Look at that shit. No, really, take a closer look please. Rejoice in the manifold retro-pleasures provided by this display. The colors. The typographies involved. The neon sign advertises a cinema (“Kino” means cinema in German), which has long since fallen into semi-disuse, to be raised from the dead only now and then by unrelenting enthusiasts. There is no real Kino anymore at that place, but somehow it lives on nonetheless. Think about it. The neon sign’s esthetics were dated even in the 1970s, when the place was in full operation. Look at the grime. The weird electrical installations. The ladder, used for exactly what? Like a time capsule this couple of cubic metres of space both entomb and display so much history (and meta-history in the form of movies), your head starts to spin. The car reflected in the window to the left is modern, contemporary. The billboarding in the foreground too. What we use in 2014 to ride around and to make our intentions known publicly will be vintage soon enough. Our colors, our typographies will be vintage. Doesn’t this place look like it could absorb it all? Minutes before I took this shot, my camera noticed the dog, relaxing in the immediate vicinity. He was right at home there, and, in some ways, only there. Would it help this place being turned into an official landmark or something? Of course not. The dog would disapprove of it. Big deal, because this dog disapproves of everything? Rest assured, he would disapprove of any kind of “cultural heritage management” even stronger.

When vintage German poet Joseph von Eichendorff wrote his poem “Wünschelrute” (“Dowsing Rod”), he told about the song hidden in every single thing around us. The song hidden in this Kino sign and its surroundings is quite a specific one. Look at that shit. Listen to the song.