Photo Shoot et. al.

So,

It's been a couple days since last we spoke. In that time, I've had some interesting sharable (as opposed to the non-sharable kind, lol) experiences. Namely, on Monday, Andy and I met with a cool American photographer who's now a professor here in Berlin. We spent several hours with Bruce Spear and gained some really interesting insights. Of course, the first insight was, "what am I thinking about moving here?" To listen to Bruce, everything in Germany is bureaucratic, duplicative, and, therefore, completely lacking in any/all efficiency. Moreover, Germans are stodgy people who cannot step outside of their routines to see the world (or, whatever, issue you might have) in a novel way. I might be able to pass this experience off as an outlyer had I not heard it on several different occasions. Though the photographer was discussing the byzantine nature of the university at which he works (die Freie Universität Berlin), I'm not at all certain, his experience, and forgive me (my one and a half readers) for omitting the details, is so singular, so anomalous.

On Wednesday, I assisted Andy in a photoshoot with a local Berlin designer. We hit the pavement in the trendy fashion area, walked into various studios, and offered designers our service for free. Apparently, there are few cultural idiosyncrasies when it comes to knowing a good deal when one sees it. We then searched the net (i.e., ModelMayhem.com) to find both models and make-up persons who were interested in working with us (all at no charge of course). Yesterday was the big day and it went off, I must say, without too much of a hitch. Although the model was about an hour late, everything else went to plan. Of course, the cafe down the street from the designer's studio wanted us to rent the entire cafe in order for us to shoot for 20 minutes there. How really stupid. I was prepared to make them an offer they might have accepted, but Andy said it wasn't his first choice in cafes anyway. We ended up going to another cafe in another (less swanky, but nonetheless cool) part of the city where the proprietor had no issue with us using his cool space for shooting a beautiful (at least in full makeup and dress) model.

What concerned me about this day, however, had little to do with the shoot itself. That went without much of a hick-up. What concerned me were some of the statements made by the designer about the German mentality. She had, similar to our friend Prof. Spear, a highly critical perspective of Germans and their ability to adjust to new or different, or unexpected things. Moreover, when I mentioned to the designer that the Italian business owners I'd run into seemed more unfriendly than I would've expected from Italians (who, by reputation, are so nice and open) she blamed it on their prolonged exposure to Germans. Ouch.