Now Hear This?! A Tale of Three Cities.

Tonight 22h berlin time, 9pm london time live and direct
on http://www.reboot.fm

Now Hear This! Paula Varjack invites the creators and contributors of the Berlin chapter of an exciting new literary journal: Tale of Three.
www.taleofthree.com

With their first issue on the horizon, these cosmopolitan creatives ware also about to launch their first live event, where stories *donated* from the public will become inspiration for prose, poems or art.

GIVE STORIES // FRIDAY, 25.02.11 // KAUFBAR,

Gärtnerstraße 4 // 17.00 – 21.00--------------------------------

A Tale of Three Cities is the first printed arts journal to get down on its knees and kiss the ground before Europe's golden triangle: London, Paris and Berlin.

Launching in early 2011, A Tale of Three Cities will showcase work from the best emerging – and also more established – writers and artists in each city. It will only exist in real, touchable, paper copy. Good content should be matched not only with good design, but high quality paper, ink, printing and binding. A poem or photo is not the same on a computer screen. Divided into a London section, Paris section and then Berlin section, the journal will be released simultaneously in galleries, boutiques and bookshops across all three cities.

Ralph & Ruth (Berlin editors)

Originally a Sarf Londoner (leafy Dulwich actually), Ralph currently lives in Mitte with a stupendous view of the Fernsehturm and Adonis, the kebab shop. He spends his money on ties, flowers and aftershave; he's probably spilt white wine on you in a club. A collection of his short stories appeared in Ganymede Magazine, a New York based arts journal, others were published by the Fun and Beautiful Journal last year and his story Assassins was published in Litro's December issue.

Ruth relocated to Mehringdamm for the antiques, falafel, and to avoid life in a friend's warehouse in North London. She has also lived in Paris, but feared that a return would put her in AA. She spends her days in Berlin pretending that she is Sally Bowles and drinking soy coffee. Currently a journalist with Berlin-based news site, The Local, she has also been published by The Mule, Index on Censorship and The Riveter. Most importantly for TOT, she is a full-time lomography nerd.

Listen in tonight to hear a taster of the first issue's contents featuring readings from the following contributors..

Helena Rosebery

Switzerland was too sterile for this Swauzzie, and she thought freezing her tits off in Europe was better than baking them on a beach in Sydney. Satchel overflowing, she haunts East-side candlelit cafes, scribbling lousy prose and loading up on free biscuits. Helena uses her 'If there was…' project as an excuse to strike up conversations with beautiful strangers. A blog? Of course she's got a blog.

Inna Selipanov

Inna has lived in a number of places – all of which feel a bit like home, along with other places she has never lived in nor visited. She is fluent in English, Russian and German, and can't remember which one is her native. When she's not working on her collection of short stories, she's busy playing mom and wife to the cutest people one can possibly envision, objectively-speaking. Blog? Why yes, thanks for asking.

Kev Alson

Possibly the most mysterious expat in Berlin; internet searches just throw up dead ends and confusion. He writes the lives and deaths of hipsters and Bobos (probably your friends). If anyone knows him, get in touch...

Closing the show, and complimenting all the literary wonderfulness, a music especially chosen by the Berlin Tale of Three team: Benjamin Pates.

Benjamin Pates

Benjamin aspires to resemble a 19th century French composer and even writes some music for cello too. He can be found touting an antique tripod between Kreuzberg cafes, speaking more Turkish than German, and sneaking shots of discarded high-heels and dirty bathtubs. He's the one on the U7 with Shostakovich shrieking from dangling earphones and staring at you in the reflection. Blog blog blog.

no requests...

No I don’t have any minimal… No sorry no techno…No , no Madonna. Sorry… No I don’t have… No I don’t have…Ahhh I wish I did.. I really like her but I don’t have any of her tracks with me. Sorry… sorry.

I've given up. I've reached the point in the evening when I have dropped all pretense, of being cool.

I am not a dj after all, and the software I’m using is really just a slight advancement on i-tunes, and it’s a house party so…

F*** it. It’s time.

It’s time to dive straight into… unapologetically mainstream pop music.

Rhianna, Justin Timberlake, Sugacubes, Beyonce...

Bring it. I don’t’ care anymore.

And then comes this one girl. This blonde girl with short hair, her eyes staring past me to my laptop. Her hands practically straying to the keyboard, without so much of a hello in my direction. Her first words to me are

Where is the music?

Sorry?

How can I see it? your music? Where is it?

I show her where the archive of tracks is kept. She’s distracted for a second. I light my cigarette. Her expression changes. She’s found something she likes.

Ratatat. You like ratatat!!!

Ah musical bonding. Our friendship is cemented...

I love ratatat. I saw them at maria last year.

Does she want to hear something by them?

No.

Oh.. ok.

She smiles and walks off. I’m not sure what happened. But it makes me feel very self conscious about playing all this pop. Maybe i should be playing something, something, something... Balkan? Or maybe some electro swing? Or maybe...?

But scrolling through my msuic I stop when I see her that blonde girl...dancing. Hands in the air totally into it, singing along and dancing. And I'm baffled because of the tune that is now playing...

Brittany spears - toxic!!!!

This is what she wanted? Maybe there is some kind of science to these things but, Now I really don’t understand.

Anyways how am I to know? I am not a dj after all.

overheard in the ryan nash smoking room...

Seriously!….I had to carry him.

I smacked him hard !!!

(laughing)

Really! I didn’t know what to do! so I just kept drinking…

There is no midweek for me. I’m a pornstar baby.

I’m a rockstar and a pornstar…

No… No..

Not a rapstar.

I would never be a rapstar.

Rapstars don’t have taste.

Usually they have gold teeth gold chains and fat sneakers…

I don’t want that…

seriously…

Dining experience...

Wanting to do something different, or… unique, or that even more overrated adjective special … I make reservations for us, to go to a gourmet pop-up restaurant .

When the day of our booking comes, we walk into what used to be a vault I think?

And more than anything… I am.. embarrassed.

Embarrassed by the product placement of 4x4’s and Smeg refrigerators. Embarrassed by the crowd, the prevalence of suits, everyone in the queue, the act of queuing itself.

Waiting for our first course, we our sat side by side at a ridiculously long table.

He tells me how it reminds him of being at a wedding and then, details to me, just how much he hates weddings.

And then I, and then all I wanted, was to disappear under that long table, and into the floor.

best left untitled..

What if one day I wouldn’t be able to read anymore? I don’t mean decipher words from combinations of letters, I’m sure I could always make out signage and stories on websites.

No I mean, what if my restlessness became so great that I could never settle into the peace of reading a book again? When a book would be opened, only for its text to blur into meaninglessness?...

I bought flowers today . Tulips… red.

I set them on the table in my kitchen. My flat has a funny layout because my neighbor has to pass by my kitchen window and then my bedroom window to get to the hallway.

He’s older, german, polite, friendly. He never complains of noise, or of any of the random people he must have noticed coming in and out of my flat or sitting in my kitchen.

I like to think he respects my privacy, or better yet, just isn’t interested. But then, what if tomorrow, when he passes my kitchen, seeing those tulips, will he wonder, who bought them? (I would) Or will he know, from having lived next to me these three years, that I am the kind of girl who buys herself flowers? Maybe he might have noticed in the first year, that I had different flowers every week. And even if some of them had been bought by someone else (none of them had), no lover would buy you flowers every week. Or would they?

I worked for a man once who bought his wife red roses every Monday. He set a weekly reminder to buy them in his blackberry. Every week with a card, with the same message.

I can't remember what it said. But it definitely ended with I love you... and..? I wondered if she appreciated it, or if it just became a routine like anything can become.

On Mondays he sends me roses, red, cut slanted at the stems…thornless.

And what if someone did buy me flowers every week? But what if it happened when that restlessness settled in. What if I met someone who bought me flowers every week precisely at the time I forgot how to read, and then I would never know, what he or she wrote, on the card attached.

man's best friend?

I can’t forget him, that man last night, at the Hermannplatz platform of the U7. He looked like a sheriff out of an old western, with a star shaped badge on his well worn jacket, and heavy boots . But instead of a cowboy hat, he wears a faded baseball cap, two dirty dreads snaking out the back. his beard is rough looking, jagged, it would sandpaper your skin off if you dared to touch it. But you wouldn’t dare, not just because of his countenance, but the company he kept.

Walking with him is an aging Doberman, mouth caged in a clunky muzzle. He looked miserable that dog, the saddest dog I may have ever seen. I suppose he would have seemed menacing otherwise. He was the size of small horse.

His owner, this urban sheriff, walked him with a heavy chain lead. Shook the chain forcefully, beat him against his neck as they walked the platform. The dog, unable to take it, began to limp. I wanted to cry out for the owner to stop.

I looked to the platform, so many onlookers, watching this pair.

All of us staring in that way you do when you ought to look away but can’t bring yourself to. Some more than others, disturbed by these actions that looked unwarranted, and cruel.

But then I have no idea of the backstory of that dog, the reasons for that muzzle.

I remember how one summer, for no reason whatsoever, my uncle’s dobermann, had turned violent on my aunt.

Very suddenly, without any provocation at all, the dog ripped a chunk of flesh from her thigh. With dogs like these, trained to attack, one never knows..

But walking into the train towards rudow, I find myself sitting along and across from this man and his dog. The chain lead is smashed into the dogs head once again, who stumbles a little, before crumpling onto the floor. He lays his head to the side, and his eyes look out into the distance.

And when I leave the train, I’m grateful for only needing to ride for one stop, and even more grateful, for not having to watch it anymore.

skint...aber...

I remember not long after living in Berlin, A friend once took me to rote rose. We’d just left a fairly glamorous party in mitte, and were looking for a local night cap in kreuzberg at five in the morning. It would be funny there. he said. I’m not even sure I really wanted to keep drinking. It would probably be more truthful to say I was avoiding going home.

When we walked in, there weren’t so many people. We sat at a table. He asked me what I wanted to drink, and looking at the grim decor and grimmer people, all I wanted was water.. Two boys were poised on the brink of fighting. An old woman on her own was staring hard at the nicotine stained walls. A man rambled to himself. Even the bar staff looked angry. I drank my tap water quickly and looked at my friend, who without a word, drained his drink . We left. We were silent walking the two blocks until we had to part ways. He said “ it can be funny there sometimes...”

Until something in my eyes made him trail off.

=======

When I first went with him to his new place, just past the boundaries of the up side of his up and coming district, I remember mentally marking the building, by its placement between a triad of the kind of tacky looking bars you would probably only suggest going to, if you were joking. On the corner opposite his was a bar named Korner (yes spelled with a cheeky k). Each time I passed it and the others, I thought of how we would most likely never venture in. Its like the kneipe next door to mine, the one I would like to check out, but intimidated by the midday alcoholics stumbling in, am never brave enough to dare.

Months later, for reasons I won’t explain, we are walking right into one of these very bars. A cheery blonde in a lame dress stamps my hand, London all over her accent. On we go into the heaving throng, Hipsters all of them. No one over the age of thirty. The music and conversationg at full volume. For the first half hour or so, all I can hear around me, is english.

He and I have both lived in Berlin for some time, before that we lived in London. Surveying our surroundings, trying to make sense of it all, our eyes meet and then almost silmultaneously we say “ this is like… Shoreditch?”

I overhear someeone say “ they have old people serving???”

The bar staff do look ancient. The joke more than anyone is on them. Most likely paid no more than a regular shift, but with a heavier workload. They are pushed by a less than patient crowd, continuing to ask for drinks they do not have, while most likely leaving no tips. The joke in fact, is possibly also over their head. But what is the joke?

A super trashy setting for young privileged decadence. A hipster party in a kneipe, in the middle of nowhere, with old bar staff! Fantasticaly ironic Isn’t it? Its like….

flash gentrification.

The bar, the area. gentrified for one night only! Don’t miss out!

So here’s what I’m wondering.

when did irony become such a cherished characteristic?

When did irony become so synonmous, with cool?

My old local in london, the dolphin, had much of a smiliar formula. Take an old grotty pub, much loved by locals who are actually from the area, and have the odd night with hip dj’s and their followers, to mash it all up. I did love it for this. But when I took friends there up from brighton, they kept saying it didn’t at all seem like my kind of pub,. I liked that, but I also worried that they had called my bluff.

Was the reality that there were only so much of real that I wanted.? Because if I really wanted east london authentic, why would I never go to the wetherspoons on the street across?

I’m not entirely sure, but as for this kneipe party we went to, all I can say is, it did end up being a brilliant night out. And there is no irony in that. So maybe the truth of it is, when the party is a great party, where it is, is of no relevance at all.