crisis over the ocean. i’m sorry…but…
And here’s Ali demonstrating that there’s no reason not to wear a double breasted plaid suit to work on a Wednesday!
THIS makes me so glad to live here. this man - a gem. this photographer - a goddess. BEST PART is - the communication is all between the words; it is likely that little of the meaning is lost, camera and smile doing so much of the work.
<3
some European artists actually go to America to live the dream, not just Berlin. what a thought…what a very very different decision…one ripe with fewer pastries and perks of socialism.
In Focus: International Women’s Day 2013
Today is International Women’s Day, a day set aside to celebrate women and their economic, political, and social achievements around the world. It is also a time to focus on places and situations where women’s rights, equality, health, and safety still have a long way to go. Collected below are images of women around the world — powerful and poor, young and old — on International Women’s Day.
Read more. [Images: Getty, AP, Reuters]
girls, _, women, whatever. rarara.
Berlin’s beautiful photography museum, more or less a space for social- cultural dialogue through images, closes today. C/O can no longer afford its space in Mitte. A gaping hole will be left next to the restored Synagogue and the arts scene for Berliners and visitors alike.
Then there are people way across the ocean, making their own cameras, pursuing passions regardless of costs to the average lifestyle, perhaps even to the artist persona.
This would fit in well in Berlin. Someone should make some phone calls…
Portraits
How many ex-pats miss their mothers? (me)
Mother came to visit today. We
hadn’t seen each other in years. Why didn’t
you call? I asked. Your windows are filthy, she said. I know,
I know. It’s from the dust and rain. She stood outside.
I stood in, and we cleaned each one that way, staring into each other’s eyes,
rubbing the white towel over our faces, rubbing
away hours, years. This is what it was like
when you were inside me, she said. What? I asked,
though I understood. Afterwards, indoors, she smelled like snow
melting. Holding hands we stood by the picture window,
gazing into the December sun, watching the pines in flame.
-Mark Irwin
have a fucking good morning :-)
Allistair Noon, Berlin poet with strange visions in winter
1
Elastic lakes, bright as amphibian skin,
encoil the city I send this from. Sweat-scenting
vamps infest the banks – eight-legged, clambering
up into armpits, hair as foot- and handhold.
The symbol of a speedboat at Wannsee, under chugging rain –
by beautiful, infested banks.
2
Clouds spread on windows, cultures on film.
Sun strikes rooftiles like a mirror. Three stepping-stone stars
emerge in a clear autumn. And always the panes
flickering with the schedules, the culture on film.
3
Cold infringes the skin’s liberties in the queue
for drafts and postures: a Great Hall to billow above
the eagle-grasped Reichstag, a palace to rise by levels
to a sun-pointing Lenin.
Communists in stormtroops’ cellars in ‘33; resistance
is a staff officer in ‘44: beggars outside the clubs,
as a Mercedes rolls the white streets.
4
Not all’s been made to last: a vase blackmarked
with curses, for priests to smash; boxfuls of china
to break before marriage. And now the mobile sarcophagi –
green, brown and white – surge with bottles.
Lean on glass meant to preserve the manifesto
‘All Art Is Destruction’ to receive the curse of the blacksuited.
5
Perception inflected: final paleness turns
white clouds dark.
In the shift of stars a satellite’s swing
is a dancer’s dash among a stageful of statues.
Among arbitrary fencing, thought is damp cement.
Window through a window, news rents the screen.
6
Land use changes as women with buckets and mugs
water their allotments in front of the Reichstag,
grenade-holed, as if hacked at by pissed-up stonemasons.
Later the forecourt will be an informal football pitch,
parliament an exhibition; later a fenced-off
construction site, around signs of the new rich:
What number must I call to rent a penthouse?
7
These may be the buildings I live my life with:
my sixties shopping centres, our thirties semis.
They’ll rewrite the skyline, redraw the malls:
these the buildings to live with.
8
Millennium sextuplets land on the Planet of the Peacocks.
A schoolmate’s tag was ‘the one on TV’. Starlets,
wander into smashed-window supermarkets, pick up a six pack
and turn to the camera. Collect scorpions. Go shopping
near studios. Visibility durch Technik, departure
foot-tagged and body-bagged.
9
Empire silk in caravans across the oceans,
along the air routes; along airwaves and cables
the shows, the Great Phrases: ‘To learn from the Talkmasters
is to learn to be victorious’ – gestures, articulation,
the studio decor. Win a million in fifty languages.
Seasons are schedules to keep to. The programmer’s directive:
‘Global in form, national in content.’
Berlin’s ‘poverty’, as this article describes, is not about lack of creative productivity (seeing shit through) but rather about investment in a place that goes beyond making pretty, interesting things. But rather than writing from a self-reflective ivory tower about a city that LET you live cheaply with your mates and make your “art”, how bout you think a little bit about your privilege - how you had this choice and agency to begin with - and how you may have changed your own experience by, i don’t know, meeting people outside of the non-German-speaking ex-pat community that work hard, contribute to a more inclusive society, and don’t have the opportunity to examine a city’s zeitgeist from a cushioned place of observer status.
