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:::: Reality is finally a kind of embarrassment to one’s own meager imagination.

Observed Philip Roth.

In 1961.

:::: The original title of Wim Wenders’s Wings of Desire is Der Himmel über Berlin — The Sky Over Berlin, or, maybe better, The Heaven Over Berlin.

I fell in love with it again last night. Bruno Ganz at his most Ganzian. Peter Falk at his most understated and wise. I had no idea Peter Handke, whose Goalie Anxiety Before the Penalty Kick changed the way I thought about fiction, had a hand in its composition — generating much of the dialogue and lyrical fields.

When I first saw the film in the late eighties, I thought I was watching a movie about an angel who chooses to enter time in order to experience the hideous beauties associated with living inside that spacesuit called a body.

Last night I realized I was watching a visual poem.

There’s so many good things, Falk, himself once an angel, advises Damiel, the one who wants to degenerate into the likes of you and me.

:::: Davis Schneiderman posts a link to David Bowie’s new video on my Facebook page. Where Are We Now? was released on 8 January 2013, Bowie’s 66th birthday. It had been 10 years since we last heard new music from him. The video features experimental filmmaker Tony Oursler’s wife Jacqueline Humphries and Ziggy Stardust as conjoined homunculi perched atop a pommel horse in Oursler’s junk-filled New York studio. Behind them runs grainy black-and-white footage from pre-Wende Berlin. To the left sits the model of a large blue ear, to the right one of a large white eye. We are in another Wunderkammer.

This isn’t a rock’n’roll suicide or suffragette city, but it is all about changes. Listen, and you’ll hear a voice washed through with time — frailer, more spectral, yearning, candid than its earlier iterations. Listen, and you’ll hear Bowie hanging out with Iggy Pop and Lou Reed at the club Dschungel in the late seventies; throngs of East Germans passing across the Bösebrücke, the first border crossing that opened as the Wall fell on 9 November 1989—20,000 in the first hour, each unsure whether he or she was allowed to do what he or she was doing. You’ll hear Bowie’s heart attack back stage during a 2004 performance in Germany, his rush into emergency surgery for an acutely blocked artery.

What moves me most about the song, which has become our Berlin Days Anthem, is how shot through it is with that blue-eyed boy Mr. Death, how it could never have been written by a musician in his forties or thirties, let alone his twenties.

After fifty, your face becomes an accomplishment.

:::: The old poet in Wings of Desire is named, perhaps too noticeably, Homer. He walks beside an angel along the graffiti-covered Wall through the blast zone once thought of as Potsdamer Platz, now just vehicle tracks through a vast mud flat, water-filled potholes, tall weeds, a lone chimney, abandoned pieces of furniture, the black skeleton of an elevated bridge.

If mankind loses its storyteller, Homer reckons later in the film, then it will lose its childhood.

:::: Here is Lyotard: The artist and writer, then, are working without rules in order to formulate the rules of what will have been done. Hence the fact that the work and text have the character of an event.

:::: Innovative works are foreigners in the land of genres, exiles from the country of resemblance.

:::: The blue and white ferry on Lake Wannsee pressing through this string of days gray and cold as the windows in Nauman’s installation.

:::: At dinner one of my fellow fellows admits he’s homesick when I ask him how he likes Berlin.

I miss my reading chair, he says wistfully.

:::: A few minutes later, it is March.

:::: By way of anachronous Flash animation techniques, Young-Hae Chang and Heavy Industries’ text-film Traveling to Utopia: With a Brief History of Technology takes the form, not of a customary nonsequential hypertext, but rather of multiple black and green blocky words racing across the top, middle, and bottom of a bright white screen at a speed the reader/viewer cannot control. Because of the velocity, the reader/viewer often needs three, four, five or more encounters before beginning to assemble the information present.

:::: While painting Daniel Boone’s portrait, Chester Harding asked the frontiersman if he had ever been lost. No, I can’t say I was ever lost, Boone replied, but I was bewildered once for three days.

:::: In the Jannowitzbrücke U-Bahn station, the large sepia pre-War images of the area that serve as ongoing reminders of what Berlin could have been, of how one day the country decided to undo itself.

:::: I was bewildered once for more than a decade, the whole of my childhood in River Edge, New Jersey, because for some reason I always intuited the tri-state area had been grafted onto the real country. So I ended up going to Madison, Wisconsin, for college when the administration was still lobbing teargas at its students, and to Charlottesville, Virginia, for my doctoral work.

I took my first job at the University of Kentucky because I sensed I would get a better education teaching there than elsewhere.

:::: Traveling to Utopia. Across the top of the screen runs a narrative in Korean characters, indecipherable to most English speakers at any speed. Across the bottom runs one in English that recounts the Kafkaesque dream of a nameless (and ambiguously gendered) narrator stopped by three policemen at a subway station that may be in Seoul or Paris, questioned briefly, and allowed to go on her/his way. Across the middle of the screen runs what one takes to be the principle narrative, also in English, telling the story of a (probably) different nameless female narrator’s life with technology from her first run-in with a computer in her father’s office to her own first laptop while at university and beyond.

Walking through a metal detector at an airport one day, she sets off the alarm. A visit to the doctor reveals someone has implanted a chip used to track endangered species in her abdomen. Like Gregor Samsa, she abruptly becomes exiled from her own body. The story concludes with the narrator reporting she has taken to living in airports, which for her represent atemporal, non-spatial realms that make her feel safe, as if she is both everywhere and nowhere — the Ur-experience for all travelers.

All three narratives are interrupted briefly, once, by a screen-sized smiley face clock, while an upbeat jazz score at odds with the narratives’ content plays throughout.

:::: In Venezuela our maid decapitated live chickens on the way to our dinner table by forcing their squawking heads down the garbage disposal.

The grinding. The bloody feathers.

:::: Young-Hae Chang is a Korean artist with a Ph.D. in aesthetics from Université de Paris. Heavy Industries is one other person: Marc Voge.

We changed Marc into Heavy Industries, Chang explains in an interview, because Koreans love big companies and Marc doesn’t mind being objectified and capitalized on.

They hardly ever do interviews. When they do partake, they generate wide-eyed doubletalk.

Andy Warhoclass="underline" hello.

Guten Tag, cosmopolitan interchange among the arts.

:::: Because people still read books on trains in Berlin. Fat books. O. can’t make out the titles, but the very fact makes him secretly happy.