Descending into the Seedy Underbelly of Berlin ... sort of

We went to the Leather Club to find a strap-on full leather gimp suit for our dog.  It’s a sausage dog, so the dimensions would have to be just right.  We pushed through the heavy plastic vertical slats that you would find in any meat locker or a leather shop in Berlin and into the leather accessories section.  We looked at the usual bondage masks with the zipper-faces and ball-gag mouth pieces.  We checked out the garden variety leather-and-steel-ringed penis sheaths and giant black double dongs.  We were starting to think this place was just way too gay for our hound dog.

“Why don’t we just take four of those leather ringy penis thingy sheaths and just put one on each of the dog’s legs?”  I ventured.

“No,” she said, “those things are black leather and the dog is black.  You wouldn’t even see the fucking things against his fur.”

“But they’ve got the silver ringy thingy and…”

“NO!!!”

We descended further down the rabbit hole.  In the next room there was a mini bar.  We each grabbed a bottle of beer before wading through the art fags who had gathered for the art show that was going on (incidentally) at the Leather Club while we happened to be shopping for our Full Doggie Jacket.

“Fear,” the barman said.

“No, I’m not afraid.  I’ve seen this shit before in S.F.  Giant black double dongs don’t even raise my eyebrow any more.”

“He said vier,” the guy next to him said, “Four Euro for the beers.”

“Cute dog by the way,” he added.

We gave up on asking for the doggie section.  Clearly these fags were way too conservative for the kind of canine costuming we had in mind.  Another back room separated by yet another wall of those heavy plastic vertical slats.  We had just watched a b movie about a missing girl and a sex dungeon with hallways and rooms separated by these exact same clear plastic curtain slats.  Fucking rabbits and their fucking holes.

The next room was a small boxed-in section of a corridor leading further down the rabbit hole.  A small group of college-aged girls sat on a leather bench talking, drinking and smoking.  A gay fuck film was projected on the wall above them.  They were completely oblivious and unimpressed.  We walked on.  The maze continued.  There were dozens of side compartments and ante rooms with the same redundant vertical plastic barriers.  Some had benches and ropes.  Others had handcuffs and small beds with handcuffs on the posts.  It’s just not enough for some people to render a simple ass pounding.  Apparently some people need the Gimp from Pulp Fiction and a bed with a set of handcuffs.  There were buckets in each room and the little woman wondered what they were for and I didn’t EVEN wanna go there.

Deeper down the hole we saw a back room with more rooms and a couple of gay guys standing around.  I got the words ‘hinter’ and ‘nicht’ and some head shakes.  We get it.  No straights allowed.  We left the den of iniquity with our dog just as we had walked in.   The dog looked up and wagged his tail.  He would get no leather action that night.

*photo taken from a website far more depraved than this here blog

Meet the Street

I’ve been stalking an individual quite by accident.  I didn’t set out to be obsessed; it just followed naturally.  First I took notice, then I started taking photographs, discreetly at first, then more planned and executed.  Then I found out the name of my subject was just an Alias.

You can see the works of street artist ‘Alias’ all over Berlin.  His works are fresh but familiar, political without being arrogant, and invasive while still within the context of the environment.  If you’ve lived in Berlin for a while you may have seen his works.  I’ve even used some shots of his work in previous blogs when I’ve run out of pics of donuts or beer.

I’ve always been fascinated by urban decay.  I’ve taken so many pictures of cracking walls, peeling paint, chipped bricks and rusty metal to completely reconstruct a 20^th century city completely from my images.  I’m drawn to the way that the Earth takes it all back in spite of the best construction materials we can stack in stony rows.  In the midst of all of this decay, some no-talent kids like to steal a spray can or two and leave their mark—like dogs pissing on each wall they pass.  Others make it a point to beautify their environment, to cover the corrosion with the bright colors of a vivid imagination.  These people are street artists, and should in no way be associated with common taggers and vandals.  A street artist uses the cityscape as his gallery, effectively bypassing the entire nepotistic and ego driven ‘what is art’ gallery world largely run by elitists.

Alias is one such street artist.  He works with stencils based on photographs; he applies these stencils and paper stickers in amusing locations and vanishes.  The image can be of a boy sitting on a bomb, a boy morphing into a cat or—one of my favorites: a screaming woman with the words ‘Don’t be afraid, it’s only gentrification!’

A while back I went to the opening night of an Alias exhibition of new paintings entitled ‘My Belly Is Mumbling.'  Apparently when he is not spraying and pasting up city walls, Alias plies his trade in more tried and true venues.  At the show I wondered if Alias would show his face, since the legal status of street art is dubious at best.  At the West Side Gallery, I was pleased to see a variety of well-executed Alias pieces committed to canvas, wood and rusty metal doors.  This gave the effect of viewing pieces which were ripped from the city walls and brought into the gallery.

The place was abuzz with the usual art people and fashion victims.  We sat and wondered if Alias was lying low, incognito in the midst of his audience, hiding just stage left of the spotlight.  Maybe it’s the guy with all the girls and booze around him seated on the couch.  Perhaps it’s the quiet dude with the paint-spattered pants leaning on a pillar.  We went to the gallery mini bar for a drink and plied the barman for information.  “Is Alias here?  Do you know him?”

To which the barman replied, “No…um…maybe….ummm…would you like a drink?”

For info on the upcoming Alias show:

http://www.street-lab.net/index.php?page=artists

A Flickr Alias group with more Alias art than you can shake a stick at:

http://www.flickr.com/groups/710677@N23/pool/

Habituation

"I have become comfortably numb."  - Pink Floyd

No, I am not loaded as I write this (for a change); but I DID have a donut this morning (go figure).  It's coming up on my 2nd anniversary in Berlin (January) and the process of habituation is nearly complete:  I no longer see Berlin as 'Ooh! Wow! Neato! Lookit!' and have become just another expat specimen consuming and excreting with Berlin as a fuzzy backdrop.

This affects my blogging; I was just talking with Lady Snooker about how I used to blog once a week--which slowly faded down to once a month.  Has my creative mojo gone?  Has my donut filling finally dried up?  No, I suspect that Old Rascal Habituation has done its thang on my eyes and ears.  It's happened to me before in other exotic locales:  London, Dublin and Prague.  Right about the time the traveler settled in to the routine; the study program (London), the jobs (Dublin and Prague) and the rent payments, the Buzz decreases, the new becomes familiar, then routine, then Old Hat.

I have noticed my best photographs of a location are generally taken within the first few months of living in a new place.  After that, things that were extraordinary become, well, ordinary.  This is a psychological process which allows us to protect our senses from the onslaught of new experience, disregard the mundane, and keep a lookout for new stimuli.   The wiki article on habituation mentions that soon after a human wears clothing, the sensations wear off.  Can you imagine if you could constantly FEEL the cloth chaffing you as you moved around?  I believe we would be batshit in about 72 hours.  Or city traffic and street sounds would make a New Yorker insane (scratch that; New Yorkers are NUTS) in weeks.

But what is basically psychological protection is damned inconvenient if you are a writer or photographer.  The details we pick out as unique and noteworthy start fading into the background.  So this is when we need to focus more.  Berlin is pegged as an ever-changing city; a city evolving before our eyes. Fortunately, if you look hard enough, you can see the paint drying:  the constantly shifting street art, the ever-changing rotation of festivals, events and goings on.  I now have more time on my hands than usual (my slow season for work), so my lack of money coupled with my excess of time gives me the perfect opportunity to slow down and observe.

I would like to also point out that many of the things I mention on this blog are cheap or free: Karaoke in Mauerpark (see: Return of Melvis) only requires a bit of nerve and/or liquid courage (and in Berlin, liquid courage is 60 cents per bottle).  Taking snaps of local street art is free if you shoot digital.  I have been following certain Berliner street artists and noticing their styles.  So when the background just starts to get a bit fuzzy, sometimes a new stencil, poster, or art piece will appear in the cacophony of color that is Berlin.

So let me throw out some ideas and we can all be comfortably numb in Berlin--with or without the chemicals.

If you have any ideas for free/cheap things to do in Berlin that Google doesn't know about, please comment.

Festival of Lights photo by Craig Robinson Photography

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Art Is For the Dogs

I was dragged to another art show in Berlin. My excuse for hanging with the Skinny Folks With Large Glasses this time around: my girlfriend’s dog would be in the show; that and the fact that there would be free beer.

Like any event in Berlin promising free beer, we had to get there early. It was a basement space in Charlottenburg (Christ, why am I dragged to Charlottenburg every month?) and it was a beehive of activity. The basement space fairly buzzed with flocks of various skinny dudes with bed head curly hair and those new fad jeans which are skin tight on the legs but droop at the ass to reveal their shorts. I’ll never figure that one out so don’t even ask me to try. Not hip hop. Not ballerina. Something in the middle I reckon.

The Artist (no symbol) let us know her plan: the dogs would each wear an Ipod with speakers for a collar and the speakers would belt out a human voice at just the right moment. WHOA!!! Said I, ‘Where’s the BEER?’ But you could see that one coming a mile away already.

The tension before any art show is about the same as the tension before a prize fight—especially when canines are involved. At the art show the early comers stood around looking poor but sexy (except me; I was an accessory to the lil woman and the dog) while waiting for the beer. I got to gawk at the crowd a bit while they were strapping the Ipods to the dogs. There were the same type of folks you’d expect to see at any art show in any city at any time in history: beardos, waifs and strays, the eating disorderlies, the vamps, the tramps and the one chick you’re not quite sure about because the calves are too thick and the jaw too square and izzit a tranny?

The dogs: a whippet, thin, speckled and twitchy; a beagle, curious, sniffy and hyper; our hund, a black dachshund/Doberman mix, social, silly and asshole-sniffy; and The Rapehound, rapacious, rapey and rapine. I don’t know what breed it was but the dog made it very clear from the get-go that it was on a mission to fuck one of the dogs in the room. That’s not normally a problem; except all of the dogs were male. Viewing this as a minor obstacle, the Rapehound immediately tried to mount our sausage dog. Having none of that, our poor beastie flipped himself like pancake so that his head was where his ass was a split second before. This was not the least bit of a deterrent for Rapehound: he began the face fucking in earnest. I’m not sure what was more disturbing to me: the ungodly act occurring before my eyes or the fact that my girlfriend thought it was cute and kinda funny, in a dog-dick-in-the-mouth sort of way. Some of the waifs and strays started laughing. They thought the show had started.

Eventually the owner of The Rapehound came over, stood and watched. I wondered if I was the only prude in the room. Hey, look, do whatever you want to whomever you want, just: A) consent; B) be of a reasonable age and C) don’t do it my face. The Rapehound’s owner said ‘I don’t understand. He is—how you say—castrata?’

Do you mean to tell me that your facefucker has no balls and STILL feels the need to mount the skulls of other male dogs? This just doesn’t make any sense at all. Now it becomes nothing about sex. Now it becomes all about power and aggression and rape.  And I think she said ‘Jawohl!’

I was ready for the art performance.

Death of an Artist

I went to visit my old neighborhood of Friedrichshain today. It was one of the few sunny days we’ve had in Berlin for a while and I was thinking it was about time we had some summer.

I stuffed the camera in the backpack and headed out.

Friedrichshain is changing—of course. It became ‘hip’ and therefore it is doomed to gentrification, higher rents, overdevelopment, displaced creative types and worse yet: yoga joints and sushi bars. Well, that shit had already begun when we decided to leave, and thankfully, it’s still gonna be a long time before the punks let the yuppies push them out. Whenever the punks want a can of spray paint to tag an SUV they can contact me here. I’ll buy the fucker.

The old squats on Rigaer strasse were still holding out; new posters plastered everywhere suggested that the battle was being lost. It’s as if the squats were a slowly sinking ship with corporate raiders on the stern and fenced-in youth hanging on the bow, swinging bottles and laughing and living in spite of the hull breach.

I was shooting some pics of the street when our Russian artist friend suddenly took us on a detour off the street through a passage to the back of some flats. I was preoccupied with shooting various kiddie rides in a playground overgrown with tall grass. My girlfriend said that our friend was taking us to meet her American artist friend. She said she was very impressed with his paintings. He was also from California, so naturally she thought I should meet him. I said why not. Nadja pushed the buzzer and I continued shooting. I’ve never been a fan of dropping in on people unannounced. And I don’t like it when they do the same to me. I like pre-arranged fun. But I was following the leader, so gate crash we did.

 

I heard Nadja shout “WHAT?!!? I CAN’T BELIEVE!!!” A middle aged woman stood on her second floor balcony with a red-headed girl of around 7. The woman said the artist had died of a heart attack last week. It was unexpected and the man was only 42. I heard the girl say “mein papa ist tot.” Nadja was emotional. She said that she couldn’t understand it. The girl, upon hearing Nadja speaking English, simply clarified: “my papa is dead.”  I felt like I had swallowed a brick.

These are the kind of moments when perspective smacks you square in the face and all of the little things you bitched about all week—late trains, bad lunches, flat beer—seem like a complete waste of breath.  I suddenly felt self-conscious of the fact that I had a camera around my neck. I put my camera back in the bag. I said I was sorry. I’ve never liked the failure of English language to express any real emotion. All I could say was “I’m sorry.” Why? I didn’t kill the guy. But all you can say when someone has lost somebody close is “I’m sorry.” That’s what you say when a mourning woman and her young child are looking down on you from a 2nd floor balcony of the flat of a dead artist. And then you walk away.

ZOMBIE ATTACK IN PRENZLAUER BERG

Or just some random art attack on the streets of Berlin.

Who would know the difference?

Very few words this time.

    

My local Schoenhauser Allee U-bahn station was graced by a visit from a pile of bloody rags.  The aftermath of a Zombie Walk?  Or just another Berlin artist desperate for attention?  Either way, gore works for me.
And props to my home slices in Sactown:  Trash Film Orgy (according to wikipedia), the ORIGINATORS of the Zombie Walk.  Keep on shufflin', C & D.