von_geisterhand

This Berlin summer.... so different from that one years back when I had just arrived here. Only my toilet seems to have remained the same with that peculiar smell it sometimes exudes during the hot spells dragging me back to those bygone days.... Obviously, that summer back then really was a summer, much less than this mixed bag of miseries currently upon us. You wanted to storm out and roam the streets, perhaps visit the Love Parade, picknick in the Tiergarten or ogle the tourists walking bare-legged in the Führer's footsteps and the locals having stumbled upon a shrill and odd new sense of national pride.
You can still walk down the "Straße des 17. Juni" but these days it does not make me think of parties of the sweet melancholy of seeing the Goldelse (Neubauten in my ears) but I just hear the distant rumble of the tanks and the re-emerging bickering tones of "Wasn't all bad, you know....". In the world of new nostalgia there is not time for those who stood up for their rights.

Reading William Gibson may do strange things to my mind, possibly in regards to how I see te world around me. But Berlin has an odd decaying quality that the London Gibson describes lacks. You can easily spot older real Berliner women easily (although older East German ladies often look the same). Seeing that they have been around for decades now, it stands to reason that the new generation is secretly created in some dingy Dahlem lab somewhere: Much like the city they represent they show the ravages of time and past excesses and are barely held together by paint, synthetic fabrics and sheer attitude. Of course there is also the other kind, the younglings, the ones I mistook for goths at first: dressed in next to complete black, with hair dyed the same shade of Kohl they circle their eyes in. And still there is a certain air about them that tells of a different mental and aesthetic heritage, possibly something typically Berlin, too, but not of a pedigree I have been able to fathom so far.

Of course, there is still myself. In my darker moments it's all too apparent that I am but one of those hipsters that have discovered the city for themselves, only that I lack the wealth, sense of discernible style and the cocksuredness of imprinting myself on those around me.
Other than that, I am obviously difficult, fiercely postmodern and self-destructively elitist. Not to mention neurotic, which obviously may not set me apart too much. Watching "Nathan Barley" was difficult to say the least.

No, I am not going to comment of the differences between the English and the German way of directing a play, as this will not help in the circumstances and will be considered gravely OT.
Considering he used to do Howard Barker, it seems like not much of a surprise, though. And I see where he is coming from.

Triggered by a listener's email to the "Mark Kermode Show" who suggested that one should be a little less harsh on "Sex and the City 2" on the grounds of it being one of the very rare current films with female leads, I wondered whether the film would actually stand up to the "Bechdel Test". And it would appear that it does.
http://bechdeltest.com/view/835/sex_and_the_city_2/

Not having seen the film myself, I had to rely on this website as well as the opinion of a friend who had but clearly there are conversations between the leads that are about something else than men. (At 150 minutes duration, I would have been more impressed if they really managed to talk about nothing else ;-) On the other hand, the test, though effective, is still fairly basic and passing it still does not make SATC2 anything but a piece of consumerist tripe.
In this context, it might be interesting to consider meta-meaning to dialogue, though. Is a conversation about shoes and dresses really just about fashion or is there a subtext about making the most of yourself, possibly in order to snag yourself the best possible man?

And is there another layer of sexism to all of this inasfar as even as a piece of consumerist tripe aimed at women and gay men, it is no worse than much of the usual Hollywood fare aimed at a hetero-male market, trying to get you to buy products or act a certain way in order to receive the attention of ladies that are "out of your league".