Soiree Mobilee and another weekend of craziness

Gah. So tired.

So, tonight/morning was a lot of fun, but also quite the adventure. My daytime activities were pretty unexceptional; I did some laundry, did some writing, took a short walk to the local department store for some shaving cream and to buy some easy-to-read German comics books.

The only amusing part of my daytime activity was probably my trip to the Friseur (i.e., hairdresser). Still unable to manage the German telephone conversation that would result in an appointment, I just went to the hairdresser that was inside the Karstadt department store, which gave me flashbacks to being a kid and getting my hair cut in the Zellers at Westmount Mall. Shudder.

Anyway, I did my best to express my desires, hair-wise, and hairdresser did a pretty decent job of cutting my hair. Afterwards, however, she decided to style it, and gave me this awesome wavy-bangs blow-dry coif that looked like something from 80’s gay porn (NOTE: I managed to find an example of 80s-gay-porn-hair that isn't XXX-rated, but nonetheless this link IS NOT SAFE FOR WORK). I should’ve taken a picture of it, but instead I thanked the lady, paid her for her efforts, and then ran to the nearest bathroom and fixed that thing.

Warm-Up: Club der Visionäre

The two friends from Chicago that had hung out with me last night were planning to go out clubbing tonight, so we decided to meet at Club der Visionäre for some pre-party drinking. We actually met on the M65 bus and then headed over together (although we sort of missed our stop), and of course the place was packed. My friends dug their way into the far end of the patio area and found some seating while I went in search of beer. We spent a good hour or so drinking and chatting before we decided to get moving. They were going to try getting into Berghain, so I advised them to get there early, and I was supposed to meet Fantô and the rest of the crew at Bar 25.

Intermission

Since Bar 25 is in the vicinity of Berghain, we all grabbed a cab together and headed in that direction. The taxi driver dropped me off at Ostbahnhof and then the other two continued on to Berghain proper. I hadn’t yet heard from Fantômette yet about when they were getting to Bar 25, so I hung around the train station and amused myself watching the other young clubbers spilling out of the train station and heading to one of the many bars and clubs in the area.

In about 20 minutes, I got two messages. One from Fantômette saying “We’re heading over to the Mobilee party directly by bike,” and another from my Chicago friends saying, “We got bounced. Should we get back in line?” Well, that changes plans a bit, eh?

Since I was only 5 minutes away, I walked over to Berghain and found my friends. They wanted to try getting in line again, but the line was too short for the bouncer (who has a good memory) to forget their faces. Instead, I convinced them to hop into a taxi with me and head to the Mobilee party going on at Rechenzentrum / Funkpark.

Mobilee Summer Soiree at Rechenzentrum / Funkpark

We grabbed a taxi from the line of them parked in front of Berghain and headed out. The taxi driver didn’t know where the club was, but thankfully I had the street address, so he punched that into his GPS system and we headed out. All was well until the taxi driver came to a stop and said, “Probleme. Die Straße ist gesperrt.” (“We’ve got a problem, the street is blocked.”) Apparently, there’s a fair bit of construction going on in this area, and of course the GPS system wasn’t aware of that. Since he didn’t know where this place was (I could’ve shown him on a map, dammit), his sense of direction was rather brittle and this pretty much brought his trip to a halt.

I asked him if we were near the Ostkreuz station, since I recalled that there was a shuttle bus running from Ostkreuz from midnight until 5h00. It was just up the street in fact, so he drove us up to the spot where the street was blocked off and showed us the entrance to the station. We got out, crossed over to the other side of the station, and then found a small clot of people waiting for the next shuttle bus.

When the first bus came along, we quickly realized that we weren’t all going to fit, since it was just a small mini-van. The group that was there before us piled in and left us on the sidewalk to wait for the next one, which was supposed to come in 10 minutes. Ugh. My friends hit the imbiss next door to get us some beers, and we waited.

When the next van came along, more people had already gathered behind us. The van stopped a little bit further along the street, and a group of kids that had been behind us tried to climb in first. I managed to push my way on along with one of my two friends, but the other one was left out of the van. I tried in my best German to complain that we had already missed a van and had been there before these other kids, but they were all native German speakers and nobody was going out of their way to be nice to the foreigners. So we angrily shoved our way out of the van and waited for the next one, this time determined to break some teeth to get on there first. On top of everything else, it was starting to rain.

When the next van came along, we formed a sort of human wall and shoved everybody else out of the way until we were on the van. The van ride itself was surprisingly long. I’d say that we spent at least 10 minutes driving east of Ostkreuz before we got to the party itself.

I was supposed to be going in on the guestlist with a friend from Berlin who knew Pan-Pot, so we waited around to find her there. As it turns out, she had room on her list entry for my other two Chicago friends, so we all got in for free. Yay!

Things took a turn for the better from then on, as we stumbled across the half-lit sandy field between the entryway and the actual club itself. The club appeared to be some sort of riverside storage building or something, which they had converted into a club. On the one hand, the interior was mostly still white and boxy and looked, as one of my friends pointed out, like a grammar school lunchroom. on the other hand, they had a pretty complex set of lights in both the ceiling and the floor, along with a ring of banquette seating and a bar near the back. They also had this interesting installation along the long walls of the room, involving old vintage telephones painted white, mounted on the wall under glass, and then accented with a pale red neon bar across the top. This was repeated, serialist-style, around the room. There was something rather grunge-Warhol about it.

2h00-3h00: Exercise One

After checking my jacket at the coat check, we headed into the main room and found the Frenchy Krew (i.e., Fantômette and company) and I told them all about our adventures getting to the party. Within a few minutes I had forgotten all about it and was enjoying Exercise One’s set. I’m having trouble describing their set, but overall I’d say that the sound was a relatively heavy-handed minimal set, with a greater reliance on sustained, panned sweeps than I would normally enjoy. Nonetheless, every once in a while they would do a job of building up some suspense and bringing back the beat, and I would be back into it.

3h00-5h00: Anja Schneider

I remember seeing Anja spin in Paris a year and a half ago at the Lessizmore night at Nouveau Casino, and finding her set super-microhouse-y. This time, her sound was much more in the center of minimal techno, occasionally mixing house-sounding tracks, but nothing with that sort of crackling, sparse, fragile sort of sound that I usually associate with the microhouse sound. Generally speaking, I enjoyed her set quite a bit, although I kept thinking that I would like it a lot more if she had used a lighter touch and had slowed down the rate at which she changed records.

5h00-6h00: Marcin Czubala

I think this was my favorite set of the night, even though the DJ that followed him was perhaps the better performer. His overall sound involved a set of rolling bass patterns that reminded me a lot of a certain doctoral dissertation on “autotelic grooves,” that is, “self-directed” grooves that create perpetual forward motion by making the end of the loop drive into the beginning of the next loop. There was definitely something of this in the set, a certain thick and tactile velocity that you rarely hear in “minimal” techno sets.

6h00-??: GummiHz

[This guy was supposed to be spinning until 10h00, but I’m adding question marks at the end of his slot because he was still spinning inside when I left around noon.]

Several of us were in agreement: his track selection was inconsistent, but he had mad skills (“une belle technique”, as Fantômette put it). Some of his tracks I liked more, some leaned a bit too heavily on vocals in a way that I found cheesy, but he had a way of bringing together his tracks to create a really fantastic experience. He seemed to know just when to pull out the bass beat, when to bring it back, when to tweak the levels to bring out a particular element, and so on; in other words, he knew how to work the crowd.

Oddly enough, the highlight of the night was when he dropped an old Detroit house track into the mix, bringing in a rather minimal-house remix of Octave One’s “Blackwater”, featuring Ann Saunderson as the vocalist [NOTE: I couldn't find the right remix online, so you'll just have to imagine this without the strings and such; skip to 1'37" to hear the characteristic synth line]. I think it had something to do with the fact that the bass kick had been tweaked to sound a lot like the usual minimal techno bass kick…either way, this wasn’t the first time that a well-placed classic house track has really livened up a minimal techno set. I certainly wasn’t the only person who enjoyed it, as this was the moment when the entire crowd went totally crazy. It’s surprising how up-to-date that track sounded, considering that it was released around 2000-2002 in various versions.

At some point during the set, a guy started dancing next to me, clearly having a great time; he made eye contact with me, and we exchanged that series of facial expressions and gestures that says “this is fucking amazing” “holy shit, yeah.” That exchange created an opening for more, and so he came over to me, put his hand on my shoulder, and started ritual of “checking in”: How are you? Isn’t this great? How are you feeling? Where are you from? How long are you staying here? Do you like Berlin? I’m a native Berliner, I love this place. Are you having fun? I like you, man, you’re cool.

And so on. I was surprised-not-surprised at how tactile he was, putting his arm around my shoulders and leaving his torso open for me to wrap my arm around his waist. Berlin isn’t quite as no-touch-please as Paris, but it’s still unusual for strangers to be this tactile in everyday life. Of course, this is precisely why I’m writing my dissertation on this; these moments where the happenstance of proximity on the dancefloor turns into intimate touches, intense feelings and reciprocal mirroring are what I’m here for (so to speak).

After a few minutes of dancing next to each other and occasionally exchanging glances again, he came back to me and said, “Now, I have to ask you a quick question, but it’s really embarrassing (peinlich). I’m really sorry to ask you this.” I did my best to express my determination to not think less of him, and then he asked, “Do you know anybody with pills to sell?” Alas, I didn’t, so I said as much and told him I was sorry to let him down. There followed a flurry of apologies from both of us, as he was sorry to have spoiled the “moment” we were having with talk of business and drugs, and I was sorry that I wasn’t able to smoothly connect him with the right people so that his night could continue.

Whether to made good the sensed rupture or to indicate his continuing goodwill, he said (in English now), “I’m friends with the bouncer. If you have any problems, you tell me and I fix it for you. I’ll look after you.” This was certainly not the kind of crowd that seemed to threaten any sort of violence, but I thanked him for the sentiment, gave him a hug, and went back to dancing. A little while later, he insisted on buying me a beer and drinking it with me. I wasn’t really in the mood for beer, but how could I refuse such warmth?

10h00-12h00: Karol

The Frenchy Krew eventually decided to head outside and see if the outdoor part of the party had started yet. According to the schedule, they had DJs set to spin until midnight Sunday night. I doubt that I would last that long, but nonetheless the idea of sitting on some beach chairs in the sun was really appealing at the moment. We set up camp as a group and got to the hard work of sunbathing.

At some point, someone in our group made friends with a befreckled German girl from Hamburg, who came over and chatted with us for a while. Two of the people in our group spoke pretty much fluent German, so they all talked happily with each other, while I made half-hearted attempts to follow the conversation. At some point this German woman sat down next to me and started talking to me; at some points I could follow her speech enough to know when to nod and smile, at other times, I had no fucking clue what she was going on about. It probably didn’t help that she was clearly pretty high and wasn’t making much of an effort to speak clearly.

Eventually, she pulled out about 15 € worth of coins from her purse and asked for a 20€ bill from me. I couldn’t quite make out why she was asking for it, but since I had gotten in for free that night, I thought that I could spare the 5€ if that would mean that she would stop talking at me. Satisfied, she skipped off to see her other friends. At that moment, I turned to the other two girls in our group that were fluent German speakers and said, “I have NO fucking clue what that was all about.” To which one of them said, “Her? She was going on and on about how nice it would be that, since the weather was nice, we could pool our money together and do something beautiful. I asked her what she meant by that and she wasn’t at all clear, but I think she’s just trying to get some cash to buy herself more drugs.”

“Oh,” I said, “Whoops.”

By about 11h00 or so, Fantômette and her roommate decided to make a headstart to Bar25, since they had come by bike and the trip was pretty far. After a few minutes, I decided that I would head out early, too, as I was really in the mood to take the tram and enjoy the ride. I don’t know why, but sometimes I really enjoy the slow, leisurely ride by public transit as the rest of the city is awake and moving about.

What I didn’t count on, as I got aboard the tram towards Ostkreuz, was the heat inside the tram as it slowly puttered along. The windows on the vehicle apparently didn’t open, and the humid warmth eventually had me dozing off.

I awoke suddenly when I heard a bunch of young voices yelling “Ostkreuz!!” Apparently, I was about to miss my stop, as were a bunch of other burned-out partygoers. I jumped off the tram and looked around, unsure of where the actual station was. The other partygoers looked just as lost, so I decided not to follow them. After wandering down a few streets and failing to find an entrance, I eventually made my way back to the corner where we had picked up the shuttle bus the night before.

I took my dozing off as a sign and decided to call it a night (or day), so I took the train back to my place, bought a sausage-croissant from Le Crobag (which is my favorite unintentionally-obscene name yet) and crawled into bed.

Failure of a different sort

After a relatively early night (I got home around 3h00, got to sleep around 4h00), I woke up relatively early (10h00) and puttered around. I answered some long-ignored emails, did a bit of cleaning, and helped a new roommate move in and get settled into the apartment.

Around 14h00 or so, a friend of mine (the same one that gave me the guided shopping tour of Prenzlauer Berg last Wednesday) told me that he was in my neighborhood, so I hopped in the shower and we went for a walk together. The Turkish Market was open today, so we headed in that direction and walked through the market. I really should’ve bought some stuff for the house, as I had barely anything to eat there, but we were walking and it was easily 33°C in the shade, so I didn’t want to schlep around bags of over-warm dairy products and softening vegetables for the rest of the afternoon.

It was so sunny and hot, that we felt dehydrated just from the effort of walking through the market (“Shopping!” swoon), so we sat down at Ankerklause (“The Anchor Cell / Hut”) by the Kottbusser Damm bridge and had some drinks. I had an Alsterwasser, which I later realized was another word for Radler (i.e., a shandy, or a beer-soft drink blend), while my friend had a grapefruit-schorle (juice mixed with bubbly water). We were a bit hungry, too, so we ordered a summer-soup of yogurt and lime juice with hunks of fresh fruit in it, along with a plate of fried calamari with garlic mayo. Very tasty, I must say. Ankerklause is clearly more of a breakfast place, though, as there was an entire page of the menu devoted to various versions of the breakfast plate.

From there, we wandered along the canal to the east until we got to a biergarten at the intersection of two canals called Burg am See. This biergarten is popular with the local Turkish population, so I had an opportunity to show off my newly-learned Turkish by declaring to my friend that the sign at the door included the words “food” (yiyecek) and drink (içecek). He was kind enough to be impressed at my minor feat.

We bought some drinks, and then wandered around the patio and eventually snuck our way out onto the greens near the water and under the huge trees. I’m pretty sure we weren’t supposed to leave the grounds with their glasses in hand, but nobody stopped us. We spent a good hour or so people-watching and talking about the cities we’ve lived in, and then we started to head back to the Turkish Market to meet another friend of his. On the way, we noticed that there is a tendency for beefy Turkish men to sit along the canal with their shirts off, and it seems to be at least as much about display as it is about comfort.

From the Turkish Market, I left my buddy to hang out with his other friend (a former roommate, I think) and I headed back home to try and be a bit more productive. I managed to catch up on my blogging and send out a few more emails, and then got a call from a classmate of mine from Chicago, who was visiting Berlin with his girlfriend. We decided to meet at my subway station and then head out for dinner and drinks. I had been thinking of going to see the FoundSound [LINK] people spin at Watergate, so I put on my club-appropriate clothing and headed out to meet my friends.

I waited for them on Hermannplatz, wondering to myself if I would be harassed again like I was last Wednesday. There was no funny business this time, although I was perhaps less prominent, as I didn’t pace the length of the square, instead sitting on a bench and waiting. When my friends showed up, we jumped back into the U-Bahn and headed to Kottbusser Tor. From there, we walked up to Oranienstrasse, the main drag of the Kreuzberg “alternative” scene, which has now become packed with bars and restaurants in the way Oberkampf is in Paris.

After doing a sort of tour of the street and looking at the various restaurants, we settled on an Indian place that had a fair selection of vegetarian options and sat down. Our timing was perfect, as what had been drizzle turned into a complete rainstorm the moment we got our table. Even better, the rain had finished by the time we paid the bill.

When we were ordering food, I made a point of asking for my Bengalore Lamb very hot, saying, “Sehr, sehr scharf, bitte.” He nodded with the sort of indulgent condescension that I recognized as the “whatever, you can’t handle spicy” attitude, so I then said “Mexicanisher sharf, bitte” (“Mexican-style spicy, please”). The waiter found this endlessly amusing, and the ongoing joke for the rest of the meal was that anything he brought to the table was announced as “Mexican-style”: beer, yogurt, samosas, whatever. At least the lamb was good and spicy.

After dinner, we wandered over to Molotov Cocktail for a drink, where we got their signature drink. Indeed, it came in a clear bottle, with an alcohol-soaked sugar cube that the waitress lit on fire. Aside from the pyrotechnic gimmicks, though, the drink was pretty good. At 9€, however, it’s not something I’ll order often.

From there, we decided to celebrate the lack of open container laws in Berlin by buying beer from a pizza shop and wandering the streets with beers in hand. I walked them back to the subway stop and saw them to their train, and then headed up to the U1 line to make my way to Watergate.

When I got to the club, there was a massive line. Admittedly, it was already 1h30 and the lineup always tends to get long at this time, but it was about twice as long as I had ever seen it. Again, the summer season makes going out in Berlin more cumbersome than usual. If I had been going to see one particular headliner, I would’ve just decided to go for another beer somewhere else and then return around 4h00, but the FoundSound DJs (Someone Else, Miskate and Ben Parris) were all spinning on the lower floor of the club, presumably each taking up a few hours of the night. If I came back around 4h00, I probably would’ve missed 2 of the 3 DJs.

So I put myself in line and decided to tough it out. It was 2h00 by then, so I decided to wait until 2h30 and see how much closer I was to the door. In the meanwhile, there was a quartet of Spaniards in front of me that were debating with each other the likelihood of getting into the club. Considering they were relatively young, all male, and drinking beers in the lineup, their chances were pretty low. When they turned to ask me what the cover charge for the door, I told them in Spanish, and then followed up with a series of suggestions: pretend that you’re two pairs, rather than a group; stop talking when you get near the front of the line; finish your beers before you’re in sight of the bouncer.

By then, it was 2h30 and we weren’t even at the halfway-point of the lineup. Quite frankly, I can see the FoundSound folks back in Chicago, and I still have 4 more weekends in Berlin to go out, so I decided to call it a night and cut my losses. I bought a totally unnecessary döner kebab, hopped on the train, and headed home.

La Cocotte, eggs and truffles

Today started rather late again, as I had been out so late the night before. The contents of my day were actually pretty unexceptional (writing, some studying, going to the supermarket for some basic items), but the evening was quite a bit of fun. Yet another pair of French friends arrived in Berlin that morning—the same pair that had given me the (in)famous guided tour of the Berlin club scene more than a year ago—and we were all going to go out to dinner. We went to La Cocotte, a French restaurant in Berlin that specializes in homestyle French cooking, especially anything involving slow-cooking in cast-iron pots. One of the people in our group used to work for the restaurant and knew the couple that owned the restaurant, so we had a table waiting for us upon arrival.

The owners greeted us upon arrival and showed us to our table, in a cozy corner of the terrace outdoors. One of the owners brought us a complimentary round of kir royal, and that set the pattern for the whole evening. We ordered a round of verrines as an amuse-gueule, and then each of us ordered the famous oeuf cocotte as an appetizer. To make this dish, they take miniature cast-iron pots about the size of ramekins, add a spoonful of crème fraiche or white cheese, crack two eggs into each, shave some black truffle on top, close the lids tightly and put them over low heat. When done properly, the yolks and some of the whites are still soft and liquid, while the rest of it has set, perfumed with a deep truffle aroma. [Look at this description and recipe from Clotilde at Chocolate & Zucchini; I was totally charmed by the warmth of the comments section, where her mother and sister chime in with childhood memories]

So we gloried in the ecstasy of the oeuf cocotte, while we ordered some wine and some water (some of it on the house, I think) and our main courses. I can’t remember what the rest of the team had, but I think at least 3 of us ordered the dinde aux girolles, which was a large turkey leg braised in a dutch oven with girolle mushrooms and aromatic vegetables. It came with a fantastic little side-ramekin of mashed potatoes with olives, which was just the right portion.

By the time we had finished our main dishes, the rest of the restaurant had emptied out and the owners were constantly coming out to shush us (the restaurant is on a residential street). We finally moved into the back salon of the restaurant, where another carafe of wine magically appeared, along with a fondant chocolate cake and some crème brulée. Delicious.

Also, the back salon had a TV screen upon which one of the owners had been displaying his collection of vintage Bettie Page bondage/spanking videos. Also Delicious.

When it finally came time to pay the bill, the owner looked at the bill, rolled his eyes and said, “Ugh, just take half off the bill and split it 5 ways, I can’t be bothered to work out everyone’s bill separately.” Yay! Hooray for friendly and somewhat tipsy owners.

Well, after some escapades trying to meet up with a friend in deepest Neukölln, we called it a night and headed back to our respective homes.

When things don't work so well

Well, today was surprisingly eventful for a Wednesday, so this will take a long while to write down.

I had had great plans on getting up relatively early to go to a certain hair salon in Prenzlauer Berg called GrünTon, since my hair is in desperate need of a cut. I slept right through my alarm and got up sheepishly around midday, tossing myself into the shower and making my way over to the Eberswalder Strasse U-Bahn station.

The salon had no openings for me that afternoon, which actually rather OK with me. The place dubbed itself a “beat Friseur” (i.e., beat-hair-salon) and had a pair of unused turntables and a mixer next to the cash register. As a friend of mine pointed out, “Didn’t we already do that in the 90s?” Well, the place had been recommended to me, but I’ll pass for now. Willfully ignoring the bushy mess that was my hair, I headed to a nearby café on Kastanienallee and got me some coffee.

Thankfully, the trip wasn’t a total loss, as a friend of mine (whom I met at a roommate’s going-away party and has since accompanied me to the Obama rally and sushi) lives in the neighborhood and volunteered to meet me and show me the hipster shopping areas. He took me down Kastanienallee to Rosenthaler Platz and then on to Häckisher Markt, where we wandered around a bit before returning back to Rosenthaler Platz.

The shopping and too varied to catalog in detail, but here are some highlights:

• both of us like bright colours, apparently
• this is not the “cheap vintage” sort of neighborhood, but the “carefully selected with ridiculous markup vintage” sort of neighborhood
• Adidas stores in Europe will venture colour combinations that are just unavailable in North America
• There’s a fine line between ironic and just damn ugly
• The “unwashed douchebag” look is still in with many male hipsters
• Someone (male) in Berlin is wearing bright purple stretch-denim skinny jeans.
• Geometric patterns and prints are still in…but for how long?!
• Japan isn’t the only place where non-English speakers buy t-shirts with nonsensical English phrases on them
• Anything that smacks of the DDR period is instantly 400% more expensive
• There is a lot of wonderfully tacky mod furniture in this city
• There is a Danish (I think) store called WoodWood that has a fair bit of amusing boy wear and magazines and such, along with a series of totally non-organic perfumes that smell like things such as tar, soda and garage. Seriously. The soda one was actually pretty nice on me.
• There is a restaurant called White Trash Fast Food which is in this amazing mid-century Chinese restaurant. They’ve kept the over-the-top decoration and fake “Chinese” lettering, which totally underscores the idea of American “white trash” culture as something exotic and strange. The menu involves lots of BBQ, chicken wings and burgers, so we each got a burger and some lemonade and stuffed ourselves silly.

After our epic shopping trip, we both stumbled back to our respective homes. It was John’s last night in town before returning to Québec, so we were determined to go out and party in style. The plans were to go to the Kantine at Berghain again for dinner and drinks, and then off to Watergate for Troy Pierce and Konrad Black…or Tresor for Guido Schneider.

Warm-up: Other-on-Other [something]phobia and Club der Visionäre

We weren’t entirely sure about going to the Kantine or another place quite yet, so we made a date to meet up at Hermannplatz in my neighborhood at 21h30. I went out at around that hour and started wandering around the centre circle of Hermannplatz, waiting for John to show up. He was taking a long time, so I spent quite a while slowly pacing the length of the pedestrian area.

At around 21h50, a guy pokes me in the shoulder, saying “Hej, Wichser.” This means, “Hey, wanker,” so I knew that things weren’t going to end well.

“What the fuck are you doing here?”

“Um…I’m waiting for a friend.”

[something unintelligible, ending in “verboten”]

“What? I didn’t get that.”

“Hermannplatz is off-limits for your kind.”

“But I live here.”

“Then you should move.”

Having gotten the gist of his sentiments and noting that there were enough people wandering around to make violence unlikely, I rolled my eyes and walked away, and he and his friend didn’t pursue. The whole interaction was both surprising and unsurprising, and not a little bit ironic. This guy was clearly a Südländer, that is, someone from a “southern” country like Turkey, Lebanon, Tunisia, etc. The term can also apply to pretty much anyone from the Mediterranean, but in practice it’s a general term for the primarily Turk and Arab immigrant-worker populations of Germany.

My neighborhood, Neukölln, is one of the most immigrant-intensive areas of Berlin, so I suppose that he was adopting some sort of protective role in relation to this area, perhaps in reaction to the gentrification that has already been happening in neighboring Kreuzberg.

Now, I’m also of Südländer stock—of the Hispanic sort—so I can usually pass myself off as a second- of third-generation immigrant “native” until I open my mouth and present my Anglophone accent. So it was unlikely that this guy approached me because I looked too white. Based on the fact that I had been wandering around the area for about 20 minutes when he approached me, I’m guessing that he thought I was one of two things:

1. a (competing) drug dealer, which is kind of unlikely, since most of that sort of drug trade happens around Kottbusser Tor right now.
2. a homosexual / sex worker, cruising the area to pick up men and/or johns. This seems more likely, since there is both a gay sex bar and a (gay) sauna in the area, and there were a few youngish-looking Turkish and Arabs boys sitting on benches and looking available.

Either way, this guy was using the same sort of “cleanse our neighborhood” approach that some resentful German youths have used in the recent past, as the reunification of Germany created a collision of working-class German citizens with Turkish/Arab immigrant workers. Ironic? Just a little.

Anyway, John finally called me to say that he was running late (yes, I gathered as much), so we decided to meet in front of the Schlesisches Tor U-Bahn station and then head over to Club der Visionäre (instead of the Kantine at Berghain). Thankfully, nobody harassed me for waiting in front of that U-Bahn station, and John showed up in a few minutes. From there, we headed over to Club der Visionäre for a few drinks and waited until about 12h30 make our move to Watergate.

Attempt One: Watergate

Apparently, the lineup to get in wasn’t so long when we first got into the area of Watergate, but John needed to get cash and I needed to get a bit of food. By the time we took care of that and got to the club, the lineup was rather long. Long lines mean a more severe door policy, so as we waited to get in, we noticed that lots and lots of people were being turned away at the door. There was one bouncer at the club here that has a square jaw and Mediterranean features that has always let me in and seems to recognize me. I saw him at the front of the line, which comforted me somewhat. When I saw him switch shifts with a bouncer I hadn’t seen before, I got worried.

When we got to the front, the two youngish men in front of us were turned away without a moment’s consideration from the bouncer. We pushed to the front, and the bouncer shook his head without actually looking at us. I waited for him to make eye contact with me (at least look at me, dammit), and said “Both of us?” in German, hoping that it would make it clear that we weren’t with the group of drunk teenaged Brits behind us, and that we were possibly native Germans.

He kept shaking his head, so eventually I started walking away from the front of the line, down the “walk of shame” that I had seen so many other would-be clubbers walk. John, still determined to get in, switched into English and asked, “We can’t see Troy Pierce?” The tactic he was using here was an inversion of a strategy often used by bouncers to suss out tourists, asking them if they knew who was spinning that night. The fact that he had turned us away without asking this set of questions was surprising, so it made sense that John would try to provide the answers in the hopes that it would get us in. Alas, no luck; he was already busy refusing the next group of people.

Attempt Two: Watergate

I had a friend coming to the club who was on Troy Pierce’s guest list, so we waited around for him to show up, in the hopes that he could get us in with him. This was made more difficult by the fact that he was already bringing 3 other people with him, and he only had a “+1” spot on the list (i.e., “you plus one companion”). He took us all up to the guest list entrance, passing the still-lengthy line, and spoke to the woman running the guest list. She looked up his name somewhere and the nodded, and he and his 3 companions walked through the gate. She firmly closed the chain before me or John could get through.

John called out to this friend on the guest list, who had not realized that we weren’t let in with him, and he came back and tried to talk to the hostess at the door, but she said no. 4 people was OK, but 6 was apparently too much.

Detour: Club der Visionäre

It was clear that we weren’t going to get in, so we headed back to Club der Visionäre, with the intention of having a few more beers and letting the evening taper off. While we were ordering our drinks, a guy at the bar overhears us speaking French and jumps into the conversation, revealing himself to be French as well. We chat for a while about our respective evenings, and he reminds us that Tresor is still featuring Guido Schneider tonight. John was up for trying Tresor, so off we went.

Truth be told, I’m not usually the kind of person to keep on trying various alternatives when the main plans for the evening go awry. If I had been planning on seeing a particular DJ and the venue is sold out or something, I’d rather grab a drink in a quiet bar somewhere and then head home and prepare myself for the next night. However, it was John’s last night in Berlin and he was desperate to party, so I followed him to Tresor. I didn’t have high hopes for the place, as Tresor has disappointed me on both previous visits.

On the way over to the club John confessed to me that he was really buying time to try again at Watergate in a few hours. Troy Pierce wasn’t likely to come on before 4h or 4h30, and by then the line would’ve become short or non-existent. It was a reasonable tactic, although I was pretty unenthusiastic.

You see, when you’re rejected from a social space, you can have several sorts or styles of responses. John’s response was to make getting in there a mission, a sort of battle of wills or wiles against the bouncer. For me, the rejection immediately created in me a desire to avoid authenticating the place with any further effort. I wanted to go home and never return to Watergate or, better yet, return to Watergate every night dressed in deliberately uncool clothes to repeat the moment of rejection and turn it into a moment of confrontation. Or maybe I wanted to get on the guestlist and come to the front of the line, only to declare loudly that I’d rather be in Berghain; maybe I would call all of my friends already in the club and tell them to ditch the place and come with me to Berghain. Maybe I could convince the Black American bouncer at Berghain—with whom I have been on friendly terms—to deny this bouncer from Watergate the next time he tries to come over there at the end of his shift (like all club/bar staff seem to do here). Or maybe I’d become a high-level, in-demand DJ and then refuse steadfastly to spin at Watergate. That would show them.

In other words, my reaction to this sort of event is to either end the night early and avoid returning, or wallow in unsubtle revenge fantasies that promise to restore some dignity to me. Since calling it quits didn’t seem to be an option tonight, I took my revenge fantasies and my foul mood and followed John.

Detour: Tresor with Guido Schneider

The trip to Tresor was relatively quick (we took the bus), and there was no lineup in front of the building, so we just stepped in. Considering it was only 3am, the stark lack of lineup was a bit disconcerting for a Berlin club. The interior was as half-abandoned as last time, and the music was totally unexceptional. As it turned out, Guido Schneider wasn’t coming on the decks until 4h30, at which point we were supposed to be going over to make our second attempt at Watergate. This meant that we had a good hour and a half to kill listening to crap music. We headed out to the patio with our new Frenchy friend that we had met at Club der Visionäre, where he smoked a cigarette and we talked about random things.

I was not in any mood to make friendly conversation, so I let John do most of the socializing, while I tried to imagine how I could get myself back home and into bed without also abandoning John on his last night out. It wasn’t happening. Nonetheless, I was constantly waiting for something to happen that would justify me leaving the scene: a snide comment, a rough collision on the dancefloor, rude service at the bar, anything.

By 4h30, Schneider came on in the upper room, so we went over to check him out. The plan was to enjoy about 1 hour of his set, and then head over to Watergate. The music certainly got a lot better when Schneider took over the decks, and I eventually found myself dancing. I certainly wasn’t getting down and boogeying like I was at Panorama/Berghain last weekend, but at least I was shuffling about and showing some engagement with the set. At one point, John tapped my shoulder and said, “I hope we get into Watergate later, because I’d like to see you have some fun, too.” I smiled wordlessly.

Attempt Three: Watergate (and Troy Pierce)

By about 5h00, we decided to start making our move toward Watergate to give the whole thing another go. We stumbled out of the bar, leaving behind our new friend, and caught a cab. When we rolled up to the bar, there was indeed no more lineup, although some clubbers were already leaving the club. It was daylight, since Berlin is on the Eastern end of the time-zone and rather far North, and for many clubbers the night was already over.

This time there was a different set of bouncers at the door; not the guys that usually do the “selection,” but instead one of the beefier dudes that actually take care of security on the inside of the club. He seemed completely uninterested in us as we approached, simply opening the chain barrier and saying, “Viel spaß” (“Much fun”). As we wandered in and paid our cover charges, the bouncer that had turned us away earlier that night came down the hallway towards us. I glared at him defiantly, but he didn’t even look at me. I suspect that if he had, he wouldn’t have remembered why I was glaring at him, anyway.

We were in! It didn’t quite feel like a triumph, since our final success in getting in won us the privilege of giving the same institution more of our money. Nonetheless, it felt like something other than disappointment or rejection, so it was an improvement. And, finally, we could dance to Troy Pierce. John was visibly much happier about the situation, and that gave me a certain satisfaction, since the mission for the evening had been to see him off in style.

Pierce had apparently started at around 5h00, so we had only missed about 30 minutes of his set. I ran into the group of friends that had gotten in on a guestlist earlier, and they were excited to see us here. “You came at the right time,” one of them said, “Konrad Black was shitty, but Troy Pierce is fantastic!” Since I had missed Konrad Black’s [LINK] set, I couldn’t judge for myself, but it was something of a consolation to know that we hadn’t missed much.

Pierce’s set was indeed fantastic, very much in keeping with the sparse-yet-pounding aesthetic of the M_nus label. What impressed me the most by his set was the separation of layers. He had a way of tweaking with the sound levels and choosing tracks so that each musical element was audibly on a separate layer; each element seemed to occupy a particular frequency-band or something like that, because the resulting sound was free of the sort of interference and wave-cancellation that often happens when you mix tracks together. On the downside, the levels on the speakers had been turned up so high, the high-end sounds began to give me a headache.

Nonetheless, we partied and danced until about 7h00, at which point it was time for John to head home and leave his hostel. He had a plane at 9h50.

Turkish Lesson and Kiki @ Coookies

Today I finally started feeling a bit more like a human being, although I was still coughing and hacking and otherwise sounding pretty sick. I slept in until the sun kicked me out of bed, then drank as much water as possible and tried to get some work done on the computer. I wrote some more bloggy stuff, helped my mom look at apartments in Paris for the X-mas season, and started teaching myself Turkish.

Yes, I got a copy of a certain language learning program recently, with a whole series of languages included. This is something like crack for a language nerd like me, as I can now teach myself how to say “The young woman has long hair” in Vietnamese if I like. Now, since I’m living in Neukölln, which is populated by a dense population of Turks, I decided to start teaching myself Turkish.

The language program works pretty darn well, using word-image and sound-image associations to help you learn vocabulary. The only problem is that it also tries to get you to learn grammar inferentially through the comparison of phrases and images, rather than explicitly explaining the mechanics. While this works well when you have an entire childhood to spend listening to your family speak and being corrected by your relatives, this is not so great for the adult learner trying to absorb the language in a few weeks or months. So, as a result I know these vague grammar things so far:

PRONOUNCIATION NOTES: A) an “i” without a dot over it (“ı”) is pronounced as a neutral vowel sound, sort of like “uh” or the sound we use in English to connect two consonants. B) “ğ” doesn’t really have a sound of it’s own, but instead lengthens the vowel before it. C) “c” is actually pronounced like a soft “g” (e.g., “gem”), while “ç” is pronounced “ch”. D) “ş” is pronounced “sh”. E) all umlauts (e.g. “ö”, “ü”) are pronounced as they would be in German.

1. There is some sort of oblique (i.e., non-nominative) case ending for direct objects and/or locations, which involves the enclitic “ın”

• oğlan — boy
• oğlanın üstünde top — The ball is on the boy.

2. Sometimes the adding of this case ending mutates the last consonant of the word, sometimes not. It’s not yet clear when or why.

• at — horse
• atın üstünde kız — The girl is on the horse.
• masa — table
• masanın altında oğlan. — The boy is under the table (note: an extra “n” is added before the case ending)
• üçak — airplane
• üçağin içinde oğlan — The boy is in the airplane (note: “k” turns into “ğ”)

3. The plural marker “-lar” is added both to the subject AND to the verb , BUT two singular subjects together are not marked as plural.

• kız yürüyor — The girl walks.
• kızlar yürüyorlar — The girls walk.
• BUT
• adam ve kadın yürüyor — The man and the woman walk.

4. Most importantly, the number four is spelled “dört”, and is pronounced like “dirt” in English. Haha.

So there you go. I’ve certainly learned a lot, but sometimes I function under a certain assumption about grammar for quite a while before I figure out that I had just misunderstood it. For example, I thought “bir” was the copula verb—that is, the equivalent of “is” in the phrase “a is b”—until I later deduced that it means “one,” “a” or “an.”

Spur-of-the-moment clubbing: Kiki @ Cookies

Anyway, by evening I was feeling bad about having not left the apartment all day, and my body was almost back to normal, so I decided to head out and try the club Cookies, which is open on Tuesdays and Thursdays. Some of the Berlin natives that I’ve met have said that Cookies used to be their favorite club, so I was curious to see what they meant by that.

I had heard that it was a bit snobbier / lookish than the standard techno club, so I put on a collared shirt, some slim-fit jeans and my pair of leather ankle-boots and headed out. It was still a bit early in the evening and I hadn’t yet had dinner, so I wandered down Sonnenallee in my neighborhood and went to a Lebanese place that served some very cheap and reasonable sandwiches. I got me some kefta in flatbread and then headed back to the U-Bahn station. I wandered all the way from Hermannplatz to Kottbusser Tor, by which time it was 23h30 and it seemed like the right time to make a move, considering the place opened at 22h30.

The club (apparently in a “new” location) was a fair distance away from the other clubs in Berlin, right at the intersection of Friedrichstraße and Under den Linden. This is smack in the middle of Mitte, about 200m east of the Brandenburg Gate, which is otherwise populated by old pre-war and DDR-era administrative buildings, embassies, hotels, museums and some luxury shops.

The entrance to the club was hard to find at first, since you essentially walk down an alleyway and enter what appears to be an old cinema through the fire exit. I got past the door-woman and the bouncers, who were in the middle of giving some grief to a collection of young men trying to get in, paid the 6€ entry fee, and headed into the club.

The club was a bit small but potentially intimate, with a pleasingly retro minimalist wood-and-black-leather design. The space was still filling up at this point, but there were a few people already milling about. There was a rectangular bar near the entrance where they were serving really expensive drinks with poor-quality alcohol (6.50€ gin & tonic; 7€ rum & coke); I was pleased that they made the drinks stiff, but the liquor they were using had all the subtlety of gasoline.

I don’t know if I’ve been spoiled from my weekends in Berghain, but my near-instant reaction to the place was : “LAME!” This club had a more aspire-to-be-Wallpaper-magazine crowd, wearing “classy” designer outfits and trying desperately to pick each other up. The crowd was resolutely hetero and not especially interested in the music, as far as I could tell; they tended to treat the music as background noise for flirting / showing off.

Speaking of which, Kiki was already spinning when I got there and I hardly recognized him. As the French would say, he was spinning “n’importe quoi” (“whatever,” but with much more pejorative connotations), laying down a motley collection of deep house tracks with more of an ear for ambience than performance. This was miles away from the sort of crackling minimal set I’ve heard from him in past performances. I suppose he was playing to the crowd and making some money on what is usually an off-night, but nonetheless disappointing.

After sending text messages to Fantomette and a few other friends to tell them just how awful the whole thing was, I decided to stay for at least an hour and get a bit tipsy to make the night worthwhile. The highlight of the evening was having Nick Höppner (1/3 of MyMy and the musical manager for Berghain’s label, OstgutTon) show up with a companion and have a drink next to me. He was greeted by all the bar staff like a bit of a hero, then he lit a cigarette and disappeared into the “smoking area” down the hall.

Around 1h30, John called me to see what I was up to, and I took the opportunity to dash into the alleyway and tell him just how sucky the whole thing was. I had already finished my second drink, so wandered back out into the street and caught a night bus home.

So, Cookies sucked pretty hard, but I was sort of relieved as well. So far, most clubs that I had been to in Berlin had just been varying degrees of awesome; even Tresor’s disappointing crowd was balanced out by it’s amazing location. I was beginning to wonder if Berlin could do no wrong, so there was something reassuring in discovering that Berlin has some shitty clubs, just like anyplace else.

Sickness and Recovery

[If you were in the rave scene in Detroit / South-Western Ontario in around '96 or so, you might recognize this as the name of an amazing M_nus rave in a field near Windsor.]

Yay! I have a cold and I’m miserable!

Once night had fallen on Sunday and the temperature had dropped to a reasonable level, and threw myself into bed and got as much sleep as possible, well aware that I wouldn’t be able to sleep once the sun spilled into my room. I’m beginning to really resent the fact that there are no curtains in my room.

When the sun finally scorched and sweated me out of bed today, I lurched reluctantly into the kitchen and made myself some eggs for breakfast. I covered them in hot sauce and extra-hot mustard, and then grabbed a raw hot pepper and ate that, too. It gave me some temporary relief, but I knew that I would be feeling like crap for a while. My roommate felt bad for giving me his virus, so he gave me some of his own cold-cure vitamins and I made myself drink tons and tons of water. It seemed to help, I think.

I was motivated to get through to the other side of this cold, as I had made dinner plans with some friends for tonight, and it was going to involve one of the best places for sushi in town. So, I spent most of the day writing up my notes from the weekend, downing tons and tons of water, snacking on super-spicy lentil curry from the night before, and trying to ignore the sheer sweaty heat of the sun spilling into my room.

By 19h00, I was feeling relatively decent and ready to make an attempt at dinner. I doused myself in a cold shower, made myself up into a reasonable facsimile of health, and traipsed over to the U-Bahn with what I hoped was a display of energy and verve. We had sushi at a place called Sasaya, which was delicious and really lovely as a location. They had lots of seafood-related specials that were above and beyond regular sushi, such as fried squid tentacles with a dipping sauce made from their livers, home-made fish balls poached in a light broth, and a sort of “summer”-roll filled with raw veggies. We also got an assortment of sushi and a few rolls, and everyone was pretty happy. Dessert involved a pair of bowls of Matcha green tea powder turned into a thick slurry, accompanied by a pair of sweet mochi balls filled with what looked like sweetened read bean paste. Also, we had this panna cotta that was sitting in a puddle of jasmine tea, which was light and lovely and not at all over-perfumed. My only complaint was that the seating (which was floor seating) was upholstered with something vinyl-like, which stuck to my flesh and got all sweaty. Ew.

From there, we parted ways (in a manner that one of my dining companions later dubbed “anti-climactic,” which is certainly the case considering my current nocturnal habits) and headed home. I stayed up for a while doing some more writing and catching up on some emails, and then called it a night.

coughcough hackhack ew

After sleeping sporadically for a few hours in the intense afternoon heat, I woke up with a full-blown cold. Dammit. I think I got whatever my roommate had last Friday. I sure hope I didn’t pass that on to anybody Saturday night.

Feeling not a little bit miserable, I set about making a super-spicy lentil curry, in the hopes of jump-starting my recovery and at least temporarily clearing my respiratory passages. As I let the mixture simmer, I got an email from John, on behalf of the crew. They were still at Strandgut, and Ricardo Villalobos was slated to start playing around midnight, although in fact he started earlier by doing some ping-pong (i.e., trading control of the turntables with another DJ) with the other DJs. Anyway, he encouraged me to put my contacts back in and show up for the late-night party. If I had managed to get some substantial sleep and I wasn’t in the throes of a total cold, I would’ve taken a shower and given it a try, but it just wasn’t going to happen. I sent them all my apologies and got back to making dinner.

Flashback from last night

Last night, while John and I were waiting in line to get into Berghain, we would occasionally see men dressed in fetish gear leaving the building from the other side. I told John that these guys were leaving the Lab.Oratory [LINK], a very fetish-oriented sexclub operated by the same people as Berghain and Panorama Bar. We entertained ourselves for a while, looking at the guys leaving the place after a night of sexual play and wondered aloud what they had been up to.

Our wondering came to a stop for a moment as a guy walked by with a huge garbage bag full of something slung over his shoulder. We both looked at each other and had the same thought: “What’s in that bag? I don’t want to know, do I?”

Well, when we finally got into the club, I made a point of picking up the flyers for Berghain’s August lineup, along with the Lab.Oratory flyer. I didn’t look closely at them at the time, but tonight, as I was getting ready to prepare my notes for my blog, I took a look at the Lab.Oratory flyer. So guess what was going on in the sexclub while we were waiting in line Saturday night?

Scat Night

That’s right: sexual play involving shit. As the description on the flyer says, “Smear it, smell it, break a rule!”

So, I now have an all-too-clear idea of what was in that guy’s plastic bag. Ew.

Too much living for just one night

Oy, tonight was a long, long, long but also very eventful and interesting night, so this may take a while to write up and post. Hopefully the suspense is not killing you.

My daytime activities involved sleeping in, sluggishly writing up my notes from last night, making a run to the food section of Karstadt (more expensive, but at least they take plastic), and wondering why my throat was a bit scratchy [foreshadowing! I’m a master of suspense].

So, by about 23h00 that night, the ever-growing crew of Frenchy ex-pats (and I) started to organize. Fantômette, her GF, her roommate and his buddy were all going to skip pre-partying and head directly to Berghain/Panorama Bar before 1h00 to avoid the line. John (see last night) and I decided to grab a couple of drinks at one of the bars in my neighborhood (Neukölln, the bar on Hobrechtstraße near Pflügelstraße). The headliners at Berghain (Heartthrob, Tony Rohr) were both going on at 4h00, so we decided against starting at Watergate, instead planning to hit Berghain around 1h00 or 1h30.

The bar was pretty empty when we got there, but started filling up as he hung out. At first, we grabbed some folding chairs and sat on the sidewalk outside, along with most of the other patrons. Our quiet conversation was soon marred by an older, dishevelled-looking man wearing a sleeveless t-shirt with a confederate flag on it (yes, the rebel flag in Germany; I don’t quite know what to say about it). From across the street, he was yelling something in heavily slurred German that we couldn’t quite make out, and it wasn’t clear if he was yelling at us on the terrace, the building itself, or to some characters that were not visible to the rest of us.

After a couple of minutes of his yelling (while we bar patrons were doing our best to ignore him), a middle-aged, large man of Mediterranean ancestry (I’m guessing Turkish, considering the neighborhood) came out of the building above the bar and crossed the street menacingly. He started to berate the man in an equally-incomprehensible German, sending the man’s beer crashing on the sidewalk and shouting what seemed to be confrontational questions at him.

The “shouter,” probably sensing that his ranting wasn’t going to protect him from harm, got up and started shuffling away from the larger man, as if beating a retreat in slow-motion. The larger one followed him, and I finally began to understand some of the conversation:

“Tell me you’re not going to come back here! Shout it out loud for everyone to hear! Go on, shout it out!”

I doubt that this command did anything but humiliate further the older man and express the anger of the larger man, but the older one muttered his agreement and continued to shuffle away. The larger man shouted a few more triumphant threats at the other’s back, and then started walking back to his apartment building, where a friend/relative of his had emerged and was waiting for him.

Then, quietly and distantly from beyond the light of the corner store across the street, came that voice again:

“My beer?”

The larger man wheeled around on his heels, throwing his hands in the air and saying something in Turkish that seemed to convey, “Heaven help me, what am I to do with this one?” And he sauntered toward the older man, looking both amused and bellicose.

At this point, I was really worried that there was going to be violence, and I had no doubts about who would win this match-up. But instead, the larger man took the older man into the store across the street, out of my direct line of vision. There was an alternation between quiet speech and loud shouting, the hint of sudden gestures in the movement of shadows on the wall, and then the two of them walked back out, the older one holding a fresh beer in his hand. The larger man gave him a cigarette, lit it for him, and then pointed him in a direction away from us.

This was a sort of transaction that will probably take a lot more consideration to really unravel and understand, but I was struck by how the gift of a beer and a cigarette seemed to release both men from the violent relation they had just created. It’s as if the beer and cigarette didn’t just stand in for the broken beer, but also for the humiliation, threats of violence, fear and shouting. I think we all soothed ourselves with the idea that nothing violent came of this incident, but I don’t think this was a happy ending, either.

Berghain, Panorama Bar and The Line of Doom

As we had just bought our second beer, I get a text message from Fanômette: “Huge line at Berghain already. If you can get here quick, you can join us in the line.”

Considering that it was barely 0h30, this was really surprising. Since the headliners were starting at 4h00, I reasoned that there was no point ditching our beers and running to Berghain right now, as the line would be just as rediculous in an hour.

We finished our beers, chatted a bit about my blogging efforts and the joys and sorrows of writing an ethnographic PhD dissertation, and then made our way over to the club. John got a falafel from a Döner stand in front of Ostbahnhof, where a group of young Spaniards were clapping rhythmically and singing Flamenco, as they seem to do spontaneously when they are abroad. We made our way over to Berghain, only to get another text message from Fantômette: “We’re inside.” Damn.

We got into the back of the line, which indeed snaked about ¾ of the way back to the taxi stand (better than two weeks ago, but still ridiculous). It was 1h17, and we wouldn’t make it in the doors until 2h40.

So John and I amused ourselves with idle chatter, reminiscing about our earlier years in the rave/free-party scene, and evaluating those around us for the likelihood of them getting in. As you’ve already gathered if you’ve been reading previous posts, the door policy at Berghain/Panorama Bar is pretty selective, and in a way that doesn’t favour tourists—in both the national and subcultural senses of the term.

At one point, John said, “Looking at the people in line here, I don’t see this as the same crowd that we saw last night at Panorama Bar.” To which I replied, “Yeah, but don’t forget about the bouncers up there. I think you’ll find the crowd inside isn’t quite the same as the crowd that waits in line.”

And so there was a group of about 6 or 7 clubbers with Irish accents, clearly already drunk, carousing with each other and yelling loudly. They were relatively young but not out of the question for Berghain, but that wasn’t likely to help them if they kept on acting like that all the way to the front of the line. Also, the girls were a bit overdressed for the location (open-toed heels, cocktail dresses, necklaces, fancy purses) as were the boys (collared shirts, leather shoes). Add to this the fact that they were loudly yelling things like “Hey Priscilla, do you have any more booze in your purse?” and things weren’t likely to go well for them.

The stakes got even higher as one of the drunker and angrier boys in the group started declaring loudly that, “This better be the best club I’ve ever been to in my life!” over and over. Up until now, I had managed to remain rather detached about their fortunes, but I began to feel bad for him and his crew. Their chances were getting lower as they approached the door.

When we were maybe 10 people from the door, we struck up conversation with a French girl standing behind us, who had been hanging out with a pair of Swedes. She, a resident of Berlin for several years, was explaining to her companions why the group in front of us weren’t likely to make it in. John and I joined in with our own opinions on the matter, as I began to realize that “Guess who’s getting in!” had become our primary form of entertainment during our wait in line. Throughout the entire 1.5-hour wait, we would look at the dejected clubbers coming back from the front of the line, and speculate as to what was responsible for their refusal at the door.

Finally at the front of the line, the group of Irish partygoers were asked how many of them were in the group. Foolishly, they indicated that they were one big group. The bouncer looked them up and down, and then told each one of them to stand on the other side of the door and wait. Although they hadn’t quite been sent away yet, I could see some of them shaking their heads in resignation.

John and I got through, doing our best to nod politely and not utter a word. The “meaner” of the bouncers (skinny, tall, buzzed hair and tiny butt) looked over to the “mean-looking” but generally nicer bouncer (huge, burly, facial tattoos and piercings, leather jacket) and asked him something quietly, and then he looked at the two of us and nodded. I’m not going to speculate about what went on there, but I was very glad to finally get in.

Later that night I ran into the French girl and the two Swedes again, and I asked her if she had seen the Irish group get in. She said no, but she also said that they were still waiting on the other side of the door when she went through. It remains a mystery, but I certainly didn’t see them during the course of the night.

00h00-4h00: Kreon & Lemons

Upon getting in, we checked our jackets, ran to the washroom, got some drinks, and then set about finding the rest of the crew. We found Fantômette and company rather quickly and then set about claiming a good spot on the dancefloor in Panorama Bar.

Things were surprisingly non-packed inside, considering the insane lineup outside. This club can certainly hold thousands of people, but the sparseness of the crowd suggested to me that the bouncers were being especially selective tonight.

Kreon and Lemons’ set was solidly within the Berlin minimal style; it wasn’t bad at all, but it wasn’t exceptional or memorable in the course of the night. Their sound focused mainly on the addition and subtraction of bass beats, with less interest in the mid- or high-frequency range. Also, I think I was a bit put off by how quickly they alternated between build-ups and breakdowns; there weren’t many plateaus where I could really enjoy the tracks they were playing.

4h00-5h00: Heartthrob

I could be wrong, but I think the last time I had seen Heartthrob was almost 2 years ago in Paris, fall of 2006. His set there as well as at the M_nus afterparty at the Detroit Electronic Music Festival (spring 2006) had really impressed me, as did his famous anthem-of-the-summer-of-2006, Baby Kate. Anyway, I was really excited to hear him do another live set.

Since this was a live set rather than a vinyl set (i.e., performed directly from a laptop and/or “gear” like samplers and sequencers), the set was organized less around a succession of tracks and the transitions between them, and more around the introduction and removal of individual elements and layers. If I had been complaining about the rapid-fire succession of build-ups and breakdowns in the previous set, Heartthrob’s set showed the sort of large-scale pacing that I really like. He would introduce a few elements, expand them outwards and fill in the texture, then build to a small climax, pull away, push towards a larger climax, pull away, and so on until, 30 minutes later, everything was at full intensity and the crowd was going crazy.

In a sense, it’s kind of odd that his live sets have that sort of intensity, since many of the tracks that he’s produced recently have been in the more atmospheric, low-intensity vein. Nonetheless, the live set was really great and the 1.5-hour wait to get in finally seemed worth it.

Unfortunately, Heartthrob was scheduled to play at exactly the same time as Tony Rohr, my other favorite headliner for the night, which just seemed unfair. I spent most of my time with Heartthrob (sorry, Tony!), but I did skip down there a couple of times to hear his set, which was the sort of thumping, full-on techno I have come to expect from him.

At some point during the set, a young man with shoulder-length blond hair passed me in the crowd and looked me in the eyes, smiling. He paused and then said “Alles klar?” [“Is everything clear?” or, more idiomatically, “Alright?”] I, not entirely sure what he meant in this context, smiled and agreed, saying “Ja, alles klar.” He smiled as if that was what he wanted to hear, and then he caressed my face and continued pushing through the crowd. Huh.

5h00-8h30: Adultnapper

Adultnapper’s set was a more straight-ahead minimal vinyl set, with a few tracks that hinted at house, and a certain light touch that somehow coexisted with the punchy bass kicks and busy middle-frequency textures. Although I wasn’t in the room for the entire set, I was impressed with what I heard—especially his ability to maintain a high level of intensity throughout nearly the entire set.

At this point, our group started to dissolve as we split into groups and wandered around the club. Fantômette and her GF wandered over to the bar at the Berghain level, where temperatures were a bit lower and the air circulated better (thanks to the triple-high ceilings, no doubt). Fantômette’s roommate and his friend also found themselves hanging around that area, while I was glued to Adultnapper. John decided to go home and take a shower, so that he could come back refreshed for Dinky’s set at 8h30. I was tempted to follow his lead, but I knew that as soon as I got home, I would shut down and go to sleep, thus wasting a perfectly good night.

I wandered around the club for a while, finally exploring the infamous darkrooms of the Berghain level. It was pretty much what I had expected: all the dimly-lit sexual play of any other bar with a darkroom (of which there are many in Berlin), but with a certain intensity and boldness that I think is probably pretty exceptional. I was also surprised to see a few opposite-sex couples getting it on, although they notably kept to the area near the entryway, rather than plunging into the deeper and darker recesses of the rooms.

I’ll be coy and withhold some of the details of my own adventures in that space, but I’ll say that I met a nice man named Marco (not his real name), who asked for my number but (realistically) probably won’t call. Darkrooms rarely generate follow-up dates.

8h30-12h00: Dinky

With that little bit of adventuring done, I continued my wanderings around the club spaces, and eventually found myself back in Panorama Bar. I ran into John, who was back again and dancing near the bar area of the room, where there was more space and things weren’t quite so sweaty.

Dinky’s set was, overall, really lovely, although I’ll have to admit that I was sometimes distracted by conversation and several amusing things going on around me. By the later morning, the crowd in the club gets pretty interesting, as people are mostly pretty high and euphoric, their clothes are all messy and their hair is out of place. And then along come the trannies, who always tend to drop in around this time of the morning, looking freshly coiffed and fabulous.

Soon after running into John, I see a girl pass me that looks a LOT like someone I used to see partying in the Chicago techno scene when I first got there. On a hunch, I tapped her shoulder and said, “Hey, are you from Chicago?” A bit confused and surprised, she answered “Yes?” saying it in the form of a question. After a few more questions from each of us, we figured out that we were both partying with the same group of people in Chicago (the Naughty Bad Fun Collective), although she left Chicago for Berlin just as I was getting to know those same people.

Anyway, it turns out that she knows Tony Rohr, so a little while later she introduced me to him, which was great. I had written an academic article on repetition several years ago, where I had used one of Tony Rohr’s tracks, Baile Conmigo as an example. Anyway, it was nice to chat with him for a little while before he was swept away by more admirers.

While I was standing around the bar area, listening to Dinky’s set, I was endlessly amused by this couple of muscleboys standing in front of me, who were nearly engaging in full-on sex on the dancefloor. This certainly isn’t out of the ordinary in the darkrooms, and it wouldn’t have been particularly noticeable in the Berghain area of the club, which remains pretty dark, but the Panorama Bar space has a whole wall of windows that let in light once the sun has come up (despite the massive blinds they’ve installed), and there is usually less overt sexual play in this space.

So I was amused to watch—as crowds of techno-scenesters walked by them—one guy massage his cock to erection through his rather loose Adidas shorts while grinding his butt against his partner’s crotch. Then, he reached into his shorts and started masturbating pretty openly. Then, he turned to face his partner and reached into his jeans and started jerking him off. Then, he reached into the back of his partner’s jeans and (from what I could tell through the fabric) fingered him rather roughly. I made a note to myself not to shake hands with him.

Towards the end of Dinky’s set, I noticed that the garden/patio area had finally opened, so I found John and dragged him outside. The patio area is this lovely courtyard that they’ve constructed, using some of the concrete blocks from the former power plant to create rows of alcoves with cushions for laying out in the sun and napping. There’s also a bar out here, and a DJ booth and dancefloor, which would get going at around noon.

John and I found a spot in a shady alcove for a while, but it didn’t have a good view of the main areea of the patio, so we moved to another alcove and entertained ourselves with people-watching. I discovered that Fantômette and her GF had headed home, but her roommate and his buddy were still around somewhere. After a few minutes, I went inside to fetch them and bring them out.

In the meanwhile, we met a French guy who was rather k-ed out (i.e., ketamine), and insisted on trying to talk to us in really broken English, despite the fact that we were all Francophone. This may have been partially because he was with a British woman, who was continually exchanging friendly insults with him. For a while, as the French dude shucked off his shoes and then disappeared to wander around the garden area, I chatted with the British gal, who was very friendly and had a wonderfully snarky sense of humour.

12h00-16h00: Prosumer

At around midday, Prosumer finally started his set in the patio. He clearly knew how to tune his set to the occasion, as I found it to be the perfect sunshine/morning-after music. It was minimal-house with a light texture, a somewhat slower tempo so that you can shuffle and wiggle rather than jack and jump, and there was an emphasis on crackling high-end patterns that gave everything a bit of momentum.

There was a dance area near the bar with a sort of perforated cloth covering to break the sunlight a bit. What I didn’t realize was that, hidden in this canopy, there were WATER MISTERS. Yes, that’s right. Just as I was beginning to feel overheated and sapped of energy, a network of hoses and nozzles sprayed down a fine mist of cold water over everybody. And suddenly I was refreshed and felt like I could keep dancing for the rest of the day. If I hadn’t already decided that Berghain/Panorama Bar was the paradise of techno, this certainly clinched it.

I was probably also helped by the discovery of two drinks at this point: Beck’s Green Lemon and Afri. Beck’s Green Lemon is just a bottled version of a Radler (i.e., a shandy, or a mix of beer and soda), with Beck’s beer and some sort of lemonade. It had a lighter taste than full-strength beer, and the tartness of the lemonade made it rather tasty. Afri is this cola-like drink that has a pretty high caffeine content, but isn’t as sweet as coca-cola. Very easy to drink.

By about 14h or 15h, our group started moving, as they had heard that Ricardo Villalobos was going to be spinning at another location (Strandgut) later that afternoon. I really wanted to go, but the contact lens on the left side of my face (i.e., the part still affected by Bell’s Palsy) had been drying out and hurting my eye for a while now, and I didn’t want to risk hurting myself. Also, I was beginning to get a headache, and that scratchy throat I had felt Saturday morning had returned.

I walked with the rest of the group as far as the Warschauer Straße U-Bahn station, and then I parted ways and headed home. By the time I was near home, my contact lenses were driving me crazy and that scratchy throat was clearly turning into a cold. To make things worse, it was the hottest part of the day and the temperatures were around 30 degrees Celsius. Gah.

I got a döner kebab from my trusty Guney Grill, sauntered home, took a cold shower and tried to get some sleep.

Berlin in 4 Easy Steps

I had not been feeling all that well last night at Weekend, so I slept in pretty late today and then slowly got myself together. Another roommate arrived today from his job at a summer camp, so I chatted with him for a bit. As he went for a much-needed shower and nap, I disappeared into my room and did a fair bit of writing (mostly blogging, but a bit of proposal, too). By 20h00 or so, I was getting ready to go out again.

Fantômette and her crew were taking it easy tonight (alas, no rest for the researcher!), but my French-via-Québec friend from previous nights was still up to go out. For the sake of simplicity, I’m going to call him John for the duration of this post, since he will be a recurring character in tonight’s story.

Step One: Dinner at Bar25

John was only in town for a week, and although I had only been here for about 3 weeks, I had already taken on the role of tour guide. So I decided that he needed to see the two major before/after-party patio bars tonight. Since Bar25 has a restaurant attached to it, we decided to eat dinner there before moving on for drinks.

When we got there, I was surprised to find out that there was a 7€ cover charge. Of course, I’ve never been here on a weekend night, and they certainly didn’t charge cover on off-nights. Grumbling, we paid the cover charge and then headed through the patio complex, through the bar and into the restaurant. After a moment of standing around looking confused, we finally got seated at a little table on the edge of a balcony overlooking the river. The location was excellent, although we were promptly invaded by a family of very large spiders. After a bit of wrangling, we managed to convince them to hang out somewhere else.

When we got a look at the restaurant, I realized that I should’ve taken a look at the menu online before heading out. Although the Bar25 complex tends to look like an abandoned American Frontier Town movie set, the restaurant clearly had ambitions for haute gastronomie. We shared an appetizer of roasted goat cheese with a chili-fruit conserve, along with a spicy chutney and an apricot chutney. After that, John had some tagliatelle with mushrooms and cream sauce, while I had some sort of chopped veal and mushroom thing, with a cream sauce and potato fritters. All of the food was quite lovely, but those three dishes, along with a bottle of water, 2 glasses of wine and two coffees, came to 60€. Even in Paris that’s a bit steep for a restaurant in the middle range of the cloth-napkin-eatery spectrum. Considering normal food costs in Berlin, the price was just way too much. At least the view was great.

As we got up and paid the bill, John felt certain that restaurant patrons at an expensive place like this shouldn’t be expected to pay the cover charge for the bar, so he tracked down our waitress and asked her what the policy was. As it turns out, he was right, and we hustled back to the entry gate with our receipt in hand to get our refund. From there, we hailed a taxi and headed over to Club der Visionäre [LINK] for the next set of drinks.

Step Two: Club der Visionäre

Although I still hadn’t quite figured out the rules for the Kurzstrecke fare for taxis (it’s 3.50€ for anything under 2km, but you need to hail a moving taxi, and not one from a taxi stand), the driver at the stand in front of Bar25 was good enough to give us a kurzstrecke, even though it was a bit more than 2km. I gave him a hefty tip.

I hadn’t been to club der Visionäre on a weekend, so I was a both surprised and not surprised to see just how densely packed the place was. Thankfully, this place doesn’t ever charge cover —you just pay 1€ extra the first time you buy a drink and that goes towards the DJ fees—so walked down onto the patio and wrestled our way through the patio and over to the bar. The wait at the bar was really long, so we finally bought ourselves two drinks each to spare ourselves the task of getting more drinks. After walking nearly the entire length of the pier, John spotted a chair and a sort of stool-box on one of the floating pontoons. Although there was something pleasant about hanging out on a floating deck of wood, it was sometimes a bit annoying as people would jump on and off the deck and make it wobble, or push against the pier to make the pontoon drift out to the end of its chains.

Anyway, we amused ourselves for a while on the patio, talking about American politics (mostly discussing what had been missing in Obama’s speech yesterday) and marvelling at the size of the fish that were swimming in the canal. I imagine that the cover given by the huge weeping willows over the patio must be fantastic during the daytime, and we resolved to try it out sometime soon. My only complaint about the place is that the men’s washroom smells like an open sewer; I mean, it smells like a hobo’s alleyway, where layers of urine and feces haven’t been cleaned up in years. Gah. Anyway, by about 1h00, we decided that it was time to move on to the next step.

Step Three: Tresor Club

Although we were very interested in seeing Bruno Pronsato at Panorama Bar that night, John had not yet seen Tresor Club, and the Detroit Grand Pubahs were supposed to be spinning there, so we decided to check it out.

I tried getting a kurzstrecke with one of the taxis waiting out front, until finally one of the nicer taxi drivers explained that I could only ask for that rate from a moving taxi. Odd, but OK.

We decided to start walking towards Tresor, which was actually on the same street about 2km away, with the intention of hailing a cab or maybe catching a bus. As we crossed the canal along Schlesichestrasse, we saw an N65 bus picking up passengers. Although I had no idea where the bus would go, we decided to catch up with it and hop on. Even if it only ran along the street for a few blocks, it would still be faster than walking. Once we were on the bus, I look a look at the route and realized that it would actually take us directly to the club. Yay! Public transit wins again!

We each grabbed a RedBull from the imbiss in front of the Heinrich-Heine-Straße U-Bahn stop, and then wandered over to the club. To my extreme surprise—considering last week’s escapades at Tresor—there was absolutely no lineup to get in. It was 1h30, which should’ve been rush hour for getting in, and the front of Tresor looked like a ghost town.

A bit unnerved, we made our way in and paid the cover charge. I again switched into tour guide mode and started to take John around the club, showing him the various rooms in the complex. We found the Detroit Grand Pubahs spinning downstairs to a crowd of maybe 100 people, which was a bit disappointing, considering the size of that underground room. We were also bummed (but maybe not surprised) to hear the DGPs spinning a “classic Detroit” hard techno set, instead of the more hard-edged minimal stuff they have been also known to produce.

Upstairs in the Batterieraum was another DJ that I didn’t recognize, spinning techno that had a bit more of a minimal sound to it (at least, more high-frequency click patterns), but was still too fast and a bit too bombastic. The crowd here was even more pathetic, with maybe about 70 people looking lost in a room that should hold 400. I was at a loss for words as to why Tresor was so empty tonight; this is the kind of club that is so massive that it needs about 1000 people at least just to feel populated, so this was sort of depressing.

We bought some beers and headed out to the patio area to hang out for a bit, where we ran into a pair of young French boys that overheard us speaking French. Apparently, they had mistakenly headed into the nearby KitKatClub (the longest-running and most famous of Berlin’s sexclubs), where they were turned away at the door when they refused to take off their clothes for entry. Only then did they realize that they had been at the wrong club.

The boys seemed to have taken it in stride, so I joked that it would give them good practice for getting into Berghain. They had heard that it was hard to get into that club, so I gave them what had now become the standard spiel about the door policies of Berlin’s larger techno clubs. They had apparently been turned away at Weekend [LINK] earlier that night, so I consoled them with my own dour opinion of the music programming there and then advised them on how to appear ambiguously gay for entry to Berghain.

At one point in the conversation, one of the boys piped up and asked me and John, “So you two are gay, then?” As a reflex, I jumped in and said “No, just me. He’s straight,” as if I were defusing a tense moment. John, however, quickly said, “Not yet, I haven’t really tried it.” (note: John has been in a hetero relationship for 10 years.) I thought that was a great way to say “no” to that question without making it sound like you’re denying an accusation. We all made a few jokes about all the effort and dedication it takes to be gay and then changed the topic.

Later on, we were talking about the Paris club scene and they both declared that Queen was their favorite club in Paris, followed closely by Showcase. This immediately caused me to adjust my understanding of these boys and their relationship to the techno scene, since both of those locations in Paris are known as being mainstream, rather fashion-y, and certainly not respected for their musical programming. I suddenly wanted to say, “Wait, actually, Weekend is exactly the club you want; don’t go to Berghain.”

Anyway, we traded phone numbers and then John and I headed back inside. We grabbed one last drink and watched the Detroit Grand Pubahs for a little longer, and then we made our move and headed to Panorama Bar.

Step Four: Panorama Bar

We grabbed a cab and headed over to the Berghain complex as the night was just beginning to get lighter (4h00 or so). Mercifully, there was nearly no lineup at the club, so we got in with no trouble and headed straight upstairs. After checking my jacket and running to the washroom (where 5 giddy men spilled out of one bathroom stall), we headed to the dancefloor. As John said the moment he arrived in the building, “Ah, this already sounds better.”

There were maybe 300 people in Panorama Bar that night, but since that part of the building is relatively small (Berghain itself only opens on Saturday night), the place still felt reassuringly full. I couldn’t quite recognize who was spinning and the usual playlist wasn’t posted on the wall next to the DJ, so we just pushed our way into the crowd and got to dancing.

True to the Berghain/PanoramaBar scheduling, the headline Bruno Pronsato started his live set around 6h00. His set started off really well as a throbbing, bass-heavy minimal set, then went through a rather lame breakbeat-and-303-squelch tangent, and then came back to some pretty heavy minimal techno. Although most of his set lacked that house-y touch that I prefer in techno, it was still a far sight better than what we had been hearing at Tresor. [Also, John pointed out that Pronsato seemed to structure his set as a series of endless build-ups, which gets boring after a while.]

By about 7h00 we both decided to call it a night and save our energy for Saturday. We made our way out of the building and walked that tranquil 1km or so to Ostbahnhof, where we got on the train and took our separate ways home.

By the way, I’m rather proud of my trail of admission stamps on my arm from tonight, so I took a picture to post on here. I messed with the image levels to make the stamps pop a bit, so my apologies if the colors are a bit oversaturated.

Tiergarten, Obama, Party at WeekendClub

After sleeping in again (see a pattern here?), I crawled my way out of bed and cleaned myself up to go meet an acquaintance for lunch. In fact, this is the same guy that had been inadvertently responsible for the bizarre events of Tuesday night. We decided to meet at the lovely Café am neuen See in the Tiergarten, which serves pretty standard café fare, but in a beautiful outdoor forest / lake setting.

I hopped on the bike and rode my way to Tiergarten, parked my bike clumsily, and then sat down for a coffee and water while I waited for the other guy to show up. Once he arrived, we ordered some food (I got this interesting potato-cheese-sausage omelet called the Tiroler Baufrühstuck or something) and chatted for a while. From there, we made our way over to the street running between Brandenburger Tor and the Siegessäule to wait in line to see Barack Obama’s speech. He was slated to speak around 18h00, but you needed to get there by 16h00 to get within seeing distance of the stage.

We arrived and parked our bikes (to a tree!) just as they opened the barriers and let people in. You still had to pass a security checkpoint, so everybody started clotting around one of several sets of security points on either side of the street. They had metal detectors and they were going through everybody’s bag very carefully. After we waited in one line for what seemed like an eternity, they suddenly closed our security station and told everyone to move to another line. Apparently, some woman had left her purse behind, and now it was a bomb risk. Fuck.

We eventually made our way through, a bit annoyed for the trouble, and claimed a spot in the ever-enlarging crowd of people in front of the stage. We were maybe about 50m away from the stage, I think, right next to the media bleachers.

We were eventually joined by someone I had met at my roommate’s bon voyage party—who had been a previous tenant of my apartment—and one of his friends. The four of us sat down on the asphalt to take up more space (so that we wouldn’t be quite so squashed when we had to stand up for the speech) and amused ourselves by talking about pop culture and the atrocious fashion sense of the people around us.

There was a trio of (apparently) Nordic youngsters just in front of me who were an endless source of entertainment. There was one girl in a pretty but somewhat over-fancy white dress, and then two guys in clearly matching attire. Both wore black pointed ankle-boots, tight, tight jeans, identical black woven belts, black collared shirts tucked deeply into their jeans, wrap-around sunglasses, and the classic “Aryan Youth” haircut (short on the sides, longer on the top and combed across the forehead). They looked like some sort of outtake of a very bad euro-trance video. To add to the comedy, they were both surprisingly short (at least my height, which is super-short for Scandinavians) and rather slim except for rather prominent beer-bellies…which were only accented by the fact that they had tucked their shirts so firmly into their jeans. Since we were sitting and they were standing, we also couldn’t help but notice just how tight and…um….low-sperm-count-inducing their jeans were. Anyway, we kept ourselves entertained by making snarky remarks about them until things started to move on the stage.

At maybe 30 minutes before, security guards (Secret Service, I think) appeared on the stage, and everybody jumped up and pressed toward the stage, so we finally had to give up our seats. Which was fine, considering how sweaty we all were by then. Alas, sweaty also means that there were many people within sniffing distance who were not wearing deodorant, which made the whole speech experience a bit less entertaining.

Also, we were treated to an ongoing commentary by a man standing just behind us, who kept yelling “Barack!” as if it were a crow call. Although he was clearly German, the fact that he was black created a lot of parallels for me with the stereotypical “predominantly black movie theater” experience, as he shouted his opinion of nearly everything Obama said. Most of the time this was just “Yes!” but sometimes he would also rearticulate something Barack had said in German: “No more nuclear weapons!” “We are all a world community!” and so on. This wasn’t such a problem when his outbursts coincided with applause, but sometimes he talked right over Obama, which the rather silent white Germans and Americans around him didn’t so much appreciate.

Obama’s speech itself was pretty short and uneventful. At around 18h00, he was introduced very briefly by an offstage voice in German and English and then walked up onto the stage. This was a bit of a surprise, as I expected there to be a stream of dignitaries introducing him, but not even the town mayor spoke (although he and many others were there in a VIP area). Obama’s speech was pretty uncontroversial and didn’t really reveal anything new about his foreign policy. Nonetheless, the mere fact of him speaking publicly in Berlin (and to a HUGE crowd) was clearly newsworthy, as video of the speech was available online within minutes of the speech’s end.

After the speech, we spent nearly 30 minutes slowly following the crowd as it left the Siegssäule. The security people had put up fences all up and down the street running toward Brandenburger Tor, so it was a bit like a cattle run. Finally, people started dismantling the fences and the crowd started to bleed laterally into the surrounding park. We followed suit and found our bikes, and then we walked the rest of the distance at a leisurely pace through the park. From Brandenburger Tor, we said our goodbyes and went our separate ways.

Martin Landsky / Kabale und Liebe at Weekend

Although I was a bit tired and not entirely in the mood to go out, Fantô, her GF, and her recently-arrived roommate were going out to Weekend bar, so I decided to come along. I got there early to avoid the line (around 0h30), and found myself getting hassled by the bouncer. When he asked me if I was coming in alone, I didn’t quite understand what he was saying and asked him to repeat himself; my accent apparently gave me away as a non-local, and he then started to quiz me on which DJs were spinning tonight. This eventually got me in, but it left me with a bad taste in my mouth, as the Weekend crowd (in my opinion) is usually the kind of people that get turned away from Berghain. On the other hand, that might also be why I was getting hassled; the look here was more “fancy” clubbing, exclusively heterosexual, and twenty-something. Nonetheless, I couldn’t help but spend the rest of the night looking at people in the crowd with disapproval and thinking, “they let them in and I got hassled at the door?” Despite all of our strategies of self-presentation, there’s still no equivalent to a “Hi, I’ve been in this scene for 13 years, so let me in” t-shirt.

I eventually caught up with the same group of Frenchy folks from last night, along with the recent arrivals of Fantô’s roommate and a friend of his. Unfortunately, the 12th-floor area wasn’t open (which I saw the last time I was here), so we spent the night alternating between the 15th floor room (which is darker and has few windows) and the rooftop terrace. The terrace, though, was lovely. They had several sets of cushioned seats and a sunken bar, along with blankets to keep you warm and speakers along the wall, pumping out the music from below. I liked this space for the same reason as I liked Club der Visionäre: medium-volume techno that allows you to relax and talk, open-air terrace, cheap drinks. Nonetheless, the music wasn’t really inspiring me and I think I was tired out from the many hours I had spent in the sun, so by about 4h00 I headed back out and home.