Filed under: club, food, getting dancey, 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: bar, club, getting dancey, made in berlin, party | Tags: appartement, haus am köllnischen park 6, kitsuné, martini, music, partyy
TO DO:
<<i sincerely hope this isn’t some kind of sassy symbolism.
my fingertips are feeling the first phantom sting of subzero glass, i’m seeing the fiery candlelit twinkle of microscopic ice floes on glacial grapefruit-juniper tanqueray deeps. that slick slide of poison over frostbitten lips before it bites my tongue and anaesthetizes my esophagus.
<<and then there’s this.
update: the location for the kitsuné biznass has CHANGED. see here. plusss there’s like posters EVERYWHERE; i think it’s going to be a mess (or LAME, blerggg) and probs won’t go, fyi.
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.
