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"Throughout the early 1920’s, Jazz was rapidly replacing the more traditional musical forms in Cabaret and Revue but it was not until after the stabilisation of the currency in 1924 that many Berliners had the chance to experience it live.
Josephine Baker became an almost overnight phenomenon from which it was said “the women of Berlin were never the same again.”"
"Marlene Dietrich became an immediate international star on the strength of her performance as the temptress Lola Frohlich in Josef von Sternberg's classic tale of love and obsession. Professor Immanuel Rath (Emil Jannings) is a strict and humorless schoolmaster who is shocked when he discovers the boys in his class have been spending their time at a sleazy cabaret called The Blue Angel, where an entertainer named Lola (Dietrich) keeps the men in thrall and sells suggestive postcards of herself. Rath goes to the club in hopes of catching his students and giving them a severe dressing-down, but he instead finds himself entranced by the carefree atmosphere of the club, and is struck by Lola's earthy, sensual beauty. Rath finds himself strongly attracted to Lola, and she later entertains him in her dressing room. When word of Rath's infatuation with Lola spreads to his students, he is taunted mercilessly, and eventually Rath is dismissed from the school. While Lola agrees to marry Rath, she shows little affection for him and delights in humiliating him, making him her servant and forcing him to play a clown in her stage show."
" a decorated with a bust of emperor and black-gold-red curtains entertainment establishment - "Sideshow" (1900) - shows dignitaries and students who look just as greedy as the dance of a bored her skirt lifted "Sideshow"-girl."
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Thought for the Day
Eros places an artist in conflict with the world, with what is average in life, he wrests him from the middle-class world and transports him to a sphere of tormented and ecstatic decay. -- Laurence Schifano
Reading Matter
- A la recherche du temps perdu
- Berlin–in vintage photographs
- Bits & Bites
- Cabaret Berlin
- Cosmodemonic Telegraph Company: A Henry Miller Blog
- Erich Kästner: Emil and the Detectives
- Fette
- Feu sur le Quartier General
- Feuilleton
- Gav Crimson
- German History in Documents & Images
- Inside Gloria's Mind
- Kreuzberg'd
- Kurt Tucholsky
- L'Ex, Homme-Âne-Yack
- La Peau Douce
- Nothing Elegant
- Poe's Mistress
- Red Light Vienna
- Retronaut
- Silents, Please!
- Slate
- Souls of Atala
- The Blue Monk
- The Local (Germany's News in English)
- The Seductive Jewess
- Wu Ming Foundation
Romanesque Café
"The Romance Café was the most famous meeting place for writers, journalists, theatre and film people in Berlin in the Twenties. It was on the ground floor of a house in the Romanesque Revival style vis-à-vis the Kaiser Wilhelm Memorial Church, where now the Europa Centre stands."
“Bacon had seen how the Surrealists equated the desire to express something new with the need to shock, and it was to form the core of his own artistic belief. When the ‘wild boy from Ireland’ returned to London towards the end of 1928, he was set on a course that would not only scandalise conventional sexual and social morality. He had something far more subversive to do: to disrupt all notions of what art was and what it could express. Beneath the carefully calculated frivolity and the unresolved pain of a rejected son lay the iron determination of a man readying himself to throw a bomb and be held responsible for it.”
“Total abandonment to instinct, above all sexual instinct, was an ideal which Bacon maintained with astonishing vigour to the end of his days. If he had a sustaining belief, it was in the supremacy of instinct as the only guiding principle in life—a philosophy expounded at length by the Marquis de Sade. Bacon had an expert knowledge and considerable personal experience of extreme sexual behaviour—and of sado-masochism in particular. He made no secret of his taboo in this area. And when he said that he ‘painted to excite himself’, he surely meant to recreate certain extreme sexual sensations. It would be true to say that, at one level or another, much of what he painted is a projection of sado-masochistic practices, though, as if by some odd consensus of propriety, his pictures were almost never viewed in this light during his lifetime.”
"I feel myself to be an alien in the world. If you have no ties to either mankind or to God, then you are an alien."
Ludwig Wittgenstein, The Duty of Genius, Ray Monk, Penguin Books, 1990.
"Philosophy, as I have understood and lived it to this day, is a life voluntarily spent in ice and high mountains - a searching out of all that is alien and questionable in existence, of all that until now has been held in the spell of morality..."
Friedrich Nietzsche, Ecce Homo, 1888.
"Very few people find their real instincts. Every now and then there's an artist who does and who makes something new and actually thickens the texture of life. But it's very rare...You have to be able to be really free to find yourself in that way, without any moral or religious constraints. After all, life is nothing but a series of sensations, so one may as well try and make oneself extraordinary, extraordinary and brilliant, even if it means becoming a brilliant fool like me and having the kind of disastrous life that I have had. That is it."
Francis Bacon, Francis Bacon: Anatomy Of An Enigma, Michael Peppiatt, 1996.
"It's only by going too far that you can hope to break the mould and do something new. Art is a question of going too far. Images can shatter the old order leaving nothing the same as before. The more artificial you can make it, the greater chance you've got its looking real."
Francis Bacon, The Brutality of Fact: Interviews with Francis Bacon, David Sylvester, 1987, Thames & Hudson.
'' Actually, I'm the most ordinary person possible. Its just that I like throwing myself in the gutter. Every artist wants to throw himself into the gutter. Its part of his life, its a necessity. You might say that I lead a gilded gutter life, I drift from bar to bar, from gambling place to gambling place, and when I don't do those things, I go home and paint some pictures. I am completely amoral. If I hadn't painted I would have been a criminal....I have always known life was absurd. Life is nothing but a series of sensations.......Life is so meaningless we might as well try to make ourselves extraordinary...I think of life as meaningless and yet it excites me. I always think that something marvellous is about to happen. How can I trap this transient thing? ''
...Francis Bacon in conversations.
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SOHO (1999) 
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