I visited an Arcadian meadow where deeply rooted strawberries were growing on golden vines and symbolized love. I was drinking a Campari and apparently strawberries didn’t go with the drink. I was a tourist, the delights conjured from my imagination. I was told I could only be offered far-removed pickles, this wasn’t Spreewald. But the pickles were not ordinary pickles, once held in your hands, you were banished from Arcadia and told to leave. But before I left, I plucked a flower to remember the smell of the strawberry meadows.
Leaving Antje Öklesund one January evening during the most beautiful snowfall
On the dance floor of “What difference does it make!” I met someone whose take on common interests were so different from mine, it made all the difference.
How two people from the humanities can amazingly miss the connect:
Concerning Hegel:
Me: I took a class on his Phenomenology.
Literature: I took a class on his Logic.
(the phenomenology / logic divide)
Me: Did you know Hegel’s writing desk is in the main Humboldt university building?
Literature: You mean the building next to a sculpture of his bust?
Me: What sculpture?
(the desk / sculpture divide)
Concerning French Philosophy/ Literature
Literature: I started a Lacan reading group.
Me: I only vaguely remember Foucault. I’m into French literature.
(his literature was German and philosophy French, my literature was French and philosophy German)
Concerning Art
Literature: What do you like doing?
Me: I like going to galleries for contemporary art.
Literature: Did you see the Mondrian exhibit at the Martin-Gropius-Bau?
Me (thinking): shit I missed a Mondrian exhibition… there is a gap is my information flow
Literature: I guess Mondrian is modern and not contemporary
Me (still thinking): I can’t believe I missed that
(the modern/ contemporary art divide)
Concerning German Romanticism
Me: I like German Romanticism.
Literature: Brentano?
Me: Brentano is the one Romantic I haven’t read.
Literature: His style is similar to Tristram Shandy…
Me (thinking): I tried to read that once and couldn’t stand the writing…
(the Brentano/ all the other Romantics divide)
Concerning the Application of Trust
Literature: I translated an academic paper on “trust” today.
Me: I used to sell “trust” to e-commerce retailers.
Literature: How do you sell trust?
Me: with a feedback management system… customer and product reviews
(the translation/ selling of trust divide)
Concerning Quentin Tarantino
Literature: The only Tarantino film I thought was good was Reservoir Dogs.
Me (thinking): That is the one film I am not interested in seeing I haven’t seen that one.
(the Reservoir Dogs/ all other Tarantino films divide)
Concerning Politics
Me: Do you know Nate Silver?
Literature: Never heard of him.
Me: All my information on politics comes from Nate Silver.
Lit in the hues of a dandy’s uterus, we have two male service workers regimented like androids. In their dance of maintenance and service, the missing parts of the female body are either man-made or artificial. What is real and in the flesh are the two male bodies. The sculptural piece in the shape of a vaginal opening and the long strands of a ponytail acting as both whip and ornament are present but not relevant.
Beyond the body, this beautifully futuristic piece by Adam Linder and Shahryar Nashatyou further dissects the components of eroticism and labor and then substitutes and categorizes the obvious parts for the underrepresented. Service work is elevated and the face often times dismissed as secondary to the sexual act is now the pornographic visual. At times contortionist in bodily movement, ‘hair care’ hits and brushes against the marble with gentle lovingness. The two choreographic service workers, Adam Linder and Andrew Hardwidge, lithely perform their maintenance labor with hair prosthetics attached to white gloves or leather head straps. As a reinterpretation of Ravel’s Boléro plays during the intermissions, one waits until the dancers come back and the video flashes sexually suggestive close-ups of functionally forgotten parts of the human face such as the tear ducts, earlobes or nostrils.
It was all about intimate spaces this past Berlin Gallery Weekend. Tobias Rehberger shows what it means to have friends Taylor Swift style in “presently” at neugerriemschneider. Each origami artifact represents a “Present for…”(to list a few Ai Weiwei, Andreas Gursky, Olafur Eliasson, Wolfgang Tillmans and Louise Lawler)
I first discovered Alain de Botton’s “Essays in Love” at 22 and still young enough to keep tabs on when writers wrote what. de Botton was 23 so I felt hypothetically, I had a year. (victim of the arrogance of youth) Since then, he has written on every single subject I ever wanted to write about – status, architecture, Proust, travel, work, airports – and now back to love (not to mention his School of Life). In his new novel “The Course of Love,” he provides what has been lacking in the art of love stories, how to understand the transition from passionate love (Romanticism/ Before marriage) to companionate love (Enlightened Romantic Pessimism / Many years after marriage) and the strong role that psychology plays in being able to tolerate each other’s “crazy.” That in the future, the main thing we will want to know about a potential partner is “How crazy are you?”
The only way for couples to perpetually exist in a state of magical enthusiasm is to die at the height of that feeling, this is one of the first things we learn from Romeo and Juliet. de Botton reveals that during the lifespan of a marriage, we all realize we married the wrong person. Instead of finding a soulmate, what we in fact decided on and found was a particular kind of suffering to spend the rest of our lives dealing with. Not until we realize this, can we really enjoy/understand/practice the institution of marriage and be more accepting and kinder to our chosen form of misery.
The biggest culprit in misaligning everyone’s general understanding of love and its discontents lies heavily in the hands of representation in literature, love songs, and the movies. If only we had more movies and books about the separation of sex and love at times, the helpless infant living within us all, and how normal it is to just be bored most of the time, then maybe there would be less failed marriages and more people reaching the heights of companionate love (happening sometime in our golden years). Love starts not with the finding but after the marriage.
You can find a similar message/ problem in Episode 3 of “Ecke Weserstraße” which I most applaud is so much better than the first two episodes. Here we have a group of young, urban, creative, internationals living in the coolest area of Berlin but their lives just don’t live up to the blogs, movies, drugged experiences and pop culture representations of what a cool life should be. Most of the time, they’re just bored, broke, and subliminally conscious that their way of existence is not sustainable (fireworks… no sparklers). If what fucked up Madame Bovary’s understanding of marriage was too many romance novels, in “Ecke Weserstraße” it comes from checking out too many travel blogs of couples documenting their romantic nomad getaways. (The girlfriend was so believable) Real jobs are boring and at times ridiculous so much so you just want to send off a Snapchat letter of resignation or make paper airplanes. As if life couldn’t get any worse, the hottest place to live now is Echo Park (like Berlin from the 90s or more Berlin than Berlin) as conveyed by a German to another German in stilted English.
Ironically, while watching this episode on YouTube as two of the flatmates portrayed a montage of a Berlin summer romance, I realized after all these years living in Berlin I never had a Berlin summer romance… but then I realized no, my life is not a YouTube episode, I will just be waiting in lines for gelato and trying to avoid the sun.
