January 25
The airline told us to book a flight out of Berlin early. It’s the weather industrial complex controlling our travel plans, we thought, overhyped. Plus we were on the guestlist at Kit Kat and had tickets for Jenny Erpenbeck.
Tell us if you ever come to NYC, we asked the DJ.
We won’t be there as long as the Orange Menace is there, he replied.
Techno energy beats back hate. That worked perfectly in Cabaret at the original Kit Kat, I replied.
Sigh, nevertheless we left a day early, before our friends headed out to the KikKat. Had a blast at Bethanien and said goodbye to Berlin.
Left Berlin at 6 am. Flew back to the crazy usa. Arrived to cold blue skies. Ran home to the cats. News reports that another protester was shot by cops. Another demo at Union Square. Biked out. It was cooooooold!!!! Brrrr!!! Minnesota protesters I salute you, waving non violence, civil disobedience, strikes. Stay safe everyone. Stay strong. Be smart. Look out for each other. Power in numbers. The international papers are reporting the US is randomly killing, randomly killing its own citizens like Iran.
Autopsy reports show that Renee Good was shot three times, killed with a gunshot wound to the head by ICE agents.
"I'm not mad at you dude," her last words.
But they call Renee and Alex terrorists. 2 plus 2 equals 5 afterall.
Ron Kuby writes:
I just watched ICE agents pepper spray, take down, pummel, then execute an American citizen in daylight in a major American city. I then saw them scatter as after they fired ten shots, looking like guiltu little boys who just broke Mom’s favorite vase. I’ve seen this before, of course—I watched numerous police murders of civilians before. What I have not seen before were the blatant lies told by the highest levels of the U.S. government—that he was brandishing a firearm at the agents (he was a licensed gun owner who never drew his weapon) that he intended to commit mass murder of ICE agents (ridiculous on its face), that his possession of an extra magazine was proof of his intent to cause a mass assasination (almost every who lawfully carries gas at least one spare mag). This seems new to me. Of course, local officials have been denied access to the evidence and the FBI, perhaps not yet purged of every impartial investigator, as been taken off the case, and state and local officials have been denied access to the evidence. PS. Not that is matters, but the victim was an ICU nurse with the VA.
Mark Anderson posted a Statement from Michael and Susan Pretti, Parents of Alex Jeffrey Pretti:
"We are heartbroken but also very angry.
Alex was a kindhearted soul who cared deeply for his family and friends and also the American veterans whom he cared for as an ICU nurse at the Minneapolis VA hospital. Alex wanted to make a difference in this world. Unfortunately, he will not be with us to see his impact.
I do not throw around the 'hero' term lightly. However, his last thought and act was to protect a woman. The sickening lies told about our son by the administration are reprehensible and disgusting. Alex is clearly not holding a gun when attacked by Trump's murdering and cowardly ICE thugs. He had his phone in his right hand and his empty left hand is raised above his head while trying to protect the woman ICE just pushed down, all while being pepper sprayed.
Please get the truth out about our son. He was a good man. Thank you."
2 plus 2 equals 5.
Not a good direction.
Conspiracies abound that the murder taking place before the storm was all part of the plot.
“Although there weren’t ongoing protests this stuff is turning people against them,” Kate theorized.
“yes, lots of cracks,” I reply.
Kate continues,
“People who never get involved in stuff are asking me how to plug in…”
No one really knows.
I was in Berlin to get away from this.
But trying to run away from history, Berlin is not a place to go.
Jan 21
Much of the Spree is frozen. Walking between the Kreutzberg Turkish market and Jannowitzbrücke, graffiti is everywhere, condemning the right, fascism, and Trump with his territorial ambitions.
The sun sets as we stroll along, looking at the frozen waterway, before we get to the Berlin dome.
On our way to a book talk on the Berlin airlift of 1948 when us pilots dropped candy, food and supplies in Berlin. JOSEPH PEARSON's new book The Airlift. "From 1948 to 1949, airmen who had spent the war dropping bombs on Berlin now risked their lives dropping chocolate bars. Berliners, who had once looked to the skies with dread and hatred, now gazed upward with hope and admiration. Joseph Pearson’s new book, Sweet Victory: How the Berlin Airlift Divided East and West, offers a cultural history of this massive air relief operation—one that wrote the playbook for the Cold War and still influences Western thinking and diplomacy with Russia."
"The book has a poignance as we see old alliances unravel" mentioned one of the discussants, introducing the author.
Pearson explained that this is a story about soft power, a friendship narrative linking cultural policy and everyday life. He told the story of a young girl, Mercedes Wild, who saw the planes above, disturbing her animals at home. Her father had disappeared in the war, probably in a Russian prison. The older boys found the chocolate the US bombers were dropping. She wrote one of the bombers, telling him about how his planes startled the farm animals. And that the older boys found his chocolate. The pilot from Utah replied, sending her some candy,replying, 'Your Chocolate Uncle.' She traded it for marbles. The two stayed in touch through the years. Friendship can make progress beyond geopolitics, says Pearson, reflecting on the terrible situation we find ourselves in. These are allies against communism. Yet, this is a friendship that has been lost, that has been challenged after a huge victory against Stalin all those years ago. After years of fighting on the Eastern Front, now to look at the West as a threat, history doesn't repeat, it does rhyme.
Says Samuel Delany:
“President Trump is trying to block a report filled with photographs of Mar-a-Lago, ranging from images of top secret documents on the floor to the president arm-in-arm with Jeffrey Epstein. Meanwhile, he's been forced to admit that he can't invade Greenland with military force, and can only enact random tariffs on Americans until Europe gives him a free island. No one's very impressed with the Nobel Prize he received from his friend who got one for her work in Venezuela. Also, his physical symptoms keep getting worse.”
January 22
It's ahistorical histrionics, says Baby C, sitting at Laidak, our favorite coffee shop, located at Boddinstraße 42/43 in Neukölln, where we spent the afternoon writing and chatting about the current state of the Spectacle from Davos. Greenland, Greenland, Greenland. The Orange One, Orange One, Orange One on everyone' mind. On the way to the Mind Shapes show, we stopped at a little wine bar and tapas joint on Mainzer Str 39, eating tapas at CIUK, mushrooms and polenta and cheese, drinking an Americano, one part campari, red vermouth, and soda, shaking our heads. At the art show, everyone was shaking their heads even more. The conversation extended into the evening.
Why's Denmark have Greenland?
What did he say? What happened?
Three more years of this?
What happened in Iran?
January 23
Maybe it doesn't have anything to do with Hegel, says Stef, speaking of Hartmut Rosa, Maja Gospel, Rutger Bregman. We walked through the cold, ice still on the ground, exploring an old bookshop about to close, out to an art opening at Berghain, with requisite line, we skipped, out dancing late at Sameheads, late into the night, a few kids from Manchester dancing with us, ahh Berlin.
Taking a few notes of Stef’s influences.
“... we are alienated in our relation to the social world … Because we, as human beings, find ourselves in constant existential competition with one another, we encounter one another primarily as competitors, and thus with latent hostility; and, over time, this leads to irresolvable self-alienation.”
― Hartmut Rosa, The Uncontrollability of the World
“An old man says to his grandson: ‘There’s a fight going on inside me. It’s a terrible fight between two wolves. One is evil–angry, greedy, jealous, arrogant, and cowardly. The other is good–peaceful, loving, modest, generous, honest, and trustworthy. These two wolves are also fighting within you, and inside every other person too.’ After a moment, the boy asks, ‘Which wolf will win?’ The old man smiles. ‘The one you feed.’ 3”
― Rutger Bregman, Humankind: A Hopeful History
“The great milestones of civilization always have the whiff of utopia about them at first. According to renowned sociologist Albert Hirschman, utopias are initially attacked on three grounds: futility (it’s not possible), danger (the risks are too great), and perversity (it will degenerate into dystopia). But Hirschman also wrote that almost as soon as a utopia becomes a reality, it often comes to be seen as utterly commonplace. Not so very long ago, democracy still seemed a glorious utopia. Many a great mind, from the philosopher Plato (427–347 B.C.) to the statesman Edmund Burke (1729–97), warned that democracy was futile (the masses were too foolish to handle it), dangerous (majority rule would be akin to playing with fire), and perverse (the “general interest” would soon be corrupted by the interests of some crafty general or other). Compare this with the arguments against basic income. It’s supposedly futile because we can’t pay for it, dangerous because people would quit working, and perverse because ultimately a minority would end up having to toil harder to support the majority.”
― Rutger Bregman, Utopia for Realists: And How We Can Get There – from the presenter of the 2025 BBC ‘Moral Revolution’ Reith lectures
January 24th
Last night in Berlin, we ran around picking up paintings and works in storage, a little groggy from the night before. Met up with chums at Bethanien for the opening of Echoes of Tumult, a show about our moment, the coming apart and back together, fissures and need for repair, the violence and cruelty, and movements to push back against it, the possibilities and fragmentation, closings and openings, glimpses of light and shadows, efforts to make sense of the wreckage. A lot of damage has been done. Good will tested.
Running around looking at art, talking about memory and obfuscation. Thank you Berlin.
"Echoes of Tumult
daadgalerie
Kunstquartier Bethanien
discourse program
Exhibition
With works by Dror Feiler, Essa Grayeb, Hoda Afshar, Interspecifics, Isuru Kumarasinghe
Echoes of Tumult brings together works that witness and process violence, systemic failure, and vulnerability by artists who are in varying proximity to the realities they are examining. Through approaches ranging from speculative and documentary, to sensorial, theatrical, and personal, their works resonate with and against current realities at the nexus of ecological crisis, geopolitics, and war. They deliberately bring us into contact with painful situations, oscillating between confrontation and resistance, and at times unexpectedly echoing with solidarity and hope.
Refracting into an affective field of resonances and disturbances, the works situate visitors within the complex connections and entanglements with the more-than-human world, address violence and unrest through sound, or grapple with memory and the construction of narratives through visual representation and the mediation of images. Some dive firmly into speculative actions or fictions pointing to futures that, while remaining conflicted, engage in new forms of relationality, agency, and hope. Together the works within Echoes of Tumult reflect on the possibilities and difficulties of repair, and insist on the possibility of listening, communication, and connection as fundamental to calling for and driving change. Things cannot and must not stay as they are.”
Great to see you, I said to Andreas, earlier in the night. We will move back and forth, good leaders and bad, all the talk of the big divorce was a little discouraging. Total U.S. commitments to Ukraine surpassed $175 in 2025, compared with 167 from Europe. And we have mass food insecurity and homelessness. Voters revolt against such expenditures. I can’t control that. Rough.
Back in and out of the vortex of Berlin, hoping the USA does not fall off a cliff.
The question is where, is how.
