Well, there is a Ramones museum in Berlin, though I'm not really clear on the connection. Come to think of it, the extremely well-developed German tourist industry seemingly has yet to do justice to the country's rock'n'roll legacy – Bowie (although he recently had a blockbuster art exhibition at the Martin-Gropius-Bau), Iggy, Lou and Eno barely registered on our cursory cultural survey of the capital, though I feel like they played a somewhat significant role in the cultivation of its cachet/mystique (from an Anglophone perspective at least) – to say nothing of Can, Neu!, Kraftwerk etc. (We didn't do any Beatles stuff in Hamburg, which seems like it might've been pretty tourist-trappy.) I had U2 on my mind a lot while we were there (and we didn't even ride the U-Bahn) – particularly Achtung Baby, of course ("Zoo Station"…) – kind of crazy to imagine them recording it there in 1990.
part of our Dresden hosts' collection
Anyway. Elsa already covered it pretty well, but basically we really really loved being in Berlin. It felt like home (she keeps talking about buying an apartment there), or at least a very serviceable home-amid-homelessness. Livable, familiar, loose and laid-back after so much North European fastidiousness. Part of this is due to our very homey stay at the Riverside Lodge Hostel, and to its very chill artist-owner Enrico, full of tips and suggestions of "100-percent, super-cool" places to go. Part of it was also being able to do familiar things that we hadn't done in weeks, like go see a concert, or go blues dancing (!) or enjoy some really excellent but unfussy, casual semi-fine dining with actually friendly/attentive service. And it helped that we took things at a relaxed, normal-life pace, spending a good amount of down time at the hostel and nearby, not rushing to see all that the city had to offer (and there is a lot of very enticing stuff…we didn't even attempt any of the multiple heavy-hitter art museums, for instance)…instead of stressing about it (for the most part), I just kept thinking "man, it will be so great to do that, the next time we come back."
Maybe the best part was how accessible it all felt. It's a great and easy city to bike around; even without anything resembling a grid I felt like I got my bearings after just a couple days – always a good feeling. For being one of the world's top cool-meccas, people seemed completely unpretentious; even Berghain, with its semi-legendary status (in certain circles) and its notoriously fickle and inscrutable gatekeeping (which we avoided since we were there for a concert – on the list!), and despite the industrial austerity of the decor (it's a former power plant, and it doesn't seem like they did much remodeling), didn't feel the least bit intimidating or off-putting. Actually it just felt comfortable; awesome and special but in an immediately recognizable, relatable way, like someplace I could just hang out and be at home (it felt a bit like some old familiar haunts – the old Philly club Transit and, in a different way, the similarly concrete-heavy Sinclair, so maybe that's part of it.) (They don't allow photography, so I can't show you what it looked like.)
It was a really hard call between going there (to see Caribou, whom I love and whose new album is phenomenal, but mostly I just wanted to experience the space) and checking out the blues dancing scene at Club Bassy (a weekly Tuesday event) – actually I had a severe episode of FOMO trying to decide – but we managed to do both successfully.
Here are some pictures from Bassy – a great time… in many ways not all that different from the regular Tuesday night dances I've frequented in Cambridge and Philly (so, again, I felt right at home), but different in a few key ways: notably, it's at an actual bar/club, which just makes the whole thing feel more real and "legitimate", less cultivated and contrived. Being a European bar, many people were smoking, and being a Berlin bar, the dancing was still going strong at 3am or so (when I left.) There were fewer college students, more random normal people, fewer clumsy beginner dancers but also fewer really serious good dancers (also just fewer dancers in general.) The best part, though, was the DJ – he was playing records (vinyl, but also shellac!), and playing all kinds of awesome and weird and wide-ranging things I'd never heard before – leave it to the Europeans to be way more obsessive and well-versed in vintage American music than we are ourselves.
And this is the club I went to after leaving Bassy, thinking to myself "Tuesday in Berlin beats Saturday night basically anywhere else I've ever been": Club der Visionaere. It's not the club I was trying to go to (based on Enrico's suggestion), because I got confused and of course there are no signs – but still a pretty neat place, and I could see it being an amazing party spot especially in warmer weather. The scene there wasn't really any great shakes, but then again fifteen or so people amiably dancing to deep house alongside a canal at four AM on a Tuesday night is probably a better party than you could semi-randomly stumble upon pretty much anywhere else in the world…
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