In the nineties, two Bunker regulars, Michael Teufele and Norbert Thormann, began throwing their own gay sex parties, called Snax, at various sites around the city. Around 1999, they opened a dance club in a train-repair depot in Friedrichshain, which they called Ostgut. It was essentially a gay club devoted to techno music, but it was mixed-friendly—open to women and straight men. Two years later, they started Panorama Bar, a separate space upstairs, which was straighter, and played house music and lighter techno. Downstairs were the burly, bare-chested men in camo pants and leather boots. Upstairs you had all kinds. The techno clubs of Mitte didn’t yet rely so much on the gay scene, and the gay clubs were less attentive to the quality of the music. Ostgut was a marriage of the two, and as such created something new—a gay club with mainstream appeal. It became a kind of distillation of the nineties scene. In many respects, Berlin’s queer culture is the city’s most essential and distinguishing element—the coagulant and the zest. It was thus in the twenties and in pre-1989 West Berlin, and remains so today. The clubs are its public face. No one in Berlin is made nervous or embarrassed by the idea of going to a gay club.
Ostgut closed in 2003, and the building was torn down to make way for a sports arena. A year later, Teufele and Thormann opened Berghain. Not much is known about them. Thormann is a former fashion photographer. They like ballet. They never give interviews or pose for pictures, in part because they value their privacy and in part because of a kind of underground code of silence, exile, and cunning—a combination, perhaps, of vestigial Stasi-era paranoia, punkish disdain for the media, and an embrace of the techno-culture virtue of anonymity. Whatever the case, it has added to the club’s mystique, and so one could understand their not wanting to change. By all accounts, they make a lot of money. It is remarkable, in a high-turnover town, that the place has been able to sustain the spell for so long.
People strain to explain Berghain’s appeal. The effort is widely deemed futile (to say nothing of blasphemous). This may be a by-product of psychotropic drugs and the ineffability of chemical transcendence. Tales of nights out are like other people’s recounted dreams.
You are not allowed to take photographs inside the club. If you so much as hold a smartphone up, you will likely be thrown out. The philosophy is that whatever happens here is for the moment and doesn’t exist outside of that moment or outside the club—a righteous stand, perhaps, in a social-media world. There aren’t any mirrors. The European press for years has obsessed over the difficulty of getting in. Blogs, and even apps, have tried to decode it: “Don’t look too glamorous; look queer; don’t act like a tourist; don’t look too young; don’t show up as a group of straight men or women; dress eccentrically; go alone.” Don’t speak English, don’t stand out, don’t act drunk or tweaked. The abiding idea seems to be don’t be a jerk.
No one dances to be watched. Fighting and aggression aren’t tolerated. Drug use must be discreet. If you’re wasted, they’ll kick you out. Generally, though, the security presence is subtle. Henke, the composer, told me, “There are lots of things you can do there, but there are things that you are not obliged to do. You don’t go to a fetish party and think, Maybe I’ll just have a drink and listen to some music. At Berghain, the architecture, and the social architecture, doesn’t force me into a ritual human behavior.”
I talked to a promoter who had had a lot of trouble getting into Berghain. Maybe he was too young. (“Older is better,” he said. “Kids are idiots.”) He was afraid of being quoted by name, because of the power that the Berghain owners have in Berlin. Playing there is such a privilege—not only for professional reputation but also for the sheer pleasure of playing extra-long sets in a wild and tasteful place—that no one wants to be subject to a Hausverbot. “A huge ingredient in their secret sauce is control,” he said. Henke, who knows the owners well, said, “They’re still not sure how to handle how this place became so popular.”
One way they’d handled it was by keeping journalists and other squares like me out. But my techno rabbi had got me onto the guest list of a DJ.
On wide, empty streets, I rehearsed my pidgin-Deutsch greeting—“Ich bin auf der Hausliste”—and walked past superstores that had sprung up in recent years on vacant lots. Before long, I fell in with a few other cloaked figures and came upon a line of taxis, then followed a muddy path along a metal grate toward the old power station, an industrial-deco block of stone and concrete. Berghain. Through the windows you could hear the kick drum and see flashing colored lights. The line wasn’t long: a few dozen bundled and murmuring souls. I circumvented it, as instructed, and waited by the entrance while the bouncer, a big square-jawed crewcut man in an overcoat, dealt with some supplicants. He was in intense but quiet conversation, as though about a medical condition, with two young men with the sides of their heads shaved. Turks, perhaps.
“In spite of this, we say no because we can say no,” he told them. “It’s just bad luck.”
For some reason, they were holding out their passports, open to their photos. “Please,” one said. “Please,” the other said.
“You’re not getting in,” the bouncer said gently. He ignored the passports and turned his back. They looked crestfallen. Next up was a group of five British men, probably in their early thirties, with a City of London polish about them. The bouncer explained that there wouldn’t be a place inside for them tonight, and one of them said something cheeky about Berlin being a backwater. The bouncer shrugged.
“I’m just joking,” the Brit said.
“I got it,” the bouncer said. He waited for them to go away and then he turned to face me.
“Ich bin . . .” The bouncer disappeared inside. I’d been told that the list was no guarantee. I also knew that they didn’t want me in their club. (“You’re an American,” I’d been told, “and to them that makes you a puritan.”) After a moment, he came back out with two other bouncers. They looked me up and down, then motioned me in. Another man patted me down. Nearby, Sven Marquardt, the infamously intimidating tattooed bouncer, was talking and laughing with a group. He didn’t look so scary, at least compared with the others. At a ticket window, a man stamped my wrist and said, “See? Easy.”
Through a door was a big concrete hall. Coat check: the operation was brisk. For a chit, you got a dog tag to wear around your neck, so you wouldn’t lose it. I tried some doors and found them to be locked, and realized that Berghain proper wasn’t open until the following night. Tonight was just Panorama Bar, an evening billed as “Get Perlonized!,” a celebration of the music of Perlon, a small but beloved Berlin techno and house record label. I walked up some side stairs decorated with giant photo portraits of the resident DJs, who were all, it seemed, forbiddingly handsome, and, at a small bar half hidden behind a grate, ordered a Club-Mate—an herbal energy drink—into which, as is the custom, I poured a shot of vodka, and then went Carrawaying around.
A seasoned crowd: diverse in age, appearance, sexual preference, condition of mind. The vibe was laid-back, the look disheveled, wild-eyed, attractive, louche. Bedhead, shaved head—intentional hair. Dark clothing, layers, leather, natural fibers, boots, scarves, piercings. The smell of tobacco and weed and sweat. Groups lounged on benches and in comfy chairs and on the floor. The bathrooms were buzzing with cokey conversation. Couples entered hand in hand and found stalls. While using one for its intended purpose, I heard laughter to one side and rustling to the other, and felt the embarrassment of my puritanical roots. The main bar, three-sided and occupying the back half of the main space, was cleverly lit, with attentive bartenders and no risk of being overlooked. The prices were low. I walked behind the bar area, along a dark corridor of cubbies in which people were fooling around or spacing out, and tacked back toward the DJ, who was working at the front of the room. The DJ table hung from the ceiling on chains. You couldn’t get very close, but there was space along the wall, where the floor was strewn with empty bottles—beer, water, Club-Mate—which people generally just toss on the floor. Now
and then, a man came through with a crate and unobtrusively gathered some up, but as the night wore on the floor pooled up with broken glass—Berghain jetsam. The sound was loud and yet clean enough to allow conversation. A friend had told me, with regard to the evolution of minimal techno, “If you amplify it really loud, you need less music.”
Nothing to photograph here. I stayed until 7 a.m.
Saturday night, or really Sunday morning, is Klubnacht at Berghain. I was back at 3 a.m., this time in the main club, approaching peak tourist hour. Past the coat check, there was a giant concrete atrium, pretty much empty, with a bar in the corner. A few glass bottles rained down from above and shattered at my feet. A steel staircase led up to a big dance floor surrounded by various bars and nooks. The left side of the dance floor was dominated by muscular men, many shirtless, and a few doing a dance that I’d heard called, jokingly, Pressing the Dwarf. The straight crowd was to the right, but it seemed that most were up at Panorama Bar. Here and there were concrete plinths, upon which pretty people danced. Groups lounged on beds hanging from chains, gently swinging back and forth.
The dark rooms were around somewhere, but I didn’t go looking for them. Perhaps I’d wait for the boar hunter. Here and there stuff was going on, in plainish sight, yet I saw little to upset or titillate. The Caligula mystique, the stories of men defecating on each other or using frozen turds as dildos, seemed disproportionate. No one offered me so much as a glance, to say nothing of an Icy Mike. I had a shot of Jägermeister and an espresso and went out onto the dance floor and stood in front of one of the speakers. There were six of them, each about the size of a Trabant. The sound was revelatory, the deep bass tones like a drug. A DJ named Mathew Jonson, from Vancouver, had taken over the booth for an improvisational turn with two others, who performed under the name Minilogue. The three men hunched over laptops and mixers as though herding tiny animals with their hands. Jonson had a curly mop of hair and a beard, and looked like some wild ape-man of electronica. The music was churning, hypnotic, almost psychedelic, and I abandoned myself to it.
The hours passed. During a weekend, the clubbers come and go, as if to a tidal rhythm. A friend had likened the scene to a coral reef: various schools of multicolored fish, stubborn crustaceans, the occasional ray or eel gliding by, swimming in an ocean of techno. In the eddies, there were people who, though all but motionless, seemed caught up in something intense—you could see it in their eyes. “You are touched by the different frequencies,” the DJ Ricardo Villalobos says in Feiern. “You start to think about your childhood.” Transcendence and transgression lurked just out of sight.
At one point, I went up to Panorama Bar, where a DJ from Windsor, Ontario, was playing a set of Chicago house and Detroit techno. Her name was Heidi—Heidi Van den Amstel. She had curly peroxided hair, a white T-shirt, tattoos on her arms, and leather pants. She’d arrived from London shortly before her set, amid flight delays across Europe—an entire continent of revelers vexed by a disruption to the techno supply chain. She was part of the generation of Windsorites who’d fallen hard for the dance music across the river, in Detroit. She moved to Europe a dozen years ago, living in London and Berlin. This was the first time she had played Panorama Bar in almost four years. She had been nervous, but now she was in the thick of it, dancing and tossing her hair as she worked the mixing console. She flipped through a binder of CDs and manipulated knobs, her pinkie out, as though she were drinking tea. Her agent brought her a shot of tequila, which she chased with a lemon wedge, and she shuddered. A voice in the music intoned, as though from a Zeitmaschine, “Can you feel it acid house acid house I was there.” People were jammed up in front of her dancing, some with Avalon Ballroom abandon. “I want you, I need you.” This was fun music, joyous music, not the austere minimal techno of downstairs, or the jazzy techno of Jonson and Minilogue, or the hardcore techno that would inspire one to press the dwarf. The bass rattled the empty tin record bins behind the DJ. I sent a text to the boar hunter, wondering if he was around. He replied, “KitKatClub.”
After a few hours, Heidi stretched her back and leaned into the climax of her set. Downstairs, the techno—and the crowd—had turned hard. Upstairs, the dingy gray light of another Baltic morning leaked past the edges of the louvered shutters at the windows. Soon the shades would flash open in synch with the music, to astonish the congregation with the insult of daylight.
Two DJs who go by the name Bicep took over. Heidi checked her face in her compact, gave herself over to the adulation of the dancers down in front, and then, after a moment, made her way to the bar with her boyfriend and her agent. I joined them for tequila shots and beers. Breakfast in Berlin. This went on for a while. Heidi had had a marvelous time—too much for words, really—but she didn’t want to talk about Berghain. She was afraid that if she did, she’d never get to play there again.
TONY PERROTTET
Made in China
FROM The Wall Street Journal Magazine
ON A RARE clear day, Grace Vineyard, 310 miles southwest of Beijing, might be mistaken for a winery in Tuscany. The balcony of the Italianate mansion overlooks lush rows of grapevines stretching to the horizon, where low mountains hover in the haze. Picnic tables sit scattered in a garden beneath slender trees that rustle in the dry wind. But take a stroll outside the winery gates, and you instantly step into the heart of provincial China. The unpaved lanes lead to farming villages whose crumbling facades are daubed with old Communist Party slogans and hung with tattered red flags. The motorbikes rattling past are beaten-up relics from Mao’s day; the grape pickers moving through the fields wear traditional broad peasant hats. Beyond them sit the half-forgotten byways of Shanxi Province, a region renowned in the Imperial era as a center of trade and banking but more notorious in recent decades for its polluted cities devoted to the coal industry. Only a short drive away lie remnants of China’s ancient glory, such as the enormous Chang Family Manor, once the luxurious abode of tea merchants, its interior lined with exquisitely carved wood.
Grace Vineyard is focused more on China’s future. In the elegant dining room adorned with contemporary artwork, a small army of servers glides around me. While the kitchen prepares a banquet of delectable Shanxi treats, including scissor-cut noodles, sautéed river fish, and fried bing pastries, a fastidious wine steward creeps up at regular intervals to refill my glass with Grace’s flagship Cabernet blend, the rich and velvety 2008 Chairman’s Reserve, rated 85 by Robert Parker’s website for its subtle blackberry flavors and hints of bay leaf, pepper, and cedar.
Grace is at the forefront of one of China’s more improbable trends, as the most successful of a new wave of boutique wineries. Most have cropped up in the dry terrain of Ningxia in the north. But winemakers are also venturing into China’s more varied landscapes, laying vines from the deserts of the old Silk Road to the foothills of the Himalayas. There are now around 400 wineries in the country. Wine consultants from France, Greece, California, and Australia are becoming as common as foreign IT experts in Shanghai, and the local product is being marketed not only to expats but to an increasingly sophisticated Chinese clientele.
The results are beginning to startle critics. In 2011, the Cabernet blend Jia Bei Lan, from the Helan Quingxue vineyard, became the first Chinese wine to take the prestigious international trophy at the Decanter World Wine Awards (judges praised its “supple, graceful and ripe” flavors and its “excellent length and four-square tannins”), and in 2011, four Chinese reds, led by Grace’s Chairman’s Reserve, beat French Bordeaux in a blind taste test in Beijing with international judges. Although some cried foul—wines had to be under $100, including the 48 percent mainland tax on imported wines—more vocal Chinese patriots hailed the result as heralding the arrival of an industry, evoking the famous blind tasting in 1976 when California wines outshone the Gauls for the first time.
As they advance, China’s boutique-wine pioneers may also help upend one of the many myths about the country. The conventional wisdom—or cli
ché—is that China can reproduce Western manufacturing or technology overnight, but European artisanal culinary delicacies that have evolved over generations are all but impossible to replicate. And yet, even apart from wine, there are dozens of small producers in China who are now attempting to do just that, with surprising success. Truffles, burrata cheese, prosciutto, feta, Roquefort, baguettes, foie gras—almost every Western gourmet item has been tackled by Chinese entrepreneurs for a new audience of adventurous diners. The Temple Restaurant Beijing, a contemporary enclave that is part of a 600-year-old temple near the Forbidden City, offers excellent French-style cheeses crafted by Le Fromager de Pekin, founded by a local producer named Liu Yang. His specialties include Beijing Blue and Beijing Gray, whose consistency falls between a Camembert and Saint Marcellin. At Sir Elly’s Restaurant at the five-star Peninsula Shanghai, if you order the selection of caviars, three will be Chinese. For a decade already, a Chinese caviar industry in the rivers bordering Russia has been winning accolades and is exporting to the U.S. and Europe.
The main hurdle is convincing consumers to give Chinese products a chance—a problem that is particularly acute with wine. An affinity for grape wine seems culturally far removed from the Middle Kingdom. For some 4,000 years, the Chinese have preferred grain-based wine (typically rice), a dark, fortified brew that often resembles dry sherry. (It became a state monopoly under the ancient Tang dynasty, when the government ran taverns that doubled as brothels, featuring female musicians outside to lure customers.) And like many uninformed outsiders, when I was first offered a glass of Chinese grape wine in Shanghai’s spectacular restaurant M on the Bund, I thought it was a practical joke. The idea tends to provoke remarks about toxic side effects—losing taste buds, for example, or even the sight in one eye. “Five years ago, you might have been right,” the owner, Michelle Garnaut, says, handing me a glass of Grace’s 2010 Chardonnay as we stand on the balcony facing the skyscrapers of Pudong. The first sip is a surprise—crisp and bright, with subtle nectarine flavors.
The Best American Travel Writing 2015 Page 27