Unscene Berlin

If you were passing through the Wiener Strasse area yesterday, you might have noticed that it was not a day for 'business as usual', down at the local pool.  Semi-nude bathers inside the pool clustered by its windowed walls to goggle at a swirling pool of dancers outside on Spreewaldplatz, making waves of the sonic kind...  Yes, that's right: the Spreewaldplatz was briefly reclaimed by an underrepresented Berlin demographic: the ravers.  Not just the people who go to raves, but those who organize them, as well: living, eating, sleeping and breathing in the liberty that is found in the city's underpopulated, undiscovered nooks and crannies. Around 90% of inner-city Berlin used to be comprised of such nooks & crannies before the relentless march of commercialization began.  So it may be fair to say that many of the people at yesterday's Reclaim the Gorli party embodied the untamed spirit that put Berlin on the map in the first place. As often reporte...

Making feminism a threat again is the motto of this year's International Women's Day march in Berlin.  It's  not as scary as it sounds, though.  For some men, just being born female is enough to make someone a threat, after all.  It really doesn't matter to them what women say or do, how feminist they are or aren't, or how demurely they behave, or how promiscuous they are in their personal lives.  Just by existing, women will always upset certain men and, for those men, no excuse is needed to mete out a punishment that fits the 'crime'. But it always helps to have a plausible-sounding reason for attacking women and right now, that reason could be summed up as: "Feminists have gone too far and/or become too equal.  They need/want/are asking for a backlash." If the 'feminism has gone too far' bandwagon was an actual vehicle, it would be a Ford Model-T because its that old. as the foto below illustrates, fear of feminists has been around ...

I am in a hallway in a turn-of-the-century community centre with high ceilings; the patchy walls are decked with fairy lights, protest posters peel from the yellowing walls.   Every inch of the scuffed floors is filled with the shuffling feet of a rainbow crowd.  Dogs weave through a crowd of black and white Rastas, hippies with pastel dreads and randoms with out-grown, razor-cut hair do's. Fresh-faced white activists & weary black men cross paths and chat.   All around them, people are smiling & swaying in droves... People squeezing their way down the hall slow as they pass by a group of Africans propping up a bar, in the middle of the hall. Passers-by are dragged in by the exhibitionist banter.  The air is peppered with giddy outbursts of hilarity.  A nother exchange of stories and ideas ignites.  Hip hop and reggae throbs out of a spacious room, at one end of the hall.   At the other end, clean-shaven hardtek fans in militant gea...