berlin

When the others were picked up and walked home by friends or fathers or best friend__ sisters,I was the kid in a grey hoodie, walking with the poets, the singers, the thinkers, and I was not alone.

There were days when I still put on make up in case you__ come back,but I wear the same clothes and shower in the rainand eat when I can and sleep when I can,which is rare and not often,so if you__ see me nowon these streetswhere I once imagined walking with youyou__ have a hard time recognising me.I takes a lot to run away.

Nobody had forgotten anything here. In Berlin, you had to wrestle with the past, you had to build on the ruins, inside them. It wasn't like America where we scraped the earth clean, thinking we could start again every time.

Cutting my roots and leaving my home and family when I was 18 years old forced me to build my home in other things, like my music, stories and my journey. The last years I have more or less constantly been on my way, on the road, always leaving and never arriving, which also means leaving people. I__e loved and lost and I have regrets and I miss and no matter how many times you leave, start over, achieve success or travel places it__ other people that matter. People, friends, family, lovers, strangers _ they will forever stay with you, even if only through memory. I__e grown to appreciate people to the deepest core and I__ trying to learn how to tell people what I want to tell them when I have the chance, before it__ too late. _

Many things in this period have been hard to bear, or hard to take seriously. My own profession went into a protracted swoon during the Reagan-Bush-Thatcher decade, and shows scant sign of recovering a critical faculty__r indeed any faculty whatever, unless it is one of induced enthusiasm for a plausible consensus President. (We shall see whether it counts as progress for the same parrots to learn a new word.) And my own cohort, the left, shared in the general dispiriting move towards apolitical, atonal postmodernism. Regarding something magnificent, like the long-overdue and still endangered South African revolution (a jagged fit in the supposedly smooth pattern of axiomatic progress), one could see that Ariadne__ thread had a robust reddish tinge, and that potential citizens had not all deconstructed themselves into Xhosa, Zulu, Cape Coloured or __urocentric_; had in other words resisted the sectarian lesson that the masters of apartheid tried to teach them. Elsewhere, though, it seemed all at once as if competitive solipsism was the signifier of the __adical_; a stress on the salience not even of the individual, but of the trait, and from that atomization into the lump of the category. Surely one thing to be learned from the lapsed totalitarian system was the unwholesome relationship between the cult of the masses and the adoration of the supreme personality. Yet introspective voyaging seemed to coexist with dull group-think wherever one peered about among the formerly __ommitt

Nothing much bothered you for a while and you kept walking like a silhouette through this town, saying hi__ and goodbyes, acting polite at all times. But there is no fire in your heart; you are not very concerned.

It__ the beating of my heart. The way I lie awake, playing with shadows slowly climbing up my wall. The gentle moonlight slipping through my window and the sound of a lonely car somewhere far away, where I long to be too, I think. It__ the way I thought my restless wandering was over, that I__ found whatever I thought I had found, or wanted, or needed, and I started to collect my belongings. Build a home. Safe behind the comfort of these four walls and a closed door. Because as much as I tried or pretended or imagined myself as a part of all the people out there,I was still the one locking the door every night.Turning off the phone and blowing out the candles so no one knew I was home. __ause I was never really well around the expectations of my personalityand I wanted to keep to myself. and because I haven__ been very impressed lately. By people, or places.Or the way someone said he loved me and then slowly changed his mind.

Berlin is all about volatility. Its identity is based not on stability but on change.

The fall of the Berlin Wall makes for nice pictures. But it all started in the shipyards.

I had been involved in U.S. intelligence in Berlin, Germany, while in the military and had worked with a contact with the Central Intelligence Agency office there.

I was always drawn to Broadway musicals, and obviously composers like Gershwin, Rodgers, Berlin and Porter were writing music that I found wildly impressive.

I woke up early and took the first train to take me away from the city. The noise and all its people. I was alone on the train and had no idea where I was going, and that__ why I went there. Two hours later we arrived in a small town, one of those towns with one single coffee shop and where everyone knows each other__ name. I walked for a while until I found the water, the most peaceful place I know. There I sat and stayed the whole day, with nothing and everything on my mind, cleaning my head. Silence, I learned, is some times the most beautiful sound.

My darlings! You can hardly expect an aged crone like me to mar such a lovely event. No, I shall remain here and knit shadows. Now go forth and shine bravely, and think of nothing but love.

Berlinerinnen also continue to reinvent Berlin fashion. Women like Claudia Skoda, c.neeon (Clara Kraetsch and Doreen Schultz), Stadtkluft (Claudine Brignot of urbanspeed and Sandra Siewert of s.wert) and Natascha Loch carry on the tradition of Berliner Chic and carry its meanings into today's fashion. Berlinerinnen will always be ready to wear: the women who live in the city, are photographed in its streets, wear local brands and give Berlin fashion its reputation as exigeant and schraeg. Without all of these women, there would be no Berliner Chic, and so it is to them that this project is dedicated.

6 months, 2 weeks, 4 days,and I still don__ know which month it was thenor what day it is now.Blurred out linesfrom hangovers to coffeeAnother vagabond lost to love.4am alone and on my way.These are my finest moments.I scrub my skinto rid me from youand I still don__ know why I cried.It was just something in the way you took my heart and rearranged my insides and I couldn__ recognise the emptiness you left me with when you were done. Maybe you thought my insides would fit better this way, look better this way, to you and us and all the rest.But then you must have changed your mindor made a wrongbecause why did youleave?6 months, 2 weeks, 4 days,and I still don__ know which month it was thenor what day it is now.I replace cafés with crowded bars and empty roads with broken bottlesand this town is healing me slowly but still not slow or fast enough because there__ no right way to do this.There is no right way to do this.There is no right way to do this.

If we lose sight of pleasures and luxuries that intoxicate the senses in the most sensuous and beautiful and simplest of ways, then we`ve lost a lot.

There is something about the very idea of a city which is central to the understanding of a planet like Earth, and particularly the understanding of that part of the then-existing group-civilization which called itself the West. That idea, to my mind, met its materialist apotheosis in Berlin at the time of the

Hundreds of ladybugs had taken shelter from the winter in the crevices of the decayed windows. From there, they broke into the apartment in commando squads. My joy at that first sighting of the ladybug spreading its lower winglets on the rim of the jam glass, flashing three spots of fortune, soon turned into something tragic and Greek, a bloodied slaughter. Like in Ajax, I had to pluck ladybugs from my toothbrush every evening and in the morning shake out my shirt that, overnight, was infested with too much luck, and at lunch, I'd fish kamikazee-ladybugs out of my soup bowl, their Etna's crater in the middle of the round kitchen table. When I shut my eyes and held the hose to my ear and heard the little crackle of tiny bodies sucked into the eye of the tornado, I couldn't remain neutral. Putting away the vacuum, I consoled myself with sentences of friends who, after a beer or three, like to repeat to me the axiom that sooner or later, living in the city, each person discovers himself to be the murder of his own happiness. They were genuine Berlin ladybugs, they'd occupied the windows illegally like my friends in apartments from which they were later evicted.