Saturday: Berlin has a party scene San Francisco can't even shake a stick at.

I guess that our Holiday weekend really started on Saturday. R and I walked over to the otherside of Alexander Platz, down Karl Marx Allee, to an area where we noticed there were a small cluster of galleries listed in the Index. Our main destination was a space called Haubrokshows for a show called Lights (On/Off) with works by Olafur Eliasson, Cerith Wyn Evans, and Isa Genzken and others. This title was an obvious nod to the Turner Prize winning piece by Martin Creed but that piece wasn't in the show. All the works did center around using light and light fixtures and it was pretty solid, especially the first piece as you enter the gallery Stripes (vertical), by Matt Calderwood. This video started as a bright, almost totally white, overexposed image of a line of fluorescent light bulbs suspended vertically and over 2.5 minutes each of them are consecutively shot and explode. The image continues to get darker as the lights are blown out and it ends with complete darkness.


Stripes (vertical) pictured on the right

The space, it turns out, is run by a collector (Haubrok) and all the works are part of his collection.

We then walked to a couple of other nearby locations where there ended up being a bunch of great galleries (only 3 of which were actually listed on Index). They were all closed for the Holidays though, but we plan to go back when they open for new shows which I think will be January 11th.

On the way back to our apartment we actually ran into Br who was trying to get into a hacker's conference to help his friend with a workshop but he wasn't answering his phone and they were trying to charge Br €30 cover. Anyway, we made plans for later that night.

About 9pm we met SS and Br in north Kreuzberg to explore a strip of bars on Schlesische Straße. The idea was to do a sort of pub crawl, have a drink at a couple of different places to see where we liked to go back. One thing about bars in Berlin is that each has their own list of cocktails. There are some common drinks, but for those of us who are not really into drinking beer, it adds a nice variable to the adventure. This night I stayed with a variety of drinks that had orange juice as their main mixer.

The first place we went to, I am not sure what the name of it was, had a kind of pirate or ship theme. This place was nice enough and played OK music (I remember hearing Ween's Buenos Tardes at some point) but there was no ventilation and it was so smoky that after 45 minutes or so our eyes were watering. We decided to move at that point and passed over a few places that pretty crowded and ended up at a place called Cake. This place was pretty fun, a hodge podge of wall painting and corrugated metal over the bar. All the furniture was thrift store quality couches and chairs, which is pretty standard here for sit-down bars. We hung out for awhile until they turned off the music and a drunk guy in tight black leather pants start wailing Bob Dylan-esque songs with an acoustic guitar. The place was small so there wasn't much room for his small jumps and hip thrusting and it was a constant battle between his performance and people trying to get by to go to the bathroom or the bar at the back of the place. This was annoying enough for us to decide to move on.

Our final stop ended up being the first bar we went to here with SS and Br, Konrad Tönz. This time we sat in the front and it was equally as funky. There was a DJ, a white guy with a black afro wig, playing what the flyer called "Soul, Funk, Trash", which was really just an eclectic mix with an emphasis in 70's soul and funk. There was a small 70's TV set above the bar that was playing old episodes of the Monkees TV show mixed with scene from what appeared to be an old German sexplotation movie about a chick who drives a motorcycle on the Autobahn. At some point she meets up with her lover and while they start making love (with her on top) he grabs a hand full of red roses from a vase on the night stand and hold them against her back as the scene explodes in to a psychedelic abstraction that only early film effects can create.

Another thing about bars in Berlin is there is no 'bar close'. This is extremely disorientating for those of us used to a specific end point to these kinds of evenings. As we hung out waves of different people came through, probably doing exactly what we had done, and before we knew it, it was 4am...

On the walk back to the S-Bahn (trains run all night on the weekends) we passed many clubs, a few of which had lines out the door...people waiting to start (or continue) their clubbing at 4:30am! Sure, most big cities have at least a few clubs catering to the all day and night and all weekend scene, but here it is the norm.