Last night I decided to go do the Kunstpark Ost thing alone. It was threatening rain when I got on the S-Bahn. Eventually we came to a standstill for some reason or other, waited like this for half and hour, and then started going backwards again towards Ottobrunn. Everyone seemed pretty hacked off about this, but honestly, the transit system is so reliable the other 95% of the time that it's wrong to complain.
I got there an hour later than I had planned but was still early; the party hadn't really begun yet. I payed 4.50 just to find out that one club totally wasn't scene. The music was cool--this is what had interested me from outside--but the place was one small room with about 20 people all standing around the edges not dancing or anything. In my initial disbelief at the lameness of the place I paced all around room looking for doors, staircases, trap doors, anything that would lead me into that crazy back room where everyone was getting down rather than standing straight up. I moodily had a beer and left as soon as I could.
Eventually I discovered where it's at (got two turntables and a microphone!). It was the Keller, which means "Cellar" in English. (Incidentally, it's also the last name of my mother's side of the family. Which is, also incidentally, of mostly German origin.) When I got there not a whole lot was going on, but the place was big and gave off cool vibes. For a while I sat at the bar and looked on as this guy with long headbanger hair and studded leather wrist cuffs thrashed about by himself. Except for him the dance floor was empty. As before, noncommital people clung to all the walls. Spectators.
I didn't have to wait long for a song I knew--STP's "Plush"--and then I was out there jamming with this guy. Pretty soon, some other guys joined in, and a hardcore girl who was to continue unfaded early into the morning made her appearance. This was only the beginning.
Maybe I should have said first off that the Keller plays alternative. Now, it is unclear to me exactly how one should dance to alternative; with hip-hop or techno there are well-established means of expressing yourself eurythmically, but with alternative this isn't the case. Unlike the former, alternative frequently has changes in rhythm, switches to double-time, to half-time, or even to sections during which there is no real discernible beat. Dancing to an alternative song you don't know can be perilous. By the end of the night I was comfortable and dancing to pretty much everything, but at first I would only dance to songs I knew. And the DJ wasn't helping me out much here by playing junk that neither I nor anyone else had actually heard.
So we had a little talk, and I told him that if we wanted to get this party started we needed to go back to some stuff everybody knew, Weezer's Blue, Green Day, Rage's Self-titled, etc. His idea of Weezer that everyone knew was "Island in the Sun" and this wasn't heavy enough for most of the people there. But the Rage, holy shit, the Rage...
It was a good thing he didn't play more than one Rage song back-to-back. The first one he put on, Know Your Enemy, illicited some beer bottle smashing right away. Total frenzy. Later we heard Wake Up, and around 4:00 am Killing in the Name, which killed me. It was the pinnacle of the whole outing for me, and after being in ultra-high-rabid-jumping-up-and-down-foaming-at-the-mouth mode for those euphoric 5 minutes 14 seconds I felt drained, and was ready to call it a night.
On a sidenote: met a cool freaky alternative girl from the south of Bavaria, and we may hang out again tonight at a different club. On another sidenote: I thought alternative was dead, but apparently it has just split into lots of little subgenres, the harder, newer of which I heard more and more of as the night went on. I didn't recognize a lot of those songs but people went absolutely crazy over some of them. Don't know yet if I'm down with the new sound.
Well after all this revelling there was the problem of getting home. I left the Keller at 4:00 am, and the next S-Bahn came at 5:46 am. I misread the signs and didn't notice that the 5:00 am one only ran on working days, so I had a lot of time to kill. Luckily for me I had my iPaq along with a bunch of Pocket books. I read Poe's "Fall of the House of Usher" while I waited.
Tonight it may all happen over again. My friend Eric arrives in Munich this evening and we're going to do whatever spontaneous things occur to us as suitable for the day and age. So I've got to lounge around and recover from last night. My neck is getting sore!
Posted by Alan at July 13, 2002 02:48 PM