From silent films to the god of thunder: a weakness for moving eyebrows

Oh, if only you had the bedroom from “Le brasier ardent”. In this silent film from 1923, which I saw on Thursday at the Arsenal, a woman lives in a highly luxurious manner - her four-poster bed is surrounded by buttons and levers with which she can have the utensils for the morning toilet, breakfast, her "chers amis" (a couple of cute dogs) and even her husband automatically delivered to her, and can make everything disappear again at the push of a button.

Over the course of the impressively meandering story, she nevertheless develops a crush on a private detective named Zed, played by jack-of-all-trades Ivan Moschuchin - which doesn't surprise me given his perfect make-up: after all, it's rare to find men with such accurately made-up lips. And I've always had a weakness for movable eyebrows.

After the cinema, I resist the urge to brush my teeth (the orthochromatic film of the early 1920s usually depicts the color of its protagonists' teeth as dark gray), preferring instead to eat a few bites of food. Namely in the Renger-Patzsch, which will soon have to move - apparently a new tenant who lives above the restaurant is responsible for the fact that the rental agreement with the Schöneberg institution, whose roots lie in the 80s, is not extended. It is rumored that he is friends with the landlord, and the wild, loud and excessive partying of the restaurant visitors (most of whom are around 60) robs him of both his sleep and his last nerve.

Apparently he simply hadn't expected anything like noises and smells in a city like Berlin. Expecting to meet partygoers my age and, I admit it, also a bit because of the implied promise of an orgy, I sit in a corner by the window, order Cremant and pumpkin carpaccio, and have a daring look. But somehow the elderly hedonists seem to be at a different rave. It's still nice in the Renger-Patzsch - it's not yet clear who will move into the traditional rooms after the restaurant, maybe it will be a drum school.

After all, there are naked people on Friday. In Marina Abramović's play in the Haus der Berliner Festspiele, the "stage version" of her exhibition "Balkan Erotic Epic", performers re-enact my favorite work from her show, which dates back to 2005, live on stage: in "Scaring the Gods to Stop the Rain", women wearing headscarves tear up their folkloric skirts screaming and offer their pussies to the gods so that they can stop the rain in shock.

Incidentally, Perun is the name of the chief thunder god in Balkan folk belief, and especially in view of climate change, which leads to too much rain in winter (and too little in summer), I am sure that this suggestion will be returned to. In fact, Abramovic has even hidden a kind of orgy in her play, but it takes place in a cemetery, is carried out in slow motion by naked performers and skeletons, is somewhat elongated, and in this respect is quite different from my imagination.

With newly awakened hope for ecstasy, on Saturday I throw myself into my blue and white captain's racquet dress, use a gift ribbon to make a double shot of a bottle of aquavit fresh from the equator and two beefy shot glasses, and rush to a Kreuzberg birthday party with the motto "Nautical". And you have to give this party one thing: the swaying thing works pretty well at the end of the evening.