It was a baking 26 degrees yesterday and when that kind of heat hits Berlin there's only one place to head – the lakes. There are several that lie in clusters to the East and West of the city and are easily reachable by public transport. So about a 40 minute journey and I was sitting by Schlachtensee:

For such a peaceful place its name seems odd as 'Schlacht' is the German for 'battle'. However its name has its roots not in the German but the Slavic tongue, coming either from the word 'slaty' which means 'golden-coloured', the word 'solt' which means 'swamp' or 'bog' or the word 'slat' which rather mundanely refers to the woodwork in a bank reinforcement. I like to think it's the first.     

Nipples

After a long break from blogging I was compelled to write a post this morning about something that has changed my life - breast cream. 

Often having dry lips, I have nearly always carried some incarnation of lip salve with me to slather over my oral labia. Recently however I've been finding that my lips were cracking and bleeding and neither blistex nor butter could remedy the situation.

So the other night over dinner I complained of this fact to a friend of mine who gleefully produced a pot of light viscous jelly. Is that vaseline? 'Nope' came the answer 'breast cream.' Her mum had recommended it to her she said. 'Don't ask'. Sceptical, yet willing to try anything that could help, I smeared the thick, odourless stuff over my lips.

I'd been told that it doesn't take immediate effect so you have to wait, but then 'your lips will be softer than they have ever been before'. So I waited. And waited. Then I fell asleep. The next morning I awoke and, lo and behold, I had the most luscious lips that I have ever had in my life. It truly is miracle stuff. I now have my own tube of breast cream and only need to put it on twice a day as it's so effective. Key ingredient is the lanolin in it apparently. But let's not stop at the cosmetic benefits of Brustwarzensalbe because there's something interesting to be gleaned from the words themselves.

The word Brustwarze means 'nipple' and it's composed of two separate words: Brust which as is clear to see, means 'breast', and Warze which means 'wart' and sometimes 'verruca'. Its full abject effect quickly becomes clear when put into everyday situations. Let's take a breast feeding mother for example, who complains to her friend “My breast warts are really sore from little Friedrich suckling on them too ferociously”. Not nice. Or a man who intimates to his lover, “I really like it when you play with my breast warts”. No, no thank you. I've always maintained that German can be a beautiful language, but I'm afraid when it comes to all things nipples, it's best to leave the Deutsch out of it. 

Food for thought

While taking a break from scanning, website-updating and Fedex-ing to nibble on a Brötchen for lunch, I wanted to post something I came across in Art Review this morning. 

Art Review is one of the foremost art magazines in the art world. It essentially acts as an advertising platform for commercial galleries, featuring large, glossy whole-page adverts and the odd art criticism feature here and there if you're lucky. Their yearly feature for which they are most well known, 'Art Review Power 100', is a who's who of the art world. It often draws criticism for its focus on directors and collectors rather than artists themselves and indeed in this year's edition, the top 20 only featured three artists. For a publication that seems pretty lacking in critical content I was happy, and somewhat surprised, to find Grayson Perry had written a forward to a special edition catalogue published by Art Review, detailing prints, editions, plectrums, necklaces, anything as long as it is by an established artist and comes in quantities. At the end of his forward Perry writes:

“While we have so many artists that are very good, since Marcel Duchamp there has been a conception that artists can just point at things to bestow significance on them, and this has become pretty tired, I think”

Words that ring true. Painfully true in fact as the artist whose show just closed here last month was one big, lazy nod to Duchamp. 

Weekday Weekend

In these past 3 weeks any time I could get on the internet was spent locked in the purgatory that is Belushi's hostel, desperately searching for somewhere to live. Now that the crisis is over and I've found a lovely flat on Hasenheide ('hare heath') I feel it is high time I write about this month - even if it is nearly at an end. 

The very first weekend after I arrived here at the start of Ocotober, I had a visit from two friends who study German with me. Saturday Hannah arrived from Halle where she is teaching in a Gesamtschule. With the biting cold there was only one thing to do: shopping. We headed to a place I had never heard of before, a Swedish store called Weekday. Obviously they're doing well as they had an instore DJ. At 5pm in the afternoon. It was so loud my changing cubicle was shaking. I guess that's how the Swedes like to shop. 

Anyway, after our eardrums had recovered we stepped outside onto Georgenstrasse. 

After the cringe-worthy yet highly necessary photo opp we headed East to a second-hand store located in an old office block from the DDR era. 

Hannah climbing on up for that 2nd hand bargain

Evening was falafel  (full homage blog to follow) and then went to CAKE bar to see my friend Melanie deejay

Emma arrived the next day from Braunschweig, where she's working for a publishing company. Having just come from the from the Peggy Guggenheim I couldn't not go to the Deutsche Guggenheim

and so we popped in to catch the last days of an exhibition on contemporary artists' work in film and how it engages with the idea of the fairytale. The highlight for me was a grotesquely fascinating film called 'Dough' by Argentinian-born  artist Mika Rottenberg. Rather than try and explain it badly here's a video of it:http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XPXpQPfZu4s

I found Peggy's autobiography in German in the shop which made me nostalgic. 

It was funny to see how they'd placed it right next to a film on Hilla Rebay. She was the woman who was responsible for setting up Solomon Guggenheim's (Peggy's uncle) collection which would become the founding collection of the Guggenheim New York. Hilla and Peggy had a particularly vicious series of correspondences where the former accused Peggy of profiteering under the Guggenheim name. Interesting then that she seems to be looking down her nose at Peggy who has rather insouciantly donned her brilliantly oversized sunglasses.  

We took a wander round autumn-coloured Berlin:

Emma's hair was strikingly similar to the tree's leaves

That evening we had sumptuous dinner: pumpkin risotto followed by bananas fried in prosecco, covered with melted Milka chocolate. Healthy.

NOM

 

BAUM/BBC

I have some loose ends of blog posts from Venice that I wanted to put up before I forgot. One seems particularly appropriate as a linguistic bridge between Italy and Germany.

In Venice in September I had the luck of being able to live with a former Italian intern of the Guggenheim called Eleonora. Or Ele. Or principessa depending on what time of day it was. She is a student of arts management at Ca' Foscari and had exams that she had to take in the middle of September. I also had to prepare a talk to give on a painting by Arshile Gorky that's in the Gugg collection and so we headed off to the humanities faculty library to study. But this is not just any humanities faculty library, oh no. This is the Biblioteca di Area Umanistica nontheless and they very proudly state this with the snazzy acronym, BAUM. All fine and dandy. Except in German the word baum means 'tree'. So every time I saw a new poster or notice around the place I thought there was some bizarre German tree cult that had a very prominent presence around campus.

TREE

Here's a pic of us hard at work

Here's what Eleonora made of the double meaning

Who knows, perhaps they were even
aware of the double meaning as this
sign suggests.....

In my room in our flat near the Rialto bridge I made a great discovery. The landlady was obviously learning English at some stage in the 1970s and she chose to do so by using a 6 volume BBC English course. Upon flicking through I started to notice that certain parts where rather Surrealist. Take this chapter heading for example which looks just like the kind of unsettlingly credible yet utterly nonsensical sentence that might be produced from a game of cadavre exquis.

It is a game that the Surrealist group experimented with in the 1920s and one that bored groups on rainy family holidays still play today. You write down a phrase on a sheet of paper, fold it over and pass it on to the next player who writes their own phrase and so on and so forth. At the end you fold out the sheet of paper and have a progression of seemingly linked sentences that offer unexpected and surprising concatenations of surreal meaning. The idea was that by involving chance in the creative process they could produce surprisingly poetic juxtapositions drawn directly from the subconscious. There were also some great picture pages that had the same effect:

Others made me laugh for their sheer quirkiness:

And others raised a wry smile for their depiction of the beloved British weather....