“Sometimes I worry you don't know how to get out”:
Berlin Diary
It rained most of the summer in Berlin. Not that that bothered many of us, moving through the city. The streets were still lively, clubs and galleries still full of people and ideas, communities ever forming around music and art and ideas. Like everywhere, everyone has their moods.
For much of the summer, news from the states weighed on my spirits.
Mom struggling at home.
Word about an old, old family friend.
Chris wrote:
“Our father Bruce - Bruce Jerrell Westcott - died last week on Wednesday, July 9th. Bruce was 88 years old when he passed, and had been dealing with Alzheimer’s for the last 11 years. Bruce died peacefully in Montgomery, NJ in the loving presence of his two sons, Alex and Chris.”
RIP Bruce
Bruce was always there.
At every Easter, birthdays, Christmases,
Went to Brown, played the part, with a smile and bubbly.
I remember Bruce showing us his watch collection in the mid 1970's and greeting me with a glass of bubbly in the1990s, a birthday dinner in Williamsburg 15 years ago.
Cracking a joke.
Commenting on politics.
Providing condolences, pointing us in one direction or another.
Sometimes Republican, sometimes repulsed with politics.
Sometimes remembering my Dad screaming at us, sometimes telling more stories, sometimes repeating the same stories.
Often without judgement, I hate to see you worry about that, he told me as i pulled on my tie, worried about a girlfriend. It's too early to do that he told me, sympathizing.
Oh Bruce, thanks for being there for us all those years. Godspeed.
And Mom, his old friend, pressed ahead.
Still alive, still planning to drive, still chatting.
I called her every day, sharing the stories of our adventures.
It wasn’t the same being here without the kids.
They are off on their own adventures, for the first time since 2021 not here.
Havn’t been sick many times coming, but this year I was.
Still the days were ever fascinating.
Out dancing or to openings at night, or at Monster Ronson's Ichiban Karaoke, Warschauer Straße, Berlin-Friedrichshain-Kreuzberg, where everyone screamed and sang along as one young man sang for all of us, “Dancing on My Own.”
17 July
Spent the day writing and reflecting on the reading the day before. Took the S7 train out to join the #revolutionaryberlin tour the socialism utopian of Marzahn" a "concrete utopia" of East German socialist planning, a massive housing plan from the 1970's, out to Babylon Berlin to the movies.
Nathan, my favorite Berlin tourguide, described the trajectoy:
That afternoon, protests across the US.
Good Trouble Lives On In Us
July, 17, 5:30 PM
Foley Square
New York, NY 10013
On July 17th, national organizations are coming together for an action in remembrance of John Lewis: Good Trouble Lives On. The New York City Good Trouble team is planning a principled and peaceful action on July 17th that will center the demand for civil rights for immigrants and for every person in our communities. In honor of making some good trouble, we will host a rally and short march circling 26 Federal Plaza and culminating in a moment of silence and solidarity.
July 18
Falco invited me to an opening on Orchestrate 67 off Hermanplatz. Stopped for my 10th Doner in the last week. Always delicious. And ran into Jana on the way. She was on the way home from the show. Went back with me. Introduced me to the artist. Then ran into Falko. Then went to Monster Ronsons instead of the piss scat party. And they sang ...
'You have to stop the world to stop the feeling...' and met Fed at
Südblock, an outdoor restaurant that serves “lammkuchen, currywurst, fries & beer at a lively, cavernous club with a shaded garden” on Admiralstraße 1-2, 10999 Berlin.
And talked with the kid about living in LA...and Berlin July meandered forward in the rain... Sometimes I worry you don't know how to get out... Said Jana. I thought the same thing watching a young man sing soul kitchen, looking at everyone in the rain, walking to and from Kottbossor Tor.
As Jim Morrison sang all those years ago:
“Let me sleep all night in your soul kitchen
Warm my mind near your gentle stove
Turn me out and I'll wander baby
Stumblin' in the neon groves”
I guess I was doing the same thing.
July 19th
Morning news from the states, yoga, lunch, a stroll up to Karl Marx Alley, perusing the wares at Humana, a kitchy thriftshop on Frankfurter Tor, through Friendrichstein, chilled, and out to KitKat, where the lights and colors, bodies and hopes, blurred into the night, people coming and going through this life, pouring into the club and out, strolled to jannowitzbrücke, scrolling to the news that a poet we once knew shuffled off. I wish people could still be human, he once told us when he was staying at our apartment and the neighbors were giving him grief.
Prageeta wrote:
“Just this last Saturday I spoke of our friendship to Teresa and then to Joshua, Cedar, and Daniel, over dinner. With Teresa, I spoke about how you loved my undergraduate thesis title: Life in Both Places, which I thought was too plain to revisit, but you thought it was very Derek Walcott, very locating and possibly allowed the poems to breathe upward into the lyric forms they took. I told Josh et. al about how much you knew about Stein, and how you, in grad school, that first year, taught me so much about your notions of experimental forms in thinking about language (so much about film and experimentation too). Telling me Stein was a foremost teacher of language play for you, outside of P-Funk. Oh Thomas, you were a genius, but you were forever complicated, which is what made you so hard to process. You meddled, fought, digressed, versed, bopped around, and loved energetically the world around you. We lost touch because I didn't feel like I knew you anymore these last ten years...
But what I remember: your early P-Funk poems, you introducing me to the song “All Your Goodies Are Gone,” when Alex broke up with me back in 1996. Starting a conversation from another room and yelling my name across it. The wedding vase we dropped down the escalator. You and me getting a ride from my mother to the MacDowell Colony that summer of 1995 because we both didn't drive. You laughing as she spoke in Hindi to her friend Mrs. Tuli, but the only English coming out of the chatter was my alma mater with an extra “s”: A bunch of Hindi then "Simon’s Rocks," she said, which then you repeated over and over again to me, poking me. You called me my mother’s name, but adding “baby” in front of it: “Baby Bimla, Simon’s Rocks, Simon's Rocks” you’d repeat. Rest in poetry, dear Thomas. Love to you, soaring away to the Go-Go.”
July 20
And the line at sisyphos stretched down the block. With multiple floors of music, people danced all afternoon into the evening.... I was one of the faces in the crowd, watching the lights pour in through the colored glass, onto the dance floor we all shared…
July 21
Here they are trickling out Monday morning morning. Facing the scariest entrance in Berlin, we walked to Berghain. Short line. Some back and forth. you're bringing in these people, said the door guy. Yes, unfortunately, said Baby C. He waved us in. The inside was dark with strobe lights and ominous sounds, strobe lights, blues, reds. We found our way outside, to the Tea Dance out in the garden playing disco and house, everyone shaking. Others chilling talking. Yana met a young musician, who'd been a Sisyphos till 7 am, then come to Berghain. He told me we should definitely stay for the midnight set. And so we danced, made friends, chatted, ate, chatted, danced as the afternoon turned to evening, the garden space closed. The Panorama Bar opened for a Klubnacht event on July 21st, featuring a lineup of DJs including System Olympia, Jorkes, Sara Miller, nd_baumecker, Eluize, Colored Craig, we.amps, and Couple Looking for Bananas. The event starts at 23:59, with System Olympia kicking things off... We sang together, shook, bumped into each other, guys in leather, and twelve hours later, i made it home drenched with sweat. Friday KitKat, Saturday Sisyphos, Sunday Berghain. Nothing like it.
Jana told story after story about being in the club for days in a row, having sex in a cubicle and looking up to see five guys jerking off, watching, stumbling to look for her friends, after eating five ecstasy pills, on and on.
You start to wonder what is real, the club or the world with work and jobs and the outside.
No one is really sure, as doors open and close, friends come and do, doors of perception shift.
July 22
Stumbled up an old Friedhof on the way home from yoga, looking at the writings and street art on the wall, writing all day, meeting friends for a tour. 'we meet just across the street from the Hotel at the fountain in Monbijou park
which u can see from the corner of Oranienburgerstr + Monbijoustr,' wrote the The XLterrestrials . Were starting in a public park, a public space. I was happy to bring people together.
Everyone introduced themselves. I never thought I'd do a walking tour, The XLterrestrials continued, telling us about his life as a artist and activist in exile from the us empire. The tours give us a chance to think about this history and what it is we are facing now, how we can not repeat in so called unified Berlin. Yet things are repeating. we have SO-CALLED " memory culture", not only is it not working, it's become apparent to us the more we research it, that it is perhaps designed to obscure, obfuscate more than it reveals.
How are we organising the gentrification that is kicking out subcultures, we're losing Berlin. Can we defend our cities, slowly devoured, pushed out. I think of SONY taking over Potsdammerplatz.
Looking at the tech hub forming here, with Google Berlin finding a hub in Humboldt University, a Gropius design. Paulo points out a site of an old palace and circus bombed by the Nazis, a post office now an office. A tech hub forming. He's spent time in San Francisco. We've seen tech hubs change cities. Finishing the tour, we stopped at cafe where we were is Buchhandlung Cafe, a lovely, cozy spot on Tucholskystr.
There we talked about the pieces of what was of this city, beneath the rubble, the buildings beneath the buildings.
As the XLterrestrials Radar put it, writing about the XLtSubkultur Tour v.2, showing a picture of an old postcard:
“Those of you who know the Mitte district in the Btropolis might be a bit shocked to see this majestic Circus Busch Theater on the Spree across from the Alte Nationalgalerie. We only recently discovered its former existence while hunting for information about Kurt Kunau, a circus acrobat, who created some spectacular promotional photographs of daring poses atop high buildings around the 1920s-30s. ( More on Kurt later ). This particular image is actually from a postcard from ca.1900 ( we cropped the underlying text out for a slightly more dramatic effect ) and is part of a new book published by Theater Der Zeit called “Zirkuskunst in Berlin um 1900: Einblicke in eine vergessene Praxis” ( 2025 ) by För Künkel and Mirjam Hildbrand. One usually expects that missing buildings in this city were destroyed in WW2, but we were intrigued by the discovery that this big Theater Haus was shut down and *scheduled* to be demolished in preparation for the 1936 Olympics. So, it seems that there is enough evidence to describe this as another “ghost story “ of a very successful circus-theater business being pushed out of the city center by the NSDAP - Nationalsozialistische Deutsche Arbeiterpartei + Third Reich agendas.
Cafe am Kotti in: Zentrum Kreuzberg, chatting into the night...strolling through the night, looking at the people in bars and cafes. Looking at the old city, always changing...
July 23
Tiny Garden and dick pick at Spittlemarket, off the Spree Canal..at the garden, Christof Zweiner and company investigated what will grow together in the local soil and climate. And planted. 15 months later a wild garden.
Back home, an unsanctioned art installation near the Warschauer Strasse sbahn. Is it trash or is it art or is it a commentary on the Berlin art world? Police have not removed it since we first saw it in January.
Crazy day, visiting the studio of Marion Andrieu in Wedding, then back to Kottbossor Tor, to chat with Alyssandra and Masha about Berlin, history, Iran, and how it all feels... Summer in Berlin... With a dash of drizzle. Even some guilt pride, says Masha.
July 24th
I'm worried about fascism in the us said baby c to some germans. well soon we'll have it here too, They replied.
Drop bombs not rent, said the graffiti.
Walked to Berlinishe Galerie... For the
Marta Astfalck Vietz show...of dance photography from the 1920s... A city changing along with herself, bodies in motion, along with an ever changing world.
Staged self
11.7.25–13.10.25
Marta Astfalck-Vietz
Marta Astfalck-Vietz, Untitled, detail, around 1927
© VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn 2025
In just one decade—the so-called Golden Twenties—the Berlin artist Marta Astfalck-Vietz (1901–1994) created a dazzling oeuvre of self-dramatizations, nude and dance photographs, and experimental images. She worked simultaneously in front of and behind the camera—as photographer, director, and model. Astfalck-Vietz humorously addressed gender roles in the Weimar Republic and confidently used the camera to showcase diverse possibilities of female identity. Using masks, theatrical poses, and grotesque elements, she developed a style that combined personal introspection with sociopolitical themes. In the year of the Berlinische Galerie's 50th anniversary, the museum is dedicating an extensive solo exhibition featuring over 140 works to Marta Astfalck-Vietz.
Later that night….
There is no pride without sexual revolution, said the MC at Monster Ronsons Poppers night. No sexual revolution without homosexual revolution. In these times we gotta stick together. Last year the police attacked the Palestine match. Germany has a problem.... It has been a rainy Wednesday, a few friends over for dinner, quiet days, back and forth with family in the states, etc... here, there, in between…
July 25
Walked out into the city thinking about grief, about losses, passings, the things that disappear, ran into a friend from New York, and then walked through the Neue National Galerie thinking about Yoko, the wars we could not stop, the love that fell apart, that disappeared, the cities inflamed, the things we can put back together, even when they fall apart, even when harsh edges separate, soften, stopped for topas at our fave spot, looking at how the city changed, how we changed, what happened when we lived in prenzlauerberg, how it changed, watched the master and margarita movie, wondering about the fates of the truth tellers, those who end up in the psych wards, made my way back to kreutzberg, to roses on orianienstrasse, the bartender laughed and pushed us away, the boys danced and talked about plans for Saturday, the queer liberation marches that are everywhere here, and chatted about Brendon Bean, the Irish poet who sang of filth and dirty slums, the ways we look at cities and people and desire and repulsion... And the techno plays and new people arrive, and finally we got served, and we separated people from governments,
.. And the kids screamed on the trains ... On the way back home.
July 26th
Day into night, the days can be joyous and scary, reminders of darkness, a trip to Forgotten liberation forced labourers in Berlin 1945. I went to the wrong location,then found the right one, tracing histories of forced laborers during the war, black and white images of lost lives and humiliation (see below). . And then off to the Dyke March. Caught some drag kings perform. Drag kings stand with dykes, said one performer. Gestures of solidarity with Palestine in the streets... Off to dinner, people out and about, to and from, a disco nap and dancing at @blank, a community based club, with a huge cozy outdoor seating area. Out and about, dancing, through the rain, before the sun rose. We sat on a couch looking at the lights pouring through the trees, purples and greens and reds ... Last weekend in Berlin.
Forgotten Liberation. Forced Labourers in Berlin 1945
July 26th
Walking through Nollandorfplatz where Isherwood lived, I see an androgenous man with long hair on a bike, who looks like a young David Bowie ... Mor amor per favour says a sign. Christopher Street Day in full effect. The whole city out... Everyone queer, bottles of bubbly in hand..Protect gay kids says one sign. Stonewall was a riot... CSD is political, says another. Quer love destroys fascists. The Israel float comes by. Silence. History. Few want to condemn Israel. But they do condemn starving children, a right wing prime minister endorsing mass starvation. Other floats go by. More anti Alt fir Deutschland signs. Anti fascist signs. Germany is rearming to defend itself against Russia ever encroaching on Ukraine. The second biggest party in the country is right wing fascist AFD. What could go wrong? At rosa luxemburg straße on, we stop at Babylon for himmel uber berlin, the masterpiece about Berlin and history, desire, being, cycles of history... Enjoy a snack in the sunshine across the street... Talking about it all....
July 27th
A final afternoon of dancing at Sisyphos Nightclub, the lady at the door laughed when I showed her my phone with four summers of stickers to block the camera, you know what to do she pointed me inside. There, i
ran into some buddies from the Freie Universität Berlin European Studies Sociology Program and Berghain who'd been there all night from Saturday till Sunday afternoon.We talked about clubs and the meaning people find... Transcending backgrounds as our bodies merge into colour and light... Beats and music... There is a story in the ways people find meaning together. Sheiss AfD, sang one band, everyone singing along. A man from Iraq told me about his father basically walking from Iraq to Sweeden after the US war. He was born there. Room after room of music. And then the right beats grab you. There is nothing like this in London, said another person I met. Nothing like this in New York... Nothing like it... Music and images, color and bodies in motion…I think of Mom and the dream of our lives together from 1969, through decades of memories, trips from Atlanta to Dallas, to Italy over and over, a trip to New Orleans in May, decades of Thursday and Sunday dinners, more than could fill a lifetime.
Where are you from, she asked me in the coat check.
Berlin in the future.
Leaving the club, others jumping off the tram on their way in.
Running into my buddies again on the train.
Back home to Frankfurter Tor.
Down Warschauer Straße, past the people out eating, drinking, chatting.
July 28th
Home for sleep.
Packing.
Leave Berlin for now.
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