Berlin - Day 5
We knew we wanted Monday to be slower than our first days in the city. When we first arrived, the focus motor on the camera I had brought with me broke and I was pretty determined to find some sort of better replacement than my phone. Luckily there was a film store close by to Pro qm, a bookstore we wanted to visit. I picked up two of those Ilford HP5 Plus disposable cameras which the rest of the trip’s photos were taken on.
Pro qm was great, a massive collection of art, design, and architecture books, magazines, and zines. Although we certainly could have seen a lot Of these books in bookstores in any big city, I really enjoy picking up something to read on a trip outside of Camille Paglia’s Sexual Personae, the behemoth I decided to bring with me to chip away at during our down time on this trip. I picked up two books, “Open Form: Space, Interaction, and the tradition of Oskar Hansen” and “Self Study: Notes on the Schizoid Condition”.
Afterwards we rode to the Berlinische Galerie. I think for both Emily and I, this is were things started to click for us in terms of why the city is the way that it is. I think up until this point, we approached the city with an understanding of what it has to offer, albeit, an understanding of outsiders. I’m writing these blog posts retrospectively after our return to Chicago and this past weekend Emily and I met Faulkner and Nat at the first Humboldt Arboreal Society event of the summer. There we happened to come across Tyler on his way to Yoga, and having just returned from a ten day meditation retreat an hour or so west of the city. Deep in overgrown flowering grass and the crowd of people all setting up temporary retreats for themselves, feeling the thump of House music coming through the dirt, we reported back on the trip, similarly to what I’m doing now. We talked about the people, the clubs, the wall, etc. but one point seemed most pertinent that Emily had mentioned, that the city kills your ego. A place with such a mystic grasp on many, promising fulfillment of your deepest desires, but only once you’ve earned it.
Tyler mentioned a conversation he had in Berlin with a woman who had lived through the extreme, pagan debauchery of old Berlin in a bunker deep underground just after the wall had fallen. I can only try to understand what the collective feeling must’ve been like, its been rehashed countless times and far more nuanced than I could ever, but throughout history there are these perfect moments in which a perfect shift occurs in the perfect location which creates seismic waves felt decades later. Just the night before Emily, Nat and I went a Dirty Truths party on Chicago’s southwest side. It was a true celebration of Chicago’s House music in all regards, a time capsule giving us just a glimpse of the excitement that must’ve been felt hearing such a fresh and novel take on Disco that possessed you to dance until sunrise. No average party goer could have ever imagined the lasting effects that Chicago’s thriving gay scene in an extreme time of civil unrest would have the endlessly iterated upon phenomena of House music born from the insides of converted warehouses. The fall of the Berlin wall must’ve been a moment in which the collectives floodgates were released in an already lush artistic community that gave rise to some of the most iconic and darkest music, style, design, art, and mindsets the world has seen. The Berlinische Galerie archives this and more. Following the chronological loop around the second floor, it covers works made in Berlin from the 1870s to today. Piece after piece it’s easy to see how unstable living situations give rise to some of history’s endlessly studied works of the avant-guard. Larger than life works that reminded me that I am nothing and deserve nothing from this place.
That night we read our books and smoked on the River Spree. Enjoying some time to reflect, we peered into the house boats dotting the water with a pair of binoculars.