Testaments to the Boom Times to Come

[Testaments to the Boom Times to Come]

akahypotheticals replied to your post “Babylon Berlin, Second Pass: Episode 10 [S2, Ep 2]”

wendt gave me mad rudolf diels vibes - the resemblance is Strong

ohhHHHH, wait I actually knew about him at one time, the scary “dashing” dueling-scarred Gestapo man who dated the daughter of the American ambassador in the early 30s! yikes whoa okay, damn, Diels…

[Testaments to the Boom Times to Come]

Babylon Berlin, Second Pass: Episode 10 [S2, Ep 2]

This time around I ended up pausing for a spell before Episode 10, by chance and also not by chance!! If you know why, welcome back to misery, if you don’t then I bet you’ll want to go over here for first-round post options. 

In addition to a thing with great repercussions in matters of the plot AND the heart (my OWN, yours, theirs, 💔), this episode also features a performance by, I know now, legend Bryan Ferry, of Roxy Music/Velvet Goldmine/decades of musical showmanship, and maybe half of this show’s soundtrack under the Orchestra with his name. And now here Ferry appears onstage at Moka Efti, the man himself! Which of course raises an ontological curiosity reminiscent of when Audrey Horne turns on the jukebox in the Double R Diner and it plays Angelo Badalamenti: Does Ferry exist in the world of the show, as in these characters are just listening to timewarped Bryan Ferry songs in 1929? Or does various extant music in Babylon’s Berlin just have a tendency to transform into Bryan Ferry on its way to us today, like a Weimar twist on the ‘Best of Queen’ joke in Good Omens? Discuss.

Notizen 10

this was the second episode of the season. this show does such a good job with second episodes!!!! the first second episode ended with the big Nikoros performance, and the second second episode opens with a whole choreographed dance fantasy. if the third second episode doesn’t hinge midway on the filming of full staged musical number courtesy of the movie industry plot I will be let down. DANCE SEQUENCES.

[Testaments to the Boom Times to Come]

chibisashimi replied to your post “chibisashimi replied to your post “chibisashimi replied to your…”

Well, we’ve already seen Gereon in patrolman drag at the play in season 2. I was thinking it would take something really awful and desperate to get him into Cabaret drag, but when duty calls, Gereon heels. In the name of the republic and all, I think the pretty boy from Cologne would take it on the chin, so to speak.

Good Lord

thanks for everything you wrote here

[Testaments to the Boom Times to Come]

[wellntruly]

chibisashimi replied to your post “chibisashimi replied to your post “akahypotheticals replied to…”

This is making me want to resurrect my mythology about the MC in Cabaret who died in the war and came back just to die in the next one. I think this is relating so well because Gereon’s story is a descent, from living Cologne to dead Berlin. To be in Berlin is to be dead, and subject to the rule of stranger kings. That’s why Helga doesn’t fit. She’s alive, and she looks it, compared to Lotte, with Theda Bara eyes, and poor Grete, whose a twitching corpse by the ep 16.

Oooooohhh. Oohh interesting. A city of the dead, and the dead keep it. God that’s so true about Helga, almost like she can’t even SEE that everyone around her is dying (her almost spookily blind response when Gereon at last rises back up from a dose looking like a whole ghost, comes to mind). And Lotte’s Theda Bara eyes yes!

Anyway I also appreciate this Cabaret mythology very much, which has additionally reminded me of a thought I had while running to ‘Wannsee Weise’ the other day:

Volker Bruch Dress Up As the CABARET Emcee For A Promotional Shoot Challenge

[wellntruly]

[Testaments to the Boom Times to Come]

chibisashimi replied to your post “chibisashimi replied to your post “akahypotheticals replied to…”

This is making me want to resurrect my mythology about the MC in Cabaret who died in the war and came back just to die in the next one. I think this is relating so well because Gereon’s story is a descent, from living Cologne to dead Berlin. To be in Berlin is to be dead, and subject to the rule of stranger kings. That’s why Helga doesn’t fit. She’s alive, and she looks it, compared to Lotte, with Theda Bara eyes, and poor Grete, whose a twitching corpse by the ep 16.

Oooooohhh. Oohh interesting. A city of the dead, and the dead keep it. God that’s so true about Helga, almost like she can’t even SEE that everyone around her is dying (her almost spookily blind response when Gereon at last rises back up from a dose looking like a whole ghost, comes to mind). And Lotte’s Theda Bara eyes yes!

Anyway I also appreciate this Cabaret mythology very much, which has additionally reminded me of a thought I had while running to ‘Wannsee Weise’ the other day:

Volker Bruch Dress Up As the CABARET Emcee For A Promotional Shoot Challenge

[Testaments to the Boom Times to Come]

chibisashimi replied to your post “akahypotheticals replied to your post: (shows up with some takeout…”

This better not give us a Gereon as Orpheus moment where he goes to retrieve(rescue?) Lotte and then at the last minute turns around because he doesn’t believe she’d follow him out. He turns to check on her, she realizes he doesn’t trust her enough, and she walks back down to the one king in Berlin who treats people equally (at least, that’s Edgar’s hype).

Unfortunately,,,

I love it.

I like stories of tragedy and weirdness and the unexpected where you don’t wind up where you thought you’d be but Huh and I! like! the line! “the one king in Berlin.” The King of Berlin! The King of Berlin! it sounds like bells when you say it

akahypotheticals replied to your post: akahypotheticals replied to your post: (shows up…

edgar as hades imagery is so thick on the ground it’s laughable. the obvious underworld/mob thing yes, the pomegranates yes, the classical physical resemblance sure, but the strict enforcement of a code/hades as judge thing, the differing levels of ME/regions of the underworld thing, calling him “the armenian” rather than using his name (the greeks hated getting hades’s attention too)… so many thingsssss

[shriek] wait Berlin has a bear doesn’t it? Or at least in Neverwhere, each of the ancient cities had a mythic beast in their underworld—the Boar below London, the Alligator below New York, the Bear below Berlin. And you weren’t supposed to say the true name of the bears.

Listen my friends we’re building up a REAL beautiful ramshackle palace of decoupaged Moka Efti mythology and hello to it!

[Testaments to the Boom Times to Come]

akahypotheticals replied to your post: (shows up with some takeout Thai food) So, in…

additional thought no one asked for: lotte dancing in the club at the end of season 2 and they do that wide shot and she looks so worn out and unhappy gave me MAD “eurydice in the underworld waiting for orpheus to show tf up already” vibes

Hell YEAH, hell yeah buddy! I like where your head’s at!

Ooh. Greek Myth Babylon Berlin. Now there’s a notion.

This isn’t based on much there save a vague gesture toward the Girls in the Underworld (your Eurydices, your Persephones), but I had this amorphous thought of a Lotte who, after she was brought into various rooms in Moka Efti she hadn’t been to before, with a sort of mythic reasoning would just kinda decide that since she’d passed some important thresholds, awoke in the Armenian’s chambers, partook of the pomegranate and all that, she was now allowed essentially free reign through the whole premises as part of the bargain. She ate, so Hades is allowed to call her back again, but also she’s allowed to move through the Underworld light-footed. I don’t know, I can just see her, exhausted, in that shot you mentioned, deciding to Hell with it, and winding upstairs back to the room with the golden moons and falling asleep in the blankets on that couch again.

[Testaments to the Boom Times to Come]

chibisashimi asked:

(shows up with some takeout Thai food) So, in Babylon Brooklyn, when Edgar is feeding up Our Lotte, she's eating from all the food, and there are these gorgeously prominently displayed pomegranates there, and I can't imagine that's an accident, given the underworld vibes of club itself. What I can't get over is what this means in the future, whether we're hinting at some kind of demon's bargain between Edgar and Lotte or her place between the cops and the criminals or what. Thoughts?

Okay initial note—this has actually happened to me before, even with this very program!, but I’m always blown away when someone with a url I feel like I’ve never seen before pops up to chat about a show I’ve been blogging about. You are so welcome to join in at any time! Stay a while, throw a like around, maybe a reply, bc I had no idea you or the person above (below?) were even here at the party?!

Anyway you showed up with Thai food so you are VERY welcome. AND because you are talking about THIS MOMENT:

A clip I just dropped in in full because I feel it really captures two things

1. the extent to which I agreeeee

2. that I love Edgar okay, and so none of my Edgar takes should be trusted!!!!

….But that said I want him to adopt Lotte and Toni as their Crime Dad and of course this makes no fucking sense and of course he imprisoned Charlotte in a freezer for a while which would be I imagine pretty difficult to move past, but I personally would enjoy this nonsensical crime fam plot I have made up just for me. And part of it is yes exactly, “between the cops and the criminals”, because I think it would be kinda perf if Charlotte, already moving around in these weird liminal spaces in the Polizei between typist and detective, was part of the police force but also she’s the ward of the local crime boss, and Gereon’s like ‘uh’ and she’s like ‘it’s fine no one knows about conflicts of interest in 1929’ and he’s like ‘actually I think they Do’ and anyway as you can see from this super character accurate and not at all meta-aware dialogue I don’t believe this is remotely realistic as an actual show development. But then again if you had told me what would happen at the end of Episode 16 I would laughed “ha ha ha you are out of your MIND!”, and look what happened. That.

So you know never say die, never say Crime Dad couldn’t be weird endgame

~Come crash on my internet couch~

[Testaments to the Boom Times to Come]

pineapple-split asked:

Crashing on your couch!!! Just want to say I LOVE your Babylon Berlin posts. I look forward to every new one! Plus you put a lot of references to other media/works in them that I always find super interesting and like to go look up afterward. Do you have any recommendations for other works that depict the Weimar Republic as well??

OhhHHH boy that warms my heart, I’m so glad you’re out there enjoying them!!! It is a fun & rewarding show to write about, it is truly my pleasure!

THE WEIMAR REPUBLIC, hey, listen, yes. I know just enough about this time period to know how VERY little I really know, as with most areas of study. But this was sorta mine for a tiny spell, so apologies in advance for the occasionally somewhat academic flavor of what’s to follow.

1. Fritz Lang movies! Lang was a groundbreaking filmmaker from the Weimar period itself. Watch M to appreciate some of the iconography they start using with Bruno (and Moritz) in Season 2, and Metropolis because everyone should watch Metropolis.

2. Literally pulling off my syllabus: What I Saw: Reports From Berlin 1920-1933, a collection of short newspaper essays by Jewish writer & journalist Joseph Roth, and Berlin: City of Stones a historical graphic novel by Jason Lutz. The graphic novel is just interesting as an object within itself, and What I Saw I’ve actually referenced a few times because I reread it recently, and it’s also just such a damn good collection of writing. Parts of it can read a little rough because Roth can be pretty hard on a lot of minority groups that have it bad enough—including his own!—but he’s also quite sentimental and empathetic toward people too. And he has a really blistering diatribe against the Third Reich at the end, which is great.

3. Okay, despite putting him in my historical wishlist….I haven’t actually read any of Christopher Isherwood’s stuff, I just know about him as a figure. Well unless you count that I saw the Alan Cumming Cabaret revival when I was in New York a few years ago. Oh yeah get yourself into some CABARET. Anyway: Isherwood. English writer who lived in Berlin during the period, palled around the clubs with his various boyfriends, and wrote it down.

4. Wrong country but I’m guessing you might appreciate the vibe of Vile Bodies, Evelyn Waugh’s send-up (though at times quite feeling, he never can quite shake that) of the Bright Young Things set. They would occasionally gad over to Berlin for the drinks and dancing, though not specifically in this book. Anyway if you’re looking for disaffected flappers in various states of alcoholism, this is your ticket.

5. And this is the wrong country AND the wrong time period, but I’m also recommending The Third Man to you, and not just because it features the tired English major version of Benda. It’s one of the hallmarks of film noir, so it’s going to feel a lot like the tone of Babylon Berlin, which after some initial resistance I do have to admit is pretty noir-y—politics, crime, city is very present, there’s a heck of a lot of plots moving around, hats, etc. Anyway I have a sort of review of The Third Man here if you want more info (it’s one of my faaaves). Edit: oh hey I have one on Metropolis too! My very first post on Watch Log, aw.

I’m certain there a dozen obvious things I’m forgetting, but here’s these for now, and I’ll probably be back later with more

~Come crash on my internet couch~

[Testaments to the Boom Times to Come]

Babylon Berlin, Second Pass: Episode 9

[wellntruly]

Hey Netflix,,

uncalled for.

Interestingly though, they’ve finally split this series into two seasons! There’s a drop down menu! They still call these ones Episode 9, Episode 10, etc, but that’s fair a lot of shows just keep counting up over season breaks.

Anyway, WHERE WERE WE IN BERLIN. Ah yes, we’d wrapped up the kom-porn-at plot, and then in a fog of absinthe Gereon had been kidnapped into an eerie, aborted hypnosis session at the hands of the mysterious Dr. Schmidt, and bolted off into the night weighed down by panic, guilt, and slowly drying concrete (we’ll return to that).

Incidentally, I think it’s time for me to share out this excellently disquieting nugget from the good Dr. Rivers in Pat Barker’s Regeneration trilogy, in which he is explaining to a traumatized WWI soldier why he does not want to hypnotize him as the patient is asking: “Basically, people who’ve dealt with a horrible experience by splitting it off from the rest of their consciousness sometimes have a general tendency to deal with any kind of unpleasantness that way, and if they have, the tendency is likely to be reinforced by hypnosis. In other words you might be removing one particular symptom—loss of memory—and making the underlying condition worse.” [The Third Man introductory narrator voice] Haha wonderful!

Notizen 9

Weiterlesen

[vonmoors]

The new thumbnail? Ow.

Stefan might be tall but he still is “the little one”. i mean, look at him! He’s so pure, so sweet, such a baby. If ice cream trucks existed back in the day, he would sprint ontp the street if he heard the jingle to get strawberry ice cream.
He is the only character who is unaffected by the grimy and dark world around him. Literal ray of sunshine. It makes his fate much more tragic.
Also: A “Schwärmer” is somebody who kind of gets lost in dreams and is out of touch with reality. Somebody who strives for some kind of idealistic, peaceful live and ignores the harsh truths of the world. 

Helga’s actress is very well known in germany! her name is Hannah Herzsprung and I was - as the kids say - shook when her face popped up on screen.
Fun coincidence: She actually played a role in “The Reader”, maybe that is why your mind went to that movie. (I had to look her movies up because I could not remember movies I have seen her in. Her filmography is impressive). 

[wellntruly]

A dreamer, oh my god that’s precious and right and would have worked. “Oh he’s a dreamer” totally scans in English, and for the context of the scene, translator why and where the heck did you pull “gusher” from!?

(Annnd this is also a nice bit of tragic irony given that Lotte will soon learn that Stefan has in fact faced all sorts of the world’s harsh truths, and just chooses to live in hope and strive for betterment. *sob* Stefan)

Wait—she’s in The Reader?? Was EVERYONE in The Reader, because I also idly checked Volker Bruch’s filmography once and apparently he was in it too, lord help me if I remember either of them. Haha that’s nuts! Anyway I am so glad the German audience was as shooketh as Episode 8 wanted, wonderful.