Ex Bibliotheca

The life and times of Zack Weinberg.

Friday, 14 November 2003

# 2 AM (GMT+1)

We visited the Museum of Musical Instruments in Potzdamer Platz, which has examples mostly of pianos, violins, and their precursors back to the 15th century or so. Also pipe organs large and small, and a bizarre interactive exhibit in which loudspeaker drivers were coupled to various found objects, like a street sign and an ashcan. It wasn't very good on brass instruments, and I saw no examples of woodwinds at all. Still lots of fun. Did you know they used to make walking sticks that unfolded into violins?

After this, we went to a movie: Kill Bill, Quentin Tarantino's latest, in which a woman exacts revenge on her former employer, Bill. He tried to kill her, so she's going to kill all his other former employees and then him. (It helps to mention that this was an all-female assassination squad that Bill was running.) It is best seen as Tarantino's loving homage and deconstruction of the genre of over-the-top action movies, not as a story in any way plausible. It suffers from having been cut in half so as not to be three hours long — we only saw the first half, which ends with Bill still quite alive and it not being clear why he tried to kill the protagonist in the first place.

And then we went out to Kurfürstendamm (aka "Ku'damm") where there used to be a church, the Kaiser-Wilhelm-Gedäctniskirche, which was mostly destroyed by bombing in World War II. After the war, what was left was shored up and left as is, and a new church built in a modern style on the rest of the site. The combined effect, to my mind, is a symbol of Berlin as a whole: scarred by history, but picking up the pieces and moving on. (Construction sites are ubiquitous here.)

We had dinner at the Europa Center, in a German imitation of an American imitation of a bad Irish pub ... at least the beer was good. There was a fascinating clock in the center of the mall which told the time with green liquid in a maze of pipes, doing extremely clever things with the principle of the siphon.

Random thought: The advertising tagline for Matrix: Revolutions says "Everything that has a beginning must have an end." Are these people unfamiliar with high school algebra? The set of all real numbers greater than or equal to 42 has a beginning but no end, or an end but no beginning, depending which way you're going.