Preparing the environment, installing j2se, j2ee, collaxa, bpelz and cygwin, I am getting ready for a more structured division of my days. This improved efficiency will already be a blessing. I look forward to devote part of my time to bioinformatics again, a field of knowledge which is both inspiring in a philosophical and social political level, and a fundament of my socio-economic independence, which is a requirement for intellectual independence.

Birmarck’s Realpolitik is so identical to the ‘might makes right’ attitude of the hawks in the Bush government, to the extent that it contains the same hybris overlooking the fundamental fault of the Bismarckan attitude: the long term interests of the state do not correspond, and sometimes linea recta oppose the short term interests of the state.

A Nigerian Drugring in a German Park for the People?
Today we ran for 25 minutes in Park Volksheide. It is now completely obvious to me, that the place is swarming with Nigerian drugtrafficers, except for a small group of six north Africans. The system in which they operate is fairly complex as it is obvious to the watchful observer. One needs only the slightest itch of streetwisdom to understand and read the true purpose of their very evident bodylanguage. The system as I have observed it in the park from running two times around it, works a little like the following.
There are roughly four groups of trafficers, all Nigerians: the shopkeepers, the watchmen, the couriers, and the hustlers. Continue reading →

Schloss Charlottenburg partly in scaffolding
Mausoleum: Friedrich Wilhelm III, first king of Prussia and Wilhelm I, first Emperor of Germany, with their respective wives, lie in state in this Doric temple, designed by Schinkel.
Belvedere, the tea house, now houses the Porcelain Museum
The Baroque garden and the latter part in English lanschape style
the wrapped up statue of The Great Elector

After our walk through the Schloss park we enter the Museum für Vor- und Frühgeschichte, which possesses that part of the Schliemann treasure from Troy, which the Russians for one reason or another did not take with them to Moscow, where now the famous Agamemnon mask is stored. Today after 1 pm, might be free entrance, it’s not our lucky day, because even the jewelry of Troy is not on display until the 12th of June, being next week. Well, our day is not over, and our stay is not at an end yet. Three busses of nuns unload. They have unpacked their lunches and stabled all out on a foldable table in the shadow of the trees in front of the Kleine Orangerie. Continue reading →

Running in Volkspark Hasenheide. It is another beautiful and sunny day. We ran for twenty minutes in the park. Little schoolchildren are taken into the park to play, they run just far enough after each other, not to flee from underneath the protective wings of the school-mistress. They must barely be six years old, their faces turn insecure only a few meters away from the teacher. She has an easy job today, she rests in the sun, if something is wrong, the toddlers run up to her and find comfort in an attentive ear. Every now and then, we pass a group of runners or single runner, an old man fills out the puzzle in the newspaper on a wooden bench, already at 11.00 am a beerbottle next to his lap. If a man drinking beer any time during the day, any place in the city, makes you feel uncomfortable, don’t go to Berlin. Drinking beer seems like drinking coffee in the US. At 10.00 am the first tables at the local bar’s terrace are occupied by men in their fifies or sixties, unemployed, pensioneered or off duty, drinking the Berliner Pilsner from the bottle. Continue reading →

Today it’s Pfingsten (Whitsun) and all shops will be closed today. It’s not a holiday in the USA and by now that’s my point of orientation. We are in vain trying to walk and find an open store, but ultimately realize it’s a national holiday and no one will be working. We take the U-Bahn to Friedrichstrasse and walk to Unter den Linden. From the corner of Friedrichstrasse and Unter den Linden it’s only a small walk to the German annex of the Guggenheim Museum, a collaboration between the Deutsche Bank and the Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation. Here the exhibition ‘Global Groove 2004’ is shown, Nam June Paik’s homage to Media Arts. The exhibit is a collage of his works in the late 60s and early 70s, centering around his classic work “Global Groove” from 1973, broadcasted on WNET/Thirteen.

Many exhibitions are full of contrast and ambiguity, not as work on itself, but as an exhibited work in an exhibition space with visitors. The work is made with so much commitment, and visitors who are interested in the work themselves often possess a certain commitment, but there is the inevitable separation between the product of the artist and the passive presence of the visitor, lacking the interaction. Continue reading →

I had to buy a monthly ticket for the public transport in Berlin, costing €64. With bicycles costing not much more than €100 this is barely worth the price, as long as Charlene will stay for another two more months, and friends visiting in June. I will look for a bike from next month on and look forward to just wander off into town for a few hours.

The Karneval der Kulturen was more crowded than I can enjoy. The parade itself a gay spectacle of dressed up and adults made up with provincial color schemes. This ‘cultural’ spectacle is already not much more than most of such mass festivals, a bread and games spectacle. The local dance groups performing culturally tainted dances was perhaps most enjoyable with its absence of pretention. But the crowd than swallows the massive group of people is too much of a presence for me to enjoy. To walk you stand more in line, to buy anything eatable or drinkable you stand in line or you have to surrender yourself to the greedy spirit of entrepeneurship that pops up in every first floor window and door opening, in the back the mustered cradles of beer and soda. I detest such vendorship mentality and could only suffer to buy something from such pathetic greed for a quick buck. Continue reading →

We will walk to Bergmannstraße through the Volkspark Hasenheide. In the park we take a shortcut, which leads us along the nude bathing area, where mostly midlife aged males stretch their wrinkled bodies out in the early summer sun, among them one woman, spreading her knees, stretching her joins and loins. The attitude toward and tradition of nudism in Germany is incomprehensible in the States, even in the Netherlands. It remains an ambiguous cultural phenomenon, also to me, as I try to estimate the psyche of the average nudist here at Hasenheide, half of the men seeming to search for a confirming glance, staring at the passers-by at the pedestrian pathway. I feel comfortable with the idea that the nude is tolerated, and that in the middle of Neukölln with its many, mostly Islamic immigrants.

At Bergmannstraße a street fair was taking place, with many second hand articles, books and clothes being offered. Some market-vendors were professional alcoholics, others weekend market-vendors, but most of the articles offered were sincerely second-hand, a rare phenomenon in Amsterdam, as I remember, where the second-hand market was dominated by professional exploiters, labeling anything second-hand that would sell well, and labeling anything antiques that was second-hand. Continue reading →

I experience today the first day of intellectual silence, as long as I remember. How, sweet to have sunken into these singular thoughts, that are elongated and clear. No desire to break out of the concentration, but a yearning to continue the thread that is unraveling. I am drilling into the well of thoughts that make the poet, although my finding might not be great yet, but my yearning and attention has been awakened.

At night we walk to the Blücherstraße, where the yearly Karneval der Kulturen takes place. This multicultural festival has turned into a large demonstration of Berlin’s multicultural society, a demonstration against national-German tendencies of the past and present. Hundreds of stands and a dozen or so main podia are spread around the area of the Blücherstraße and the Zossenerstraße, in Kreuzberg. Against the background of the red dom of the Cathedral of the Holy Cross, and right beside the Jerusalem cemetery, huge beer jugs are served to a mixed crowd, which is seated near the stand at the lines of plain, wooden, square tables and benches. At these mini Biergartens a colorful mixture of people eat world snacks or just plain German Bratwurst, drink up their beers or their tropical cocktails. Continue reading →

So recent now are the impressions of Trier, that I look forward anxiously to return to Berlin. Knowing what lasted time, it is as if the objects we know today, the present are easier to recognize in the storms of current events. The sight of classic times, behold, of names that once were claimed by the flesh of living people, but now, detached from their physical temples, have regained their freedom of eternity. Only now can they be observed, can they be distinguished from the masses of millions, as true names, free of their bodily representations, standing free in eternity are the names of ruins and resurrected facades.

The transposement in time, erupts from the ashes of involvement and commitment, the sense of travel within me, again a longing for journey, to wander for ten long years. The ‘porta nigra’ is probably the best known Roman building in Trier that has been preserved. But also there are the remnants of later times, the baroque era, imperial time and modernity, but mostly am I drawn to the Roman and medieval sites.

The ‘porta nigra’ with its solid, blackened façade in the heart of modern Trier, still today feels as if one approached the entrance of the old city. Continue reading →

With the German Frühstuck at the Gästehaus Ravené still lying heavily on my stomach and my memory alike, we travel down to Trier by train.