A couple of weeks ago I joined the shop collective (in German Ladenkollektiv) Mitten im Walde in Berlin-Kreuzberg. Silke, the woman who is running the shop, wrote me a message at Augenblickphoto and asked if I would be interested in joining. I’ve been thinking for a while that I would love to see what it’s like to work in a shop because selling online is pretty darn lonely and I may want to open my own later when my daughters are a bit older. Plus the shop just happens to be about a two minute walk from where I live, so how could I say no?
There are twelve artists/designs/crafters in the shop altogether making everything from furniture, to pottery, to clothing to hats, to jewelry and to lamps. We each pay a small monthly rent and have two days a month when we have to work in the shop. I did my first “Ladendienst” (shop duty) today and, although it was pretty slow (we are on a side street in a basement shop, so it will take a while to get noticed) I really enjoyed it. Several friends stopped by and I listened to the new blues and old school jazz mix on my Ipod.
If you’re in Berlin and looking for a nice handmade gift (we even have handwoven cashmere scarves!) or would just like to check out a unique new independent shop, please come on by: Mitten Im Walde, Mittenwalderstrasse 46, Berlin-Kreuzberg (U-7 Gneisenaustrasse), Open from 1 to 8 Mon-Fri. If you come on Thursday or Saturdays I just might be there, so feel free to say hi.
My niece is in town and today we decided to spend the early afternoon in the Gerhard Richter exhibition in the Neue National Galerie. The only problem was that everyone and their uncle's second cousin twice removed is visiting the exhibition and, even though we got there pretty early, there was still a long wait. Both impatient by nature, we decided to go around the corner to the Gemäldegalerie instead.
The Gemäldegalerie has amazing paintings by many an old masters but, like all great museums, what makes it extra special are the museum rooms themselves.
High ceilings, lots of natural light, walls covered in beautiful cloth and these gorgeous wooden sitting areas for the awestruck or simply tired gallery goers.
As we wandered through the rooms, my niece and I marveled out the amazing way the painters depicted light and cloth, movement and depth, a masterful skill that is, sadly, largely lost.
I took lots of photographs for the Art Fragment series in my shop Augenblickphoto. I'll be printing some of the ones I like the best (not pictured here so stay tuned) to see if I want to work with them or not.
All in all, most definitely not a bad way to spend the first day of Spring in Berlin, 2012. ;)
For the last week or so we've really been enjoying what Germans call "Old Women's Summer" (Altweibersommer, though apparently it actually has more to do with spider webs.) In English I guess we call it Indian summer, though I never had much use for it since in California everything is either summer, Indian summer, spring or six weeks of torrential rains and mud slides. How's that for variety?
To enjoy it while it lasts we spent yesterday (which just happened to be Tag der deutschen Einheit) at Cecilienhof in Potsdam. We certainly weren't the only ones. When we were there we saw this ridiculously beautiful couple....
....the young and middle-aged....
....the middle-age middle aged....
...and of course the elderly. This is just a side note, but why do a lot of older Germans look like they spent their entire lives hauling sacks of potatoes and the only time they ever had fun was when their mother let them haul a ten pound sack instead of a 20 pounder? You can't see it so well on this picture, but when you zoom in this couple have such dour looks on their faces. In real life they weren't quite so bad. I think they even smiled at Miss Mia which, for a German, is almost like winning Miss Congeniality.
As much as I complain about Berlin winters (and, I assure you, I will again) if I ever were to go back to California I would miss autumn. Such beautiful light, crisp air, vibrant colors. California doesn't have autumn. The leaves on the Eucalyptus trees just dull a little. And then it's spring.
Needless to say, the girls had fun.
Right here they are getting excited because they just discovered a roly poly crawling across the bark. They are so my children.
Jasper's grandmother was once a lady-in-waiting at a castle a stone's throw from Cecilienhof. How did a California lass like me whose heart will always beat a little hippie end up with a Prussian count with aristocratic roots up the gazoo? Life is, indeed, full of surprises.
Fall light and Old Women's Summer we will miss you. Do come again.
This wee
kend I went to the Hello Etsy Summit on Small Business and Sustainability here in Berlin. I really had no excuse not to go, considering the conference was a ten minute bike ride from my apartment and I've also been selling in Curious Knopf and Augenblick Photo since Spring/Fall 2010 and in Schaufenster (for which this blog is named) before that.
I'm also thinking seriously these days about expanding both of my shops and (perhaps) even combining them with an actual Brick and Mortar shop here in Berlin. In the past few weeks I've been taking a workshop on Existenzgründung, i.e. how to go into business for yourself in Germany. Needless to say the bureaucracy, etc. is rather mind-boggling and worthy of a blog post all to itself, so I won't get into much detail here.
The conference was held at the eWerk in Berlin Mitte just around the corner from Postsdamer Platz. A former energy plant in gorgeous 1920s style, the building is now a conference center where they've apparently also hosted techno parties (or at least it looked like it from some of the images I found on google....) The plant was owned by AEG. I happen to know from a recent translation I did for the Visual History Archive on Forced Labor that AEG had a particularly shady past with forced Jewish and Polish Labor during the second world war, something that makes the topic of the summit all the more ironic.
The conference was split up in the main room (mainly for eating, chatting, networking, etc.), two rooftop rooms and the control room. I never went to anything in the control room, but it looked a lot like the one in Chernobyl pictured above. I know this because I went up their with my camera in hand no knowing that a) the elevator opens up into the middle of the room and b) a workshop was going on. Though I felt like I had landed in the middle of the "real world" in the Matrix, I was just too damn shy to snap a picture.
Speaking of too damn shy, that's one of the reasons I didn't get as much out of the conference as I might have since it definitely would have been a good chance to network. Although I am far from being painfully shy like I was as a teenager, I am still definitely introverted. Sometimes it really is a pain in the ass. I know a) that I am interested in people and like getting to know them and b) that once a conversation gets going everything is fine. But still, getting those conversations started of my own volition is just not that easy.
Then again, that's one of the reasons I decided to settle down in Berlin. In the US you're often seen as a freak if you are too introverted whereas in Berlin true extroverts are often seen as a pain in the ass. German (at least Northern German) culture is definitely introverted, so much so that, when with a group Germans, I am sometimes the biggest extrovert among them which is absolutely ridiculous.
The conference was basically split between the nuts and bolts side (PR, marketing, google and branding tips, etc.) and the inspirational, new economy side (but unfortunately not much "seller success" talks and workshops which would have been great.) On Saturday I did the nuts and bolts workshops which were interesting and helpful, albeit somewhat overwhelming. On Sunday I stayed downstairs for the inspirational stuff mainly because it was cold and rainy and I had come late and was too lazy to wait for the very slow elevator to take me up to the rooftop rooms.
I found Michiel Schwarz's talk on the Culture of Sustainism very inspiring and Biba Schoenmaker's talk about the Bread Fund, a trust based insurance for the self-employed in the Netherlands to be a brilliant idea I hope they soon implement in Germany, especially if I do go into business for myself full-time.
However, I found Douglas Rushkoff's talk a little over the top or maybe just too, well, American. Yes, it is important to know what the new social media is and how it defines us and yes, there are new possibilities for us to define ourselves and the new global economy in a different way but why does it have to be so big, so mind-boggling, so revolutionary? Maybe I've just become European enough to be turned off by this larger-than-life American presentation.
There is a reason I sell on Etsy and not on Ebay and that reason is I do like the personal, aesthetic and community aspect of it. I think a lot of buyers are drawn to this too. The concept definitely was new and is global-yet-local in a way that simply wasn't possible before. But why does it have to be life-changing, a whole new way of being, a revolution in how business is done? Etsy isn't going to change the world and I hope to god they don't think they are going to. If so, they will only be swallowed up by their own hype and fall into cynicism once the bubble bursts. Yes, the world can change and yes, you should live in a way that supports what you believe. But what the significance will be can only be seen once the events have already happened. To pump them up to the level of grandiosity as Rushkoff to a certain extent did seems ultimately hollow and destined for disillusionment.
Before I headed for home I went up the roof to take some pictures, at the time virtually deserted since everyone was downstairs drinking tea and staying out of the chill. I looked down at the hot air balloon I went to recently with Miss Mia and Little Li. Mia had wanted to go on it forever so finally we did. It was ridiculously expensive (6 Euros for each kid but 20 Euros for me for a 15 minute ride) and they played cheesy canned music at the top, but Mia loved every second of it.
I looked down on Trabi Safari reminding me I was on a rooftop of a building in the former East incredibly close to where the wall once stood.
And I looked down on this empty, over-grown lot, one of many hundreds in Berlin. Berlin may be changing. It may gradually be getting more expensive i.e. from dirt cheap to moderately affordable. But the city still has so much green. It has its problems, but it holds so much promise and possibility. We've got it good.
On Sunday Jasper and I called in a babysitter and spontaneously went to the ABC (art berlin contemporary) art fair About Painting. By far the coolest thing there were these huge hamster-wheel like things that kids could roll around in inside a pool. It really made the coolest sound and made us (almost) wish the kids were with us or (better yet) that they would allow adult-sized people in those balls.
Looking at those things reminded me of the time I put one of my pet rats in a hamster ball when I was a teenager. He stayed perfectly still and stared at me with his beady eyes as if to say "You've gotta be kidding me."
That's pretty much the way I felt when I walked around the art fair. Although it was called "About Painting" there were only actually two paintings there done by a woman born in 1944 who, as my brother-in-law assured me (he is a painter), is not very trendy. Everything else looked either as if you would have to read a 14 page essay to understand it or like my 4 year old daughter drew a princess castle and my 2 and a half year old daughter then threw up on it. Please, people. The emperor is wearing no clothes.
Seeing such art (or the art world in such a state) reminded me a lot of studying music at Mills College. Although I studied classical singing, what the music department at Mills is best known for is electronic and conceptual music. When I was studying there I was pretty open and went to a lot of different kinds of concerts. I remember in particular one where 25 women in tuxedo shirts played electric guitars with bottles of nail polish and another (from a famous composer from the University of Arizona) with a video installation of ants crawling over a microphone half buried in their nest.
The problem? The guitar playing sounded like hideous noise and the ant recordings like vague scratching. I understand that both art and music can be boring when they are merely beautiful, but when all you have is concept then they are worse then boring. They are simply ludicrous. These days any one artsy fartsy usually calls themselves a designer instead of an artist like they might have 10 or 15 years ago. On Sunday I could see why. If About Painting was a mirror of the contemporary art world then art, in my opinion is dead. Joseph Beuys may have said everyone is an artist, but I think it's time we got over it and something like, um, skill came back into the picture. 
Still, the fair was definitely worth a visit if not for the location alone. A former U-Bahn storage house, the rooms were spacious with beautiful light coming from the skylights and lots of warm gray tones abound. People watching was also definitely good. Lots of well dressed ingenues typing madly away on their Mac books. All gallery assistants I assumed.
And I saw a lot of really great shoes. Seriously. I almost asked a few women where they had bought them they were so damn gorgeous, but you just don't do that in Berlin, especially not at an art fair. Speaking of shoes, I never could figure out if the pair above were a work of art or if someone had strangely forgotten them. If anyone knows, please drop me a line. ;)
The word "Bauhaus" has meant a lot of different things to me in my life. When I was a teenage, I was a big fan of the band Bauhaus, much to my sister's chagrin. Listening to Peter Murphy have spastic fits about Bela Lugosi being dead was probably not the nicest thing to hear every morning through your bedroom wall. Although I didn't necessarily dress the part, my first boyfriend in high school did write me a poem half penned in his own blood (I thought it was the most romantic thing in the world) so I was definitely a bit of a goth girl. Hmm...Maybe that's why I still like to take photographs in graveyards.
Later I learned Bauhaus (literally "house of construction") was a design movement headed by Walter Gropius up until the 1930s. It is one of my favorite design styles by far, especially for architecture. I would love to collect more Bauhaus objects, but they're hard to come by, or at least at a decent price. Write "Bauhaus" in the description of anything on Ebay Germany and you're pretty much guaranteed a good price.
Shortly after I moved to Berlin I discovered a third Bauhaus, the Bauhaus Baumarkt. A huge hardware store a la Home Depot minus the plant nursery, Bauhaus is filled with things with sexy names like lumber, nuts and bolts and silicon tubing. Seriously though, I do find it kind of sexy there. Lumber smells great and all you see are men, men, men with an occasional lesbian mixed in for good measure.
Granted, the kind of men who loiter in Bauhaus lusting over power tools are generally not my type but I still definitely get a kick out of how surprised they are when they see me in there. I swear, at least three times I've had a man nearly drop his bucket of nails when he saw me, an ordinary woman, getting lost in the aisle of Bauhaus without a husband or boyfriend in tow. Bauhaus has so much testosterone in the air a (female) friend and I have joked all we have to do is walk into the place and our biceps start growing.
It was on a jaunt to Bauhaus a couple of months ago that I discovered these stones. I started mounting photographs to them and so far they've been pretty popular. You can find them at Augenblick Photo with many more to come.
A couple of weeks ago I joined the shop collective (in German Ladenkollektiv) Mitten im Walde in Berlin-Kreuzberg. Silke, the woman who is running the shop, wrote me a message at Augenblickphoto and asked if I would be interested in joining. I’ve been thinking for a while that I would love to see what it’s like to work in a shop because selling online is pretty darn lonely and I may want to open my own later when my daughters are a bit older. Plus the shop just happens to be about a two minute walk from where I live, so how could I say no?
There are twelve artists/designs/crafters in the shop altogether making everything from furniture, to pottery, to clothing to hats, to jewelry and to lamps. We each pay a small monthly rent and have two days a month when we have to work in the shop. I did my first “Ladendienst” (shop duty) today and, although it was pretty slow (we are on a side street in a basement shop, so it will take a while to get noticed) I really enjoyed it. Several friends stopped by and I listened to the new blues and old school jazz mix on my Ipod.
If you’re in Berlin and looking for a nice handmade gift (we even have handwoven cashmere scarves!) or would just like to check out a unique new independent shop, please come on by: Mitten Im Walde, Mittenwalderstrasse 46, Berlin-Kreuzberg (U-7 Gneisenaustrasse), Open from 1 to 8 Mon-Fri. If you come on Thursday or Saturdays I just might be there, so feel free to say hi.
