studio and observations

I have decided that Berlin is like LA with public transportation. it is huge. only here there are tons of bicyclists, I think because said public transport is tres expensive.

down the street from the studios, every morning, some people set up a table and chairs with a different checked tablecloth everyday and a vase of different huge blowsy peonies everyday and silverware, sugar bowl, ashtray. they sit there all day. in the morning they drink coffee and sometime around lunch they switch to beer and liquor and then every night they move the whole lot back inside. it reminds me of China and how people lived on the streets in the summertime because it was cooler, even slept on the sidewalks lined up on rows of mattresses. you'd see them if you were up early enough in the morning.

back to Berlin: I continue to be struck by how overgrown all public spaces are, it really lends a strange post-apocalyptic air to everything. here in east Berlin there is graffiti running down the streets on every kind of building---for the most part staying right about person height, so it's like a street-level color babble channel that you walk through.

yesterday crossing the street we saw a man who had made himself a "cart" by duct-taping a cane to a sawed-off half skateboard. that's right: a cane + a half-skateboard = a cart. it was quite beautiful.


2 full studio days and then tomorrow we are off to Prague for the weekend sans computer. today I bought a book of folk and fairy tales in German I am going to work on translating them on the train. I entered the used bookstore and said "ich suche buchen von franz kafka" I was very proud it seemed appropriate to translate Kafka on the way to Prague but the result instead was that there were no Kafka books there and the shopkeeper prattled away at me in German the whole time. I tried to get by with some (what I thought were) well-timed aahss and OKs and mm-hmms. hence the fairy tales. of course the tales could help with my oracular meaning machines. it reminds me that Tom and I are very glad to have watched those 10 hours of Berlin Alexanderplatz because we hear people say "Nie" ALL the time