Taking Pictures So You Don't Have To

I am producing more photos than prose these days, so this will be kind of a bare bones update with lots of pretty pictures.

I’m in the final week of my intensive German instruction course. I’ve done this many times before—filled out all of the worksheets and taken all of the notes, read about the Wall and the Wende and the Widervereinigung—but I am still thankful for the review. Classes start in two weeks and Professor Doctor Lutz Danneberg is going to want to talk about Kafka, not the correct construction of a passive conjunctive II past tense sentence.

ITEM: there are a lot of sweet posters up all over this city. They seem to just appear magically, as if they are applied by invisible leprechauns very early in the morning, or like they are a natural protective dermis grown by construction barriers and sidewalk transformers (I’m hearing David Attenborough saying, with great reverence, “As stop motion photography reveals, the old posters gradually give way to the elements, allowing the new, freshly-grown advertisements to emerge from underneath”). Only once so far have I actually caught a posterman in the act:Also his neat modified post-up bike:
Here are three posters for upcoming shows. I want to see the first two, and the third dude shares my middle and last names and has got the hair and the nose and the mustache and the yellow slacks that I can only someday dream of achieving.(Yes, Peaches Christ Superstar is Peaches singing all of Jesus Christ Superstar. Yes, I'm seeing it on Thursday. Yes, that is great.)ITEM: American influence in Berlin: On the plus side there are these awesome jars of Hot Dog Sauce and Hamburger Sauce,And on the downside there is this crappy merchandise for the stupid Yankees, who stink, and who are somehow the only stupid MLB team with it’s stupid merchandise in this dumb store.

ITEM: heh heh hehITEM: I went to the opera. The show was Carmen, so it was cool to be able to recognize some of the main themes. Still, though: looooooooooooooong time to sit and listen to Germans dressed as Spaniards sing in French.

Look at all those attentive krauts down in the classy season ticket area:The building was sort of astounding. Very old, very geometric and efficient, with that strange sense of time travel I associate with well-maintained dirt-old structures. None of my pictures really turned out, except for this one of the magnificent primary chandelier: See, that is the kind of thing that the word “magnificent” was made for.

ITEM: photos that didn’t’ fit anywhere else:

I call this one, The Tower And The Moon (And The Clouds At Night):

And finally, this one is Duck-Duck, The Duck In My Elevator Who Loves Smoking Cigarettes But Can't: