Unscene Berlin

Leaving Berghain last weekend, I saw two bright beams shining through the mist in the pitch black, pre-dawn sky.  They were yellowish white, and looked exactly like a pair of lights from a construction crane. My first thought was, "Shit, they're building another high rise in Friedrichshain??"  But after a while the mist cleared away and I realized that those two orbs in the sky were actually a pair of stars: Venus and Jupiter, in fact.  The veil dropped between the sky and the earth, and suddenly everything seemed like one big extension of the dark dancefloor I'd just left behind, dotted with glimmering lights that stretched all the way to the edges of space. I'm used to leaving a party in the morning and being shocked by the sight of the waking world outside, doing its thing, blissfully oblivious to whatever's been going on inside the clubs and bars.  But this time, the 'world' I was seeing was millions of miles away and it was still close...

Last week, I stumbled upon Blo Ateliers, an art space that's been managing to keep " one of the most interesting and largest artist communities in eastern Berlin" hidden from me for the last four years, despite being right on my doorstep in Lichtenberg .   It doesn't feel like you're going to an art venue; the road's cracked and flooded and leads towards what seems like the deadest of ends.  There are signs telling you to stop, that the yard's for rail employees only, even as a handwritten sign promises that there's an free exhibition on. After a few seconds' hesitation, like the kind that I get before every new discovery made in Berlin ( is this a new find, or is it all in my mind? ) I went ahead in.  A courtyard opened up and around each crumbling building in the complex, the litter of half-finished sculptures, DIY gardens and pointed statements written in graffiti and kept carefully clear of encroaching trees ...

Fighting for the right to live, eat, breathe... and party ... at last Saturday's demo On the surface, the Stop TTIP & CETA demo last weekend was a mass uprising in all of the usual ways: there were signs, costumes, chants and dance tunes.  People marched and made demands.  But the demo seemed like it was more than just the sum of its parts. It wasn't just because there were more people there than at any demo I've been to in Germany. Their feelings about the cause were also tangible, full of new variety and depth. They were feelings shared by people that'd never meet any other way : families, kids, teens, pensioners, working classes, black bloc anarchists, ad-hoc hippies... and that's rare in a city where people tend to plan every detail of every social encounter, from the friends that they handpick to share it to the exact second that their train returns them home.  Maybe I'm just unlucky but since leaving England, I've rarely felt a multifacet...

"Berlin shows no clear CO2 reduction trend since 2008." from Soot Free Cities' clean air report, 2015. Bagger 288, the world's scariest biggest coal-extracting machine.  I talk a lot on this blog about Berlin's underground, but there is one thing that all the subcultural species who live in this city depend upon that is located firmly above ground: the air . Air is a priceless commodity, and it is one that is being sidelined in this city.  In 2011, Berlin was ranked the city with the best clean air policy in Europe in a Soot Free Cities report.  In the five years since then, however, the city has fallen to fifth place on the list.  To anyone who's noticed the constant grey-ish haze on the horizon in recent months (a mixture of humidity and increasing air pollution) this probably isn't news. Yet, expressing concern about the " Himmel Ueber Berlin " still seems to be an underground issue... even in the underground! The overstretche...