Xenia

When I finally saw her it was hard to imagine what had happened.

We first met in Berlin a few years after the wall had come down. It was during that great crazy time when the world actually seemed like it was getting better. There was an explosion of club life as art in those days. They were springing up everywhere like weeds in the waste, in abandoned bunkers, in bombed out factories, in the bullet riddled back allies of block houses. You often had to pull back fences or climb down candlelit cellar stairways. Some moved every night carrying with them only their names. Some dug in deep and would become institutions.

We were in Eschlarock Rumpstump. It was in the hinterhaus at the end of a long damp ally in Mitte. It featured a twisting bar, lit from within where fish appeared and disappeared behind found scrap metal and knotty limbs. She was sitting on a table in the middle of the crowd. She had thick curly chestnut colored hair. Her skin had the rich amber hue of raw honey. She wore dainty white gloves and carried a tiny suitcase as her handbag. Her carriage was regal, like a princess. I knew she was a dancer.

I was sitting next to some shrill American girl. I kept thinking "Why am I sitting here, why don't I just go up there and talk to her." So I did.

I told her I liked her bag. She asked me where I was from. I said "New York" and she said
"It might be possible to have a conversation."

We found a table in the corner and I got us drinks. We talked about art and music and dance and dance and dance. She had never met somebody from New York. She had heard about it though. Growing up in the east she had been taught that New York was the center of all evil in the world.

At some point I got up to go to the bathroom. While I was there I panicked a little. I wondered if she would be there when I came out. I looked in the mirror. My beard was showing. I rubbed my face with my wet hands. "Relax", I thought, "she likes you. For whatever reason she likes you."

When I came back she tilted her head down and looked at me. "I want to go" she said. "I don’t want to be the last to leave."

There were few street lights in Mitte and so it was dark. We walked down cobblestone streets lined with 19th century row houses that had been so gleefully shot up by Russian solders. Leering gargoyles, maidens carrying sheaves of wheat, billy goats all with ears, noses and bellies pock marked by bullet holes. Never repainted and never cleaned they had turned a uniform urban grey.

She told me she had a little balcony. She said it wasn't far and perhaps we could have a coffee there. We walked up past the Ferhnsee Turm towards Fredrichshain. For a North American it was hard to imagine that any place outside of Moscow had been named Karl Marx Alle and that made it wonderful.

I don’t think we even managed to turn on the lights. Inside the door we found each others lips and began tearing at our cloths. I was sucking on her tit when she said she wanted me inside her. I fucked her hard and then she pushed me on my back and fucked me. She came with a violent shaking her nipples flushed and hard, her nails digging into me.

I remember looking at her. She was examining her body in a nimbus of morning light. Slender, lithe, brown with no tan lines, shadows of intensity passing like clouds across her brow. I thought "This is it."

What "it" was, was not much. Her moods shifted in violent reversals. She could cling to me like a child and then stare into my eyes with equally intense hatred. One night she woke me with her fists screaming that she didn't love me. In the morning she sucked me hard, mounted me and then rode herself into a dizzying orgasm. She curled into my arms and said.
"Everything is OK now."
It was time to get out.

She made one request. She asked me not to forget her. I didn't. I wrote to her. She wrote back. She found a boyfriend and moved to Stuttgart. Her place in the east was empty and I was invited to use it whenever I was in Berlin. I did.

On my way back from Malaga I received a message from her. She would be in Berlin. She would meet me at the airport. It had been years since we had seen each other.

There was nobody waiting for me at the airport. Shoenfeld is so small, there are bigger bus stations in the midwest. I took the train. When I got to her place the lights were out. I found her in bed. She was groggy. She had called the airport. I told her it didn’t matter. She invited me under the covers. We found each others lips. I caressed her hair, her face her hips, her breasts. She turned on her back and drew me inside of her.

Something was funny. Her breath tasted of alcohol and cigarettes. Her body felt different. I would find out in the morning. She had gotten fat. Not the nice kind of curvy female fat either. Her legs and arms were still skinny but her belly hung out like someone who had been hitting the bottle. She had deep wrinkles around the eyes and jowls under her chin. Her skin was a pasty, yellowish hue. She had transformed herself. From twenty four to thirty she had gotten old.

She brought me brochen and coissants for breakfast. She made rich black coffee with fresh hot milk. She knew I liked Yogurt and fruit and she carefully peeled and cut apples for me while I slept. There was a newspaper too, because Americans like newspapers at breakfast.

I washed her hair for her. This tub had been her pride. It had a separate heater. In the days when we were all struggling with these shitty electric showers or none at all she had always been able to soak in a tub of hot water. An unimaginable luxury for a dancer from the east.

We played Patanque in the park. She told me her story. Her boyfriend and her had never connected sexually. After the first few months he never wanted to do it. This was a girl who liked to fuck and knew how to do it. The eastern girls had been blessed with a hundred years without the church and it had made a difference. They were notorious. She learned all about his world. He knew nothing of hers and so she left.

I was feeling cruel. I told her she should have stuck with me. We could have been raising kids by now. She asked me how she would have survived in New York. I said we would have made it somehow, together, lots of people do. Then she asked me what would she have done in New York. I looked at her like she was nuts.
"You could have danced."
That hit her. I should never have said that. I could see it in her eyes. New York is the dance capital of the world and she had missed it.

She was supposed to meet me later that night but she never showed up. I smoked cigarettes and drank beer in a cafe by the canal. I spent the night on the floor of Johannes kitchen. Lena kept crying and nobody got much sleep. I took one last walk around Prenzlauerberg. I went by the wasserturm and Kastanian Alle. So many cool little cafes and bookshops and used furniture stores. There used to be nothing.

I knew I was in trouble. The second I walked into the airport. The curteous guy told me ever so nicely that the French Pilots were on strike. From Berlin to Paris was ok, but Charles DeGaule II was a disaster. There was a mob at our gate. The rest of the airport was empty. Even the shops were closed. They were trying to put everyone they could onto this one flight going to New York. Just get them out of Paris.

I ended up sitting next to a Danish biologist. He was supposed to get to Mexico somehow. He had been frantically trying to get out of the airport for ten hours. He kept cursing Air France. He had a blanket wrapped around him like a funeral shroud and his breath stank. Every few minutes I kept giving him another mint otherwise I wouldn't have been able to stand it. The headphones didn't work. We only had one movie anyways, Spiderman. It came in in French in one ear and english in the other. Danny Elfmans beautiful soundtrack was like a crackly arc of static between the two. The only good thing about the flight was the conversation. People in Europe believe that every single one of us Americans support Bush and his shitty war. Can you believe it? Like all of us are stupid. Still, it was Air France and so there was plenty of wine. I told the Danish guy, lets just get drunk, it's free and it will take away the pain. It did.

When I got back to New York, Xenia called me. She didn't ask me what she really wanted to ask. Instead she asked me not to forget her. I promised her I wouldn’t.

Ciao Bella

Ciao Bella!" from a balcony and have it be completely sincere and real. I just had mine.

I spent my last night in Barcelona with Daniella and her friends. These Italians, they can go into a kitchen where there is nothing and come out with something wonderful. We drank and ate and smoked and listened to music. Daniella performed a Moroccan belly dance. At midnight the girls put on their make-up.

We wandered around the forbidden areas of the Barrio Gottico,down twisting streets so narrow you could touch either side, through hidden plazas where the addicts slept, past skinny drug gangs on motor scooters, by big black barking dogs and gypsy beggars with babies at their breasts. I asked Cosima if it was dangerous. She looked me in the eye and said "Of course, I live here."

We started to dance. We were at the bar where Xavier worked and the drinks were plentiful and free. She asked me if I would and then held out her hand. Soon we were kissing shamelessly on the street, in doorways, on the beach. We were touching everywhere. Daniella appeared on the back of a motor scooter with some spanish boy and as it whined away into the dark, yelled back to Cosima that the apartment was free. I had the most peaceful sleep I ever have had in her arms.

When I woke she was already dressing. Her English is not so good nor my Spanish either. I asked her if we would meet again and she said that she would think about it. I figured she was done with me. I went to the balcony in time to see her disappearing down this narrow medieval alley. She walked like a queen. "Cosima" I yelled. Ciao Bella.

I spent my last day at the beach. When I returned to get my bags Daniella told me that Cosima had come to say goodbye. There was an old 78 on top of my bags entitled Sueno de Amor". I called her and somehow it was decided that she would see me off. We had a mad dash through the jammed subways to the train station. There on the platform we kissed along with three other couples before the train began to pull out. Still holding her hand I jumped on. "Will you come to New York?" "Vale, Vale!" .... ok ok

Nightbus

I have learned that life if you split it open has as many possibilities as a fig has seeds. I have learned that you can dance all night only if you sleepall day. I have learned that the moon is not just the moon but "La Barca""The Ship", also the word for cone as in ice cream. I have learned that a beautiful woman is even more beautiful if she lies brown and naked and oiled in the sun as if she is being roasted for a feast. And above all I have learned that I have been smoking way too much hash.

I screamed when I saw him. He was leaning over me burnt and red with dark sunglasses like some poorly briefed technician at Los Alamos. It was five in the morning. It was Neshta and he had brought home a spanish boy. They made ficky ficky in the bathroom while Tunte and I tried to pretend sleep. These are the whores of Marbella.

They come from England with their perfectly bred daughters to mate them off to the proper people. Both the mother and daughter are so fine and so stylishly dressed you could go either way. But the girls slip away at night to fuck Spanish men. Everyone is fucking spanish men mainly because it is so hard to fuck a spanish woman that they mostly all go either way.

I was having no luck until I talked to a Norwegian bartender at The House of Silk. He told me it is possible to have something with Spanish girls, but only after you have met their family. They wont even talk to you unless you prove yourself by following them around for days like a dog. The English girls are all sluts. Then he pointed out two Morenas at a table, slender, lovely, a blonde and brunette, sisters.
"Have a go with those two, they're not typical Chicas, tell em there will be Chupitas at the bar soon"
That was how I met Alithia and Marta.

They were both studying to be ecologists and intent on saving the world. We talked in spanish, in english, in spanglish. We argued about politics, we laughed and we danced like mad people. They rolled one fat joint after another of hash mixed with tobacco. At five or so in the morning. Alithia took my arm. Her black arabian eyes pierced right through me. She told me that if I came back tommorow I would find her and then they disappeared into the moonlight.

I found Tunte passed out under a table. We walked along the marble promenade past palm trees, past the light of the full moon which glistened like broken glass across the Mediterranean. We found Shatzie in a smoke filled gay bar where Andaluisian men, shirtless in blue jeans danced to the rhythmic clapping of their peers. I left those two there and completely disoriented stumbled around for an hour before making it the two or three blocks I had to go to reach home.

In our tiny room with my bed one foot from the door I fled this world in a haze of hash dreams until Shatzie stumbled in. I screamed when I saw him.

We had to be out of there by noon. We managed to wake ourselves up and get to the car. At the airport I kissed the boys good-by. I was on my own again. It was time to get out of town. I had no place to stay and no chance of finding one. Except in Barcelona. Tunte had arranged it all with his friend Daniella. The only problem was getting there. It is 1064km away. It is the end of summer and everyone is traveling. There were no seats on the planes. There were no seats on trains. But there was a bus. They told me you can always get a seat on the bus because nobody wants it.

It is a fourteen hour ride to Barcelona on this shitty bus. At one time someone had had a vision of luxury and comfort but now the seats are all broken, the TV's hang mute, the drink holders and dinner trays lie useless like vestigial organs. You ride all night, in the cold, in the mountains. We stopped at one place called The Hotel Zurich where the driving team had beers and sandwiches. It was in some dusty forgotten town filled with freaks and the hopeless. A mother with her retarded son played cards with her parents. A old man in a tattered yellow and black outfit which included matching two tone shoes sat with his elderly blind dog in his
arms. I asked the fat woman at the bar who had a face like a sunburned Wayne Newton
"where are we"?
"A la Frontera" "At the Frontier". I couldn't imagine what she meant. We were in Spain, miles from any border that I knew of, but apparently here in the mountains the people of Andaluicia consider Alicante another country.

The next stop was at a super sleek ultra-contemporary place called Autogrill. Perfectly modern with modern graphics and food content. The parking lot was filled with hundreds of Gypsies, all of their belongings roped onto the hoods of their cars. They were sleeping on the pavement
next to them. One felt as if they had been passing through this way for thousands of years and that something had always been in this spot, but instead of being able to get figs and flat bread, water, one could now get pasta with pesto and orange Fanta. And Sangre de Torro, but you could always get Sangre de Torro.

And finally, Barcelona

Alive!

I have learned that life, if you split it open, has as many possibilities as a fig has seeds. I have learned that you can dance all night only if you sleep all day. I have learned that the moon is not just the moon but "La Barca" "The Ship", also the word for cone as in ice cream. I have learned that a beautiful woman is even more beautiful if she lies brown and naked and oiled in the sun as if she is being roasted for a feast. And above all I have learned that I have been smoking way too much hash.

I screamed when I saw him. He was leaning over me burnt and red with dark sunglasses like some poorly briefed technician at Los Alamos. It was five in the morning. It was Neshta and he had brought home a spanish boy. They made ficky ficky in the bathroom while I tried to pretend sleep. These are the whores of Marbella.

They come from England with their perfectly bred daughters to mate them off to the proper people. Both the mother and daughter are so fine and so stylishly dressed you could go either way. But the girls slip away at night to fuck Spanish men. Everyone is fucking spanish men mainly because it is so hard to fuck a spanish woman that they mostly all go either way. I was having no luck until I talked to a Norwegian bartender at The House of Silk. He told me it is possible to have something with Spanish girls, but only after you have met their family. They wont even talk to you unless you prove yourself by following them around for days like a dog. The English girls are all sluts. Then he pointed out two Morenas at a table, slender, lovely, a blonde and brunette, sisters. "Have a go with those two, they're not typical Chicas, tell em there will be Chupitas at the bar soon"

That was how I met Alithia and Marta.

They were both studying to be ecologists and intent on saving the world. We talked in spanish, in english, in spanglish. We argued about politics, we laughed and we danced like mad people. They rolled one fat joint after another of hash mixed with tobacco. At five or so in the morning. Alithia took my arm. Her black arabian eyes pierced right through me. She told me that if I came back tommorow I would find her and then they disappeared into the moonlight.

I found Braulio still dancing away as if in a trance. We walked along the marble promenade past palm trees, past the light of the full moon which glistened like broken glass across the Mediterranean. We found Shatzie in a smoke filled gay bar where Andaluisian men, shirtless in blue jeans danced to the rhythmic clapping of their peers. I left those two there and completely disoriented stumbled around in circles for more than an hour before making it the two or three blocks I had to go to reach home.

It was time to get out of town. We had to be out of there by noon. We managed to wake ourselves up and get to the car. At the airport I kissed the boys good-by. I was on my own again. I had no place to stay and no chance of finding one. Except in Barcelona. Braulio had arranged it all with his friend Daniella. The only problem was getting there. It is 1064km away. It is the end of summer and everyone is traveling. There were no seats on the planes. There were no seats on trains. But there was a bus. They told me you can always get a seat on the bus because nobody wants it.

It is a fourteen hour ride to Barcelona on this shitty bus. At one time someone had had a vision of luxury and comfort but now the seats are all broken, the TV's hang mute, the drink holders and dinner trays lie useless like vestigial organs. You ride all night, in the cold, in the mountains. We stopped at one place called The Hotel Zurich where the driving team had beers and sandwiches. It was in some dusty forgotten town filled with freaks and the hopeless. A mother with her retarded son played cards with her parents. A old man in a tattered yellow and red outfit which included matching two tone shoes sat with an elderly blind dog in his arms. I asked the fat woman at the bar who had a face like a sunburned Wayne Newton "where are we"?

"A la Frontera" "At the Frontier". I couldn't imagine what she meant. We were in Spain, miles from any border that I knew of, but apparently here in the mountains the people of Andaluicia consider Alicante another country.

The next stop was at a super sleek ultra-contemporary place called Autogrill. Perfectly modern with modern graphics and food content. The parking lot was filled with hundreds of Gypsies, all of their belongings roped onto the hoods of their cars. They were sleeping, covered in ornate fabrics, on the pavement next to them. One felt as if these people had been passing through this way for thousands of years and that something had always been in this spot, but instead of being able to get figs and flat bread, water, one could now get pasta with pesto and orange Fanta. And Sangre de Torro, but you could always get Sangre de Torro.

At last I got to Barcelona. Someone from the bus helped me with the train. I found Daniellas place which by the way is on d'Estruc 12. It is very cozy here. I slept for fourteen hours straight. Today Anabelle comes and I will get to do some fucking.

Marbella

I want to live in spain. In a town, not too big, not too small. A place like Granada with its narrow twisting streets opening into secret plazas. I would get a little room in the old town and eat figs and oranges for breakfast. I would do yoga under a palm tree. In the afternoon, when its too hot to go outside I would close all the shutters and peck away at my laptop.

We are in Marbella now. Shatzie and Tunte are at the beach. We never call Neshta,"Neshta", we call him "Shatzie" and he in return calls everybody Shatzie except for Barolio. "Shatzie" is something like "darling" in Deutch."Tunte" is more like faggot. We call Barolio "Tunte" when he does things like forget where he left the car keys and we have to take his bag away from him and dump the entire contents into the street.

I decided to stick with the boys. I was going to go to Sevilla and then on to Barcelona. But I will stay with them and go to Africa tommorow. Just for the day. We will take a ferry to Moroco and see something really different. Besides Barolio knows an Italian girl in Barcelona who rents rooms and he is trying to arrange something for me. She is in Milan right now but they are trying to figure something out. Cell phones make everything possible. They fly back to Hamburg on Sunday and then from Malaga I will take the night train north.

We were lucky to get a room in the old quater. Three beds crammed into this tiny little space. There are no real windows, they all open up onto tiny shafts that look directly into the other rooms, or like our bathroom window which opens up back into our room. It is run by this fat old gay named Juan. Juan has an overgrown nose as brown and as wrinkled as the mountains that surround this village. His legs are covered with little sores. He had a special offer for me. He said I could stay with him in his apartment for 12euro per night. I said no, its ok. He said if I wanted to I could also come down and watch TV with him.I told him thanks. Still, everything is clean and its cheap.

There are many beautiful men and ladies in this town. They lie near naked on the beach during the day, then dressed in white, promenade the town in the evenings. Everything is opulent casual. There is so much money here that one central park, filled with tropical trees and plants, is entirely paved in white marble. Shatzie, of course, loves it.

Schatzie

You always see him with a cigarette dangling from his lips. He is over six feet tall. Even at night he wears black sunglasses. You can tell he was once muscular but his white skin is now slightly pudgy with fat. He has been walking around without a shirt for days now, the crack of his ass showing above his black italian pants. His skin is completely burnt red from the waist up.

We have been roaring around aduluisia for days now in this shitty little fiat that never seems to burn any gas. We have wound round the treacherous mountain roads to Ronda, a town so pristene in its ancient Spanish Morocan style that standing on Puento Nuevo you fell like you have been captured in a painting. We have eaten tapas next to an unending row of Dali statues, girded by palm trees, on a marble plaza in Marbella, a town so grossly rich it would embarrass the citizens of Las Vegas. We have darted in an out of the narrow streets of Granada, we have seen mountains and vistas and moorish castels. We have eaten sunripened figs off the tree, we have seen bulls, blood pounding high off thier black hides, slaughtered by prancing toredors dressed completely in pink and still, he never takes off his sunglasses.

The other day as we sat on our balcony, with Barolio singing, smoking hash he had copped from some Turk in a DJ bar for the international set in Benalmadena he squinted at me and said "Rene, we ave to find you a voman, dis life for you vithout a voman is no good¨"
Barolo just rolled his eyes...
"Shatzie, Rene can take care of himself"
But I was already gone, in a haze of wine and hash, half dreaming, half laughing, listening to Salsa on the porno channel and slipping away.

besos

rene

La Blanca

Hey

We decided to call her La Blanca. She was brown and wirey and had long black hair. She wore a traditional flamenco dress, all in white. It pressed against her breasts revealing a faint discription of her areolas, hung on her slender waist for quite a while before itflared around her long legs. There was a single blood red rose in her hair. Best of all, she rode to and from work on a little yellow motorized scooter.

When she danced, she danced with all of her heart and you could feel it. We stayed there for hours in this little beachside restaurant surrounded by palm trees, listening to the ocean and the castenets and the sorrowful singing of the guitarist. We drank three pitchers of sangria. We watched the moon rise above the jagged cliffs. Barolo said that he might cry. I was on the verge myself. I don't get the feeling that Neshta cries much.

Earilier, when Barolo and I were by ourselves, he told me that Neshta had been raised in a very wealthy family in Sarajevo. When the war started soilders had forced their way into his parents house and cut his mothers throat in front of him. His father and sister survived. So when he gets a little moody we don´t bother him.
Barolo is Brazillian, he never gets moody. In the mornings when we have dark arabian coffee with hot milk in a cafe, he sings to us, just under his breath, while I try to read spanish newspapers and Neshta keeps an eye out for interesting men.

We met in Torre del Mar. When I got to the airport in Malaga they told me that because of the Feria there were no rooms anywhere at all within 30km of the city. Malaga is a great hidious mass of a city. It is as if someone took 100 Miami´s, piled them on top of each other and dumped them along a narrow strip of land between the oceans and the mountains. I found my way to the bus station and got out of town. I ended up 25km north of there in a tourist office where they were listening to the same story I had been hearing all day. Completo, there is nothing, go away. They lived in Hamburg and so we all spoke german. We decided our fates were no less miserable alone than seperate and besides I spoke better spanish, and they had a car.

We drove for hours going to town after town, twisting through narrow medieval streets looking for tiny pensions which we hoped sombody had forgotten about. I spoke with old ladies who sat in doorways, who greeted us like lost friends and wanted to know our histories. I petted their cats, tickled babies feet and still at midnight we had nothing. "Maybe tommorow" they said. I was thinking the beach might be our only friend.

We decided to head back to Malaga and from there north to Sevilla. We ate fresh, whole fried fish, drank wine in some little town, and had our first taste the rich black coffee that we would all come to love so dearly in the following days. Somewhere on the outskirts I saw a hotel and said to Barolo lets give it one more try. Neshta chain smoked cigarettes and looked out the window. I talked to the old man inside. He told me no right off. I asked him if he knew of anything anywhere. I told him we had been looking all day. He asked me where I was from. I told him and he bent a little. He said he could give us two rooms for one night only.

The next day we went back to Torre del Mar to see if any of our tommorow possibilites might materialize. I talked with this girl in a hotel for half an hour, told her my life story, complemented her english, her dress, her hair, her mother. The old lady interupted. She knew of an apartment in town, not one of her´s but a friends. We were in luck.

Our place has two little balconies and a kitchen. Barolo and Neshta are in one room and I in the other. We are a short walk to the beach.

We took a day trip to a place farther up the coast and found a paradise. Nurja. It is an old city completely painted white to fight off the fierceness of the sun. There is lush palm vegetation and the mountains come right up to the azure ocean. The beach is filled with the brown and the naked and at night, if you walk along the carterellas, you can watch La Blanca dance.

Besos

Rene

Berlin Beat

The Berlin Beat or The Berlin Bang or Berlin Bang Bang, something like
that.

While I have been here in Berlin I have met an unusually high number of people working on music projects. There are lots of educated, artistically oriented people here who have no jobs. The unemployment rate is 17%. They still have access to computers purchased in better days. In the last two years there has been a spate of new software that allows anybody to have a home recording studio with an array of synthesized instrumentation. Being Berliners and basically anti-social they don't mind cracking the codes and freely distributing this software. They have already accepted "techno" culturally, unlike the US. They have a techno-club infrastructure and audience already established. They are many good engineers and media strategists. They are highly competitive. There is lots of rain and crappy weather and they love to work.

There are so many projects going on that I think there will be a big bang in Berlin. Naturally out of all these people there will be a small percentage that will be good and an even smaller percentage that will be great. Still the numbers from what I see must be so big that this will still be significant.

If you are interested I could give you many phone numbers to get you
started.

ok?

rene

hairydancers

Ive settled in here nicely now. I am taking german lessons twice weekly. Its almost as painful as being your own dentist.

Mostly lots of swimming in nice lakes. Johannes has a dacha in the country that we go to. I always thought of a dacha as some place that you flee to when there is a coup, but actually its a cottage on a lake. Almost everyone in the former east had access to one. Now they are selling them to people in the former West. They are actually quite happy to be rid of them. They want to vacation in Vegas. My music projekt with Johannes goes slowly, but I have written some nice tunes.

I saw an old musikkomodie on tv yesterday. It was made in technicolor on a wide screen format in 1961. The soundtrack was just like an Elvis Presley film only in German with a German sensibility. Of course there were lots of cool cars and girls in beehives and bikinis. Except for the language difference the big giveaway was that whenever there was a big dance number and one of these 1960 girls wearing frosted lipstick raised their arms they had hairy pits. Often much darker than the hair on their heads.

I head to Malaga next week. Not much money left and I dont know
anybody. The perfect combination for adventure.

Hope you are having a great summer.

Rene

Schmetterlingen

There were butterflies in the hallway today.

It rained everyday last week in Berlin. I held on to my New York warmth for a day or two, but then it got me, this shivering, bone tingling, chill. People here were wondering if it was the end of summer, or the end of the world.

There was no point in even looking at this dissappointing sun and so it was avoided. Like everyone I stayed out all night. Berlin time is essentially New York time, you just slide on over. One gets home at six am, which is midnight back home and then sleeps until two which is eight, normal.

There were rumors all week that summer would come back sometime late Friday. It did. There were so many party opportunities for Saturday it was hard to choose. I went to look for one a DJ friend had organised in Monbijou Park, a little green near Hackesher Markt. They had started playing at noon and had promised to go through the night. The party was held in this swimming park, with a very modern low slung white building and a nice grey plaza. there was green and trees and little candles in paperbags every where. You could see the Ferhnsee Turm between the trees reflecting in the glitter blue of pool. The DJ was playing very cooling summery music. There was a grill and a bar and lots of pretty Berliners. In the distance, down by the river you could hear music and screaming, something wild was going on down there.

I tried to talk to a few people but the atmosphere was too cool, too hip. Finally I went to this one really freaky looking girl covered in tatoos and piercings who nobody else was also talking to. We tried to get the dancing started but nobody joined us. I complained to her that I couldnt find my friends.

"You know, she said, there´s another party going on by the spree, maybe that´s where they are."

I split thinking she might be right. She was. I met Ellen and her friends there on a blanket. There were no bathrooms. There were bottles everywhere. A completely haphazard array of candles. People making out. The wild party. It was free, and all different kinds of people were dancing, dancing very hard by this murky green canal. We made it until dawn, until 5, until 6, until the DJs gave up. This party wasnt getting any smaller, as people left other clubs, it grew and the dancing got harder.

Ellen and I rode bikes home. I slept until two and then fled the city to my friends dacha in Brandenburg. After the train I had to bicycle 24km on bad eastern roads to get there through arbored streets and cobblestone villages. I didnt know the way. I had to ask, but I made it. I went for a swim on a pretty little lake, had a barbecue. Talked, had great inspirations and slept.

The next day we swam again across the lake and back. I made my way to the train, this time on a longer but better route. I rode down the magnificent Karl Marx Allee, the Fernsee Turm again, farther, more silvery, pointing towards the kosmos. I had dinner on Simon Dach Str. In the grimness of the week before it had been empty. Now the cafe tables were full up and down. On a Monday. People were smiling, loosening up, phone numbers were exchanged.

This morning I did the wash. On my way out there were butterflies fluttering in the hallway. Rusty, yellow, black green and brown making it, fufilling it, and then dying on the sunlit windowsills.

Finnally, summer in Berlin

Rene

Prenzlauerberg

I am here in Berlin. The plane was half full and still nobody died. The flight was actually quite wonderful. Air France really knows how to do it. Everyone has one of those little interactive active matrix screens. There were several movies to pick from, all kinds of music, games and shopping.

I watched The Majestic first, a movie that died in the theaters so fast they had to put it in a ditch and throw lime on it. I figured if the French had chosen it there must be something to it. I loved it. No, I really loved it. Jim Carrey turned in his first top to bottom solid serious performance. I always thought that in the hands of the right director he could be a great actor. The cimematography and art direction worked flawlessly together. I think that the 50s will be Americas touchstone period. It is the age that defines us, like Victorian England or Medieval France. The script held no surprises but was expertly written with lots of poetic flourishes. The dialog was genuine and workable. I cried four or five times.

Then I watched most of Charolette Gray. It was ok. Fantastic locations, south of France... cant be beaten, well told story, good acting. I just wasnt really in the mood.

The dinner was two or three notches above the usual 3 mile high fare. What makes it all work is the style in which it is presented. They have the nicest plastic ware I have ever seen. The glasses say to you, "I'm not crystal, but let me remind you of the beauty of real glass." There was a decent selection of wines, champagne. I put on a mild buzz, listened to a dicerning selection of Jazz and did the crossword in The Herald Tribune.

Charles De Galle 2 is the modern architecture equivalent of a peoples palace. It has soaring glass and steel ceilings that float skyward. Everything is clean, moving foward and into the future. My connection to Berlin was turned back because of bad weather.You cant fly nowadays without god or terrorists trying to kill you.

I finnally made it. All is gemuetlich in my Prenzlauerberg flat.

More to come

Rene