Unscene Berlin

There are so many hipsters turning up in Lichtenberg these days, I’m thinking of tagging and tracking them like the displaced urban wildlife they are. Here are some excerpts from my imaginary log: Journal 1. Section h,i,p Hipster no. 78 turned up dead in front of NP Markt today.  Moments before his collapse, he was seen rummaging through the reduced bins in the aforementioned supermarket.  He was heard remarking that they were ‘very lifelike’, as if under the misconception that he was in some sort of antikmarkt and/or art installation.  He dug out a bottle of gherkins that had expired in 1988, bought them and proceeded to go outside and take a selfy of him consuming one.  After posting the image to Facebook, he went into  convulsions and died within minutes, of a severe case of botulism. Journal 2. Sections s,t,e,r, s Hipster no. 32 was involved in an altercation with a Trabant vehicle today.  He saw the Trabant coming down Weitlingstrasse ...

When I started writing this blog in 2011, Berlin was a city that was all about finding itself, finding the right way of being 'authentically Berlin'.  Every organizer of every event seemed to be clamouring to prove they had that original, underground Berlin spirit.  Droves of people were coming here to find a piece of the Wall, some 1960's clothes or anything else that wasn't nailed down that they could drag back and display like a trophy of the unrefined, undefined Cold War landscape that was vanishing as they watched.  Every weekend I'd see them clawing oversized 1980s jackets off the rails of Humana and scurrying furtively through the streets schlepping musty chunks of GDR furniture like packrats, afraid to run out of supplies.  Supplies of character.  "See?" I could just hear these droves of new Berliners declaring: "Even the chair I'm sitting on is a one-off that was hand-tooled out of old bed posts by an impoverished citizen of East ...

Overconsumption: not pretty sight unless you're hipster, right? I've read that 21 Types of Hipster article that's gone viral in Berlin's English communities the past few days.  And I can't help noticing that the definitions in there embrace pretty much everyone I see in the streets - whether I'm in London, Barcelona or Berlin.  The faux-retro truckstop caps, teamed with designer plaid shirts, teamed with H & M shades that cost ten times what they look like they're worth, teamed with Diesel skinny jeans, teamed with pre-stretched American Apparel sweaters and sloppy, scruffed name brand trainers. You could say that the hipster trend is a 'diverse' style, embracing 80s glam, punk, metal, biker, disco, hippy and goth.  Hipsters, generally speaking, are people who seem to have too many teetering piles of zany, mismatched accessories & clothing laying around their funky coversion flat, unworn.  They've gotta be blase about how...

A few weeks back I got an email from a reader asking for recomendations of a "few nice bars with good techy house tunes with a bit minimalistic sounds".  I sent them to Farbfernseher .   It was only after doing that that I realized I haven't actually been to FF yet, despite hearing rave reviews about it over the past couple of years.  The club is centrally located on Skalitzer Strasse, Kreuzberg, and it is better known than the place that I usually try to write about on this blog.  (Maybe that's why I never went; not enough of a challenge?). In the interest of keeping readers up to speed on the state of Berlin clubland I grabbed a friend and went down to Kreuzberg to check this Colour TV (which is what Farbfernseher translates to) place out. It was a rainy Friday night when we arrived but we didn't have to wait in the line too  long.  The security did hum and haw a bit before letting us in, even though it was still early and we had guest list entry....

Acid techno fan models his new ensemble The other day, I had a yearning for some new acid techno and started checking out various sites that have those kinds of tunes.  On one of them, I came across this line:  “Acid techno: a way of life, not a fashion statement!” For a horrible moment I imagined this meant that, somewhere in this world, legions of hipsters were actually donning acid techno costumes they'd bought at Primark and posting pics of themselves in Facebook groups, without ever having set foot in a squat party.   And maybe there are, but the above statement wasn't referring to them.  What it was referring to was the fact that the U.K. acid techno scene has always been style-free, and has stayed that way, despite the neverending growth of the fashion industry and its commodification of every other aspect of mainstream life.  (Admittedly, "it's not a fashion statement it's a lifestyle" rolls off the tongue much more easily than all tha...