Chapter 1

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Chapter 1: Free the State.

"You buy furniture. You tell yourself, this is the last sofa I will ever need in my life. Buy the sofa, then for a couple years you're satisfied that no matter what goes wrong, at least you've got your sofa issue handled. Then the right set of dishes. Then the perfect bed. The drapes. The rug. Then you're trapped in your lovely nest, and the things you used to own, now they own you." 
~Chuck Palahniuk, Fight Club

Maybe you've already read Fight Club?   It's a novel about a group of guys who create an underground group dedicated exploring extremes of 'real' experience.  They start with bare-knuckle fighting and then progress to radical pranks. Eventually, they end up planning a quasi-revolutionary coup to destroy all the credit agencies in the world, and re-set the financial system to zero.  All this, they undertake in the name of rediscovering themselves, shedding the artificial padding and identities of their cookie-cutter lives.  

After it was published in 1996, Fight Club lifted its previously unknown author, Chuck Palahniuk, to fame.  If it was published today, the media would no doubt dissect the author's life, personality and image obsessively, in an attempt to explain his success away as an isolated, inimitable stroke of creative and/or marketing genius.  Maybe they'd be right to do that.  Back then, however, it was obvious that Palahniuk's 'overnight' success was not due to any clever marketing ploy or cult of personality - how could it be?  It was due to fact that the story's characters had captured the attitudes of masses of real people, attitudes that had never really been printed in mainstream fiction in that way.  I was one of those masses, one of the millions who were already wise to a lot of the assertions made in Fight Club.  But I - we - had become that way via years of experience, not from reading a best seller bought in a local book shop. It was a bottom-up phenomenon instead of the usual top-down one delivered to the masses, missionary-style. 

 The need to smash the system is a foregone conclusion from the novel's outset, just as it was for many people, my friends and me included.  Even living in the corporate wet dream that is North America - saturated with cars, highways, televisions, malls and reasons to spend, spend, spend, spend - we had managed to stay connected, throughout our teens, to a seductive spectrum of seditious subcultures: political punk, deep ecology, squatting, anarchism, eco-feminism and Riot Grrrl. Even without the internet, and living in the ostensibly-brainwashed, North American 'burbs, we were connected the western-world-wide culture of dissent.  Connected via zines - independent publications like Maximum Rock n Roll, for subculture, or Squall, for counterculture - and through music, mainly the independent touring band circuit.  

My friends and I didn't fight the status quo because being grounded by our parents once too often had tweaked some sort of pre-setting for 'teenage rebellion'.  We didn't look down on the status quo because of its passé dress sense, or the un-cool jobs it offered (although people who felt that way definitely existed.  They attracted the well-earned label of poseur).  We were fighting because we recognized, intellectually and intuitively, that the status quo's 'work, produce, consume' lifestyle was programmed to self-destruct.  

The Western world might have been an orderly, well-maintained ship... but it was a ship with no captain at the wheel.  He was below board, checking the accounting books... making sure that everything looked pretty and market ready. Meanwhile, no one was up top, keeping a lookout for life-threatening obstacles, such as environmental collapse, misogyny, economic depression and war.  Anybody who awoke to this fact knew that it was only matter of time before disaster was gonna strike.  How could it not, when the system could not see what a bunch of high school-educated teens could?  

The desperation that people like me and my friends felt to try and see the way more clearly and steer the planet out of danger, led to extremes of the underground that were as dramatic as anything found in a fiction book; just as lucid, too.  So people who started 'fight clubs' after reading that eponymous book were kind of missing the point.  In the 1990s, the subterranean West was already riddled with cells of people going to extremes to get a sense that their existence was anything more than a stereotype, and could be used to do anything more than consume.  

I would have undoubtedly recognized the world that the characters in Fight Club are struggling against.  My mum's condo was a drawer in a big 'filing cabinet' too, as were most other areas of our society: schools, social groups, the arts community, even pastimes.  The city I grew up in and the people in it were featureless, defined by uniforms and property.  It was a dystopia of convenience, where people could have anything except individuality or, apparently, happiness; they looked about as cheerful as tenement dwellers living behind the Iron Curtain.  Just as united in their quest for grey conformity, in the way their expressions were moulded into blank masks.  

I remember waking up most days, looking in the mirror and sensing the invisible fugue of distractions, misdirection and illusions that distorted whatever I saw there, which I could almost, but not quite, see through.  I felt like I just needed to look at it from a point slightly outside of where I was standing, be somehow quick or clever enough to slip between the mirror and whatever filmy mist was hovering in the way.  No matter which angle I took the reflection showed me someone who needed something that already existed within the system: a university education, an office job, a driver's license, a car.  And yet every contact I had with 'the system' left me feeling violated, uneasy and a bit queasy.  Maybe seeing a new system would change my perspective, because then I would definitely be on the exterior.  I chose England because it was the most different place from North America that I could imagine where people still spoke English.  

In 1996, when the book of Fight Club came out, I didn't buy it.  I was working just to save money to leave the country.  When the movie of it came out in 1999 I was too embroiled in my own version of Project Mayhem to notice.  But I had already heard plenty about it through the grapevine, never realizing it.  In the Fall of 1998 Ian, my new guitarist-carpenter-squat-raver friend from Kentish Town, quoted the book at me when I told him I didn't want to leave my Islington bedsit to go and squat.  The bedsit I was renting was in a prime area, and cheap.  'But I know a guy  just down the road that just opened a squat,' Ian had debated.  'They call him Mad Max.  He's living there with a pair of witches.'  I gave him a look and repeated that I wouldn't find another place this cheap if I moved out.

Ian threw his hands up in the air.  

"Well, you know what they say," he said cryptically. "'The things you own, they end up owning you.'" He assumed a sage look that hinted he was a well of further adages (without letting on that they were probably all second-hand). 

"It's only when you've got nothing," he misquoted, "that you're really free to do anything."   These were ideas I'd felt but never really articulated.  Fight Club had made them more quotable, more transmittable by word of mouth... especially for Ian.

Ian had seemed like he was in a median ebb when he'd arrived at my place on that rainy, fall day, announcing his presence with a hail of pebbles against my window, as always.  He seemed... pensive.   It was such a unique state for him that I struggled to put my finger on the word.  Now he was sitting on the foot of my bed in my Barnsbury bedsit (there was no room for chairs there, unsurprisingly).  

Ian's laughing grin was subdued and serious but his dark eyes and stubble-pocked face still looked vaguely feral.  Long, dark, grey-streaked curls straggled out on all sides of his heart-shaped face, ripped from a hasty ponytail by the wind during his bike ride here from Kentish Town. His hair always looked like that, like it was electrified by his hectic, reckless energy. He was ruggedly handsome and well-proportioned, cyclist-fit, but eclectic in the extreme.  I had no idea who I was going to deal with when I was with him, which made two of us 'cause I felt the same way about myself.  We added up to an equation that was too vague to envision as a 'couple'. 

When Ian's manic energy was in full throttle, god forbid that you should get in his way.  His last spurt of hyperactivity, in late August, had ended with me pretending not to know him while he screeched into the sulphur lit skies over Pembury Road that the whole world had gone mad (not him, no-o-o.  It was never him).  Man, the night bus took ages to come that night.  Earlier that same night, Ian had picked a fight with the manager of the Pembury Tavern by calling him a 'faggot', and gotten us both chucked out at 9:30 p.m.  

"I never knew you were a homophobe," I'd snapped at him as we'd left the pub; this was moments before the screeching had started.

"I'm not," he'd replied with a mischievous smile, "I just don't like him and I knew that that would wind him up because he's the homophobe... innit?  Hah-haaa!"  And seconds later, he was furious, spewing rage instead of laughter at the sky like a ruptured pressure-cooker.  I can't even remember what set him off.  A question, maybe: 'What didn't you like about him?'  Apparently, the manager of the Pembury wasn't just one thing that was wrong with the world - he was everything that was wrong with it.

I'd limited my time in public with Ian since that night, but still let him visit me at home. 

Ian had played in a semi-famous Indie band in the early nineties that he didn't want to talk about except to say that it had once been in the Sun's gossip column. There were lots of those kinds of people floating around London, and members of bands I’d always dreamt of seeing, too: the U.K. Subs, Flux of Pink Indians, Crass.  They were just rolling around the city like ball-bearings in a pinball machine that had somehow gotten trapped in eternal ‘play’ mode.  Of course, I‘d checked out a bunch of gigs in my first month or two in London, starting with Sham 69 at Adrenaline Village.  Their set was unmemorably short and when the guys left the stage, everybody in the audience (Italian postcard punks, aging Londoners with the wrong kinds of tats and an unphotogenic brand of disaffection) turned away from each other, too fast... like as if any recognition, or any lack of it, might explode the illusion that everything had stayed the same since the 1980s.  

London's punks reminded me of the pigeons in Trafalgar square, aimlessly flying away from a screaming child or a roaring car, moved on by one deterrent after another.  Only being punks when they were allowed to instead of forging circumstances for it to happen.  Punk in London seemed like it had become just another excuse to drown one’s sorrows down the pub... but the up side was that I'd met Ian at the last punk gig I went to in London, at the Dublin Castle.  We were still friends 18 months later.  

Ian said he wanted to give me the address for the squat.  I gave him another look.

"Just... go there, all right?  Check it out," he urged.

“Check out the Witch House?  Uh, okay.  Should I say hi to Mad Max for you?" I gave a scornful laugh.

“I dunno,” Ian huffed, swatting a hand irritably, as if to kill the cynicism in my tone.  I decided to give it a rest for a moment and just listen.  He continued, “It just seems a bit stupid to be paying, what, 40 quid a week for a place like this...” 

"Sixty," I corrected him.  

“...sixty quid, when you could pay nothing.  Their place couldn’t be any worse and it might save you some money.  Then we could go out for a pint more often.” My perennial excuse for avoiding Ian when I didn’t feel in the mood for his antics was to say I was too skint to go out.  That he enjoyed my company enough to come up with this solution for my supposed money problem, made me feel guilty.  Shouldn't I feel lucky to have someone that thoughtful for a friend?  Couldn't I at least humour the guy? Besides, he was more right than he knew: despite having a full-time job, I still had to ration my pints at the pub, and pretty much all my leisure pursuits (pre-clubbing, clubbing and after-partying).   If I'd had more free time to think about it, between commuting and sleeping and work, I'd have felt pretty ripped off.  

“Here," Ian was saying, pulling a pen and paper out of his multitude of pockets.  He started scribbling a few words on it and shoving the paper at me.  "Now you have the address.  Go there, it’s just around the corner!” 

I didn't see anything wrong with any of it to be honest: with me just having a look, or with the place being just around the corner.  But I couldn't just let a thing happen without having some say in it.  Not anymore. 

“Well, all right..." I said reluctantly.  "But I mean, even if I like it, I can’t just turn up on their doorstep with all my stuff and move in…”  I laughed half-heartedly because it was a half-hearted argument, said for the sake of fabricating an oar to put in.

Ian shrugged.  “Maybe you can’t, but that’s what I’d do.”  Then he abruptly started shrieking laughter, piercing my ears and the walls in that unhinged, hyena-whoop that had made him oh-so popular with my noise-o-phobic neighbour, Helen.  My bedsit was a partitioned-off afterthought of her room, the 'master' bedroom of the one of three in the subdivided maisonette we shared... which was, itself, a single storey subdivided from of a terraced house.  The landlord had doubled his earnings from the maisonette by dividing its biggest room in half with something that looked like a wall, but wasn't. Not really.

“Yeah, that’s exactly what I’d dooo!”  Ian cried between whoops of laughter (he always added vowels to any word that wasn't sufficiently emphatic for his mood).  “I’d turn up there with all my shit piled up in boxes on a shopping trolley and say, ‘Hey guys, love the squat.  When can I move in?’ Hah-haaa!” 

And when I lost my job two weeks later, that's exactly what I did.

We are all hipsters... unfortunately.

Overconsumption: not pretty sight unless you're hipster, right?

I've read that 21 Types of Hipster article that's gone viral in Berlin's English communities the past few days.  And I can't help noticing that the definitions in there embrace pretty much everyone I see in the streets - whether I'm in London, Barcelona or Berlin.  The faux-retro truckstop caps, teamed with designer plaid shirts, teamed with H & M shades that cost ten times what they look like they're worth, teamed with Diesel skinny jeans, teamed with pre-stretched American Apparel sweaters and sloppy, scruffed name brand trainers. You could say that the hipster trend is a 'diverse' style, embracing 80s glam, punk, metal, biker, disco, hippy and goth. 

Hipsters, generally speaking, are people who seem to have too many teetering piles of zany, mismatched accessories & clothing laying around their funky coversion flat, unworn.  They've gotta be blase about how they mix and match it all, in order to put all that crap together in new & original ensembes each day.    Being a hipster means having so much money, so much stuff, and so little time to wear it all, that even just putting clothes on each day is an exhausting chore.  Hence their world-weary faces and louche, resigned poise.  All those wardrobe doors and drawers to open - what a workout!  It's a style for people with lotsa clothes... but no time for putting outfits together in a meaningful way.

And yet Clive Martin of Vice Magazine (piss-taking handbook for/against all things hipster) recently wrote that hipsters are now so normalized that they can't be ridiculed anymore. I totally agree with that... but I don't agree with his inference that it's too difficult to "wage war on a subculture that defines itself through constant revision."  Subculture?  Ex-squeeze me?  'Hipsters' can't be a subculture because, by definition, they are doing, and being, exactly what all good Westerners aspire to be: voracious consumers.  They have basically spent so much time shopping that they've managed to cycle through every fashion trend ever created, in a bid to stay ahead of the trend curve.  This speaks to an identity that's entirely bound up in stuff, inseparable from it, and an unresolved identity crisis that is played out in shops strewn with clothing, so many cast-off shells of a self that will never find a perfect fit.

People seem to look down on 'hipsters' (and it's interesting that hardly anyone ever uses the word to describe themselves, only someone else) because they are clearly looking in the wrong place for their identity, i.e. fashion.  But how does that make hipsters any different from anybody else?  Hasn't everyone at some point been materialistic, and bought something with the vague idea that somehow, it's going to change their life?  That's the capitalist dream.  An existential craving to become 'better' or 'more' through buying stuff is business as usual whether you're in Paris, Melbourne or L.A.  Not every person wears the decadent hipster style but nearly everyone with a job is decadent in other ways: going to pubs and cafes daily, eating out in restaurants weekly, owning wide screen TVs or even smartphones, taking multiple holiday out of the country per year, etc. All these trends seem decadent to people like me, who started working in 1996, when consumer spending was nearly half of what it is today.  At that time, DIY clothing, free parties, pot lucks, protests and fanzines were the coolest things around.
  
I don't want to sound like an old person, suggesting that we are all consumption junkies simply because people have more stuff nowadays, but the facts and figures support my opinion: everyone is overspending as much as the average hipster on something. Since constant consumer spending growth is the Holy Grail of the Western economy right now, is closely tracked in charts like those below, salivated over by investors whose every waking minute is devoted to pushing the bottom line higher. Their campaign to keep the masses spending has worked a little bit too well though.

These graphs show the consumer spending growth from Germany, the U.S., the U.K. and Spain from 1995 till 2012/2013.  The dramatic rise in spending is reflected in every Western nation.  Source: TradingEconomics.com

The universal trend of nonstop consumption growth is rarely noted in the mass media, except in glowing annual growth reports. I think many people would be as shocked as me if they looked back and see how high consumption, and production, have become thanks to the Western nations.  Society has noticed a down side to over consumption.... aside from causing credit crunches and recessions, it also has a soulless, very human downside.  I think that society has epitomized and demonized this in the so-called 'hipster subculture' because they are so darn obvious about their spending, but perhaps their energy would be better spent cutting back on our own spending.

Whenever I go into the store to buy anything - a pair of shades, say - they're invariably bright, silly hipster shades.  Same with trousers.  And shoes. To get something non-hipster, I'd probably have to go to a designer store and spend even more money I don't have.  It seems that being a hipster is less of a conscious choice, and more of an unavoidable by-product of shopping.  Maybe that is because hipsters are a physical symbol of a generation that believes that buying is the same thing as being. Maybe that's why, whenever I want to spend, I can't escape coming face to face with the hipster trend. But I also can't escape the sneaking suspicion that I'm reaching for those imitation, retro  80s shades, not just because they're everywhere and cheap but because, on some level, I wish I could afford to be as conspicuous about my consumption as those f%$ing hipsters.  I am pretty sure I don't wish that, but I wonder how long that will last, when the largest 'subculture' in the West around revolves entirely around buying shit.

Thoughts?

The Ectasy and Agony of Doing Our First Party

The experience of putting on my first party in Berlin lived up to its name - it left my mind feeling pretty smeared.  Anyone who's thinking of 'making party' for the first time should do themselves a favour and read on, to find out and what I learned:

1) There are no norms or standards in Berlin's party venue market.

I received venue rental quotes ranging from 120 to 2000 Euros per party, and the venues ranged in size anything from a 20 sq. meter cellars with leaks, to sprawling, hypermodern spaces that rivalled the Tate Modern. Unless your bestie owns a cool space, expect to spend up to half of your organizing time finding one &  making it just right for the guests.

Also specific to Berlin: there seemed to be no universal method of getting in touch with these venues.  Some club managers are contactable by telephone, others by email, Facebook, SMS, YouTube video, telepathy, interpretive dance...??  A couple of clubs were so difficult to get in touch with that I seriously considered spray painting my name and phone number on their front door and hoping for the best.  


2) Be honest.  

It's a Berlin cliche: every second person in the city is a 'designer' an 'entrepreneur' a 'producer' or 'business manager'.  You rarely hear them admit that, 'I'm an underemployed tour guide and amateur, wannabe promoter'.  Many people working in the Berlin club scene are just as opaque about their qualifications as the hipster fantasists who describe themselves in the above flowery terms.  As I quickly learned, it's because some of them don't have real qualifications and the results of working with them can be disastrous.  In the course of organizing this party, I met 'graphic designers' who couldn't recognize layout errors, 'club managers' who hated techno, and 'promoters' who struggle to communicate with their own group of friends, let alone the city of Berlin.

Sticking myself with the less-glamourous, truthful label of 'amateur wannabe promoter' was much more useful in the end; whenever I met people who genuinely were qualified to help me, they were more willing to give me a hand.  (Thank-you Katja, Rachel, Dylan, James, Katie, Dave, Alenee, Zoe and the DJs!)

3) It's the end of the world as we know it (I feel fine)

When Northern Europe was abruptly plunged into a mini-ice age in the middle of March, this did not seem to bode well for our semi-outdoors, April party.  Ditto when I had to rush to hospital for an urgent operation, in the midst of the epic search for a party venue. Still, it was something of a relief to realize that, hey, at least climate change is something I am not personally responsible for sorting out by April 20th. Goddess grant me the strength to change what I can and the wisdom to accept what I cannot etc.  The post-operative strength codeine pills might have helped me to foster that sense of acceptance, too.

4) Printing the flyers is the last thing you should do. Period.

An oversight in the 'quality control'
of our first batch of 

5000 flyers resulted in them being misprinted.  After painstaking efforts were made to ensure that the second flyer batch was correct (this time, I consulted a professional designer with, like, a degree to prove it) I sent off our new, improved flyer to the printer.  The next day, I found out that we had to change the venue.  D'oh!  I was then duly informed by another promoter that flyers only need to be handed out in the final week or two before the party, so there was never any rush to get them done. That brings me to my final point:

5) Delegate the responsibility, delegate the stress.

As this was my first party, I made a fair few mistakes. I was prepared for this.  What I wasn't prepared for was the wall-punching frustration of being given 'helpful' advice by nearly everyone after the fact.  

Like those people, I also posess 20/20 vision in hindsight and, retrospectively, I can see now that it would have been a good idea to find someone with the foresight to avoid mistakes and hand off a few jobs to those people.  It's much less painful than punching walls, and cheaper than buying a time machine as well.

The one thing that this party organizing experience didn't teach me was that having a good party makes everything better again... I already knew that!   Finding time to dance for a whole hour to a set by one of my favourite DJs, and catching glimpses of friends having a great time all throughout the night, made all the stress evaporate faster than a sheen of dancefloor sweat on a cool April night. 

 Would I do it again?  YES.  If it's true that you learn how to avoid mistakes by making them, and how to avoid pitfalls by stumbling into them, then the next Mind Smear party should be utterly mistake & pitfall-free!

Join Mind Smear on Facebook or check back on the party website for the details of the next one!

 

*Thanks very much to Katie for taking the above photos of the party.

Brrrlin's long winter puts global warming on ice

Welcome to Brrrlin!  Last year at this time, the trees were budding, the flowers blooming and the birds singing.  Now everybody has the same questions on the tip of their tongue: why's it so cold?  When will it end??  And whatever happened to global warming???

It's still here.  In fact, this is probably how it should look... for those of us in northwestern Europe it should, anyway.  We can blame the Gulf Stream for that.  Or rather, we can blame the humans, since it is humans that are messing it up.

It’s a common misconception that spring arrives in Europe, Canada and the rest of the Northern Hemisphere because that is when the days start getting longer and the earth starts getting nearer to the sun.  Actually, the arrival of summer has nada to do with the length of the days and the earth’s distance from the sun.  If there was any relationship between those things then it would be impossible for Australia to experience scorching summers at the same time of year when Europe and Canada are freezing cold.    

To understand Berlin's cool summer in 2012 and its extended edition of winter 2013, one first has to understand that its summer comes here largely courtesy of the Gulf Stream.  If it wasn't for the Gulf Stream, northwestern Europe, Britain and North America would be damn cold all year round. 

The Gulf Stream is part of a massive, circular current that runs through the oceans, bringing warm water and air up from the equator, to the Atlantic ocean.  As the equatorial waters heat up in spring and summer, so does the Gulf Stream; in turn, it shares its warm wealth with Atlantic areas of Europe and North America.  How much wealth?  The warm air and water carried by the Gulf Stream is “comparable to the power generation of a million nuclear power plants” according to NASA.  Without the Gulf Stream, “Europe's average temperature would likely drop 5 to 10°C (9 to 18°F).”  In Europe, winter doesn’t ever really end... the Gulf Stream just pushes its 'pause' button each year, with a gust of imported heat from below. 

  

In 2005, however, the Gulf Stream was reported to be slowing dramatically.  The slowing of the Gulf Stream is "intimately linked with dramatic regional cooling" according to Bill McGuire, Benfield Professor of Geophysical Hazards & Director of the Benfield Hazard Research Centre, University College London (try saying that five times fast).  

"Just 10,000 years ago, during a climatic cold snap known as the Younger Dryas," he continues, "the current was severely weakened, causing northern European temperatures to fall by as much as 10 degrees. Ten thousand years before that [...] when most of the UK was reduced to a frozen wasteland, the Gulf Stream had just two-thirds of the strength it has now."

"It is the Gulf Stream, and associated currents, that allow strawberries to thrive along the Norwegian coast, while at comparable latitudes in Greenland glaciers wind their way right down to sea level."

But the melt-off of Arctic ice, caused (or at the very least, aggravated) by man made warming, has poured "huge volumes of fresh water into the North Atlantic" and thrown the Gulf Stream out of whack.  It is now returning much more cooled water from the North Pole, and moving northward more slowly than before.  As a double whammy, melting Arctic ice is allowing any heat that is trapped in the water to disperse into the cold air. The warm waters of the Gulf Stream are being attacked by cold water from below, and cold air from above, resulting in a paradoxical Atlantic cooling caused by, well, warming.  

Many people I meet in Berlin seem mildly alarmed about melting glaciers, reserving the larger part of their anxiety for the polar bears and whales that are becoming extinct because of it.  ‘But hey,' I've heard many of these same people saying, 'warmer weather won’t be such a bad thing for me - I hate winter.’ Actually, the melting glaciers should scare the crap out of anybody who hates winter.  In a country where summer only comes courtesy of warm water, the melting glaciers could spell the end of warm seasons altogether. 

Climate prediction involves far too many variables for even the cleverest human scientist to calculate, so no one can say whether another ice age is definitely on the way, or whether we should instead be expecting heatwaves and drought.  What climatologists do agree on is that the seasons will not return to normal as long as the Earth keeps warming  up.  As McGuire says, man made global warming is “nothing more nor less than a great planetary experiment, many of the outcomes of which we cannot predict.” By adding to it - by driving cars, wasting electricity and cutting down trees - we are playing with fire and ice.

In Sickness and in Health

So you're new to Germany and, after a few hiccups, you're singing the country's praises: the trains are so efficient! Nightlife and entertainment are so cheap! There is so much space and greenery! It's affordable to have a home! You're thinking, it's so sensible over here. So balanced and sane, so well-planned.  Why can't all of Europe be like this?

And then you discover the health care system, lurking in the corner, playing with a bloody scalpel and giggling like Dr. Frankenstein on acid, and start backing away from that opinion slowly... carefully... so as not to get hurt and bring yourself to its attention.  The health care system is the severed horse's head lying under the covers of Germany cozy, Ikea bed -once you know a few facts about it, you'll probably never rest easy again.

Unhealthy fact #1: Social democracy works well in other aspects of German life but, when it comes to health care, it's bleeding the people out.  Despite this being socialized medicine, people here end up paying more for it than they would on private plans elsewhere.  How can that be?  No one really knows for sure because, unlike the dome at the Bundestag, Germany's health care isn't transparent. Which means that there's a good chance it's robbing people in broad dunkelheit.

Unhealthy fact #2: The health care system here is blatantly sexist.

In terms of  gender roles, Germans are closer to equality than many countries but in the health care system they are still firmly stuck in the Dark Ages, a time when childbirth was seen as a punishment for Eve's sin and immaculate conception was a thing.  Most Germans seem to have accepted that women can make the first move on men... that they can expect satisfaction in bed... that they can go to work while the men stay home with kids... that they can share the child rearing costs.  But when it comes to bringing a baby into the world, women are smacked with paying the bill for something the guys helped to create.  Women pay 210 Euros more than men per month in premiums, just in case they eventually give birth.  Anyway what do the guys need that extra 210 Euros for?  They're not the ones who go through the trauma of childbirth which, let's face it, deserves to be a paid profession in itself!!

I can't shake the feeling that this policy was dreamt up by the same kind of man who enjoys letting the door slam shut in a woman's face. It positively reeks of "let's see how you like paying your own bills" backlashy petulance.  What really freaks me out though, is that women just pay up without any argument.  Does that mean that they agree?  

Unhealthy fact #3: The insurance companies seem to have no idea what they're actually charging you for.  Carrying on with the childbirth example above, a normal hospital birth costs about $5230 (that's a U.S. figure though, and might be a bit high). German women pay nearly that amount in extra insurance fees every two years, and they pay enough to cover 14 births in their working lifetime.  And yet, the current birth rate in Germany is 8.33 births/1,000 people and plummeting like a rock.

I've heard German people blaming feminism for the overall decline in the German birth rate.  I've also heard them blame too-high education standards and even immigration. Oddly enough, people here rarely consider that German women might simply be unable to afford to have kids because of the high insurance/low pay situation.  Maybe the too high education standards still leave something to be desired, after all...

With all this in mind, you might be tempted to forget about health insurance and go holistic.  Germany is a leader in the European holistic health community, for good reason - it produces some of the best organic remedies in the Western world.  The average German seems to take it on faith that herbal remedies are better because they're time tested and natural.  I'm sure they're right, but sometimes I get the feeling that they might be a bit overconfident.

Whereas stuff like Advil has to be bought over the counter at a special pharmacy, herbal remedies in Germany are widely available.  If you're like me, you'd tend  to assume that that means they're pretty safe.

A few days ago, I bought a pack of "Women's Tea" just because I thought it smelled nice.  It looked like a normal, non medicinal herbal tea with no health warnings on it, After a couple of mugs, I started feeling a bit woozy and sore, so I decided to check out the tea ingredients online.  Turns out that the main ingredient in the tea, Angelica, is highly contraindicated for pregnant women who want to keep their baby as it induces miscarriages.

Guess that clears up some questions about Germany's low birth rate.

About a year earlier, I'd bought some garlic pills to help me get over a chest cold.  I started getting a weird fluttering in my chest after taking them, so again, I did some research.  This time it turned out that one of the secondary herbs in the pill, Mistletoe, is actually used as a heart medicine and is strongly contraindicated for people with certain kinds of heart trouble.  Again, no warning.  While I was on the computer researching the garlic pills, I noticed I could hardly keep my eyes open, so I decided to check out some herbal congestion tablets I'd gotten from the same corner store.  And guess what?  They can put you into a coma.

So if you want to buy Advil in Germany, you'll only get it from a pharmacist with a stern lecture about the health risks but if you pick up the wrong tea or cough pills at the supermarket, you might end up giving yourself a miscarriage, a heart attack or slip into a coma.

Come to think of it, those high health insurance premiums are starting to look more sensible after all.  Safeguarding your health in Germany is risky business!

Collaborators for Print Magazine Sought

English-speaking Berlin writers! Have you lived here more than a year? Do you have an serious interest in Berlin's activist, arts and music scenes? Then read on...

I have been writing about subcultural events in Berlin for two years and am now about to launch a print zine which covers an expanded range of Berlin topics: activism, women's issues, tourism, the environment, expat life, independent film and theatre, arts, festivals, street parties, clubs, openairs, gigs, reviews... basically, anything that's shaking Berlin's subterranean communities to their foundations.

You will work in collaboration with the editorial team to put the zine together and spread the word, so you should be dedicated and wiling to help with all aspects of publication. This is not going to be volunteer/internship - all contributors get a share of the revenues.

Please get in touch before March 1st if interested and pass this info on to your writer friends. To apply, please send an introductory message and a sample of your writing or photos to unsceneberlin@googlemail.com.

 

Looking forward to hearing from you soon!

Lucky Number 2013!

Winter is the season when Berlin gets that famous post-apocalyptic look to it:  the streets are empty, the wrecked buildings that people used to work in loom visibly over the more discreet, tidy ones they now live in; everywhere you look, the city's mottled grey shell is exposed by bare branches.  In the streets, nothing seems to move except a few furtive pedestrians, camouflaged in dark clothes that blend in with the post-industrial grime.  The crows and sparrows are silent, saving their energy to keep warm; the pigeons sip spilled beer and peck fallen drugs outside of clubs to blot out their existential despair.  Even the trains seem to have a touch of winter blues as they sluggishly creak their way between stations.  It's a bit bleak, if you get my drift. These weather conditions are perfect for checking out an exhibition like X Lab’s solo show of Ken Plotbot's work, this Saturday the 26th.  The show's “dark nuclear graphic and post industrial atmosphere” and elektro-dubstep DJ sounds will no doubt complete the Apocalyptic Berlin™  experience.  Starts 6:30 p.m.

Because nothing in the outside world seems to be changing very much, I've been reviewing the past two years of blogging about the seedy underbelly of Berlin nightlife.  I understand now why many people reflect and resolve to change their habits in January: it is one of the only ways of getting a sense of transformation when everything else is standing still.  Another way is by dancing to innovative new tunes, which Liquid Sky has helped me to do many times in the past year.  Talented, anarchic, unpretentious and refusing to play by any established party rules, they are a must for fans of adventurous sounds, obscure locations, and finding a space where boundaries end and creativity begins.  In 2013 they'll be hooking up with fellow avant gardists Michael Rother, FM Einheit, Mijk van Dijk while keeping up the great work with an ensemble of self-determined producers, helmed by Ingmar Koch.  Next big date on the Liquid Sky calendar will be Easter weekend... I'll be keeping my ear to the ground!

Back when I wrote my first entry for this blog, in 2010, there were still a number of active anti-squats around the city: Landsberger 54 and RAW in the east, and a bevy of derelict sensations in the central Mitte area, like Tacheles and Schokoladen.  They had been moulded by bombs and bad weather into shapes that might as well have been hallucinated by Gaudy.  In 2013 more than half are empty shells, covered in now-ironic messages about the right to housing and free spaces.  Brashly radical on the outside but dark and cold on the inside, these deserted relics are a poignant metaphor for Berlin's radical dream, which has left its stamp on city's surface despite the fact that very few people these days are actually, you know, living it.

The radical community has survived but it is being pushed ever further behind the scenes; for instance, the shrinking anti-squat scene is being replaced by a growing wagon-community scene in less residential areas.  Whenever radicals get moved on from a neighbourhood to make way for gentrification, though, all the relevant questions they raise about gentrification, and the feral capitalism that creates it, get moved on with them, swept under the plush carpet of unsustainable luxury.  Mindpirates is one collective that is still using its base in gentrified Kreuzberg to raise, and then answer, those questions.  The collective describes itself simply as an “artist group that works on aspects and issues of contemporary culture, sociology and ecology”.  No fancy imagery in the description - instead, they let their space provide that via an incandescent tapestry of backdrops, sculpture, and animated lights playing on exposed brick.  Their events explore activist themes from a kaleidescopic array of artistic angles, fusing the new aesthetic Berlin with the old, radical one.   Tonight Gegen's finissage at Mindpirates will be "questioning history and rewriting the past" via an exhibition of work by Erik Mittasch.

Aw shucks, seeing Mindpirates and Gegen working together gives me that warm, fuzzy feeling I get when two well-liked friends start dating! Gegen is one of the few party teams I can think of whose strong visual element comes from deep inside, at the cellular level of personality, beliefs and most importantly, action.  Week after week, I read event write-ups by imitators that seem aimed at making their superficial extremes sound as 'radical' as possible.  Could that be because the majority of these events are detached from any deeper cultural radicalism that would otherwise pull in the crowds?  Or am I just imagining that?  Anyway, Gegen stands apart from them because, when they say they’re doing a night of “human, animal and alien languages expressed  through poetry, spoken word, reading and collage,” I know I'll get a genuinely mutative experience and not just some freak show for passers-by to gawp from behind a velvet rope.  Gegen does freak shows for the freaks, where every artistic, psychological, philosophical permutation of the word 'queer' is realised and moved to the center.  They started off doing parties that blended style, counterculture, art and rhetoric but, as mentioned above, they've moved out into readings, exhibitions, and the streets.  That's where counterculture belongs!  I look forward to another year in which they'll loudly and proudly throw the mainstream into doubt.

This weekend Gegen return to their party roots with the huge, theatrical event Homopatik, a special, 22-hour Orgy-Mystery-Theater "hosted by the kingdom of electronic music TRESOR.”  They say that you have to go there to find out what it's all about, which is about right - the melting pot atmosphere depends entirely on who turns up.

Speaking of freaky style, 2012 saw some of the city's designers reclaim Berlin's radical chic from the Mitte fashion magpies.  Many of the hallmarks of Berlin’s creative, radical spirit have become the hallmarks of a vacuous 'gutter glamour' style over the years.  The punk hairstyles, the shredded gamine clothes, the tattoos and the anarchy symbols are still around, but they're increasingly detached from any meaningful, radical counter-culture. Hence, real squats sit empty while Berlin Fashion Week's Opening Party is called 'Squat House' and features fashionistas dressing up as anarcho-punks and posing against bare, graffitied walls, with Veltins and Red Bull sponsoring the event.

Mitte venue Food/ZMF, run by activist Penny Rafferty, is bucking the slacktivist, gutter-glamour trend.  The unpretentious, back-alley venue hosted an anti-fashion "show" at the end of 2012.  It seemed tailor-made to showcase moody, frustrated models and designer diatribes against consumerism, rather than to sell clothing.  This was very much intentional.  Shouting, ranting and storming off the catwalk, Penny's crew embodied an energy that has been pent up in the shallow confines of fashion for far too long. "Starting 20 years after the first waves of subcultures started on the Streets surrounding Rosenthaler Platz, Food/ZMF now seeks to redirect, reverse and recreate," reads the Food/ZMF blurb.  And not a moment too soon!
 
The "Berlin style" seems to have been reduced to a bunch of micro-brands that have the same goal as the macro brands: to earn money and make someone famous. And, okay, I too have watched 'The Sky Over Berlin" and fully grasp that a strong visual element has always been part of this city's appeal (in fact, styles haven't changed all that much since the film was made).  The difference between then and now lies in the willingness of radical-looking people to change a system that clearly isn't working for them, the city, or the world.  The current incarnation of that style is escapist because it has no ties any effort one could make to actually change things.  

Ironically, the radical style that Berlin's fashionistas are falling all over themselves to acquire only became popular because it was once associated with real escape: escape from repression via rebellion; escape from the housing market via squatting; escape from the system via anarchy; escape from bigotry via egalitarianism; escape from capitalism via DIY living; escape from fashion via absurdity.  The escape lay in what the people wearing the clothes did to free themselves.  If their style is associated with this city, it's only because Berlin was cheap enough that they could do that here.  But prices are rising now, probably because there a growing proportion of Berlin's population that thinks that, by buying up the city's buildings, styles and 'underground' clubs, they will get liberty included with their purchase, like a free set of batteries.  I reckon that, if the act of handing over money could achieve radical change, it probably wouldn't be legal!

Sounds For Berlin seem to get this.  Their openly-defiant but utterly inclusive free parties put people before profit every time.  They say: "We want to hold the Berlin Senate to the obligation to decriminalize subcultural events. We think it's fundamentally a good thing that there are commercially-operated venues, because tourists have to celebrate, too.  But there are plenty of partiers who can’t or don’t want to pay the sometimes-exorbitant drinks and entry prices.”
SFB started off last summer with a series of lively outdoor parties in East Berlin that got everyone dancing... except, maybe, the Senate!  And they have consistently brought together quality examples of every kind of music that makes you dance, fashion be damned.  Minimal is kept to a minimum while banging techno, tough house and breaky-psytrance also feature in their selective line-up. Sounds good to me!   

One final tip: London's radical party scene is  probably going to be making some waves in this city in 2013.

Check back here, or check out Club Alien's Facebook and Twitter pages, for updates about these events and more!

 

"If time doesn't change you, you're doing something wrong."