If you are ever in “The Spinnerei” in Leipzig and realize it
is late at night on a Tuesday, walk down the central road. Follow the old railroad tracks. When you’ve come to the end, you are in the
dark, there is nothing. You are in the
right place! Look to the right through
the trees and follow the distant light.
This nocturne will reveal oddities untold.
But Patience first.
It would be un-Leipzigian to handle business without first a drink, or
coffee and cake depending on the hour.
And this motley outdoor bar will melt you into place. Talk to Peep-Pa,
a lovely older woman in a blue mechanic’s jumpsuit, who wields a hand-crank ice
grinder for infusing love into your cocktail and a playful passion to educate
you on the nuances of her whiskeys and scotches. Enjoy the fireside if the weather is right.
Spoiler alert:
You are sitting next to “Bimbotown,”— what might be the largest animatronic
wonderland on Earth, housed inside the ground floor level of a Marxist era
cotton mill. I found it when I asked
where the bathroom was. I never found
the bathroom. I think one-dozen waves of
astonishment reversed the metabolic pee-process.
I was beckoned forward by the slow clicking of high heels
and a bobbing light, impossibly slow and methodical, belonging to a sexy
robot. She walks eternally in a circle. She is
a walk, simply one gear held delicately by a metal pelvis, driving her languid
rodded legs, welded footwear and lamp-head spine. I will aspire forever to be as sexy as that
robot, a perfect scientific reduction of catwalk in time-suspension.
I learned that my new girlfriend robot had a career in
the music industry. Her jazzier younger
self does a sweet two-step in Herbie
Hancock’s 1983 Grammy Performance of Rock
It as well as the music video. Robots doing the robot, of course!
These creations are
the life-long brain children of artist Jim Whiting, who you will
have the pleasure of meeting if you inquire.
I also learned that Bimbotown has been closed to the public with few exceptions
since 2012 because the permits to ‘turn it on’ became prohibitively
expensive. It seems to me a failure of
society that such a wealth of human ingenuity cannot be celebrated. Plans are currently in the works to exhibit
Bimbotown in London later this year or early in 2016. I will keep you posted!
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