Filed under: art, made in berlin, travels | Tags: friedrichshain, photography, Holga
It’s never occurred to me to call myself a photographer, but every now and then, I find myself having a good long thunk about photography and what might it all be about?
One of the things I’ve decided is that an important catalyst for taking interesting pictures (that is to say, for a non-photographer like me) is the circumstance of being thrust into an unfamiliar landscape or a strange new situation — your sense of sight takes on a new depth, a certain sticky thickness, as if you were experiencing color vision for the first time.
[White: the breathless, glittering wide-eyed sweep from the top of your first alpine ski slope. Green: you straighten up slowly after a morning of hacking at sugar cane with a machete has left you doubled over, panting and sweating-- to have the plush wetness of a Costa Rican jungle glade overtake you suddenly and completely. Pink: a burning shock of sunset over water, somehow smoldering that much deeper for being on a foreign horizon.]
When you take a daring leap outside of your routine, you are big-eyed and bandy-necked as a barn owl, turning your head all the way around in one direction, turning it all the way in the other. You are alert as a fox in a farmyard, ears pricked, intelligent little eyes glowing in the dark.
With your feelers thus extended, all the flurries and scurryings in all the far-flung corners of your perception suddenly signify; happenings seem orchestrated, premeditated, curated. The dusty chaos of a city street feels organized as an art gallery (click!), the little scenes unfolding in a Viennese restaurant feel like a piece of theater (click! click!); a fluttering of doves (click!); a flash of red fabric (click!); a bicycle in the rain (click).
But when I move through spaces that I’ve thoroughly explored, a camera around my neck feels like dead weight. Why would I take a picture of something I see with my own eyes every day? [A rhetorical question! I'll be answering it in a minute.] But I guess the aesthetic anaesthesia is just a routine process of my brainsicles, pluckily arming themselves against the dangers of overstimulation: if I spent all my time noticing things, I would be constantly overwhelmed by a stupid sense of wonder, like a baby: goggle-eyed and wordless.
I would short-circuit in a puff of smoke, like a robot in a swimming pool!
The ironic problem with digital photography in particular is that it is limited by its limitlessness; if you can take a picture of everything, why take a picture of anything? And if the photo looks just like the real thing, where is the magic, where is the little transformation, the click and whirr of tiny golden gears that shifts the photograph into another dimension and renders the image a self-contained world unto itself?
On a recent drizzly, clammy Thursday afternoon (O Berlin summer, why have you forsaken me?) I learned that the inverse of the original theorem can also be true: that under the right circumstances a camera in itself can be the catalyst for a reinvestigation of your natural habitat. On the advice of a (pretty baller) friend, I bought a Holga 120 CFN camera, which looks like a crappy plastic toy, but somehow takes pictures that look like gauzy still frames from my most elusive dreams.
Stalking around Friedrichshain, squinching my eye up to the viewfinder while aiming my new secret weapon, I saw everything framed in a little plastic bubble. I saw my old familiar neighborhood begin to take on that seductive sheen of secretive extra-reality again. And there was the careful question of cause and effect, which digital photography sweeps under the rug — the terrible significance of shifting your weight this way or that, focusing just so, the patient play of light and shadow — with only 12 frames to illuminate before the film would have to be surrendered to the ancient alchemy of the stoic sorcerers, their shadowy seance bathed in hot red light.
But look! The pictures aren’t what I wanted at all. They’re underexposed and out of focus.
Somewhere between the reflections and refractions and reactions, the interfaces and exposures, a spooky, topsyturvy new universe has shimmered into view, which exists in a dimension my eyes alone can’t see. (Like in that episode of Are You Afraid of the Dark?, which was hands down the scariest one ever.)
In these images, my life feels Lynchian.
I relinquished control & followed the urgent urgings of the Lomo lens into a nearby cemetery I had never entered before (see top.)
Down the rabbit hole.
Filed under: alltag, dance dance fun for nights, made in berlin, travels | Tags: Alaska, Badeschiff, Bar 25, Eastside Gallery, Kleine Reise
And, just like that, it’s suddenly somehow summer in Berlin. The city has unfolded his lovely jade moth wings and – flutter-flutter-glide – on a benign & balmy breeze, we’re all sailing straight for the moon.
But while I – shameless, wild mother – was out recklessly gallivanting, prancing, flirting, basking, glowing, I completely forgot my baby-child’s birthday. glowlikeberlin, my heart, you turned 1 year old on May 17th! Make a wish, kid, make a wish. I don’t know where any of this is headed but we’re in this together, my nappy little notebook.
(My excuse? I was 10 time zones away, in Alaska, on that day. Glittering glaciers, smoked salmon, whiskey and rollerskates under the midnight sun. I avoided bears, but returned reeking of campfire. Everything, I suddenly realized, is pretty much OK.)
See??!
But back to you, Berlin, baby: it’s been so real because we chose each other. And now I’ve written you the world’s longest love letter, 13 months’ worth of sweet nothings. I crash-landed into your coolly glowing moonscape and I was fiercely in love (was? am), but things are not the same now I’ve seen your ugly side. In summer you’re my acid-trip science-fiction fairy-tale prince. In winter you’re the dragon.
And therein, maybe, lies your magic. Playing us hot and cold, as it were, you freeze us out until we vow to leave you, but we’re back in your gangly, tatooed arms as soon as the sun shines. In June, Berlin explodes – it turns itself inside out and the huddled masses spill into the street, blinking and rubbing their eyes and hungry hungry hungry.
The scars left by six months of fear and loathing can fade fast when your most confusing conundrum is just exactly who will watch your drink whenever you should decide that your spot in the sand has gotten just a little bit too hot for comfort and it’s time to switch from beach to pool.
A hot sunny day at Badeschiff is the kind of situation where everyone is inadvertently walking around with a dopey grin on their face, helplessly happy, lolling around defenselessly as their brains are melted by sunstroke and beer.
Were we in say, LA or Maui, this would be nothing to blog home about. In Berlin it is a delirious dream – I dedicate my post to you, Berlinese summertime.
The timing is appropriate: we find ourselves at the utter apex.
Cruising homewards on my fearlessly green bicycle, leaving Kleine Reise at 5 am on solstice Sunday morning, having spent the (almost) shortest night of the year dancing in that debaucherous basement (dodging the clumsy courtship of disoriented flanneled Canadians and explaining to the random renegade hairdresser that yes, I did agree that my bangs needed trimming, but no, I did not feel that this was the right time nor place to do so, as he brandished his shiny steel shears and twirled them around his finger like a Colt .45), Warschauer Bridge was washed uncharacteristically clean with crisp morning sunlight, the Fernsehturm was blushing pink, there was nowhere to hide my sleepy telltale raccoon eyes. Blink blink!
Berlin: now more than ever I love your wily weirdness. So why does my treacherous gaze keep wandering wistfully to the horizon? Big change is impending. Time will tell.
Filed under: made in berlin, travels | Tags: Café Moskau, dinosaurs, Karl-Marx-Allee, Kino International, Spreepark, Stalin
Berlin is a city of relics. Tiny, twinkling, charming relics and great colossal lumbering ones. Which totally jives with my fetishistic obsession with the antique and abandoned.
The city is also quaintly unassuming about its artifacts, as if they weren’t really much to be proud of — which is because they aren’t, really. The most exciting parts of Berlin’s landscape are its scars, its broken pieces, records of where it has been bruised and where it has failed.
The wall seems like it would be an obvious example, but even I don’t think the wall is all that cool, per se. It’s actually pretty dumb. I mean, it’s a wall?
What gets me every time: walking down the boulevard of haunted megaliths they call Karl-Marx-Allee (which, incidentally, they used to call Stalinallee), at sunset, amidst the long sad shadows of the space aged glass boxes and hulking glossy ceramic-tiled apartment cathedrals where secret Stasi security cameras are said to keep watch still over the landings of the upper floors;
…standing under the angular protrusion of the Kino International‘s aquarium of a second floor as it puffs its chest out at tragic Café Moskau: faded 1960s-Miami-motel glamor.
Surrounded by all this futile, lovely Jetsons-y decadence, anachronistically mingled with Stalin’s shiny wedding-cake fortresses, something stirs and tingles at the base of my brain. Is this what people who care about Jesus feel like when they’re in church? What does it say about me that my religious experiences are limited to encounters with Socialist East Berlin’s grandiose stabs at modernity?
Anyway, this is all getting very far away from what I actually meant to write about when I started. Which is dinosaurs.
It’s actually always dinosaurs, but sometimes it’s hard to work them in. In this case I totally encountered some.
Bona fide, enormous decaying fiberglass dinosaurs out in the wild. I know! I also can’t believe I waited this long to tell you about it. It was just like being in Jurassic Park II The Lost World when they go back to the island and everything is all drippy with vines and moldy and the technology is all broken and crappy and nature found a way!
Not just dinos. There was a whole park full of broken stuff and fire hazards.
This magical derelict playground is called Spreepark, and the most important thing you need to know is that it was once the only place where little ruddy cheeked East German kids could find a decent Ferris Wheel. Then some creepy dude took it over in 1991.
Then, in a chain of regrettable events culminating in creepy dude fucking off to start a new park in Peru then being arrested for trying to smuggle 180 kg of cocaine in a ship inside the dismantled rides and his son being thrown in jail forever and ever…the proud & glorious Spreepark died an ugly death.
Then they made a cool movie about it.
You can walk all the way around the perimeter and take pictures through holes in the fence, or you can take a tour on this weird little train but only at certain times of day.
Which all leads back to my original point: dinosaurs.
The best things about Berlin are very big, somewhat old and slightly broken.
Filed under: club, dance dance fun for nights, food, party, restaurants | Tags: appartement, Fleischerei, Kleine Reise, martini
Wait for it.
Our brave travelers having now survived, for better or for worse, the murderous entirety of February and even the better part of March, we become groggily aware of a change. It’s cold, yes, but Siberian? Hardly. Dark OK, but conspicuously less sinister. And that malignant layer of ice that made walking down the street a mismatched battle against gravity? Melted away like popsicles in July!
You begin to appreciate the little things, like how taking off your gloves outside doesn’t mean you won’t be able to feel your hands by the time you finish fiddling with your ipod.
And sometimes, even, the sun comes out and stays out all day, and the sky is the color of pool-cue-chalk with cartoonishly white, fluffy cloudlings minding their own business up there like innocent baby Zeppelins.
Enough about weather! Rewind two weeks: Zzzzzztt. We find ourselves, froze & hungry & ornery, on your average standard issue February Friday evening, which, as any soldier worth enough spit to polish a boot knows, it is simply SOP to transform with delicious food and cocktails, then just chug along till that crazy train is going off the rails.
Because dinner obviously sets the tone for the entire evening (/morning) to follow, this one was predestined to be solid gold. It all began at Fleischerei (my new favorite restaurant, in case you were wondering.)
Any questions?
There was a gin martini involved, natch. Otherwise I feel like the chandelier pretty much speaks for itself.
Magical as it all was, after something like 3 hours we reached a tentative consensus that it might be time to make moves. Where the dranks at? we asked ourselves ponderously. They were many places, as it turns out.
Note: In the interest of everyone’s safety, one is to take taxicabs from place to place when it is February in Berlin and you are hustling and bustling and growing sloppy. Be advised.
Between apartments of friends and Appartements of strangers and a mysterious Kimchi Princess afterparty we managed to find plenty of sekt for everyone.
It must have been around 4 am by my calculations when we chased the grooves and partykids on to Kleine Reise, the new sweaty underground neon binge basement ahem place to be. (ironically I’ve just noticed that they’re currently shut down due to fire code violations. yikes. not shocked.)
The rest is a lurid smudge of colors and sounds on my mind’s eye, a sucker punch to the nervous system, a great vertiginous, kaleidoscopic tumble into morning.
At 7 a.m. the staff politely informed us that they were closing by cutting the music. Smoked us right out of the party cave with lethal silence.
And now here it is. That moment both profoundly heartbreaking and gloriously ecstatic. We blunder out blinking and gasping into the vast chilly morning, feeling delicate yet rapacious like cosmic discospiders leaving their velveteen lair in search of breakfast. And there it was, painfully bright, blindingly true – a supernova? no, the sun. The classic Berlin sunlit a.m. dull-eyed homeward trudge – that hallmark of the summer months. The first of the year.
Big bright crazy days ahead.
Filed under: alltag, bar, club, concerts, dance dance fun for nights, food, made in berlin, music, party, restaurants | Tags: drinks, disco, villa, La Fete Fatale, Botanischer Garten, Botanical Gardens, steampunk, Palmensinfonie, Neukölln, burlesque
Children, children. Settle down. If you’re really good I will tell you a story. But beware!
We will pass through dark places, cold places, wild snarling volatile places, before we reach the glowing glimmering gleam on the other side.
This post has been a long time coming. It all started in early February, like this: a snowflake. Then another, and another. A million! A whole big mess o snow! Ah, but wait, how about a lil thaw in there for good measure…? Doh! What do you mean it’s going to drop below freezing again for 3 weeks straight? And that’s how all of Berlin came to be coated in a slick layer of ice 5 inches thick.
For all of February.
Effin bleak. Petrified flautist bleak.
Which brings me, by-and-by, to my theme: how to deal. Coping mechanisms, anyone? Yes, please. It is all about discovering what numbs your own personal pain, and just coasting for a while, riding that fragile high, until the sun comes out again.
I’m not talking about drugs, you crackhead! I am a graduate of the D.A.R.E. program.
No no. I go on adventures. If you ask schoolchildren, what are some famous explorers? They will name Indy, and then they will name me.
In my holster I’m packing: 1 (one) iPhone, 1 (one) 250 mL bottle of Rotkäppchen (trocken only, please), 1 (one) VBB Monatskarte Berlin AB (that’s a Metro card, fyi), and probably some lipstick.
I’m flanked by a lusty troupe of strapping young adventurers. We polish our boots and buckle our sashes, we’re off into the night.
(Sssh it’s more like dusk still. Bear with me.)
Our journey begins on a Saturday. It is late afternoon.
Determined to laugh winter straight in its hideous face, we bravely trundled all the way out to Dahlem to luxuriate in the lush, fecund world of ferns and fungus and foliage and flowers that lives in the network of greenhouses at the Berlin Botanical Gardens.
What my fellow travelers and I realized only after arriving in this (weirdly steampunk, right?) tropical paradise was that some angel had gallantly organized a small concert in our honor! And not just one concert, but a bevy of small ensembles, scattered throughout the gardens and perfectly matched to the vegetation around them! Trumpets in the tropics! Clarinets among the cactuses! Bongos in the ferns!
As the sky turned from frostbite white to a bruisy blue to a sinister velvety violet black, we were safely encapsulated in a glass and steel lozenge, tipsily scampering from giant banana leaf to sultry palm glade as the musicians tactfully tuned.
Haters might say something like: dude, that is a thing called Palmensinfonie that occurs regularly and in fact there is another one this weekend. To which I say, have you ever found yourself inside fucking Jurassic Park while a lone flautist serenaded you from within a thicket of vines and prehistoric ferns, as tiny chickens scampered underfoot? Take your cynicism elsewhere, Captain Reality-check.
We have made our dashing foray into the West, and emerged victorious.
Night has fallen. Feeling frisky from all that oxygen, we stretch out our antennae inquisitively…
…and sniff out an event in Neukölln called La Fête Fatale. I know you already love it! Yes it is in fact a burlesque show, the highlights of which were twofold. 1. a lady dressed only in golden glitter. 2. The Tin Man.
It was not a single sequin short of an enchanted costume party — with some spooky vintage Hollywood theme, in a crumbling prewar ballroom. It was glorious.
And yet the night sweeps us onwards, ever deeper into the disco cave.
What began so epically could only end at Villa, where the bartender is 17, the DJ is 35, and the median number of people in the bathroom stall at any given time is something like 4.
While you’re waiting for them to pile out comically, you’ll notice the bathroom walls are covered in wisdom and art.
Right, Villa, if you say so. I’m still mesmerized by that taxidermied hawk.
TO BE CONTINUED…
Filed under: club, concerts, dance dance fun for nights, music, party, style | Tags: music, electropop, glass candy, wmf, Planningtorock, CTM, Italo disco, Transmediale, Ida No
Curses how is it possible that I have let fully two weeks go by without providing any sort of update on my comings and goings? I hope you weren’t worried about me. My withered soul was only huddling indoors feeling horribly depressed about the hopeless glacial permafrost darkness aka Berlin in January. Did you know they don’t clear the sidewalks here? Haha! I didn’t! What a zany surprise.
ANYhow now I have gained access to one of those fake sun lamps by mysterious means which I won’t explain here, I am throwing caution to the icy gale force winds & staring straight into its UV glory, my vitamin D levels are through the roof. I am feeling fresh, my typing fingers are nimble and limber, it’s blogtime yall.
So on the itinerary in Berlin right now is the Transmediale festival for art and digital culture. It will run from Feb. 2-7. Running sort of parallel to this is Club Transmediale (CTM) which is all about “adventurous music” (wha? I know.) and started on Jan. 28th. So the upshot of all this is that Glass Candy and Planningtorock were playing at WMF last night. WMF which btw I have decided is not that cool per se but anyways moving on.
The only thing I know about Planningtorock is that she is really named Janine Rostron, lives in Berlin, and just collaborated with The Knife on an opera, “Tomorrow, In a Year“. Awesome? Check, check, check. So obviously I was stoked to see her and really sad when I got distracted by things like prosecco, chatty Lufthansa employees, and vietnamese spring rolls and missed the whole thing. Gah.
Glass Candy though has gotten some blog love from me before, they were in Berlin this summer, and I was not about to miss them again.
It should probably come as no surprise that I love singers who a) wear sequins b) prance around like ponies on stage and generally just bask in their own glamor as if being beautiful and crazy were the ultimate answer to everything.
Check, check, check. Ida No is not messing around.
She was fabulous in leopard print and and sparkles and a flowy platinum mane and knew it. This sort of creepy dude had his iphone camera all up in her george foreman all night and she was all about it.
You’ll notice I kept my iphone camera at a tasteful distance.
Glass Candy is a weird and stylish duo. Their spooky Italo-disco-electro-pop makes my dance muscles tingle in a dangerous way. I was not to be stopped on that floor, friends, especially since it was not so packed and there was room to whirl and twirl — taking brief pauses to make pretty pictures (apologies for the fuzzy phone pics, they’re ‘shopped with love).
Forget fancy sun lamps. I can & will survive this winter on champagne, disco and sequins.
Filed under: music, songs on the internet | Tags: Micachu & the Shapes, mp3, music, pregame playlist
Woo! Happy Saturday! So I’m not even going to pitch this like dudes I just found this cool new band because, realtalk, I’m a little late on the uptake here.
Really the most disappointing thing about this whole scenario is that Pitchfork beat me to the Pokémon joke. bastards!
Not only p fork of course but everyone else who talks about music on the internet has already been losing their cool over Micachu et al since their album came out last summer.
All of this being said, I still felt the need to write about this band because I am feeling very good about them on so many levels. Their frantic, jumpy electrobeats make me think of Le Tigre or something, and that fiercely wide-eyed, technicolor spunkiness is a little bit Alphabeat-ish…
…but finally the music that the apparently immensely talented and classically-trained Mica Levi and her Shapes are making on their weird menagerie of homemade instruments is really just doing its own thing. Sometimes it’s pop for just a second, but then it clicks or it bloops or it sizzles or they shout something like “after this we’ll slip your disc” and suddenly you realize you’re at a birthday party in the 4th dimension.
Also, she looks like a boy but that’s ok.
You can buy all their records through their label’s website. Plus not that I condone this but pretty much all the songs off their new album are to be gotten free on various music blogs. Just ask the hypemachine.
PS Also props for not putting a ‘Crystal’ in their name like all the other little electropoppers are doing these days. Micachu and the Crystal Shapes? Nope.
Filed under: the internet & things we find there | Tags: blogging about blogs, blogs, music
Sometimes people ask me, Lis what is the secret to having a cool blog? Yikes! I Don’t Know!, I tell them bashfully. Mostly I think it is all about reading lots of cool blogs. Well today I am here to tell you about my favorite ones.
It’s like reading books only REALer, cuz I know u are sick of all that “using your imagination” bullshit.
*****
NE-Ways here goes, #1: here is the post that inspired this post about posts. It’s just too good to let it go by without some mad props.
IMBOYCRAZY is a blog by a girl named Alexi Wasser who lives in LA. she is funny and sassy as all sassafras. Here she writes to smartypants boys who are too obsessed with themselves to make moves for a quality girl.
You probably aren’t richard gere are you? Then you should probably read this!
*****
Next in line is Tom Oatmeal. I forgive him for only having a tumblr. because he is one of my favorite writers and a comic genius.
sometimes (#2) he talks to us about 2pac, but try not to get confused when he calls him 2-Pack.
*****
I’d be misrepresenting my internet self if I didn’t mention at least one blog about clothes and jewels. One of my favorite ones is Style Rookie which is written by a 13 year old girl called Tavi who seems like she is probably smarter and cooler than most grown ups.
No joke: we could all learn a lot from Tavi.
Here she is ( #3) making fun of that font “Curlz”. Dude why u gotta ack like u don’t know exactly what I’m talking about.
*****
I would also just be kidding myself (and all yall) if I didn’t say anything about Carles – the voice of Hipster Runoff, who is here to talk us through it when we struggle with defining our personal brand, or maybe our internet presence experiences an existential crisis.
He’s there when you need to ask yourself the big questions, like: do these child predator glasses (#4) make me look cool, or scary?
*****
And this post wouldn’t be complete without at least one music blog, but don’t worry! I’m not going to tell you about Gorilla vs Bear or (god forbid!) Stereogum. Said the Gramophone is the real deal. Writers writing about music.
Here is a great post which is just a list their fave songs of 2k9 (#5). Don’t miss it, plus (sssh) all the mp3s are right there for you to right click download. Careful there’s a lot.
*****
So there are 5 of my all time favorites from the past year — what does the blogosphere hold in store for 2010? What will be the next ‘it’ blog?
Haha! This one, of course. Or maaybe our macbooks will break and we will all go back to reading normal books?
Filed under: travels | Tags: air sickness, blizzard, LOT Polish Airlines, NYC, Toronto, Warsaw
We’ve already learned that Berlin doesn’t really like it when I leave, and tends to throw childish tantrums. This time, mad blizzard action in NYC meant my Christmastime homeward flight was canceled. What to do? How about paying twice as much to fly last minute with LOT Polish Airlines via Warsaw? Oh boy, buckle your seatbelts kids.
Where to begin? I should probably start by noting that I was running on 3 hrs of sleep and a Red Bull going in. So there’s that.
I had the foresight to arrive at Tegel 1.5 hrs early, this gave me just enough time to locate more caffeine, then find an electrical outlet where an auto-check-in machine was once plugged in, huddle next to it, and watch the entirety of natural born killers on my laptop. Which turned out to be a great choice, because it’s physically impossible to fall asleep while watching this movie.
When you’re living fast, you might wake up one morning and find that you don’t exactly recall the details of your journey home the night before. It happens. On Tuesday I learned that this feeling is considerably weirder when, instead of being in your bed, you’re in Warsaw. So apparently I made it there somehow.
My contribution to the Polish economy was 5 EUR; for this I received a bottle of water and a duty free mini bottle of Belvedere (a souvenir! and, in a pinch, first aid kit).
LOT flight 41 to Toronto, scheduled to take off at 12:20, did not take off at 12:20.
They did finally let us on the plane, but they weren’t happy about it, and it was like an hour late. At the front of the line, my passport disappeared for 5 minutes without explanation before they grudgingly decided there was absolutely no reason that I shouldn’t be allowed to walk down that gangplank.
Congratulations, LOT, on operating your very first flight! Boarding was only kind of a clusterfuck.
Don’t worry, it gets better. The interior of the plane had been haphazardly salvaged from 1980s Lufthansa machines. We were going into the stratosphere in a trash can.
The flight attendants were not even trying to be cheerful, they were so over it. How about some optimism, I thought, your life is OK if you compare it with the slave-model-robots of the 50s…
I KNOW! HAHA!
At some point an Asian girl moved past me. I noticed only because a) even though she said excuse me like a polite person, she got this death glare from the girl across the aisle, b) there were no seats back there; I was, as I may have mentioned, in the last row. But I was super busy trying to get less uncomfortable so I totally forgot about her and her life.
Until, 20 minutes later — still sitting on the tarmac of course — the scary kind of police clomped officially toward the back of the plane. They were strapped in, they were locked and loaded. They were all in black, bristling with guns and electronics, thudding down the aisle in tight-laced skull stompers.
This is not good news when you are wedged into the back row of some Polish airplane. The Tourette’s-sufferer inside your head has already lost it, is already screeching something about terrorists and different kinds of violent death. Meanwhile your body sits very very still.
They breezed right past me, opened the toilet door on somebody whimpering with rising panic. She really said this, I wrote it down: “No! I don’t have family here…my flight was canceled. I will die!” Whether she really was going to die isn’t clear; she was having some kind of panic attack. But her voice was pure, desperate, frantic terror. She was crying and I had the kind of cold heavy feeling in my gut like you get when something really bad is happening. She was actually afraid for her life.
Her English was also really bad, which made the whole thing extra tragic.
After like 5 minutes of this they must have just been like fuck it, we’re like, death squad troopers, bitch. #1 grabs her feet, #2 grabs her arms, they hoist. (At this point I saw her face and realized it was definitely the Asian girl who had disappeared into the back of the plane about 20 mins before.) And they dragged her, literally kicking AND screaming, all the way back up the aisle and off the plane. She totally lost her shit, in the sense that she was out of control flailing, also in the sense that she dropped her backpack and a flurry of papers: “Oh my GOD! My documents!” But I think someone picked it all up for her.
What in tarnation? Whowhatwherewhenwhyhow the fuck?
So what did we learn from this, campers?
Alls I know is, next time I’m defs taking the G-IV.
PS I knowwww this post was mad long; I felt like I needed to spread some of the suffering around. Anyways, Merry Christmas lol!
Filed under: food, holiday boozing, made in berlin | Tags: Weihnachtsmarkt, Glühwein, Alexanderplatz, Seasonal Affective Disorder, Gendarmenmarkt, Opernpalais
Here’s something you might not know about Berlin, if you don’t live here: around the same time as Christmas, the sun does this nasty thing where it sets around 3 pm.
If you blink…or if it happens to be Saturday and you don’t even open your eyes at all until 2 pm….you’ve already missed the precious precarious window of sonnenschein. Might as well just go back to sleep without even getting out of bed. Somebody told me that that is actually how clinically depressed ppl act. Haha! What a kooky coincidence!
How to deal? Let’s brainstorm together for a minute…suicide, a tropical vacation, scrapbooking (?),
BLERGGG i’m too depressed & cold to think of any more ideas……..
Trudge trudge trudge. Shuffle. Are we out of cooking sherry again? Dammit.
Saayyyy! What’s this lil’ ol’ place all lit up like fireworks on the fourth of july?
OMG it’s the Christmas Market! The Germans call it a Weihnachtsmarkt and it is like their version of mall santa…or something. Berlin, being big and fancy, has something like 102 to choose from.
As long as you don’t accidentally stumble into the technicolor train wreck at Alexanderplatz, these concentrated epicenters of Holiday joy and goodwill are guaranteed to fill you with warm fuzzies.
Basically, the Weihnachtsmarkt is like a big fuck you to winter. It’s cold and wet and dark, but whatever we’re going to stand around and get drunk outside! It’s a Christmas tradition bitchez!
To be specific, they have other stuff too, but since all the tchotchkes they sell there are T-R-A-S-H trash, I’m pretty sure it’s all just a flimsy front to push as much Glühwein as possible on the frozen huddled populace. So my team and I did our best to help them out with that.
We moved in on each market with a mission: we got our Glühwein, we got our second Glühwein, we assessed the situation. Did we want a third? Based on this systematic and highly scientific testing of Berlin’s finest Weinachtsmärkte, finally the one at the Opernpalais on Unter den Linden came out as sort of a hands down winner. So cozy and bright!
(Plus it ended randomly in a cocktail lounge with an all-female jazz ensemble in matching white suits, which in retrospect may have been what tipped the scales…)
Gendarmenmarkt probably takes second place, because it was actually very pretty. But it scored some major minus points, unfortch: the Maronen were sort of crunchy, the people were a little bit snobby, we had to pay 1 EUR admission for the privilege of spending our money there, o yeah and the band sucked. yeah i said it.
The great thing about the Weihnachtsmarkt, though, is that the Glühwein, true to its name, Photoshops the whole scene with a warm & tingly glow.
Back at Alexanderplatz, it is raining big, wet, icy drops. The vendors are quietly contemplating suicide. A soggy little boy is looking at you with big eyes and his hand out, but you reason that you’re too miserable and cold to take your hands out of your pockets. What’s that you say? Another Glühwein? Whyyy yes, I think I will! Whaaat a shot of rum in it? You so crazy! Ah, what the hell, it’s Christmas! Best drink it before it gets cold! O God I love this place let’s come here every day and be friends forever and ever!
Merry Christmas, Berlin! O, and Happy Hanukkah, even though I think you maybe don’t understand what that is! See you in 2010! I love you!
xo
Lis
