HAVING come back to England for an almost entirely unnecessary bout of self-indulgent relaxation, ostensibly to celebrate some holy shopping event from eras past, I have a little time to reflect on the past few months in Berlin. If I had a gram of sensible matter between my ears, I'd choose this moment in time to curtail my adventure in Berlin and earn some real money before going back to the great unknown. Life tastes more vivid when you become an expatriate; even the wholly familiar feelings released by becoming homeless and unemployed can be quite savoury in the context of going through it all abroad.
I could stay here, risking entrapment in the heady business of London, to earn some money for my travels, but the pound is worth less than the euro, after commission. The motivations that could have prevented me returning to Germany have vaporised, and now my only recourse to a sane existence lies in going back to Berlin, empty of pocket, and starting my empire from nothing, like the lead character in a three-hour mafia film.
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Returning to London was like being confronted by a disorientating mirage. Seeing things with a new perspective was great, as it reinforced my assessments – you don't need to travel the world to know that London is small, dirty, over-run by corporate messages and criminal youths, with one of the most pathetic underground train networks still in operation. The pace of life seems faster there because so many people are skittering about the place, but the only reason that everyone's running or in taxis is because personal time is so limited. If they'd extend opening hours in shops, bars and gyms, I'm sure people wouldn't risk ankle bones running down escalators just to hit the pub at beer o'clock.
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The cameras, the anti-terrorist station announcements, the barriers and bouncers and exclusivity and elitism - the lack of personal freedom is palpable in the narrow streets of London. The parallel of this anxiety is something I haven't observed in Berlin. Everyone feels less oppressed by unseen monitors. These people lived with secret police and physical separation from the rest of the city and the world, and have lived under the thumb of governments that sought only control, so it makes sense that people in this city want to feel like their decisions aren't biased by authority. Freedom is free for all - freedom to hold parties in bank vestibules, to have famous squat precincts, to be a neo-Fascist, to have a gun - for better or for worse, the people live the way they want, and arguably freedom is the polar opposite to repression. As such, it's a mite safer - even without the neglected panoptica we have in London.
-x-
Liberty is a reward for those who play London's game - those who achieve a position of comfort through a combination of hard work and social climbing - or to be concise: getting fucked in the right places with the right people at the right time. Aspiration begets liberty - and to live in denial of London's mainstream culture and just get stoned at home with friends is an easier way to deal with failing to know enough beautiful rich people.
It would seem that the further up the class/money hierarchy you ascend, the less bound you are to follow prescribed patterns of living - for example, the people who take cabs everywhere are much further up the food chain than you. They avoid the uncertainty of walking the streets at night, and thus mitigate the dangers that other people present. They can visit as many parties and clubs as they can squeeze between dusk and dawn. Their experience of London is far removed from those who walk home from a night out, crossing the road to avoid the unseen sources of enraged screaming. Due to the high expense, the short opening hours, the distance between venues, the eclecticism of the events on offer, the same night out could go in so many abstract directions depending on your mood, your budget, your network and your proclivities. This could be a truism of all cities, but nowhere enforces the divisions of have and have-not more stringently than London.
Berlin, on the other leather-gloved hand, isn't over-kind to the privileged few. You party with them, or otherwise get on with your own scene in your own district, confident in the knowledge that you're probably having more fun. Everyone uses taxis, everyone gets in free to the clubs, in short - everyone has access to that lifestyle. You meet those people on even ground because the village attitude prevails - only 3.4 million capita, so everyone knows someone.
-o0o-
I don't need to be in London any more, but there are certain things that Berlin squarely lacks, or that I cannot find, that London will always provide:
1.Experimental dance music.
Germans tend toward either minimal techno or electro house, and even Modeselektor's favourite scene is that of UK dubstep. With good reason, I might add, that we're fucking indomitable when it comes to music. When Germans get retro, they listen to Beatles, Bowie, Lou Reed & the Velvet Underground, even Britpop like Pulp, Blur, Oasis - I fail to understand why Germany hasn't formulated any solid response to the likes of braindance, acid, old-skool revival (the only old skool nods I hear are the King of Rave travesties, all electro house). So musically I am lonely, and I don't have anyone to jam with, so I miss Blighty for this reason. This also makes me feel like a pioneer, despite being fully aware that Berlin is the epicentre of some of my favourite musical culture, I am finding it actually quite hard to track down !K7, Bpitch Control etc. parties – and as such, as you may be able to tell, I'm in doubt regarding the German's musical tastes.
2.Supermarkets.
In English supermarkets you can get 8 kinds of everything, meaning you can opt for a less-than luxury product without buying the home brands, and still have a lot of money left over from fifty quid for a week's food. You can't in Germany and this has made me resort to petty theft as a small retaliation for the indignity of paying hand-over-fist for (frankly strange) food at the counter. My advice is to stick to the fucking fruit and veg, don't give the cunts the satisfaction of charging four Euros for Bertolli pesto or nearly four for Lavazza Crema E Gusto – the abject lack of competitive behaviour between German brands means that there is no under-handed price war, and each retailer charges whatever they sodding well want. Prices in England's supermarkets will wildly fluctuate for the sake of undercutting Asda's toilet paper by a penny, but German chains seem to be in grand unison, sharing a joke at the expense of the customers.
2a. Bacon
It's Danish - and Denmark isn't so far from Germany - but no normal bacon in Germany? This is the #1 country for schweinfleisch products, but the only one I eat is off the menu. What's the deal? I had to approximate a full English with streaky bacon, you know, the kind that shrinks into a miniature suitable for a fucking Borrower's breakfast. At least they had the good judgement to get Heinz beans in.
3.Ugly people.
London may not have the salubrious fashion scene of New York or Paris but it does have one – and given the influx of migrants from the world over, there is a far higher percentile of sexually attractive human beings in London than anywhere else I have lived. Germany does not espouse these same ritual aesthetics and if you want to be a short-haired 46-year-old woman in combats and Crocs with obstructive facial piercings, do as thou wilt. There's a home for you in this vain world, and it's Deutschland. Did I forget the current Berlin vogue for having a dog specified in the Dangerous Dogs Act and taking it everywhere you go? Fuck the WAGs and their chihuahuas – the red carpets (and most pavements) in Berlin are constellated with steaming piles of Rottweiler shit.
This has exhausted my list. For the few major problems it suffers from a British perspective, Berlin has given me a higher standard of living – a big bedroom for the first time in my life, cycle lanes, regular public transport with no barriers, permanent recourse to doner kebabs and Jagermeister (some luxuries visited upon me that I didn't even know I wanted) – and the ability to make friends with people who are like me – lost twenty-somethings with a defined life plan or no life plan who have come to the Arctic party town to get their shit together.
I would retreat from my earlier definition of Berlin as being a bohemian paradise, simply because it is not cheap enough. If you want a scholarly, miserly experience of life just to get your shit novel typed out, go to Prague, Vienna or Budapest. When I find a sub-tropical metropolis where fifty quid lasts two months and every other expat Limey is an unmarried struggling novelist, I will know I have found my boho hangout. Not that I am a cerebral closet-homosexual like Frasier Crane, it's just that I find the ideology of 'settling down' repugnant in the extreme. Fuck long-term employment! Fuck a mortgage! Fuck children! If I am ever stupid/brainwashed or in love enough to procreate, I will move country every 6 months for the rest of my life, so my children never have close friends. Ever.
In fact, falling in love could be the worst thing that could happen to me right now. In any case, in my experience, you need to actually approach and talk to the really pretty girls that smile back, and the less attractive, though intellectually stimulating ones who grab your arm (and unwittingly initiate a two-year relationship) are all you get if you refuse to take initiative.
From 2008 on, I refused to be emotionally available (thus avoiding talking to the scarily pretty ones). The result is that now I can't tell if a two-week tryst with a smart, average-pretty girl is worth hanging onto, because she's not the sexy, tall brunette fashionista that my ego tells me I need now. I'm also unable to fuck with any conviction, as though I'm being berated by my cock for wasting time.
Once you've attained a certain degree of proximity to your goals, you don't slip back down the ladder. I once had a job as a runner after having been an animator in a studio; I was the most disobedient and obstinate runner there and got fired after a month (days after my birthday, a week after I got dumped by my girlfriend) just because I had been higher up the food chain and was now stuck getting Starbucks for people I deemed less worthy of clean oxygen than myself. Likewise, why should I get into a relationship with a short, pretty-face-fat-arse German girl if the German girl I really want is terrifying, monotone, 8 feet tall, thin lips, cheekbones like Terminator, a body like a cheetah with a hollowed-out Great White shark tightly stretched over it (in a thoroughly erotic way, of course). Of course, I am being superficial and aesthetic – but if I won't be happy otherwise, then why shop at Elizabeth Duke, when I'm saving up for Tiffany's?
I've been with 'pretty' girls, and they all know that they're pretty – and some are really intelligent, in a way that could relegate (elevate?) them into league with nerds such as I – but then they could, using said intelligence, also assess their own perceived sexual currency and then the rate of exchange becomes worthless. To offer anything that a potential mate might want, one needs a certain degree of stability in a few key areas, but after 26 years I'm still oblivious as to what these areas are and how to achieve stability in them. If I'm still single in four years, I might have to Facebook-stalk one of the female friends I made the 'If we're both single when we're 30' pact with. That is not a prospect I'll nurture while I still possess a modicum of dignity.
Groucho Marx remarxed once that “I wouldn't want to join any kind of club that would accept me as a member”. I wouldn't want to start a relationship with a girl who would accept me as a boyfriend. Our aspirations have to be distilled from our reality, being the hard kernel of desire driving our every overarching move. My aspirations, being as I am of the grasping, ambitious English middle class, is to have what so many total bastards have had before me, and done so through pure conviction in their own hideously immoral behaviour. Without – and this is the tricky part – becoming a total bastard myself.
You know when you meet those slightly hippie couples, they do wholesome stuff like volunteering and travelling Europe by train and she works in publishing and his hair is sun-bleached because they built their own house et cetera – and they're both attractive as hell and your only thought is HOW and WHEN you'll get Mr. Nice's wife on her own when you're both steaming drunk? I want to be Mr. Nice – married to a strong-willed femme like the woman from Dawn of the Dead – (the one where they live in the mall) and she'll be independent, able and willing to scrape my sick out of the bathtub or reapply the sealant around the oven door, she could even have hairy armpits – but she'll be like a glorious, passionate Che Guevara in indestructible female armour. She'd be loyal, but do her own thing, hell, we'd even holiday separately, but when we enter the dancefloor in our matching 'Das tracksuits, everyone be lookin'.
I need to earn Mrs. Nice (née Totally Fit) by becoming a better man (so popular ideology and modern capitalist society tell me – thanks Edward Bernays). So for now? I'll stay footloose and fancy-free while I enjoy my current phase of being totally inept at life's little intricacies such as: gaining and maintaining employed work, waking up at an hour conducive to work-bound commuting, study, or any form of self-discipline.
So much for summarising Berlin 2008. I know now that a personal transformation is possible, but I have wisely chosen to sustain my former level of idiocy and test it out upon a new audience. Travelling could trigger an epiphany, the kind that makes one quit smoking and start exercising, or abstaining from masturbation and dabbling in veganism, or beginning to write with fevered intent, for that matter - but no such lightning bolt has struck me. Instead, leaving Monkey Island for a more cultured place, and making friends with so many intelligent, culturally aware Europeans, has meant that now I aspire to be contributing to culture - giving the people I meet something to do or look up, rather than sucking at the marrow of modern culture and finding with disappointment that I'm the last cub to the kill.
Times are changing, so watch this space. Or at least set an RSS feed.
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