The last fortnight…

Apologies for not writing last week but nothing of real note actually happened.  My brother visited me the weekend before last and we walked round Dresden and looked at stuff, and it rained constantly, and we had some rather nice lunches, and I introduced him to my favourite bar (Unfassbar in the Neustadt), which he found highly depressing, and made me promise not to take him back there again.  Personally I love the cheap drinks, crap 80s music, smoky atmosphere and barman with a huge handlebar moustache, but I think it creeped him out.  I also discovered a nice pub in Laubegast and we found that the Deutsches Hygiene Museum in Dresden is not particularly interesting.  They had an exhibition on work, with sod all in the way of actual exhibits (except for, strangely enough, €1M in bank-notes behind a glass screen), just lots of videos of people describing completely mundane things, like when they wake up in the morning.  It wasn’t even absurd enough to be humourous, and I wondered if the whole thing was supposed to be ironic, because people had to put in work to make an exhibition about work, so even though the exhibition didn’t work in the sense that it was crap, it was a product of people’s work, so it WAS work, transcending if you would the traditional boundaries between artwork and the exhibitions that hold art and instead making the exhibition a piece of (as I’ve said, shoddily executed) artwork in itself.  …or something.  Anyway I’m beginning to suspect that this was actually a single monolithic slice of post modern art so fiendish in its conception that no-one has even noticed it!   Or maybe it was just crap.

This last weekend was much more exciting though, a trip to Berlin.  Due to leaving booking to the last minute I ended up booking rooms in Friedrichshain on the border of Kreuzberg, in an area that was, er, interesting.  Unfortunately though a funny looking man has come in and wants to turf me out because they are locking up the labs at TU Dresden at the moment, so I’m going to have to write about it tomorrow instead.