Adam Bousdoukos) who transforms his restaurant "Soul Kitchen" into a four-star establishment, and his ex-con brother (Moritz Bleibtreu) who's using a job at the restaurant to maximize his time out of jail. Bonus: Awesome soundtrack, great script, main character who looks like Jim Morrison. AWESOME.
For: foodies, people who think a film is nothing without a kickass soundtrack, people from Hamburg.

An event:
Orhan Pamuk's lecture today at Humboldt University, "What Happens To Us When We Read Novels" (as part of the Mosse Lecture Series)

One of the things I really appreciate about living in one of the cultural centres of Europe - and I sometimes feel Berlin is a bit of a special case anyway because of its mix of cultures and historical faultlines and aesthetic sensibilities - is the mindboggling array of cultural and literary events at my fingertips. I was incredibly lucky to hear Amos Oz last year and today Nobel laureate Orhan Pamuk, whose novel "Museum of Innocence" I started reading over the break provided a worthy follow-up. Pamuk spoke of the desire to read literary novels for their "atmosphere", distinguished between "naive" and "sentimental" readers, and called Anna Karenina "the greatest novel of all time". He also suggested our desire to find secret meaning within novels is one and the same as our desire to find meaning in life (even if most literary critics would now suggest that novels, in fact, lack a secret "meaning" and are instead constantly shaped and reimagined by their readers). I loved his humour, his heavily accented English, and his attempts at pronouncing "Bildungsroman." A great evening all around.

That's all for now...off to go watch "Rules of Attraction."