Posts Titled: Dead or Alive?

Good and interesting days interspersed with dark and virtually hopeless ones.

As Nadine and I lament our financial situation Berlin overall contunies to offer new and interesting people and experiences. Wednesday we went to a potluck at a friend of a friend's place which was actually in our neighborhood. Amelia (friend of Leland from Seattle) had a whole gaggle of fascinating characters over for a make-a-pizza-for someone-else potluck. I haven't been around so many english speakers in a month so I found myself talking much more that I normally would at a social gathering, really exicted at the mere fact that I could express myself fully and others could understand completely and respond. I spent most of the evenging talking with Tod who is currently in the Hague doing his first book reading (his novel comes out in the states in 2008?) and Ilya, a Australian-Russian journalist who went from Baghdad to chasing Brintney for the Enquirer. Also spoke quite a bit with Ryan, a really effing talented painter from Boston, and Michelle, a reporter for Deutsche Welle Radio. How the hell are there a dozen truly interesting people at one party? I was amazed at how clever and fun these people were, all ex-pats and all doing good things with their lives. Amelia even sang at one point, which is pretty gutsy really, bt apparently she'd written a song, played it on iTunes and sang along. Lovely.

Nadine got along just fine as well, and half the time we were off talking to our own newly-people (I only mention this because in the two previous parties Iîve attended here I've clung desparately to the people I arrived with, only nodding and having brief exchanges with the other party-goers.



Black Market: für nützliches Wissen und Nichtwissen. It's a bird. It's a plane. It's Superman.

I took part in a large-scale art project tonight, basically the SCENARIO:
HAU EINS (Hebbel-am-Ufer EINS of Drei) a nice old theatre, one enters the lobby where young people are busy directing traffic and talking can be heard, lots of talking. I go to an alcove that says SchwarzRadio (Black Radio) and give some ID in exchange for a little radio and headphones what is transmitting conversations on multiple channels (one can choose) from the next room. I tune into a filmmaker (American with lisp) who is explaining his recent disasterous film endeavour with audio and photos to a younger German woman. I listen in for a few minutes before looking in on the main performance hall (an old dimly lit theatre) filled with approximately 50 small tables, each fitted with two chairs and a lightbulb and perhaps a hidden microphone and radio transmitter. It takes me a full 10 minutes to pick out the pair (based on lipreading adn gesticulation in the crowd) before I find the pair I am voyeuristically listening-in to and then I head upstairs to buy or bid on the next round. The rounds are 6 half-our sessions one-on-one with an expert in a given field. Fields range from the paranormal to Mexican border disputes. There were only six choices left when I reached the registration board so I chose the Expert on Mormonism, Amelia Seymor, who had just completed a documentary film about her own falling out with the Church of Latter Day Saints as well as all the other people in her life who had or had not left themselves. I then bumped into Michelle from the night before who had me say a few things for her piece on Deutsche Welle Radio. Michelle had also found a German Rodeo expert names Lars dressed in full-on Rodeo regalia, which was kind of awesome.

My own talk went well, we actually got started about 10 minutes early before the big GONG bang and I got her permission to record the conversation- ìfor no reason in particular, I just record stuff.î Which is true. It was back and forth for awhile until she really got going a mile a minute on every detail of Mormonism, mainly focusing on polygamy and how Joseph Smith was kind of shady... I really wanted to know about the secrets: the full body underwear, the cultish things I'd heard in rumor, but no, after she got going I could barely get a word in edgewise. I did mention Ben, my childhood friend who was Mormon and now gay who has most likely been exiled from his family, and she agreed: the Mormons encouraged praying the gay away... which doesn't usually work.
I left without getting any video of the space so maybe I'll stop by again tomorrow if I remember, but overall this Blackmarket was totally overwhelming and grand. Hundreds of people talking and trading knowledge and experience in one room- then GONG, switch over to a new group of ripe minds, there really isn't anything quite like it that I can think of... I found myself thinking ìwhat am I an expert of?... Killing Time in Semi-Productive Ways? Making sh*t? Youtube? Heh. No idea. I could be the ìExpert on Nothingî next year.



Amelia Seymor's film screens at 16:00 Sunday at HAU ZWEI.




Another icky night at my most favorite icky U-Bahn station, Kotbusser Tor. Tonight was quiet featuring a Chinaman reading a newspaper and smoking.
BELOW; HOW NOT TO ADVERTIZE THE NEW BOND FILM: set up a scene from the film using REAL dead people then charge people money to see it in a museum. THis is SOOO WRONG.

Don't kill Whitey! he's so darn cute and helpless...