“Every single art form, the Chinese landscape, Egyptian sculpture or the Gothic counterpoint, exists only once, never to return again in its soul and symbolism.”

Oswald Spengler – Decline of the West

Word! This art form is certainly staying put, left to steep in its own atmosphere of 80s transpirations. Well, most of it must have escaped through the array of vent holes on the left by now. Rarely has Spengler’s point been stressed as succinct and as well as with this redundantly framed description of an art work at Spichernstraße underground stop on Berlin’s U9 line, as if trying to heighten the distance in soul and symbolism one might already feel looking at the space invaders era art work by Gabriele Stirl, which looks like Atari but is much more cerebral.

My suspicion is that sometime in the 90s, they realized that that flimsy ‘86 frame, though crafted with much care, would hardly suffice to shield its content from the vicious edding dildo attacks by alienated urban yoots with some time to spare that ripped through Germany’s metropolitan landscapes in the 90s.

So there it lies, encased in the past and behind two layers of glas and somewhat defused, as a kind of encrypted Schneewittchen code, the art form of the 80s, irrevocably lost to us in context, in soul, in symbolism, leaving us with the strong desire to delve into the thick smokey atmosphere of a 1986 West Berlin bar, if only for a moment, and eavesdrop on some banter by the perpetrators of this lost art form over a glas of afri cola, perhaps. Shit, I’m late for my appointment with my accountant in Friedenau.

There were no anarchos and no champagne and no prosecco, just the Prosecus security company, and not much else. Their presence was announced by a printed tarpaulin that had been hastily zap strapped to the construction site’s fencing.

Within the now infamous courtyard a portly employee of that company leered at me from a distance as I appeared at the front entrance, then slowly started to walk in my direction. Between him and me there stood only some more fencing, newly added to block the uninhibited access that I’d enjoyed during my covert, drunken operation a few weeks before. A couple of schicky micky (shitty mitty?) residents then fortunately stepped into the scene, preventing the kind of confrontation that I dread.

Keen readers will notice a further minor change to the masthead, this time in homage to Kolja Reichert, freelance journalist to the Berlin daily newspaper Der Tagesspiegel, who recently, and we hasten to note, inadvertently, referred to “SLUB Magazine” in said paper.

Mr Reichert has been a real dude about things by writing a suitably groveling apology in the comments section of Slubbing It With The Dailies, where he expresses some pride in having caused such frothing consternation in an esteemed journal such as this. Joshing aside though, his concern that he might have misrepresented the output of Elegant Embellishments, is bona fide.

But what does Mr Reichert reveal in his comment by referring to the typo as a “Saturday morning vowel shift”? One imagines here the 10am deadline, a furrowed brow, drawn curtains, and the cuff of a dressing gown soaking up milk from an unfinished bowl of muesli whilst the last few paragraphs are hacked into a laptop. Can this be the reality of legitimate, for-cash freelance journalism? If so, it differs precious little from the blogging experience.

Whatever case, two world’s have collided, and I’m keen to find out more about the changing shape of professional and amateur journalism. Answers shall be sought with gin and peanuts, and published here. Or over there.

[Photo by Flickr user shordzi]

The headline is deliberately obscure, and meant to be educational. Those are the Inuktitut words for ‘seal’, with Inuktitut being the name of some of the Inuit languages spoken way north of the Canadian tree line.

The photo above was shot in Berlin though, last week. And I have to say, it does look as though a seal has been bludgeoned to death right here. My guess is that there’s a more rational explanation: spilt red paint from the DIY store just out of shot, or someone let off several kilos of Chinese firecrackers here at New Year, and the red paper wrappers are now dissolving away in the snow. Now maybe someone can tell me what the Inuktitut word for ‘blood-stained snow’ is.

The Las Vegas colour table:

I’m tempted to think this gem is in fact a club or a design-firm or something cool like that, and it’s called (lowercase) ‘garage’. Or else, the word ‘garage’ is kind of a descriptive tag or label, as if it describes the style of the structure. So people would say, ‘Hey, that building’s really garage, you know what I mean?.’ The graceful lamp-post stands in front like an overdesigned question mark, as puzzled as we are.

… a wall mounted barbecue.

In fact, come to think of it, people with tiny apartments and very small kitchens could just store all of their kitchen utensils, plates, bowls and glasses, on the outside of the building. All you’d need is a securely fastened, weather-proof shelf, with access from the inside of the building. If you had a nice collection of crockery, you could even glaze the shelves from the outside so that neighbors and passers by can appreciate your impecable taste.

Hay-on-Wye, Wales

A cursory image search for “outdoor shelving” reveals little of real interest, but did remind me of the Welsh book village, Hay-on-Wye, where outdoor shelving isn’t uncommon.

Rucksack house [Photo from www.convertiblecity.de]

Exterior attachments to buildings do exist. Stefan Eberstadt’s Rucksack House is a radical way of expanding your living space. But this isn’t the kind of small-scale intervention I’m thinking of. I mean building façades covered in a crust of cuboid micro-structures; alcoves pushed out through the walls …