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...

The cold weather this last weekend definitely put a freeze on my plans for openair exploring but it did not stop me from going out entirely. I dropped into pretty decent happenings in Prenzlauerberg and Wedding as well. Last weekend's snow flurries sent the Easter bunny scampering back to his burrow, but the rest of Berlin's party menagerie chose to take refuge in an altogether different sort of underground: a place as full of talking animals and sideshow acts as the flipside of the looking glass. On Friday, I spotted a lady in a Raggedy-Ann style wig waving midget-sized parasols among the tipsy-turvy masses at a chilly openair in the Wuhleheide side of town. Stumbling hungover to work the next night, I found myself chatting up a charming stilt-walker outside of Dazzle Club before he got sick of me and swept me down the stairs into the vault with his comedy umbrella. The cave-like, subterranean venue was packed with fans of some experimental s...