Worry

Having just read a variety of books, some 'trashy', some theoretical, which all say the same thing; that is, in their various ways, they all say we are in the shit, and then turned on the TV to find Prof David Harvey saying also 'we're in the shit' on something called 'Hardtalk'. I can only deduce we are in the shit. The shit we are in revolves much around our passion for so called libertarian capitalism. This basically maintains your right to shop at Primark and get offended at just about anything, and assumes you see the benevolent nature of the 'War on Terror'- or makes sure you do if you don't.

Obviously for a poor sod like me this means I may not get away with a sentence such as:

'Young german women walk by with that stereotypical strut of a horse in dressage. Their ponytails swing, their limbs are taught. But it is also a certain sexual arrogance that promises the equivalent of Michael Ballack on the football pitch, it no doubt prefigures considerable and painful disappointment for all parties when the game is over'.

I'm editing my novel. I have to worry.

Thought I'd try Freud this morning, but The Interpretation of Dreams (a hulk of ancient polemic) proved too much. I've got my unconscious sorted with the girl and the kitten. So I wandered down to the old fellas bar on Wilmersdorfer Str, we call it that, it's actually called 'Wilhelm Hoeck Est 1892' where you sit in the dark rustic bar with the other old fellas sillouetted against the doorway in the dark and don't do very much at all, all that glimmers is the yellow of each glass of beer, shimmering in the darkness across the landscape of wooden tables. You sit still, you watch and wonder. Everything is calm and correct. Sitting still in a bar is of course is my ideal way of being. Hours will pass, 50's country and sixties pop will play on the old juke box, you will sometime or other 'well up' to 'Those Were The Days..My Friend' and so on. 'Maybe it was always my ambition to be one of those old fellas in a bar' I think to myself.

'Well you've just become one of those old fellas in a bar!' says Julie when she arrives, by way of congratulation.

There are worse things to be.

Fortune Favours the Brave

The hunt for german girl figurines with cats intensified as we returned to the place where we saw the damn thing in the first place- a year ago. The shopkeeper only speaks German and Russian and I suspect sells very little if you see what I mean. I mean, it seems to be a shop but not a shop, but to a degree way beyond bars with no customers which appear thankfully to thrive over here. So in encounters of this type, drawings of girl and cat were made, and phrase books were consulted, the light of recognition shone, and backroom searches began, and, low and behold, we have this fabulous figure right infront of us NOW on this desk. She's a real 'Ukraine girl gonner knock you out' with a kitten dancing on her pelvis, a very particular bit of her pelvis, and she is as far as I'm concerned unique (no 25). She is the remarkable conjugation of many signifiers of the sixties, and confirms that it was possible to have fun in the USSR.

So I've sat in all the designer chairs. I've listened to the rain fall. I've read all about Chairman Mao. Maybe I should start writing fucking poetry. Here in Charlottenburg on a Sunday you'd better get used to the desire to chew your own legs off. No, look, it's lovely, we go to the street market and I realize I've developed an unhealthy interest in the qualities of german porcelain which is weird because german porcelain is by enlarge the ugliest, most vulgar stuff you can possibly imagine. However I realize that in order to have 'good taste you have to have bad taste' and so I pursue my dream of finding an adolescent female figurine rolling around playing with a pussy cat. Nothing doing. But that's OK, there's a bar round the corner at Tiergarten which as far as we're concerned, has never had anybody else in it while we've been in it, which is in itself mind bogglingly tremendous, and it's one of my favourites in the world (and where my blog picture was taken- see right). Sullen adolescent female takes our order for beer and korn and I draw diagrams on beermats of Marx's theory of value. Christ I must be good company. Julie talks me through her purchase of an early C20th cigarette tin. Love Is.

Times Like These

Without music for ten days (excepting noodling techno/Cure stuff in the baby bar back in motherworld) and when our latest hostess explained 'Of course the cd player doesn't work', I take it on the chin, I say, well, they must be crazy but I still like 'em, and there's all these designer chairs to sit in. Our methods of music appraisal are obviously hopelessly outdated, out of touch, like we like 'big high quality speakers with an amp you can discuss over dinner'. Things are so quiet here I'm sure we wouldn't last a week for complaints.

However, comes a time. I was preparing dinner and the bloody football transmission via the internet disappears (however, Chelsea are one up). I think, well, tiny sound is better than nothing, and I slot the Foos into the Macbook. You know you love rock n roll when you are loving the Foos on a thing like this.

Mies Chairs

So...after ten days in isolation from 'the media' (apart from books) we got to relax in front of CNN in our new rather snazzy quarters in Charlottenburg. Boggle eyed, we reclined in designer chairs, we heard of drastic wheat failure in Russia, floods in Pakistan (no wheat there either) and mud slides in China, Man Utd's latest transfer signing etc etc and well, I have to say the situation wasn't looking good, but at least the chairs were slightly more comfortable than last year even given the designer tag (usually 'totally uncomfortable').

At which point, today I retire for lunch over the Mies dining suite. Now there's a problem here, Mies dining chairs have the propensity to involuntarily throw you right into the plate of food in front of you. They also trip you up when you dare to do anything else other but sit in them cantilevered over your sausage; ie you cannot sit sideways or anything like that. You can hardly admire your neighbour even. As a big fan of Mies, I'm pleased he stuck to buildings you couldn't inhabit at all.

Even more wonderful, I'm not sure these dining chairs are exactly the real deal. They do not look EXACTLY like the picture above. This is either down to Google images or Knoll, or some other fellas (somewhere else) 'knocking them out'.

Woke up this morning..

Woke up this morning to the sound of gunfire and explosion, to the rumble of machinery, to the screaming of the old and the young, the women and the men, the young and the elderly, to the smell of cordite and smoke and rape and death, to a vision of bodies strung up on lamp-posts for desertion, a land of total ruin, a metaphysical landscape of total inhumanity, and I was lying in one of the rooms where it could all have happened.

It's a surprise I hadn't really registered this thought before, I mean I'm sure this was one of the sectors where the Russians penetrated in the horrific fighting of April 1945. And like many I am fixated by the cataclysm that was WW2. I have a considerable library on the subject, and find myself continually glued to the National Geographic Channel when I can (obviously not here- see below). I had it in the back of my mind.

But Julie discovered a long list of civilian dead for just that month of April 1945 in a local 'park' yesterday (I mean, an empty lot next door with trees in it - not the English understanding of a park at all) which was of course a small cemetery until the previous dead were lifted up once again by allied high explosive, and of course my register shifted. Only a few of the heaviest stones remained of course, that's gravity for you.

So I got up and felt sick and above all old; fat and old. And I got myself a beer from the fridge, and I thought about it.

Later we went out to that memorial, innocuous of course, mooched around, paid near 10Euro for the smallest piece of sushi in the world and two halves of beer, watched once more in wonder the parambulations of the latest inheritors of this landscape, who of course only scream out of innocence rather than utter despair, and looked at it, and went, well, my god, even the winos in the park are playing techno on their laptops!

'Laptops are cheap these days' said Julie

'But they're fucking Macs!' I said

Winos with Macs.

This, friends, is a different landscape, an altogether different landscape from the world I understand back in London. Here even the wino's have Macs. It made me think somewhere along the line, the UK has really fucked up. We have more disparity in England than ever before, and it is a conspiracy that favours of the rich.

Notwithstanding of course the utter subjectivity of these observations (only one wino had a Mac, the others had bongos) there is much to consider.

We are away tonight to the other side of town, slightly less weird and certainly more balanced than this one, but it's been, well, quite a trip.