Berlin


Recently I spent two weeks in Berlin visiting a friend.
As usual I spent my time as If I lived there,
making myself at home cooking, taking photos, drawing,
going to restaurants, dancing, museums etc.
Also, I went through a major change while there,
a change I anticipated and am still reeling from.
But there will be plenty of time for that later.
As usual if you want to bypass all this neurotic nonsense
and and get right to the action:


Click Image to see the rest of the photos:




West/East
I found the physical and psychological distinction between west and east Berlin very interesting. It gave a structured schizophrenia to the city I really appreciated. Though the wall is down, still much of the architecture and culture of the two sides remains distinctly it's own. The west side is basically a big sleepy mall. Designed to maximize window space to show off women's shoes. And it didn't go un-appreciated. There seemed to be a women's shoe store every twenty feet and most had women glued to the windows with cupped hands peering through the glass at the oh so sweet shoes inside. Stores in general in Berlin are strangely specific in their business plan. For example a book store won't even carry sketch/notebooks or pens etc. Simply books and nothing else. A far cry from our Wall Marts and Costcos, where you can by everything but a human soul, which is curious when you think how many are left inside that commercial purgatory.

Residential parts of the west side are saturated with a palpable sense of stillness. But it's not the eerie stillness of abandonment that you feel on the unused sidewalks of L.A. Rather the stillness feels natural and informed. I think it's partly due to how safe and clean the city is. With such a late night culture you would think that disorderly public drunkenness and riff raff would besmirch every corner and liquor store. Instead, almost every time I saw a police officer he was good-natured-ly chatting with a civilian on the street laughing. It's a strange feeling walking through the darkened streets of a city at three in the morning on a Friday night and feel completely at ease.

The whole city permeates a sort of German efficiency. All the times you might have occasion to vent your frustrations about how things work in America, along the lines of: "Ugh, that's so stupid, whoever designed this is a moron.", in all those same instances in Berlin, you're likely to think "Huh... Well that's clever, how come we aren't set up like this in the states?" I found myself having thoughts of this sort on a myriad of different things, from how the subway system works to the organization of shelf space in a grocery store.

The east side however has a more gritty, young, hip quality, much like what silver lake is to Los Angeles or Brooklyn is to Manhattan. Food and drinks were cheaper, things are open later, more live music, less fanny pack wearing tourists etc.


Aesthetics
I have to say that aesthetically Berlin didn't impress me. It's mostly flat and drab, with soviet reconstructed utility and blandness permeating most everything. Though I have to say the couple of historic buildings which survived the war are truly gorgeous.




There is a church on the west side that spoke to me aesthetically more than maybe any structure I have ever seen. I could sit in front of it and draw and paint every day for a year and not get tired of it.




Food
The food was pretty standard hearty, simply prepared 'lumberjack food'. Which is basically my name for dishes comprised mostly of big cuts of meat and potatoes and the like. Which was pretty much what I expected, an abundance of big heavy good meat with obligatory fixins tacked on to justify a meal. This obvious emphasis of priorities was reflected in the pricing. You can get a gigantic cut of meat and all the beer you can drink for practically nothing. But order vegetables and a glass of orange juice and you pay through the nose. I would marvel at times that the giant cut of meat was two euros but my tiny little glass of concentrated orange juice was four.

One of the most interesting moments I had was at a Persian restaurant in the west side. I went with the friend I was staying with who speaks Russian, English, and German. I spoke with one of the waiters in Farsi, which both the waiter and I understood but my friend didn't. The other waiter spoke to us in German, for which my friend and the waiter understood, but I didn't. My friend and I spoke in English for which we both understood but the waiter couldn't. The people sitting behind us spoke Russian with each other for which the waiter and I couldn't understand but my friend could. So my friend translated the waiters German to English for me. I translated the Farsi the other waiter and I spoke to my friend in English. My friend translated what the people behind us were saying in Russian to me in English. So basically every possible combination of the four languages at hand were expressed with no one person knowing them all.


Berlin as an all night middle school dance
Probably the most noteworthy thing about Berlin from a lifestyle perspective is their all night culture. There is a multitude of things going on all over the city every night and most places don't close until after sunrise if they close at all. It's quite normal to start your night out at midnight, and continue your debauchery well into the the following day. Though I should say something about Berlin's brand of debauchery or lack there of. Now I'm sure that there is some secret seedy underbelly operating below the publicly available night life. But what I saw was the most confusedly orderly and respectable debauchery I've ever experienced in a big city.

One night I went with some friends to a dance club. Walking through a catacomb of damp smoke filled rooms, saturated in dim fluorescent colored lights. Each room was littered with old mangy couches covered with the lazy outstretched bodies of bleary eyed hipsters, lazily watching us pass through. I felt like I was walking into a trainspotting-esque den of drugs and sex ready to explode on me with a strength I was prepping to defend myself against. But after making a brief tour of the rooms and the various dance floors, all I found was a bunch of very orderly German people respectfully keeping their distance from one another as they all very tamely swayed their knobby elbows in a subdued erratic manner to redundant techno beats. It was almost like a Jr high school dance as all the single women were dancing by themselves occasionally glancing around radiating their receptivity, but the men stayed an overly respectful distance, choosing instead to simply enjoy the rhythmic hypnosis of the music.

And really it was at this moment, surrounded by everything needed to stoke the flames of hedonistic debauchery (alcohol, loud music, youth, the dead of night, smoke filled deep lit rooms slippery with perspiration etc.) and finding instead respectful well mannered consciences Germans acting with natural self restraint and propriety, that I felt I understood Berlin. Because really the whole city is like that dance floor. Hard working, upright, honest people, proper to the point I can best describe as "charmingly-earnest clueless-ness". I had a vague sense that their propriety on some level causes them to miss the point. Now of course no one can argue there is anything wrong with people conducting themselves in an orderly fashion at a dance club, drinking responsibly, respecting women's personal space etc. and instead privately enjoying the music and the movement of their bodies. But my point is there is a reason you don't often find that in a dance club, it's because on some level people go out to put themselves in a chaotic unpredictable environment that encourages indulgence and disarms inhibition, because that's how people break the structure of every day life to make new connections, romances, release steam etc. In other words, If you don't act stupid and horny and indulgent in a late night dance club then when do you ever? And if you never do, are you somehow missing something? Bottling it up? etc. Then again it's probably why their subway system works so well, or why you don't have to worry about being ripped off at a farmers market etc. I mean this sensibility even extends to their pets. Dogs are very popular and Berlin and you see them everywhere. But almost every time i saw a dog it was without leash, walking obediently beside their owner or else waiting patiently outside a store for their owner to come back out. Obviously well trained, with all impulsive urges curbed, always trotting along with respectable decorum. It's impressive and certainly a pleasure to have dogs behave so well, but is it perhaps on some level, unnatural?


Changing of the guard
On a more personal note Berlin retired a long running chapter in my life which I will only cryptically speak of here. This trip provided a backdrop to a changing of the guard within me. I redefined much of the framework I have well worn to coordinate my understanding of myself and relationships. The old system was built on an outdated design that was hindering my progress more than it provided me with the clarity I once valued it for.

I adopted the now retired framework soon after high school when the pursuit of my artistic development and professional success took hold of me as the forefront concern of my life. At the time I recognized the key to establishing myself on this track was clarity. The clarity to make decisions, the clarity of mind to discipline myself to commit to what I resolved, without weakness or distraction. And the clarity to see myself blemishes and all, to stay honest with myself and others so as to never stop improving myself. And it worked. My life became full of planning, to do lists, one, five, ten year plans, flowcharts, countless sleepless days and nights painting, drawing, filming, writing etc. I began making great strides in all aspects of my life and self improvement, and felt validated by my resolve. But I've recognized for some time that the clarity to which I tenaciously clung, required a simplification of life and relationships into black and white extremes. Things were "bad"or "good"insofar as they helped me or distracted me from my goals. This oversimplification freed up my mind and time to work in committed directions with little deviation, and seeing the reward of such fundamentalist focus, I kept it up and intensified it. People began to increasingly describe me as "over thinking" , in fact the default operation of my mind became to imagine and churn over every possible permutation of any given scenario in any sphere of my life and to develop a plan for how to best anticipate and react to any one of these imagined outcomes. I never lived in the "now"but continually defined the now by it's influence on the future. If you paused my brain at any given moment, you would have found it somewhere in the future, maybe an hour, week, year, decade etc. And often this proved useful, I was rarely caught off guard, and seemed to have a ready well developed plan for how to act and what to say no matter the situation.This constant state of preparedness imbued me with self confidence, and people admired my integrity, discipline and tireless commitment to my principles and priorities. Even if they found it difficult to simplify themselves into such opaque shades so as to fit into my life. But over the last couple years, I have little by little replaced the self image I've had of the scrappy young artist fresh from art school trying to edge his way into the adult world, weary of any and all of life's tricks to edge me off the narrow path of success, and have begun to accept that I am now comfortably walking at my own pace with steady footing, and that no such fear of derailment need exist within me. I have safely chosen a path free of such hazards. I'm no longer the scrappy art school student, rather, I'm working lead and senior positions, as a consultant for my knowledge and looked up to and counted on for my experience and know how. I have a hand in the hiring and training of artists for which I'm qualified to guide. It's no longer me against the cruel world of the status quo. Rather I've made deep investments in quality people and lifestyle choices and in my art that have begun to shape my daily environment , relationships and opportunities, so I no longer need to have a moral polarizing filter for every activity and human interaction. I have the bandwidth now to support more shades of grey between the black and white extremes. And really life is in those messy shades of grey, and it's okay to get mussed up by it, in fact its preferable.

This trip broke down some of the most re enforced walls of my outdated system, and while it's thrown me off balance for the time, rebuilding with new materials, lacking in clarity, but much more rich with the shades of experience already making my life broader in it's experience, deeper in it's depth and more satisfying in its chaos.

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