the dirty dozen {recurring dreams}
01 the kitten will die if someone doesn't do something
02 we have to leave new york city
03 y kant lauren type
04 time is running out in san francisco, but what about a burrito
05 accidental commitment to grad school
06 iceland
07 david bowie and i have the talk
08 this whole apartment must be painted and furnished
09 no traffic on the service road
10 pregnancy
11 swimming as shortcut
12 punching donald trump
Showing posts with label david bowie. Show all posts
Showing posts with label david bowie. Show all posts
12.15.16
BERLIN ENDORSEMENTS {part II}*
interfilm berlin (festival, citywide). we've had the good luck to stumble on several film festivals while on foreign adventures: montreal's festival du nouveau cinéma, the reykjavík international film festival, and, for 2016, berlin's 32nd annual short film festival. we did our damndest to catch the sci-fi program (which was heavy on extraplanetary disasters and draconian population control, as one would expect) and the horror program (held on our final night in town), but cooler heads than mine prevailed; starting a late-night film extravaganza hours before catching a flight to milan and a flight to new york probably wasn't the soundest plan, even if it was the best plan. german audiences don't seem to be as forward as american festival audiences i've known, and the largely questionless q&a sessions after a few of the films were kind of painful (particularly the one where the woman whose empty beer i knocked over as i tried to sneak out to the bathroom turned out to be the writer-director of the short we'd just seen), but the works themselves were marvelous, and the venues (or what i could tell of them from their websites) were gorgeous. we'll be back.
michelberger hotel (hotel, friedrichshain). the michelberger did not let us check in at 7 am, or 8 am, or any of the other hours before 3 pm, which hurt, given that our train from leipzig deposited us at the station just after dawn. that said, we were motivated to burn an hour and a half or so walking along the remains of the berlin wall, which was just across the river, and i was awake for hotel breakfast (which was staggeringly good; here's to you, german hipster breakfast) for the first time in years. my sister and brother-in-law raved about the michelberger after staying there a few years ago as part of a eurotrip for a small-town polish wedding at which people woke up the next day with sausages tucked into their clothes (we need to befriend art-school people who seem like they might get married), and they were right; it was cheap as hell (something like 90 euros a night), the room was large (i feared i'd mangle myself on the ladder up to the spacious sleeping loft, but it wasn't nearly as dangerous as it looked), we were right across the (very wide) street from the warschauer straße s-bahn station (a girl on the train-style commuter with binoculars could have watched me apply ultraprecise german salve to my bowie-tribute tattoo each morning when we threw open the drapes), and we were within walking distance of kreuzberg's greatest hits. they made their own schnapps and canned their own coconut water. they played the big lebowski in the hall at all hours of the day and night (to be fair, half of berlin did that). they let us sneak rosé and a bottle opener upstairs when we were too tired to mingle in the hotel bar. stay at the michelberger, especially if you were thinking of an airbnb instead (most short-term airbnbs in berlin are now super-illegal, thanks to last may's zweckentfremdungsverbot).
monkey bar (bar, tiergarten). can one really say one has been to berlin if one hasn't been to a tiki bar overlooking the zoo? don't answer that. we ventured up to monkey bar to investigate monkey 47, a black-forest-produced gin based on a recipe scribbled down decades and decades ago by a homesick brit who named his hooch after his favorite primate. parts of that story are likely apocryphal, but the cocktail piece in which i mentioned the booze and the bar were very real, so we queued at an elevator bank for like half an hour and were carried into the sky to sip tiki drinks and rub elbows with tiergarten's prettiest (and some tourists). the mango maniac slushy, a seasonal special, was one of the best tropical drinks i've had in the last couple of years. if you can manage to make it to monkey bar's terrace in time to watch the sun set over the elephant enclosure at the zoo, you'll probably feel like a master of the universe.
neues ufer (bar, schöneberg). "do you follow american football at all?" robert, the impossibly young fellow behind the bar at david bowie's old local, asked. "i was asked to go play for the ducks of oregon, or for alabama." (he decided to join the german military instead, and will be leaving the bar in a few months.) if you catch them in repose, the folks at neues ufer don't listen to all that much david bowie; they hear hours and hours of him when tourists come through after visiting his apartment down the block, and his face has been on every wall since his death in january. i believe we listened to michelle branch as we chatted with regulars about donald trump and i shifted on my seat and tried not to harass my new tattoo. i think robert would have gone to oregon rather than to alabama, but it sounds like he ended up in the right place anyway. a stately woman with a perfect rooster wished us well as we folded ourselves back into the rain: "have a nice life!"
*part I is here.
interfilm berlin (festival, citywide). we've had the good luck to stumble on several film festivals while on foreign adventures: montreal's festival du nouveau cinéma, the reykjavík international film festival, and, for 2016, berlin's 32nd annual short film festival. we did our damndest to catch the sci-fi program (which was heavy on extraplanetary disasters and draconian population control, as one would expect) and the horror program (held on our final night in town), but cooler heads than mine prevailed; starting a late-night film extravaganza hours before catching a flight to milan and a flight to new york probably wasn't the soundest plan, even if it was the best plan. german audiences don't seem to be as forward as american festival audiences i've known, and the largely questionless q&a sessions after a few of the films were kind of painful (particularly the one where the woman whose empty beer i knocked over as i tried to sneak out to the bathroom turned out to be the writer-director of the short we'd just seen), but the works themselves were marvelous, and the venues (or what i could tell of them from their websites) were gorgeous. we'll be back.
michelberger hotel (hotel, friedrichshain). the michelberger did not let us check in at 7 am, or 8 am, or any of the other hours before 3 pm, which hurt, given that our train from leipzig deposited us at the station just after dawn. that said, we were motivated to burn an hour and a half or so walking along the remains of the berlin wall, which was just across the river, and i was awake for hotel breakfast (which was staggeringly good; here's to you, german hipster breakfast) for the first time in years. my sister and brother-in-law raved about the michelberger after staying there a few years ago as part of a eurotrip for a small-town polish wedding at which people woke up the next day with sausages tucked into their clothes (we need to befriend art-school people who seem like they might get married), and they were right; it was cheap as hell (something like 90 euros a night), the room was large (i feared i'd mangle myself on the ladder up to the spacious sleeping loft, but it wasn't nearly as dangerous as it looked), we were right across the (very wide) street from the warschauer straße s-bahn station (a girl on the train-style commuter with binoculars could have watched me apply ultraprecise german salve to my bowie-tribute tattoo each morning when we threw open the drapes), and we were within walking distance of kreuzberg's greatest hits. they made their own schnapps and canned their own coconut water. they played the big lebowski in the hall at all hours of the day and night (to be fair, half of berlin did that). they let us sneak rosé and a bottle opener upstairs when we were too tired to mingle in the hotel bar. stay at the michelberger, especially if you were thinking of an airbnb instead (most short-term airbnbs in berlin are now super-illegal, thanks to last may's zweckentfremdungsverbot).
monkey bar (bar, tiergarten). can one really say one has been to berlin if one hasn't been to a tiki bar overlooking the zoo? don't answer that. we ventured up to monkey bar to investigate monkey 47, a black-forest-produced gin based on a recipe scribbled down decades and decades ago by a homesick brit who named his hooch after his favorite primate. parts of that story are likely apocryphal, but the cocktail piece in which i mentioned the booze and the bar were very real, so we queued at an elevator bank for like half an hour and were carried into the sky to sip tiki drinks and rub elbows with tiergarten's prettiest (and some tourists). the mango maniac slushy, a seasonal special, was one of the best tropical drinks i've had in the last couple of years. if you can manage to make it to monkey bar's terrace in time to watch the sun set over the elephant enclosure at the zoo, you'll probably feel like a master of the universe.
neues ufer (bar, schöneberg). "do you follow american football at all?" robert, the impossibly young fellow behind the bar at david bowie's old local, asked. "i was asked to go play for the ducks of oregon, or for alabama." (he decided to join the german military instead, and will be leaving the bar in a few months.) if you catch them in repose, the folks at neues ufer don't listen to all that much david bowie; they hear hours and hours of him when tourists come through after visiting his apartment down the block, and his face has been on every wall since his death in january. i believe we listened to michelle branch as we chatted with regulars about donald trump and i shifted on my seat and tried not to harass my new tattoo. i think robert would have gone to oregon rather than to alabama, but it sounds like he ended up in the right place anyway. a stately woman with a perfect rooster wished us well as we folded ourselves back into the rain: "have a nice life!"
*part I is here.
12.10.16
i wasn't planning on getting a tattoo on our trip abroad this year; i'm running out of space for them, as i prefer to get them along my spine and i don't seem to be getting any taller, and berlin didn't feel exotic enough (ha). i then learned, via one of the david-bowie-in-berlin books i bought a month before we left, that bowie's old building in schöneberg (in which he lived from 1976-1978) boasts not one but two tattoo studios; well, hell. maybe it was time for a GIANT ARTY BARN OWL across the top of my back?
my foreign-tattoo m.o. is pretty complicated: i tend to reach out to the artist or studio i have in mind long before we leave new york, and we become penpals over the course of a few months. i drop by to say hello and chat when we first get into town, a few days before my appointment, and then get whatever lagoon-soaking or intense bathing i'd planned out of the way; then it's tattoo time. this was going to be different, as i hadn't yet settled on a specific design and we were about to leave; the black-metal guys at Studio 1 a) sounded like they weren't interested in any work but their own, which is completely understandable but probably wasn't going to work for me, given time constraints, b) were only in the building by appointment, c) had portfolios with a lot of burning nordic churches in them, which was more than a little intense, and d) seemed like they were into some less-than-egalitarian erotic art featuring ladies? one of Studio 1's artists was in new york the week before we went to berlin and i could have looked him up, but he didn't seem like the guy for me. i didn't even know Studio 2 existed, in turn, until i saw a line on Studio 1's webpage about how people should not go there. its website was pretty generic, but i've learned that plenty of lovely people have a hard time getting their digital shit together (cough). the more i read of bowie's adventures in berlin with iggy pop, brian eno, and tony visconti, the more convinced i became that i needed to embrace their spirit of collaboration and improvisation. some friends of mine got black star tattoos after bowie's death back in january, and the simplicity of that appealed to me. i could fit it below my lowest tattoo, the gothic cross i got in california right after turning 18; it was simple enough to hand over to a stranger on the spot. i decided that we'd stop in at Studio 2 after paying our respects at the apartment, and if i got a good feeling about it, well.
Studio 2 was easy to find, as it was 10 feet away from the candles and silk flowers at bowie's door. a genial french bulldog snarfled up to us, and his person apologized for him from down the hall. sprechen sie englisch? "a bit," he said, and i pulled the rumpled little image out from the bottom of my wallet.
my foreign-tattoo m.o. is pretty complicated: i tend to reach out to the artist or studio i have in mind long before we leave new york, and we become penpals over the course of a few months. i drop by to say hello and chat when we first get into town, a few days before my appointment, and then get whatever lagoon-soaking or intense bathing i'd planned out of the way; then it's tattoo time. this was going to be different, as i hadn't yet settled on a specific design and we were about to leave; the black-metal guys at Studio 1 a) sounded like they weren't interested in any work but their own, which is completely understandable but probably wasn't going to work for me, given time constraints, b) were only in the building by appointment, c) had portfolios with a lot of burning nordic churches in them, which was more than a little intense, and d) seemed like they were into some less-than-egalitarian erotic art featuring ladies? one of Studio 1's artists was in new york the week before we went to berlin and i could have looked him up, but he didn't seem like the guy for me. i didn't even know Studio 2 existed, in turn, until i saw a line on Studio 1's webpage about how people should not go there. its website was pretty generic, but i've learned that plenty of lovely people have a hard time getting their digital shit together (cough). the more i read of bowie's adventures in berlin with iggy pop, brian eno, and tony visconti, the more convinced i became that i needed to embrace their spirit of collaboration and improvisation. some friends of mine got black star tattoos after bowie's death back in january, and the simplicity of that appealed to me. i could fit it below my lowest tattoo, the gothic cross i got in california right after turning 18; it was simple enough to hand over to a stranger on the spot. i decided that we'd stop in at Studio 2 after paying our respects at the apartment, and if i got a good feeling about it, well.
Studio 2 was easy to find, as it was 10 feet away from the candles and silk flowers at bowie's door. a genial french bulldog snarfled up to us, and his person apologized for him from down the hall. sprechen sie englisch? "a bit," he said, and i pulled the rumpled little image out from the bottom of my wallet.
09.17.16
i printed out a september calendar, wrote in each of my deadlines, each of my races (four this month, why?), and felt like a functional human adult; then i managed to convince myself that we were supposed to drive to pittsburgh this weekend instead of next weekend and it all went to hell. actually it's been alright; i got a lot of work done on monday and tuesday because i was panicking about leaving town. the panicking wasn't the best, but i'm getting around to accepting that being a freelancer, for me, at least, means feeling queasy most of the time.
i've decided that the only way to approach the last race of the month, a relay in northern new jersey, is to buy really obscure camping gear; i'm vacillating between a marlboro sleeping bag and a david bowie throw blanket (really, how cold is it going to be in new jersey at the end of the month?). said obscure camping gear will come with me to washington in january when we head down for the inauguration, which seemed like an adventure when we bought train tickets a few months ago and is now contributing to my queasiness. such queasiness! time for my saturday run.
i've decided that the only way to approach the last race of the month, a relay in northern new jersey, is to buy really obscure camping gear; i'm vacillating between a marlboro sleeping bag and a david bowie throw blanket (really, how cold is it going to be in new jersey at the end of the month?). said obscure camping gear will come with me to washington in january when we head down for the inauguration, which seemed like an adventure when we bought train tickets a few months ago and is now contributing to my queasiness. such queasiness! time for my saturday run.
05.15.13
@evencleveland On my way home last night: a mini dachshund in an argyle sweater and rhinestone collar who answered to the name "Diamond."
@kidchamp @evencleveland would bowie be pleased? i like to think so.
@evencleveland Now I have a happy thought for the day: David and Iman, reading, suavely relaxed, surrounded by dachshunds in diamond collars.
@kidchamp @evencleveland would bowie be pleased? i like to think so.
@evencleveland Now I have a happy thought for the day: David and Iman, reading, suavely relaxed, surrounded by dachshunds in diamond collars.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)