Filed under: club, getting dancey, made in berlin, party | Tags: appartement, partyy, stattbad, villa
Anyway, back to my main rant: Berlin is the perfect treasure hunter’s city. It’s a cave of jewels and ancient riches; it’s riddled with trap doors and mazes; underground; makeshift.
Largely it seems to be an afterglow, or desperate nostalgic simulation, of the charged fluidity and frantic change from the time right after the two Germanies were vigorously smooshed back together, when Berlin actually was the grungy sinkhole it still likes to pretend to be.
But what if it is a tawdry ruse? It’s so fucking fun.
The most exciting places to dance and prance, not surprisingly, are either impossible to find, in some back alley or weird basement or gutted insurance office somewhere, requiring you to clamber through a window or up a fire escape to get in, or best of all: password protected.
The Stattbad, e.g., while it’s definitely on the radar, is cool because it’s in a closed-down public indoor pool. They host parties and exhibitions. Also it’s in Wedding, which I can’t decide if that means it’s so uncool it’s cool again, or if it’s just queasy. Takes forEVER to get there.
o jesus!
Then there’s Villa, which is just all about keeping it on the DL. At the door, a tweaked out pixie with big goggly eyes and twirling in a poncho sang out as we tried to enter*, “and where are you going, my pretties?!” This made me feel confused (and not only because I was a half bottle of sekt deep) as I had believed it was generally clear to all that we were going into the club. She wanted, as it turned out, to test us, like a little guardian troll type thing, to see if we were tuned in enough to know the name of the event, which I vaguely remembered from the flyer only because it sounded a little like
fuck.
Phew!
Inside it feels like a creepy but cool apartment. It is Berlin, remember, buzzing little beehive of creepy/cool apartments with crumbling plaster moldings on cavernous ceilings, just begging to be outfitted with chandeliers and disco balls and ironic taxidermal birds of prey to set the stage for dance party magic.
in retrospect it seems weird that there was a cute little birthday party with candy and snacks going on at 2 in the morning, but villa is the kind of place where you generally just go with it.
And, because Tuesday nights are really the most utterly depressing time of the whole entire week, it’s a good thing that Dinner for Friends happens to be just then, in a little place called Appartement on Prenzlauer Allee, where you can get yourself a helping of warm noodles with a side of warm, fuzzy candlelight and a sprinkling of peppy throwback beats.
Wash it all down with the fierce hipster parade that starts marching in around 10 or 11 and that’s some damn tasty Berlin. But don’t even try and get past the gatekeeper if you don’t know the password.
*roughly translated
1 Comment so far
Leave a comment
[...] 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 [...]
Pingback by More Fear and Loathing in the Eastern Bloc *OR* Your Favorite Blog Strikes Back *OR* February in Berlin: A Survival Guide, PART I « glow.like.berlin March 4, 2010 @ 12:28 am