Unscene Berlin

Aside from the red Ganesh banner hanging over the decks, the bar in R19 is indistinguishable from the bar of any other after-hours club I've been to; think Sisyphos or Ritter Butzke at 1:00 p.m.  It's sultry, red-tinged and smoky.  The crumpled leather sofas and armchairs are full of grinning, blurry people swaying and resisting the call of gravity to assume a more horizontal position. A DJ is casually manipulating the atmosphere from an inconspicuous spot in the corner.  Tech-house beats slouch along at a sedate pace and drawling vocals are slowed to the speed of dark, cool treacle.  I am far too awake for this type of after-hours club but, luckily, R19 has an alternative variety on offer. A quickening pulse pulls me along the hall, away from the bar and into a second, bigger room.  Entering it feels like stepping into a hard trance all-dayer from the mid-nineties.  Everyone is on their feet in a fluro-washed darkness that's bubbling with spacey riffs...

Forget summer: in Berlin, the dead winter months of February & March are when the really silly season begins. At this time of year, you can see what a big part of the city's identity clubs are... and how tenuous they are, too, much like that identity (wow, how deep is that?).  When I check out the optimistically long listings on the party sites each winter  weekend, I can't help thinking that some of these places are just throwing out regular events with increasingly stranger names out of sheer bloody determination to exist and legitimize their own ephemeral, moonlit presence on this landscape.  Same goes for some of the pale & gaunt regulars who trek through the snow and the daffodils (thanks again, climate change) to get there.  In the summer, it seems all too legitimate to try and stay in Berlin all year, seeking your fortune and infamy in this city's party scene.  But come the winter, that self-assured sense of permanence goes away... taking...

Why is Berlin being so meeeean ? Berlin can be so mean. Many of its long-term inhabitants will already know about the Berliner Schnauze . Most visitors will have encountered it, too. Most of us choose not to let it bother us... until it catches us off-guard, in the shape of some car driver spraying us with a stream of water on a drizzly day. In Berlin, you tend to run into people who've got their schnauze on at the worst of all possible times.  Like when some old fogey sticks their foot out to trip you up as you're hurrying to catch the train to get to an appointment on time.  Or when the travel agent starts cackling sourly after you desperately ask her to book a hotel for you in Köln on Rosenmontag (and then shouts at you a bit). Or when the guy at the tax office deliberately gives you the wrong forms to fill in, and then yells at you for not using the right forms after a week spent filling them out.  High-tech 'Fuck You' from an exhibit of robotic art. O...

What ever happened to the drama in our lives? In the quest to become the individual directors of its content, we've given up our roles as its muses.  More time spent photographing, producing and presenting ourselves online has equaled less time spent in front of the lens or in search of fresh material. So it's great to see that the unashamed theatrics of simply being can still be found in a medium where all but self-expression have been removed. In zine-land, there's no chance to edit, second-guess or overproduce the content we come up with.  This is where the zine gets its addictive, artistic appeal from. "How to Become a Sea Creature in a Call Center" & other zines... Zine culture as we know it had its countercultural boom in the 1970s & 1980s punk scene, with label-band Crass leading the charge.  In the 1990s, the zine diversified, with grrrl bands like Suckdog and ravers mingling with the hardcore punk zine crowd. The zine even surviv...

The 25th anniversary of the 'Mauerfall' (fall of the Berlin Wall) last Sunday was in some ways similar to the original fall of the wall.  Throngs of people gathered at the old checkpoints, and all along the path of the old political barrier between east and west. It was cold and everyone was tense. But instead of release from the GDR, they were waiting for the release of a  f*** ton of glowing balloons that lined the Wall perimeter.  The release had been meant to happen at 7 p.m. sharp. It was meant to be one of those magical, cathartic moments where everyone would tear up as they looked into the night skies and watched the balloons (which symbolised bricks, apparently) drift away on clouds of helium, dissolving like the Wall itself was meant to do. But as was usual for any Fall in Berlin, it was drizzly, dark, foggy, and people were lucky if they could see from one side of the Spree to the other.   The tourists throngs seemed  enrapt by the displa...

“I think Frank Henkel should come here and see what he is doing,” says Anja, a German activist at a refugee protest in Friedrichshain. “Instead he stays inside his house, in his warm bed.” Anja wants the senator to explain why he ordered the eviction of 108 refugees that the Senate was housing in Berlin hostels. The fact that the refugees were all members of Lampedusa, an activist group that has been fighting for asylum reform, probably played a role in Henkel’s decision… but he isn’t about to admit it. Senator Henkel has almost entirely walled himself off from the refugees, going about his life as if they don’t even exist. This past September, his stonewalling forced Anja and her friends to take the battle to his doorstep. “We went to his office and sat on the floor,” she says. “We refused to leave until he came out.” But instead of answering their questions, Henkel’s staff called the police, who lifted the activists up and dropped them outside on a kerb, like bin ba...

Spot the victim: almost all of the above images are from mundane, every day ads on magazines, billboards and news sites.  Some are indistinguishable from images of true violence against women (bottom, center).  Ads like this tap into the misogynist's fantasy life and whether we share that fantasy or not, we have to admit it's riddled with violence and hate... which means that society is, too I've been reading about the recent Gamergate debate(s) on Twitter - which I've still not got my head around, and am unlikely to, now that the number of tweet accusations flying around has reached critical mass.  But one thing that stuck with me after reading a few threads was the shocking blitheness with which guys on these threads bandy the word 'misandry' about.  They seem to have decided that the word 'misandrist' can be used to refer to any woman who says or thinks negative things about men.  Is being negative about sexist men such an innately ...