i’m still not watching babylon berlin, but gereon and severin are literally districts in cologne (also, one cloister and one church). tell me if they have a sister called agnes, that’s where my parents live.
This is killing me, would this be like a family from New York naming their kids Brooklyn and Staten, oh my god
And I think it’s a no on a sister, but the eldest boy is named Anno, is that anything??
standuptragicomedy asked:
Haha wow love that the son whose name is basically just “severe” took a no-fucks jaunt off to American to be a jazz rat, like ‘lol @ determinism’
Fabulous, good, that’s what I’d come up with too after I spent, oh, some time just, trawling around in websites about Armenian cuisine.. And then making some…. just for Fun & Frolic
Actually my favorite cashier at my grocery store got a little excited when I told her what I was making, and told me that where she grew up in Detroit there was a big Armenian population and their food was amazing and she missed it
Actually the real Bryan Ferry Challenge is when is THIS one gonna end up in Babylon Berlin, which I’ll sure be grateful for given that this is the song I didn’t even know he’d already written for the beginning of the S3 spec script abstract I mystified my semi-secret fict feed with last month
There is really no reason for me to point this out besides my obvious and shameless fondness for out ’n out torturous mobster Edgar “The Armenian” Last-name-unknown. But look, ya cannot deny that at one quarter of the way through the show, all the real bad shady shit has actually been Soviet Embassy jobs. They slaughtered the Red Fortress, and tortured and killed Pointy Revolutionary Train Lad, and have generally behaved exactly like the ruthless gangsters you’d believe Edgar’s faction to be. Meanwhile, all Edgar’s crew has actually done is very stylishly intimidate people who on the whole appear to have deserved to have tattoo-bound priests materialize in their jail cell to threateningly pray with them or consume dubious octopus dishes under alarming theremin music. God even just writing it out….the man’s taste in villainy is fucking superb.. I love Edgar and you can @ me.
And I do have a reason for this one I promise, but there’s a whole section in What I Saw (that collection of Joseph Roth’s Weimar essays) just on the traffic of Berlin. It’s kind of incredible, and there’s this one tremendous bit where the collector & translator offers his own brief editorial note that goes like:
Roth, 1924: Potsdamer Platz looks like a suppurating wound.*
Hofman: *When last seen, (August 2001), it still did.
Haha, *zeing!*, Berlin city planning!
But I bring this up because I’ve realized why I think Gereon ended up on the wrong side of the Red Rover line (I’m so proud of this joke I am abso-lutely repeating it), which is that he TOOK PUBLIC TRANSIT with the REST OF THE PROLETARIAT to get to his police position for May First. Oh you sweet Cologne child, still learning how the capital’s traffic arteries work.
Anyway, this ep’s main notes contain several more extended asides, and several further Adorable Photographs of Charlotte Ritter—a-read on:
standuptragicomedy replied to your post “standuptragicomedy replied to your post “standuptragicomedy replied…”
YEAH okay so I’m re-watching and I noticed that when Sveta says “I love you” to Kardakov his response (translated as “and I you” because Netflix is a bunch of COWARDS) actually translates as either “you are my light” or “you are my world” both of which are SO MUCH. Also when Sveta hands over the list to the Soviet ambassador and he passes it on to his henchman, the henchman uses a v Soviet Secret Police phrase - “my hand won’t tremble” - to say that he’ll get it done.
ALSO when Kardakov is telling the others that he got a telegram about the train he uses the word “rodina (motherland)” when referring to Russia which I found odd mostly because in the context of the Soviet Union “rodina” is a very ideologically loaded word that I wouldn’t expect a counterrevolutionary to be using in a genuine way.
—holy FUCK this is good content, give us all that unfiltered Russian! Shit’s wild! Everyone worships Svetlana Sorokina. “My hand won’t tremble” ai-yi-yie! SOVIET. And whoa, huh, Kardakov pulling a “motherland,” that IS interesting.
…anyway I’m going to do a Babylon Berlin rewatch/liveblog inspired by @wellntruly but specifically focused on a) the Russians and b) Concern about Gereon’s Life Choices because that’s what I do best.
[x]
standuptragicomedy replied to your post “standuptragicomedy replied to your post “Babylon Berlin: Second…”
Okay i need to re-re-rewatch with a specific eye/ear on the Russian BUT i did pick up on the specific way in which Kardakov structures his sentences - in Russian, word order is pretty flexible but the emphasis changes depending on word order and Kardakov structures even the most basic conversation like he’s giving a speech at a rally.
Also Svetlana, despite being ex-aristocracy, doesn’t speak “posh Russian” the way I would expect from someone who grew up rich before the Revolution…then again we only ever see her speaking with the Trotsky-ists or representatives of the Soviet state so maybe with other disgraced aristocrats she would code-switch…
OF COURSE KARDAKOV WOULD. OF COURSE! KADAKOV WOULD!
Ohhh HECK, and, well, [spoilerspoilerspoilers] but don’t that make a lotta sense actually!
As a Russian speaker I have to give this show HELLA props for the pretty much flawless spoken Russian (the translation in the subtitles is…a bit off a lot of the time, but that’s Netflix’s fault). Also literally every single thing Sveta/Nikoros wears is A GODDAMN LOOK and i want to live in her wardrobe.
Waaaaaat you speak Russian! Please share any and all Russian lang thoughts! Are there characteristic vocabulary quirks from Sveta, Alexei et al I’m missing from getting all the words through Netflix’s rather workhorse translation?
vi0lentquiche replied to your post: BABYLON BERLIN - Ep 16 Notes
YES re the suit making Volker’s already slender drame look disproportionate, that’s not a good head:shoulders ratio. he only ever looks proportionate in the bulkier coat. “tom twombly”, fucking lol. double lol re lotr, SAME, as soon as overlarge-eyed gereon started crouching around in dry autumnal foliage
drame: frame, but like, Dramatic
me early: I think he looks tinier when he’s set against the scale of a room
me later: no I think he looks tinier when he’s OUTSIDE
me finally: oh it’s just that he looks tiny wearing clothes
