Berlin Misadventures - Day 4 - The music forms and seals your name in my heart or within the department store, your porcelain fish smells of Aphrodite's succulent armpits.

Well, it's 6.35 pm, I am sitting by my hotel table, armed with a glass of orange juice and some rather obvious looking chocolate treat called Lilly, I purchased from the vending machine in the station.  Three bars for a Euro.  Lilly is a wafer based confectionery, a tiered mass of substances, a metaphor for the human body that will digest and form a brand new substance, substantially different yet no less rewarding as it makes its erstwhile journey to strange new parts where it can float and mingle with its nutty colleagues, offering solace in those lonely hours between dawn and dusk.

Just to reassure you, they taste pretty disgusting, yet after the edifying day I have had today, they are as tasty as the elixir of the Gods.

Lilly, anyone?


I began today with a visit to the Beate Ushe Erotic Museum.  Now I am not sure what you expect when I use the word 'erotica' but I hope that you realise the material was obviously sexually explicit but not predominantly, nude photography etc.  The Erotic Museum serves two purposes; it celebrates the life of Beate Ushe, a fascinating woman who deserves a film and helped to propagate the more liberal approach to sex and sexual pleasure that we are still hiding from today and it also explores sexual iconography and erotic engravings/illustrations.  In short, it does everything and museum admission also gives you a discount on the goods in the sex shop downstairs.

Believe it or not, at 9am there were only two random strangers exploring images of fellatio, masturbation and golden showers, one man and one woman.  If I were feeling blasphemous, I may make reference to Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden but it was nothing like that, the Serpent had long since been put out of his misery and probably provided a key ingredient for one of the dodgy aphrodisiacs in one of the cabinets.  I will never look at a Tiger's penis in the same way again.  I left the museum with a desire to learn more about Beate Ushe.  She certainly helped to redefine the sexual morals of her day and we have a lot to learn.  What struck me as strange was how uncomfortable I felt leaving via the sex shop, which also contained a section where you could watch adult films in booths.  I must explore these feelings because I am not a prude and actually enjoy the attention that goes into the development of certain undergarments.  Silk befits a lady as leather bondage wear I am sure upholsters a fine young man.




Erotik-Museum.  A mirror rather than an eye-opener.

                                              Fetish wear for those who long to hang around with the right people.

 

After the Erotic Museum, where else could I visit but the Zoo.  The perfect metaphor for the procreative and recreational instincts.  The Zoo smelt in places but that's to be expected.  The complex blend of excrement and cheap sweets filled the air.  There were so many animals and birds.  The trip was a veritable feast for a guy who loves taking blurry shots as a metaphor for fading memories.  Alternatively, he simply can't get the focus right?  You decide!  I was particularly interested in the Monkeys.  The scientists and biologists are not kidding when they compare us to Monkeys.  We too grope and spend half our lives, preening, cleaning and touching each other up.  All in the name of human interaction and endeavour.

 

I learnt that Goats and Donkeys are natural poseurs.  Unfortunately, most other animals and birds are not that photo friendly.  'You can look but don't capture our image and steal our souls, strange Londoner!'

 

Adult Monkey stopping Little Monkey from falling.

 

Polar bears.

Giraffe.  'No photos please!  I am having a bad hair day.'

 

 

Following my zoological exploits, I met up with a friend who had thoughtfully volunteered to be there if I needed her.  Marie initially took me for a little walk taking in a church built in the Sixties that illustrated to me how the interior of a building can be so much more stunning than the exterior.

 

Church.

Jesus framed by the beauty of glass, cubes and light.

Marie took me to lunch in the department store, KaDeWe.  I am not someone who usually gets excited in a department store but wow!  They had everything and the amazing thing was the fact that little areas were dedicated to dining.  I believe we had Sole or Salmon.  Whatever it was, it was good.  I learnt more about Marie and her connection to my friend.  Also I learnt of Marie's connection to my London neighbourhood.  She lived in a road near mine about thirty years ago.  She lived in one of the police houses (properties specifically built with the families of policemen/women in mind.  My road also contains them.  After gazing admiringly at expensive wares I will never be able to afford (and in some cases, quite frankly, why would I want to?) we left the department store and I went to the Sammlung Scharf-Gerstenberg on my own then finally to the Brohan Museum.

 

The first attraction, the Sammlung Scharf-Gerstenberg was set in a former palace.  The artwork (primarily the Surrealists) was in some ways charged with a greater potency as a result of the majesty of the surroundings.  I was reminded how much I like Max Ernst's work and how inspiring the Surrealists and their antecedents, who were also included in a space that seemed like an old chapel, are to me.  I left the establishment buzzing.

 

'Welcome' indeed!

 

Did you see the Surrealist?  He placed a moss on the butter dish and carelessly mislaid his second rib.  He saw you yesterday and misheard you next Thursday.

 

 

Lockers in the Bauhaus style.

 

 

The Brohan Museum opposite was just as much fun but more conventional.  Art Deco furniture and objects complimented by Art Nouveau statements.  Possibly now as parochial as egg on toast but reactionary for their time and still visually striking.  Outside the Brohan Museum in the Gardens (okay, how you can call a patch of grass with a couple of sculptures performing a grotesque dance is slightly beyond me!) Anyhow, the sculptures are absorbing.  The bizarre cousins of one of Lewis Carroll's characters.  Well, they seem like something like that.

 

Brohan Museum

But how can we dance when we are tied together?

 

On the way back to the hotel buzzing with energy, I took so many weird and random photos that a psychiatrist would have a field day trying to piece them together.  'What you see a drain cover as a symbolic representation of something?  A womb like vending machine containing the detritus of life, the smoked down cigarette butts, the weird plastic loops and hoops from bottles and the green algae, all struggling to be noticed in a dark world.  Send the guy to therapy!'  But seriously, my head contains an explosion of ideas that with a little bit of appropriate channelling could be quite interesting and possibly, sensical in the end.  The signs and symbols which confine and direct our existences are an interest of mine and Berlin is a topography yearning to be heard and misappropriated.  The old and the new in barbaric union.  Even advertising slogans become slightly less real when you eat, drink and sleep in their shadows.

 

What do you see through this drain cover?

 

 

 

 

The end or simply another beginning?

Today, I am a spoon.  I stir the sludge of each synapse, sugar coated and caffeine addled, assured that the truth subsequently revealed will mean nothing in its whispered form yet everything when shouted visually on a forum or social networking site.  You don't need to be understood to be heard.  Just open to the stimuli.

 

 

                                                                                Barry Watt - 12th September 2013.

 

P.S. The Lilly wafer is called 'Lilly Kakao Waffel' in German.  I think that warning is in the second word.  'Don't do it' as Stuart would say.

 

 

 

                                                                                                               B.W.