parklife

so, we've been a bit quiet on the blogging front the last couple of days.
lucy had a case of the flurgens, or microbious laxus (huh?), which left her a little under the weather and somewhat confined to the flat. but she's come good now (no, I still feel poorly, but Kent is over it so he is pretending I am fine), in fact, she's making a hot chocolate right this instant and just completed a KILLER collage. seriously, it's a total winner, i don't want her to sell it (but Kent, if Lucy sells things, she gets money. Buy Kent pretty things. I could sell that collage, get the money, and buy it back and give it to you as a present!).

as the weather has begun to soar into the heady heights of the mid-teens (believe me, 15 degrees is like some sort of heavenly bliss for us right now) we've been venturing out into the park around the corner to soak up the rays. we're totally sans picnic blanket, so we've sacrificed one of our spare doona covers to the good cause of keeping our arses dry.

still suffering some effects of the dreaded flurgen

oooh - so, i have to advise on an update about our street art expeditions.
on my way back from the shops, where i dutifully offloaded empty beer bottles for cash back against food (tis a sweet system indeed), i thought i'd check on one of our pictures on my way past. when i crossed the bridge and looked across at the concrete pillar that we pasted an image onto, it was totally gone.
a giant pillar, moved.
'ah', i thought to myself, 'that's a bit of a shame, but such is the nature of street art.
here today, gone tomorrow.'

so then i kept going on my merry way home, rounded the corner into our street and walked right into the pillar! someone had moved it about 20 metres out into a much more prime position. now everyone walking down the street can glimpse lucy's cat-lady-with-bird-skirt, kent's drawn version.

what once was slightly obscured, is now wonderously exposed.

poseur
(Kent clearly means hot awesome chick near cool stuff)


a little further along from our own pasting is this scary poster for some sort of children's event...


That has been mocking us for DAYS as we walk past it's smug I-will-make-you-have-nightmares-about-this-well-into-your-adulthood-your-psychiatric-bill-will-go-through-the-roof type smiles.

now, google translate advises me that this is apparently a story of a special magical tree, but i think it's pretty clear from the first part of the title (not to mention the nighmare-inducing, poorly made-up, under-worked drama school dropouts in the photo) that this is, in fact, a childhood trauma ('traum' is in the title after all) just waiting to imprint various untreatable psychoses into the growing minds of berlin's unsuspecting youth. Why is he not in scary munchkin slash clown make up?! Who is this man?! The whole situation screams stranger danger.

i bet they serve mushroom tea at this shindig.
That ... and a big slice of farmer-themed clown phobia for the rest of your life.

tomorrow we're off to enjoy some sort of continuously relentless anniversary (IT'S KENT'S BIRTHDAY TOMORROW EVERYONEEEEEEEEEEE!!!), which should be fun, and will probably involve more park time, grosse kaffee and maybe lots of cheap beer. nay, probably.
And maybe a surprise or two (ok, probably just one).

'all right billinger and schwarzkopf, you two are on park duty today'
'but sir, can't we catch crooks and break up meth labs?'
'sorry boys, it's off to the green grass to lope about, check out the girls on bicycles and ignore the drinking, bong smoking and graffiti that goes on right under your very nose.'
'all right gov. as long as we can hold hands.'


Kent has special fantasies about the lives of the local Polizei.

biosluts

So, Kent and I are no longer currywurst virgins. Isn't this exciting?! (Slightly pathetic that after about 5 weeks in Germany we eat our first wurst. But no matter!) We toddled off to the end of our street the other night and had some biocurrywurst with biopommes and biomayo (because bio means that it's organic, and organic means that it's good for you ... right?).

I mean, just look at all of that biosauce - enriched with vitamins of the earth, that is. Needless to say, it was pretty biolicious, if a little heavy on the biosauce. Ok I will stop saying bio now. Bio bio bio!! Sorry. Had to get it out of my system.

oh - there was one fun experience while we waited for our currywurst. aside from the vendor telling me my german pronunciation was good, which chuffed me no end (show off), some random dick rocked up, a beer can in each hand and just stared right into my eyes. now, this dude was kinda like a metallica bonghead, circa '...and justice for all' era, hair to shame Axel Rose, and cut off denim jacket. no joke. anyway, he just starts dribbling bubbles of spit. like a baby. staring and dribbling spit. he got sick of staring me off, especially when i laughed, tried the same thing on with the poor cook, then got bored again and left. dribbling off into the sunset.
nutbox. And by dribble, Kent seriously means blowing raspberries type of dribbling, complete with spittle spray and little fart noises.

anyway - 'twas more confusingly hilarious than threatening and just added more experiential depth to the currywurst episode! In other thrilling news, we have taken some walks in the park
(we are an old married couple now, and that is what old married couples are supposed to do! you're really not selling this up very well lu. what we really did was embark on some photographic research, monitored seasonal adjustments in the local urban flora and perambulated a textual language of spatial experience upon a rapidly familiarising territory of physical knowing. kapow!
-woah, you really are the king of speak shit! I think I prefer my old lady walk thank you very much.),
visited the Jewish Museum, which sparked a large debate about going to places
because you want to or going because you think you should.
The space is quite spectacular
(more so now as I look back on Kent's stellar photography skills)
though very reminiscent of Fed Square (with more scrapes and dints
and other bits of crap on the walls that no doubt Kent will get stuck into.)

invitation accepted!
lame.
look, the architecture, on a macro level, was notable. on a micro level, horrid. cracked concrete floors, water stains running down the walls, windows broken, misaligned door frames and a build up of dust that would have only been surpassed by the tombs of the pharoahs (he was not happy). i dunno, i just thought the point of such a museum was for a reinforcement of our human capacity to notice what's going on around us. if you noticed the museum, you noticed shoddy maintenance and boring, isolating and disaffecting artifacts and displays. there's a million more arguments i could play out about it, but the public permanence of the digital discourse is not the place. you get my drift, i'm sure.

I think we both found that the experience was ever so slightly marred by the hoards of giggling, yelling, gum chewing hormone bomb exploding teenagers EVERYWHERE. Anyway, we had a customary teeter over the falling leaves exhibit, something I found very bizarre and uncomfortable, particularly watching tourists try and find an especially large head to stand on while being photographed by their companions. So Kent and I dealt with this the only way we know how: we ran away to have coffee. And it was sweet.


close up of the interactive falling leaves

ok ok ok - i'm always diplomatic.
coz there's always something of interest buried inside even the lamest things.
but, walking on a thousand iron cutouts of human-like faces? really?
and three stairs that go nowhere? i get the symbolism.
jesus, who couldn't. but, really? three stairs looked like a mistake.
why not an entire set of stairs? something to actually walk on.
it all just felt kinda kitsch and overloaded and seemed to actually push way too hard,
but without being hard enough - if that makes sense.
but then again, here we are, venting. and, as a result, thinking, analysing and remembering.
see, even inside the lamest things lie kernels of potential.

Spring is most definitely on its way (I know, I know, we keep saying that, mostly to convince ourselves I think) and is very similar to our Melbourne Autumn. This could also be due to the filter from my camera. It makes things so much more nostalgic and deceiving dammit! It was a shiny blue day! It was!

omg, it is soooo coming. but man it's slow. we do harp on it, i know, but the trees here are like 98% deciduous, so they're skeletons. there's no colour anywhere. and i miss pairs of rainbow parakeets flying past, screeching. but there's green buds on the skeletons now and there's sparrows chirping and i'm nearly bursting out of my frozen, pasty skin in desperation!


Kent has new sneakers

And he is just loving the excellent Vampire novel Sarah sent us! See him swoon?
I AM NOT READING THIS DRIVEL.
Whatever man, you lo-lo-lo-loooooove Vampire Teen Romance!
wow, that made me so angry i used capitals.
i never use capitals.
(it's heirarchical and un-democratic, btw)
Wife rolls eyes and sighs - get over it and stop wanking my post!

You know that when I get to posting pictures of creepy window content, I really have no news. We have to walk past this window every time we go to the Gesunderbrun (real name forgotten - i was gonna correct you lu, and put the correct name in, but i did that once before and i actually got it wrong, like a total twat, something about the ecker river, which was really the neckar. dick. plus, you got closer that i would have) train station. It's fucking scary. It is on the scary side of Prenzlauer Berg, the side that clearly has all the monsters, ghosts, and gangsters. (I have not seen any of said characters YET but the babies in the window say it all don't they? I mean look! There's LOTS and they are ALL in fluros! Why would somebody do that?!
omg - check out the weird sergeant doll in the middle, keeping them all in line.
dis.turb.ing.
More disturbing than you actually being able to SEE that from here? Ok I need my glasses.



And I have discovered that I am Roast King and am going to cook it every night.
Or, I am not. Because that would be boring. BUT it is delicious and the second attempt went spiffingly
and just LOOK at that steam! I know this photo is a bit grotty, but seriously, all the ones Kent took
(this one included) looked straight out of a Women's Weekly Dinner Party Cookbook 1981 -
I know you all know the ones I mean.
With all that special glaze, and glace cherries in ALL the wrong places.

And I can safely say that the bacon that we draped over the chook
(did you not get the reference to Women's Weekly yet?) was most definitely bioschinken.

Biotastic!

de.
lish.
us.



one more thing to add.
i am loving the beer sitch here.
(i know i know, 'sitch' is ridiculous)
a six-pack costs me $3.60 australian. six bottles of 500ml.
genius!

- but -

take the empties back to the store you buy them from,
get a refund for said bottles,
and it turns out that the actual cost of said six-pack, is...

$1.46 australian.
for 3 litres of beer.

I know - he has talked about this a lot. It is very exciting.

berlin.
i love you.

takin' it to the streets

in a city decorated with so much street art what's a pair of antipodean doodlers to do?

in a debate between 'passenger or participant' - the latter trumps.

so we plucked up the courage and headed out, at what we thought would be a pretty good time of night, for such endeavours, just before 11pm on a tuesday. of course, this is berlin, and we walked out into a neighbourhood still throbbing with girls on bicycles, couples out for a stroll and even young families with prams.


still, we were on a mission.

actually, just as we finished our first 'bandit bird of spring' paste-up, a cop car whizzed by and parked at the end of the street. we kept our cool, and changed directions. apparently they had bigger fish to fry.

yeah.
we be renegades baby.


this is my personal favourite actually.
lucy has a wall here, for a mini-exhibition-style setup. hopefully you can make it out from the picture.
there's 4 of her paper works running along at eye-level.
i think it's loosely titled 'laser ladies of the night'
it rules.

here's some close-ups of the works:

once we got into the swing of it, it was quite fun.
there's really a lot of street art everywhere, so it seems perfectly natural to be pasting up some eye candy for the locals.

here's a strange floral-type mandala.
all done with texta and a billion stipples and lines.

all the art we put out is original - no copies.
all hand painted or drawn, one-of-a-kinds.
kinda feels nicer, for us anyway, to wholly hand over the work in one hit, rather than produce facsimiles of an original production, distributed en masse.
it's more labour-intensive, but hopefully, somehow, more ... i dunno ... special.

i love these guys!
ok, so these works - the bandit birds of spring (unofficial title) - are a truly collaborative work.
they're are supposed to be fun and joyous and celebratory of the slowly (so so so slowly...) arriving spring.
we're thinking we'll pop a few of these out every couple of weeks, slowly appearing like a flock of cheeky, sneaky birds, arriving for the sunshine.

lucy got to work on a whole pile of old photographs she bought at the flea market.
so we got those suckers out and about too.

detail




and also some altered book pages....


oh, and here's the cat-woman image that i drew up from one of lucy's collages that was in an earlier post.


we were quite busy actually, even though we were only out for maybe an hour to get these guys up.
but overall, there's a bit of work gone into them - what with the bandit birds of spring, the floral mandala, the laser-ladies of the night, the cat-woman... that's a lot of production.

but wait.

there's more!

a small series of birds, from lucy - that i'm calling Schnitt durch Vogel.

how cool is this g-bird...!?


detail



another bandit bird made its way into the aldi carpark
(yes mum, aldi does serve at least one purpose, aside from my 40c per bottle beer - street art!)


and sort of accompanying the bird, is a lucy flag work...

this was a work of serendipitous delight.
while putting the bird up, lucy noticed two very old, i'm gonna say 'cold-war-era' 4 inch nails coming out of the wall, which happened to be the exact, EXACT, right distance apart to hang her poetic urban intervention.


(dear berlin polizei: it would seem that images placed on this post may portray acts that contravene certain legalities that international visitors are generally requested to adhere to. this is simply a misunderstanding on your part. you do a good job. a very good job. these are not the droids you are looking for.)

look what came in the mail!

So we got a little card in the mail the other day, saying we had a LETTER.
It was very exciting. We did our best to translate it (which didn't go very far mind you - i think the best we got was something like 'your parcel ordinary is for collection to available locality on working day next')
but it said our letter was '10 stücke.'
Was ist das?! 10 stücke! Das ist sehr gut, nein? FYI, stücke means pieces.
10 PIECES? Unbelievable.
There must have been some kind of a mistake, a postal malfunction if you will.

So we find the post office (after much confusion and snitting - including direction from the shopping mall info desk, which was sheer gold,
'first you go downstairs [pointing up to the ceiling with her thumb], one floor, and drive along to end'.
haha - drive! in the shopping mall!
still, we were grateful for the help, twas better than our german would be).

The grumpy lady at the desk disappears to fetch our letter(s) and is gone a rather long time.
She then returns with a MOUND OF PACKAGES!!!
She requests our passports in a rather grumpy way
and accepts our drivers' licenses in a still rather grumpy way.
I look at the pile of packages and blurt "Holy SHIT!",
to which grumpy post lady cacks up laughing.
there's something very pleasing about getting the generally very unemotional germans to giggle or produce any sort of emotive reaction.


So, without further ado, we scurry off too goudy
(because we are now addicted to their fine coffee and go there everyday like fine losers)
for, well, coffee, obviously, to accompany us ripping those suckers open!! YES!!!
(Oh no - I have started to talk like Kent!)
haha - sucked in lu!

And what is inside but a rather MASSIVE assortment of novels,
from the one and only Sneaky Minx Sarah James and her trusty accomplice Stealthy Brigid Pants. WOWSERS!!! (I know, I said wowsers. It was an emergency though.)
How AMAZING!!! We now have a book in every genre imaginable
and can broaden our bed time reading from ...
ok it's true, our bedtime reading is ninja fruit and angry birds ...
but NOW we can delve into Rudyard Kipling, Tim Winton,
Bill Bryson and Jane Austen to name but a few.
But if I am going to be entirely truthful,
I am already nearly finished the cream of the crop:
Almost to Die For, by Tate Something-Stupid-Last-Name.
In a nutshell, she makes Stephanie Myer look like a literary genius
and my carpet cleaning pamphlet look like a thesis. FANTASTIC!!!
(I would like to say that I am lounging around reading something far more cleverererer
but it just isn't happening.)

the stack

Kent gets into it

So, a big hearty thanks to Sar, and the Mighty Mum - our little home is that much homier!
(and since we our housebound today due to tradesmen needing to enter our flat every hour
[too teeth gritty to explain right now] it is the perfect relaxing time killer!) Much love!
ditto that sentiment!
xxx

cookin' in the kuche

i.
am.
never.
drinking.

again.


ever.

I concur. I confess that this post was rearing and ready to go yesterday,
but yours truly couldn't get out of bed, let alone form a sentence in order to contribute.

'twas a good party.
even the polizei dropped in for a bit. nothing raises the cred of a party like a visit from the constabulary.

more later.
but before the party, we checked out some arty stuff.


the supermoon was seriously killer. we had clear skies, so the giant floating rock in the sky was monumentally present at every turn. it seemed like every direction we turned, we headed straight into the gravitational pull of this magnificent celestial guide. (This of course had nothing to do with the fact that the moon is fucking ginormous and is pretty much EVERYwhere at once anyway. Coz it's magic and shit.)

we went into mitte to see a show at a gallery where one of lucy's new berlin friends works. it was damned fine actually. titled, 'why women like to buy textiles that feel nice', it was an installation of silk curtains, floor to ceiling, with this fantastic graded colour variation, encircling the entire gallery space. based on a 1937 study by a sociologist, it was really evocative.

Really stunning work - I touched it a lot.


possibly even more exciting, at least, especially for lucy, was the appearance the 'crazy art twins'.
familiar to some, these two ladies (although i'm of the opinion that one is a man, debate still rages [yeah I kinda think so too ...she's pretty butch, in a cute sparkly make up and pink handbag kinda way]) appear at many swanky art events, are apparently collectors, and both dress absolutely identically, in every conceivable way. like some sort of living art performance. truly an amazing sight.

Seriously the most exciting thing to EVER HAPPEN EVER. Ok well maybe not ever. I saw a picture of these ladies on facebook last year, a friend had seen them at some show somewhere, possibly in Berlin, I dunno. So I think it was pretty awesome to bump into them (from a few metres away while hiding behind much cooler art show guests). But I did lose my shit a little bit - I glanced over and saw a rather gleaming bald head and lots (LOTS) of makeup and went huh, interesting looking dude, and then went OH MY GOD IT'S THE CRAZY ART TWINS AAAAAH! (To tell you the truth I didn't really shout that, just punched Kent several times and then proceeded to try and get my best creepy voyeuristic shot - see below.)

we didn't have enough balls to walk up to them and get a proper snap, so we only have this clandestine image, but hopefully you get the general gist. see the matching shoes, the bags, the coats - even the makeup is exactly duplicated. wunderbar!

then we went to another show, which was pretty good too. it had this great concept, a battle of two curators. each curator gets, i think it was like 6 artists. the same 6 each. and each curator puts together their own show using those same 6 artists. then the audience judges which curation was better.

Yeah. In theory it was awesome. In reality it was pretty retarded.

sorry i haven't got any images but there was some incidents with wine spilled on my arm, being elbowed in the neck by a teutonic giant and a general overwhelming claustrophobia attack that nearly resulted in me going postal and smashing 100 art hipsters in a frenzy of angst.

one room, there was a bouncer on the door, enforcing a line and a strict one-in/one-out policy. which was fucking annoying, frankly, especially when the only toilet was in that particular room. anyway, once we got in, we discovered that he was a performance art piece. which, in the end, after the annoyingness of it, was actually kinda good.

But also really really lame. All in all, a super fun experience (no that was not sarcasm), but if you have ever been to any art-wank-extravaganzas in Melbourne (because we all have, it's ok to say), you get the gist. I believe my voting card said something like "I'm voting for this room because it made me really angry, and then I thought it was funny, and now I'm angry again, and now I don't know." You gotta hand it to them - I'm still thinking about how stupid the whole thing was and how it was totally pretentious and there were so many hipsters there and it was the best fun EVER!!! Sigh. So many conflicting thoughts.

and then - party time!

so, in berlin, apparently it's customary to provide some sort of pre-party meal.
we got some chili con carne, some pasta salad and some mousse. not a bad deal.
(Thank god, considering the host then swanned around with trays of shots. How frat party!)
we got there at, like, 1030-11ish, to find about 12 people sitting on the kitchen floor, eating and talking very quietly. but, after about 30 mins or so, the place was an ever-increasing throb of newly arriving party goers.

the above image is indeed the kitchen of this apartment. (Kinda hilarious how we know NO ONE in this picture - to be frank I don't even remember any of those faces ... could have been the champagne ...) a pretty great space all round, and the bedrooms are also huge. so we baked in that smoky, noisy atmosphere till about 3am and stumbled our sorry asses out of there to find our way home.


ha ha!

at one point, we were on the train, chatting about god knows what,
probably about the desperate need for chips or a bio-wurst,
and lucy just piss-bolts out of the train, leaving me staring around the carriage, wondering, what the fuck?!
HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA!!!!
I knew I forgot something, turns out it was Kent.
then i hear the beep beep of the imminent door closure and a faint voice from outside saying 'our stop!'
so i dash like a startled rabbit out of the door, in the barest nick of time.

the above image is lucy losing her shit over the hilarity of the whole situation.
Everything got very funny after that. See below for Kent riding the escalator of doom:

tra la la I am so smart ...

Bah!

And I gotta put this last one in because I believe it's the last point before we both got pretty messy trying to find our way home. Gets ugly.


Then, an entire sunday based around getting up at around 11am, dragging our pathetic carcasses for a goudy coffee and then trudging back home, to be back in bed by 2pm. I promise I did eventually get up and get my flag on (pictures to come!) and we had a general lazy evening of drawing and watching movies (oh my god, District 9 - who knew?! Amazing!)

Today promises to be more productive - we're having a dinner party and cooking a roast - should be aaaawesome! (If only we could get it like our Mums do - we're relying on the magic of Jamie Oliver and the Interwebs. Wish us luck!)

xxx