Photo via HAPPY ACCIDENT

Boris and I were walking next to each other on a mushy day shortly after Christmas. Two days before, the water had frozen as it fell from the sky, and now the sidewalks looked oddly shellacked—in some places rough with ice, in others, where there were footprints, the pavement was so clearly visible through a thick layer of cold water—like a sterile tidepool, like a thick window with nothing but cement on the other side—that it looked more sharply real than naked ground.

That was the winter I learned the lunatic paradox of dieting to the point of self-starvation is you live in fear of getting too hungry. So on this day I had a plastic bag full of big red apples, always anticipating the urge for a snack. Boris, always anticipating the urge to escape, was gripping the handlebars of his bike, wheeling it along in the space between us, and neither of us was talking. I was distracted, gazing so intently into the crystal depths of the boot-shaped puddles and hoping to catch a glimpse of us in the intermittent glassy surfaces, that I didn’t notice my bag swinging a little too close to the thresher of Boris’s glittering spokes.

Photo by Jennilee Marigomen

A tug, a dull chomp, a flare of sticky mist: The bag was chewed up into a wet mess of flesh-colored plastic spaghetti, but the unlucky apple inside was sliced cleanly in half. I giggled and popped it through the new hole in the flimsy shopping bag, first one perfectly heart shaped hemi-apple, then the other. I was surprised at how easily I shrugged off the gloom I was wearing like a thin sheaf of ice, as the cold weight of everything I didn’t know how to say melted into the upside-down puddle world. When I handed him his half, Boris laughed at me gently, and said, “Look at that, I broke your heart!” And now I can’t remember what I had been angry about in the first half of that afternoon, or what he had done to make me feel with such certainty that he didn’t care.

Being relatively fresh on the scene, it could be years before I manage to cultivate that perfect patina of heavy-lidded disenchantment with this haughty, pugnacious city. So I had this great idea to get myself psyched up for the day when my enthusiasm starts to wane. To do this, I would go squirreling around in the tubespaces to bring you an epic battle of two of New York’s most conflictedly jaded cultural icons. It’s a disillusionment-off: “New York I Love You But You’re Bringing Me Down” vs. “New York is Killing Me.”

But so then Gil Scott-Heron wasn’t really available to do this post…I knocked on his door, and I’m pretty sure he was home; I heard a string of angry growls, then a crash, but then it got real quiet, so I started to feel sort of weird and just left. Luckily, Jamie xx was a real champ and gamely agreed to fill in for him. He assured me he’s totally over New York too.

Well but so the thing is you guys: James Murphy couldn’t exactly make it either….he’s like super busy making rude hand gestures at scalpers and Googling himself these days, and….never mind. I got someone else. You’ll see.

Hey, the celebrity guests never showed, but around here everyone knows that’s no reason to cancel the party! Come on: Who makes a better bitter New Yorker, the muppet, or the Englishman?

No, New York tastes like a pomegranate – tart and explosive, endlessly clustered.

Yes! A city of tiny universes like gelatinous seed pods, intricately layered, just touching; with each laborious, victorious bite you become increasingly suspicious your succulent solipsism is a myth; the shiny red surface you dimly perceive is only the interface with one among infinite other worlds; is the goal to eat them all up?

Image courtesy Headless Horseman

Headless Horseman – SH8KR

But I get it. Right now you are asking yourself: how can a person have a Berlin blog in Brooklyn? That makes no sense.

I’ve probably never used a sports metaphor before, but I like to think about it like this: when a team called “The Jazz” gets relocated from New Orleans to Utah and inexplicably keeps the name, nobody says, “But that’s ridiculous as there are about 3 black people in Utah.” [ed. note To be fair, someone probably did say it, but I wasn't paying attention because Twitter didn't exist yet then, so it might as well not have happened.]

Now look what I’ve done! Not only did I audaciously make a sports reference against my better judgment, but I’ve gone and outraged you with a bald-faced, marginally insensitive racial generalization. Before you delete me from your bookmarks, let me remind you that I’m being completely facetious at all times without exception, and also concede that your indignation is justified, of course; you’re always right. There are plenty of really…excellent…jazz musicians who are not black. Also, I am totally aware that Salt Lake City is the birthplace of “metallic jazzcore“, so hold your angry e-mails, I don’t need a lecture on the history of math rock.

Anyway, hopefully you get the point. The point being that in the end, you don’t have a choice, because I know what’s best for you. The other thing to keep in mind is that the changes are purely cosmetic; in the end, Williamsburg=Kreuzberg, Neukölln=Bushwick, so sshhh. You won’t even feel a difference.

Listen: before you say anything — it’s not what you think…I mean, wait, what do you think it is?

Never mind. Wow- deep breath. Here goes:

So over the past couple months, I’ve felt this like, yawning chasm opening between us. I thought it was just one of those “ruts” at first, and people kept telling me to give you another chance, so I did, I gave it some time.  And you can’t say I didn’t try really hard to mix things up. I even quit my job, so I could spend more time with you…well, all my time with you, really. I explored every inch of you, I stayed up all night with you, talking, not talking…

Shit, I’m no good at this kind of conversation. Am I rambling? Listen to me — the last thing you should think is that I don’t love you anymore. Look – it’s not because I don’t love you, it’s sort of because I DO love you, so much. Too much! Ask anybody. I’m obsessed with you. It’s true.

Let me put it this way: I came to you at a time in my life when you were exactly what I needed. But I’m a different person than I was just one year ago — thanks to you, Berlin, light of my life!

Now I think we owe it to ourselves, to each other, to get out there and explore those things we were thinking about doing before we even met, to peek adventurously behind those doors that would slam shut forever if we took the safe road now and just settled in comfortably to our life together.

I realize this is maybe not as enticing a prospect to you as it is to me: being made of stone and glass, wood, rubber, spunk and sprockets, and god knows what other kinds of funky spacejunk, weighing billions of tons and covering an area of roughly 890 square km. makes it hard to branch out, socially and romantically. But hey, chin up baby; consider: maybe I’m handing you a golden opportunity, a million-dollar chance to break out of your shell a bit. Improve your English! Get a job! Stop drinking beer before 10 am!

Aw come on now! Please don’t look so gloomy; there’s absolutely nothing you could have done differently to make me stay; you’re perfect, just the way you are, really.

It’s not you. It’s me.

The truth is, I’ve been feeling stuck for a while and I need a change of pace. I changed my hair, I switched from white wine to red wine, I changed my Facebook profile picture (more than once!), but nothing is big enough to relieve this dull ache of existential stagnation. I can feel it gnawing away at my bones, whispering into my ears while I lie dreaming, and it’s telling me that I need to leave you, if only to prove myself wrong. If I committed myself to you now, I’m sure it would just end badly — for both of us.

But I mean while we’re on the subject, it’s not like you haven’t pushed me away at times. I’m not one to hold a grudge, and I don’t mean to play the blame-game here, and I love you to death, but what about the time you made me pay 40 EUR, just because I brought my bike on the S-bahn. That really stung.

And how many times this winter did you play that prank on me, where I stepped outside only to find your sidewalks had been covered by tiny glaciers overnight? Maybe it’s just because I’ve never really been able to understand the secret German soft spot for slapstick, but slipping and falling down over and over again was not funny to me! It was really embarrassing! You don’t even want to know how many millions of dollars I could sue you for, if this were America.

And how many times was I forced to run for the cover of the nearest Spätkauf, my delicately straightened bangs already curled beyond repair, because you failed to properly notify me when you were going to rain torrentially? You could have short-circuited my iPhone. Yeah, I’m not laughing.

And yes, the parties were the fucking truth; all those dewy summer dawns spent twisting and jumping in some glowing purple bunker — ecstatically mind-blowing, actually, even, sometimes — and you finally got me to appreciate minimal techno, I’ll give you that one, but explain to me why nobody ever even shows up on the dance floor until 3 am? Is there some kind of rule that you can’t dance to electronic music until all the other genres have gone to sleep? No. You know what I think? I think it’s all that Club Maté you’re always drinking. Yeah I said it.

I’m not gonna lie: even though I’ve definitely totally made up my mind, there’s still part of me that thinks I must be making a terrible mistake — after all the crazy shit we’ve lived through together, you know? But I’ve got your number. And you’re not exactly going anywhere, ha ha.

Oh and by the way, whatever you heard about me and New York? Lies, baby. Slander. Everyone knows you can’t believe everything you read on the Facebook.

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.

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.

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.

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.