Filed under: alltag, bar, club, concerts, food, getting dancey, made in berlin, music, party, restaurants | Tags: Botanical Gardens, Botanischer Garten, burlesque, disco, drinks, La Fete Fatale, Neukölln, Palmensinfonie, steampunk, villa
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, getting dancey, music, songs on the internet | Tags: disco, drinks, electropop, mp3, music, tape, the whitest boy alive
It makes me sad sometimes that it takes me a week to get it together and blog about anything…that being the case here I am just bloggity blogging about a concert I was at LAST Sunday.
But here we go so The Whitest Boy Alive played a wonderful show at TAPE open air garden…a big dusty post-apocalyptic courtyard right outside the club, which weirdly enough started in the afternoon (4), which turned out to be a great idea because just as WBA went on, the sun started going down, making everything flash and glow.
<<outside the gas station…prosecco run, duh
(<<on the way back in after prosecco duly chugged)
We got there (we thought at 5, tho actually it was 6, as it turned out my watch was an hour behind), as the first opener was still on, a girl electroband called Laing. They were so much fun and the lead singer danced like a ballerina, also she was a friend of a friend of a friend.
Then DJ Erobique came on, which was funny because at first I kind of thought he sounded like he was looping instrumental Stevie Wonder samples over and over, also he kept dropping the beat for long periods at a time and then he would just stop making noise completely, or start talking, so we were like big thumbs down, and then all of a sudden it just got really good, kind of newage disco-ey with an R&B backyard BBQ vibe. I was dancing.
<<so were the kids on the rooftops right outside. get a job, hooligans. yea right, im just jealous i didn’t have that idea.
So as I was saying, as the sun sank sank WBA took the stage, and boy are they EVER precious. I dig the napoleon dynamite aesthetic of the lead singer.
He only *looks* like a dork tho. On the inside he is a rockstar. Anyway I guess the dork look is totally rockstar these days anyway, right? By “he” I mean the frontman of course, Erlend Øye, who is also the singer from Kings of Convenience, which I might characterize as a faded polaroid of Whitest Boy Alive, all washed-out and fatalistic and conducive to deja-vu-style memories of childhood summer vacations and rainy days indoors.
WBA bumps it all into a major key and makes you want to jump around.
…
which we did, until like 10.30. Or was it 9.30? Not sure, my watch was broken.
PS I ♥ this remixxx
**The Whitest Boy Alive – Golden Cage (Fred Falke Remix)**
UPDATE: O dude sorry I already posted that one ages ago!
Well here’s another song, whiners.
**The Whitest Boy Alive – Burning**
jk jk about the whiners thing. Don’t be mad, ‘s just a blog.
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?
particularly seeing as she’d just gone thru great pains to ensure that the medium of writing was, indeed, said napkin, and not the notepad the willowy young bartender with the careful facial hair had–helpfully, he must have thought–proffered moments ago in what was retrospectively a benevolently awkward interchange involving the puzzling replacement of the white napkin in question with a black one. as prev. one can only assume the barman had good intentions.
it is CSA on Karl-Marx-Allee, we know it by the high ceilings, long and narrow, sleek proud Stalinist storefront. the whiskey is cold. little white speakers are wafting samba from dark corners. a little too easy-listening: her last thought in this private moment as the expected friends bridge the steel/glass interface between rainy boulevard and enveloping interior warmth.
this bar has achieved, magnificently, the elusive/impossible: it is exactly the right temperature.
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.
Earlier I guess I promised a post about martinis but now that the time has come I suddenly feel there’s not much to say.
Use Tanqueray and not much vermouth.
Use olives and make it freezer frosty ice crystal cold.
Probably shouldn’t have more than 2.
I want to write about Berlin now so I will.
I’m moving there next Tuesday, this is very exciting.
Berlin is a spot unlike any other, it’s the implosion of everything; like the brushed aluminum surface of shiny dark Germany got hit by a neon meteor and nobody bothered to clean up, just let little space lichens take root in the crevasses and grow into a chittering surrealistic moonscape. Tidepool of esoteric cool.
