If Amsterdam is the hippy little sister that teaches pilates by day and sells make-up in department stores by night, and Copenhagen is the preppy big brother that goes to Harvard and rides his Vespa to canoe polo on Saturdays, then Berlin must be the schzisophrephic fucked up half brother born to dad´s first girlfriend whom you´ll always find on the corner of the street high on acid and writing poetry with gastly spray paint. Therefore he is likely the most interesting family member you´ll meet at the dinner party but the least you´d want to end up in bed with at the end of the night. But then again...
I wrote this two years ago when I first visited Berlin. So how would the story end?
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But then again, I changed my mind. I was drunk. I was chuffed. We were happy. Bored too, perhaps. I thought it could be an exhilarating ride. Completely random, unreliable, unpredictable, interesting and complicated, fucked up, foreign, unknown, and much younger. Completely the wrong type for me, and certainly what I don’t need. So I took a chance in a whim. I like the idea that I can see an end to a story before it even begun. It entertained the recklessness in me, and in my still broken heart. Great love affairs never last. Condensed, intensified, self-destructive. Their greatness lies in the fact that they are made to be broken. .......................................
“What the hell are you doing in Berlin?” How do I answer that question?Two years ago I was roaming around Europe on a train pass, hopping from one city to the next, like a giant speed dating evening. Even though I loved Amsterdam and Paris, London was the most natural and safest first stop for me as an English speaker working in the NGO sector. And I would never exchanged that crazy hazy and educational year for a thing in the world. But I still vaguely navigated my way to Berlin, because its strange allure had never left the back of my mind. I was, and still am, quite taken back by the quirky, dark, irreverent, rebellious and eccentric colours and sounds it exuded. I liked the way that they daunted me, but pleased me at the same time – for the fact that it had daunted me, and for the fact that I am surviving it. A raw, upbeat, and almost vengeful energy about the city that seemed to be fresh and renewed every day, but all in the most unhurried, assured and carefree manner. That was what brought me to Berlin. So its probably not so odd that now, when I am surrounded by these fast moving and foreign sights and sounds that I have fallen into a mild, peaceful and restful frame of mind.
Have you met anyone that’s always planning for tomorrow and forgot that today was yesterday’s tomorrow? Yes that’s me and I’ve had to remind myself again and again to slow down. I love the pace that I lived in London and in Wellington, and the personal growth and confidence that comes with traveling and experiencing culture shocks across the continents. But when I reached Prague in early April after a botched carpool attempt and facing a crowd of crystal shoppers, I realised that I had hit overdrive. I realised that in my entire life I’ve been over stimulated and distracted with too many things and too many plans, the things I possessed, the job I had, and the places I’d been had defined me, rather than the other way around. But you can’t hurry life if you don’t breath. Its time to be like Berlin, time to be unhurried.
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At 5 in the morning we could just see the pavement in front of our feet, and gentle rain sprinkled on our faces and formed tiny little jewels on our jackets. He lived in a little fifth floor apartment near Treptow Park. The room glowed like fading amber in a fire, nothing but a mattress, records and books, spread across the floor. He ran his fingers down my back. Silhouette of Alexander Platz formed through his blinds, in a smoky blue dawn. I closed my eyes and heard the wind chime tingle in the breeze.
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I own nothing and will take nothing with me.I arrived in Germany with a backpack weighing 10 kilos, and apart from books I have added virtually nothing to my possessions. I have no job between the school holiday camp counseling work – I go to German classes and I write and read a lot by the canal, that’s about it. I don’t share much about where I come from or what I’ve done, because they don’t ask me that kind of questions here.
So I was going to come to Berlin to add another brilliant chapter to my book. But instead I’ve come to Berlin as a blank sheet of paper that’s been ripped out of the book. I left much of my past, and my plans and inklings for the future somewhere else for the moment, as if time ought to momentarily stop in Berlin, and shall begin again after it. I’m going to make a little paper aeroplane out of it and watch it fly away. ‘Weggeflogen’. Yeah, that’s it.
I’ve come here to just be.
PART II
Words were lost between us. I didn’t speak his language and he didn’t speak mine. It had meant that we could only communicate in the most primitive way – physically, sensually. Expressions on our faces, and the merging of our flesh, on a touch, and listening to one another’s strange tongue as the other person rambled on in their own language. Reading the raptures on his face, the distress in his voice, the contours of his drawings on a scrabble pad. Reading his eyes, reading each sigh, each laugh, each silence. Comfortable silences, uncomfortable silences, mysterious silences, intended silences. Yet communicating with the body is not free of cross cultural divides, as we have found out, the meanings assigned to physical expressions are not always the same in every culture, and having to translate that without a dictionary is actually quite a mission. And finding a way through another strange layer of prejudgment - what we assume of each other that our own social culture and its stereotypes taught us about who the other person may be/ may represent, and guessing what the other person’s prejudgment of ourselves may be, and the misunderstandings from the interlocking of all of these. A complex, risky, but exhilarating game. We explored each other like that, without words, and for the first little while it was confusing, then it turned intense as we got to know too much, but now we have become in sync, almost inventing a new language based on what we have become used to with each other’s habits, expressions, emotions, appetite.
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German was just a whole lot of sound bites that came out of people’s mouths, like every other language spoken in the places I’ve been to through my travels - nothing meant anything to me, and unless the other person could speak English, I just used signing and drawing.It’s been almost two months now, living in Germany, and the situation of being a virtual illiterate is becoming easier – firstly because I am now getting used to being illiterate, and secondly, well, I am becoming less illiterate as my German improved. Words are like pieces of puzzle that I collect a bit of everyday, all falling into their own place, and creating a clearer picture in my head every time I hear sentences or read printed words. Tenses and the different conjugated verb forms are becoming more and more clear to me, and I keep recognizing key words or parts of words in every day conversations. Even if its parts of a sentence, I can then use those key words to form an assumption of the meaning of the entire sentence or phrase. I especially love listening to the radio, because of the clear and slow annunciations they say, and the repetition that I never used to notice that public speakers use a lot as a technique for honing in messages they want to stick in the audience’s heads.
My German flatmate was surprised to hear that my classes are very grammar heavy. I guess it’s a little bit like how in New Zealand no one ever taught you grammar at school – you just assume these things come to you naturally as a native speaker. (and probably why my grammar is still so poor – as you can notice on this blog!!) Admittedly I was first quite resentful too, thinking that it was all this crap about the German obsession with preciseness and discipline. But now I couldn’t really imagine learning a second language as an adult without knowing grammar, especially for a language laden heavily with conjugated verbs and gendered nouns etc. It’s the basic structure by which words fall into their places. Without these quietly achieving patterns and rules, words would just be alphabets disjoint. Learning a second language as an adult is not like for children learning their own mother tongue, where you progressively learn the meaning/significance of things/words. Because you already know the meaning/significance of things/words in your first language, a second language is basically like learning a different system of codes to express those same meanings and words you already know in your head. It’s a bit like learning to use a new software to perform the same task on the computer. Except learning a language in a total emersion environment is like regaining the sight and hearing that one had lost as soon as they touch down on the plane........................................
Like everyone else in this city, he was a musician. His first band, of which’s Hungarian name I can’t pronounce, was a three piece gypsie ska band, which he leads/sings for, and plays the base or the banjo, while the other two guys are on either another banjo or guitar, and a violin. His part time band, called ‘Angela im Wunderland’ was a part children’s theatre, part political satire, part experimental group that shows up for street festivals or get booked by schools or birthday parties every so often. He also DJ’ed at private parties for free. Sometimes he got up in the middle of the night to strum his guitar, because a tune was stuck in his head and he just had to get it out. His fingers running up and down the strings so agilely, like a spider on its web, as I fell sleep under the lamp light.
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The music scene in Berlin is an eclectic smorgasboard of styles, groups, artists all with their own respective fame ratings and income generation from music. Berlin has had a very long history and presence in any type of alternative music, but perhaps made the biggest boom between the Cold War years, where West Germany's selectively rebellious and anti-estblishment youths 'escaped' to West Berlin to avoid being conscripted into the army. And the music and art scene is now one of the biggest in Europe, and the cheap rent/abundance of venues, state sponsorship loose squat policing attracts all kinds and styles of musicians and performers here.
In fact, pretty much 9 out of 10 of my friends here are some sort of a musician, from singers, fiddlers, soundscape artists, guitarists, drummers, to music video artists. Some good, some bad, some really really good, and a minor few excruciatingly bad, and are all still trying to get me to buy their home-made CDs. Subsequently, I’ve been going to gigs pretty much 4 or 5 nights a week. Most of the events like jam sessions and open mics are free, and they often let you bring your own beer – so its been a big eye(ear) opener for me. And there is always at least two or three bands invited to the numerous free gallery openings/shows across town, and the fleamarkets, fresh food markets, squat parties, and the numerous festivals going on at the moment would never be complete without eccentric looking performers adding some beats to the festivities…
My favourite gigs at moment are the soundscape artists (bit like in this video by CocoRosie) using all kinds of mixture of instruments to create unusual but pleasing and often witty audio experience. Many of them also perform with a huge loop pedal emphasis (bit like Mihirangi or Camille), while others will go one step forward and add a screen for accompanying visual art. One artists was playing a bendy saw (yes, a bendy saw) with a violin bow, and another sang entirely to the accompaniment of her music box. There was another experimental group that performed at Maria am Ostbahnhof – that called themselves ‘Ballet Opera’ – there were 3 ballerinas and two hip hop artists that performed together, to the music of a small Pink Floyd-esque rock band, which swapped occasionally with a soundscape artist and a techno DJ, and cutting edge videos and lighting. The result was an unbelievably surreal experience for the senses. And just last night one of my mates Rob performed inside a recently closed swimming pool complex (with story reading from a local writer in between the sessions) – the acoustics from the bottom of a 5meter deep pool was haunting and dramatic, and the audience sat on the slopes of the descending pool floor as if in a cinema. Upstairs amongst the former offices a little gallery is set up, and turned into a makeshift dance club in the evenings, and an even bigger club is downstairs amongst the pipes and boilers…
Again, this takeover was completely tolerated with half a closed eye by the city council…
A particular musician of note is a new acquaintance, a young Kiwi girl – the one and only Kiwi I have met in Berlin (but apparently there are 300 of us, with half of them being diplomats…); a fellow political scientist from Vic, except an entire generation younger, and a self-made singer/song writer, and arrived just a few weeks before I did. We talked about our Professors, student politics, Bodega, and writing for the Salient as if I was just walking down the stairs of the student union with a loudspeaker and a placard just yesterday. This world really is such the smallest of all places.
The first night I went to see her play, the music was actually a little intolerable… (I had invited a German friend along to ‘check out Kiwi talent’ as well…), the sound system was badly set up and basically her guitar overpowered her voice, and she had made a few mistakes. Moreover, she was dressed like a young Dolly Parton crossed with Farrah Fawcett, in a zebra striped boobtube dress and cowboy boots, blond boofy hair tossed out like a lion’s mane, and heavy black eyeliners. She is so different to the rest of the women musicians in Berlin, who are usually quite chilled, alternative and grunge, raucous and have to be boisterous enough to be noticed amongst the boys. So her sweet little country and western style had drawn a bit of sarcastic negative comments almost immediately – even though her style totally works for her and its just purely who she is. I kind of feel sorry for her, and almost disappointed that Berlin can’t seem to be man enough to except this ‘mainstream girl’ gate-crashing the party.
As the ‘only two kiwis’ in Berlin, and as part of a protest, its absolutely my duty to play groupie, and since that evening I’ve been attending pretty much all her gigs, sitting like a mother at her child’s music recital, tense, nervous for her, cringing at every mistake she makes, and always the first one to clap, and check up on her in the toilets before and after her appearances. I mean, how often is it in a complete foreign city that a kiwi girl gets up with her guitar in the middle of a crowded pub, and whip out her chops?As the nights went by she got more and more comfortable in front of a foreign audience, and I am beginning to really enjoy the music. Her songs are actually really quite wonderfully pretty, and her voice range is huge and dynamic, and the texture, while still more or less immature, is complex and full of allure. The music is a mixture of ballads influenced by, say, The Sundays, Bic Runga, Alanis Morrisett, and Sarah McLauchlan, which is right up my ally (well, one of my alleys…). Her lyrics too reflect the kind of surprises and emotions confronted by any new comer in a new place, and often I relate to those words and emotions so much that my throat chokes.
So it was kind of funny and kind of surprising when I found out that she was a B-Grade celebrity back in New Zealand. One of my friends told me that she was actually a NZ Idol finalist a few years back, basically making her a household name back home, because it was such a popular program. She would have been on the front pages of women’s magazines and on teenage pop posters and made into stickers and cartoon characters, and betting agencies would have made fortunes out of punters predicting whether she would win the
show. I had been living in Australia at the time, and so I had absolutely no idea that this young woman I’ve become very good friends with and supporter of in the last few months – is actually associated with bad reality TV in my home country. She was obviously too humble to mention it to me in passing. When I finally confronted her she gashed and told me that it was an embarrassing secret and that I’m not allowed to tell anyone else. Ever!Aren’t we all trying to get away from something by coming to Berlin?
(TO BE CONTINUED)
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