the bordello

The Bordello is one of my official favorite places in Los Angeles now. I went to see Miss C. of the Finches sing. She's such a beautiful songbird, and how can any man not instantly fall into an instant crush with her? They all do, even in Berlin they did.

Like many of my friends here, that's where we met. I was dirty and covered in paint and we were in this filthy but wonderful silkscreen print studio, and it was very cold and gray that year and I didn't even realize she was American and that much younger than me until we started talking. Appearances are deceiving! That was a really weird time, and we were thrown into the mix with lots of freaks from all sorts of countries and earnest Germans running the workshop with the loose happiness of part time kindergarden teachers.

That place is still going, run on good will and cheap rent by generous building owners. The whole street corner where it's at is one of those hot nightspots in Berlin that will stop being interesting in a few years, or maybe not. I'm not a horrible snob about these kinds of things, but there's definitely a sense of energy and accomplishment in many places and in other places there is not. That street corner is still going in Berlin long after much of Mitte has died. And it's still the kind of place where if you stand on a corner at four in the morning long enough with some guests from Brazil, a pack of French girls covered in mud will appear and start talking about falling off their bicycles and charm everyone into falling in love with them. It's not the kind of thing many people are looking for, but for those who want to live their life with a degree of magic, it's the kind of thing you treasure forever.

So lovely miss C, here and now in Los Angeles: There was a slight technical problem, and then she went into the most deadpan, hilarious little story about East Coast frat boys on a yacht diving through the innards of a dead whale.

We were in a booth with a glammed-up girl, and as the Bordello used to be, well, a bordello, the womblike hole encouraged us to talk about very racy and saucy topics. How many people would want to listen in on the things we say?

That place is just so feminine and pretty, although I can say that the corsets the waitresses wore were (for me) decidedly not so sexy. I would rather have women like in the paintings on the wall; heavy saucy women with dark hair and heavy make-up and low-cut white blouses.
I can only take one drink at a time; they had midori sours. Those were the only drinks I got used to, I used to order them all the time in Manhattan, but only one. They don't like cocktails so much in Berlin, although it's growing, especially with young yuppie girls.

K. commented that it was astounding how little light all the red chadeliers gave off. I love seeing people in the dark. As I've said before, people look better in the dark, clothed. On the beach and in clothes too revealing, it's lacking in mystery.

All that on the surface, that's what people catch when they're in Los Angeles. That's why you have hole up in the dark here for a few months until you discover all these little secrets: recording studios with basketball courts and old-fashioned microphones and tucked-away parties where everyone looks like they come from Europe and massive tiki bars in the middle of suburbialand full of flourescent fish tanks. That's when it's David Lynchland.