Ah cannae remember a fooking detail!

Dienstag 14 Oktober 2008 15:55

I've been doing a lot of nothing these days, so when Sunday rolled around I just wanted to sit in a cafe all day and write melancholic self-criticisms in my journal all day. Where better, I thought, than the trendy St. Oberholz cafe. Here well-dressed young people interact almost exclusively with their Apple laptops all the day long. Occasionally their eyes skim over the top of their notebooks to ogle whoever may be ascending or descending the stairs. It is then wurst-o'clock, whereupon they spend half an hour slowly singing the skin of a bratwurst over a single gas-ring in their tiny coal-fire-heated hovels on the eighteenth floor of a building designed in the Time Before Lifts.

After seven hours artfully numbing my arse over a hot sketchpad and a borrowed Apple laptop, my pal Nina and I escort a new temporary friend to the Lichtblick Kino on Kastanienallee to watch Jim Jarmusch's Mystery Train. I thought I was playing it safe here – after all, a single-salon DVD theater will just play the American DVD with German subs, right? Well, yes, but Jarmusch has a way of almost always annoying me, and this time it was by having the first third of this portmanteau feature almost exclusively in Japanese with German subtitles providing little clue to the conversations on screen.

Nonetheless, it provided a great way to stone two hours to bloody oblivion, and afterwards I needed a beer. Due to the triangulation of the three dwellings our gang inhabits, it's to Kastanienallee that we always gravitate, and in particular a bar called Schwarzsauer. This bar provides something we find the others around the allee cannot; You can smoke inside, buy American Spirit at the machine (well, you can everywhere - American Spirit is HUGE in Berlin), has good beer, the occasional attractive woman and good tunes on the hifi. The reason our good friend Lars insists upon it is because it's a luvvie haunt for the board treaders of the Volksbühne theater up the road. His acting career is about to flourish (if not his 4-chord music career) so often we go in there and shoot the crap with all sorts of fancy people.

I would have a punchline but this will be added as an afterthought when I regain my memory in eight years time.