Unscene Berlin

A combination of the pandemic and policing efforts have left Alexanderplatz looking like a still from the 1960's: empty, windswept. Aimless people, seemingly fresh-awakened to the endless possibilities of city life, are moving with uncertain freedom to the Reclaim Club Culture sound system. I had to bypass what looked to be a " hygiene demo " to get to this antiracist action by RCC, in support of freedom of movement. The hygiene demo was a messy scene, full of aggressive, drunk people trying way  too hard to look like they were having fun.  One can see the different intentions behind the two actions in the way that each group uses its allocated demo space. The hygiene crew use it to scream at passers by to take off their masks and invade their personal space, walking or dancing uncomfortably close. As if they blame you for whatever is going wrong with society. Under the auspices of freedom, they move into the power vacuum of an empty city street, and attempt ...

I'm playing infinite-scroll roulette on my Twitter feed. I swipe, and watch the posts flip past at warp speed, blurring like the stars outside the windows of the SS Enterprise. Where will it come to a stop? * An ad for a food show * Coronavirus politics * Clever German psychobabble * People openly advocating drug use * Earth Day * Pets wearing clothes? It occurs to me that everything's changed but many people don't even realise it, because nothing's changed on Twitter. Or Facebook. Or Instagram. Or CNN, BBC, Reuters, etc.  All of the mass media templates are holding patterns for a mentality that's optimised for panic. Outrage. Fear. They hang on to those emotions rabidly, regardless of what actually happens in the real world. Caging our adaptability. "Nonapocalyptic reality is simply not hospitable to [disaster capitalism's] ambitions,” writes Naomi Klein in her book The Shock Doctrine. Our disaster-fuelled me...

The reality of life in Berlin is much better than the [online] perception. April 3, 2020 Outside, sun-burnished, friendly people smile their way past me to thank me for leaving them enough space. In parks, balls and discs fly back and forth, in a sort of long distance conversation between players...  Everyone seems to be coming back together across the divide, unpaving their way back to a less fragmented state. Or out here they do, anyway. Of all the hesitant wildlife forms returning to the cities, the most instrumental one is probably us. Humans don't normally linger this long in their own habitats, which are too disrupted by "human" activities: traffic, pollution, sirens, stress. Industrialisation stops us from settling in, in our own cities, in our own name. But today, finding a new niche in this static, airy landscape is an irresistible urge. One that encourages me to find complexity and value in staying in one place, instead of carrying m...

March 29, 2020 Via  Reddit Colder weather today has me housebound, so I let my fingers do the walking. They moseyed on over to a conspiracy forum that I sometimes look at when I'm short of whack new ideas. I was thinking someone there might be bouncing around some totally overblown theory that the coronavirus is actually a DARPA-engineered, organic malware that we caught from using Instagram or something, I dunno... bizarre, you know what I mean? Something to make the whole pandemic thing seem so OTT as to be ridiculous again. To my surprise, everyone on the site seemed to have a more pragmatic take on The Plague than the mainstream of the Internet does, right now. Like, wow. How often does that happen? Consensus there seemed to be that the virus was being blown out of proportion and we should be more (or even just equally) concerned about the government's intervention in our lives. So for once, the conspiracy theorists were not on board with a wave of pa...

March 18 I feel bad throwing out my disinfectant spray bottle with a few dribbles still in it; it may be worth 50 Euros an ounce, soon. Available only drop by the micro-dosed drop in Gorlitzer Bahnhof. Ah, well. March 19 I go for a walk, then work, then go for another walk. Keep finding loads of Z u Verschenken  ("to give away") boxes on the ground, chock full of stuff; probably no one wants to touch other people's old things in case some of it's infected while, at the same time, everybody has more time to clear out all their secret underfloor catacombs and bomb shelters and make way for... even more toilet paper, I guess? A friendly East Indian man sees me eyeing some books in the road near Rummelsburger Bucht. He starts shaking his head gently and saying, ' Aber nicht fassen. Nicht fassen ' as I stop for a closer look. I reassure him, I have no intention of touching those books. Though it's hard to fight the reflex to pocket free stuff wh...

Left: Dr. Pimenta. Right: Dr. Sikora T his news roundup from Channel 4 News popped up in my recommended feed and I was feeling homesick for ole' Blighty, so I sat down to watch its interpretation of the border closures in Europe, and Boris Johnson's Covid-19 'policy'. I use that word loosely 'cos, since when is doing nothing a 'policy'? This video starts off more like a parade of national stereotypes than a news report: there's the French guy expressing his fears about the virus whilst smoking furiously on a traffic-choked street; there's the Italians, finally learning how to queue because it's easier to socially-distance that way; there's the German skinhead sitting in an empty pub, sipping from a bierstein of pilsner with a look of utter satisfaction, oblivious to the lack of human company. (Don't snicker like that, European readers: your mass media ain't any better in how it portrays its close neighbours. If I have ...

Here in Berlin, it was a mixed start to the #coronapocalypse, as it is affectionately known on Twitter. It was a sunny and warm-ish Saturday for the first time in ages, so everybody was out taking walks, jogging, smiling, laughing, making daisy chains, preparing altars for Summer Solstice, etc. Typical spring stuff.  But as we all learned yesterday, everything that is unnecessary for the city's running will close down next Tuesday: bars, restaurants , nightclubs (yes  even Mensch Meier ). Schools and daycare facilities will close, too. So a lot of parents are panic buying at the moment. The rest of us are collecting bottles and going on a diet until we hear more about government compensation plans. I did all my shopping the other day but today, I had to go to the shops twice to pick up a few things I forgot: once in the morning at 11 am and once at 6 pm. In the morning, everyone was happy and relatively calm, like Sainsbury's before a long bank holiday weekend. People were...