Gent Canal
Originally uploaded by killerfemme.

Just to give you an idea of how beautiful the place where I am staying is, this is the canal and view about two blocks walk from W. and A.’s house.

Alexanderplatz
Originally uploaded by killerfemme.

Leaving Berlin on the night train, a blurry dark shot of the TV antenna in Alexanderplatz. It is done up like a soccerball for the world cup.

Bionade
Originally uploaded by killerfemme.

M. and G. aenjoy Bionade, our drink of choice in Berlin, at the V Cafe in Kreuzberg. It is fizzy, refreshing, organic and not too sugary I love the mod styled label design, though one would think it was English, not German. Maybe I can set up a Bionade import business?

General Idea Retrospective
Originally uploaded by killerfemme.

At the Kunswerke, a really interesting center for modern and contemporary art, this Canadian artists collective had a retrospective. They also worked with ideas of design, art, media and life, but in a much, much different way than the Bauhaus. They designed publicity to call attention to AIDS (their most famous being the word AIDS in the style of Robert Indiana’s LOVE sculpture), staged a beauty pageant by mail and published an art magazine called FILE based on LIFE magazine. The best part was you could read photocopied versions of FILE and look at the originals in glass cases. Though it was a magazine, it seemed to have a zine ethic and even reviewed early fanzines, and I think for me it was quite an inspiration for riffRAG to see that…

Gorlitzer Park
Originally uploaded by killerfemme.

In Kreuzberg, this park also seems to house an old train station and the these strange, modern ruins, where the city attempted to build some kind of fancy fountain and then gave up. It is quite sinister with the sky behind it I think and I think it is a really interesting concept for Berlin, modern ruins, history, how we deal with it, how we try to move forward and not cover up the past.

Bauhaus Archive
Originally uploaded by killerfemme.

The Bauhaus Archive from the outside. Somehow the Bauhaus managed to have poetic modern architecture, wheeas much of the modern architiecture in Berlin I found to be just ugly.

photo by Lazlo Mohoy-Nagy
Originally uploaded by killerfemme.

This was part of an exhibition at the Bauhuas archives in Berlin. These color photos were taken in 1935 and they totaly blew my mind. The colors were rich and intense and had the quality of an Almodovar film at times. It was hard to beleive that color film had just been invented then. I think this also shows that good composition and photography is lasting, that you dont need photoshop to make good photos, or maybe I am just an analog crank (she says on her blog…). I think also the Bauhaus in general created really moden, clean, simple forward thinking forms that had a human tough, that did not loose the people into the machine, as if the artists and craftspeople of the Bauhaus knew that ultimately, design is for people.

So the overnight train without a bunk really wiped me out. I never want to see the train station in Dortmund Germany at 2 am ever again… but Berlin was great, pictures coming soon. Here are some of my favorite things to drink in Berlin: Bionade (organic fizzy Brittish lemondate type drink, but German), Schwepps Bitter Lemon, Caprihinias (especially at Tante Horst, a new collectively run bar on Orienstrasse 45 in Kreuzberg, which everyone should go check out, they are opening officially on the 13th, but opened special for a night for Ladyfest Berlin).