Berlin took me

Probably what I love most about Berlin, and this includes having porn there when you get home all sozzled, is how you can just start walking and suddenly everything is so fucking awesome. For example, I was staying at a hotel in Charlottenburg, so on Saturday morning, once I'd had breakfast (which was quite nice, despite the dingy cheapness of the hotel - Germans have mastered the art of brekky) I decided to start my day by moseying towards the nearby palace. On the way, there was a park. It had a rappel swing. Or at least a thing I'm choosing to call a rappel swing. I had never seen such a thing before in a children's playground and it took up about 20 minutes of my time. Later on in the trip I saw several more. Germans rock.

So I kept walking to the palace, realized it was right next to the Deutsch Oper, where I was going the next night, turned around - and there was a fucking exhibition of Surrealist and precursor art, opening with a bunch of Goya etchings, and there was Ensor there too, more than in his stupid fucking home city Ostende. I could have cried with the awesomeness but instead I spent a few hours at the exhibition. So fucking ace. There were no real revelations there in terms of artists who I now love who I'd never known or loved before, and while it was all very well put together by the end I was getting annoyed by what appeared to me as the whiny masculine cluelessness of it all. Okay, existence is a series of inarticulable questions with unverifiable answers, and I know that's frustrating. But I find that the emphasis was on suggesting life's fundamental unknowableness was something to whine about and not something to gloat over and play with - not like I always like to imagine a good Surrealist would do - but then I walk through a floor full of them and realize they had run away so pell-mell from what they thought was their consciousness that they'd ended up wedged too tight up Freud's ass. It was still a fantastic exhibition.

Anyhoo. I walked slowly over to the Altes Museum then. It was farther than I expected but the weather was fine, and I was going through the Tiergarten most of the time, so it was pleasant. I had chosen the Altes Museum for Nefertiti. That bust was the first classical human representation that had ever piqued my interest so I figured it was time to gawk at it from a couple of feet away. In a way it was more beautiful than I had ever imagined. In another way, she had had Obama ears until someone broke them off, and that was amusing.

I don't like talking about people on this blog but the friend of the F-word who I dined with Saturday was illustrative of Berlin's awesomeness first by bringing me to a sushi bar - I hadn't had raw fish since I don't know when, it's just not done here in a quality way at prices I can afford - and secondly by describing in some detail a psychotherapeutic process he's going through with some doctors in Berlin who use mescaline, MDMA and acid in their work. Speaking of running pell-mell away from your consciousness. It was interesting enough for me to want to try it but I'm pretty sure that's just because I want some really good mescaline. And I suppose I distrusted the enthusiasm of the F-word's friend a little bit - I like him very much but having grown up with them I can recognize men pretty readily who're defined by their appetites, and I don't think it's any coincidence his psychotherapy of choice chimes so well with his appetite. He seeks to be one big, articulate id, and while I tend to laugh at appetite-driven men, I found myself wishing him good luck with that. At least it's a goal.

Anyways, I'm pretty sure from a psychotherapeutical perspective I don't need to take mescaline with a German doctor supervising and sort myself out that way when all I actually want is some really good mescaline. But maybe I just feel that distrust, etc, because I'm one big articulate shadow-complex, who's clutching the reins of must-must-appearances too tight to even throw myself the bone of some medically supervised tripping. Just alcohol, weed, and porn for me, and once I get pregnant, that dwindles down to porn. Sigh. At least there's always porn. And if my shadow-complex ever changes its mind, there's always Berlin.

More tomorrow, with pictures if I can find the cable.

We're gonna have a real real cool time

So wrapped up with Hirst-hating and Hughes-loving yesterday that I neglected to point out what a chart-topping mood I'm in. As you know last week was the height of frustrating, as far as work is concerned. Now I'm not saying I'm so great at dealing and don't take my anger out on the people I love in an inappropriate fashion, but for some reason my troubles with the Yankee management have made me more than less aware of how super-great, uber-great, Mohammed-Ali-minus-sexism-and-brain-damage great the F-word is. Romance aside, that man rocks.

And that combined this past weekend, among other things, with a lovely trip back to Antwerp on the sort of crisp sunny autumn day that makes Europe seem worthwhile, and a wade through the art gallery there, with all its Ensors and oils and old things. The Ensors were the highlight of the gallery for me, besides the single sultry Modigliani, who was looking at the F-word that way, and of course that's great, because my reptile brain registered her as a threat as well as a beauty and I love it when tricks are played on my reptile brain.

But Ensor wins. He combined absolutely inappropriate colours and a sort of shimmery pointillist-without-the-headache movement (his people - and his objects and corpses, for that matter - look ready to bounce off the surface of the painting) with a deep morbidity, or skepticism, or fatalism, or something to do with death and vanity in a way that really satisfies me. The Antwerp museum has tonnes, versus the fucking none in Ensor's home town of Oostende.

Anyways, for much of the weekend, I was at that point of happiness where the only fly in the ointment is that not everybody is this happy. Even the trembling under-knowledge, the teenage paranoia of 'if you let yourself be this happy you stand to lose so much' was just the lime in the sorbet. And any troubles from work seemed part of a little part of a little something, like braces getting tightened, a nothing, a bagatelle that wasn't even a story yet, an unobtrusive skin rash.

Of course that set off its own worry for me Monday morning as I walked to work deafening myself with the Bad Seeds' last album and visualizing a violent burlesque routine (still love it but it sounds more and more like stripper music to me); I wondered, does ignoring work like that, thinking 'work is not real life, real life is real life, work is a task I do to fund my real life until I retire or get a job that counts as real life' lead into the kind of evil professional behaviours that allow people to do truly horrible things with no guilt at all, just because it's their job to do them? But that's not enough of a worry to ruin my mood. I don't do horrible things at work. I just write about other people doing them. And that may be a moral cop-out, but as Baywatch pointed out last week this only is a temporary nightmare.

Anyways, another good thing about Antwerp was the train reading, which was the rest of the Mosquito Coast. Eesh. That's a fucking great book, an epic of a lip-smacking good read. My favourite by Paul Theroux, possibly. Over the travel books, even, which I love. Adventure and Oedipus-complexes and adulthood and puberty and jungles and marital strife and racism and religion and murder, oh my. Speaking of Oedipal-complexes, how do you describe the father with a complex about his son, or a grown man with a general complex about young men? As having a Laius complex? The fact that there's no popular name for something so apparent when we're attributing formative murderous hate to all the little babies in the world makes me hate Freud more than I already did. Atta blame childhood, Herr Doktorb, obviously none of the shit in your brain is anything worth dealing with if it came up post-pubescently.

A lot of things going on there in the Mosquito Coast, in short, and yet never too busy, if you know what I mean, never hard to fix the mind on because of all the things and words going on, like books by that World According to Garp guy, which are just too magenta for me to get into. I recommend Mosquito Coast 100%.

Ensorific

Living in Europe is great in a lot of ways. Even living in Belgium is great in a lot of ways. But you may have noticed by this point that Belgium also drives me apeshit. One way it drives me apeshit - a whole new way I discovered yesterday, during a trip to Oostende with Mum to get some fresh air - is its lack of appreciation for one of my favourites among its sons, James Ensor.

Oh sure. There's a bust up of him in the town there, and a twee little 'Ensorhuis' with reproductions of his work, and some of his paintings have been stuck into the Royal Gallery here in Brussels. But Oostende has not yet managed to pull its thumb out and re-establish its own modern art gallery - an idiocy that left us gawping at a post office in the downtown central square that my Crappy Planet had insisted was its new location as of 2007, and then gawping at a Tourist Information lady who said that since the plans for the new location had fell through there was no timetable or information about when those Ensors would be viewable again. They've been sold off to Russian oligarchs, I fucking know it. Bloody Belgians.

Anyways, here's 'Christ's Entry into Brussels', which the bloody Belgians sold off to some American twat who at least is showing it: