Home Away from Home

I have always loved the idea of being a cafe-goer, someone who lounges in a favourite corner, espresso in hand, cigarette blazing away, whiling away hours reading avant-garde literature while discreetly people-watching. The fact I don't smoke and coffee upsets my stomach has dealt this fantasy an almost-fatal blow. Nevertheless, I have visited a handful of cafes during my stay in Berlin which fulfill a social as well as gastronomic function.

First up, tucked away in Neukölln is The Dumpling Cafe, serving the titular product, much to the bemusement of patrons. When I visited at least three people stopped in just to ask what a dumpling is. Still, it's good to have an air of mystery, even for such a lowly foodstuff as the humble dumpling. The name alone conjures up the ultimate in comfort food. I well remember as a child visiting a certain cafe on the Lower East Side of New York once or twice a year to get my fill of blintzes and pierogis, the dumpling's eastern European cousin. These dumplings are on the small side but quite tasty. Other attractions are wi-fi access and a chess set. Reading material is less avant-garde and more lefty-feminist-queer, with a definite US slant: Mother Jones, Curve and Anschläge among them. The patrons, too, number quite a few expats. I heard a lot of English being spoken. It's a bit of a queer social space, with occasional performances and readings tucked into the small, cosy space. And on Wednesday nights, they show Cagney and Lacey.

Heading a bit north to Kreuzberg, one finds Tante Horst, a collectively run space which is quite friendly. Aside from tea, coffee and cake, one can also enjoy DJ performances. Reading matter includes Siegessäule and Stressfaktor.

And finally, up in Prenzlauerberg, there is the redoubtable and collectively-run Cafe Morgenrot, quite a large space. The service is a bit daunting. One orders at the counter and then the staff shout out the patron's name when the order is ready. One feels a bit like the naughty child in class being called before the teacher. Reading matter is definitely eclectic: Konkret, daily papers and the odd out-of-date music mag. There are also film screenings in the evenings.

Berlinale: Experimental Films

Today, the closing day of the festival, I attended a screening of John Cook's Langsamer Sommer, shot in the '70s in Vienna. Cook, a Canadian, put himself and his acquaintances at the heart of his film, then indulged in self-referencing and navel-gazing, as he agonised (on-camera) about finishing the film and about his relationship with his ex, "the beautiful Ilse". Christ, it was dull.

Cook is an unsympathetic character, seemingly unaware (or is he?) of his relentless self-pity and casual misogyny, while his "friends" Helmut and Michael have their own problems. By the end, when Cook declares the film finished, I could only breathe a sigh of relief. Was it fiction? Documentary? Fictionalised reality? Frankly, I didn't care.

Experimentalfilme, a programme of shorts encompassing work from the USSR, Hungary, DDR, BRD and Poland, screened as part of the Winter Ade series. This proved to be a mixed bag. Gerd Conradt's Ein-Blick, 12 hours of surveillance across the Wall from West Berlin into East Berlin, was revealing and witty, while Thomas Werner's Sanctus, Sanctus, shot during the 1988 May Day parade in East Berlin, offered a poignant glimpse of long-gone rituals.

The two shorts from the USSR, Lessorub and Schestokaja bolesn muschtshchin, were baffling. The first a series of group hijinks in the snow, the second a kind of socialist-realist-brutalist lesson.

Z mojekgo okna, by Jozef Robakowski, offered a glimpse through his Lodz apartment window, as the view changed from 1978-2000. What started as a collective square traversed by workers and the odd dog walker became a parking lot cluttered with the latest western imports. Progress, eh?

Berlinale: No Country for Young Folk

As, Grafinjata (Petar Popzlatew)
Hayat Var (Reha Erdem)
Dorfpunks (Lars Jessen)
Ein Traum in Erdbeerfolie (Marco Wilms)
Die Koreanische Hochzeitsruhe (Ulrike Ottinger)
Chan di Chummi (Khalid Gill)

Today's theme is youth and its discontents. How society treat its young tells a lot about its values. In the Bulgarian film As, Grafinjata, the state and family conspire to crush all life from the spirited and rebellious Sybilla. Her individuality and opinionated nature are not valued in a state that demands uniformity.

Hayat Var is a film that revels in its tediousness, as the titular character, a 14-year-old girl on the outskirts of Istanbul, retreats into her own head to escape the mundanity and casual violence that lurk around every corner of her extremely proscribed existence.

The teenaged boys of Dorfpunks seek a way out of the tedium of 1980s German suburbia by forming a band but find their inadequacies are only magnified by the process.

Their East Berlin counterparts in Ein Traum in Erdbeerfolie sought to express themselves through fashion and performance and in so doing, found themselves enemies of the state. Eventually, the state fell, but 20 years later, as middle-aged people in reunified Germany, they miss the excitement and danger of their youth.

Which brings me to two docs which shed a bit of light on the differing expectations of boys and girls. Die Koreanische Hochzeitsruhe is Ulrike Ottinger's examination of Korean wedding rituals. Leaving aside the clumsy attempt at placing it within some kind of mythology, one is left with numerous shots of shops and teeming streets. The film really comes to life in the ceremony, excruciatingly regulated and staged, with a strange Fix-It woman constantly adjusting the bride's dress and issuing instructions to guests as the ceremony progresses. Nobody, including the bride, looks happy.

The Khusra community of Lahore is a grouping of people who might be called intersex and MTF in western society. Historically, they were held in high regard, admired for their dancing and connection with spirituality. But, as shown in Chan di Chummi, modern society regards them as freaks, misunderstood and cast out by their families for not being proper men. Living in the margins, they eke out a living through dancing and prostitution. Celebrating the birth of boy children in neighbourhood homes, they seem unaware of how they are actually reinforcing the gender roles that so oppress them.

Berlinale: Panelstory

Full title: Panelstory aneb jak se rodi sidliste (Prefab Story). This astounding film was made by Vera Chytilova in 1979 and showed as part of the Berlinale strand Filme Vorboten der Wende, which includes Soviet, Bulgarian, Polish and East and West German films, as well as this Czechoslovak entry.

Chytilova was part of the Czech New Wave and endured her share of troubles with the authorities. A rare woman in a male scene, she had a distinctive vision that still seems fresh and modern.

The opening title sequence alone is mind-blowing, as a taxi driver tries to find an address on a giant housing estate in which all the buildings look the same, and he is told to find the number by the colourful laundry on the balcony. The estate is under construction and the cranes and rollers impede his progress. As various residents pick their way through the muddy paths, it becomes clear that the building of a socialist paradise has come unstuck, and that the project is crumbling as quickly as it is being built.

Chytilova's handling of the multitude of characters--an array of workers, housewives, errant children and corrupt officials--is as sure-footed as her eye for a shot. A series of absurd situations is intercut with shots of the cranes lifting the various panels of the building into place. Nothing works and everyone is on the make--a brilliant metaphor for society.

Earlier in the week, Chytilova sat on a panel (see pic; she's on the left) discussing the theme of films that appear to pre-sage the end of state socialism. She spoke of her run-ins with the government and the various strictures in place. Unfortunately, this panel, as with her remarks at the film screening, was not translated to English and I understood little. This is curious, as the subtitles for the film were in English. I asked the moderator about this oddity and he explained it was to do with "Grenzen" and "Logisten". Perhaps appropriate, considering the subject matter.

Happily, Chytilova, a small woman wearing Yoko-type glasses and clearly made of stern stuff, is still working. She has two films underway, one of them about men and women. So, still critiquing the state of things.

This year, Berlin is celebrating 20 years since the end of the Wall. On Potsdamer Platz, where the wall used to stand, is a strange-looking structure, a combination of viewing platform (to see what?) and exhibit about the peaceful revolution. Polls suggest that a large percentage of Germans remains unsatisfied with reunification and that easterners, in particular, feel let down. One wonders if in 10 years' time there will be a slew of films on 30 years of unfulfilled promises.

Berlinale: Pez + Ghosted + Chat

Three auteurs. Three visions of relationships.

The best thing I've seen so far at the Berlinale is Sophie Fillieres' Un chat un chat, a sophisticated comedy starring Chiara Mastroianni (see pic for cast and director). Amazingly, Mastroianni had never before done comedy and was in a panic a week before shoooting, but her performance as Celimene (or Nathalie or Natasha), a writer suffering writer's block that masks a deeper crisis, is note-perfect. The expression on her face when her well-meaning friends offer her books as birthday presents is priceless--no words are needed.

There's so much that's right about this film--intriguing leads, a good set-up (the writer is stalked by a lonely teenager), snappy dialogue and space to let the film breathe. Not much happens but a lot develops, including Nathalie and her pursuer.

Monika Treut's Ghosted sets up a triangle, as artist Sophie travels to Taipei hoping to lay the ghost of her dead lover Ai-Ling to rest. Instead, she meets the mysterious journalist Wei-Ming, who takes a more than professional interest in her. Why is Wei-Ming so intrigued? How did Ai-Ling die? And can Sophie let go? A co-production between Germany and Taiwan, the film travels back and forth between Hamburg and Taipei as Sophie and Wei-Ming try to settle unfinished business.

The post-film Q and A session was amusing. Most directors come over all coy, allowing the Berlinale staff to shower them with praise and field questions. Not for the formidable Treut, who took control of the stage, setting up her own personal chat show, introducing the actors and discussing the problems of finding the money.

At least five funders' names and logos were listed at the start of El Nino Pez, Lucia Puenzo's follow-up to XXY. Adapted by her from her own novel, the film is something of a throw-back--a kitchen sink melodrama of forbidden love, as spoiled rich girl Lala (Ines Efron, who also starred in XXY) and housemaid Aylin plot their escape with the family loot. But the course of true love never runs smooth. Nor is it clear whether this is true love, as Aylin also has entanglements with Lala's father, as well as with others. Is she simply using Lala to better herself? When the father is found dead, the strength of their relationship is tested.

As with XXY, I was a bit disappointed with this film. I wanted to really like it but found it lacking dramatically. Pondering a crucial plot point, I found myself asking: "why are they taking the dog? That makes no sense." A pity as it's beautifully shot and acted. I just didn't quite buy the maid character. If she is untrustworthy, the audience's sympathy is compromised.

Berlinale: Human Zoo

dir Rie Rasmussen

This one had it all: drama, controversy, dramatic entrances--and that was off-screen. The film was pretty good, too.

It all started when the woman introducing the screening announced that director Rie Rasmussen was not attending and that there would be no post-screening discussion.

OK, so on to the film, which was a disturbing, violent affair asking (but not answering) a lot of questions about morality. Adria, a Kosovo Albanian, escapes certain death at the hands of the Serb Army in 1998, then falls in with a deserting Serb soldier and embarks on a life of crime. Intercut with this are scenes from her present-day life as an illegal immigrant in Marseilles (how she arrives is never explained), as she fears deportation and cuts herself off from emotional entanglements. After meeting nice guy Shawn, she dreams of a new life but then finds herself dropped back into violence.

Part war drama, part jet-black comedy, part romance and part social commentary, the film is wildly uneven in tone. In Serbo-Croat, French and English, the dialogue varies from astute to embarrassingly obvious. The film takes a wild left turn when the heretofore timid, restrained Adria suddenly turns into The Terminator and starts chopping off hands and shooting up strip joints. Most bizarre.

The director, who also played Adria, has very strong views on gender roles and I think somewhere in this picture is a comment on violence and strength but I found the ending a huge copout.

With the film over, I waited to leave. But then Nick Corey, the actor who played Shawn, jumped on-stage (with the lights still down), and the drama became a farce. He told us the director was outside the screening room and wanted to speak to us. The woman who had done the introductions appeared with a mic (and a spotlight) and explained there was no time for a post-screening discussion.

Cue Rie Rasmussen (see pic), who strode on stage. No messing with her. She and Corey traded insults directed at Luc Besson, who is credited as producer but apparently hated the picture. She also said the story had personal resonance, in terms of the immigration and trafficking theme (a sub-plot of the film), as her adopted sister's mother had been trafficked to Russia.

Extraordinary stuff, but it was cut short to make room for the next screening. Corey repaired outside and continued slagging off Besson and bigging up Rasmussen, who mortgaged her house to make the film. Then she held court. I was quite interested to hear her views on the reversal of gender roles in the film, with Adria taking an all-action stance while Shawn is a support. Once she started talking about women's natural function being reproduction, I rather lost interest--biological determinism is so 20th century.

But, the Human Zoo continues in various locations throughout Berlin for the next week or so. Ba-dum-bum.

Gustav

Volksbühne

A bit late with this one but I was dog tired when I got home. Not that the performance was enervating--far from it--but it was a long day.

And a curious one, surely for Viennese performer Gustav, who turned up without her guitarist Oliver Stotz. Imminent fatherhood kept him off the stage, with the result that the band advertised was keyboardist Elise Mory. Gustav commented on the situation a few times, with comic asides.

I was surprised at how powerful the songs were in a live setting and especially with a German-speaking audience, with whom she had great rapport. Gustav's two main expressions were furrowed brow (singing) and beaming (fiddling with her laptop). The contrast between her very light, almost babyish, voice and the content of her songs is stark, but the right balance was achieved on this night. (And if one is any doubt as to the ferocity of her opinions, check out this blog posting).

Because of the missing guitar, some songs were dropped and "We Shall Overcome" was reprised for an encore, but the setlist was well-executed, a mix of songs from her first album Rettet die Wale and last year's follow-up Verlass die Stadt.

Mory and Gustav had great chemistry, and I was amused to see the singer clamber on to the piano for a well-subverted torch version of "Rettet die Wale", while Mory tickled the ivories with a straight face.

And the baby, delivered two hours after the gig, was a boy.

Gustav will be taking part in the Audio Poverty conference this weekend.

Team Pony

Hubertus Lounge
30 January

Smoky rooms, dogs sleeping on threadbare chairs, a disco ball. Such was the setting for a late night gig by the post-modern Wohnzimmer (trademark pending) performance trio Team Pony.

Two singers and a pianist make up the threesome, who de-construct misogynist pop culture via an array of 20th (plus a smidgen of 21st) century songs mostly on the theme of love, from Billie (no, not Piper--Holiday) to Britney. That's a lot of de-constructing in 30 minutes but the topic's ripe for it, and in their own inimitable way, they do a remarkable job, given the limits of time and space. Giving one's all to a torchy ballad is difficult when the bar staff are dropping glasses and chatting away in the background.

The two women, who also perform as Julia + Julia, take turns at the mic, delivering straight-faced lyrics of betrayal, desertion and obsession while subtly undermining the song's intent. "Toxic" was brilliantly staged, with the two twirling like marionette ballerinas before shuddering to a halt.

re.act: it's a wrap

So, all done then. The final speakers discussed the importance of archiving and different underlying philosophies. Chris Regn spoke about Hamburg's Bildwechsel, running for 30 years now and documenting work by women + (this includes queer work). She also conducts interviews for the Performance Saga series of DVDs on women performance artists. I missed speaking to them, through an odd series of crossed wires, but they are presenting live events in Switzerland in February.

Martha Wilson, featured in the exhibit and archive, spoke about the strange journey of her New York performance art archive Franklin Furnace, starting as a space for live art in 1976, pilloried by the culture wars of the 1980s and now in its online incarnation, digitising work produced at the venue. She commented acidly that it's easier to get grants to preserve work by Karen Finley than to present work by said artist, such is the shifting political climate.

I had an interesting chat with Wilson, curious about a comment she made in one of her pieces on show. In the early '70s she had explored various identities, including male and female archetypes, which she photographed and then wrote comments on the frames. Trying on Lesbian for size, she wrote: "her sexuality is so misplaced that the rest of society ignores her". To which my response was: Eh? Not very sisterly, Martha.

So, I asked her about it, and, blushing, she acknowledged that it was a negative comment and then explained that it was her view in 1974, that the photos hadn't been shown in 30 years and she knew she would take some flak for it. But, she is obviously made of stern stuff since she left it intact, despite identifying as a part-time lesbian. (Were the full-time vacancies not available? Damn this recession!)

Anyway, conference goers seemed buoyed by the proceedings and by the resurgence of interest in feminism and feminist art.

re.act conference: it's a stitch-up

So far, my focus has been art and not performance, so last night I put that right by attending live events scheduled as part of the re.act conference. These might be summed up as blood, clothes and laughter. Quite the gamut of emotions and responses and, indeed, intent, though I can't be sure of the latter.

Boryana Rossa's performance The Vitruvian Body was conducted with the Bulgarian artist wired up with a headset a la Janet Jackson ca. 1990 or, indeed, presenters on the Home Shopping Network. But rather than try and sell an unseen audience a range of rather shoddy consumer goods, she had more pressing concerns. The contrast between her rather matter-of-fact commentary on her ideas about the idealised body and what was actually happening was disquieting. As she spoke, she undressed, positioned herself inside a circular apparatus and then had her arms and legs sewn into it by her colleague Oleg Mavromatti. Much has been spoken about body art and feminist theory in relation to it. But this was the first time I had actually seen a live performance of it.

Rossa created a very striking relationship to the audience. Before she started the performance, she invited people to come as close as they wanted and to take pictures in any form they wanted: mobile phones, cameras, video cameras, etc. She wanted the audience to document and participate in the performance. For that reason, I think the experience was less uncomfortable for me than I might have anticipated. I went up close, I had a good look at the stitching. I saw the blood run down her leg.

I wasn't shocked, but I felt a lot of empathy, as did many other audience members. Once the artist escalated the performance to have her lips sewn shut, as a protest against censorship in the Czech Republic, many flinched, as she was clearly in pain and a lot of blood ran down her chin. But, she had also invited an audience member to cut her free, and that allowed a certain amount of relief: we observed and were complicit in her pain but we could also participate in her liberation. Body art and manipulation are not really my areas of interest but it was certainly an intense experience. I also found it rather endearing that several older artists approached Rossa afterward and hugged her, as if offering comfort as well as congratulations for her performance/ordeal.

The other two performances also involved a certain amount of discomfort, both for the artist and audience, though not in the visceral manner of Rossa's. Tanja Ostojic re-enacted Juniper Perlis's Clothes I, which involved the artist attempting to put on all the clothes she owned during the duration of the performance. This was a curious exercise: firstly, Ostojic was re-enacting quite a modern performance, originally done in 2003; secondly, Perlis apparently spent several hours getting to the venue with her clothing (she said she had to carry her own baggage) and then putting them on, while Ostojic's performance was less than an hour; thirdly, Ostojic came nowhere near to putting on all of the clothing she had arrayed on the stage, as she must have known.

As she put on an item of clothing, Ostojic displayed quite a large grin, as if she were a small child doing something a bit naughty and was testing out the limits of parental patience. Then she would step up to the mic in her bulky clothing and read a bit of text about her own mother's experience in Yugoslavia or about Perlis's experience of homelessness. Again, one sensed quite a bit of audience empathy for the artist, with calls of "Tanja! Don't rip it!", as she attempted to pull on a delicate item. And once she had everything on she could manage, several women, including Rossa, got on-stage to help her extricate herself.

By contrast, the final performance, Antonia Baehr's Lachen, was conducted in a more formal setting, a proscenium theatre, with Baehr reading from a score, taking bows in between scenes, and the audience very much kept at a distance. However, given that the content of Baehr's performance was laughter, this allowed the audience to share in it, in a strange way. Baehr had invited friends and family to compose laughter pieces for her to perform. This was a testing experience and I felt more uncomfortable at certain places than I did in Rossa's performance. Who wants to spend an hour watching someone laugh? But, there was variation and some clever staging, with Baehr dropping balls and laughing in time to them. And the final piece had her performing a duet with herself on a TV monitor, with the TV self giving the live self orders. At the end the artist switched off the TV.

re.act conference: yes, we have no bananas

Well, after an enlightening afternoon and evening spent at the re.act conference, I emerged with some delightful quotes and thoughts. The talks I attended on "Performative Tendencies in the DDR" and "When Personal Was Not Political" were intended to fill in some gaps in the historical record, documenting performance culture in the DDR and Yugoslavia, states that no longer exist and whose conditions produced a particular kind of performance that was done in secret.

Nonetheless, as Bojana Pejic pointed out in her witty presentation, commenting on the "comradesses" of her country, much subversive art was produced, even if it didn't use the name feminist, which was considered a western concept. Artists such as Sanja Ivekovic found a way to stage performances by utilising the state surveillance and incorporating it into her scenarios, making the agents of state control complicit in her actions.

Pejic also pointed out that Yugoslavia had a bit of a consumerist culture, i.e., they had bananas. Bananas seem to be some kind of marker for the eastern bloc: to have them was to have some connection with the west, a tiny bit of capitalism in the form of the forbidden fruit. An audience member questioned whether this focus on bananas weren't some kind of phallic-patriarchal-capitalist symbolism, which added a bit of levity to the proceedings.

The DDR, Angelika Richter informed us, did not have bananas, only green oranges from Cuba. State controls on expression were much tighter, producing a hermetically sealed border state. Consequently, there was no public audience for the art produced by women such as Cornelia Schleime and Gabriele Stötzer. Instead, they made photographs and Super 8 films to be shared amongst themselves.

I was able to speak with Gabriele Stötzer, who explained a bit about the artistic Frauengruppe that she founded in Erfurt in the early 80s. More on that another time, but she confirmed that the group was not aware of any of the western feminist performance art going on at the time, and she followed her own drives in making photos focussing on the female body, wanting to externalise the pain she felt after being imprisoned for being a "class enemy". Her story shows the incredible threat these women posed to the state.

re.act.feminism

Akademie der Künste, Berlin
Through 8 February

This exhibit looks at the development of feminist performance art in the 1960s and 1970s, while an accompanying conference running 22-25 January looks at the resonance of the form today, with a series of talks and performances.

Visiting the exhibit last week, I spent about three hours there and could have stayed longer. The displays are not that elaborate but there is an impressive video archive of performances and some interviews, which bears careful perusal.

The film Not for Sale, by Laura Cottingham, gives a bit of context to the exhibit, offering a history of how performance art developed from the feminist movement and other social conditions in the United States. With protest in the air, it was only a matter of time before women put themselves at the centre of expression, using their bodies as inspiration and sometimes sites for creativity.

Of the many works in the archive, I was quite taken with DISBAND, a New York group of misfits, including Martha Wilson, Barbara Kruger and Diane Torr, who performed as a mock band in the early '80s, skewering machismo and US foreign policy with their songs and raps. Interesting that the members went off in such interesting directions afterward. Wilson will be speaking at the conference on moving from performer to archivist, as she now runs Franklin Furnace.

If the archival material is heavily informed by US performance art, the exhibit has a much more Germanic flavour. I was quite intrigued by the work of Gabriele Stötzer, who, moving from the punk scene to the art scene, formed the women's art group Exterra XX in the DDR in the '80s and fell foul of the authorities for her support of Wolf Biermann. Her video work and photos present alternative visions of female groups. Ewa Partum, originally from Poland but working in Germany, used her nude body as a way to protest against restrictions in society.

One theme of the exhibit is connecting past and present artists, and Stefanie Seibold's installation, A Reader-Wallpaper, offers a kind of summary in performance practice past and present. Her series of booklets, A Reader, presents an assemblage of influences from feminist theory to pop culture references, while monitors play performances by such artists as VALIE EXPORT from the De Appel archive.

Archiving and re-staging performances are two themes of the conference and Cornelia Sollfrank is currently staging several artists' works, including one of EXPORT's in which she takes a man on a dog lead for a walk through a shopping mall. This features in the video archive, while photos of re-stagings are showing in the exhibit. Her newest work re-imagines Valerie Solanas's SCUM Manifesto, which rather boggles the mind.

What relevance does the work of the '60s and '70s have today? Why re-stage? Where does feminist performance art go from here? All questions to be discussed at the conference.

Kuchen mit Rock

K9
18 January 2009

Kaffee, Kuchen, Kunst. Always a good combination, in my book. So, back to sunny Friedrichshain for an afternoon in support of the Ruby Tuesday Rock Camp, planned for the summer. This is a local version of the Girls Rock camps that have sprung up in North America, which offer girls the opportunity to pick up instruments and so increase their self esteem--stealth feminism, if you will.

And any doubts about the need for such an undertaking would be quickly dispelled by viewing the Girls Rock film which was screened (in part, more on that later). Filmed at a camp in Portland, Oregon, I believe, it focussed on a handful of participants taking part, as well as counsellors and tutors, who included rock luminaries Carrie Brownstein, Beth Ditto and sts.

The girls came loaded with baggage of problems at home, identity issues, body issues, and the general burden of living in a misogynist society. Quite a lot to get through in five days, but they threw themselves into forming bands, writing songs and getting to grips with playing instruments, while also exercising their communication and bonding muscles.

Sadly, we didn't get to see how it all turned out because the DVD froze 75 minutes in, but what was seen was gripping.

Also, on the bill was music from last-minute booking The Dropout Patrol, a duo with acoustic guitar and only one mic. This was an interesting exercise in working in less than ideal conditions but the songs came through strongly, an odd combination of amusing lyrics and earnest, understated delivery. Charming.

Equally beguiling was the performance art duo Julia + Julia, whose performance I only caught part-way through. Two women in red dresses reclining in their living room staging scenarios involving hysteria, science and smoking cigars as a way of debunking gender cliches. Hard to describe but I found it very funny.

sleazy, inc. operated

K9
17 January 2009

It's hard maintaining cool while wearing red socks, but the bassist from the artfully named sleazy, inc. operated managed it. The trio from Leipzig headlined Winterfest, LaDIYfest Berlin's cold-weather offshoot, with a sparky set that woke me from my torpor.

With a singer/guitarist whose voice recalls Lesley Woods, a lanky bassist who loves to pose, and a powerhouse of a drummer, they are somewhere between post-punk and power pop, filling the small stage with a riot of galloping rhythms, stop-start songs and a clear enjoyment in doing what they do.

Young Marble Giants

HAU2
16 January 2009

What this gig had to do with "music, money and society after digitalisation" I don't know but the opening night of the Dancing With Myself conference featured a gig by post-punk minimalist legends Young Marble Giants, a welcome return after their decades-long exile. "Was anyone at our last gig here?" Stuart Moxham asked. That would be the lone Berlin gig in 1980. "No? You're all too young."

And it was a surprisingly fresh-faced crowd for such a grizzled band, if one can call the unassuming YMG that. Certainly, bassist Philip Moxham is becoming a dead ringer for Samuel Beckett, with his spiky greying locks and chiselled features. Alison Statton, though, still looks like the shy teenager she was when the band started in 1978. They make an amusing contrast on-stage, the rangy bassist stalking the stage while the diminutive singer stands at the mic, poised for action that never comes and fixing the audience with an unwavering gaze. When not singing, she looked possessed.

By contrast Stuart Moxham, the primary songwriter and historically frustrated vocalist, kept a low-key presence, concentrating on his guitar-playing with a series of agonised faces, and on the lovely, spiralling organ that marked the band out from their metal and punk peers back in Cardiff. At the back, younger brother Andrew performed the difficult function of human drum machine, playing sampled sounds from the original recordings.

The audience was rapt, adoring, demanding more from a tiny songbook that only numbered one album and one single, plus the odds and sods that turned up on last year's compilation. In fact, so pressed were the band for material that they performed a second encore of songs they'd messed up earlier. And these were the gems of the evening: a transcendant "Choci Loni" complete with the guitar lines missed out earlier and a "Wurlitzer Jukebox!" that turned into a singalong.

In truth, the gig was a bit ropey, with Alison forgetting the words to "Eating Noddemix" (which she co-wrote), and Philip and Stuart flubbing a few notes. But YMG were never about technical perfection and stagecraft. The songs, lovely, delicate, full of open spaces, are still wondrous. And it was wonderful to experience it live.

I can't imagine when they started in Cardiff that YMG ever thought they would be playing at a festival named after a Billy Idol song. In fact, the HAU space is hosting two conferences in the immediate future: Dancing With Myself explores the music industry in the current climate of uncertain economics and relentless digitalisation, while the upcoming The Politics of Ecstasy looks at altered states of presence.

I keep conflating the two into one imaginary one called The Politics of Dancing. I guess these shebangs will just keep going until the supply of '80s song titles is exhausted.

Dancing With Myself runs thru 18 January at HAU.
The Politics of Ecstasy runs 23-31 January at HAU.

Waltz with Bashir

dir Ari Folman

The experience of seeing this film certainly affected my impression of it. This was my first foray into German subtitles, the film's original language being Hebrew. I am bound to have missed a few things, but was surprisingly successful with the Untertiteln.

It is always a difficult proposition to make something beautiful about something ugly and Ari Folman's film is quite astonishing in its use of magical images contrasted with the grim subject matter: his own complicity in the massacre of civilians during the Israeli occupation of Lebanon in 1982.

A talking-head documentary on the subject would have a limited audience but Folman has made a number of bold decisions in making his film: the animation allows for all kinds of surreal and dreamy experiences to come to life, while the use of real ex-soldiers recounting their experiences gives the power of truth to the film.

Folman's search to recapture his memory becomes an extended inquiry into Israel's conduct in the country and his own participation, which he had "forgotten" since that time. Its recent Golden Globe win should give the film extra exposure, which is well merited as its anti-war message is timely.

Berlin: Fake or Feint + Transgression

New year, new country. Yes, it's all about change here at Kunstblog HQ, which is for the next month or so, snowy, icy, frosty Berlin. No need to explain why one would decamp to the capital of cool, except to say things were a bit glum in Blighty and one needs a change sometimes, even if it does mean arriving in -17 temperatures.

So, it was I found myself tonight at the opening of Fake or Feint, the first in a series of scenarios on the subject of deceptive appearances. Well, here's a topic ripe for exploration and thoroughly modern and all that. But, what is one's response when faced with a brown scrim in a glass-fronted room in the middle of the Berlin Carre shopping centre? The great and good were out in force, sipping from their drinks and making animated conversation, enclosed by the scrim, while another group dotted the edges, where hung three photos by Claude Cahun.

Quite the interesting character, Cahun, who only came to my attention recently but led an eventful life in the Channel Islands and continually photographed herself in various guises, pre-dating Cindy Sherman by decades. The relation of Cahun to the brown scrim (the work of Eran Schaerf)? Both are examples of the tactics of marking, with Schaerf's diaphanous curtain marking a space between public and private.

And speaking of crossing boundaries, I just about caught the closing of Transgression at Neurotitan. A collection of work by seven women working in multi-disciplinary fields, this exhibit included strange knitted portraits by Francoise Cactus, other-worldly drawings by Danielle de Picciotto and distorted photos by Lydia Lunch, all better known from the world of music than from visual art.

It also included work by Gudrun Gut and Myra Davies, who have been collaborating for almost 20 years in music and spoken word, and whom I spoke to just before Davies returned to her homeland of Canada. More on this conversation another time, but it sounds like the opening of the exhbit was the place to be, with a girl group backing of Gut, Beate Bartel, and de Picciotto for Davies' performance of tracks from Cities and Girls. Now there's a band in the making.

The two also shared some amusing anecdotes about living in freezing conditions in the Berlin of the past, making me very glad I invested in a hat with Elmer Fudd flaps. Not at all cool, but very, very warm.

Fake or Feint is at Berlin Carre through 7 February.

Music for One

The Red Thumb

Music for One is the nom de plume of guitarist Sherry Ostapovitch, who creates understated textures from an acoustic resonator guitar.

The Red Thumb contains 12 pieces, all recorded live to 2-track, so is quite lo-fi and DIY in approach. It's reminiscent of an earlier time, when music was created spontaneously and quickly, on the hop before jumping on the next boxcar out of town. No 64-track studios or Pro Tools then.

Which isn't to say it's backward-looking or derivative. Just very atmospheric. All instrumental, the music has a dreamy quality, reminiscent of a Sunday afternoon in an overcast town, when one is wandering, wondering what to do next.

All of this comes packaged in some splendidly delicate hand-crafted artwork. So a DIY project in every sense.

Music for One plays on Monday 2 February 2009 at bar&co, temple pier, London.

Penetration Reanimated

It's become a bit of a theme for this year: punk band re-forms for one or two gigs. But, Newcastle band Penetration have been at this re-formation game longer than most, having actually re-convened as far back as 2001.

As leader Pauline Murray explained recently, they take a flexible approach, with band members coming and going. This week the band play two gigs, but also have a compilation out on Easy Action, as well as a new single on Damaged Goods.

Veterans of the first wave of punk, Penetration carved out a niche for themselves with angry agit-punk merged with more traditional rock guitar. Murray's vocal style was strongly influenced by Patti Smith, and the band covered "Free Money" to great effect.

Unlike some of their punk peers, the band have new material, with the single "Our World" their first since 1979. To my ears, "Our World" is a bit wimpy to carry the Penetration name, more reminiscent of mid-90s Britpop than punk. But kudos to them for not resting on their laurels. It remains to be seen how long this incarnation will hang around.

The dates are:
12 Dec Northampton, Roadmenders
13 Dec London,The Forum

11th Festival of German Films

28 November - 4 December
London

This year's Festival of German Films features a co-production strand and a focus on the documentary maker Andres Veiel.

Intentional or not, the themes of politics and families run through the programme for the festival. Sometimes, as in Lenin Only Got as far as Lüdenscheid (dir Andre Schäfer), one finds both. In this ironic documentary, Richard David Precht recounts his upbringing in 1960s West Germany, being raised by leftist parents and dreaming of life as the head of the East Berlin zoo in the the fantasy land of the GDR.

With an extended family that includes two adoptees from Vietnam, there is plenty of scope for drama, while mentions of Baader-Meinhof and shots of protests provide the necessary backdrop, as the country goes through its own growing pains, ending with reunification and a family reunion in Denmark.

Alex, the hero of My Mother's Tears (dir Alejandro Cardenas-Amelio), also has an unconventional family, which encompasses the residents of his group house in West Berlin in the 1970s after he and his parents flee the Argentine dictatorship. His gift for moving things with his eyes proves more help than hindrance, and he observes with unease his dad's struggle to settle in "the island of Germans". It is a compelling story with wonderful moments of invention, as when dad's drawings come alive and in the films shot by the household.

Meanwhile, over in Absurdistan, the residents of a small village find themselves left behind once the Soviet Union crumbles and as their ageing water pipe collapses, their water supply dries up and the village divides along gender lines. Veit Helmer's allegory is enlivened by bits of surrealism but let down somewhat by crude humour.

Inter-generational conflicts provide the fault lines in Cherry Blossoms - Hanami (writer-dir Doris Dörrie), as the well-ordered life of elderly couple Trudi (Hannelore Elsner) and Rudi is disrupted when she dies and he tries to live out her dreams in Japan by visiting their son there, having discovered their other two kids in Berlin have no time for them. The sacrifices his wife made for him and the family haunt him and he realises how little he knows of his family. The most perceptive characters are the outsiders: the daughter's girlfriend (Nadja Uhl) sees both parents in a way the kids never do.

Late in the film, as Rudi bumbles around Tokyo, the character of Yu appears, and if she's a bit ditzy and overly mannered, she does represent a less rigid character who helps Rudi connect with his departed wife and some risk-taking in himself. It is also amusing to find "ah so" exists in German and Japanese.

The documentary Two Mothers - The Search Began in Riga considers the very meaning of family, as filmmaker Rosa von Praunheim searches for his biological mother and father and uncovers some uncomfortable truths. His adoptive parents were part of the occupying forces of Riga and his investigation into his origins moves between Berlin and Riga, as he tests out hypotheses: was dad a photographer? A Nazi? Could his mother be Jewish? Along the way he meets a range of characters from devout nationalists and apologists to historians. In the end he simply cops out and decides it's better not to know.

In Beautiful Bitch (dir Martin Theo Krieger), 15-year-old Bica is cut adrift from her brother and homeland of Rumania as she arrives in Dusseldorf and takes up the life of a pickpocket. When she meets the spoiled Milka and streetball coach Andrej she hopes to find friends but is constantly under threat from her "patron", the odious Cristu.

The premise is intriguing and the promises made to easterners about the west that lead to exploitation and greed are well-rendered, but the film deteriorates into melodrama and the relationship between the girls is not developed. It's not believable that a few games of streetball and some dancing would create a real bond so much so that Milka says Bica is her first real friend. And what's up with the black-clad girl who appears sporadically to ask (backwards) if Bica will be her friend?

Drifter (dir Sebastian Heidinger) is a well-shot but very slow observational doc about street youth living around Zoo Station in Berlin. This is perhaps a nod to Wir Kinder vom Bahnhof Zoo but with no sensationalism. Aileen, Daniel and Angel live on the streets visiting shelters in between shooting up and taking clients when they need money, but there is little drama to their lives, just the sensation that they are wasting away, while complaining of being undercut by those even lower on the social scale--Poles.

With no voiceovers and no interviews, it relies purely on observation. The worst scene is Aileen giving a blood sample and finding her vein is too scarred from heroin injections. In the credits is a thank you to Andres Veiel, who has several showings at the festival and will be a guest.

The festival screenings are mostly at Curzon Soho, with some at the Goethe Institut.