I appear to have no hair. This wasn’t exactly the haircut I was looking for.

Oh well, I’ll just have to find something else to hide behind.

ETA

: Maybe I should try getting it dyed, if I could manage that in a way that would work on dark hair, and wouldn’t eventually need to be grown out and cut. That, or a piercing somewhere.

A few weeks ago I finally saw my first Fassbinder film. [Fassbinder](http://jclarkmedia.com/fassbinder/index.html) was an obsessive prodigy who dominated German cinema of the 70s, churning out 41 films in 13 years before working and snorting himself to an early death at the age of 37. He has been mythologized as a romantic hero, as a driven man surrounded by a clique of neurotic hedonists, and as a sadomasochist obsessed with the cruelty underlying love.

‘[Angst essen seele auf](http://jclarkmedia.com/fassbinder/fassbinder19.html)’ (ali: fear eats the soul) fits into that stereotype, though perhaps not in the way a plot summary would suggest. Emmi, a middle-aged German cleaner, meets Moroccan migrant worker Ali in a Munich bar. They begin a relationship and, to the disgust of society at large, eventually marry.

Racism and social opprobrium are omnipresent, but as background rather than theme. The fear of the title isn’t of foreigners or violence or economic hardship; it is fear of small acts of cruelty from your friends, as they protect whatever small scraps of social respect they have by kicking out at anybody below them. The sole cure for fear is desperation; characters come together only when they have nothing to lose.

The first scene covers all this in microcosm. Emmi walks into an unfamiliar bar, half-full of migrant workers. She’s rigid with anxiety, not knowing where to look or where to put herself, aware that all eyes are upon her. But she’s here, overcoming fear and cultural barriers, because she has nothing else: her husband is long dead, her children ignore her, her work gives her nothing but shame. If she had just a little more self-respect, just a little more status to defend, she would retreat back into a world of petty closed-mindedness. Fairly soon, she will. So will everyone else in the film: all the characters betray themselves and their companions through small acts of social cowardice.

Maybe it’s because I’m leaving, but Berlin seems even more politically alive than usual at the moment. Today, tens (hundreds?) of thousands of students have been on the streets, as [part](http://www.taz.de/1/zukunft/wissen/artikel/1/bildung-statt-banken/) of a week-long [strike](http://www.bildungsstreik-berlin.de/page/index.php?show=call) against attempts to privatize and charge for education.

The government response has been, rather pathetically, to [call them](http://www.spiegel.de/unispiegel/studium/0,1518,630965,00.html) ‘behind the times’. Bleating that markets = modernization = good was pretty shaky at the best of times, but now it seems positively ludicrous. And the students’ [demands](http://www.bildungsstreik-berlin.de/page/index.php?show=call) are much saner:

– Self-directed life and learning

– Free access to education, and the abolition of tuition fees, training fees, and childcare costs

– Public financing of the education system, without corporate influence

– Democratization of educational institutions, and strengthening of their self-government

I went along to support the Berlin demonstration earlier today, and found myself strangely weepy. I don’t know if they can win, mind, given the current hopelessness of the SPD and the rest of the European centre-left.

From a more radical corner, the squatting scene is [headed for a busy week](http://rockstar.blogsport.de/2009/05/27/heisser-juni/). [One place](http://brunnen183.blogsport.de/) is due for eviction tomorrow — and then on Saturday comes [something more ambitious](http://tempelhof.blogsport.de/) — a massive, and pre-announced, attempt to squat the currently disused Tempelhof airport. It sounds insane, but I’m gradually coming to see the logic of it. Turning an abandoned space into a temporary hippie playground appeals both to my head and my heart.

I mentioned that I spend a lot of time listening to spoken word recordings. I thought it might be nice to list some of the other places where I find good listening:

* [Democracy Now](http://www.democracynow.org/). Amy Goodman must be one of the most hyperproductive activists out there, a throwback to the living-for-the-cause agitators of the 19th century. With a small team, she somehow puts together an hour-long tv/radio news broadcast every weekday. It’s campaigning journalism with production values to equal or better the mainstream media. I wish I could find a European equivalent of this; Democracy Now does a great job of picking up stories from around the world, but it’s really a USian affair.

* [In Our Time](http://www.bbc.co.uk/radio4/history/inourtime/). The best thing on Radio 4, Melvyn Bragg and a few academics holding a no-frills discussion on some topic they know inside-out. Shamelessly highbrow, and generally fascinating.

* [IT Conversations](http://itc.conversationsnetwork.org/) is a mixed bag. They collect (mainly) talks from computer conferences, and repackage them as podcasts. Both the content and the audio quality are very variable. Generally good are Moira Gun’s ‘[Tech nation](http://www.technation.com/)’ series, and anything recorded at an O’Reilly conference. [The white, male faces gracing most of their listings do tell a story — but mainly, I think, about the IT industry as a whole, rather than IT Conversations itself]

* [Here](http://delicious.com/oedipa/audio) is my unsorted collection of nice things to listen to. Some good, some bad, some I never got round to playing.

I’ve also discovered that

The West Wing

works even better as an audio-only experience. If only it were financially viable to get Aaron Sorking writing radio plays!

I listen to a lot of audio recordings: as I fall asleep, as I’m walking around town, or while I’m working on things that only need partial attention. So I’m delighted to have (re)discovered the LSE’s [series](http://www.lse.ac.uk/resources/podcasts/publicLecturesAndEvents.htm) of recorded public lectures.

These are, with very few exceptions, excellent. The speakers are major figures: ministers, Nobel prizewinners, the top tier of academics, journalists and pundits. They’re mostly very thoughtful, and pitched at a high enough level to be interesting. Some of the [upcoming events](http://www.lse.ac.uk/collections/LSEPublicLecturesAndEvents/Default.htm) also look very, very good.

Sign of the times: a [group of hitch-hikers](http://the789project.eu/), planning a mass hitch this summer, need to agree on a European destination that will give them the least possible amount of hassle with visas and the like. Their choice: Ukraine. Yes, 500 people will be thumbing their way to Odessa because Shengen bureaucracy is so visitor-unfriendly.

This nugget from the [Berlin Beach Camp](http://www.berlinbeachcamp.org/), an annual get-together of [couchsurfers](http://couchsurfing.com/) at a lake near the city.

[38 Degrees](http://38degrees.org.uk/) has just launched. It’s aiming to become a UK counterpart to Avaaz: a large non-party campaign organization built around a stonking big email list, picking winnable campaigns and feeding their supporters with small, easy ways of contributing.

They’re kicking off with an attempt to bounce of the MP expenses kerfuffle to give constituents the power to recall MPs. So far they’re pretty vague about what this would entail, and I’m not entirely clear on the benefits. Sure, a few immensely corrupt MPs might be removed. But I dread to think how many local campaigns could end up diverting their energies into unwinnable attempts to remove their MPs.

I’m mildly concerned about a few aspects of their site: the [petition page](http://www.38degrees.org.uk/page/s/recall) doesn’t make it clear whether 38 Degrees will hold onto your email, and they aren’t offering any email address to get in touch with them. But it’s early days yet, and these are things that will doubtless get ironed out quickly. Plus David Babbs is involved, so I already have a fair amount of unpleasantly old-boyish confidence in them.

Simon “[Energy Flash](http://ohuiginn.net/mt/2009/04/book_energy_flash.html)” Reynolds, K-Punk and friends have been having an interesting (and intriguingly nerdish) discussion on ‘nuum’, or the ‘hardore continuum’, the family of British music descending from rave and hardcore, and covering the range of jungle, garage, grime, and a thousand subgenre cousins. A blogger-heavy [conference](http://nuum.org/events/the-hardcore-continuum-a-discussion) at the University of East London has given them license to go into depth. Simon’s posts ([1](http://energyflashbysimonreynolds.blogspot.com/2009/05/nuum-and-its-discontents-1-centripetal.html) [2](http://energyflashbysimonreynolds.blogspot.com/2009/05/nuum-and-its-discontents-2-genre-versus.html) [3](http://energyflashbysimonreynolds.blogspot.com/2009/05/nuum-and-its-discontents-3-wot-u-call.html) [4](http://energyflashbysimonreynolds.blogspot.com/2009/05/nuum-and-its-discontents-4-party.html)) are unashamedly, delightfully, high-falutin’:

>You could see rave as a whole, and the nuum in particular, as modernism’s last stand, or unexpected comeback, long after the ideals of modernism had been abandoned, eroded, questioned, everywhere else….Miraculously holding pomo at bay, the nuum preserved within itself, within its own partially cordoned off space, the heightened temporality of peak-era modernism: a sensation of hurtling into the future.

K-Punk, incidentally, has a nice little [defense](http://www.factmagazine.co.uk/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=2437&Itemid=105) of criticism.