James Franco: Real Men Do Eat Quiche

Henselmann

Karl-Marx-Allee 75, Berlin

Vegetarian quiche x2 €15

Cappuccino x2 €5

Total €20

Here's the bill for today's Lunch With The FT, probably the British newspapers' gayest regular column (that doesn't involve some bloke going on about being a gay dad).
The delicious James Franco's clearly a cheap date - whoopee!
Today he's promoting not a fillum, but his art piece installation thing, Gay Town.
Any good?

The exhibition is a sprawling, infernal mess. Mixed media from an evidently mixed-up mind: videos, printed rugs, neon signs, many of them profane, all questioning the motives of a culture that simultaneously values and trashes those to whom it assigns celebrity status. A recurring image is one of a crudely-drawn Spider-Man figure, with the words “Fuck Spider-Man” scrawled across it. (Franco featured in all three of Sam Raimi’s Spider-Man films, as the hero’s friend-nemesis Harry Osborn, aka the New Goblin.)
The show’s title is a reference to speculation on Franco’s sexual preferences – just one of the preoccupations of the gossip-mongers, fuelled by some of the actor’s professional choices: he played alongside Sean Penn as gay politician Harvey Milk’s lover in the biopic Milk (2008), the gay Beat poet Allen Ginsberg in Howl (2010) and has just co-directed and brought to the Berlin Film Festival Interior. Leather Bar, a sexually explicit reimagining of some “lost” scenes from Cruising, William Friedkin’s infamous 1980 gay police thriller starring Al Pacino [Neglects to mention the new Oz film - FB].
We are a long way from that degenerate world as we take our seats in Henselmann, a bright and empty café-restaurant with cheery yellow seats, named after the architect who designed several of the local buildings...

"Degenerate world"? 
Uh-huh.

Actually, although it all sounds a bit "Next stop, Pseuds Corner", it doesn't look too bad.

PS And here's an interview with Noam Chomsky from yesterday's FT, his favourite newspaper; "My impression in general is that the business press is more open, more free, often more critical, less constrained by external power and external influences.”