Cats and Dogs

So times like these, to fully enjoy them, require considerable inactivity. There's a lot to think about if you give yourself hours of inactivity and so I sat on the sofa staring at a wall of drawings, some by the kids of the apartment at the bottom of the wall, others by the mum rising to the top of it.

Firstly, in strictly critical terms, the drawings by the kids were better than those of mum. Mum's looked better, very stylish fluid line drawings, but the kid's had something else going on; they were discovering things and it was good to think about what and how they were discovering things.

There was a fabulous kid's drawing of a cat, it started as a 'cat', but the barbaric nature of the child's imagination soon took it into 'tiger' with the ferocious scribbling of orange and black 'stripes'. I thought this drawing was utterly fantastic, it had everything of cat and tiger AT THE SAME TIME (same set!) and probably the kid didn't even care!

Weirdly, as far as I have seen anyway, there are NO CATS in Berlin. Berlin is a DOG CITY. Dogs (hounds) trot around like they own the bloody place with their curly tails in the air, they even go along to shop in the supermarkets. Our friend has a big white wolf of a thing, very stylish indeed, and as soon as it saw us in it's customary second home, it threw up on the parquet as if in disgust. Hence, the kid was really using his or her imagination.

But the only time I've ever seen a cat here is in my favorite bar in Savignyplatz, and so as far as I'm concerned, that's the only cat here (my friend agrees). That made me think, maybe because I like cats and especially pub cats, that this may contribute to me loving that bar so much. I also wonder whether the sound of the german language is better associated with dogs than cats, and a cat language would have to be...Italian. There is indeed much to ponder on.

Then I read Zizek deconstructing 'Kung Fu Panda' and thought, well I'm not as good as him, and then, then, the problem with Zizek is, he just does too much.