You don't send me anymore
Since my roomate's been gone traveling in Israel I've basically had my apartment to myself. Being alone definitely has its perks (walking around naked/blasting music from the living room/watching endless DVDs in her room that doubles as the living room) but I've gotten so lonely sometimes that I've taken to talking to the furniture. I've just been going a little whacko perhaps. Also I think I'm losing a lot of steam and Begeisterung for being in Berlin. No, I still like it here a lot, but this past week I've had such annoying brushes with the notoriously evil German beauracracy that I've had more than my fair share of "I hate Berlin" days. For one, my student visa is not yet ready despite three weeks of just waiting, which means if I want to go to Spain in June I have to haul ass at 6 in the morning tomorrow to go to the main office and retrieve my passport from a pile somewhere on a bitter, bored clerk's desk. And I can't get my 110 euros of "greeting money" from the city of Berlin for moving to Berlin and being a student (yay socialism!) unless I go back to the city hall and wait in line and get a stamp, even though I already have a stamp that is for the exact same purpose, but on another piece of paper. GAH!!!Enough bitching. Wait, actually I lied. I need to bitch about one more thing: classes here. Nothing to write home about. Quite honestly, I would actually feel bad for asking for credit for them. For one, not only do they meet only once a week for "two hours" (actually one and a half), half an hour of that time or more is taken up by whichever student is giving a presentation (Referat) on a topic that day. The professor doesn't actually do any teaching per se, other than sporadic comments in reaction the student's presentation. And if no one signed up for a presentation topic, we just don't talk about it. For one of my classes (Art and Play, avant gardism and the theory of play in 20th-21st century art) our professor did not give us a syllabus, but rather narrated the syllabus to us on the first day of class. And no one wanted to do the Referat on Dada because it was the first actual class and too early in the semester. I asked her about the readings and the "reader" is a bound binder of some photocopied texts that aren't required ("you can read them if you want", she said) and is in the library, which is only open from 10 to 5 Mondays to Thursdays and 10 to 4 on Fridays. Weekends?! Fugeddaboutit. University libraries are never open on weekends because hey, librarians have social rights too--rights to their 38 hr work week. (boo socialism!)
Last Fri night was pretty crazy: we celebrated Dan's 21st birthday with food, wine and dancing at his place, then headed to Sage Club where my Tandem-language partner Luiza somehow convinced me to take a dip in the reflection pool there. It seemed like a brilliant idea at the time. But oh fuck was it cold. After attempting to "dance" off the water I hauled my wet ass home and then took a hot shower to make sure I wouldn't get a cold. Guess Germans don't believe in heating their reflection pools.
Luiza's this cute Polish girl who's striking it out on her own in Berlin to study translation (she wants to be a simultaneous translator and is learning 5 languages), she's in her second semester and is living in an apartment in Neukölln, known as the roughest part of town and has the highest crime rate in all Berlin (in all Germany, perhaps). To make money she works at a betting office around the corner from her place, which is where she met Siddik, her big Turkish boyfriend. It's quite a sight seeing blonde buxom Luiza with her swarthy Turkish man, but they've been together for two years already and just took a trip to Egypt together. So that's sweet.
I watched Veronika Voss a couple of days ago, it's the 3rd and last installment of Fassbinder's BRD trilogy. I remember seeing Maria Braun at MoMA a year ago and was totally blown away by the ending, literally--no pun intended, for those who've seen it. Fassbinder chose to film it in black and white in a hyper-stylized mode that cites American crime noir movies of the 50s as well as the archetypal washed-up-eccentric-old movie star story, Sunset Boulevard. This fits the conceit of the film perfectly because Veronika Voss tries to convince others around her that she has contracts lined up with MGM, 20th C Fox and the other big American film production companies of that age. Ominous reminders of the critique of Hollywoodization (or Americanization of film/society/culture) come in the form of creepy country music tunes piping in at bizarre moments throughout the film. All in all, the film is a very apt example of good narrative cinema that effectively embodies the ideals of the New German Cinema...I say narrative because Prof. Levin has us watching weird shit like Straub and Huillet's documentary-like, boring as hell Chronik der Anna Magdalena Bach.
Just came back from Belle & Sebastian at Columbiahalle. They were so hilarious and endearing and tons of fun on stage. Some chick had the balls to shout her name "Alice!" to Stuart and he started spinning some psuedo-yarn about Alice while Stevie played Jonathan David, then Alice was invited to go up on stage and she danced with her plastic pfand beer cups. Amazing. A really short American hippiesh chick behind us was pontificating loudly about her existence in Germany: "I mean, it's so empty and meaningless anyway--I don't really have a purpose here unless it's being American for a living, for my German students." Is that so? I wonder what motivates someone just to pick up their lives and pack up and spin a globe or stand blindfolded in front of a map and stick their finger at somewhere on the globe and say "hm, I think I'll just go and teach English in, oh, Berlin for a couple of years." Would I ever be brave, reckless or spontaneous enough to do something like that? Maybe it's because I've been having doubts about wanting to come back here for a whole year to do research for art history after graduation. Berlin's a great town for it, no doubt, but how far will that really take me in terms of where I want to be in life?I FINALLY rented Match Point and watched it last night. I thought it wasn't that spectacular and although the best part (the last third) was good, it certainly is not "the best American film this year." An American film with English pretentions certainly does not qualify as such. Some of the lines of dialogue were just laughable. Yet I did like the subtle hints of upper class philistinism in the Andrew Lloyd Webber reference as well as the disgusting art work that Chloe handles and puts on the walls. I would like to know, however, which aria keeps getting played throughout the entire movie (espesh when he goes to the kitchen and sees **SPOILER ALERT** the ghosts of Nola and Mrs. Isby). What is its significance, pray someone with a good opera background please enlighten me.
Alright, off to brave German bureaucracy in a few hours. That's probably one aspect of the DDR that lives strong and is encouraged to persist--hm, how to inculcate Ausländers' lives with much, much more red tape than necessary? After all, I'm here technically illegally anyway because I'm already enrolled and going to classes at the uni even though I don't have a student visa. Was auch immer. I think this country is pissing me off because it's been pissing with rain for the past week. I bought tickets to go to sunny Spain in late June and I am so, so, so looking forward to that.
posted by joyce @ 4:01 PM
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