Post Titled: D'oh!
I showed up to the venue but didn't end up going to this show because it was €15. d'oh!
BONAPARTE live at Festsaal Kreuzberg, Berlin featuring Laura Bean

Post TItled: Post-Google as a graph


made possible by webpages as graphs by Fernando Luis Lara

Post Titled: headed over to Freedom of information:
Live TV : Ustream
Miguel Gutierrez doing freedom of information, a 24 hour continuous movement performance/protest/meditation while blindfolded and earplugged, originally done in 2001 as a response to the U.S. invasion of Afghanistan and then reprised in 2008 in response to the ongoing U.S. military presence in Afghanistan and Iraq. This incarnation of it is being done at the Politics of Ecstasy Festival in Berlin. Dance artist Katherine Ferrier is simultaneously doing the action in Kansas City, Missouri. Her channel is http://www.ustream.tv/channel/freedom-of-information-2009---kansas-city
For more information about this action go to freedomofinformation2008.blogspot.com HAU 2 berlin

live stream here.

intrn'l moratorium on pants w/o pockets day

Post Titled: post-google goes all cabin fever... (after 3 days of hardly leaving the house due to illness i have started to take more fotos of the things around me...)

Post Titled: close enough.
This photo was stuck into the small (old) book about Switzerland I bought the other day. Well, kind-of.

Post Titled: Burritos at last.

Making burritos in Berlin is a project. The ingredients which one requires are very difficult to find and usually scattered across nearly half a dozen stores, so I am very happy that Buck was able to finally assemble everything and have a burrito dinner night... here are some images which I took (that do not feature burritos but rather people):

table, chairs, people.


emma.


michael vermillion pretending to be at the beach...


emma and ben examine a disposable camera


antony the bulgarian blues guitar player who pops up randomly


Buck and Laura Bean


michael and adam


buck.

emma.


ben and adam.








michael vermillion


a the remains of a burnt origami frog

post post titledt: on dayquil and nyquil
Pos by the way that is an iPod on a very cheap and silly stand which i gt for €10 at the shady mobile phone store across the street. it works great.
t

Titl
(disclaimer: oh sweet effing jesus. I just woke up and accidentally took Nyquil instead of Dayquil... I have about a half hour of consciousness left before I drift off into that aquakelly green oblivion... shit, there goes the
daylight. I donder if I still have that swedish vampire flick Tod transferred to my harddrive... I definitley have Lilo and Stitch in Bulgarian... and Arested Devlop,m.-)
ed: non-fic
tion som
ewhere betw

ee
n wak
ing up, eyeglas
ses, contact le

nses, and coff

ee/tea-

Post SUBBERTitled: The Convalescence of this listlessly infected, to and fro, plowing towards objects, the things on the table and in the kitchen and the newspapers we didn't end up reading.
Post Subtitled: gott sei dank that I stocked up on dayquil and nyquil in the States or I'd be a deadman. cinnamon and lemon and tea are not going to cut it... maybe Aspirin Complex...

Post Titled: Beuys Beuys Beuys

There is so much Joseph Beuys up right now at the Hamburger Bahnhof that I don't even know what to say... I even had time for a nap during the coyote video...

Post TItled: O-bar-ma party at Schönleinstr. 6 this evening...

Post Titled: Irma Thomas It's Raining

THE GRAPES OF
WRATHSPBERRY BERETnon-fiction, things lit by the "on" indicators of electronic devices, very long exposure...

Freitag steht Michael Vermillion (Seattle) auf der Bühne der Villa Orange in der Eberswalderstr.35, Berlin-Prenzlauer Berg, Beginn 21.30 Uhr. Eintritt FREI, komm vorbei!° Michael Vermillion Berlin show Vermilion tar art rat tarartrat musik music Happysad Radio eins christine heise Listen to him on RADIO EINS HERE

Post Titled: JAYBO AKA MONK interview in WHITEHOT
My interview with Berlin grafitti artist JAYBO (aka Monk) regarding his show at CircleCulture Gallery is now up at WHITEHOT Magazine of Contemporary Art, -lovely guy. enjoy!

Post Titled: Painting Again.

after a long break from painting (in favor of drawing, photographing and -uh- WORK) I started painting again today... considering posting fotos of the progress... it is all so new again... and I remember why I stopped, paint is such a fickle bastard pain-in-the-ass. Dear INk, I love you so much more.

Speaking of which, the most controversial painting in my apartment is NOT the $4,500 painting, NOT the enormous portrait of my estranged wife, NOR is it even the one portraying the obese stripper bending over wearing only in a Chinese straw hat and thick heels, but rather it is the one of a girl in a sun hat which I got for €22 at a flea market:

people are either in love with it or are quite disturbed by it. Dunno why, it is just a young woman in a hat who looks like she walked off the set of Dynasty...

Post Titled: About a Bat.
Post Subtitled: I hereby prove my bat-dorkiness in that I just wrote this in one sitting off the top of my head.

The 1989 Tim Burton Batman film was a break from previous live action Bat-camp (as in overtly campy: the 1960s TV series) in much the same way as Batman Begins is a break from the Schuhmacher-imposed Bat-camp of the mid-to-late 1990s. I am just wondering: WHY did the studios feel the need to bring the camp back? Was it that Batman couldn't keep being dark and "cool"? Or that the 90s themselves had reached or called for some level of silliness? What? Why?
The 1995 crossover film Batman Forever, also the first film in which neither Michael Keaton nor Tim Burton were involved, was the gateway to the death of the 90s batman franchise: aka 1997's crap-campfest Batman and Robin. Since I have been following this all fairly closely since age 9 (when the first Burton/Keaton Batman came out) I can't help but wonder why these overhauling waves of re-imaging and re-imagineering have occurred, but actually looking at the history of the Batman comic itself it almost makes sense. Bob Kane's original 1938 Bat-Man was somewhat cool, but still fairly campy- and then the character goes through a dozen re-inventings of the Bat, most notably by artist Frank Miller, who made him notably dark with the Dark Knight Returns (I think), -but I'm not talking about comics here.

Upon re-watching Batman and Robin for the first time in 10 years (since seeing it in the theater and being horrified, for even in the first 5 minutes this film lets you know that it is just pure silliness. 90% of the script is one-liners delivered shamelessly by Schwarzenegger, Clooney, Uma Thurman (aka ONLY good thing about the film), the intolerable Boy Wonder, (the since-vanished) Chris O'Donnell, alongside that girl from Clueless who joins the cast as Batgirl. In general, I like George Clooney, but Clooney is no Batman. Or maybe Clooney just isn't Batman with this script. No, no- Clooney's eyes are just too friendly. He can't be Batman (but he was).
The previous Schuhmacher film, Batman Forever (Forever what?) was the highest grossing film of 1995. So, I suppose the studio might've figured that it really didn't matter what they did next, that people would probably show up to see whatever they slapped together so long as it was "Batman."
What was initially amazing to me upon viewing Batman and Robin this (2nd) time around was that I had completely forgotten about Bane, the character who, in the comics, breaks Batman's back (note: this was done shortly after the Death of Superman presumably to boost Batman sales.) Rather than being a terrifying muscle-bound giant freak of science, he is instead a hokey bio-enhanced thug, a big goofball. Tragic. Actually, I had originally thought that Bane might be a good concluding element to a Nolan/Bale trilogy, assuming the idea of a laboratory-created superfreak doesn't break too far from the realism of the Nolan films, (which is kind-of does.) By realism I mean that the films go to some effort to make things as believable as possible given the circumstances, i.e. the bat-gear coming mainly from a back stock of unused commissioned military prototypes which just happen to be laying around in the basement of Wayne Enterprises' R&D department waiting for Batman to come along and make his Batman-ness possible.
(Side-note: in a recent article which Dan sent this was noted as a potential hazard for the Avengers, where characters such as Iron-Man (who live in a fairly realistic world) team up with the Hulk, who are more fantastical.) I also wondered if that might be why we haven't seen a Batwing since Batman Forever - for example, the Skyhook scene in Hong Kong featured in the Dark Knight. Previous Batmen would've Batwinged that stunt, right? But no, the Nolan Batman reaches for some semblance of believability, even if it is unbelievable- they demonstrate how the things Batman does are at least possible.

Batman Forever gives us the stoic Val Kilmer Batman, definitely a passable Bruce Wayne/Batman, and the comic appropriateness of Jim Carrey's Riddler, who very much echoes the original Frank Gorshin Riddler, seen in the Adam West series, aka bright green, funny, an harmless-seeming villain whom the audience never really feels is "evil" in any way, just ridiculous and misguided. The color palette for this film changes completely, not only is there the Riddler-inspired green light everywhere, but there is neon and color to juxtapose the black of the bad. Usually the films' logos are often a dead giveaway for the color palette, for example the Burton films were mainly just black (and the rich honeybee yellow backdrop for the cool new oval-shaped bat-insignia, then there is purple via Prince/Joker), whereas Batman Returns, like Batman and Robin, went with the ice and snow motive- the difference however is that Batman and Robin -despite the red-lit logo- enter a super-neon color scheme, even the Batmobile has a weird sort of twinkling rainbow engine in the front. Batman Begins is presented with a sort of dirty India-yellow sunset, and The Dark Night is cold white-blue with the occasional fire-orange explosion (congrats on not going for purple and/or green.)

My guess is that if Christoper Nolan's Johnny Depp Riddler continues with the palette of the first two Nolan Batman films, that the Riddler will be just as dark as any other character we've seen thus far: dark forest green coupled with black humor. How can this next film be as dark and effective as the Dark Knight? I don't think it can, but I do have faith in Nolan's handling of the franchise.
Since rumors of Cher entering as the Catwoman for the upcoming film seem to have been proven false, I am pretty curious as to whom Nolan might choose to take the role along those lines. The potential choice of Cher hints that the Catwoman might perhaps inclined less towards pure sex appeal and more towards cougar-style mature-lady-vampire succubism. Nolan will nevertheless definitely have to recruit someone who is as un-Halle Berry as Cher is. Can we just bring Michelle Pfeiffer back? I know that would be world-shattering since the 1090s Batmans do not cross-pollinate with the 2000s Batmans at all, (heck, the only elements which I can think of that carry-over from Burton to Schuhmacher are Commissioner Gordon and Alfred the Butler and that Bat signal, everything else changes, notably Gotham itself) but still... Michelle Pfeiffer would work, as she has proven.

Anyhow, there were a few thoughts on that.
Other random notes which I didn't expand upon: Batman and Robin is notably more acrobatic than any of the other films. Just for fun check out the Batman Forever soundtrack songs U2 - HOLD ME, THRILL ME, KISS ME, KILL ME, which if you were a teenager in Europe during the summer of 1995 you probably saw about 1 billion times (for better or worse), along with Seal's Kiss From a Rose (Also note: are there ANY pop songs on the Nolan Batman soundtracks?)
Whoa, is something wrong with YouTube?
"500 Internal Server Error
Sorry, something went wrong.
A team of highly trained monkeys has been dispatched to deal with this situation.
Also, please include the following information in your error report:

4lfVy83b7hYWhIdivRlkBdQ2fJ955dgmW7SD8fooA4dI8QN-Hsdbk99zfB3s
MkABo8ZeI1XiAKuAjFh9tukGaViS1P9YNopXN9Egc8SKIlnt4xxRZEsR7nAA... (gibberish forever)"

Post Titled: There Will Be Blood throbbing through your...

My flatmate's post titled "Viagra Elegies" is hi-larious.

Post Titled: Meet Your Meat
In his "Consider the Lobster" essay, David Foster Wallace recommends sending away for your free "Meet Your Meat" VHS video cassette from PETA, but thanks to the magic of YouTube I can now simply embed the Alec Baldwin narrated classic:
(I guess they save a lot on shipping now)

Post Titled: Furnished Room available at Lausitzerstr. 6, Kreuzberg, Berlin, 10999
10 Feb. - 22. May, email the fabulous and fantastic ms.messica@gmail.com
apartments for rent berlin kreuzberg

Post TItled:
PALESTINE VS. ISRAEL on VBS.tv

Post Titled: Maniacal Joker Laugh

I have been trying to listen to the Ricky Gervais Podcasts, but unfortunately Ricky's maniacal Joker laugh makes this more-or-less unbearable to do in headphones, his laugh is too sudden and too high-pitched to bear. Overall the show is terribly entertaining, the pinch and taint of sly cruel British humor swirling around the tree men talking about everything and nothing is strangely really enjoyable, but that psycho laugh!!!

Yesterday's KRUPP shoot was tedious, after 3 1/2 hours of costume and make-up we (the extras dressed as 1932 students and Nazi students) were then shuttled around town and occupied various Horsaals of a few of Berlin's "elite" universities, i.e. Humboldt. Lighting schemes were impressive, I'll admit- there was literally a light blimp (8 ft wide, 25 ft long) suspended in mid-air in the main hall of the Robert Koch Forum, and huge floods coming through all the windows because -apparently- in the film it was "summer", not January. Funnily enough the Nazi students weren't allowed to leave the buildings because of their Swastika arm bands, and the Germans basically spent much of the day whining about their being not enough food, no milk of sugar for the coffee and things taking too long but -actually- the shoot was so down-time oriented that I had enough free time to read 196 pages of All Shall Be Well; All Shall Be Well; and All Manner of Things Shall Be Well which Tod brought by on Wednesday, the day it went on sale in paperback in the US. More on that when I finish it...
KRUPP dreh film Tod Wodicka Todd Wodicka All Shall Be Well; All Shall Be Well; and All Manner of Things Shall Be Well JANET MASLIN NY times review TAR ART RAT tarartrat Post-Google

Post Titled: hi, rad!

INVADER- Binary Code Street Art- Part 1 from Daniel Lahoda on Vimeo.
found via THE OVERSPRAY MAGAZINE FISHBOWL

Post Titled: Microsoft PAINT

(don't knock it 'til you've tried it 10 years since you tried it last)
which goes well with The curious case of Aelita Andre, artist, aged 2 A painter in an Australian gallery

Post Titled: Get what you want.

So I have electricity again and it is such a double-edged sword. I am overwhelmed by the media possibilities, in fact Buck and I watched nearly an hour of psychic critic James Randi videos (like where he destroys Uri Geller by putting him on Johnny Carson without any of his own prepped props) -good stuff, but is it worth an hour of my day? Then there is the 45-minute daily dose of the Rachel Maddow video podcast, which I try to put on while I am doing dishes to multitask in a way...
Tomorrow at least I have a gig as an extra in a film about the Krupp family, which apparently will be filming out in the countryside by Babelsberg... which will be super duper cold, and of course I have no idea who these people are, but wikipedia tells us "The Krupp family, a prominent 400-year-old German dynasty from Essen, have become famous for their steel production and for their manufacture of ammunition and armaments. The family business, known as Friedrich Krupp AG Hoesch-Krupp in modern times, merged with Thyssen AG in 1999 to form ThyssenKrupp AG, a large industrial conglomerate." I'll be decked out as a student from Munich in the 1940s, which includes a haircut that they pay me for- so bye-bye goldene locken!

Post TItled: Of note...

From Nigel: A Conversation with Phil Toledano

From Goldman: Life must go on in Gaza and Sderot

This blog is written by 2 friends. One lives in Sajaia refugee camp in Gaza and the other lives in Sderot, a small town near Gaza on the Israeli side.

Post Titled: ON THE GRID (almost)
been travelling in places of low internet connectivity so Post-Google had been on hiatus lately, but drück die daumen and knock on wood that the guy comes to turn on the electricty again tomorrow, (we have been without since Haloween) and thanks to all the wonderful folks, one in-particular) who had a huge hand in getting the power back on! seeya soon!