I’m not afraid of sleep.

February 19, 2008 at 10:46 pm · Filed under Cultcha, Germany, links, Music, pictures for art's sake, writingwriting! and tagged: blogs

Mr. Stephen Frost invited me to join his dream blog, Fearless Nights and now I can’t wait to get to sleep so I’ll have something to write about. Thrilling dreams for thrilling stories. Will my unconscious get performance anxiety and bring me only dreams as bland as a beige pantsuit?

I signed up for a darkroom photography class at my Volkshochschule, for the language practice as much as for the chance to give my old Canon the sort of workout it deserves. It’s elderly, but certainly not ready to be put to pasture. This week, to get us comfortable with the darkroom equipment, the instructor had us play with photo paper. We got to select objects from a series of trays, and arrange them to make interesting designs in black and white. I have glowing donkeys marking along the shadow of a piece of film, a gnome, framed with sand and feathers, a collection of keys surrounding a watch with a cupid instead of time on its face, and larger keys, framing a vine-draped walkway. I tried to make Mr. Dunkel a Volksbuhne logo out of a noodle, but I accidentally spilled light on the paper, and it came out grey, grey, grey.

It was exciting, and even somewhat liberating, to work where the photographic image, printed from a negative, was only a small part of the final image, if present at all. That I slipped enlargements from the scraps of film that were part of our repertoire of objects might even be called cheating; we haven’t learned enlarging yet, and I have yet to admit to any previous experience. But I couldn’t resist the chance to combine images with the impressions of objects. It was tremendous fun.

Rock AG is a fantastic name for a band; it’s like calling your band “After-school Rock Club”.

Jens Lekman, the love of my life, was in Berlin this weekend to play a show at Lido in Kreuzberg. On his albums, Jens has a lovely voice, but live, it’s tremendous. The audience was happy and danced along to his songs, but went absolutely wild when he whistled the theme to Unser Sandmännchen (who wouldn’t?). Berlin cheered and stomped him back onstage for encore after encore, until he finally told us that if he sang even one more song, he would fall asleep right there at the keyboard in the middle of the song and ruin it for everyone, but was anyone going out dancing later? Would we go out dancing with him? I hope some of the audience took him up on it.

The chandelier at Lido

The most beautiful man in pop music, during one of his many encores.

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