After some massive traffic jams on the autobahn, we finally arrived at an art opening at a gallery owned by Tobias, who also represents our artist friend Thomas. Sam joined us there with a friend, and we enjoyed talking to Waylon, a young man originally from Goa who was serving beer. We went down the street afterwards and had pizza, with Sam, Thomas, Bibo, and a friend of theirs from Mexico City.
Saturday, September 24
On Saturday we returned the rental car to the Berlin Zoo place, and walked to C/O Berlin, a photography museum that was featuring “Queerness in Photography”. Downstairs there were two exhibits of historical photographs of crossdressers, a collection by film director Sebastian Lifshitz, and one by artist Cindy Sherman. Upstairs there was an exhibit based on the Virginia Woolf novel “Orlando”, curated by Tilda Swinton, who had starred in the 1992 film. She found some young photographers to make some works based on the novel. The museum bookstore was more eclectic. Going to bookstores in foreign lands makes you aware of the level of censorship that exists in America.
We met Lindsay and Kevin at Jemenitisches Restaurant, a Yemeni place with a couple outlets in Berlin. It’s on Eater’s list of Essential Berlin Restaurants. It’s not fancy, but there were many items which you don’t see elsewhere, especially slow-cooked meats. They said it was always really busy, but we went around 4pm and there were plenty of tables. We were served reasonably quickly, so we had a lot of time to catch the train to the airport, so we could get to Dublin, from where our plane home will leave.
On Tuesday, all our friends had to work, and so we decided to drive to Kassel to see Documenta fifteen. We had seen the previous event in 2017. We rented a car from the Berlin Zoo area. The drive was reasonably uneventful — the VW Golf was a little too old to have CarPlay, but it had really good adaptive cruise control, and it was a pleasure to drive with it on the Autobahn. The trip made me wish that someone would write an app for a Tesla, using its sensors, that would display how fast the car zipping by you on the left was going — I was often going 140 and passed by cars going well over 200. We arrived at our little airbnb in the suburb of Harleshausen, and walked to a nearby restaurant called “Shan Dong”, which turned out to be really good. Wikipedia says that Shan Dong province is noted for educational and religious institutions. We had dumplings, cumin lamb, and eggplant.
Meanwhile, I’d gotten a sore throat (I was happy to get tea and soup). I hoped it wasn’t Covid.
Wednesday, September 21
I woke up and tested myself, and it was negative, so I felt I wouldn’t be spreading anything to artgoers.
Each edition of Documenta, every five years, has been curated by some artist, but this year it was curated by an Indonesian collective. They decided to involve several other collectives in the planning. So all of the art we saw was produced by these collectives, but also on display everywhere was extensive descriptions of the Process. All of the collectives were from cultures who are unrepresented in traditional art museums — Indonesian, Haitian, Malian, Palestinian, Roma — there basically wasn’t any First World art at all. There was rage at this exclusion:
Regardless of their level of patronage and their cultural background, modern artists face many of the same problems.
Documenta’s documentation advertised a parking lot they’d set up, but Apple and Google Maps were unable to route us to it, other than on bike paths. There were no descriptions in the brochures of how to get into the parking lot. We gave up and parked on the street.
The most memorable venue was a small Catholic church which had been gutted of pews, etc. A Haitian collective had installed several metal sculptures outside and in the main sanctuary area. It is not clear, whether the church had an organ, but a row of organ pipes had been propped up in the balcony along with a sound installation. A scale model of the neighborhood in Port-au-Prince where the artists worked hung upside down from the ceiling.
Many of the venues were east of the Fulda river in the “derelict building” district, in derelict buildings. One large one featured a “wall of puppets” from a Malian collective. You can see why the Indonesian curators were drawn to them.
We walked through the Fredericium, the main art museum in Kassel, where the most memorable work was a monumental painting of the Hungarian Roma origin story. It had been in a children’s center when it was painted, and then stuck away somewhere. They were all happy to get it on display.
There were several cute things in the Documenta Halle.
Andy Warhol knew just what he had started
The cutest was when a young woman walked up to us and asked if we were on a poster for an art show by our friend Thomas. We had been, and we took pictures.
We were able to get a dinner reservation at a German tourist restaurant at the base of the Hercules mountain we’d walked up five years earlier. It was decent.
Thursday, September 22
I woke up and tested myself again, and it was still negative. I felt once again I wouldn’t be spreading anything to artgoers.
We walked around the derelict building district a bit more, and saw more art. The most memorable piece was from a Palestinian collective, a chapter from a graphic novel presented on large panels, featuring photographs of actors and text balloons. Several women were interviewing important people about art made by women, and whether it was “women’s art”, or just “art”. The interviewers were all male actors in drag.
We walked across a couple bridges looking at pieces by the river, and passed a large pickaxe made by Claes Oldenburg for documenta 7 in 1982. We asked a woman selling documenta-branded beer about it, and ended up having a nice conversation with her.
Then, after seeing an augmented-reality exhibit on the way, we walked to Mondi, a Michelin-mentioned tasting-menu restaurant (59 euros). It was a fun dinner with several creative bites, and a sommelier providing thorough descriptions of the wines which all turned out to be white.
Friday, September 23
We left our airbnb and drove up to Braunschweig to meet Jonathan, Dennis’ 13-month-old nephew. We ate at a potato restaurant with Dennis’ folks Klaus and Lisa, and brother Thomas and his wife Daniela.
In Berlin, we stayed with Lindsay and Kevin, who make the most of being in Berlin, taking advantage of as many of the things it has to offer as they can. They’d made reservations for the evening at a synthesizer concert, which filled up Volksbühne, a local concert hall. The main act was Caterina Barbieri, who played all the pieces from her recent album. The smoke machines ran the entire time, and along with many automated lights created quite a 3D atmosphere. Also unpleasant. It was annoying when the lights were directly in your eyes, and smoke is smoke no matter how allegedly nontoxic and allegedly aesthetic it is.
People miss smoke. Smoke has been a marker for bonhomie for the last half a million years, and now we have learned that it’s bad for us and we don’t want to do it any more. It’s always been unpleasant, like alcohol, but taking one for the team is what social animals do, and if wine and smoke can create cohesive hunting and gathering squads, then their use will persist. But now, with eight billion people and technical knowledge stridently oriented toward individual welfare, we must give it up.
Before the show, we walked to Mi Bap, a little Taiwanese place that had a very simple hot pot menu. If you go, ask for a spice level of 1. No spice is bland, and 2 is quite spicy.
Saturday, September 17
In the afternoon, Lindsay and Kevin hosted a barbecue at their house. The barbecuing took place in the reasonably large backyard belonging to the whole apartment house. Many of the neighbors attended, as well as 30-40 of their friends. We were also joined by our friend Sam, who has been in Berlin for several years now. We knew a few of Lindsay’s friends from before as well. It was potluck, and many people brought meat and vegetables to grill. Many bottles of wine were consumed. The guests were pretty much all artists, musicians, or tech people, and it was fun talking to them.
Sunday, September 18
Most of the day was spent recovering from Saturday. We walked around their Neukölln neighborhood, having lunch at a little Israeli place, and touring some gardens that were open.
Lindsay is taken with this artist, whose graffiti has been made product and is available in the usual media (posters, coffee cups, etc.)
In the evening we just ate leftovers.
Monday, September 19
Monday started out with brunch with our friend Philipp and his wife Lexi, who was very pregnant with a boy we will find out about any day now. We met at Benedict, which features many Benedict menu items; I had “Kalimera” which was poached eggs over shrimp and potatoes. Afterwards we had a mission to replace a belt which was disintegrating, so we went towards the Berlin Zoo, shopping in the upscale Kurfürstendamm area. One place we looked was in a mall called “Bikini Berlin”, named for its see-thru middle story. We’d been there in 2019 and had visited an interesting shop. Neither of us remembered the exact shop or its exact attraction, only that we wished we’d gotten something from them. It turned out to be a Danish licorice shop, and so we got a bottle of licorice syrup and a small jar of chocolate covered salt licorice. All the belts we saw were expensive and had metal buckles, until we got to a store whose name was something Outlet. They had a 5-euro belt with a large backpack-style plastic buckle that we struggled but succeeded in threading through the belt loops. We stopped in the Kaiser Wilhelm memorial church, which had been badly damaged in WWII, but where a modern replacement sanctuary and bell tower had been built next to the remains. The decor of the original definitely was worshipping the Kaiser, no surprise to Richard Francis Burton: “The more I study religions the more I am convinced that man never worshipped anything but himself.”
Lindsay and Kevin pointed out a jazz show that happens every Monday night in the building where one of their friends has a studio. And our friends Thomas and Bibo had just returned from a trip to Azerbaijan, where they were involved in a group art show. We met them for Ethiopian food, and then all six of us converged at the jazz show. Omniversal Earkestra is a big band with 13 brass players and bass and drum. They have played together weekly for ten years, so they are very tight and dynamically in control. It was thoroughly enjoyable. The venue was full of art.
The train over the Alps passed orchards in the northern reaches of Italy that were espaliered like grape vines. I expect the robot fruit harvesters will be put to use first there.
Our train came in to Munich at 18:31. There were not a lot of obvious Oktoberfest celebrants around. This seemed like it should be a good thing, until we got on the U-bahn and discovered that a stadium at the other end of the line would soon start a match FC Bayern vs. Barcelona. We got on the train with our luggage and people packed in and packed in and we couldn’t move. And then the train sat there and didn’t go, like it was broken. If you read too much news and history, you start to develop expectations and prejudices concerning the way that soccer fans behave in crowds, to say nothing of the way Germans behave in crowds — let me throw in a quote from J.D. Salinger, no stranger to fear and anomie:
“There’s probably no limit to the extremes of infantile and Zoo-like behavior adults will take to, or revert to, if they’re in a group (which means any number of people in excess of two – and on some occasions two’s a mob, especially if there’s booze around), and if the organised shit-throwing is given the permissive, O.K. general heading of Fun & Games, or if it’s vaguely categorized as Letting Off a Little Steam Once in a While Never Hurt Anybody, Mac….Group enthusiasm, of any kind, either for cheering or lynching, makes me very uneasy…”
He wrote that in a letter to his son, who is now trying to pull together all of Salinger’s post-1965 writings for publication. Has the world passed him by, or could the Glasses be Kardashians?
Most everyone on the U-Bahn was dressed for the football game. And they started singing. And here we were with our stupid backpacks, and foreigners (but at least obviously not Catalunyan).
Eventually the train started again but it seemed a long time.
It hadn’t been easy to find a place to stay in Munich, because Oktoberfest was to begin on the next Saturday. Dennis had sensed our difficulty and offered us his living room for two nights, which is why he always gets five stars. They have a slightly too clever foldout couch (all foldout couches are slightly too clever) and we slept in the living room at great inconvenience to Dennis and Paulina and Lukas. The couch was quite comfortable.
We went with Dennis to his local Afghan restaurant for takeout dinner. It’s good to have a local Afghan restaurant.
Wednesday, September 14
The major destination of the day was to visit the Alte Pinakothek, where the major activity planned was to Ritually View the wallpaper in the movie “The Bitter Tears of Petra Van Kant”. The image, Nicolas Poussin’s painting “Midas and Bacchus”, is considerably larger in the movie than it is in real life. The painting is just a meter by a meter and a half. This is what happens when you visit heroes. Dennis never disappoints, though. We went to an Italian restaurant near his house that night. I never get tired of Italian food. Nobody does.
Thursday, September 15
We went for breakfast at Occam Deli. We have been there on previous trips to Munich. I haven’t been able to figure out the joke. It’s not like they favor sandwiches with the fewest possible ingredients, or refrain from needlessly multiplying condiments. Another friend joined us, whose birthday it was.
Dave left Occam’s to go pick up a rental car, in which we departed to drive to Leipzig. Leipzig is the home of our friend Adam and his family, and also Leipziger Lerche, a kind of hot cross bun that used to be made of Larks but they ran out of larks in the 19th century and switched to jam and marzipan. Eventually you have to respond to environmental degradation.
We stayed at a third floor guesthouse in Leipzig whose WiFi didn’t work. The horror. We had dinner at a Nepalese place with our friends. The lady at the restaurant was very nice and the food was good.
Friday, September 16
In the morning, we met our friends again (without their kids) for Leipziger Lerche. The restaurant had a lot of posters and free advertising post cards but for their own advertising post cards, they charged a euro. Ae we all chumps for paying other people for the opportunity to advertise their product?
Posters
On the way to Berlin, we stopped at a roadside World Heritage Site I had never heard of. It was a tiny castle, a miniature version of Sans Souci, built for one of the wives or cousins or mistresses. Apparently there are a bunch of them scattered around Dessau, and little parks, too, and a whole other World Heritage site that we didn’t even have time to go to, dedicated to Bauhaus, which was indirectly responsible for more ugly imitation buildings in the twentieth century than the white supremacist William Levitt.
It was also starting to get cold, and we took the opportunity to go to the Mall and buy a hoodie, since we hadn’t brought much in the way of warm clothes on the trip.
We drove the rest of the way to Berlin, arriving around rush hour.
