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, 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.
