a weekend, recently :
Our breath hung in the air, heralding the coming winter, as we bundled in our coats and made our way to Waschauerstr where my flatmate was playing a gig in a karaoke bar. Aine, my amazing visitor from Montreal, and I met up with Christoph around Kottbusser Tor as we ate our doners, drinking beers on the walk to the club. We eventually got there and the revelery ensued, mostly taking place in the palid green light of the smoker’s lounge. We were both rather tired, her much more so than I, and so we found ourselves more or less trapped in the soft contours of the couch, slumping as the smoke curled and dissipated in the air. Dievondavon performed and it was a wonderful “Erasure-style” pop dream, as expected. Then there was drunken karaoke, which for me is quite rare, having had an aversion to karaoke since at the age of 12 going to a karaoke bar with my parents and having small bouts of epillepsy due to a potentially fatal blood disease. After a couple of sloppily sung songs it was time to head home, walking slowly in a small group to Kottbusser where we all split up again. The cold was sobering, but after going one stop on what happened to be the world’s slowest train, we got out and walked, telling a rather long story regarding limosines and dragons. In a post-drunken and sleep deprived haze we got into bed and talked. The sun rose and the ladybugs began to creep from the eaves.
Brief sleep and we were up in time for a bit of light, the sun retreating earlier and earlier each day. Friday, we journied to the East Side Gallery, past the boring and disgustingly trite murals to a secret abandoned school building that I visit occasionally. Past the dodgy makeshift ladder and through the darkening corridors, we raced up the stairs, crushing broken glass beneath our feet. Up up up to the roof, where we climbed a small metal ladder to the very top where we laid on our backs, watching the clouds swirl as the sky turned a brilliant orange. In the distance the clouds looked like mountains. We left before the sun was fully down so we could navigate the passages in the waning light. I faced defeat in a record shop and we ventured to Alexanderplatz for burritos. Exhausted, we grabbed a bottle of wine and went back to the flat where we sat listening to records in the lamplight streaming in from my room. We fell into the void.
Saturday morning we searched for a good option of what to do and decide on Teufelsberg, an old NSA listening tower built by the US in the west side of Berlin in order to spy on the East Side during the Cold War. The weather was warm, the sun shining brightly, and the short train ride is nice. Aine battled a bit of a cold at the time so we stayed in the sunlight. Upon arriving at Devil’s Mountain, a manmade park created on top of a Nazi bunker from old rubble from WWII, we climbed to the top of a small hill where we were greeted by scores of kites soaring in the air and crashing to the ground around us. In the distance the spherical top of the tower was visible, so we walked towards it, going through the forest and then circling the perimiter to find a break in the three fences surrounding the structure. We come to a large hole in the fence and crawl through. There are families and elderly people milling about and we begin scaling to the top, eight stories high, stopping to admire the incredible view and being overly cautious about the edges and the open elevator shaft. Inside the top all sound was refracted and reflected, it moved around the dome with an eerie delay. Every word echoed and moved around the space like a ghost whispering at your back. We sang, chanted, banged on metal poles and forgotten artifacts of America’s paranoia-induced espionage. It was beautiful. Leaving before sunset, more record shop defeat, and then back home where we had sandwiches and relaxed. At Sameheads that night, my friend TJ was doing a DJ set under his moniker Objekt. We got some beers and I ran into a friend of mine who offered us a higher state of mind. We took it, danced wildly, exhausted ourselves, went home to curl up under blankets, talking again until the sun peeked through the bottom of the window and the ladybugs emerged from their confused hibernation.
(20/10/2011 - 22/10/2011)
