Porn and the City

This month, Berlin is hosting its first Porn Film Festival, centered around a number of film-screenings this week, as well as numerous retrospectives on the works of notable pornographers like Maria Beatty and Todd Verow. I was fortunate enough to attend the afternoon portion of last weekend's Post Porn Politics symposium, held at the fabulous Volksbühne am Rosa-Luxembourg-Platz (home once to Bertolt Brecht and now, apparently, to pomo-indie-hipster pretensions). Todd Verow, nearing his forties, stripped off on stage to talk about his movies naked (a yummy treat), and I was treated to such lectures as "EJACULATORY INTERPUNCTION: THE CUM SHOT AS PERIOD, ELLIPSIS, AND QUESTION MARK" (what, no exclamation mark? semi-colon?) and "DYING IN WHITE: ON FETISHIST REPETITION, COMMODITY- AND BODY-EXPERIENCES," (the speaker would have made an ideal SLE lecturer: more Marxist than Mark, more feminist than Edie, more black-leather-jacketed than Patrick, and more pear-shaped than Suzanne) while vendors hawked dildos and DVDs behind us. Bruce LaBruce played us clips from his latest, The Raspberry Reich, a movie in which a radical leftist revolutionary group attempts to smash such bourgeouis constructs as heterosexuality and monogamy by, yes, having lots of gay sex. All in all, an educational experience, even if I couldn't quite manage to hide my erection on the U-Bahn ride home. I couldn't attend the evening portion (with a performative lecture by Annie Sprinkle, and films and concerts until 3am) or even Sunday's full-day event (including a talk that I was hoping to catch on the issue of class and ethnicity in porn)... all because of an ill-timed trip to Bucharest, Romania.

A rich German Stanford alum endowed this trip so that students in Berlin could visit new or acceding EU member-states in Central and Eastern Europe. Romania's due to become a full member of the EU on January 1, 2007 (a decision that was still up in the air until a few weeks ago), along with its neighbor to the south, Bulgaria, so the Center figured this would be an interesting place to go. Besides the muggings by Gypsies, credit-card thefts, and incidents of projectile vomiting and diarrhea (fret not, I was involved in none of the above), we were occupied by meetings with high-level government officials, NGO executives and EU officials from 8 in the morning to 10 at night. Understandably, the large portion of the group that didn't care much for politics, economics and social issues boycotted most of these meetings. The crowning glory was to be a one-hour conference with the Prime Minister, in his offices downtown: the only condition was that only six of us would be allowed to go, out of the thirty-six on the trip. Much chaos, confusion, back-biting and begging ensued: the final group of six consisted of the three most desperate to go, two others chosen on merit, and then myself, naturally, sui generis. The vilification began almost immediately - I even volunteered to leave the group so that someone else could go, but our handlers would have none of it - and so I've been mildly ostracized among the group since Tuesday. In any case, the Prime Minister wasn't able to meet us (I don't blame him: a faction of his party was threatening to break away, which would have lost their coalition the majority in parliament, so he was in crisis talks), so we sipped orange-juice and chatted with a few of his close advisors and his nubile young spokeswoman. It was pleasant enough, but hardly worth the tears I've shed for social acceptance by shallow sophomores. We only got out of the city once, on a trip out to the countryside to visit a 17th century monastery and castle; the only time I had to myself I spent at the Romanian Peasant Museum, a lovely open-air park with original peasant dwellings from various parts of the country. Oh, and I must mention the Palace of the Parliament, among the largest buildings in the world and the heaviest (on account of the quality Transylvanian marble, it seems) - it is always surrounded by a menacing flock of crows. We stayed at the Novotel, a classy newly-opened establishment downtown that charges 5 euro for a bag of peanuts and provides freshly-baked pain au chocolat if you get to breakfast early enough.

Back again as of the night before, I'm setting out now for my interview with Deutsche Bahn, the government-owned rail operator. If you have been here, you've probably seen the immense DB-Tower at Potsdamer Platz, right next to the Sony Center and over the S-Bahn station - well, that's where I'm heading now. If I'm lucky, I'll be working there for a few months afterwards, but, as of now, it's hard to say. Wish me luck!