Then I went to the Shell station to put some oil on my bike's squeaky
chain. Some kids were trying to buy four packs of cigarettes(for their
father...). I tried to help them but the guy at the counter
resisted--"there are cameras everywhere!." So I travelled on to Potsdamer
Platz, just to navigate the funny curves there and to check out the
contruction, like hundreds of other people. Today Mercedes Benz was
selling beer in front of the "Red Info Box" and families were gathering
between the still-standing cranes and mountains of sand. It must have been
quite similar 42 years ago, when they started building up "Germania".
Later I went over to Wilhelmsstrasse where one is confronted with E-Werk, a
former electric-plant which has been transformed into a
"touristic-techno-temple." I traded my 10DM for a chance to see the third
"Chromapark TechnoArt Exhibit" and to write something down about it. This
year's motto--"Die Natur der Zukunft"--had inspired a series of colorful,
blinking, moving and semiotified installations, back-lighted PhotoShop
collages, telekinetic plasma tubes, postmodern walking TV titles, jaggy
mandalas, painted amorph blobs, slightly pornographic anime, font-design,
lots of plexi-glass, Tokyo-logos, some poorly configured HP web-terminals,
and some shameless test-the-camel event marketing. The whole thing was a
perfect backdrop for "hip" news reports and a must-see for
adventure-seeking adolescent visitors from western and southern Germany. I
felt a parallel between the "future is now" mindset of pre-wall society and
the present production of "hipness", both of which function through
homogenizing the wishes of the many.
After coffee at Kaffee Adler, at Checkpoint Charlie, where I watched
tourists and looked at the Philip Johnson retro-modern mini-skyscraper
under construction, I drove over to
Internationale Stadt (Prinzessinstrasse
11) to check my email. Everyone is scrambling to adapt to the new time
ushered in by the net--yesterday's "access for all" has become overnight
"online business." Lost naiveté: the enthusiasm of autonomous creativity
gets integrated into the circulatory logic of the divine code of money.
A few hours later it was already dark and I went to the
Friseur (Kronenstrasse 3, will get demolished this summer) which offered
SPANK: a two-floor, 6-dj mixture of house, electro, and drum & bass. An
intense, yet relaxed party beat with a coherent groove and a raw, bouncing,
hypnotic surface. The people there seemed to be having fun without
subjecting themselves to "techno-youth-culture" or the propagandizing
pressure of being hip and new.
After checking out some amazing computer-edited, hyper-corporate
video-loops from Daniel Pflumm at Panasonic(Invalidenstrasse 31), I decided
it was time for a last drink at WMF(Burgstrasse 29). It's the only really
"clubby" place in Berlin at the moment, sort of media-savvy, somewhat
cosmopolitan, somewhat underground, something too tasty for TechnoTourists
and too commercial for purists. It's the club for the youth of the new
capital.
There are more than 20 clubs in Berlin--it's the only cultural export the
city has. The art world can try to coopt it, but nobody else cares.
Instead they just make fun with decorative art(and its sponsors) to show
the flow of "creativity", sounds, and money in this singular end-of-the
milleniem culture.
Email: ThingReviews
"The people there seemed to be having fun without subjecting themselves to 'techno-youth-culture'"
WARNING: subjecting yourself to techno-youth-culture can yield intense pleasure
tja pit da ist ja richtig viel los in berlin ariane
>The poetic flickering of neon signs seems to hold hope for an
>end to self-referential capitalism.
The logo gallery on the framing buildings represents the not-so-new order of
competitive commerce and establish a semiotic regime which gets subverted
by the pathos of a lost utopia, so the neons imitate a poetic message of a
possible end of capitalism, mostly refering to themselves.
I woke up at 2:30 pm to the phone ringing--it was my parents announcing a
visit and asking for a key. Outside the birds were singing and children
were playing and people were sitting along the sidewalk drinking coffee and
looking into the sun. The first warm day of 1996. I pumped up my
Motobecane and went for a ride to Alexanderplatz to have breakfast(a big
doener kebab, orange juice and a McCoffee). The area at the base of the
TV-tower used to be the perfect spot for an East-Berliner to take a Sunday
stroll; at the moment it's caught in the throes of renovation, but still
textured with graffiti, somehow still in the hands of eastern Europe.
Cheap little shops and the mix of people they attract(not the kind featured
in the glossy pages of "Zukunft Berlin")are being replaced with western
megastores anxious to snap-up prime real-estate. Entering this part of
town and surveying the broad skyline, one can't help but feel the effects
of the socialist kosmos architecture that laid the foundation. Hosts of of
logos, which sit perched high on the constuction scaffolds, represent a
not-so-new order of competitive commerce which is subverted by the pathos
of a lost utopia. The poetic flickering of neon signs seems to hold hope
for an end to self-referential capitalism. A flock of punks lounging on
the stairs in front of Burger King; the throwing of beer bottles; dogs
barking.
To post a response fill out the following form and click the "Submit" button. Or go back...
Scroll down to read messages.
susan -- sg@thing.net
Responds:
--
Responds:
pit --
Responds: