Sunday, August 10, 2008

Berlin and the Fuck Parade




I have been in Berlin for about two and a half weeks and it truely has its own rhythm and style.
Sam came back to town from Finland and moved in with me into an empty flat which is half renovated and empty except for an armchair. It's like urban camping, complete with candlelight and no running water. We trek in our water from a friendly neighbour and have made our own little 'campsites' on the floor. I have my bed/nest under a giant window looking onto an oak tree five floors up. It's almost like a treehouse in a really abstract way. The rent is um, free and the neighbourhood (Kreuzberg) is a leftist cycling utopia of cheap food and beautiful scruffy men. Our street even has a radical supermarket with helmets, the usual dusty collection of anarchist books, dozens of types of gloves, hoodies and all the radical accessories. There is free organic bread out the front and the ceiling is covered with jackets and jumpsuits of all kinds hanging in a solid wall of musty riot gear in dark colours.
Ive bumped into heaps of people from Oz here too. Matt, Daniel, Swift, Charlie, Meaghan, Grace, Nathan, Sam and my old friend Kris. I was in a line for beer yesterday and I saw Grace out of the corner of my eye. I didn't even know she'd left Australia. After a screaming hug, we took our cold beers down the road and hung out at the manic Drum and Bass truck stage on Revealer Strasse at the Fuck Parade afterparty, lay in the gutter and caught up.
The Fuck parade is a response to Berlin's 'Love Parade' and features about 5000 people clustering around seven bbiiigggg soundsystems on trucks. People dress up, or not and dance like muppets, get wasted and piss everywhere. Like mardi Gras but with better music: Gabba, breakcore, minimal techno, retro mash ups, dark psytrance (it was good at the time), punk and breaks. We walked for hours and hours and ended up on Revealer Struasse where the munted occupied the street. It was a bit like a Reclaim The Streets, but more fun/less tense, even with the German cops everywhere watching the scruffy hedonism with bemused faces. The cops/riot cops here are huge, and most police vans have a metal grid over the windscreen.
It is Sunday now and after getting home at 7am after adventures, it is a very lazy afternoon.