Right now in Berlin is the silent movie festival happening at the Babylon theater, this year with Buster Keaton. They play a short movie and a longer one about three times a day until the 29th of July.
All the movies are accompanied by a pianist playing during the movies. I was there last Sunday with Jake and Mark and we all laughed like crazy people. The pianist that time, Neil Brand, has the last 20 years been playing the piano for silent films. I heard him on the radio the other day, and he said that he doesn't watch the movies before he plays because he rather improvise to get the best feeling across. Brand was amazingliny good. I can't believe that he improvised about 90 minutes of silent film and made it really fit very minute of what we saw on the screen.
This is something I recommend to everyone to do. This is something you can't really do at home and the whole thing is an experience worth it.
I like silent movies, and back in Stockholm I used to go to all the silent movies that Cinemateket, the old movie theater showed. Or at least all the ones I could, and they where always accompanied with a pianist and sometimes also a violinist. They mostly showed Chaplin and Keaton, and Keaton has since then been my favorite of the two, even if I've seen more Chaplin then Keaton movies.
I'm overly happy that my last boyfriend was a cinefile and made me get into old movies, not only silent ones.
I will go back to the Babylon tonight with a group of friends and I would love to live at the theater and see every movie until the silent movie festival is over. That would be awesome.
These last week a lot of changes happened.
I got a new job in a bookstore where I start in the end of August. I'm really excited about it and looking forward to talk about books all day. I meet some of the people working there and they are really great.
The mum in the family I work for, Ankia, has deiced to work less and have more time for her children. Something I find good, but it also means that I'm not going to work so much for the family anymore.
I will be moving out from the apartment after August and just pick the children up from Kindergarten once a week.
I've decided to start changing my diet to a more vegan diet. My goal is at least one vegan meal a day and gradually cutting down on animal products. This I would never thought I would be doing. If someone said to me five or even two years ago that I would want to go vegan I would have told them no way. I was a big meat and dairy eater then, but now it only feels logical to start going vegan.
So in just a week all this happened and it feels both scary and exciting. A new period in my Berlin life is starting.
Yesterday I went to the Guggenheim Lab to listen to Charles Montgomery (Canadian writer and Guggenheim team member in New York) talk about The happy city.
Nanna and Rose introduced me to the Guggenheim Lab when they started to go to work shops and other lectures there. I was a bit sad that I didn't know about it earlier and that I work, so I can't be there all the time. There are so many things going on that I would have liked to take part of. The Lab is open until the 28th of July.
This week is all about emotions and the city. Read more about the week here and here.
Charles Montgomery talked for an hour about how to design a city that would make people meet more though that be happier, because he means that people that are more equitable are more trusting and he gave many examples in different cities. Like Bogota, where the plan was to pave modern roads for cars, even if only 20% of the people living in Bogota had a car. So instead of making paved roads to for cars, they made paved roads for people walking. The car roads are still bad but there aren't that many cars either so it works out.
Montgomery also talked about living alone and together and how clean or dirty a city is, and how this makes feel in other situations of our life. He talked about the more social time, time with other people we get the less stressed we are.
This lecture went on for an hour, so I will not write about all that he said, but what really stuck to me was he's talk about Oxytocin (his and mine favorite hormone). The easiest to explain oxytocin is that hormone that is send out in our bodies when we hug. Not only when we hug, but also when we're in social situations, when we collaborate and have a connection with other people. When we get more oxytocin, we become more trusting and can handle other things in our lives better, like stress for example.
I think oxytocin is a way to handle things, and sometime long ago me and some friends in Sweden had T-shirts made with the oxytocin (see picture above) made and where hugging each other like crazy.
I really enjoyed myself listing to Charles Montgomery, talking notes and laughing with and to some of the examples he took up. I found it super interesting that architects and city planers can make cities where people meet naturarally and how green parts are impotent parts in our towns, not just to look at or see when passning but that people could stop and slow down in the green parts of town. All this I'm really glad I spent some time listening to and I will be back at the Lab soon again.
Hey readers.
I've been bad at writing here for some time and this is because:
- a two week vacation and spent time in Copenhagen and Sweden.
- work and applying for a second job.
- changing computer time to reading and diary writing time.
- lack of interest of sharing what I do. I don't even tweet about books anymore. Something has happened.
- social events. Meeting new people, making new friends, having friends visiting, dancing, couchsurfers and so on.
- confusion and having a hard time concentrating long enough when it comes to writing on a computer.
- Biking and The Spree.
- TV shows and day dreaming.
Basically that's it.
I'm back in Berlin and I feel great here. As always.
Sweden gave me a bit a prescriptive. I like Sweden a lot and I had an awesome time there, just spending time with friends hanging out, having random adventures.
Sweden is just not the place I want to be in right now. It's a great place to visit, there are wonderful people there that where hard to leave again and everything feels so easy there. I can't see myself living there right now. I'm not done with Berlin.
I will now try be a more frequent writer from now on.
I have some paper written stuff about Sweden and Copenhagen to share and life in Berlin is always happening. Right now I'm sitting with two notebooks, reading what I've written recently and writing about change. (Fun fact: my notebooks and diary are written in three languages: English, Swedish and German.)
This I will be doing until lunch, so no more computer time. Until next time.
