Filed under: club, concerts, getting dancey, music, party, style | Tags: CTM, electropop, glass candy, Ida No, Italo disco, music, Planningtorock, Transmediale, wmf
Curses how is it possible that I have let fully two weeks go by without providing any sort of update on my comings and goings? I hope you weren’t worried about me. My withered soul was only huddling indoors feeling horribly depressed about the hopeless glacial permafrost darkness aka Berlin in January. Did you know they don’t clear the sidewalks here? Haha! I didn’t! What a zany surprise.
ANYhow now I have gained access to one of those fake sun lamps by mysterious means which I won’t explain here, I am throwing caution to the icy gale force winds & staring straight into its UV glory, my vitamin D levels are through the roof. I am feeling fresh, my typing fingers are nimble and limber, it’s blogtime yall.
So on the itinerary in Berlin right now is the Transmediale festival for art and digital culture. It will run from Feb. 2-7. Running sort of parallel to this is Club Transmediale (CTM) which is all about “adventurous music” (wha? I know.) and started on Jan. 28th. So the upshot of all this is that Glass Candy and Planningtorock were playing at WMF last night. WMF which btw I have decided is not that cool per se but anyways moving on.
The only thing I know about Planningtorock is that she is really named Janine Rostron, lives in Berlin, and just collaborated with The Knife on an opera, “Tomorrow, In a Year“. Awesome? Check, check, check. So obviously I was stoked to see her and really sad when I got distracted by things like prosecco, chatty Lufthansa employees, and vietnamese spring rolls and missed the whole thing. Gah.
Glass Candy though has gotten some blog love from me before, they were in Berlin this summer, and I was not about to miss them again.
It should probably come as no surprise that I love singers who a) wear sequins b) prance around like ponies on stage and generally just bask in their own glamor as if being beautiful and crazy were the ultimate answer to everything.
Check, check, check. Ida No is not messing around.
She was fabulous in leopard print and and sparkles and a flowy platinum mane and knew it. This sort of creepy dude had his iphone camera all up in her george foreman all night and she was all about it.
You’ll notice I kept my iphone camera at a tasteful distance.
Glass Candy is a weird and stylish duo. Their spooky Italo-disco-electro-pop makes my dance muscles tingle in a dangerous way. I was not to be stopped on that floor, friends, especially since it was not so packed and there was room to whirl and twirl — taking brief pauses to make pretty pictures (apologies for the fuzzy phone pics, they’re ‘shopped with love).
Forget fancy sun lamps. I can & will survive this winter on champagne, disco and sequins.
Filed under: club, concerts, food, getting dancey, music, party, restaurants, songs on the internet | Tags: diplo, major lazer, mitte, mp3, music, partyy, switch, themroc, wmf
You might say that the theme for this post is bad photography.
Or: what happens on a Friday night when you power through from work>>dinner>>club/party.
Namely, exhaustion, drunkenness, bad photography.
And fun times.
(Just don’t expect good pictures, is what I’m trying to get at here)
The night began righteously with a restaurant I simultaneously want to tell everyone about, and not tell anyone, so that it will stay a little lovely secret, because I don’t really like to share.
I’m talking about cozy-wozy Themroc on Torstraße, where we almost got turned away at 8 because of “reservations,” but after milling around the bar for 5 mins. we were apparently legit enough to be seated.
The awkward shuffle at the door was quickly forgiven and forgotten.
The view from our table was…the kitchen. As in sink, spice rack, cook. As in making our food. And no, this doesn’t mean we got hustled into the nosebleed section on account of no reservations. The kitchen is adorably right by the door.
As in any kitchen worth its guests, the refrigerator is covered in magnets/cute pictures. Jazz in the background and the gentle hum of various groups of people who like each other talking about things that make them feel good.
The menu is very small and exists only in the brains of the cook (1) and waiter (1). On offer was one appetizer, a sort of tabbouleh-style salad with shrimp. I like my tabbouleh with a little more zing and zest i.e. lemony-mintyness, but the shrimp were flavorful morsels grilled to perfection.
Next was a choice between something lamb and something chicken, I regret to admit that I was paying nil attention at this point, focusing more on like the wine-aspect of the meal (also excellent and plentiful), and so can tell you nothing about the lamb, since everyone at my table and at all the neighboring tables seemed to be going for the chicken.
The entree was solid and satisfying, if not spectacular. A little mogul of basmati rice mediated between a hunk of (baked?) chicken and a tzatziki salad. The chicken was tender and melty, basking but not bathing in a zesty-sweet-curry kind of sauce….mm now that I think about it, it actually was pretty perfect. It just didn’t stand out, exactly, but with the obvious theme here being that feel-good satisfaction of utter simplicity, wouldn’t anything more have been too much?
In any case, the dessert launched me to new heights of happiness: a warm fig amid fruity sauce and vanilla cream, all gooey and soft and choice with tiny caramelized crunchy nuts sprinkled on top.
All this warm and wonderful comfort food + drinks aplenty for less than the price of a pair of American Apparel leggings.
Speaking of which, the next stop was Major Lazer at WMF. This was really a great party, mostly because they had a little side room where the dj actually laid down the hip-hop all night long (this never happens in Germany), including some mash-ups that even though I feel negative about the mashup genre generally I have to say were pretty tight.
“MAJOR LAZER is a fictional cartoon character, who (according to press releases) fought as a Jamaican commando who lost his arm in a secret zombie war in 1984. He fights vampires and various monsters, parties hard, and has a rocket-powered hoverboard.” (Wikipedia)
I don’t feel like that requires further explanation, except that it’s the mutant science experiment of dj/producers Diplo and Switch and rocked pretty effing hard.
um you may recall I mentioned something about substandard photography. i think i should get points for even trying to take pictures and dance simultaneously.
why yes, thank you for asking, that is in fact a storm trooper in the right hand corner on stage. mostly blocked by some hombre getting way better pictures than me.
Forget the visuals, here’s an audio.
**Major Lazer – Hold the Line**
so get your dl on
