Neighborhood Ramblings

Berlin and fashion are mentioned in the same sentence about as often as Milan and Mettwurst, but over the past weekend, Berlin actually played host to something called Fashion Week, which played out in my 'hood as something called Projekt Galerie, in which a large number of the (be nice!) second- and third-tier galleries in the area pushed the art to the side and hauled in rack after rack of clothing from designers who presumably rented the space from them. Given the quality of the art in most of these galleries, this was probably the first time they'd made any money in a great long while, and given the taste of some of the designers, hell, maybe they bought some of the art on display, who knows?

Entry was by invitation only, and for some reason, the world of fashion doesn't consider me a player, so I didn't look in, but one odd thing I noted from what I could see through the windows was that all the clothes seemed to be black, with the occasional bit of white. Whether this is the result of the informal local ban on non-black clothing, some sort of scheme to make it easier to see the lines of the garments, or what I can't say, but I did find it appropriate that the poster for the event, which was plastered on just about every flat surface around here, features (as you can see on the website) an androgynous head, blindfolded by a tightly-wrapped cloth. Was s/he being protected from the sight of the clothes, or of the art, I wonder.

At any rate, the fashionistas, who'd been rushing around clutching street maps and notebooks and wearing worried expressions, all vanished on Sunday, and I'd like to thank them for taking down all the posters, too; they were a unique form of pollution, and pretty annoying. I'm sure some money was thrown around; I saw some of these folks dining at local places, and the former copy-shop run by hostile Ossis on my block was transformed into a showroom for some designer whose sign is still in the window.

Ah, well, at least we didn't have the Love Parade this year...

* * *

It looks like street art is really in the forefront of people's minds these days. A few weeks ago, I was showing a visitor from Texas around, and noted that one of those funny alien dolls had appeared overnight on a wall by my place. "Gotta shoot that," I said, and made a note to do it. Two days later, here's all that remained:



Below, the component parts of the doll, which had horns or ears, and a tongue sticking out -- clearly the best of all of this person's work I've yet seen -- were strewn all over the vacant lot, torn apart violently. Just why anyone would want to do this is beyond me, but then, I tend to respect other people's work in the hopes that they'll respect mine. I also remember Berliners' penchant for the "if I can't make art, I sure as hell can destroy it" meme, back when Keith Haring did a section of the Wall and within two hours it had had an orange line drawn across it (as every piece documenting it that I've seen has shown).

However, it wasn't as if the lot was devoid of art, because this had appeared:



Given the amount of unexploded ordnance that keeps popping up here (anyone remember some years back when a bulldozer hitting a buried bomb took out the better part of a block in Friedrichshain and nobody but the bulldozer driver -- who was vaporized -- was hurt because they were all at work?)(Too bad that was before all the hipsters moved there, eh?) that's a pretty grim piece of art.

But it's not like the doll-maker's been silent; s/he's just learned to position the dolls so they're harder to mess with, and a couple of days ago, this showed up in a location I won't disclose (but I'm sure many can figure out):



Not a great picture, but not all that easy to shoot, given the altitude and the intricacy of the face. Anybody know of any of these outside Mitte? I think I've tracked down all the ones here at one time or another.

And this post was going to include a photo of another amusing piece of street art which appeared a couple of days ago, showing Rambo as a Renaissance Madonna, but the one nearest me has vanished. The one at KW may still be up, though. It was also going to have a demented tiny doll someone stuck to the face of Hello Kitty on the sign on the shop on Rosenthaler Str., but it, too, was gone. Gotta move fast both to put this stuff up and to document it, I guess, and the cold rain last week just made me too lazy.

Just Another Day In Berlin

I was awakened around 8 am yesterday by a call from a friend in Prague, announcing that a friend of his, from Texas originally, would be coming to Berlin later in the day. After the call was over, I went back to sleep. I had a lot of work to do, and wanted to be fresh.

By the time I had had my coffee and was checking e-mails, the friend-of-a-friend had written me, and we went back and forth until we had a meeting set up later in the evening in Friedrichshain, where he was staying. Then it was time to get to work: totally rewriting a sample page of a brochure for a school here so it wouldn't be so stuffy and yet would appeal to the right kind of students.

This, it developed, took a couple of hours, but I figured if the school green-lighted the project I'd have made a significant score. And I'd find out: the woman in charge was leaving for vacation at the end of the day. So after I'd whipped it into shape and e-mailed it to her, I realized I'd be stupid to sit around the house waiting to hear from her, so I strapped on the trusty Nikon and went in search of the Acid Icon artist's other work.

It was just past Rosenthaler Platz, on the south side of Torstr. but proved maddeningly difficult to photograph, as you can see:



This gives a hint of the colors, especially in the face, but it obscures the majority of the piece.



This, on the other hand, gives an idea of the scale of the piece. The only proper way to photograph this would be from inside the industrial courtyard, unfortunately. Still, there are a couple of clues here. First, it's copyright by Super Blast, which explains the SB on the other icon's field. Second, the idiosyncratic spelling of "Maschine" makes it pretty certain the artist is German. And the mysterious inscription "Thanks to Play Station" doesn't, I hope, mean that Super Blast was part of that lame promotion of a few weeks back. If so, there's nothing overt in either image that indicates it.

I grabbed another couple of shots as I headed back home -- the defaced Ronald McDonald, which I added on my post about the McDonald's closing a couple of weeks ago, and a shot for bowleserised's all-things-pony blog, The Ponyhof. She and I then spent an amusing couple of hours trying to figure out how to download the goddam photos from Gmail.

Finally, since it was getting towards 5 and I knew just how fast Germans depart the office on Friday, I called the school, only to discover that I'd been in competition with some other writers and the school had gone for one who had a degree. Because naturally, making your living by writing for over 40 years doesn't mean that you know a thing about language. I wasn't even particularly surprised, since I know how much store Germans -- and, I suspect, Europeans in general -- put in such things. Hell, I'd have graduated from college if I'd understood the weird experimental educational project they'd put me in. Or not, I don't know. (It doesn't matter now: the damn place is closing).

So the next order of business was to eat some dinner and head off to the bar to meet this guy, which I did. The new tram line by my house makes it easy to get to the hip! edgy! district of Friedrichshain, where every second person is from America and nobody's much over 30. Trouble is, the new tram line, like all the tram lines in my neighborhood, are closed for the next couple of weeks for track work. Thus, I was wedged into a bus that was loaded well beyond its legal limit with drunken teenagers and ferried most of the way across town, where we were dumped to meet the part of the tramline that was running. Then I got there and there was a sign on the bar that there was a private party going on.

This turned out to be because apparently the place is officially not open for business, so I won't identify it further, but at any rate the Texan finally made his appearance and we talked for a while until the trust-fund hipster vibe got to me and I realized that I'd be repeating the same arduous journey back home, so I said good-bye and caught the tram.

Boy, did I feel smart: by the time the (mostly empty) bus pulled up at the terminus at Nordbahnhof, I could see lightning flashing in the sky, and by the time I was half-way down my block, tiny raindrops were intermittently hitting my skin. I opened a nightcap beer, sat and read with the windows open as gentle rain started to fall, and then went to bed.

Now, I don't know about you, but thunderstorms, for me, are like the best sleeping-pills ever invented. I think it's the rapid drop in air pressure that does it, and I was asleep in no time.

The beer, however, wasn't, so after lying there listening to a really bad storm pounding down, I got up to recycle it. Although all the lights were out, I could see that the entire bathroom floor was slick with water. Worse, it was copiously studded with dark lumps. Yes, folks, the sewer had backed up, the toilet had overflowed, and my bathroom was covered with the Waste of Others.

German mop technology, I'm sorry to say, isn't very good. All I have is a so-called Wischmop, a primitive thing with semi-absorbent cloth shreds which need to be wrung out every couple of seconds. Over the next 90 minutes, until after 3 am, I was angrily swabbing, pushing the, um, souvenirs, against the wall, and praying not to get cholera, typhoid, hepatitis A, or some other dread disease. When things were somewhat under control, I took a long, hot shower and collapsed back in bed, where I remained until 10:30.

Why the city of Berlin's sewers are so bad, I can't say, although you've got to admit that a city so broke that it's begging other police departments for their cast-off uniforms probably can't maintain them. This kind of thing has happened before, but it's never escaped the toilet before, and I was genuinely glad upon rising to note that there wasn't much of a smell. I spent my early afternoon swabbing the bathroom down with Mr. Clean (Mr. Proper over here) and a healthy dose of Clorox (DanKlorix), and, while it dried, went off to buy some coffee.

Some time ago, I lamented the demise of the Malongo Coffee boutique at Galleries Lafayette here, where you could buy superb whole-bean coffee cheaper than at Starbucks or Einstein or Balzac or any of the other similar "quality" coffee joints. Well, in the past few weeks, they've returned as a presence at the bakery counter there. The prices have risen so that it's no longer €4 for 250g, but more like €5, so they're on par with the others (except Starbucks, which is €6), but I can once again make my famous blend and breakfasts here at the house are far more enjoyable.

Walking home, I made sure to avoid Friedrichstr., which has apparently been entered in an international competition for auto and pedestrian inaccessibility, and instead made my way over to Museum Island. At Bebelplatz, there was a book fair going on, and if I'd stayed til 4, I could have met Rolf Hochhuth and punched the old man out for awakening an interest in Germany in the teenaged me, but instead I wanted to get home. Walking up Tucholskystr. I saw yet another horror: a Hollywood Boulevard-style star, with a Vanity Fair logo, for Damien Hirst sunk in the sidewalk outside a gallery. Yet another there-goes-the-neighborhood moment -- and Brangelina have yet to move in, as far as I know.

I was contemplating the messages the past 24 hours had brought when the doorbell rang. A young woman in a Deutsche Post uniform handed me a large, soft package of the sort I never get. It was postmarked Montpellier. In it was a huge towel, with Languedoc.com embroidered on one corner. I was puzzled until I realized I'd won it weeks ago in this contest, which I play when I'm bored in hopes of winning. (Yeah, I know the page doesn't work all that well and most of the "clue" links don't work: it's French, for heaven's sake!)

And it occurred to me: the students are leaving Montpellier right now. The apartments will be available all summer. Once again it's time to strike.

Now to raise the €12,500 I need to do it with.

The Writing On The Wall

So why do you suppose Berlin has so much graffiti? Does it contain large gangs of disaffected black or Latino youth? That's one demographic from which graffiti springs in the States, and although I do think there are some Turkish-German posses behind it, that's only a part of the answer.

And why do you suppose so much of Berlin's "graffiti" actually falls under the rubric of "street art?" Sure, there's a large contingent of international artists who work in this fashion, and even the suddenly oh-so-fashionable Banksy has his rats around my neighborhood, but that, too, is only part of the answer.

And I'd say that another part of the answer that's being ignored is simply this: because Berlin's official public art sucks. Really: I've never been in a place with so much bad outdoor sculpture, eye-straining murals, and, of course, all those damn bears.

So I want to spend just a minute here examining three works of art. The first is public:



This sucker sat under a tarp for I don't know how long before being unveiled at the Hauptbahnhof a few weeks ago. It should have stayed there. There's a plaque on the side, which explains that it's a memorial to the Lehrter Stadtbahnhof which used to stand where the Hauptbahnhof now does, and was created by a Prof. somebody or other using stainless steel and "high-tech elements" to symbolize, ummm, this and that. The horse has a clock-like face set in its side with bad mask-like faces which revolve, so I guess having an electric motor is high-tech. Underneath, in the base, are various gears the "artist" has modified with more faces, as well as bits of the brickwork from the old Lehrter Stadtbahnhof, although whether they're original brick from the old building or part of the multi-million-Euro reconstruction which was torn down a couple of years after it was finished is hard to tell. The whole thing, towering over an outdoor eating area, is of such amazing ugliness that it's breathtaking. Hard to figure how the Ponyhof missed something this size.

Now, Exhibit B is a very small piece, currently hard to find because trees obscure it.



Yup. Nike again. What's disarming about these paintings, besides the lack of formal skill, is the feeling one gets when one comes upon them, always in an unexpected place, and almost always cheering you up by the very act of discovery. That's something I think public art should do, and it informs my own reactions to things like, say, the wall rabbits or the long-gone, intricate cutouts by the New York master (mistress?) Swoon.

And then there are the works which proclaim mastery:



I have no idea who's behind this (and another one I've found), but a huge Russian icon-on-acid popping up on the corner of your street (this is at the end of Torstr. at Oranienburger Tor) is something you notice. It's taller than I am, and, needless to say, many times wider. The palette of color is quite basic, but used with the kind of skill any commercial artist would envy. And the subject matter, well, it makes you think.

If I were running this city (and there's a nighmare I've yet to have) I'd discreetly channel funds to the likes of Nike, Swoon, and the Acid Iconist in hopes that they'd continue to beautify what's not a very beautiful cityscape. The more obscure the place beautified, the bigger the fee. Meanwhile, it's encouraging that you don't actually have to walk past the Iron Horse to catch your train, although it's hard not to cast it a glance if, as I do, you take the bus to the Hauptbahnhof (well, when I have luggage I do, anyway). And it's further encouraging that these other artists are out there, continuing to surprise us.

The Hip 'n' Edgy Update

I'm big enough to admit when the New York Times gets it right, and it seems that a couple of weeks ago, that's just what they did with their recent article on Brunnenstr. as the new art district of Berlin. Actually, it's one of several, and the more serious one is down on Zimmerstr. by Checkpoint Charlie where the big guns have huge spaces inside some kind of old warehouse. And I'd say there's a reason that the Times used a picture of a cute beagle instead of any of the art on display, because most of what I saw on a recent walk up the street from Rosenthaler Platz to Bernauer Str. was pretty boring. I'd say that the Brunnenstr. galleries are sort of an arts lab, where talent can be developed.

And it's kind of not fair for Peter Herrmann to have moved his exquisite gallery for African antiquities, currently showing some astonishing Ife bronzes from Nigeria, onto the block. It just makes the other galleries' daubings and scrapings look sick. Definitely worth a visit, though. (Interestingly, I've been in that building before, since it once held the Amiga recording studios, the place where all the DDR's pop acts recorded for the state label. A friend was recording a DDR dissident band called Die Vision there, as the tea-ladies cringed.)

But what's really not fair on Brunnenstr. is the blatant move by Sony to co-opt Berlin street art. A few weeks ago, I mentioned in passing that I'd noticed a lot of broken windows around town recently, one of them in the old Beate Uhse shop at the start of Brunnenstr next to the collection of greasy spoons. A little research shows why this has happened. First, we started seeing brown-paper circles that said www.dont-forget-the-game. com all over the place. When you go there, the first thing you come upon is a blog, which purports to discuss street art. Fine, but click on the photo gallery link and it gets more insidious.

It's an ad. In fact, if you go down to Brunnenstr. to the old Beate Uhse place, there's a bilingual sheet of paper posted there bragging that Sony has gotten Berlin street-artists to cooperate with them in promoting the new PlayStation Portable System (PSP) device. So we have a huge number of stencilled brown-paper women caressing huge PSPs, many of which have been defaced by street-artist 6, and everywhere you look, someone's stuck a PSP-shaped sticker with their custom design on it. Other "artists" have made PSP-shaped art which is on display around the corner on Torstr. in a fake art gallery.

Now I understand the rocks through the windows. And it's depressing to walk around and have to wonder if the latest piece of street art is, in fact, some lame-ass viral marketing campaign. I wonder how they enlisted these guys. Just handed 'em a PSP? Was money involved? I have to say, I saw one of these in action when I flew to America last month, and although the game being played was that moronic car-crash one, the graphics were extremely impressive. I wouldn't mind having one (well, if there were a game that could hold my interest for more than ten minutes, anyway, which there rarely are on these systems), but would I viral-write an article about it for one? I don't think so.

So boo to the supposed "street artists" who let themselves be pimped by Sony, hooray to the ad-busting graffiti artists who are sabotaging the campaign, and, like that car whose ads were everywhere a couple of monts ago -- what was it called again? -- may this fade from view as soon as possible.

Meanwhile, a bit of street art from Brunnenstr. that I really find impressive:

Wallbunnies

The other day, I made a hasty decision to leave the S-Bahn at the Wedding station due to an expired ticket, and figured that, since it was almost a nice day, I'd just walk home. Reaching the former East-West border, I was gratified to see that one of my favorite bits of unknown Berlin was still intact. The last time I was around it, the sidewalk was under construction, and I figured that, being unauthorized, this delightful installation was probably long gone.

But no. And since it's Easter weekend, I went back to shoot it today.



This little fellow is set in the pavement just beyond this familiar marker:



In fact, that's why he's there. He and his brothers and sisters decorate a swath of sidewalk where Chausseestr. meets Liesenstr. -- a pretty obscure corner of town occupied by not much:



This patch of earth was a no-man's land. Now, as all Berliners know, and few outside of town do, there were two Walls. There was the big, thick one with the rounded bits stuck on top, and, some dozens of meters away, there was a thinner one with less fortification. Inbetween was no-man's land, with a path down its middle. This area was filled with all manner of impediments, with the aim of making an escape over the thin wall, across the bare area, and over the big wall to West Berlin, impossible. As we know, it was pretty effective, and it not only sealed Berliners out, but it sealed the no-man's land in.

And that's where the rabbits come in. I remember my first visit to Berlin in 1988, and climbing one of those observation towers at the edge of the Tiergarten, from which I could see the area which had once held Potsdamer Platz, the lonely scrap of a once-grand hotel the sole witness to what had stood there before the War. Inbetween, dust, rocks, scraggly shrubs and weeds, and rabbits. Lots of rabbits.



Given that I saw the Wall as a symbol of terror, as a structure which had added immeasurably to world tensions, as a (literally) concrete representation of the Communist Threat back then, it was unnerving to look over it and see...cute.

"Oh, yeah," said one of the friends who were showing me around, "they got in there somehow, and since there's nothing to threaten them, they, well, they did what rabbits do."

The Berlin Wall. And lots of rabbits. Apparently they were everywhere.

It's not that there were no threats, though. There were trip-wires attached to automatic firing devices. Hip hop hip trip, KABOOM. One less bunny.



And what about the guard dogs who patrolled with the guards? They must not have had a lot of fun: if they caught a skinny East German trying to defect, they had to give him to the humans. And since Germans love dogs -- even the brutal youth who were conscripted for guard duty on this extremely unpopular assignment must have loved dogs, being German -- who could begrudge faithful Odin a rabbit now and again?



Mmmmm! Bunny sushi!

And that's how the rabbits got in the sidewalk. After discovering them for the first time, I mentioned them to a friend who told me that an artist -- an American woman, as I remember -- had installed them in memory of the rabbits who used to live between the Walls, and who, of course, vanished as soon as the Wall was dismantled. When I first saw them, they were a bright coppery color, but as you can see, they've tarnished. There's no signature, no tag, no nothing. Just rabbits. (And just today, this friend said she had no knowledge of the rabbits or the artist, so my information may not be correct, although it's what I remember from four or five years ago). I love that this group exists in a place almost nobody has any reason to visit, on the edge of a garbage-strewn lot, on the corner of a street nobody lives on.

Not that Liesenstr. is without interest: maybe nobody lives there, but there are a bunch of graveyards, one of which has a French chapel, a French war memorial for soldiers who died in defense of the "King of Paris," and the gravestone of Theodor Fontane. I once collected some big pieces of Wall in this graveyard, and still have them in storage in Texas.

And, at the end of Liesenstr., where it stops at Gartenstr., there are two rotten railroad bridges and, recently stripped of its protective coating of vegetation, a rather large remnant of the Wall:



And, at night, rabbits. Maybe.

Crumbs From Behind The Wall

First, I would like to make extra sure that readers of this blog realize that it has nothing to do with the dining-out column by the same name in the wretched Ex-Berliner magazine. It's really not even worth wasting electrons on those people and their amazingly myopic view of Berlin's anglophone communities, but it probably is worth highlighting their astonishing lack of originality.

Those who are interested in my dining-out experiences here should a) wait until I can afford doing it again and then b) check over at Dishola, the Austin-based experiment in restaurant blogging or whatever it is. I'm the official Berlin Editor over there, and I've really got to get some stuff up about Toca Rouge and that ramen place on Neue Schönhauser and a couple of other places I'm thinking would appeal to their readership.

* * *

As promised some time ago, a new work by Nike, this one on Brunnenstr. near the park. Is this an hommage to Gaugin, or...?



* * *

I'm headed to Texas and California via Paris for a couple of weeks, starting in a week, and walked over to Hauptbahnhof recently to buy my ticket to Paris and see if I could get beaned by a piece of falling steel so I could sue Deutsche Bahn and get myself free tickets for life. I did manage to accomplish one of those goals, but it was the one that cost me money, not the one that cost them money. Whatever: I'm leaving this place for a while, and that always feels good unless I'm headed to someplace even worse like Frankfurt/Main.

At any rate, I was amused by a rather ambitious currywurst budde over there which calls itself Berliner-Curry.de. Around the name are listed cities: New York, Dubai, Paris, and so on. Interesting; an entrepreneur actually attempting to franchise Berlin currywurst around the world? That actually could be a winner (although not in Dubai unless the sausages were beef). Naturally, as soon as I got home I hit the URL, and was disappointed, as you no doubt will be. It is emblematically Berlinish, though, to hop on a trend without really understanding it. I remember years ago when a new office supply company opened here in Mitte calling itself Papyrus.com. Naturally, they hadn't registered the URL, and didn't even have a website. But that dot-com stuff was trendy, right?

* * *

One thing you can always say about Berlin is it's a really safe city. Violent crime here is almost unknown in most places, and I've only been burgled once, which was pretty much my landlord's fault. But that's not to say there isn't an undercurrent of anger here which blossoms forth every now and again in unpleasant ways. Currently, the trend seems to be throwing paving stones (easily dug out of the sandy soil here with a pen knife) through windows. Just in the past couple of days, I've seen smashed windows at the hookah bar on Chausseestr. and Tieckstr. (although this is probably just the tip of a larger story involving the huge number of these places and shops to supply them which have sprung up virtually overnight: do people really enjoy sitting around sipping sweet tea and smoking perfumed tobacco if they're not Arabs?), at the huge SAP software company building on the corner of Rosenthaler Str. and Gipsstr. (where you can see the place they dug the stones right in front of the building), and at the former Beate Uhse porn shop on Rosenthaler Str. This last suddenly sprouted some weird art-like installation in the windows almost within minutes of the Uhse folks pulling out, and it was apparently part of some viral marketing scheme by one of the game box companies -- I've lost track of Playstations and Nintendos and so on, but one of them has put up fake street art, opened a fake art gallery on Torstr., and now this. Not only did the windows go, the bricks were still there when I walked past, and someone was filming it.

I have to admit, I understand how street artists can get irked by this sort of thing, because the paper art with the URL was just bad enough that it stood out as fake. It was as annoying as the ad campaign for the new Toyota auto which has -- and I'm not exaggerating here -- taken up about 95% of all advertising space in this city for most of this week, and which will, if there's any justice, disappear tomorrow when the car is actually introduced. The Toyota campaign is yet another one which presupposes the utter stupidity of the consumer, the "Hey dumbass, buy this" attitude that's at the basis of so much German advertising, as opposed to the "You're clever enough to want this" approach the Brits pioneered and the Americans eventually figured out. Trouble is, there aren't enough paving stones to take this one out.

* * *

Yes, I know Berlin is changing, but... One night not very long ago, I was walking down Invalidenstr. and there was cheesy pink light streaming off a ginormous disco ball inside the staid walls of the old DDR post office. A couple of weeks later, I saw that Volkswagen was staging an event there. Now, when I first moved here, that was my local post office, and I've (naturally, because it's what one does at the post office in Germany) stood in lines there many a day, admiring the strange metal sculpture on the polished marble walls. After Deutsche Post went private and the post office moved into a MacPaper outlet (I am not making this up, for those of you who don't live here), the building was empty for a long, long time. But apparently it's been rescued by a club which will give the lie to all those reports of hip! edgy! Berlin! Ladies and gentlemen, I give you Bangaluu! (Warning: cheezy handbag house music when you click the link). Opening a branch of this -- or even an imitation of it -- would soon empty Friedrichshain of hipsters, and the flights back to Williamsburg would be packed. I kept clicking links on that site out of sick fascination. And to think it's right next door to where, many many years ago in the Paleolithic Era, the Technics Club was...

* * *

And finally, the pictures to explain the headline. Some months ago, I posted a picture of some graffiti "artists" spray-painting the wall of the building next to me, which I have to walk past on my way to my front door. I thought they were done -- surely it couldn't get any more hideous than that -- but they kept working at it until there were all sorts of horrible details: a little green head of some depressed-looking guy, a woman-robot...who knows what they thought they were doing? But they signed it and left their phone numbers, in case anyone else wanted their house desecrated.

Then, as I guess artistic collaborations do on occasion, this one went south, and one of the "artists" came back and obliterated his former partner's work and re-did it to his own liking. Not only that, he also went to work on the wall next door to it, so now we have a diptych with the theme of the Berlin Wall. Now, just why someone would want to spray-paint a new Wall, I cannot tell you. In fact, besides the eyesore factor, the depression this horrible set of murals sets off in me every time I have to see it (which is, of course, every day) is hard to even verbalize. What is the point of this? Who on earth would pay someone to do it? And just in case you think I'm making this up, here's the wall closest to the street:



And here's the wall on the rear building:



There's only one solution I can think of. The original Berlin Wall attracted graffiti artists from around the world. Not just the collection who did the stretch known as the East Side Gallery (which was all post-Wall anyway), but Keith Haring over by the Gropius-Bau, and the French guy who did all those heads that wound up in Wings of Desire on that stretch in Kreuzberg. So maybe Nike can come and stick a nude or two up on this "Wall" and make it that much less depressing to look at.

I still liked our wall better when it had a big billboard on it featuring the Puhdys shilling for Berliner Pilsner.