The kids didn’t want to join me. But Federico did. We met outside Berlinische Gallery, a museum of “Berlin from 1870 onwards. The museum focuses on Dada, New Objectivity and the Eastern European avant-garde, among others. The exhibition rooms are located in a former industrial hall that shines in sober and clear white.”
First exhibit, ““J’Accuse” (2016) … seventeen wooden busts, eight sculptures and an eleven-minute excerpt from an anti-war film of the same name by French director Abel Gance (1889–1981)... We stand to watch, black and white, the screen screaming with anguish. “The busts portray ‘gueules cassées’ (broken faces), First World War soldiers who had suffered severe facial disfigurement. Here Attia continues to explore his concept of “repair”, which has been at the centre of his art for many years.”
Inside the large gallery, we took in the black and white street photography of early 1990’s Kreuzberg, a toilet in the rubble with the ironic tag, “Fuck Duchamp”, a women in a photograph booth, and other scenes from “Being, Seeing, Wandering, Akinbode Akinbiyi’s street photos from three decades in Berlin and street photography about the world.
Gallery after gallery on our way upstairs to the ever rotating permanent collection. Looking at the Otto Dix, we were sad the The Portrait of the Dancer Anita Berber by Otto Dix from 1925 is in Kunstmuseum Stuttgart, Stuttgart, not right here in Berlin where she belongs. But others are, a photograph of bombed out Pottsdammer Platz, the John Heartfield, Kurt Schwitters, and Hannah Hoch photomontages of a post war world in flux, the pieces of the Dada anthology that was never to be, the “Lovis Corinth, Edvard Munch, Max Beckmann, Ernst Ludwig Kirchner and others.
Afterwards, I stroll to catch a beer with Allesssandra at Kotti, chatting about the city ever changing, the people, and neighborhoods ever shifting, the secret out, everyone coming, from Syria, Ukraine, New York prices and people, transforming the city, one neighborhood at a time. Still the secrets are many. Democry in the streets means constant change.
Summer in Berlin, the days are long here.
Thursday, woke up for yoga and coffee in the cemetery, then wrote and stumbled through the heat past Bowie's old apartment here on Hauptstr. 155 in Schöneberg, with a plaque. He saw Berlin as “The greatest cultural extravaganza that one could imagine." The bottom of the plaque: “We can be heroes, just for one day.”
At the store, we saw a guy in a rubber suit picking up some salad materials on the way to Steph’s. There is something special and unique about Schöneberg.
Steph Hanna showed us around her wonderful studio, a record playing, chatting about themes of sustainability, plastic, animation, cultural reanimation, the commodity fetishes that devour our commons, our compulsion to consume, entertain, shopping ourselves to death.
Back to Neukölln, I join my friend Pit for more conversations about communmity gardens and green spaces, apartment prices rising, and the freeway planned to cut through Berlin, ghosts of Robert Moses ever looming. Hopefully they push it off just as Jane Jacobs once did.
Off for dinner of fresh pasta at Grand Casino, restaurant and cafe goers sitting in the sun.
After dinner, Fed and I visit Scheune, an old school leather bar with a backroom downstairs and raw smells of body odor, full of older men in Schöneberg. “If there's one Berlin neighbourhood that embodies fetish, it's Schöneberg - and not just for the two big fetish events, 'Ostertreffen' and 'Folsom Europe' that are held there. The cruising bar, 'Scheune', is a firm favourite with all gay men who like it a bit rough. It is the most traditional bar of its kind and it is also the club venue of the 'Berliner Leder und Fetisch e.V.' (Berlin Leather and Fetish Association). Depending on which evening you visit, you'll find leather dudes or rubber ducks, skins, and punks….”
After Scheune, we venture to quainter stops at K6, with prostitutes outside, and Sally Bowles' bar on Eisenacher Str. 2, comfy spots in Isherwoods old neighborhood, chatting about the summer and our lives.
After a couple of bourbon and cokes, Fed journeyed one way; I walked back to the Nollendorfplatz station, and caught the last train home.
Last two weekends in Berlin coming up. What a summer.
Friday, in between this and that, I joined the kids for Polish food on Prenzlauer Allee, and a miracle happened. (Can’t say here). We talked about summer possibilities you don’t want to end. Maybe you dream about summer meanderring into fall, hoping its even possible to keep the feeling going, as Berlin journeys move to Italy and Greece. You want to keep summer forever, sometimes its the most fun you've ever had. That was my novel. The illuminations are many. George Emerson’s creed still rings true, “Beauty, Joy, Love,” echoing through the Arno Valley.
Leaving them, we were off to Sisyphos, for a night out at my favorite egalitarian disco, a light buzz in the air, red lights in the trees. Before dancing, we strolled about the club, through the outside spaces, with couches, hide away spots, secret corners, dresses hanging in the sky, as if phantoms, multiple rotating dance spaces, an eclectic mix, the Beatles Abby Road Medly playing for a second, groups of women and men from everywhere, hugging, rubbing up against each other, shaking, drinking, inebriated, high, house music, gorgeous people everywhere, from France, Italy, Spain, Romania, Germany, dancing, hanging, one blond with sunglasses in a white dress with two girlsfriends, another on the stairs in the house room, in black tight shorts and pink bra, hair pulled back, bodies moving and shaking, confident, alive, new friends, lots of comrades, night into day, when we left at 645 Am in the morning, the crowd cheering for the DJ as we departed, the exit at Hermannplatz, coming out of the train. Less than two weeks to go. Leaving, saying goodbye is hard. But sometimes necessary.
Went home and slept for a bit. And back for the afternoon tea party, met new friends on the tram who helped me find my way to the movies, after my phone died. They were happy to help and chat on a quiet Saturday, walking me to my train. And out to dinner and the movies, anime at Babylon Berlin, Ghost in a Shell,1995, "Packaged in a biocapsule, the shell, each cyborg contains human brain cells with the ghost, which contains the identity and personality..." Between Blade Runner and the Matrix, a story about what we’ve become, ghosts and cyborgs, phones and machines, repliants who become closer than our friends, our best friends, loves, Philip K Dick stories, which become prophecies, with hot sweet popcorn. Afterwards, out into the night, on a stroll down Rosa Luxenbergplatz, and back to Neukölln, with Berliners out for a summer evening, stopping for a glass of wine, in an old bar down the street from us, people smoking inside, sitting about candle lit tables. An apertiff and back through the streets of Neukölln’s boulevards lined with hummus joints and pastry shops.
And off to sleep, dreams, reading the next morning. Out to the flohmarkets by lunchtime, we walk into the mid morning. A syringe with blood sits on the cobblestones outside our door. Seen a lot of that lately, someone shooting up on the block, people suffering, self-medicating, shouting, taking care of pain, one friend screaming into the night, cackling, subways full of desperation, ride after ride, people sleeping in the streets, another telling her boyfriend she was taking a hand full of pills. At the metro, I see this sign every day. "I trust pain." There is still a lot of it here. Christina F still resonates. There's a rawness and a tenderness, a lot of wounds. We walk past vacant lots from blown out buildings, trees grown in craters from bombs dropped decades prior, the old soldiers’ kids’ kids walkind down the street, drinking beer, raw pain to numb, drugs, relics and piles of junk and of course street fashion and love at the Sunday flomarkets. A young women in cowboy boots and tight shorts, another in a black fur coat kissing her boyfriend. I haggle, win some lose some. Caroline chats with Sonya, who sells us a t shirt.
The longer we’re out, the more the afternoon light starts to envelop us, the sounds of the bartender singing along to old Edith Piaf and Leonard Cohen songs at Mein Bar on Auguststraße 61, the morning rain giving way to sun, the vivid sunset, a cute couple playing backgammon in front of us, after an a mid afternoon of friends selling their old t-shirtss at the flohmarkets, before an the impromptu gathering on a roof looking at the Berlin skyline, Alexanderplatz in the distance, the techno pumping onto the water on Warschauer Straße in Friedrichshain-Kreuzberg, kids and friends dropping by, out for a late night snack, a glass of rosé wine and ice cubes, the kids chatting about what bands were playing at Kopi squat the night before, the shaking in the mosh pit, another recalling where they were last week with no idea where they were going to sleep before they found a bed on the road, and where they were going next, Italy, Greece, Spain, feeling the summer as if it would go on forever, even if we know if doesn't, the infinite summer in all of us.
Albert Camus knew it, Simone understood it; the discos played songs about it,
And old song played in my head, about a Summer in Berlin:
open your eyes and let the sun break in for a while
there may be something that you've never seen inside
…
here stands the innocent and there it comes oh so wild
that's when you're longing for a summer by the wall..”
I always remembered that song. Never dreamed I’d see that summer.
I think I just did.
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