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This Berlin summer.... so different from that one years back when I had just arrived here. Only my toilet seems to have remained the same with that peculiar smell it sometimes exudes during the hot spells dragging me back to those bygone days.... Obviously, that summer back then really was a summer, much less than this mixed bag of miseries currently upon us. You wanted to storm out and roam the streets, perhaps visit the Love Parade, picknick in the Tiergarten or ogle the tourists walking bare-legged in the Führer's footsteps and the locals having stumbled upon a shrill and odd new sense of national pride.
You can still walk down the "Straße des 17. Juni" but these days it does not make me think of parties of the sweet melancholy of seeing the Goldelse (Neubauten in my ears) but I just hear the distant rumble of the tanks and the re-emerging bickering tones of "Wasn't all bad, you know....". In the world of new nostalgia there is not time for those who stood up for their rights.
Reading William Gibson may do strange things to my mind, possibly in regards to how I see te world around me. But Berlin has an odd decaying quality that the London Gibson describes lacks. You can easily spot older real Berliner women easily (although older East German ladies often look the same). Seeing that they have been around for decades now, it stands to reason that the new generation is secretly created in some dingy Dahlem lab somewhere: Much like the city they represent they show the ravages of time and past excesses and are barely held together by paint, synthetic fabrics and sheer attitude. Of course there is also the other kind, the younglings, the ones I mistook for goths at first: dressed in next to complete black, with hair dyed the same shade of Kohl they circle their eyes in. And still there is a certain air about them that tells of a different mental and aesthetic heritage, possibly something typically Berlin, too, but not of a pedigree I have been able to fathom so far.
Of course, there is still myself. In my darker moments it's all too apparent that I am but one of those hipsters that have discovered the city for themselves, only that I lack the wealth, sense of discernible style and the cocksuredness of imprinting myself on those around me.
Other than that, I am obviously difficult, fiercely postmodern and self-destructively elitist. Not to mention neurotic, which obviously may not set me apart too much. Watching "Nathan Barley" was difficult to say the least.
You can still walk down the "Straße des 17. Juni" but these days it does not make me think of parties of the sweet melancholy of seeing the Goldelse (Neubauten in my ears) but I just hear the distant rumble of the tanks and the re-emerging bickering tones of "Wasn't all bad, you know....". In the world of new nostalgia there is not time for those who stood up for their rights.
Reading William Gibson may do strange things to my mind, possibly in regards to how I see te world around me. But Berlin has an odd decaying quality that the London Gibson describes lacks. You can easily spot older real Berliner women easily (although older East German ladies often look the same). Seeing that they have been around for decades now, it stands to reason that the new generation is secretly created in some dingy Dahlem lab somewhere: Much like the city they represent they show the ravages of time and past excesses and are barely held together by paint, synthetic fabrics and sheer attitude. Of course there is also the other kind, the younglings, the ones I mistook for goths at first: dressed in next to complete black, with hair dyed the same shade of Kohl they circle their eyes in. And still there is a certain air about them that tells of a different mental and aesthetic heritage, possibly something typically Berlin, too, but not of a pedigree I have been able to fathom so far.
Of course, there is still myself. In my darker moments it's all too apparent that I am but one of those hipsters that have discovered the city for themselves, only that I lack the wealth, sense of discernible style and the cocksuredness of imprinting myself on those around me.
Other than that, I am obviously difficult, fiercely postmodern and self-destructively elitist. Not to mention neurotic, which obviously may not set me apart too much. Watching "Nathan Barley" was difficult to say the least.
