November 11+16, 2009

The dominoes fell, and so did I.  A rainy night, hundreds of people, and umbrellas everywhere made it difficult to see the ground, and I slipped off a curb.  I now have a Botero foot and knees–puffy!  It was okay.  The crowd was chaotic.

Berlin was absolutely fantastic.  I met up with Ollie at the Hatch Kingdom and hope very much that I can show my sticker exhibition there next spring.  It will need to be updated since the exhibition originally showed at SLU in 2006.  It was also really nice to hang out with SLU alum, Spencer Homick.  I told him he has good sticker stamina (unlike someone else I know!)  🙂

Each day, I gave myself a goal to travel to new neighborhoods, which usually involved negotiating trams and subways that require tricky cards that vary by hour or day and have to be authenticated before you board.  It was interesting to see how sticker content varied from one area to another.  Kreuzburg especially focused on issues of race/ethnicity and immigrant populations.  Antifa stickers everywhere.  Several stickers at the Neurotitan entrance focused on anti-US politics.  I can’t wait to go back next spring.  Berlin has a great sticker and street art scene, more so now than NYC, which is too bad since I get to NYC quite often.

I’m still trying to get a handle on the concept of antifa.  It seems like it covers so many different issues.  Maybe antifa could be equated with the notion of resistance and class struggle in general, beyond anti-fascism in Germany, though it’s not all that useful to describe anything like this “in general.”  Dunno.  I’ve now bookmarked International SPIEGEL to keep up more closely with German politics.