of bunkers and catacombs

Just before leaving Berlin, at the end of August, we realized that something quite unusual was about to happen in Schoeneberg. One of the biggest Cold War bunkers would be open for visits, in Pallasstrasse. A couple of artists were setting up an installation in the bunker, “In Reih’ und Glied” – 3000 pieces of panzers and U-boot. We quite regretted not to be around in Berlin for the exceptional event.

Apparently 4,500 people could be hosted in the Pallassstrasse shelter. And yes, also non-Berliner are familiar with the big block building on Pallasstrasse, featured in “Wings of desire”. Where Peter Falk and Bruno Ganz discuss over the metal fence, that’s the street corner we’re talking about.

Well, funnily enough, Sunday morning we discovered that also at walking distance from our home in Rome there is a bunker. A christian one. We were having cappuccino at our local Bar when we saw an affiche advertising the Day of the Environment or something. One of the events in the program was a visit of the St Hyppolite’s catacombs. Across the street??

So off we went, wearing our Birkenstock and with the Sunday papers under the arms. No proper shoes, no torch…but it was take it or leave it. After 15 minutes an archeologist and a fossore (=catacombs caretaker) from the Vatican turned up. Small intro. This is a multilayer (5) catacomb. There is a basilica on the first layer, the one we are going to visit. The rest is underwater. It is not open to the public.

Yellow daisies and shrubs had to be uprooted from the front of the small door hidden against a tall wall and mimetic among the wild vegetation. Very decadent, very Grand Tour. A bit Indiana Jones too. Above the wall, the Economics campus of the La Sapienza University. “Caemeterium Hyppoliti” was carved in the marble lintel.

The catacomb features intact tall arches in roman bricks and plenty of epygraphs, some written with a beautiful “swallow’s tail’ font. Apparently Hyppolite  was a scholar.

Well, quite odd. Both our neighborhoods, Schoeneberg and San Lorenzo/Nomentano have a surprising underground story…

Foto: Thilo Rückeis

your local politician

Yesterday we met our local deputy Mayor in our Bezirk (Municipio III) in Rome. It was about the local catacombs and bike sharing. We told her about the current light-saving technique used in Rome and also in our borough: during the week selected blocks go in complete street lamp blackout. Her answer: “Oh really? Let US know…”. Because she’s not a citizen. She’s something different from us simple citizen. As our friend Ramius said “un atteggiamento cardinalizio” (a bishop-like attitude).

Yesterday Jan-Marco (the man on the poster) was elected in Schoeneberg. We’ll see.

I’m not worried for Germany

Photo: tagesspiegel

Whoever will win today’s Elections or form in the new Koalition, will form a more than decent government!

If only Germans would give us part-time the loser of the Election.

firewall

Months ago MeinMann and I bought our flight tickets in ordet to “sei dabei”, to be there, in Berlin, on November 9th.

There are many reasons to it. The main one is to be physically there, since in 1989 I lived the events (fall of the Berlin wall, but also velvet revolution in Czechoslovakia) through the letters of my DDR and Czech pen pals but I wish I could have been there, side by side with my friends.

And of course we want to join the party, and live the Stimmung, the atmosphere of such a special day.

But there is also another reason. We want to escape to the viruses which are already incubating in Italy. I have already spotted extreme-right posters with the small icon in the corner: “against all walls”.

There are people here, in the Banana Republic, ready to hijack the celebrations. We don’t want to be in Italy on those days, even if we are very well equipped with firewalls against these viruses. We don’t want a beautiful day to be stained with Banana Republic rhetoric.

As Tabucchi says in an interview today “The end of totalitarian governments is a good thing to celebrate, but you have to be careful. Someone could use it to scrutinize other conquests and other freedoms”.

The laboratory of post-democracy, Italy, is not the place where I want to be on that day.

24 hours Berlin: 6am in the morning

Two nice discoveries today. A friend in London told me about The Auteurs. And while browsing the movies MeinMann discovered 24 hours Berlin by Volker Heise.

Well, all this has been around for a while but nevertheless, better late than never!

If you love movies The Auteurs is a precious website. And if you love Berlin, you will love this collection of 24 movies shot in Berlin one year ago, each one covering a specific hour of the day. With stunning photography and everyday stories.

The first part of 24 hours Berlin takes us in the capital and her inhabitants at 6am. Nori at the BMW motorbike factory in Spandau. An inmate in the Knast in Reinickendorf. Waking up in a flat in Schoeneberg. A Koepenick fisherman on the Mueggelsee. An old man waiting for heart surgery at the Charite’ hospital in Mitte. A round-the-clock bakery in Schlesisches Tor. An interview with von und zu Guttemberg in front of Brandenburger Gate about John McCain (John McCain…? who was that?). A vain and antipathique foreign correspondent headquartered in Gendarmenmarkt and totally waterproof to the country he’s reporting from.

The crisis was just starting: September 5th, 2008. MeinMann and I only watched episode 1 so far (the one covering the awakening of the city, in between6.00 am and 7 am) and so there’s more to come. We have 23 movies in stock to look forward to now!

One year after this magnificient series of shootings I wonder what happened to the people portrayed in the movie. The world changed an awful lot in the meantime.

Sarah Palin and her red jackets were pestering our screens one year ago. FW Steinmeier was not sure to become THE candidate to the Kanzleramt. Lehman Brothers was fame and glory. Barack Obama was preceded by an “If”. Von und zu Guttemberg was in the making. KaDeWe was strong as an ox. The S-bahn ran on time (but with a dark secret) and the U55 was still in the box.  We were still discussing the project for our flat in Berlin.

This movie frames life in the city and its Zeitgeist. Berlin is the lucky town which deserved but also generated such an oeuvre, I hope it means something beautiful for its future.

soundcloud, soundwalk, skyline

A couple of months ago I discovered thanks to Pino the existence of Soundcloud. How could I ever have stumbled upon Floh im Ohr or Rob Babicz without the orange fuzzy cloud?

Today jumping from link to link I landed on Soundwalk. The branded Louis Vuitton product is stylish indeed, featuring Joan Chen and Gong Li. But there’s also a more obscure, evocative and obviously unbranded Berlin soundwalk…

Cold summer rain, the skyline view from the Weekend’s terrace over Alex, cold Oslo sounds and even colder vodka…a month ago, me and MeinMann in Berlin…

Photo – stylewalker

film making: Rome, Berlin…Rage

At Kohlenquelle, in Prenzlauer Berg, MeinMann and I met the authors of FirstWeTakeBerlin, Thorsten and Daniel. We had followed them on Miro’, their Berlin video-clips mixing reportage and sur-reality. The friendly riot in Kreuzberg on May 1st, the Oberbaumbruecke fight between Kreuzberg and Friedrichshain, the diverse social mix in Moabit, Wedding by night. Together with Phil they are now filming Dougs Deutschland, their first film, in Berlin. We met them on Kopenhagener Strasse during a pause in the tournage.

As Daniel suggested, this round of cappuccinos and Club Mate seemed one episode of the FirstWeTakeBerlin series itself, because it did have a slight surreal twist. We had contacts via e-mail and followed their videos on the web so it was a bit like FirstWeTakeBerlin meets its Italian public or anyway, a good portion of it. It was like when you met your pen-pals, you had seen pictures, exchanged views in writing, but to sit at the same table in a bar seems odd at first.

Our questions were the usual naïve ones of those who go and see movies, and don’t make them. The movie is a movie in the movie, and its matrioska structure was not always easy to grasp because the authors made references to movies we had never seen. Thorsten took us through the intricacies of the plot, which reminded me of Patrick Modiano’s Rue des Boutiques Obscures, where the plans of reality and amnesia are strictly intertwined. We glimpsed a few scenes on Daniel’s phone, we are really curious!

I was curious to understand if creative city Berlin or Europe were  helping financially the young cinéastes (a local film commission? Eurimages?). Daniel and Thorsten told us that they are financing the film by themselves, since film commissions want to have too much control on the plot and the whole process.

I had to put my sunglasses on, I was staring to the warm afternoon sun and it started to get visually difficult to sustain a conversation with the guys sitting à contrejour. Producers, financing, sunglasses, bright sun light brought to my mind a movie scene, Sally Potter meeting the producers in LA (“The Tango Lesson”). Her plot was still in the making, the producers chase her, want to force her ideas in a cookie-cutter scheme, her expression remains frozen behind her sunglasses. She would finance the film herself, in order to let her freedom shape the plot. And that was a movie in a movie.

Yesterday night we were asking to MV, a film director living here in Rome, the differences digital vs film photography in movie making. Eventually we ended up talking about Sally Potter once more: her i-phone movie, Rage, is just out now on the Babelgum platform. And about film commissions. The new Tornatore movie, Baaria, apparently cashed-in 4 millions Euro from the Sicily film commission, and is one of the most expensive movies ever produced in Italy.

Rage is out today on the i-phone and on Nokia N96 (among others), I am definitely curious to watch it, also for the techniques used by Sally Potter, as described by Lily Cole: “The unusual shooting set up on RAGE, of just Sally with the camera, the sound recordist, and myself created an extraordinary level of intimacy quickly which allowed Sally and I to experiment and really explore the character. With great sensitivity and intensity, Sally was drawing out emotions in me and then tempering them, always guiding me toward delivering just what was necessary and true to the character.”

I hope my German will improve further in the coming months in order to fully enjoy  Dougs Deutschland when it will hit the silver screen. And in the meantime MV intends to leave Rome for Turin in order to realize her movie projects in a truly creative environment, now completely dried out in Rome. As per Baaria, probably as an Italian tax payer I already paid for it, I’ll wait for it to turn up on the TV shores, no hurry.

Photos: Babelgum, Ragethemovie, Brandtundsimon.de

applause for the dead

Soldiers killed in Afghanistan. Workers killed on building sites by insufficient security measures. Innocent citizens killed in organized crime attacks.

Condolence messages from the President of the Republic. And the crowd “applauding the dead”.

Mourning. Remembering. But not applauding.

The pavlovian reflex of applauding the dead is something new, it surfaced over the last decade, and I find it deeply indecent.

no party-crashers in Berlin, bitte

Looking forward to November’s celebrations in Berlin, I hope the city will remain – as many Italian bars in the German capital already are – a “Berlusconi freie Zone”.

A party-crash by Berlusconi would be another source of embarasment for many Italians (and not only). He should already have other parties on his schedule anyway.

Berlin invites all EU leaders to Berlin Wall celebrations

The British, Russian and French leaders are among those expected in Berlin for the festivities, set to climax in a “freedom party” at Berlin’s Brandenburg Gate.

Berlin — Germany has invited all European Union leaders to attend ceremonies in November to mark the 20th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall, Chancellor Angela Merkel said on Friday.

Speaking to reporters after an informal EU summit in Brussels on Thursday, Merkel said: “I invited all colleagues from the European Union to take part in our celebrations for the 20th anniversary of the Wall falling on November 9.”

British Prime Minister Gordon Brown, Russian President Dmitry Medvedev and French President Nicolas Sarkozy are among those expected in Berlin for the festivities, set to climax in a “freedom party” at Berlin’s Brandenburg Gate.

The Soviet leader at the time, Mikhail Gorbachev, will also take part, as well as former United Nations secretary general Kofi Annan.

One world leader not likely to attend is US President Barack Obama, who will be in Asia for a summit. Former president Bill Clinton will likely represent the United States instead.

AFP/Expatica

the service sector

Books about Berlin and Rome are my passion, and this week I read “Fucking Berlin” by Sonia Rossi.

I read the book in the Italian translation, but the original version was written in German by an Italian young woman who worked in the Berlin brothels for a few years while studying Maths at the Humboldt University. She starts with a webcam as a virtual sex worker and then experiences hands-on the working conditions in several brothels around Wedding, Lichterfelde, Neukoelln, Charlottenburg.

Italian reviews on the autobiographic novel use terms such as “the book of scandal”, or “the young and disinhibited Berlin”. Very frou-frou indeed. These reviews all convey an idea of something forbidden or prohibited, which is totally absent from the book. So I suppose that they did not read it. Or read it with the usual hypocritical pink pair of glasses. (How prurient! It’s forbidden…buy it!)

It’s a story about the anxiety of temporary employment and lack of money. About relationships. About wanting desperately to succeed in a project, which happens to be studying maths at a prestigious university and needing not only the cash but also the time to do it. And about prostitution. Its economics. The elasticity of the demand. Margins and cash-flows of various brothel organizational structures. Client profiles. Supply chain. Customer relationship management. And yes, anecdotes.

While reading it, by contrast I had images of Rome bouncing back, those young girls who line the streets in the suburbs. Plastic chairs and bonfires. Tattered mattresses behind bushes and girls holding a blanket in a plastic bag.

On the European services4sexworkers portal, it is possible compare and contrast the German and Italian legal frameworks (see end of post).

For sure prostitution is no walk in the park, but the author of the book made the move without having been forced into it by pimps and violence. In 2006 a cage was discovered in Rome, where some girls were kept segregated and forced with violence to sell themselves on via Palmiro Togliatti in a state of slavery.

Now with the new mayor you may see “less of that” on the streets. But that’s exactly what matters. To see less. Just to see less. It does not matters in which conditions these workers work. Only Tornatore had the courage to dig deep in the worst consequences of this “push it under the carpet” attitude, with the film “La sconosciuta”.

A few months ago the “all you can eat” offer of a Berlin brothel made the headlines. If I recall well, Dummy Magazine drew a curve of the business model and found out that the more the client eats (and drinks) the higher is the margin, as interaction with the girls decreases. Maison d’envie, another Berlin brothel, came up with the idea of discounts for environmentally-friendly patrons who moor at its dock by bike. Cages on Palmiro Togliatti street apparently are not among the special offers.