Unscene Berlin

I've been getting plenty of requests for New Year's Eve tips for Berlin and have been reluctant to provide any suggestions for two simple reasons: 1) I won't be around and 2) frankly, cheap underground parties are as rare as hen's teeth at New Year's Eve.  December 31st is probably the only time of year when the average Easyjet setter is actually better off staying home, as party prices rise enough to offset any of those great deals that they fly across Europe in the hope of finding.  It's a day when buses, tents, backyards and probably even large cardboard boxes sitting unattended in alleys will suddenly be converted, with the aid of a disco ball and a bouncer, into 'venues' charging for entry. New Year's Eve (Silvester as it's known in Germany) is all about finding a place that offers the best quality of experience for the relatively high price.  The Burning Man New Year's Eve party at Urban Spree seems to cover a lot of bases.  Altho...

Banksy, ducks and the Mayan apocalypse. Just another Xmas in Berlin! I have some appalling fantastic news: there's only two days left until the 2012Apocalypse Winter Solstice!  After Friday, everybody can breathe a sigh of relief because they'll never ever have to go through Christmas again the days start getting longer!  Better yet, the End Times carnage New Year's Eve is just around the corner! Sorry for all the scratched-out phrases.  I just wasn't sure whether this week's entry should be about the surviving the end of the world or about having a 'holly jolly Christmas'.  Should I be telling readers to stock up on stollen and head for the nearest Weinachtsmarkt , or to stock up on ammo and head for the nearest air-raid shelter?  Should everybody be singing "peace on earth and good will to all" or screaming, "OMFG the aliens just touched down we're all gonna dieeee"?   Sigh... every year writing these Christmas previews...

As quickly as capitalism snaps up new fashion styles, the underground cultures that spawned them cease to exist.  A glance around the Mitte quickly confirms that there is no longer any culture, subculture, counterculture, sexuality, spirituality or philosophy that does not have its own, dedicated boutique shop.  Meanwhile, the radical squatting scenes that popularized 'the Berlin style' have been evicted from the area en masse. Many people from those same scenes have accordingly abandoned fashion and art as a means of conveying their message, after seeing how quick its merchants are to abandon ethics and cash in at the slightest hint of popularity.  And yet, by ignoring the impact that art and fashion have on culture (whether underground or above-ground) those radicals are fighting the system with one hand tied behind their back. The organizers behind last week's Cult of the Personality : Commercial Christmas Special at Food/ZMF aim to cut through the ties that bind ...

Bad Santa street art in Ostkreuz There are dozens of Christmas markets (known as 'Weihnachtsmarkt' in Germany) in and around Berlin where a person can sample fine chocolates, buy luxurious doilies and perch on outdoor stools under a gas heater while sipping hot cocktails.  I am not  going to talk about any of them in this entry.  No - this entry is about the kinds of places Santa goes after a hard day of waving at tourists to dwell on more pressing themes like gentrification, greed and Guantanomo Bay, while chugging a Sterny.  There is a reason why he wears red and black after all, and it's not to please his corporate masters at Coca-Cola. Read on for a shortlist of the places that Santa goes to when he feels like stuffing a lump of coal in some capitalist's stocking... They can't afford Christmas turkey dinner, so the organizers of the Cult of the Personality: Commercial Christmas Special at Food/ZMF are going to 'eat the rich' instead.  Every prod...

Radikal Guru We only dropped in to Dub der guten Hoffnung at Subland to take a quick look, which is exactly how crazy nights usually start.  My friend had never been to the venue in the industrial Lichtenberg/Friedrichshain borderland and I decided that he had to check it out. "Where are you taking me?" he squeaked as we turned off of Gurtelstrasse and down a street that seemed to be made entirely of eroded pavements, ragged brickwork, rusting gates and graffitti.  I laughed evilly.  After a few minutes, he seemed about to make a break for it but just then, and with perfect timing, the venue appeared.  As we walked alongside it, the audible bass coming through the wall started to calm my friend.  I pointed to an iron-barred grill at street level with ghostly blue light glowing through it. "That's where the party is," I said, and his face started going pale all over again.    It was all I could do to drag him through the club gate and int...

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....

Dance music's 2 choices: sell its soul to the Devil or die? by Julian Dourado www.juliandourado.co.uk I often get accused of taking clubbing too seriously but that's simply not true.  I find clubbing fun - and, at times, funny - but serious? Don't make me laugh (pardon the pun). In a club, I know I can go through the motions of change but that's all. No matter how far I get, I know that at some point, the lights will go up, the bouncer will shepherd me out the door, the floor will be swept and all traces of whatever transformation I experienced there will be removed. The club is not a community center, after all: it's a product and as such, it needs to be consistent. Any alterations by its users have to be removed, its original shape restored, before it can be re-packaged and re-sold. How could somebody who is committed to real change take that seriously? A recent article about the crisis of creativity in dance music made it clear to me that some DJs and...