Question: Would something like this ever be allowed on the side of a building in America?

Now I'm not saying you really need something like this (it's a random collection of heavy metal lyrics) on the side of a building, but I found it pretty interesting to stumble upon in a place which fails to legally guarantee freedom of speech (although I guess you don't really have to stumble upon this, as it is rather in your face).


Anyway, the 'Diesel Wall' seems to be a pretty cool idea - they have a contest every year that's open to the public to create a design for the wall, and this is what happened to win this year. Along with all the graffiti and murals (Nike put up some beautiful ones for the World Cup with their logo only barely noticeable), the parks and open greenspace it seems to be indicative of a generally different take that Berlin has toward civil engineering and the role of private enterprise in the organization of public space.

Weltmeisterschaft 2006:

The air is thick with pollen, yet most eyes are on the screens. A woman wipes a baby’s bottom by a recently constructed sandbox. Youth bounces on a trampoline. 20-somethings drink beer. A Dutch striker strikes a football just wide of the Serbian right goalpost, allegiances among the onlookers not readily determinable. In this host country, the home team is not playing, nor in the same group as either of the teams which are. And yet, in the visible range of these pixelated outdoor players, light-drawn through the pollen-filled air from newly purchased projectors, on a Sunday, seating capacities are reached.


Prinz Lauerberg is at its parks and flea markets, but mostly - it is watching football. You see a stranger on the street and want to say something. Sage brush brushes past you as you pass, wordless. You do not speak German. Makeshift beergardens are thrown up in empty lots. Those well-established gather makeshift German lines outside their walls, the ones already inside hanging over, looking for their friends. Men wear flags around their necks like capes. Women paint national colors on their cheeks. Waiting to get into the beergardens, people drink bottled beer, the bottles piling up in mounds like post-war rubble affording the city its minimal topographical variance.


In German-accented English two record producers speak of violence, of German adolescents (or Belgian ones) shooting up their schools, of a boy running into a crowd at the opening of the long-awaited Hauptbahnhof with a knife, stabbing. An American recording artist sits quietly, listening. Almost overnight the lavender explodes into color.


My mind empty with the churchbells' ringing, the sun glows down as if just risen, though it is already afternoon. A thin yellow-haired-shaggy dog lies resting, half in shade, while the bells continue without sign of letting up. Two women talk, and drink tall beers in tall skirts, with their legs crossed. They smoke cigarettes, and wear sun glasses. The dog looks up at me, its muzzle browned, its presumptive master reading, sandals off, legs propped. She puts down her book, momentarily gathers the air in a smell, and drifts back to her lines. The bridge passes its walkers, and below, the rumblings of a ring train, as I return to the unidentifiable yard to sit for an unidentifiable anthem.

Berlin:

An electro-magnetic field pulses. Laundry spins. Stops spinning. You bend your left leg slowly at the knee. Stretching your calf. A bird calls. A car passes. Accelerates. Brakes. A computer tries to scan the disc inside it. A book turns its pages. Reading.

Someone steps hard against a wooden floor. Ruffles a plastic bag. Clinks a fork against a plate. You move your right leg, rolling up, onto your side. More cars. A train too.

Groaning, empty-headed, at the morning, you scratch your balls.

'The ideal political candidate is both charismatic and authentic', you think.

The curtains pulled up, the windows bending light, the door opened, the morning says “get on with it”.


Nick, showered and dressed, lies back down in his bed, lazy. “Unni saw my penis this morning” he says, then sings a Dylan line for the two-thousandth time. I fart. “This sunshine feels awesome,” he replies, though I know it’s not a woman. (He lies and says “it feels better”)

He wonders aloud if he’s ever been alone in the world, farting. He wonders if he’s ever farted at the same time as Geena Davis.

Somewhere along the German country-side a cow, chewing, thinking cow thoughts, leaks methane.

4.24 - Berlin

The Prater Biergarten: Sunset. First sun all day. Still early, the garden, packed with tables, is thin with people. I'm confused with what to do. The idea of going on to France, having grown closer, no longer holds the same appeal. Learning new cities can be both exciting and exhausting. The culture and affordability of berlin are quite appealing to this wanna-be writer looking for a home. There arent too many jobs here, but the realities of our digital age make place-specific employment seem a little less integral. Three small girls, in red and pink, swing on a makeshift swing out the corner of my right eye's distance. Clouds swallow up the sun. I finish my beer and walk home.

4.23 - Berlin

I've been staying in Berlin for two weeks now with my friend Nick. We transferred to Brown at the same time, but he graduated a few semesters back. He's been over here for a year teaching English and learning German, and is going back to the states in the fall for an MFA program at Stanford in documentary film. He's moved around a few times, but currently lives in a nice apartment in Prinz Lauerberg, a neighborhood in the Northeast part of the city, with one roomate, Otto, a Norwegian medical student. The rent is quite cheap here, Nick's is only €200/month, and you can find places that people are leaving for a while and sublet them pretty easily.



My friend Paul, an ethnomusicology grad student from Brown has also been over here working at the opera and doing research for his dissertation. The three of us played together on an intramural basketball team two years ago. It was called 'Beer'. We didn't drink so much that winter, but have been trying our best to atone for past shortcomings.


You can get pretty good .5L bottles of beer at most any grocer or small convenience store here, sometimes for as low as .50c. As there aren't laws against public drinking, we often head to the parks to drink outside in the fresh air, and just leave the bottles lying around, as the recycling program is quite well thought out, and you can get a solid refund at almost any grocer for turning the bottles in.

We've been going out most nights. I've been working on my 'game'. I'm still not sure whether or not I have any. So many intriguing women in these cities. French, and Spanish, and German. oh my.

Nick's going back to a city in the Western part of the country to teach English today, and I'm going to stay on in his place for the next day or two and try to figure out my next move.

4.15 - Berlin

This morning I woke up in the sunny warm tiredness of having not gone to sleep until 5am, rolling to the bathroom to crap out the tofu and curry I’d eaten still recently on a drunk belly. I drank some water and the last of the orange juice, gathered my notebooks into my bag, threw a long-sleeved shirt on its back, and went out to the courtyard to untilt the wooden bench and table’s laying against one another (for the run of precipitation and protection of the wood). I tried to think about art and social critique, then went off for a walk without destination.

When I got back, Nick was hanging out the window, asking about brunch. We went, meeting up with his roomate Otto, and his fiancee Unni. I ordered fruhstuck vegetarische: more tofu (unseasoned) with hummus and guacamole, olives, lettuce, tomatoes, cucumbers, sprouts, bananas, strawberries, and so many cheeses. All laid out on a big platter, I threw everything but the fruit and olives into a couple of sandwiches, and ate slowly, for what felt like forever, on what felt like the first day of summer. Or maybe spring.

At the park in Prinz Lauerberg, with Nick and Paul, near where the old wall ran, we sat down on top of a hill, and smoked the last of my pot from Amsterdam. Between Good Friday and Easter, with Jesus dead in a cave somewhere (or something to such effect) we joked about tatoos, Paul suggesting that I get one of Alfred E. Neuman doing the Pope from behind, while the Pope made a face like Macauley Culkin from Home Alone with his hands on his cheeks, a bit suprised. As wearing such a likeness on one’s skin would most probably be some sort of sin, we decided I’d then be required to confess it. Does the Pope hear confessions? Regardless, an interesting scene.


After doing two Hail Marys, we tumbled down the hill and tried to play hacky sack. A small German girl of about 3 and shaggy brown hair, in a flower print dress, came by to join us, correcting my English words for things with their German equivalents; giggling. She said my airplane was not an airplane, though she pointed at the sky, not a sky, just the same. We threw the hacky sack into it, into the air above her head, letting her try to catch it. Once she had gotten it she would toss it off in a direction apart from our circle, already running before she'd let go, trying to beat us to it. At one point, hit softly in the forehead, as cutely as possible, she said "scheise", picked up the hacky sack, and threw it back.

She made long excursions across the length of the park, randomly inserting herself in a game of frisbee, or grabbing a soccer ball. Raised in small parts, in the course of a day, outside, in the German sun, by total strangers. Not so strange to her non-existent childhood self-consciousness.

4.11 - Berlin

In Kreuzberg I met a bearded American. The proprietor of a used bookstore. Some of my favorite kinds of stores. They had a lending policy for certain books: red-leafed on the opening page, the inside of the cover.

I finally found White Noise, for which I’ve been looking since I started it some weeks ago back in Providence, on the steps in front of the Diocese, in the windy sun of a sparse New England weekday.

He asked me if I was from California. I wasn’t. He was from Devon, and had gone to Conestoga. Small world. Now he lived in Berlin, spoke perfect German, worked at a used English bookstore, and seemed to have artistic commitments.

It came up that I’d gone to school in Providence. He assumed RISD. I said Brown. He made a softly condescending statement about my not being an artist; 'one of them'. He didn’t mean it badly. A clubhouse just has doors...

4.08

I hadn't realized how long the trip to Berlin would be. I thought I could leave in the afternoon, and get in that night, but I ended up needing to take an overnight train that left at 19.00 and got into the Ostbahnhof (East train station) at 04.30. After moving around the train a bit trying to get some good scenic shots of the German countryside, I found an empty cabin. After a while I was joined by an '04 UNH urban studies/German grad from New Jersey, and a German guy from the Northeast coast along the Baltic. She had just finished au pairing in Nuremburg for several months and was heading home. He spoke no English, and we awkwardly failed to communicate. After I helped him with his enormous bag though, he pulled a a couple of beers from it and handed one to me: a common language.


Berlin

The sky was still grey when I arrived, and slowly leaking light. At 5 am the station was mostly quiet - a few people passed out in massage chairs by the doorway, some kids scattered about outside, smelling of pot. I’d planned to give my friend Nick a call when I got in, but it being so early I figured I should kill a few hours first so as not to wake him. The lockers at the station that were large enough to fit my pack cost E3, so I got a falafel for E2 instead, having had only biscuits and beer for dinner, and headed east with all of my possessions toward the sunrise.

Friedrichshain, north of the old wall which ran east-west through this part of the city, is in what used to be East Berlin. It’s a sort of punkish anarchist neighborhood now, reflected in the shops and building fronts, and the graffiti and murals adorning them. There's a sort of seedy chaos, a disorderly intersection of artistic energies, and youthful cultures of potential change, a hopefullness which permeates the streets. I’d found some of this in Amsterdam and Brussels, but nothing so profound. It reminds me a bit of Providence, of Philadelphia or Brooklyn, though at least at first glance their seems to be less of a feeling of self-consious pretension here than what I've sometimes felt in similar American communities. But who knows, such judgments seem both convenient and superficial...

I did my usual wandering routine for a while, going from street to street, generally just scanning for things that seemed intriguing, or particularly demonstrative of the local culture. After a while, I found a building with a great mural on its streetfront wall, with Dr. Zoidberg from Futurama saying something about anarchy. I went into the courtyard in the back, and there was a whole big messy workshop - randomly scattered old bathtubs, bikes and their disassembled pieces, a compost heap in the corner next to the neighboring graveyard, and several more murals.


When I came back out front a couple of drunk, punkish looking fellas, evidently still partying from the previous night, stumbled out of the building and spotted me with my camera. They started posing like models, generally quite friendly, asking me some hardly intelligible questions. They offered me a beer and a joint, and we tried to talk about whatever the language would allow for, the kind of things that late night early morning drunk people talk about. No one spoke great English, except for a nice older guy from Luxembourg who was working on a biography of some Dadaist writer whose name I couldn't place. One guy was very excited to show me a picture of his friend 'Osama Bin Laden' (a nickname evidently for a white-bearded Arabic-looking German fellow). We had a great time for an hour or so, but then they started to wander off, in need of some sleep, and I went to go meet up with Nick, and to get a famous Berlin brunch from a cafe where you get to choose the price you want to pay. mmmm, vegan lentil liverwurst spread...