Wednesday, 21:30. Kaffee Burger, Torstrasse 60.
Past the bar, in the back. Red-walled entry. Tall man on a stool.
"Vagina Jones is performing tonight?" I ask.
"Ja."
"Two tickets, please. How much is that? Wait, I have a student pass. Does that count for something? "
"Nee." He shakes his head. Sadly. "Five Euros each."
I turn to Katrinka. "Hope it's worth it."
"Oh, yes," says the tall man, now in English. "Star lineup." Then: "You're not German? I wouldn't have known."
"Ooh!" Katrinka nudges me. "Listen to that!"
I am alight in the dark. "If we kept talking, you would." But he's pretty much made my night.
Through the hall, another bar. Six round tables clumped. A band of four or five. Testing testing testing. Too much bass. African-American guy at the mike. Gray dred-nests. Anthony Baggette, practicing his "energized Jazzoetry" (Ex-Berliner, September 2007). Beside him a younger kid, white sweatsuit. Trying to hip-hop. Their pitches clash.
A grimace is caked to my face. I claw Katrinka's thigh. "We can leave anytime," I hiss.
She nods, bright-eyed. It is the look of one trying to make the best of something bad. "See the ammunition belt that guy is wearing?" She means Stevie Ray Vaughn's Doppelgänger. "It's full of harmonicas. Him I'd like to hear."
Sweatsuit gives a shout-out: "We just warmin' up!" Baggette busts more rhymes. The lines are mealy in his mouth.
"Where's Vagina Jones?" I say. No one here looks likely to "have worn fruit inside her clothes for a week just to see what happens" (Ex-Berliner, September 2007).
"You really want to see her, huh?"
The band suddenly disperses. The rap-poets too.
A chick trundles to the mike. Eggplant-shaped. Torn black tee. Child's xylophone on a stand before her. She dings a note. It hovers. Then another.
"Turn off the music!" someone calls. Old-fashioned jazz, piped-in overhead.
"Oh, yeah, can someone get that?"
No one does. She keeps dinging. Moans what must be a note. Another.
"We can leave anytime," I hiss again.
Katrinka won't turn her head. Too dangerous to meet the eyes. "Five minutes?" she says.
"One song."
Vagina stops. The stereo jazz dies. Then: "I'm Vagina Jones." Beneath her foot, a white plastic toy, perhaps a Star Wars landing platform. She treads; it blinks blue lights. "The screen," she says. Suddenly black-and-white couples, fifties-style, flash on the wall above her.
The xylophone hums. She intones. Her voice is a wide, dark tunnel. We slide inside, fall from one flat note to another.
The faces have turned to stackable blocks, bird beaks, eyeballs. Blackened shapes shift with every blink.
Within five minutes, the "song" peeters out ("Not that I heard a bridge," says Katrinka. Qualifying this more as momentary spelunk than musical interlude.) Copyright credits flicker on the wall. We whip our jackets from our seat-backs, weave quick through tables. I flip my jacket — arm-hole quest — and suddenly: Euros spill across the floor. A clang of coins. Katrinka and I gasp, giggle. Stumble to the exit.
We pass through the main bar. The band is gathered 'round a table. Vagina Jones can't be heard.
Out on the street. "I am so, so sorry," I tell Katrinka. This plan of mine, an evening of pure Berliner experimentalism…
She thinks it's funny. I am depressed.
This got a write up. This was a featured event in Ex-Berliner. At least fifteen people in that room. Calm. Cringe-less. Not going nowhere.
Is this Berlin? Dross so easily mistaken for gold?
Three weeks ago, I saw a play with girls from school: Agatha Christie's The Mouse Trap, in German. Berliner Kriminal Theater. Set walls swayed when so-called doors were closed. One actress knitted brows so tight she buried her eyes from start to finish. Another wore a skin-tight flowered top, circa 1995 (dramatic time period: Britain, 1950s). The cop delivered his lines back turned to us all.
The audience laughed. The audience clapped. At the end the audience even hooted.
"But of course, you think it's bad," said Alicia, of Barcelona. "You're from New York."
And before that San Francisco.
I know quality. I expect it.
"You know," says Katrinka, as we hike back home, "if you want to do your art, that's cool. But if you can't sing...why sing?" She sounds pained. Honey-dipped jazz vocalist that she is.
"Art?" I say. "You call that art?"
"It did feel genuine Berlin to me," she says. "Raw."
"Bad," I say.
Katrinka laughs. I do not.
It's not my fault. I am ruined.
hilarious and painful -- the downside to a city that has so much funding for the arts? perhaps the struggle of new york and even sf yields better fruit (not sure I can think about fruit now, after the reference above, without cringing)
Posted by: Julie | October 06, 2007 at 04:43 AM