[ pulling up the vegetables ]

I was walking my baby dinosaur down the street last night.  All was cool until my baby flew out of my hands only to leap forward to tear into some palm trees.

Amazed, I saw baby d. uproot an entire palm tree.  He moved towards me with a huge bulbous object clenched into his mouth. I spoke aloud “WTF? How are we going to manage this?”

art by babbletrish

Less is more (except when it’s not).
Friedrichshain, Berlin

Renaud Cojo’s staged testament to the beautiful complexity of the Ziggy persona.

Paris, June 2010

Of all the techno-gadgets, mid-century furniture, objects of devotion, torture and surveillance in the Stasi Museum, somehow I fell most in love with the rugs.

Samariterstraße station, Berlin

Congrats to the woman who scored a couple of Oscars last night. While everyone seems to get off on the fact she beat her ex-husband, among others, for Best Director, she made history by being the first woman to win for directing a feature-length film.  Of course all great things, however, as BlondHouswife just  tweeted:

“James Cameron consoled himself last night, by rolling in a huge pile of money. Something his ex-wife’s movie will never see.”

The imagery is more than I can handle here. But it’s funny because it’s probably true on both accounts. Unless the historic rumblings of the awards starts to drown out the Avatar hype machine, The Hurt Locker will still pale in comparison to Avatar’s box office earnings.

With the awards, making history and all the critical acclaim inside the film industry, it’s interesting to see what people aren’t really talking so much about here. That a woman directed and produced an action-based ANTI-WAR FLICK.  Yeah, how about that. Suck it all you testosterone-crazed misogynist pigs out there.

This moment also brings to mind another female director who shared with us the lives of NY’s drag queens rising from poverty-stricken backgrounds to come out and express their brilliant and beautiful selves in extravagant competitions.  Jennie Livingston directed 1990′s Paris is Burning, which was a tour de force for both queer cinema and for art house crowds alike.

While both of these directorial cases clearly demonstrate smart, talented women doing their thing,  they also bring to light how much more has to be done to promote women filmmakers. We shouldn’t have to wait another 2o years for a female director to break through on the indie scene, or another 82 years for mainstream acclaim. Not to mention what’s going on in the valley or what is not happening for the most basic of womens rights in places like Afghanistan.  Thankfully, the days of suburban girls burning bras are long gone.  However, there’s much more left to do.

Straight out of  Sears’ playbook, Ikea now offers prefab housing. They’ve already crafted Ikea communities in Sweden, Denmark, Germany, Norway and the UK.

In response to the Art History Poster

It’s epic in scope, and deeply textured in narrative. We’ve been watching Fassbinder’s masterpiece, Berlin Alexanderplatz, for the last ten days. The series was co-produced for German and Italian public television in 1980, and is comprised of thirteen one hour episodes, plus an epilogue. We’re currently at episode eleven. I’m sure we’ll finish watching the series this evening.

Berlin Alexanderplatz recounts the struggles of Franz Biberkopf, in Weimar Germany. I could go on endlessly about the film quality itself, the cinematography, acting, set design, script etc. No doubt there have been countless film student theses on this, so I won’t even go there. Suffice it to say, it’s like nothing else you’ve ever experienced cinematically. Especially in front of your own television, which it was produced for.

What strikes me instantly about Berlin Alexanderplatz is how contemporary it still feels, thirty years after it’s debut on German television. Yet, if one reads about the series, almost all of the series’ descriptions point to something akin to it being a story of “a common man in uncommon times”. Maybe so.

The problem is that what was so “uncommon” about the Weimar period seems all too common today. With a resurgent right reasserting itself in both Europe and the US, rampant unemployment and a hedonism that can only be a reflection of general desperation, is the social situation Fassbinder describes so different from that of today?

Last night, episode nine (or ten, I can’t remember) boasted some of the most intensely brilliant scenes I can recall ever seeing. Franz is with his girlfriend, Mieze. They are at the house of their dear friends, Eva and Herbert. Franz recollects a Communist Party meeting he attended earlier in the day, and spends the next five minutes delivering a monologue distilling the the finer points of historical materialism.

As Franz is discussing the enslavement of the work class, etc, you can hear a voice in the background growing louder and more intense. It comes and goes, ebbs and flows in direct contrast to Franz’s monologue. Only sometimes does one catch the exact remarks, in German, spewing forth from the radio. As Franz nears the end of his speech, you realize that the person in the background is Adolf Hitler.

Footnote: I found this sweet post on the design of the Berlin Alexanderplatz Criterion box set. Includes all the concepts explored before arriving at the final solution.