“I am a camera, with its shutter open, quite passive, recording, not thinking.” The year is 1930, and Christopher Isherwood, writing his “Berlin Diary,” is looking out his window at the “dirty plaster frontages” of houses “crammed with the tarnished valuables and second-hand furniture of a bankrupt middle class.” Which depending on your perspective may or may not sound disturbingly familiar 80 years later, as we too confront a society that seems plagued by a kind of decadence and political turmoil that makes the future feel very precarious, to say the least.
