It was Vass who introduced me to Nyla Rose, the Oneida, Native, Black American trans woman wrestler. And also told me about her hot af girlfriend. Talk about hot summer couple goals.
I was going to buy more Roman Reigns merch, but fuuuuuck shipping costs were mad expensive. And anyway I always wanted something of hers, and this t-shirt’s royalties go to Casa Ruby.
My t-shirts are now folded and stacked vertically like a record bin. I have finally achieved t-shirt critical mass.
My once-per-year selfie I’m kinda good with.
And that’s a Roman Reigns t-shirt ’cos my love for big dudes and ladies inevitably led me back to WWE wrestling.
Something Dasniya Sommer has been working on for an age and I really wanted to see her première (thanks poverty): The Männy at Staatstheater Hannover. Really, she’s gone to another realm of hectic with her rope work.
I need a disco ball to open this.
Under the railway bridge at the east end of Kaskelstraße, just before the entrance gates to B.L.O. Ateliers, glowing seductively at midnight as I left Berlin is not Bayreuth. Vol. 1: Tannhäuser.
Das Helmi on tour, all the way out east to Lichtenberg, in the shallow parabola of northern Rummelsberg right by S-Nöldnerplatz, where the rails form a curved triangle around the old railway workshops backing onto the roundhouse and railway turntable to the east, now typically Berlin ateliers and halfway to forest of the B.L.O. Ateliers.
Festival time. Wagner festival time. Berlin is not Bayreuth. Vol. 1. Six hours of Tannhäuser spread across at least four stages, meandering through the dishevelled brick and concrete buildings and fastigiate black poplars charging thirty metres into the dark, cloudless evening sky. Peter Frost wrecking it singing dodgy Schlagermusik, Cora Frost doing the same as a Pope to ruin The Young Pope. glanz&krawell (I think) working their way through the long shouty bits with proper opera singing. Das Helmi with their always always glorious, monstrous, chaotic stagings, scaring off people who though it was going to be, y’know, opera, culture and shit, instead of what the fuck is happening here, how did I find myself on stage slapping a stranger’s arse with twelve other people doing the same I should’a left when the Pope started kissing people’s feet kinda thing.
Mad thanks to Dasniya Sommer for getting me in, reminding me of a Berlin I utterly love, deeply pagan and animist, rough as guts and no intention of ever changing.
We went and saw Mission Impossible: Fallout and laughed for 2½ hours at the brilliant kinetic absurdity: Tom Cruise, part of the Jackie Chan and Buster Keaton lineage of getting audiences to pay stacks to watch them do mad stunts. We ate chocolate and ice cream and nachos – cinema nachos! – and drunk Sekt. In the Kino. This is Germany and everywhere is drinking erlaubt. Ten years today, ago Dasniya and I met in her Fabrik studio in Uferstraße.
Who put this there, Emile? It’s all new.
On my way to meet Emile for Pacific BBQ Café Cantonese roast duck and our usual madness (which happens all too infrequently). Sci-fi replacement skyline and Sydney / London memories.
This is my commitment to perseverance, endurance, and suffering. In panorama. 120 metres of finger-ripping bluestone, of which I’ve worked out maybe 10 metres. I had a quick climb yesterday before going to Williamstown Beach, and again today before seeing beautiful Paea, and later most excellent Emile. Some moves became a small sequence. It’s a delight. Thin edges, feet smearing on nubs, a right-hand pincher that swaps to a gaston via a vertical crack between two blocks where the mortar fell out, just enough to get the edge of middle and tip of index finger of my other hand into, then another tiny edge to get my left hand to a side pull on the same pincher after I’ve reached wide right with my foot to a rather good edge and going for an invisible single-fingertip pocket where a sea shell fell out, all stretched out and pulling myself into the rock. When it came together, along with the moves leading into that … this is where I belong.
