Momus is a Berlin-based Scottish artist. He’s currently curating the Japanese art show Aftergold.
Friday
20:00 Standing in the deep snow outside Yam Yam, the Korean canteen at Alte Schönhauser Straße 6 (Mitte), I see joyful scenes and radiant faces inside, and wish once more that the old injury had not… and Nellie were still… but no mind, no mind.
21:00 Dressed in the filthy elegance of my Bless clown rags and a fearful black lion’s mane, I pace up and down Mulackstraße quoting D’Annunzio.
22:00 I rummage through the rubbish bins outside Pro qm (Almstadtstraße 48-50, Mitte) in the hope of finding some folios of Dante’s Inferno. Nothing but an old art magazine.
Saturday
13:00 I spend an hour, and then another, feeding my friends the crows with mushroom-flavoured chocolate taken from a sample dish at in’t Veld Schokoladen (Auguststraße 26a, Mitte).
16:00 The Japanese woman who runs Motto, the book gallery at Skalitzer Straße 68 in Kreuzberg, comes out into the courtyard and wraps my fingerless mitts around a small bottle of kerosene and a book of short stories by Jeff Rian.
19:00 I annoy the staff at the Walther König art bookshop (Invalidenstraße 51, Mitte) by telling them a long story about the time the painter Bram van Velde and I frightened Man Ray by appearing on his balcony dressed up as Peggy Guggenheim’s left and right breasts.
04:45 Ice crashes off the roof of the HAU1 theatre (Hallesches Ufer 32, Kreuzberg). The night watchman, taking pity on me when he sees my injuries, invites me in to drink tea and play tiddlywinks with him in a small, eerie, airless cubicle. Somewhere far off I hear the pitiful sound of whipping.
Sunday
14:00 I visit the statue of Dionysus in the rotunda of the Altes Museum (Bodestraße 4, Mitte) and have managed to read him 17 pages of Schopenhauer before the guards ask me softly to leave.
17:00 At the Botanical Museum in Dahlem (Königin-Luise-Straße 6-8, Zehlendorf), I mount to the podium in the peculiar beehive room and deliver a lecture entitled “The Marvellous Kingdom of Ant and Woodpecker” to no one in particular.
19:00 The Sri Lankan monks at the Buddhist House in Frohnau (Edelhofdamm 54, Reinickendorf) serve me wholegrain pilaf rice in their basement kitchen, which is lit with fluorescent tubes. After the meal, I toy for two or three hours with a clockwork prayer wheel in the library.
00:00 I am trapped in an infinitely regressing spiral on the U8 Pendelverkehr: two stops forward, three stops back. Curse my old injury, and Nellie, and Berlin, and the Maker.
