Bang Bang Club

It sounds like another kitkatclub with lots of, erm, banging, but it's a small indierock club right at Hackescher Markt. Actually, it's located under the rail tracks, so besides the drum and bass guitar vibrations, you often feel a deeper rumble coming from a train passing over your head. Picture on the left is the Hackescher Markt S-bhf from the outside, lights are probably because of the Festival of Lights, more on that at the end of this post.

As I checked last.fm again for inspiration for the evening, the most popular and interesting event seemed to be a shoegaze/dream pop gig with Malory, a german band. After checking out some songs online (which were pretty convincing), I decided to go and shelled out the 10 euro at the entrance (after walking around for ten minutes looking for the place).

Foreprogram was Come to Hannes, a young guy with his guitar and laptop and voice. Cool and everything well worked out, with the laptop taking care of whatever background instruments (drum, guitar, electronic beat) needed and he singing and playing his guitar live. Short rap performance by a friend of his as well, which was a nice diversion. Nice visuals as well.






Then came Malory, which was excellent with some proper hair-raising solid-guitar-soundwave climaxes, complete with projections. Cool stuff, and real "shoegazing" indeed with the band members staring at some indefinite point on the ground about two metres in front of them.

Small audience, about 50 people.






Berlin has since tonight or last night started its Festival of Lights, which means lots of famous landmarks are specially illuminated with projected texts, moving and colorshifting lights, lasers and spotlights... Even the Park Center shopping center close by has joined the festival, check out the picture. There will be special events as well, off course with "light" as central theme.
Damn, the more I come closer to leaving this city, the more it has to offer.

Fuck Buttons

Yesterday evening, before I went to the cinema to see Berlin Calling, I went to a concert in Kreuzberg Festsaal. As I wanted some inspiration for the evening, I checked last.fm and the most popular event was the concert of Fuck Buttons and HTRK, and the tag cloud of the former is like "noise, experimental, drone, electronic, post-rock". Can't possibly go wrong there :-)
Decided to check it out, and after arriving at about 9 pm and paying 13 euro (2.5 for a beer), the foreprogram started - which was HTRK. Cool group as well, consisting of two asian dudes and a cool deeply-cleavaged (although very un-smiling) chick. Most of the songs sounded pretty alike, but I liked it.
Then came Fuck Buttons, which was a mix of hard beats, distorted guitar, noise, low-fi voice effects (fisher-price radio!) and live percussion, all looped and mixed up on the fly. Very cool. Pop-drone?

The place itself was a regular small concert hall (200-300 people) but with an excellent sound system.
Kreuzberg is a strange place, the area around Kottbusser Tor U-bhf seemed to be filled with drunks, homeless people, crazies and young people.

Berlin Calling

It's a movie about a Berlin DJ (who is played by Paul Kalkbrenner, a famous techno producer) and it's about techno, drugs, love and everything in between. I had seen the movie before at home, but I just had to see in in Berlin itself. And what place would be better than some small movie theatre in Friedrichshain? I went to Tilsiter Lichtspiele, which basically consists of a bar, toilets and a movie theatre for about 50 people. The toilets were dirty, the projector just an off-the-shelf digital projector, the left front speaker had a bad contact... and I loved the place. 4.5 euro for a movie, 2.5 for a beer. You have to pay your cinema ticket at the bar, and the waiter is a nice guy who looks like Viggo Mortensen. 'nuff said.

I was the only one watching the movie, and they started it just for me :-) I'd like to watch Antichrist there as well, which is the 8pm movie. Oh, I got a stempelkarte, which gives me one free movie for two paid movies. Now that is a real bargain. Maybe if I watch Antichrist tomorrow, I can see another movie of their Lars von Trier Filmreihe for free. Have seen way too little of his movies anyway.
Actually.. none of them. That's bad.

Wochenende

Weekend! Sadly it's over now, though.
Friday evening I went to Berghain again, Sub:stance. Was looking forward to this a lot, although the music was kind of a desillusion. Have I grown out of dubstep? Has dubstep grown out of me? I guess I was just longing for the deep, relentless techno beat of berghain on the saturday night before. Maybe I just wasn't drunk enough. I stayed however, 10 euro entrance and one hour of waiting makes you think twice before you leave a place. The music wasn't all bad, however. And the panorama bar offered some variation.
The crowd was very different as well. Gone were the gay people and hello to short trousers and baseball caps.

Once the line-up in berghain itself stopped (8 am), I changed to Tresor. Located close to S-bahn station Jannowitzbrucke (yup, close to Kitkatclub) in an old electricity generation plant (hello Berghain) its friday evening was one of (industrial) hardcore. The Speed Freak had come that evening as well as other pretty famous industrial hardcore artists. I should have gone there instead of Berghain, perhaps. Anyway, cool place. Very gritty, dark, dirty. Feels like scraping your face over concrete, but in a good way. Some dude selling lollipops at the entrance - this was a pretty hardcore place. Only the main room was still open, with about 50 people. Main room has a big window in the side offering a view over the blue-lit insides of the factory.
Stayed there for about an hour, then switched to Golden Gate. I read about it, people describing it as a cool underground place. Which it is :) It is very, very small too, as the guy I met waiting in Ostkreuz told me (he was a Spanish person living in Berlin for about eight years. Oh, and he had studied physics - that was a first). Golden Gate is located in an old storage/maintenance room of an U-bahn station and the dance room is about as big as a decent living room in a house. 5 euro and a thorough pocket check got me in.
This is a place which draws mainly locals coming there to chill down from a night of clubbing. Felt like a pub where you go to to meet people you know, a place where you go often and know everyone. Very nice and cosy with lots of couches and low music volume. With nice and cosy I don't mean the place itself, which is pretty plain and worn, but the atmosphere. I liked it. Everyone was on some kind of upper - but knew how to handle it. Different from the kids in Berghain stumbling out of the toilet sweeping their nose at their sleeve.
But all nice things must end sometime so went home to crash in the couch at about 1 pm and to wake up again at 10 pm.

For saturday night I had planned a night of Arena Club, which was very close to my apartment- just a ten minute walk.
Very nice place, an old factory with lots of stairs, walkpaths and some old piping and machinery left. Even a small waiting line (ten people) and weird door policy (group of four perfectly normal girls turned down, as well as a couple of thirty-somethings - the porter saying people coming here are usually dressed up and they didn't fit) - but I got in without problem, dressed just plain. I don't know, maybe guys alone are considered good spenders. Coat and pocket check, asked if I had a photo camera (although I saw a couple of camera flashes during the night).

Besides the industrial look, there is some funny and trippy decoration as well, which gave the place a friendlier, tounge-in-cheek feel. Music was not bad but again pretty light-weight for my taste. Service was unfriendly, which is a shame. Is it so hard to smile when you hand me over my three-euro drink? This is one of the things where Berghain shines: even in the wee hours of the morning, staff are smiling and friendly.

After that I wanted to check out Maria am Ostbahnhof, but that weekend was a reservation-only weekend. Maybe I'll check that place out next friday, which will be my last night out (except if I would travel to Prague wasted). French electro with Yuksek live, hmm.

So today at monday I cleaned up the place a bit after idling all sunday afternoon in the couch watching movies (Lawrence of Arabia - Ponyo on the cliff. Excellent movies) and staying awake to reconfigure my biorhythm. After that I wanted to visit the dome on the Reichstag, which is free to visit and looks like a cool place with an impressive view. Turns out the dome is closed until wednesday for a cleaning operation, so ended up going to the Volkswagen Automobilforum at Unter den Linden, where there was a free exhibition of pictures of North-American nature, made by Pavel Sticha.
Some nice pictures, but most of them seemed to be just rocks in funny shapes. A duck-shaped rock. A foot-shaped rock. A hamburger-shaped rock. Nice, but not that special. But hey, it's free so kudos to Volkswagen and Skoda.

After that I went to Deutsche Guggenheim, which is close to the Automobilforum. Guggenheim huh, sounds impressive. And it had some very famous pieces indeed, although it contained only paintings (I like to see some three-dimensional stuff as well) and half of the collection were pictures of squares extensively commented by artsy people.
The most interesting one was one of Paul Klee (image on the left), who made awesome stuff like this and this and this. The Daimler exhibition I visited last week however, was more interesting and much more relaxed (at least three guards in the guggenheim exhibition and lots of people).

After that I went to see Pixars Up in the Cinestar cinema in the Sony Centre at Potsdamer Platz. That cinema shows mainly "OV" or OriginalVersion movies, which means they are in the original version, often without german subtitles, which is great. Brilliant movie as well, true pixar magic.
The cinema itself is nice, a pretty classy place with even free newspapers to read on the comfy couches while waiting and drinking your (3.6 euro for half a litre) beer. No digital projection, but bright image and excellent sound. Most of the cinema is actually underground, the main hall showing the underside of the fountain central in Sony Centre. Pretty cool, as that part of the fountain has a glass floor.

On my way out I found a stand with free Exberliner magazines, which is english-language and all about music, art and places to go to.

Salome

This evening I went to the opera of 8 pm, in the Staatsoper Berlin at Unter den Linden. Paid 7 euro for a ticket, which is dirt cheap indeed but gets you only a "Hörplatz", which means you literally can't see a thing. Luckily, lots of places in that part (at the utter left, on the top floor) were empty so I was able to "upgrade" to a place of 16 euro, where I could see most of the Bühne with some stretching of back and neck.
The hall is very nice, exactly as one would imagine a classy opera building. Check out the Fotogalerie.
The play itself was Salome by Richard Strauss, which is based on a play by Oscar Wilde. The story is actually quite fucked up, with a drunk king, an imprisoned prophet and a manipulative, murderous bitch princess. One would expect an opera to be about love and passion and sweet things - which this was, but distorted and over-the-top with a strong undercurrent of human excesses. Seems like the public on the original viewings thought about the same, the play was forbidden or censored on many occasions.
Captivating story though, I wasn't bored for a minute.

The decor was kind of a desillusion, as I expected an opera decor to be lush and baroque with false perspective, plants, gold and candles and all that stuff - kind of like the opera hall itself. None of that though, only the most necessary of attributes were there, the multiple floors consisting of off-the-shelf scaffolding with some canvas. Funny thing too: the soldiers carried machine guns and wore modern uniforms, where the king and the prophet wore ancient clothes. Old and new seemed to be mixed randomly.
That didn't matter much, though, as the singing, music and acting were excellent. Very impressive how the actors managed to bring a dramatic story like this on stage and let their voice fill a whole opera hall - not amplified.
Good thing were the projected texts synchronised with the singing (in German), which were a great help to understand the storyline.

The picture is an official one from the website, with different actors than those I saw. It shows Herodias, the angry wife of Herod (who is in the back). Salome is dancing for Herod, much to the disgust of Herodias. Salome is Herod's stepdaughter.

The names and storyline are based on stories out of the Bible, bit I don't know how original they are. Should check that out.

Raum 18

Last tuesday, I went to Raum 18, which is a small multipurpose room rented out for music performances in Neukölln, somewhere next to a canal/river close to the Sonnenallee bhf. If I recall correctly, it must be somewhere at the centre of here.
I passed a huge and expensive-looking hotel first and then the area quickly changed to an utterly deserted, smelling-like-car-paint industrial area. Only a small board bearing an "18" gives any indication of the venue, and you have to climb several stairs passing raum 1, raum 2 all the way up to raum 18 - which explains the name as well. Cool place with old chairs, unstable bar and orange-painted TL lights, but with a decent sound system and off course pretty cheap.
There were about 20 people there (same amount of people who said they would come on last.fm) for the drone concert of that evening. People were friendly and mainly from out of the country - I heard more english than german. The music was, well, drone. Not for every evening, but interesting nontheless. One of the guys is Dutch, and they had just been doing a tour through some old Eastern Block countries.

Had a nice chat with a New Yorker who just moved to Berlin for a stay untill the end of the year. Another guy there came from the Baltic sea and moved to Berlin a couple of years ago. Needless to say, the was a graphical artist. The New York guy made drone music.
I'll have to think up something cooler than "computer guy".

On the picture you see an image of that hotel, taken from the bridge on the Sonnenallee.

Potsdamer Platz

Today started off as kind of a dud. Wanted to do the Flak Turm tour of Berliner Unterwelten, but as I arrived at their office in Gesundbrunnen bhf, the place was packed and the english-language tour of 13h sold out. Other days were always very calm, I guess this tour is very popular or some large groups of people took that tour by chance. Next week it will be, and I'll be there a couple of hours in advance to buy my ticket.

As I was intending to visit the Mythos Germanium exhibition (which is also of B. Unt., and you get reduction with a ticket of a tour) close to Potsdamer Platz, I got on the sbahn to that station... only to realize there that, as I didn't actually did the tour, I didn't have a ticket so there would be no reduction. 2 Euro difference, which isn't that much but why spend it if I can save it as well? Being close to the Sony Centre, I saw the entrance to the Film and Television museum or Deutsche Kinemathek, which I did want to visit. Could as well visit that one now!



6 euro ticket, very interesting museum. I somehow managed to enter the exhibition at the wrong end so I did the whole thing backwards, but that didn't matter :) Large parts on Marlene Dietrich and famous movies like Metropolis and Das Cabinet des Dr. Caligari (which I have yet to see), all in a very modern and pleasing way with lots of authentic stuff like movie cameras, contracts and letters, costumes, awards...
The pictures show an overview of famous German movies (I've only seen the one right down -Christiane F. - Wir Kinder vom Bahnhof Zoo) and a statue of the robot out of Metropolis (don't know if it is in any way authentic, though).

The museum also contains a portion on German television with a "Spiegelsaal", which is a large room with a lot of projection screens on one wall and mirrors on all the other. All different kinds of television footage is projected in a semi-chronological, semi-orchestrated way, offering an interesting view of decades of german television.

Oh, btw: german school kids on the loose are as annoying as the belgian ones.

After the museum I found myself in the centre of the Sony centre again, and recalling my experience with a reasonably priced and excellent cocktail, the relaxed sitting and nice scenery a couple of weeks before, I decided to have a drink. 3.90 euro for an Irish coffee, which is pretty nice indeed. Especially if you consider this is the Sony Center, which is a very touristy place. Decided to get a club sandwich as well, which turned out to be a decent sandwich with egg, bacon, salad and a pile of fries (although way to salty, which was a shame). But anyway, had a decent meal there for 12.5 euro, not that bad.


Luckily I had my Lonely Planet guide with me, so I checked out what I could be doing when I was there. Turns out there is a small, free arts gallery close by. The gallery exhibits a part of the extensive Daimler collection (yup, those guys of Mercedes) on a floor of the Huth Haus, which is one of the sole buildings on Potsdamer Platz which is pre-WW2 (and survived the wall as well). The building is dwarfed now buy the modern high-rises which took up the real estate after the fall of the wall, but it is a nice buidling, well renovated.
I had to search for the entrance, which is a nondescript door and a small indication on the wall. You have to ring at the door and actually state your intentions ("I, erm, want to see the art collection, sir"), after which the door buzzes and you can enter.
Good thing about the L.P. guide: they actually wrote that you have to ring the door, otherwise I'd just have thought it was closed or something. Now this is a travel guide which really is of use.

Anyway, the gallery was pretty nice. The art was contemporary indeed, lots of the pieces were only a couple of years old. Great that the collectors allow the public (although only the public which really wants to see it, because you wouldn't just find it accidentially) to see it for free.
The pictures show the Huth Haus from the backside, and the inside of the gallery.

The picture on the left is one on Potsdamer platz, oriented to the North. You see a reproduction of the first traffic lights in Europe - which were placed there in 1924 - and the sony centre at the left. In the back at the right, before the white building (don't know what that is) you see the entrance to the subway station.


After that I wanted to visit the Topographie des Terrors exhibition close by, which deals with the history of the headquarters of the SS and all that was despisable and ugly about the third reich. Exhibition closed at 6pm though an I made it only a couple of information boards far, I'll have to check it out later again. Close by were some government buildings, and a fairly large part of the wall. On google maps (which proved yet again indispensable in retracing my steps, damn I love google) the wall is visible as the thin line on the south side of the Niederkirchstrasse. The area depicted as Topographie des Terrors is still a construction area now, and the museum is actually a walking path in open air.

On walking to the nearest s-bahn station which was Anhalter Bahnhof, I noticed the distinct shape of the Tempodrom, a concert hall. Didn't recognise most of the posters at the entrance, although there was one advertising a Massive Attack concert. Shame they only come here at the end of October.
I passed the remains (just part of the front wall, actually) of the old Anhalter Bahnhof (I thought it was a church), which, according to wikipedia, must have been a very nice and large building.

See those two kids on the roof of the Tempodrom? They were using it as a slide. It also gives you an impression of the size of the building - it's not that big. The architecture is nice, but coming from the glass-and-steel style of the sony center, this looked kind of shabby. This was a less rich neighbourhood with a large North-African community, which was especially visible in the s-bahn stations I passed on the way to Sudkreuz, too.

In the course of the afternoon I found a Berghain folder in my coat pocket, the guy of the cloakroom must have put it there. Check out the artwork.
Background for the picture is a painting in the sleeping room of my flat (which I will sadly have to leave in 9 days).
Berlin is so full of art everywhere, it's crazy.