I spent New Years Eve and a couple of days around the event in Berlin and the trip very much revised my negative image of the city. For one thing, the trip was really lucky: no waits in underground stations, the weather held, good food without recommendations and last minute theatre-tickets.

Here are some comments.

The Schwulenmuseum, as in "gay male museum" focused exclusively on the history of male gays in Germany. Quite according to its name. Though one might have hoped for different angles. If not queer, perhaps, at least, the developement of gay identity, of a political angle, or ...

Bad: the uncommented, unreflected equation of male homosexuality and pedophilia, based on some vague idea of "how the old Greek did it".

Almost funny: an interview with a guy in a leather-jacket who complains bitterly about how the "Mannheimer Frauengruppe" (Mannheim women's group) walked out on the orga team of some gay event because the guys were not serious and political enough (something about make-believe group-sex in a bathtub on a pride march wagon). Oh my.

Exhibition Die Kommissarinnen in the film-museum. About female detectives in German TV series. Very well done. Starts slowly, with large-scale portraits, and then offers a wealth of clippings and interviews, in parallel with the history of women in police-service in C20 Germany.

My favorite part: a projection of face-shots and footwear of the detectives.

Permanent exhibition in the film museum. About 50% might as well be called "Marlene Dietrich memorial museum", but I'm not complaining. The rest of the exhibition is concerned with the development of film as a cultural artefact and a scene in Germany till after the reunition. Very impressive: the entrance hall dealing with the "gaze" - huge screens with clips of famous German movie-gazes in a many-cornered, fully mirrored room.

Deutsches Thater, Genet's Die Zofen (the maids). Lame. But we got great seats. I read some reviews later: apparently, the whole point of the production was to celebrate an 80-year-old Berlin diva who played the Mistress. What I didn't like was the theatrical tone of voice - the setting was abstract enough, the casting too realistic (on leaving, I overheard another member of the audience report from a production she'd seen with two gay men as the maids), so that extra-distancing via the use over-proclamatory voices did not seem to do very much for the play.

Party at the Brandenburger Tor. We missed most of it, arriving at quarter to twelve or so. Not the speeches about the flood, not the calls for donations. There were about 700K people squeezed back-to-front between Brandenburger Tor and Siegessäule or roaming the shrubs nearby. Nice, very peaceful. Less people there than in the past years, due to mourning about the flood, they say, or maybe because it rained all evening. But still, 700K, as many as live in Frankurt, squeezed into what? a square mile?

And so 2004 ended.

Saw the Band Aid 2004-video on TV the other day. Much like the original, it has a crowd of young popstars (Who Are Those People, anyway?), singing along and a bit of video-coverage from Ethiopia.

But.

The young people are smiling too much. And the video-footage is mainly one clip from the original BBC-documentary, cut and zoomed and sampled. Most of the time, though, we see the faces of the singers, reacting to footage they are presumably viewing while we, the audience, look at them. And, in the end, the face of the starving kid morphs into the face of a young woman, possibly twenty years older than the kid, healthy, laughing, alive.

OK, so the Band Aid fund did save lives. But this happy ending 20 years later is a bit to glossy for my taste. Live Aid might have been consumerized suffering and compassion, but Band Aid 2004 is the instant-soup version, quickly consumed, easily digested, no aftertaste.

USA 2004, dir. Steven Soderberg.

Boring. The review in Die Zeit promised a postmodern (without mentioning the term) film-quote-fest, but we're tired of that, we've seen it too often. OK, so the decors are great. OK, so there's Catherine Zeta-Jones with short hair, looking like Jasmine Tabatabei as Meg Ryan's not quite as silly-sisters. But there's too little wit, not enough action to fill the gap, and a father-daughter sob-story bolted to the ending.

Late last year, Mal Sehn Kino showd the Medienkunstrolle to a spellbound audience of five. The mekurolle ("Alles so schön bunt hier") collects winners and runner-up of 11 years of the SWR/ZKM-Medienkunstpreis (I covered the 2003-awards in TEKKA).

I don't dig media-art. Some of it was video, some looked computer-generated, some told a story and might have been a short-film. Some didn't even use the medium in any specific way, in other occasions, media-effects were used with no apparent benefit or message. The term "media-art" appears very much to be a catch-all for a wide and dissociated array of time-based, visual art.

Seems media-art is something I need to look into in 2005.

As far as I can see, A Citizen of the Country is Sarah Smith's weakest book.

The Vanished Child is touching and tantalizing. Beside a Whodunnit, it's a WhoamI, exploring what family and past and family-history can mean for the (traditional) subject, and how the subject shapes and reshapes and reinvents itself in the face of its pasts and presents.

The Knowledge of Water, continues this story of a man who doesn't want to be who he doesn't appear to be. Reisden's story is mirrored in the story of a painter('s wife) and their struggle for identity. Also, the searching I turns into a we: love is added to the equation. Water is also more dominantly a historical novel.

Citizen seems to stretch Reisdens's throes too far and the mirroring, the predominant yet-another-father-and-son plot is lame, clouded and obscure. The historical context seems far-fetched, especially the witchcraft-motiv, which barely serves to cover up gaps in the characters' internal logics.

Note to self: I still need to write this article about the connection between Smith's novels and her hyperfiction, King of Space.

Most impressive in Budapest: The Terror Haza (house of terror) in Andrassy Boulevard 60, where both the Hungarian Nazis (the Arrowcross party) and the Hungarian Communists had their headquarters. The museum is huge, impressive and very well designed in black, red and white. The first exhibit is a several storey-high wall with faces of victims, at its base a pedestal, covered in a black, smelly liquid, like oil, with a dusty tank perched on top.

Three floors (including basement) with 30 rooms that either contain symbolic renderings of certain phases or occurences of the terror-regimes or recreate the actual usage of the rooms. In each room, visitors can pick up info-sheets in different languages, but the exhibits, inclucing the murals, the films (there was a lot of multi-media) and the soundtracks/ voiceovers were in Hungarian. Theme-parky and visceral at the whole thing is, it's clearly pointed at Hungarians, not tourists.

Most spooky: the basements, formerly used as prison and execution-place, with cells and gallows recreated in detail. To get there, you take the lift, up to ten people at a time. The lift is slow. It takes several minutes. It is black and dimly lit. People with hear-conditions are not allowed to use it. On the trip down, you hear a report from one of the execution-assistants who used to work in the house.

Most impressive: the way Hungarians treat guilt. There appears to be a self-image as victims *and* actor. And they show names and faces of the most active Nazi and Communist, well, criminals, some of whom are alive (and probably living in Budapest, or Hungaria) today.

See the website of the House Of Terror and find the "English"-link.

After Vienna, Budapest. A modern, Western metroplis, quite aware of its history, all of it. Or, more specifically, the KuK-history and the communist terror. Very vivid street- and cafehous-life. Lots of public art.

Also, public "art" (or exhibits) that deals with the communist past. In fact, the statue park seems to turn this era into a theme-park - at least it gets marketing for the "thrill-from-a-safe-distance" it affords the visitor.

Right beside the Haus des Meeres, in a subterranean bunker, the Foltermuseum (torture-museum). Interesting medieval tortures, that don't look so bad - mostly public display in a manner that depicts or symbolizes the crime - a coat of playing-cards for the cardsharper, collared together face-to-face for bitching neighbors. Then the gruesome stuff we know from inquisition and witch-trials. Then nothing for a while (historically speaking), then a modern docu-video from Anmesty International. And some paraphernalia for sale at the front desk. Weird, in a way.

Must-see in Vienna, which we stumbled across by chance: The Haus des Meeres (house of the ocean). Mainly a well-equipped aquarium inside a high-rise bunker complete. Outside walls 2 meters thick. Half-submerged crocidiles look pretty stupid. When fed dead fish, they take their food lightly between their teeth, pull it under water and shake their heads back and forth - in order, it turns out, to scale it, the scales floating down in water like small shreds of silver.

Most amazing, the vivarium, a three-storey high glass-protrusion jutting out of one of the walls, with plants and free-roaming birds, reptiles, and small monkeys. Not to touch, but to photograph real close-up with no glass.

Talking of Blogtalk ... Blogtalk's probably the best-blogged, streamed and wiki'ed conference I've been to, yet. Little use reporting from it - it's all online.

Nice and easy conference, though, with nice and approachable people.

I already mentioned the tendency back to the private and the realization that blogging is not journalism. Another notable thing was that a large part of the conference took part online, with blog-posts and chats about the presentation that, to a degree, stifled the immediate discussion. But here's the jealousy of one who did not bring her powerbook.

In July, I went to Vienna for Blogtalk. What do I remember about Vienna? (Except that I still have to put up some of the photos...) First, the size. Not just the sheer spead, but also the hight of the late C19 tenements. The arterial roads, two, three lanes on each side and a small river-bed plus traintracks in the middle.

The weight of history suffusing every part of the city. Schaffolding around renovation projects with windows cut in stratefgic places that afford views with especially pleasing angles.

And above everything else, the speed. Or lack thereof. For a metropolis this size, Vienna's got a pretty unhurried pace. There's a train in the station, it's been standing for a while. But none of the people coming down the stairs and escalators break into a run. Why should they? The train's waiting, anyway. At one point, I saw a guy climb into a street-cleaning vehicle about ten meters ahead of me. OK, I thought, if I go slow now, he'll be off and on his way before I get there. But he took ages to get his engine started. I think he even took a bite off his sandwich first ... He started after I passed him and I thought damn, now he's going to come after me and chase me off the sideway, so I sped up. But the sound of the engine didn't change for the time being. Perhaps another bite off the sandwich? Then, at last, the vehicle began to move. Looking back, I realized, however, that it wasn't gaining on me. I was outwalking it, slowly.

It's the New Year. It's 2005. I'm miles from empty inbox - small surprise. Last summer, I was lucky to land a huge project that's kept me busy till xmas. So everything else got pushed to a low flame. Which is okay. In November, I worked - literally! - 7 days a week. No need for extended acquisition activites for new projects, really. But I blogged less - and with less quality - than I would've wanted to. I didn't use my camera as much as I wanted to. I started a Taekwondo-class and dropped out halfway. And the only sound my guitar made this year was when it burst a string on Dec. 23 - due to the rapid changes of room-temperature you get in winter when the heating's on and it's freezing outside and you open the balcony door for some air. Not to mention reading. Or writing. *sigh*

For 2004, I have a backlog of about a dozen issues I meant to blog about. And I'll cheat a little and hide them in the 2004 archive. The dates will be screwed cause I created place-holders for those posts. But they'll go straight into the archives, anyway.

USA 2004, dir. Michel Gondry.

Yeah. I mean really Yeah. Not just because I love Kate Winslet. First of all, I hadn't even known Jim Carey was an actor. Had pegged him as a nuisance with a rubber-face. But he was actually pretty touching, with ragged hair and a bit of stubble.

Sunshine zooms in on the dynamics of a love affair: the good things you do and the bad. The stuff you're so ashamed of afterwards and the stuff that makes you cringe while you do it but appears entirely sweet on hindsight. The delicate, half-forgotten first steps and the agonizing fights, till you break up. And then, when the passion simply won't stop, the moment when you download all your pain and frustration on each other, all the "what I always hated about you"s, and the first, tentative steps when both decide to reach over the rubble and maybe try again.

With this, Sunshine is entirely based on one pretty silly idea: What if I could go see an expert who'd ask me to dump out everything you left in my apartment and who'd then proceed to erase, with the help of some head-gear and a computer, every tiniest memory of you from my mind. No need to ignore you in the supermarket, I'd simply not know you. No shame, no second thoughts.

That's what Clementine does to Joel, and, after the first surge of pain and disbelief has passed, Joel does to her. As the erasure proceeds, we see the relationship evolve backward, from the fatal fights and coldness to the shy beginnings - and realize, with Joel, that losing the memory is like losing the person all over again. And while memory-Joel regresses towards a childhood-self who tries to hide Clementine in memories of which she's never been a part, contemporary Joel appears to mature a little through his failure, to grow stronger, more involved and more determined.

Joel goes out to win Clementine all over again, and as in "real life", without day-clinics for memory-erasure, there comes the point where the two go back over their relationship, what they hate about each other. Appropriately triggered, within the logics of the movie, by both getting their treatment-tapes in the mail and hearing each other identify the reasons for their break-up. Clementine walks out, hurt. Joel follows. The ending is kind of open.

But until that point, a beautiful love-story has been told and quirky little images, no big Hollywood gloss. If the spotless mind, the mind without memories, is eternally in the sun, it's also eternally untouched by the light and shadows of love. Nice.

While I've been totally snowed under with work from the agency, Mark and Elin have worked extra shifts and pushed out a brand-new issue of TEKKA even before the holidays.

TEKKA 7 has diet suggestions (well, diet blog suggestions at any rate), music downloads (well, not downloads as such), more ways to use Tinderbox, insights into Brenda Laurels, Thoburn and Jenkins' and Montford's latest book - and on top of it all, we bring you Marginal Effect, Stuart Moulthrop's spotlight hypertext fiction.

So, if you're snowed in like those poor Bostoners or rained-in like me, don't say you were caught with nothing interesting to read.

For my warm and comfortable Xmas, I got the Band Aid/ Live Aid DVD-collection. A bit of 80s voyeurism, my one-time heros younger than I am now. When the concert first aired, I wasn't allowed to watch, so the DVD fills a long-felt gap in my socialisation. And on top of this, "money raised from the sale of this DVD will be used to continue the work of the Band Aid Trust in Africa".

The first DVD starts off with a BBC news report about the situation in Ethiopia, summer 1984. I know this. I know all of this. I raised money for this as a teenager. I must have seen this. But I can't wrap my mind around those images on my TV right now.

One thing that strikes me: no apparent advertising-partners on this one. Ah, those naive 1980s ...

Jills asks an interesting question: Where can I "write all those things that today I can't write, not here"? This is actually quite an interesting comment about blogging. For this blogger, at least, writing appears to be about publishing rather than about chronicling. Some bloggers blog (or say they blog) in order to have a place where they can keep and find notes and thoughts. Others say that blogging is a good incentive to keep writing a little every day (wish that'd work for me) and thus to become a better writer. But why publish this? Why not keep a Tinderbox or three and be done?

Blogs are about publishing, visibility, and giving back. You blog, I blog, because at some point I believe that some nugget of what I scribble here may be of importance, interest or entertainment-value to someone else. As so many nuggets I've stumbled upon on the internet have done for me. And visibility is a good thing: see what the Kinsey report has done for how people conceptualize their own sexuality and lives. Or to be able to recognize a "glass ceiling" and call it by its name. To recognize that there's a system or at least some empirics to your personal experience.

In the brand-new issue of TEKKA, Diane Greco writes about diet blogs. Blogging about your dietary progress or relapse is a bit in the Protestant confessional or Weight Watchers tradition. But exhibitionism aside, diet blogs enlist their audience as witnesses to your resolution. 15 pounds before the summer starts. If half the world or your five closest friends keep an eye on you, it's probably easier to maintain the discipline than if you try to do it on your own. Even though everyone knows there's hardly anything more boring than listening to someone drone one abou their diet.

So, basically, even the unwriteable should be bloggable. But not necessarily traceable. A while ago, a former employer contacted me about a comment I'd made about an event he was involved in. He hadn't even read my blog, but a friend had forwarded the link. The other day, a client told me that she'd google me while I made some changes to her site and got her another preview ready. Ouch, I thought, what was the last thing I blogged? Am I prepared to chat about the topic with my client later on?

At the very least, publicity is a good reason to phrase more carefully, research better and quite generally treat those around you with more respect or consideration. After all, the Way-Back-Machine never forgets. Which, quite generally, sounds like A Good Thing.

But there's a difference between the private and the public. And it's up to the blogger where she or he draws the line. Keeping private writing to a different medium, Jill's paper, my Moleskine, my not be economical, but is probably a good idea. Especially if you do a lot of writing in such a blurred-boundary medium as the weblog.

Has the blogworld changed? Thinking back on this summer's Blogtalk conference, I'd say that, yes.

We learnt, for example, that blogging is not journalism. Journalism is. You can be a journalist writing, among other places, in a blog. But blogging won't necessarily make you a journalist. On The other hand, blogs are conducive to frequent writing, which again might make one day make you a professional writer.

At blogtalk, we learnt that the claim to fame charm of blogging is waning. When it comes to her personal/ semi-professional writing, Mena Trott would rather be read by ten of the right people than by tens of thousands.

We also saw quite a few commercial or pro bono applications of the blog-concept.

Though once one starts to custom-program a whole new blog-system for a specific project, the charm of "here's a free, smart mini-CMS for you that lets you publish on the spot and the template design is cool, too" is kind of gone.

Technically speaking, a blog is nothing but a mini-CMS. The really radical idea behind blogs is that a smart mini-CMS will get more people to publish than those huge commercial or OS contraption will with their cluttered interfaces that are a programmer's wet dream and an editor's nightmare. And - remember Ted Nelson? - publishing power to the people is what the internet is all about.

The other thing that turned the weblog into a killer application (beside ease of use) was (is?) the social or community aspect. While blogging was (is?) cool, stepping into the maze and being part of the party added visibility to the mere possibility to publish without having to deal with tags and designs first.

But at its very heart, blogging is a one-way communication tool. Comments have their pros and cons, but they are subsidiary. Comments are not forum-threads. Blogs are about one person (or a small group of persons) deciding what she wants to write about and how: personal news, musing, work-related news, commented links, comments on other blogs, vast networked conversations with other blogs. But every post is one voice going out and replies echo back with more or less of a time-lag.

What makes blogs cool is that they are one-way communication-tools with built-in dominoe effect. This easy to use, short genre is perfect for picking up a thought (or meme) somewhere, commenting on it, extending it, transforming it and thus passing it on. Sometimes, a loose group of bloggers clicks together very well, turning into a cluster with a unique flavor.

But the blogosphere is not a closed system that produces predictable output - even if, for a while, one blog or some blogs produce a style of output you particularly like. Blogs are about freedom of expression. And if they work as a web-based, easily accessible note-taking tool for you, that's fine by me.

Blogs are also noncommittal. When I start a magazine, I kind of owe it to paying subscribers to publish as promised. When I start a blog, thousands of readers may be an incentive, but I can basically write whenever I like. Whatever I like. Which is A Good Thing. No obligations means low barriers. An editorial concept, a deadline can supply the necessary scaffolding for regular, distributed publication actitivites. But blogging is by definition a low-barrier writing tool: blog-software is supposed to facilitate writing and publication. And publishing power to the people is really what the internet is all about.