the sky over czechia from vienna to berlin this evening

hooters is about to file for bankruptcy so i had to act fast on this one

i have only eaten at hooters once and it made me sick. on my check the waitress had written: “my left leg is thanksgiving. my right leg is christmas. don’t forget to eat between the holidays!” i was 16 years old

gotta be either the jester or the magician . . . maybe the explorer too . . .

Listen: I think about NIGHTS OF CABIRIA at least once a day . . . and whenever I picture Cabiria in my mind I almost start to cry. I’m serious! I just love her and want her to be happy!!

If you have never seen it, you have to. My friend Amissa once sent it to me in the mail and said: “This is one of the best movies I’ve ever seen.” Foolishly I did not watch it right away . . . I finally got around to it during the pandemic. And during the closing scene, out of nowhere I started bawling. It just came upon me at that moment and surprised me. I was deeply moved by it, OK?

Look, it’s even in my LETTERBOXD TOP FOUR (!):

In Roger Ebert’s review of Cabiria, he ended it with this:

Of all his characters, Fellini once said, Cabiria was the only one he was still worried about. In 1992, when Fellini was given an honorary career Oscar, he looked down from the podium to Masina sitting in the front row and told her not to cry. The camera cut to her face, showing her smiling bravely through her tears, and there was Cabiria.

The American writer Ambrose Bierce, whose most famous work is probably the short story ‘An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge‘ (‘An Inhabitant of Carcosa‘ also rules), mysteriously disappeared while traveling in 1914 when he was about 72 years old. In one of his last letters, which he wrote from the road, he said this:

Good-bye. If you hear of my being stood up against a Mexican stone wall and shot to rags, please know that I think it is a pretty good way to depart this life. It beats old age, disease, or falling down the cellar stairs. To be a Gringo in Mexico—ah, that is euthanasia!

I love it. I have many times written similar such things in letters to friends (lol)~

I cannot forget Carcosa where black stars hang in the heavens; where the shadows of men’s thoughts lengthen in the afternoon, when the twin suns sink into the lake of Hali; and my mind will bear for ever the memory of the Pallid Mask. I pray God will curse the writer, as the writer has cursed the world with this beautiful, stupendous creation, terrible in its simplicity, irresistible in its truth—a world which now trembles before the King in Yellow.

ich bin ein berliner

LAST NIGHT AT MIDNIGHT

. . . the timezone changed in North America, sleepers there robbed of a whole hour. . . and yet it has not changed over here in Europe. Until March 30th, I am only five hours ahead of my friends on the East Coast, six hours head of my friends in the Midwest and the Heartland, seven hours ahead of my friends in the Four Corners region, and eight hours ahead of my friends in California and the Pacific Northwest, and on and on.

On account of my having an insane sleep schedule that would make a fuckin vampire blush, the time difference is not so much a big deal to me . . . though why not: I’ll take one more hour with everyone back home as long as I can. Curiously, Europe falls back weeks earlier, but springs forward weeks later. So this “plus or minus one hour” thing is a twice-yearly event, at least for now.

They’re always talking about getting rid of daylight saving time, but it never comes to pass. What they need to do is abolish standard time and make daylight saving time the default. So what if you wake up in darkness in the fall and winter? You’re going to be miserable anyway. As for me: I’ll take that extra hour of sunlight in the evening. And I don’t even like the sun! Give it to me! I want it!!

THE RUMORS ARE TRUE: The Berlin winter is a bleak and arduous time all here must endure . . . unless of course you split for the Canary Islands or Italy or Portugal, or some such place, and ride it out there till mid-March. For the less fortunate, and I among them, we have no choice but to button our winter coats all the way up to our fucking noses, and make our apartments as comfortable and cheerful as possible till the planet rotates around the sun in the direction of brighter days. Thing is, it’s not so much the cold that kills you, it is the blanket of somber greyness which pervades the entire city. I can tolerate and even dig a winter’s day if the sun is out a little . . . give it to me!

And then, and then . . . at the beginning of March, if you’re lucky, you’ll wind up with a few 60-65 degree (that’s around 16-18 C for the people in the box seats) day in a row, an unbroken streak of dreamlike days, and you feel a little hope in your heart. Your brace yourself for the insanity of the wild card German March, when it can be warm and sunny one minute, and snowing and hailing the next, only to go back to a sunny day, or else some strange unknown weather pattern of which you had not previously been aware. But even this too shall soon pass. Eventually the warm days are reliably consistent and all your winter Berlin misery will have paid off: now the city is your friend again, and it’s all yours in which to dwell beautifully till next November, when the Dark Days return . . .

Meanwhile, the Berlin summer transforms Berlin into the most beautiful city in the world, as far as I’m concerned. The days are long and fair, and with the exception of a Freak Week of exceptionally hot weather, it is pleasant outside day and night. It’s so beautiful you almost want to kill yourself. In the Bay Area, even in dead-center summer, you never really get a warm night. You can’t swim at night, for instance, which is something we always used to do when I lived in Austin . . . hopping the fences of apartment complexes where we did not live, sometimes laughing our asses off on acid, and swimming for hours beneath the huge starry Texas sky. And when you did pull yourself out the water, you dried almost instantly, such was the friendliness of the summer nights there, even if the days were deadlier than hell.

And so it is same here in Berlin at night, especially once you get to the middle of June and into July. At its peak, Berlin gets nearly 17 hours of sunlight, and the sun does not set until nearly 10 pm. To be clear: the sun has already begun setting at seven or eight, and so it is not as though it feels like high noon. It is a sort of gentle downward slope into nighttime. As my friend Katie put it: a long sunset makes the world feel a little safer.

DIG THIS:

As I have opined many times during the long history of this very website, the sun has since my earliest childhood made an enemy of me. The sun struck first. On a day with a UV index over three, I begin to burn very quickly . . . my skin essentially smoking like the vampires in NEAR DARK. Fortunately Berlin never really gets above a four, and so the white-cast zinc oxide sunscreen intended for babies that I use is powerful enough to repel both UVA and UVB rays until I can retreat back to the shadows, like a desperado under the eaves. Shielded by it, I have never once burned. I took this stuff all the way to the limit when I visited my friends Demet and Ege and Aysu in Ankara, Turkey last June, where the UV index hit 10 and 11. Even in a shaded outdoor patio of an America-themed restaurant (of all places), the hateful rays of sun bounced off every nearby surface and burnt my lips, what with me having forgotten to apply SPF chapstick. Another hour out there and I would have turned into a pile of ash, for god’s sake.

THAT BEING SAID

Even I, The Count Dracula of Schöneberg, The Pale Prince in the High Tower, The One Who Hides the Sun . . .

. . . do not dread the Berlin sun of springtime. On the first warm and sunny day here, you will see Germans, most of them elderly, sitting on park benches and outside coffeeshops, smiling and letting the sun shine upon their faces. I have witnessed this several years in a row now, and I’ll think: “. . . Wow!” Within days, hey presto, the city-wide phenomenon of peace and brotherly love unfurls itself in the hearts of all who live here. Even the gloomiest gasoline-guzzling Russian is humbled by the restorative powers of the sun. On any given spring or summer day, even in the middle of a weekday, every cafe and park and green space is populated by weed-smokin, radler-drinkin Berliners, and I among them. And I got to say: I love it . . .

Only a few weeks ago, from atop my balcony in the high tower in which I dwell, I saw the glistening snow lit by pale moonlight:

Days ago, as the sun set at six pm, I glanced outside my window and saw what looked to me like a Southern California sunset crisscrossed with chemtrails:

As I observed all my Berlin friends post essentially the exact same picture, I discovered we had instantly become a parodies of ourselves:

SUCH IS MY TALE

Tomorrow I will wake up early and pop open the tops of my windows and balcony door, as you can with all windows in Europe (and Turkey and places beyond). I will make coffee and a smoothie, the same smoothie I make every single day of my life:

From bottom to top:

• frozen mangoes
• frozen blueberries
• frozen strawberries
• spinach
• blackberries
• raspberries
• vegan yogurt
• strawberries
• one banana
• oat milk

. . . and head to the nearest Bürgeramt to register my apartment, provided my quiet desperation will afford me a same-day appointment. Otherwise I am still weeks away from the only appointment I was able to nab all the way back in January. In Germany you have to do this annoying thing called anmeldung where you beg your landlord to sign a piece of paper saying you live where you live, and then take it to this miserable office that is the definition of senseless German bureaucracy, and they ask you some questions and look at your passport, and on and on, and then they stamp a piece of paper that now effectively recognizes you as a human being whereas before you were a non-entity, as least as far as the law is concerned . . .

Otherwise I would not be waking up so early. I would rather die. Thing is, I just quit my old job and now I have a week of beautiful nothing ahead of me before I fly to Vienna for three days to meet everyone at my new job . . . so when I come home tomorrow, almost certainly dispirited from the Bürgeramt, I can go back to sleep till noon with the spotless mind of a little angel. Among other things, one of my goals during my week off is to finally watch UNTIL THE END OF THE WORLD in one sitting. When I visited my friend Kelsey in Detroit in November, it was playing on the TV at the bar we went to, and I thought: “Man I gotta finally watch that . . .” This thing is nearly five hours long, don’t you know, so it is an Everest in the same way ANDREI RUBLEV is.

I will absolutely chill with a movie that long. When I watched the director’s cut of KINGDOM OF HEAVEN, I wished it would go on for another three hours. I want the six-hour cut. But I refuse to break up a movie of any length, especially long ones. I power through a movie and I never do it piecemeal, which is the road taken by cowards. I feel that treating a movie as though it were a season of TV is a kind of sin. It took me a few years to get around to ANDREI RUBLEV because my friend Emma had said the same to me, and so we decided to walk into the abyss together, hand-in-hand Thelma and Louise style, and gladly have our minds ripped open by it. We turned our phones off and everything, and did not speak a single word to one another until the end. And that’s only a little over three hours, or three hours and 20 minutes if you watch the first cut. UNTIL THE END OF THE WORLD, on the other hand, is a whopping four hours and 48 minutes. And this time I’m flying solo. Listen: I can’t wait.

UNTIL THEN . . .