A Dutch artist is sitting in a Berlin gayborhood storefront where he is live-streaming photos and chats with unsuspecting local Grindr users to giant video screens in the window. Some of these men, perhaps unsurprisingly, are furious. Via Gay Star News:
The project is called Wanna Play? But many Grindr users don't consider the art playful, some consider it to be a gross invasion of their privacy. Others say they have felt manipulated into acting oddly or writing messages that they would never have done if it was being broadcast for the world to see. Parker Tilghman is one of the men furious over the art show. When he started chatting to Verhoeven, they traded pictures and chatted for awhile before he was asked whether he was interested in shaving the artist's beard. "Given the odd nature of our conversation I comically asked, 'Are you going to murder me?' to which he responded, 'No, but I'm afraid you might be the one to murder me.' When Tilghman went to the address the artist gave him, standing on the corner of Marienenstrasse, he saw his Grindr chat out there for everyone to see. "Someone involved in the project confronted me and I shouted at him louder than I have ever shouted in my life. The entire block stopped, at one point they started clapping. I screamed, 'How dare you? You are violating peoples lives, you are publicly mocking people and projecting the pictures and words onto a screen that an entire city block in one of the busiest parts of Kreuzberg for everyone to see.'"
The two-week installation is in its third day and is live-streaming here. At this writing it appears that the screen is turned off.
For years, Wowereit had enjoyed popularity far beyond the capital's borders, not least thanks to a deft turn of phrase and considerable fearlessness in the face of the tabloid media. "I'm gay and that's OK," he casually remarked in the runup to his election in 2001, becoming the first high-profile German politician to declare his homosexuality. Another snappy phrase, his 2003 description of Berlin as "poor but sexy", summed up his achievement in reinventing the formerly divided city as Europe's capital of cool, helping to attract tourists and investors from across the globe. On Tuesday, Wowereit said at the press conference called to announce his departure that he was leaving in response to increased speculation about his future from within his own Social Democratic party ranks. He said he had originally wanted to announce his intention in June, "but then we won the World Cup". He is to leave office on 11 December.
A cemetery for lesbians will open outside of Berlin on Sunday. The project, which is on the grounds of a Lutheran Church, has been criticized in the German press by writers who characterize its backers as lesbian separatists.
“We are the first real generation of emancipated, feminist, open lesbians, and we need somewhere to be buried,” said Dr Astrid Osterland from Safia, an association for older, mostly gay women. Hitting back at criticism of the burial area in the Georgen-Parochial-Friedhof, Osterland explained that the project had “absolutely nothing against men”. They are welcome to have their urns here, but women will get first pick of the plots, the 69-year-old said, who has her own spot reserved. “There is no reason to be buried anonymously anymore and like everyone else, I want to lie with the people I've fought with,” she said. This was, she explained, logistically easier in a specific cemetery.
Safia has about 500 members. The group's leader says that there are no "strict rules" barring heterosexuals or gay men from being buried in the cemetery. More about the arrangement:
The group was given use of the cemetery area for 30 years in exchange for cleaning up and landscaping the area, and promising to be responsible for its upkeep. In Germany is it customary to have long-term, renewable leases on burial plots rather than buy them outright. "We don't have to pay any rent, but we had to invest a lot of money to turn that part of the cemetery into a usable burial ground again," Zachau said Tuesday. The group commissioned a landscaping company to build winding sand paths and has reserved spaces for cremated ashes in urns and for the burial of bodies. The area is framed by oak, birch and yew trees.
News about the project has reached American right-wing sites, which are reacting as you would predict.
Gad Beck, an anti-Nazi Zionist resistance fighter and the last known gay Jewish survivor of the Holocaust, died on Sunday in Berlin. He passed away in a senior citizens' home six days before his 89th birthday, which would have been on June 30. Beck was a pioneering gay activist and educator in a severely anti-homosexual, repressive post-World War II German society. He was famous for his witty, lively style of speaking. On a German talk show, he said, “The Americans in New York called me a great hero. I said no... I’m really a little hero.” Perhaps the single most important experience that shaped his life was the wartime effort to rescue his boyfriend. Beck donned a Hitler Youth uniform and entered a deportation center to free his Jewish lover Manfred Lewin, who had declined to separate himself from his family.
The famed Berlin man who was said to be cured of HIV after undergoing blood transplants for leukemia may still have the virus in his body.
[N]ew research presented on 8 June at the International Workshop on HIV & Hepatitis Virus "challenge[s] these results," asserts Alain Lafeuillade of the General Hospital in Toulon, France, a well known HIV/AIDS cure researcher. Lafeuillade issued a press release, "The So Called HIV Cured 'Berlin' Patient Still Has Detectable HIV in His Body," that questions whether Brown was reinfected and may still be infectious to other people. Lafeuillade also posted a blog item, "The Weird Story of the Berlin Patient," raising similar questions. The scientists who conducted the new study strongly object to Lafeuillade's interpretation of their results. "We weren't trying to say HIV was still there or he hadn't been cured," says virologist Steven Yukl of the University of California, San Francisco, who gave the talk.
Berlin's openly gay mayor was reelected to a third term yesterday.
Berlin's mayor, Klaus Wowereit, will remain in office for a third term. Wowereit, who became the first openly gay leader of a German state in 2001, is known for his popular touch and distinctive Berlin accent. He has ruled in alliance with the Left Party for 10 years but could switch allegiance to the Greens, who made gains of 4.5 percent and polled 17.6 percent. The Left Party secured 11.7 percent of the vote. A coalition with the CDU would also be possible. Wowereit indirectly laid out conditions for a partnership with the Greens on Sunday evening, saying it was "important that they come out in favor of politics that favor development, progress, and change rather than a stalemate."
Some believe Wowereit could succeed Chancellor Angela Merkel in 2013.
RELATED: Germany's Pirate Party earned enough votes to seat 15 representatives in the state parliament. Initially formed to battle copyright and patent laws, the Pirate Party also advocates for free internet service and free public transit. The Pirate Party has chapters in many countries, including the United States.
Knut, the polar bear who as a cub captured the hearts of the world and sold millions in plush toys for the Berlin Zoo, died unexpectedly yesterday at the age of four.
"Everyone is just in shock here," said Claudia Bienek, a spokeswoman for Berlin Zoo where Knut shot to global fame in 2007 as a photogenic snow-white cub after being rejected by his mother and reared by hand. Knut, pulled dead from a pool in his enclosure he shared with three females on Saturday afternoon, was just four years and three months old, well below the average life expectancy for polar bears of around 35. The cause of Knut’s untimely death was not immediately known, said Heiner Kloes, in charge of bears at Berlin Zoo. Vets were due to conduct an autopsy on Monday. The BZ daily quoted zoo visitors as saying that Knut was sitting on rocks in his enclosure when his left leg began to shake. He then started walking around in circles before falling into the water.
I was in Berlin a few years ago during the height of the Knut craze and his likeness had been stamped on just about anything a tourist could carry. The one souvenir that made it into my suitcase was a small toy Knut for my nephew. He's going to be devastated.
Berlin's memorial to gay victims of the Holocaust is an austere concrete block with a small window that displays a "never-ending" video loop of two men kissing. Installed in 2008, original plans for the display called for the gender to the two people in the video to change every two years. But now that it's almost time for the switch to a lesbian video, historians are crying foul.
Alexander Zinn, a board member of the foundation that maintains the former Nazi concentration camps near Berlin, said such a move would distort history as there were no known Holocaust victims targeted for being lesbian. "Historical truth must remain the focus," Zinn told AFP on Thursday. He has banded together with other Holocaust experts and fired off a letter of protest to Culture Minister Michael Neumann and Berlin's openly gay mayor, Klaus Wowereit. Neumann defended the plans as true to the original concept of the memorial in addressing present-day discrimination against lesbians and gays as well as the plight of homosexuals at the hands of the Nazis. "The option of using a lesbian film motif in the memorial is in no way meant to put on the same level the persecution of homosexual men and women under the Nazi regime," he said in a statement.
It took a few days to get my photos off of Aaron's laptop, but I've finally posted a gallery of some of my pics from Berlin and Folsom Europe. There's a small slideshow at the bottom of this post, but since a few of the pics are NSFW, you'll probably want to view the full-screen versions on your home machine. (Hence this weekend posting.) Click on the "slideshow" button at the above link for full embiggening and captions.
Below are a couple of shots of the fair. As you can see, it was a comparatively civilized event, held on a lovely tree-shaded street flanked by dozens of tables with umbrellas. Complete nudity and public sex was forbidden, unlike at San Francisco's Folsom. Which was a good thing, because also unlike SF (and NYC), the fair takes place in the middle of a quite nice residential area. We noticed a number of bemused locals weaving their way through the crowds carrying laundry and groceries, but they and their kids saw nothing more notable than the occasional bare ass in chaps. Wait, I guess the guys in full-body rubber suits and gas masks were probably somewhat more memorable.Saturday night we attended the charmingly named PiG Party, the official dance, which was held at a massive old factory way out in das boondocks of East Berlin. The cavernous space probably could have held two Roseland Ballrooms (site of the Saint Black Party), although I'm told attendance was about half of the Black Party. While it got very crowded, it was never felt uncomfortably so.
The place had no restrooms, so folks had to tramp into a field next door where several big trailers were parked. Not a big deal, really, except that the continuous light rain rendered the field into gelatinous grey muck very quickly. Some guys were not happy about ruining their "show" boots. The coat check was also outside, about a hundred feet past the trailers, so some of the nakeder guys arrived shivery and wet.
As tends to be the case these days, I wasn't crazy about the music of DJ Jack Chang, who played a trancier take on typical circuit tribal without a single vocal for the 6.5 hours I was there. (You can download Chang's set here.) Still, he did throw in a number of beautiful swirly dropouts, which I love, but are the bane of America's teeth-grinding party boys. The sound was pretty good for such a big bare room - not overloud, but strong enough to rattle a harness on the dance floor. One nice bonus of such a large space - the temperature stayed a perfect 75 the entire time. On the downside, the ceiling (about 70-80 feet high) was made entirely of glass, so the morning light seemed to dampen spirits a bit by around 6am.
Peering over a rail into a basement space around 2am, I spied what I thought was the usual American-style party boy resuscitation food area - fruit, cookies, etc. But much later in the party I wandered down to find it was a full restaurant, including a crepe station. A crepe station, at a leather dance. That still kills me.
I met a few JMG readers at the party, so "Hallo" to: Ken (the cute bearded cub from Milan), Jeffrey (the hilarious Brit), Alex from Moscow, Brantt from Berlin, Henri from Paris, and the big bear thruple from San Francisco. Below is a one-minute clip of the view from the balcony, but I'm not sure it gives you an idea of just how big the space was. I'd definitely visit Folsom Europe again, including the PiG Party, only next time I'll try to get out of Schoenburg (one of the gayborhoods) a bit more. Although we did get some sightseeing done, the bulk of our trip was kind of like visiting NYC for Pride and hardly leaving Christopher Street. Next time.
Similar to the program I've seen in DC, these bikes are parked all around Berlin for folks to rent and explore the city. You register with Call-A-Bike online or by phone and they'll give you an access code for the lock of a nearby bike. A 24-hour rental is quite inexpensive at $14 and when you're done you just call and tell them where you left it. Berlin is the perfect city for biking, lovely intimate neighborhoods, no hills (that I saw) and bike lanes are pretty much everywhere. I'm definitely taking advantage on my next visit. The only downside is you'll have to be on the continuous lookout for dumbass Americans like me who forget every ten minutes that many of the bike lanes are actually on the sidewalks, not the streets. "Joe, you're in the bike lane. AGAIN." (I nearly got clobbered about twenty times.) Berliners use their bike bells the way Manhattan's cabbies lean on their horns. Good thing.
OK, so after the first couple of days of being bothered by dive-bombing bees in Berlin, I was thinking I'd come home and blog something like, "Now I know where all our bees have gone. They're in Berlin." Then on Sunday we were wandering around Alexanderplatz and decided to stop at a quite lovely looking bakery for something sweet. I walked up to to the display case and stopped in horror. "Wait! We are SO not eating here. There's bugs all over the food!" BEES, actually. (Only a few of the dots in this picture are raisins. Embiggen.)
The bees were flying all around in and out of the case and the staff was completely cool with it. Patrons were nonchalantly picking out their selections and the counter person would reach in, shake off the bees, and hand it over. Uh, WTF? An equally freaked out American woman muttered to me, "I can't handle this," and scooted out past us. We left without inquiring, not wishing to be laughed at. I've tried Googling "bees on food Germany Berlin" and other things, but have found no answer. I'm sure somebody here can explain this.
As you can see by the coffee table in our Berlin apartment, by yesterday it was apparent that it hadn't been the most "cultural" of visits. Depends on how you define culture, I suppose. Embiggen at your own risk. NSFW.
We had an incredible lunch at a place called König in the Alexanderplatz neighborhood of Mitte, the centermost Berlin borough where most of the museums are. Then we rode to the top of the Fernsehturm, the Communist-era tv tower which is the tallest object in Germany. The view reveals the striking differences between the stark and ugly formerly East Berlin buildings and the low-rise charm of West Berlin.It's a bit difficult to get your bearings in Berlin, the TV tower is the only thing of any height (by American standards) and with the narrow curvy streets, you can rarely see it. I'll be back to regular blogging in the morning.
Pretty much every person we've met here immediately wants to talk about Sarah Palin thanks to my Obama cap, which only a hour finally elicted the above quote from a shopper at Checkpoint Charlie. The consensus on Palin is completely horrible, of course. One very tall Finn told me last night that she's become a national joke for his countrymen. Oh, us too, honey!
Our apartment here in Berlin is near Viktoria-Louise Platz, about a ten-minute walk from the heart of the Schoeneberg gayborhood. Last night we barhopped for a few hours, hitting Prinzknecht, Mutschmanns, and Scheune. Berlin is packed with tourists for Folsom Europe of course, so we've met more Brits and Italians than locals, so far. Tons of NY'ers here too.This morning six of us hit Ka-De-We, the ginmorous fancy department store near Kurfurstendamm, where we had a fancy brunch in their sprawling "food court" which must have two dozen themed cafes. Then we took a fantastic three hour bus tour which was put together by Folsom Europe organizers. It was quite amusing to watch the reactions of our fellow tourists when a hundred leathermen poured out of the bus at every stop. The tour was filmed by a local documentarian and somehow Chris, Aaron, Little Tom and I got into about every scene, maybe because we were American, maybe because we were the only ones not in leather. More photos later, hopefully. Our apartment doesn't have wireless and I'm finding it a chore to lug the laptop around. Hey look, gas is like, $9 a gallon!
Aaron, Little Tom, Chris and I are in Berlin until next week, posting will be light except for some touristy photo stuff from the occasional cafe. Now we get to see what good three years of high school German does me, thirty years later. I'm betting, nicht viel.
Perhaps the Republican National Committee needs to lay off the prescription drugs. It certainly should consider laying off web videos. Consider this monstrosity, which "provides a parody of what an Obama TV ad in Berlin, Germany might look like, with video commentary from Obama's international fan base." Among other things, the ad:
* Insinuates that Obama is a commie * Insinuates that Germany has anointed Obama "king of the world" * Shows that no one at the RNC knows what the word "parody" means.
Sure, it annoys me that Germans have the gall to lecture America about anything. Hey, you're the people who fell for Hitler. You're the people who plunged the entire world into war twice. (Maybe you liked Obama so much because he completely forgot to mention that.) You're the ones who got to build a nice little socialist democracy while we footed the military bill to protect your western half from your eastern half. So don't go acting morally superior and telling me who to vote for. Send over your beer and sausage, but keep your opinions to yourselves.
All of that said, this is still one of the worst "ads" I've ever seen.
Pretty much every person we've met here immediately wants to talk about Sarah Palin thanks to my Obama cap, which only a hour finally elicted the above quote from a shopper at Checkpoint Charlie. The consensus on Palin is completely horrible, of course. One very tall Finn told me last night that she's become a national joke for his countrymen. Oh, us too, honey!
