Gawker
In this occasional column, we learn what's the haps with the best friend who casually destroys your life. The Underminer has a new address, and it's on the Fingerstraße!
Oh wow, hi. There you are! Your hair is so much longer! And kind of...wild!
It's SO good to see you. I am so glad we could find some time to catch up while I am in town. Before I go back to BERLIN!
How ARE you? How's New York? Great, great.
You're writing a lot, huh? What are you writing? The Ten Best Butternut Squash Soups for Time Out? Cute kiddie Christmas Gifts for House and Home? Or maybe just something mean and snarky about socialites for a website?
Haha! I love New York, it's so insulated and strange now.
Me? I'm AMAZING. Thanks for asking. As you know, I have been in BERLIN for seven years now, just creating and living and being a fully realized artist, novelist, and lead singer. It's crazy I know. But I just have so much TIME there because unlike you (well not really YOU-you but people like you) I haven't had to scrounge around and take career-compromising odd pathetic assignments and gigs to pay for my overpriced life and instead I can really become a fully expressive ARTIST in BERLIN.
I mean I am not trying to really diss New York. It's just, well, over. And I know you agree with me. The luxury condos, the lack of dance clubs, the NYU robots, the Nanny-culture. In BERLIN, it's different. It's different in BERLIN. We don't ascribe to the narrowed, uptight, fitted, fashiony ideology that seems to have taken over this city. For instance, the other day I woke up in my apartment (I live in a huge former button factory on the Fingerstrasse for which I am charged about 60 dollars) and I decided I would just walk down the street with a teacup on my head! And no one even looked! Because we are all beautiful losers and artists and creators and puppeteers in BERLIN!
BERLIN BERLIN BERLIN!
What's even funnier is being here and seeing how New York is in love with BERLIN now. There's the Weimar show at Joe's Pub, and the Speigeltent, and my friend Ute is doing a show here too! I was eating dinner with her the other night and she couldn't believe how much The Big Apple emulates our beloved city. No, it's sort of cute. Like when your younger sister tried to dress 'cool' like you in high school.
After eating, Ute and I walked out into the street, and before you could say "Bienvenue" we ended up back at my hotel drinking cheap vodka and singing Kurt Weil songs with a dwarf accordionist, a Flamenco dance troupe and three Ukrainian baritones that we randomly met. It's weird when you live in BERLIN this kind of night is just commonplace, but somehow we still had our innate BERLINABILITY to make it happen in the boring, mid-level-restaurant-clogged Upper West Side!
There is of course a sense of tragedy in BERLIN. Sometimes I think that's what makes BERLIN thrive, because we walk among ghosts of the dead yet we still celebrate our artistic selves!
Maybe in like 50 years, after Guiliani becomes president here and turns the entire country into a hideous fascistic death camp, you guys can be as free as us, in BERLIN! But until then I guess you will have to be depressed, and write think pieces about 'Gossip Girl.'
No! Don't get all sad. Don't worry. If there is one thing I have learned from my amazing, expressive, incredibly cheap life in BERLIN, it's that we are all victims of history. Remember to celebrate life! Because it's a cabaret!
Well, I gotta get going. Could you remind me — which is the best subway to Marc Jacobs?
Oh right, perfect, thanks. Ciao!
Comments
And also, my money is worth like 80 of yours.
Plus, virgins all!
You know who else was awfully fond of BERLIN?
Berlin is so last year. The best new place to live and be an artist is Zhezqazghan in Kazakstan.
Don't believe me? Just move there. You'll see.
A conundrum: Native English speakers accent it on the final syllable, [ber-LIN]. Native German speakers speaking German also pronounce it [ber-LIN].
However, native German speakers who say Berlin while speaking English pronounce it [BER-lin]. I've got no trapeze artist / cabaret dancer willing to drink tea with me, so perhaps the knowledgeable Gawkerites can 'splain me why this is so.
life is a cabaret old friend
As if!
While I find "Ute", Kurt Weil-serenading dwarf accordionists, and dance troups all being completely plausible, BERLINERS DO NOT EAT.
They're simply too real to do so.
That Fassbinder lifestyle-choice is so demodè. Unfahrvenungen!
I'm writing a poem about it: does "schadenfreude" rhyme with "hemhorroid"?
I don't know, I miss all the talk about Prague. It is so much more fun to say Prague. And only one syllable to worry about.
@Transuranic: How do the English say it? Maybe the Brits pronounce it that way, and because many Germans learn British pronunciation in high school, they also do the first syllable thing?
@Ha Ha Sound: Yeah, Berlin is so last year (more like 2002, really), but that's a lot closer to now than whatever year New York began the rapid descent into suckitude. You take what you can get. Especially if it comes with little rolls that have sunflower seeds on them.
the photo is much more interesting than the post. but i like tits so don't hold it against me.
zoo station baby
The morning will come when the world is mine.
Tomorrow belongs to me.
Fuck it, why not. I'll bite. Better than New Haven
@Arthur Phillips: They're still talking about it in Budapest.
Oh, please. In Helsinki...
@Transuranic: If they do, my guess is they're focusing on producing the hard American rrrr so the first syllable sounds as if it's being emphasized. Or they're cold.
Up next: The Underminer goes to Qom
@Gayatrispivak: Oh no... you too?
(I'm afraid this post showed me how annoying I must be. But what the hell, Berlin is fucking awesome. And a friend of mine, coming home from a club on New Year's at 11 am, had dwarves in wheelchairs. Seriously. To say nothing of the random naked people.)
I'm waiting until Bucharest takes over the Prague/Berlin torch. Unfortunately, that was a city that really was destroyed.
I hear Erlangen is the Minneapolis to Berlin's Saint Paul.
@SylviaPlathWasFramed: and Indianapolis is the New York of Indiana!
I am fond of Antwerp.
I also want to add that this post made me go out and get the Underminer from the library and read it all in one go this evening, and I am now miserable and suicidal. And, you know, amused, but in a miserable and suicidal kind of way. Thank you, Mike.
How vile not to know it's spelled "Weill." But thanks for the photo of Ute Lemper.
[www.amazon.com]
Click on:
9. Aufstieg und Fall der Stadt Mahagonny - Alabama-Song
@Arundel:
Love is colder than Death, but I suspect Berlin beats them both.
They sentenced me to 20 years of boredom
For trying to change the system from within
I'm coming now, I'm coming to reward them
First, we take Manhattan
Then we take Berlin
Is everything in black and white in BERLIN? That's how I imagine it.
@Seeräuber Jenny: Berlin - and I only know this secondhad - is very warm and pleasant for most of the year. Much nicer than NYC.
"Es war das schoenste an die Welt"
The Berlin scene decamped for Tallinn, like, AGES ago.
Haff you kum vor ze Scheisse wideo?
Speaking of Ute (Lemper), she's been hosting the first hour of Evening Music on WNYC (93.9FM) this week, playing Weill songs and old Brecht recordings, and telling fascinating stories. I guess tonight's the last night.
I thought at least my suffering was unique.
I did the BER-lin thing in 2004. Can't believe it's still going on, or even generating a story. Twat-rot is everywhere, but let's try and leave Europe alone. Cuz, you know, it's actually cool and it's way better to keep the ass clowns encaged here anyway.
@Mediahohoho: Ah, you loved me as a loser, but now you're afraid that I just might win.
Three words of riposte: German hip hop.
@tracybluth:
Now ya tell me.
@davidbaton:
Brandylachen waren, wo man saß,
auf dem Tanzboden wuchs das Gras
und der rote Mond schien durch das Dach....
[www.basquepoetry.net]
@GayatriSpivak:
Thanks. I Am [Not] a Camera and apparently I am [Not] a Thermometer, Either. :-)
[en.wikipedia.org]
@LolCait:
Knew that sounded familiar, hey, big literary Spender:
[books.google.com]
@LolCait:
New that sounded familiar, hey, big literary Spender:
[books.google.com]
Ja ja, mach schnell mit der art things, huh? I must get back to Dancecentrum in Stuttgart in time to see Kraftwerk.
@square_state: Exaclty. BERLIN was in, like, SO long ago. Things have gone round so far that I think New York might be IT again.
Only because of the SATC movie though.
@tracybluth:
Thank you! She started this segment with one of my favorite songs, Jacques Brel's "Jacky."
Beau beau beau et con à la fois.
[www.wnyc.org]
i was there in may and seriously; i saw a cello quartet dressed in black and white masks playing "smells like teen spirit" with breakdancers poppin and locking on stage japanese tourists filming. their name? cello mania. mike meyers might as well have been dancing.
I have a huge bias against Berlin, for more or less no reason, because in the on-going war between Bayern and the rest of Deutschland, I chose Bayern. And, just objectively speaking, Munich is a billion times awesomer than Berlin.
@Transuranic: Maybe they're trying to make sure they don't accidentally say "donunt." A German friend just told me that when Kennedy proclaimed "ich bin ein berliner" his pronunciation of "berliner" made it sound, to the German ear, more like he was saying "I am a donunt." That could lead people to think that how you say "Berlin" in English is different from how you say it in German, and so they're trying to "speak English properly" by not speaking like Germans.
Brits also pronounce it Ber-LIN. Just like the Yankedelic cousins. The reason the locals über-stress the first syllable is becuase of the Irish capital: DUB-lin. So the Germans think there's a rule there. And y'know what? If the Germans don't have a rule or a system to guide them, they go into meltdown.