DER TRAUM

On Saturday I learned that a nice gallery here in Berlin is interested in my work. A friend of a friend sent my website link to the gallery owner and I guess he liked what he saw. I tried to get over to the gallery to introduce myself on Saturday, but I had to work all day so I didn't get over there until 8pm and the place was already closed. It looked like a nice gallery though, and it was in the middle of the gallery district. I'm going to try to catch up with them some time this week.

Today was a bank holiday today so I worked for a few hours in my studio and then went for a long walk along the train tracks, through Treptower Park, and then over to Kreuzburg near where I work. There are a lot of strange empty fields and crumbling buildings in Berlin, which I find fascinating. Here are some of the buildings I saw today while I was out walking:

Gotta love how non-English speakers use English, lol. This place's name made me laugh because it's just so to-the-point:


I spent yesterday at the Berlin Biennale for Contemporary Art. In this piece, titled something like, "Today I might go to work, or I might not", the artist disassembled a MacBook Pro and hung every single piece on the wall. I happen to have a MacBook Pro, so it was interesting to see something so familiar all in pieces (I wasn't too impressed with it as a work of art, though):


I thought this piece was cool. The artist had built an intense network of copper pipes running all throughout the rooms of the exhibition hall, ending up here with a block of salt on a little table, and a pillow and some bedding on the floor beneath. Water dripped intermittently from the copper pipe onto the salt block, which had gradually spread salt water onto the floor, which the pillow and bedding had then absorbed. The salt had crystallized beautifully on the floor and bedding:


I found this interesting little gem of conversation on the bathroom stall at the exhibition space:


And you know, it's a completely valid question. Why is there so much boring art? Definitely not all, but some of the stuff I saw at the biennale had me wondering the same damn thing. I mean, there was a video piece where a woman and her mother re-enacted her birth. So there's this naked 30-something year old woman laying on her mom in a fetal position under the mom's nightgown, and I kept feeling sorry for the mother, who didn't look comfortable at all with her grown daughter laying on her like that. The woman laid on top of her for forever, dramatically waiting for the right minute to "birth" herself, and I completely lost interest and walked away. I mean, seriously, wtf.

Incidentally, the bathroom where the above was written was right beside the area where this video piece was playing. Probably not a coincidence.

Wish me luck today – my interview is in three hours! :)

I walked around Kreuzberg and Friedrichshain until the bottoms of my feet felt like they had turned into bruised pulp and I took the train back to the neighborhood where I'm staying. Today's mission was to research studio space here in Berlin but I think I'm looking in the wrong places. I've emailed a couple people for advice, so hopefully they can point me in the right direction.

It's raining here now, and I'm having a chill night in. I was going to do laundry, but I forgot to buy detergent. I like to use "Denkmit" when I'm over here because the name amuses me. Same thing with Blend-a-med toothpaste, lol.



( There be more photos here... )

My flight to Berlin was atypical. About an hour in, one of the crew got on the PA and asked if there were any doctors on board. And it's never a good thing to hear something like that, so I kind of knew immediately that things weren't gong to go as planned and that I should just accept it and go with the flow. I was sitting in the farthest back row, and the crew and two doctors (yes, thank god there actually were doctors on board) brought the suffering woman to the area directly behind my seat where there was an empty space. I offered my pillow and blanket, and they took them. The woman had had an allergic reaction to something and none of her medicines were proving useful. The doctors gave her what was available on board, but apparently it wasn't enough, so we made an emergency landing in Butt Fuck, Egypt Moncton, Canada. We sat on the tarmac as various officials ran around with papers, filling out forms, and finally the woman (who's reaction had generally subsided by then) was taken off in an ambulance and our plane was given a new flight plan.

I watched kids' movies the whole flight, the best of which was "How to Train Your Dragon". The woman sitting next to me was interesting and we had some nice conversation, but she wasn't a Talker (thankfully... you know what I mean), and slept most of the way.

Connecting flights were rescheduled, and the extra wait time wasn't so bad. My luggage, however, landed in Berlin ahead of me (I'm not sure how that worked out), and finding it was kind of a PITA, because they'd stowed it in an outside warehouse. But at least everything got here with me, for which I am grateful.

I got dinner and walked to the place where I'm renting a room. Martin (the guy renting it to me) and his girlfriend were waiting outside, and showed me inside. They made a dinner of pasta and pesto sauce with cherry tomatoes, and it was so good that pasta with pesto sauce is all I really want to eat now.

Yesterday, by the time 8pm rolled around I was exhausted from walking around the city, but was determined to hit the clubs, so I got all dolled up and headed out at midnight. My first stop was a club called Der Club Visionaere, but it was So Packed that after one beer all I wanted to do was get the hell out of there. The words "Fire Hazard" came to mind. So I left and headed over to K17, which is a huge gothic/industrial club.

Early in the evening I heard a girl speaking English with an American accent and she looked cool so I introduced myself and we started chatting. Turns out she was Johanna from the band the Crüxshadows, and they had played a show there earlier in the evening. It was interesting to hear their tales of life on the road and I was really impressed by how super nice and down to earth they all were. They mentioned a goth cruise they're going to be doing soon, and I'm going to look into it – something like a mini WGT on a boat, which sounds über fun.

I had a bunch of conversations with people between songs, all in German this time, and I was complimented on how well I spoke the language (!!!) and had people wondering how I had learned how to speak it so well (omg). It's funny because I couldn't speak German this well when I was in Hamburg...somehow it all just "clicked" in my head and makes sense. I can understand what people say to me, as well as easily reply in German without having to slowly translate things in my head before I say them. When I initiate conversations or deal with people in shops or restaurants no one ever immediately switches into English anymore, and although I still can't have deep philosophical conversations, I'm generally fluent – it's awesome!

Got home around 6am and went to bed. When I woke up and saw that my clock read 4:58pm, my first thought was, "AAAAAAAAAAAEEEEEEeee!" After which I though, "oh fuck, it's the Day of Rest after all, isn't it?" and took a shower.

I got dinner and walked for 10 miles around the city, checking out Freidrichshain and Kreuzberg. I'm currently having a glass of red wine up in my room, before trying to go to bed. I've been having a blast here so far ;)

I have my plane ticket to Düsseldorf! I'll be staying there a few days with my friend and her family before we make our way to Leipzig. The Wave Gotik Treffen website still hasn't listed the bands that are playing this year, but I'm sure we'll have a blast no matter what. Our hotel room has been secured, so all I need to worry about is which pairs of tall leather boots to bring along. I think I'll be packing an actual suitcase this time around! Yay luxury. Afterwards, on the 13th I will head to Berlin on my own for a couple days to see the Berlin Biennale.

I ordered a hair piece a few days ago. It's wavy platinum blond and is supposed to make my hair look fuller and longer than it really is (it's a 15" piece). You clip it under your hair at the crown of your head and is supposed to look "seamless". We shall see. If it looks good I might splurge and get the longer one too (the 22"); I've always thought it would be really cool to have long platinum hair, although I'll never have it naturally because bleached hair becomes far too damaged to make it that long before breaking off. They had human hair versions of some of the styles too, but they were vastly more expensive, and it seems really gross to be wearing someone else's hair.

Last night I did some paint experimentation. I hung a shower curtain in my kitchen as a drop cloth, took a bowl of paint, and used an electric hand mixer to fling the paint out at a piece of kraft paper. The results were nice: long thin tendrils of paint in arcs as well as some delicate spray. Very cool. I'm thinking of doing a few abstract pieces next, so we'll see.