Filed under: club, concerts, getting dancey, music | Tags: CdV, drinks, friendly fires, indie rock, kreuzberg, lido, music
OR: FRIENDLY FIRES, FINALLY
we are all excited and happy.
Saturday night found urs truly just returned from work, withered into a chair like a popped balloon, airless and distended and slack. BUT the knowledge of two presale tix to indie british popmakers Friendly Fires at Lido electrocuted me to my feet and wafted me all the way to U1 schlesisches tor, or was it the redbull.
once there it was quick dinner with friends, lil bit o wine, surprise lil mini rotkäppchen from my purse on the way to the club, at the door my waterbottle was taken bc doorkeepers are friends of dehydration. or thirsty themselves and not squeamish. what is the official rationale? do they just assume theres vodka in there? does any1 over 19 and under 49 ever carry vodka in waterbottles?
Lido is a great place to see a concert, wide, high-ceilinged, maximal acoustics minimal claustrophobia.
(bad lighting for photography tho)
there was no opener, friendly fires came on right around 10 on the dot.
on the earlier numbers, art garfunkel and some hacker provided backup horn sxn.
the bassist was a bore, later found out he is only a temporary band member for live shows.
guitarist, edd gibson, was focused and intense.precious.
drummer jack savidge appeared to be ensconced in a supercomputer.
and singer ed macfarlane writhed and jumped like a salmon being tazered.
i was only able to get pics after he settled down & started playing guitar, the others are too blurry to make out.
sometimes they switched instruments. a dustbuster came into play, among other things.
friendly fires play a tenacious, urgent sort of dancerock reminiscent of bloc party/franz ferdinand, but with a more generous splosh of disco in the mix.
everyone had fun.
the crowd tonight was lucky enough to hop&jump to the tune of a world premiere. but what was it called again?? hm
forgot my 3D glasses, unfortch. is that why the pics came out a little flat this time?
afterparty (our own little postgame, that is) was located across the street and down a ways at club der visionäre, what a great place to chill after being zapped through with music. great bunch of ppl hanging around on the dock, as always, tho pics thwarted by almost total darkness. wonder how many tipsyteeterers have flopped right over into the brownish waters over the years?
Filed under: bar, club, getting dancey | Tags: CdV, drinks, partyy, poetry, pooristhenewrich, prater
Well so now we are in Berlin for good land of adventure home of the trashy chic sexy poor, purportedly at least. They (ehh, Newsweek) say, incidentally, it’s a luminous bastion of stoned optimism and impromptu dance parties in these times of economically induced global existential gloom because nobody here ever had money anyways and nobody cares.
And so the adventures have begun.
Last night was about my boots, really.
Red geometric marching machines. Cleveland thrift treasures.
It began on the U5, the motley girlcluster across from me obviously indicating them, chattering about them in Portuguese (?) I’m sure they said they were awesome and wouldn’t it be nice to have such a pair of lovelies?
Yes and then to Prater because we had some USA guests and Prater is where to take USA guests. I had never been, not being a beer lover obv but it was a nice night and so a nice place to be although a little chilly and honestly not much of a crowd. Perhaps more lively in the daytime hours?
After that the question was zu mir oder zu dir ODER zu that nameless websiteless BAR on Pappelallee (KdR, as it turns out) in what seems to have been a second floor storefront with the globular orange lights like a 1950s spaceship (ie Berlin). SO we said both and KdR was first because I had been wishing to go there ever since they went there in a stupid episode of Berlin Berlin and I remembered cigarette-burned benches and Slavic dooormen and the question how sweet jesus do you get IN answered: fire escape. E had been wanting to go there since last time when a crazy lady passed out on the bar. Yes and so we asked no questions when there was a 1euro cover, no questions when the crowd was sitting ominously spectatorially before the DJ and a projector (BEAMER ha) was turning the far wall into an advertisement for surfpoeten.de. Ahem. So I learn too late that this is a weekly Wednesday ritual, who knew. We sat through a poetry(?) reading–one man’s conversation with a goofball God about doing strange things to animals such as hedgehogs and frogs, God, he explained firstoff, not being able to attend that night but having given permission for the poet(?) to read in his place–before agreeing hey didn’t somebody say something about zu mir oder zu dir that was a good idea.
So off we went, the place full of Americans of course it being a soccer night meaning no European would leave their house to go anywhere not having a TV, the closest approximation of which at zu mir being a wall-sized projection of the view through a rotating kaleidoscope. And so we drank Aldi wine from IKEA glasses and participated obligingly in (retrospectively random) promotional games administered by strapping young representatives of Philip Morris, eg, without asking questions, the loot of which finally being free tickets to a party at CdV & Freischwimmer on June 5&6. hm
Some new South African and Russian friends, a gay techno dance mistake and falafel later my boots were echoing their way through the empty Alexanderplatz arcades looking for the night bus stop that never materialized, and finally having decided to get a cab I fumbled coins from my purse and dropped the change that should have been the tip but didn’t feel bad after the driver dropped me heartlessly a block from my WG at the beepy insistence of the kurzstreckometer. Thinking, well so he can just find it himself. Undressing at the birds’ first sleepy tweets, a clink on the hardwood; it had fallen out of my boot.
