Berghain Berlin sells you its Music

Some whim just lead me into the arms of record label Ostgut Ton, soundkeeper of the Berghain beat. The Berghain, my uninitiates, is like boiling the essence of Berlin nightlife down into a single techno track, storing it in a huge, bare ex-warehouse, mixing in a little leather, and turning the volume up very, very loud. I only enjoyed the nightlong party for one happy Friday last summer, but it fixed itself hard in my mind, and I'd give anything to go back for another round.

And now I've found its record label. Techno is mine for the taking. Come to think of it, the Berghain and its sister Panoramabar also have a myspace with free music downloads. It gets better and better. And just as I have started looking in earnest for music to play with for my dance show this spring.



Oh yes. And why can I supply you with no photographs of the club interior? Because cameras gets strictly confiscated by its bouncers, who look to exclude anyone less than amenable to its sexual landscape and alternative character. Any kind of reflective surface is likewise banned. No visual judgments. Just joys. A huge, cavernous first level fills with smoke and industrial pipes, while the second level's more intimate bar serves drinks and ice-cream as the beat goes on. And on. And on.

Dances of Anachronism

Give me the past elegance of satin boned corsets and fishnetted legs in long black boots...ah, wait. That's not accurate. That's just our weird, modern history fetish for bits and pieces of antiquated costumery, poverty fetishizing, and WWI eroticization, all pulled together with masking tape into some jumble of pure, inauthentic fantasia.
A stunning german woman just linked me to a NY-based group that organizes afterday parties of dance and entertainment, plucking the plumpest fruits from various eras of history and mélanging them together into something which, if inauthentic fantasia, I'm sure is divine. (Stunning german women will do that to you.)

Check out Dances of Vice: They bring the avant-guard and the rococo too, they list Art, Music, and Spectacle (with capital letters) on their C.V., and with all the Walter Benjamin I've been reading lately I do appreciate a good, commodified, fetishized Spectacle.

Next up is "Visions of Weimar" in Brooklyn tomorrow night: German cabaret songs, Anita Berber toying-withs, a fellow from The Dresden Dolls, and (inexplicably) burlesque dancers from San-Francisco. And shadow puppets! Charleston and swing dance lessons. A musical saw.

For $20? My devil (on the left shoulder) tells me I ought to go, but my angel (wearing a cardigan) reminds me that I have to write 25 pages in three days.

My devil also wants to point out that I recently completed a writing/directing project on the German Kabarett, authentic songs and all, which I fought tooth and nail to pull back from the brink of sexy modern anachronism. So take my good-natured mockery with a pinch of salt. I'm sure it will be excellent.

Go, little kiddies, go! And come back and tell Auntie Starving Artist all about it.

Womanizer, Womanizer

Inspirational anecdotes from one of my little books 'o research, "Bertolt Brecht" by John Fuegi...and your first taste of my interest in the playwright, drama theorist, director, and provocateur that it concerns.

- Of the numerous women he impregnated in his early 20's, the great man said, "let them grow these little Brechts!"

- To the two impregnated women demanding to know which one he would marry: "Both!"

- While carrying a riding crop and quoting Nietzsche: "When you deal with women, don't forget the whip."

- His thoughts on man: "The way he takes things into his body, goes around in wind and rain, makes little young humans out of other humans, by gluing himself to them and filling them with fluids, to the accompaniment of groans of pleasure."

- And finally, my favorite rumor, finally confirmed here in Fuegi's words: "Those having an affair with Brecht were required to wear a close-fitting woolen coat that reached almost to the ankles. The coat was never to be buttoned, but was to be held closed with one's elbows across the stomach. Thus all of Brecht's mistresses were highly visible to one another and to everyone else in Berlin."

I take this time to assure you that had I lived in his city, I would never have let myself fall to his suspect, unwashed charms, no matter the strength of my draw to his theatrical philosophy and work. No. I'd be bitterly icy and cool, resisting the fates of theatrical mistresses Marieluise Fleisser and Helene Weigel...


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Architecture of Lust

A girl in Berlin stumbled accross a designer on day last July, while making her way to dance class through Mitte. The designer was Marlies Dekkers, the girl was me, and the love was true and star-crossed. I mention my obsession because Marlies Dekkers's stores hold their bi-annual sale starting Jan. 2nd, and perhaps someone more fortunate than broke me will profit from this. They've got no boutique in New York (well, good for them.) There is one in Bangkok, and when I go there in just under a month I may look in...

I'll throw no more empty words at you until I've embedded the visual feast: and Prudes Beware...this is a lingerie fashion show, after all.



And the year before...



I like her insistence on clean geometry, angles, against lady-curves. I like her sense of humor - the double-gartered stockings. I like how well her stuff fits me. I like her riffs - this past summer was japanese rope bondage, and her current winter collection has fun with adam & eve.

Why, Marlies? Why did you get it so right, when so many other lingerie 'designers' get it so wrong? You make the simplest straps and lines such revelations - simply by venturing beyond the narrow, narrow palatte of the undergarment shapes we're taught to expect. But arousal comes from surprise, and fascination, and I think Frau Dekkers appeals to the intellect as much as to the blood...and that's what gets us going: the puzzle of the human body.

(The climate in the city: large lazy snowflakes just gave way to sun.)
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