das ist der hammer

hello there, woefully neglected blog!

betwixt all the travelling, plus the lack of computer, this blog now has some serious commitment issues. 

but it's ok. i'm back now, all is well -- nay, better than 'well', it's been a fantastic month all around, from germany to greece to london and back home to chicago for a wee summer stretch. i'll post about greece in the coming days, but here are some more photos from berlin.

{this post coming to you via my SHINY SEXY PIECE O' MACBOOK, purchased this morning on michigan avenue, where a line was still forming around the block for iphones, which came out FOUR DAYS AGO OMG.}

posing on my fantasy vehicle, with juan & paula.

the excellent club Watergate, set right on the river, whose bay windows look over a gorgeous old bridge and all the street and building lights reflecting off of the dark water. Around 3.30am, black shades automatically descended over the windows and we wondered why until we took a dancing breather on the terrace and realized, ah, the next day was dawning. we shuffled back inside to dance to some seriously excellent electro-house DJs til 7, hiding from the onslaught of daylight under the colorful LED lights above the dance floor (pictured above).

that guy behind me: "ME, ENGLISH NO VERY GOOD. YOU, DRINK, ME?" 

Outside club Zapata, a bar that turned into a dance party in the late hours. Like many clubs in Berlin, it's housed inside of an artists squatter area with an outdoor sandy beach play-land in its backyard. That was one of my favorite aspects of Berlin -- around every corner was a hidden surprise, a sandy riverside beach bar disco just behind the Berlin Wall, a wee hours playground set just apart from a busy restaurant district. We just had to listen for music and follow the sound to the party, wherever we happened to be in the city. Fantastic.

The Holocaust Tower at the Jewish Museum. You pull a heavy door to enter an incredibly claustrophobic, cement-floored "room" whose stone walls reach upwards and inwards to a tiny, insurmountable sliver of sunlight. There is a grey ladder whose bottom rungs are unreachable, adding to the sense of hopelessness. It's very quiet, and every word echoes powerfully. 

The museum is full of artifacts from the aborted lives of those who were killed in the Holocaust. Here a typewriter, there a silver menorah, chinaware, clothing, letters written from concentration camps. It is eerie and very sad, these items silently waiting behind glass, relics from lives unfinished, with placards explaining their origins like bronze bracelets dug up from ancient civilizations, only they're from not even 70 years ago.

Contemporary Israeli artist Menashe Kadishman created this piece, entitled Fallen Leaves. 10,000 open faces are coarsely cut from iron, which you are supposed to walk over. It is a surprisingly horrible, gut-wrenching feeling, walking over these metal faces, and it took me several minutes to gather up the courage to do so, but finally decided to because I wanted to do justice to the piece by engaging in the full experience the artist intended. The faces are unsteady, and therefore it is a precarious and difficult walk, slowed by the discomfort of walking on such gruesome visages and the shaking of the metal faces, all clinking against each other like so many tinny pleas.

Homosexual Memorial, a several-minute video looped and housed inside a metal structure which depicts several minutes of two men slowly removing each other's clothes and kissing. I like the reflective juxtaposition of the old bloke peering in.