Just for Me (?)

I must admit I live a fabulous life. Of course, I would never in a million years admit to it being otherwise – having flitted off to Europe to pursue my dreams, no strings attached. Tonight I am going to an experimental opera in a subway station and then an all-night party at a 100 year old ball house where it girls and it boys learn how to do a proper Viennese waltz from East German ladies who have been AROUND. Why, at this very second the melted buttery afternoon sun is streaming into the window of my apartment –casting exquisite shadows from the crown moldings onto the unfinished parquet floor. It is one of those Cecil B. DeMille moments where the clouds part and you find yourself the recipient of a shaft of light that seems to indicate that you have been given some divine acknowledgement for just being yourself - when it is really only chance and the lady on the floor below – the one with the noisy cat and the Schlager music at 3 AM probably feels the exact same way because the shaft of light is shining on her too. Still, it is nice to have those moments – those unexpected breaks in the weather…a turning of the dial to a more pleasant frequency.

Yes, I do have a pretty fabulous life – but in gay terms, it is only entry level fabulousness.I came to this realization over tea with my friend Michael. I had just gotten my diplomatic passport because I was about to be sent on assignment to Rome. We were both very excited because now I had something really fantastic to tell people at parties. What did it matter that I was really only going over for 6 weeks to feed paper into a scanner? Since when does a good story have to be burdened with something as ridiculous as the truth? I was finally fabulous and this would have to be acknowledged. Of course, Michael and I both came to the conclusion that it would have been far more fabulous had I been an ambassador or something – someone with a retinue and a car and all sorts of decorations. Then, every knee would bend and all would be forced to recognize the absolute supremacy of my existence. There would be much plotting of my downfall of course, but I would persevere and overcome with that steely grace that is my trademark.

They don’t call us queens for nothing.

In the gay world, fabulousness must be maintained at all costs: even if your life is going down the toilet, you must present well. For example, a cramped bachelor apartment is a charming pied-à-terre. Old clothes are called vintage and skipping dinner because you can’t afford it is slimming down for spring. One must never, EVER admit to the banality of one’s existence, much less the oppression and ridicule one must often overcome to get on with it. To do so would admit some sort of defeat, some tacit acknowledgement that the forces that have tried to keep you contained - to keep you invisible have won, or at least gained ground. My dear, this is not DONE: Not only must you have a stiff upper lip, but the makeup must be perfectly applied.

And while all this social corseting is very impressive, resulting as it does in an entire subculture of perfectly turned out people who thrive on artifice and dreams, it can be exhausting because you can see the gears working: it takes a lot of thought to upgrade your life on a constant basis. That being said, a night out in one of the gay clubs of Berlin can be a great deal of fun, as long as you don’t scratch the surface and expect anything real. But who expects reality after dark?

The other night I went for a drink with some fellow expat friends at a pub over in East Berlin. I was telling them – as I have told you - that I had a fabulous life…but that it would probably be more fabulous if I took a private plane with Bjork or something.

Here is what followed:

Jack

Bjork? ….Oh God – I know people who PARTY with Bjork…she is crazy – really, she should be committed. I went to a club with her in Ankara once that was too INSANE to believe. Oh Ben, you’re sweet – meet Robert – he’s sweet too and from New York… we hooked up in Pyongyang when I was on assignment for Lonely Planet…this was of course before I met my husband and we moved to Istanbul (the food is to DIE FOR). Oh, how I love the Turks – such little anarchists. Not like the horrible rule-bound Germans…but really, are the French any better? The European Union needs a collective FUCK, if I do say so myself. Now Ben…is it? Ben – why are you in Berlin? You’re an opera singer? Oh faaaabulous! You must meat Adonis…yes that’s his real name – he is a singer too – from Manila. Such funny names they have down there….I think his mom’s name is Conception or something. God – that’s like naming your daughter Impregnate or something. How bizarre! Folker…oh FOLLKER…where’s Adonis? Very funny…no Folker, I don’t think you’re that cute. -What’s that? Adonis is in Milan? Now Ben, Adonis is a fabulous countertenor and he is dating a conductor from Lithuania...they just bought a house in Crete. Have you been to Crete? No? You MUST go. I would go, but my husband is in Iceland for a fashion shoot and I am just PINING for him. Oh and then of course there’s Guinevere - a singer as well, but she is doing her PhD at Columbia on feminist undertones in modern German opera. Folker….oh FOLLLLKER…does Guinivere have a Fulbright? Thought so…very smart….you would never guess she comes from Kentucky….what’s that? Where do I come from? Kansas. Can you believe it? Well, we all must come from somewhere. I know I talk with a European accent...it must be because I’ve lived EVERYWHERE…., I went to school in Munich, and then I lived in Japan for a while …and then I moved in with a bunch of Jewish lesbians in Berkley. We are no longer on speaking terms - they think I’m Anti Semitic because I don’t worship Susan Sontag. Do you want a drink? Oh, just try some of my champagne…entre nous I know it looks ridiculous, but it really does taste better when you drink it from the bottle with a straw… Folker.oh FOLLLKER – get Ben a straw. Isn’t this fun?

Dante

Oh GUINIVERE– you really are the queen lesbian bee of the party. And you know there can only be one – queen, that is. I am intensely jealous! But you are such an ENLIGHTENED despot…rather like Joseph II of Austria – benevolent yet firm and in control. And isn’t that just what one needs in a man? What’s that? Of course I know you couldn’t care less, but you’re hanging out with a bunch of queers so could you just PRETEND to look interested? Folker…oh FOLLLLKER! Where’s Adonis? Milan? I thought they already went to Crete. One can never keep track, coming and going....like my last trick! Well, I should be going myself – I have to travel to San Fran at the ass-crack of dawn and I haven’t even BEGUN to think of what to pack. No – I won’t be back next week… I’ve decided to take a few days off after the conference….Sergio and I are renting a car and driving to Napa. But I’ll be back in December after I meet with my thesis advisor at Stanford. Come to think of it, next week might be a bit slow…I’ll be away of course…. Bryce is going to Moscow for work…and Sebastian will be in New York at his art opening…well Ben, it has been a pleasure…but do tell me, why are you drinking champagne with a straw?

Seamus

What am I doing in Berlin? What aren’t I doing in Berlin – that’s the question you should be asking! No – the question that you SHOULD be asking is WHO aren’t I doing in Berlin. My God! This place makes Sodom look like North Dakota. Do I own a boutique? How flattering – you are so charming…Ben, is it? No, nothing as glamorous as that – although one does have dreams. I am a translator and interpreter….from Polish to German and Russian to German…and German to Czech, and Czech to English. I work on contract with Krupp, Siemens….all of those lovely companies who built tanks during the war…and you? You’re a singer! Have you met Guinevere? You have? She’s on a Fulbright…very smart – although I can’t for the life of me understand what she’s writing about. How about Adonis? He’s in MILAN you say? He does get AROUND, that boy. Well you know what they say - to succeed in the opera business you have to get under good conductor. Ben, darling - lovely to meet you – we MUST do this again some time….and champagne with a straw…very daring – you’re BAD aren’t you… don’t try to admit you’re not! Tschussi!

I have no idea if anything my friends told me was real – or rather, at which point the reality stopped and the embellishment began. It did not matter because I was entertained and caught up in the froth of it all. But I had, at that very moment, the overwhelming desire to race home and sit in silence. In the middle of the most exciting city in the world, I longed for solitude and for something that I could say unequivocally was real. Silence is real – it does not pretend to be anything more than it is. It is the absence of embellishment – it is the place from which you can build a firm foundation. It is in and of itself complete. It is the ending of things, and it is the beginning of things.


In this most exciting city in the world, I longed for a new beginning of things - one which was based in something as pure and complete as silence; based on the knowledge that I am in and of myself complete, a firm foundation – no need for embellishment.

Remember how I said that it was sunny? It isn’t. It is actually quite grey….and I am actually not going out tonight. Tonight I will sit in quietness and read a book, or really enjoy eating that pear I bought the other day… it must be ripe by now – although one can’t rush these things. I did, however, go to an opera in a subway station the other day, which was quite interesting...and from time to time, when the sun shines, I think it is just for me. But of course it does not shine just for me, and I think that is the lesson in all of this.

No need for embellishment.

Quite Enough

It is Sunday morning in Berlin. The church bells are ringing, but I can assure you that the pews will be empty. Berliners do not go to church, and if they do, they certainly never admit to it. If a Berliner admitted to going to church on Sunday morning, then there would be the assumption that they did not go out on Saturday night, and that is an unpardonable sin - perhaps the only one - in this Sodom on the Spree. I am assuming that most people are asleep, although they could be at one of the all-night bars in Schőnberg where they paint the windows black to keep out the sunlight– those places that have not been renovated in 30 years…where they still play disco on cassette tapes and where strangers still ask you to dance.

It is almost 10. There are still a few brave revelers on their way home, swerving in and out of the sidewalk, glinting at the unwelcome brightness. One young man in impossibly tight leather pants raises a beer bottle to his lips but misses and in the process sprays himself with foam… a baptism of sorts – a sacrament of the cult of Dionysus – just one of the things you see every day in this city where carousing is an act of defiance, where scars run deep.

For in Berlin there is no half-hearted revelry, no tripping the light fantastic – here there is grit and seediness in pockmarked buildings – a desperate hedonism that is revolting, but which you cannot resist. In Berlin people still drink to forget - to overcome – and it feels as though the thousands of neighborhood pubs that define this city are a living theatre where world-weary citizens act out their collective history with a vital force that never sees the light of day.

Heavy, I know – and perhaps a bit outdated, for Berlin is changing fast. It is becoming more international - worldly, more style and less substance. It is more difficult to find that Berliner Schnauze – the pugnacious come-as-you-are crustiness of the people who have seen it all – people whose surly exterior reveal a genuine warmth once you get to know them.

Indeed, going for coffee in the recently rebuilt Potsdamer Platz feels like going out for coffee in any number of cities – sitting in a Starbucks, across from the Marriott, beside the McDonalds. You order your latte and your muffin and sit down – listening to the CD of the week that is the same one you heard everywhere else. It is hard to know where you are - until you look outside and see the double row of stones on the pavement, marking the place where the wall once stood. I asked my friend why they didn’t try to rebuild Potsdamer Platz in a more authentic way that was rooted in the history and culture of the place. He looked at me and calmly told me that the stones were quite enough.

Yes, the stones are quite enough. Stones where the wall once was, stones where the Jews once were, stones where the boots once marched…stones where the books once burned. Berlin changes, reinvents itself, stays the same, tries to remember and at the same time move on, can’t decide which one is more important...can't decide if one can exist without the other.

But I can tell you that even if Berlin were razed to the ground - if it ceased even to be a place on the map, that Berlin would still be marked forever. And this is right and good, lest we too become only stones - the ones that people step over on their way home from a night of drinking, the drinking they do to forget the fact that they knew – knew all along what had happened in this place.

And that they chose to do nothing.

Sehnsucht

Last night I went to a pub in Prenzlauer Berg. Prenzlauer Berg is the epicentre of all things cool in this city, and it is quite difficult to get to. I think this is on purpose: if it were really accessible by public transit you wouldn’t get to embrace the zietgeist and ride your antique looking but actually brand new and quite expensive bicycle – its front basket laden with organic produce and a memory stick containing your latest digital art. In addition, if there were more buses in the area, then everybody would live there, and then how would the people of Prenzlauer Berg feel superior to the people who lived everywhere else?

Everybody in Prenzlauer Berg has a bike…and a child….and this being Germany, various state of the art contraptions to adapt one to the other. In fact, there are so many children around that the area is now called “Babyberg”, and one can while away the hours on the Kollwitz Platz watching the urban-hipster-moms agonize over which brand of fair-trade quinoa to buy for little Jochen or Eva before riding home (how do they do it in their peasant skirts and combat boots?) to work on their dissertation/performance art/sustainable macramé.

Of course, those in the know will tell you that Prenzlauer Berg has become far too gentrified to be considered a hip and happening place. Apparently, the action has moved further afield to the great socialist housing blocks of Friedrichshain –although I hear that these too have been overrun by drunk British tourists, and other species of untermensch . It is hard to know where to go, really – but someone did tell me the other day that there is this club in a bombed out basement in Lichtenberg that is hot and as of yet, undiscovered. You bring the vodka - I’ll bring the keen sense of awareness. (By the time you read this, the place will probably have lost its edge and then we will have to drive all the way to Poland for a good time, perish the thought.)

Prenzlauer Berg is in East Berlin.

East Berlin was once ghastly and is now less so, although traces remain. Interestingly, many people feel a sort of fuzzy longing for the iron-clad security of daily life in the socialist past. There are even East German -themed parties: you get driven there in a Trabant, dress up as a Young Pioneer and dance like its 1988. Few of these parties feature food shortages and police informants however, nor are you walled in. East Germany – it was the party you just couldn’t leave.

It is curious to note that a good portion of the people who suffer from Osalgie never actually lived in East Germany. Many would consider it peculiar to be nostalgic for something you never knew, but not the Germans – they have invented a word for it: Sehnsucht.

Was ist Sehnsucht? My dear, there isn’t enough ink in the world. Sehnsucht is an emotion – how does one say auf Englisch - a feeling, or the perception of a longing for that which is unknown, but on a deeper level is perhaps understood. It is the acceptance that the delicious pein of this unfulfilled longing is sweeter than the fulfillment of any mortal desire. In the context of the fall of the Berlin wall, I think it would be like saying that you wished you knew, or could actually have seen for yourself if the grass were really greener on the other side. Of course, now that there is no other side, you will never know, and the realization that this particular longing will never be fulfilled only serves to make it more intense. But with the pain comes a frisson of excitement – the awareness that you are perceptive enough to have this longing; that you posses the character to be able to experience and identify these feelings at all, and in so doing, confirm the depth of your soul. I mean, you always knew that you were deeper than your friends – more aware, more attuned to the human condition, but now this longing has confirmed it – and you feel special…but oh, the pain.

That, in a nutshell is Sehnsucht – although the Germans will delight in telling you that it just one of those concepts that is impossible to translate, but if you become a willing student of German culture and society, maybe – just maybe – you will be able to understand and then someday soon you too can experience Sehnsucht and it will cause you to rent a Trabant for a day, or live in a commune.

I know one man who actually does lives in a commune. He is from West Berlin, of course, and comes from a distinguished family. We went out for dinner the other day, and he was beside himself with glee. Communal living! Now he could finally cast of the shackles of his capitalist past and contribute to “actually existing socialism”. (Cheers to that). He told me that he loved living communally because everything was shared – costs, chores, frustrations and joys (blame?). In fact, he pulled out his iphone ™ from his Burberry™ trench coat to show me a picture. Now, I don’t really know much about living in a commune, but if it means you can buy designer clothes, then I am all for it.

In the interim, I will have to endure the unfulfilled longing I have for a bespoke suit.

It could be a lot worse. I could be walled in.