Notes On Berlin
spent last week there. my first visit, not my last.

a few musings:

* whole districts of it look like sheffield in the 1980s.
* you can still get white dog poo there. in plenitude - as tho to compliment my first point.
* outside of the tourist districts all times of day look and feel like 6am. it's easy to walk three blocks in schoneberg at 2 in the afternoon, without seeing so much as a dog crouching on the pavement to take a white shit.
* night times are the opposite. 3am on the underground - and the trains are as crammed as monday morning at 8.
* the film museum's main dietrich room looks like a  shrine to a goddess. hellenistic greece would have honoured athena as fittingly. her personal artifacts displayed like articles of faith made me think of the catholic fetishization of the saints. so this is where religion was transferred in the 20th century - past god on to the great icons. lili marlene as faith; and i'm a believer.
* ubiquitous posters of penelope cruz advertising hairspray prove certainly that she suits rather less make-up.
* it's difficult not to come to a city for the first time without indulging its entire romance - and there are few cities as battle scarred as berlin. think of the city as a body and you can see where it has slit its own wrists - freshly if you consider the wall: reduced now to short strip; part sepulcher, part tourist attraction. it's difficult to look at the brandenberg gate without thinking of it, or the kaiser wilhelm church without thinking of hitler.
* german food is massively underrated - unpretentious and tasty, i'd say it was ripe for re-evaluation by world cuisine.
* the news-reader on rtl could by heidi klum's mutter.
* the city is abounding with second hand shops - all of them shit. almost as tho traders are given licence to open a shop round a dumpit site. no i will not pay 8 euros for a hessian shirt that would better work as a dishrag. made me think i should scrape out the wax from my ears and try selling that. if dishcloths are clothes here, i'll call it a candle. the 'biggest second hand shop in europe' fared little better: the odd item i found inspiring would have probably only fitted the residents of munchkinland...should change its name from 'garage' to 'mothercare'.
*my favourite wing in the pergamon museum was 'islamic art thry the ages', of which i'd hitherto seen little. greek and roman ruins i know inside out - and whilst these renderings of the human form never fail to move, it's great to see something fresh. the beautifully painted pages of the koran, passed down from the ottoman empire were my favourite. reminded me to take up calligraphy.
* i was bemused by the reichstag building. should this novelty glass bulb really be sitting over parliament like that? i understood its symbolic principles and very much enjoyed the view from the top, but it still left me scratching my head. the bundestag itself made me think of a lecture theatre, plastic blue seats seeming somewhat cheap, given the cherry on top.
* the cold boulettes carried around bars at 2 in the morning by amusing meat men are tastier than anything you might get in a restaurant. currywurst varies in quality, but always hits the spot.
* there is no need to pay for the u-bahn. no barriers, no checks, as efficient as clockwork, running all night at weekends - it's the service for me.
* modern cabaret is somewhere between french and saunders and hell. all things have their time, then if untethered, descend to pastiche. nostalgia can save an industry, but not an art.
* berliners are markedly more friendly than londoners. nothing was served to me without a smile and no-one seemed flustered by my broken german; it did leave me in search of the stereotypical frosty manner - perhaps hijacked by the french, who always think they need that bit more.
* the place seems like somewhere * becoming* or re-imagining itself. this is as good a thing for a city as for a person - things are not stale, innocence is back in fashion. where else could you go into a gaybar with red foil wrapping paper stapled all over its walls and white balloons tumbling from the ceiling and not feel underwhelmed?  it's the sincerity and naivete that lifts it, and which touches me.
* of all the cities i've visited in my short life, this is the one besides london i can imagine myself living in.