Something I have learned is that I need downtime while travelling, which for me usually means reading or watching something. While I’m walking a million steps a day and being confused by unfamiliar customs and stressed by a language barrier and new road maps and even the high joys of new experiences and adventures, I need to recuperate with experiences that I can receive passively and don’t have to do anything to participate in. Here are the things I watched and read while travelling in Berlin.
One Last Stop by Casey McQuiston—After all the all the gay hockey romance (I have now read 5/6 of Rachel Reid’s Game Changers series and let’s just say Heated Rivalry was the right choice to make a TV show about. The other books are…fine) I was really curious about a queer romance with ladies in it. I mentioned this to some of the young people at the org where I volunteer and they were excited to recommend McQuiston’s novel to me. One Last Stop is about an awkward young woman named August who moves from New Orleans to Brooklyn for a third (fourth?) try at finishing college. Her single mom had really messed her up by spending her whole life investigating August’s uncle’s mysterious disappearance and August just wants to live a quiet life. Instead she immediately gets embroiled with her roommates—a psychic, a kooky artist, and an emotional recluse. There’s a dog that comes and goes inconsistently too, plus a drag queen next door. Then she falls in love with a girl on the subway who turns out to be a ghost…some type of spectre, anyway. The specifics are very confusing and there’s a moment towards the end where you can see the author sort of throw up her hands and admit she did not have a good plan for the ending. That part of was annoying but in truth, it didn’t matter that much—I liked this book. It had a tonne about community, and queer joy and solidarity, which is very much missing from the male/male romances I’ve read. Friendship is a big thing for McQuiston, as it is for me, and the party scenes were fun and epic. The attraction between the two leads was a realistic slow burn, and if the sex scenes—standing up on the subway—were very hard to picture, or even understand (very much the opposite of Reid, who is a very graphic, almost anatomical, sex writer)—I could at least feel the chemistry. Who cares about the plot?? I was rooting for these two baffling kids.
The Drama Film was a big deal in old East Germany, and there is an absolutely stunning art deco theatre called Kino International, tenderly restored, on Karl Marx Allee, recommended to us by my friend Maria who lived in Berlin for a bit. It was so pretty, and we were so tired from running around, that we stayed to see a film even though it was just an A24 picture with German subtitles. It was fun to see it with the German crowd, though, who very well-behaved and into the plot. The Drama stars Zendaya and Robert Pattison as young lovers planning their wedding despite the fact that they seem not to know each other well, having not talked about any of the darker periods in their pasts. On a night out with friends, who they also seem to not know well, they get into a “game” of What’s the Worst Thing You’ve Ever Done? (what?) and everyone confesses to have done something pretty bad and it’s glossed right over—no one even seems to feel guilty. EXCEPT Zendaya, who THOUGHT about doing something bad, and then didn’t. For some reason, she’s the one no one can forgive. It’s a weird weird way for people to behave, and it bugged me throughout that all the characters were so…mean. The other thing that bothered me was that there was also no mention of race despite the fact that some characters were white and some were Black and their lives are different in ways that maybe point to race and maybe not—no one examines this, and I couldn’t tell what the filmmakers were hinting at, if anything, but setting some of the worst stuff in the American south made me think these were choices the filmmaker made but the characters didn’t talk about?? A lot of the reviews made a big fuss about spoilers, so I won’t say what the big plot thing is, but I can share this illustrative little plot thing: the inciting incident is that the main couple thinks they spot their wedding DJ on a street corner smoking heroin. It’s not clear to them that it was in fact her, or if it was her that it was in fact heroin, or even if both these things were true that it would impede her ability to be a good wedding DJ but in the end, the mere thought of it makes the couple so edgy they just “have” to fire her to soothe their nerves. Which says a lot about the quality of human conduct in this film. I think it’s supposed to be sort of film everyone talks a lot about and tries to imagine themselves into, but it was so mean-spirited and cruel that I could not.
The Three-Penny Opera by the Berliner Ensemble at Bertoldt Brecht’s original theatre in Berlin, in German with English surtitles—another Maria's suggestions and one of my favourite things we did in Berlin. The theatre was over the top stunning, with lots of red velvet and sculpted moldings and buttresses and other architectural details I don’t know the words for. The show was in German and I think the audience was mainly out-of-town Germans on Easter break, but there were sur-titles and we could basically follow. The performances were delightful and over the top, although my mom, who knows the play later, explained to me later that Pirate Jenny is an actual character in the original play and not just mentioned in passing—I guess they were making do with a skeleton cast for this production. Nevertheless, they were wonderful, particularly MacHeath, who throws glitter from his pockets and spits blood and appeared to truly enjoy himself and the audience. I thought the German audience was very decorous—they were neither early nor late, but mainly scampered in just before curtain, and did not stand up to applaud. But then they gave five curtain calls so I don’t know!
Get Back is a nearly eight-hour documentary about the Beatles trying to make their album Let It Be and simultaneously prepare for what I guess turned out to be their final live performance, this consists of leftover footage of the original album documentary Let It Be. I’ve always liked the Beatles (doesn’t everyone like the Beatles?) and felt I knew them well because I like the music, but it turns out I didn’t know anything about them before this doc, including, on sight, which is which. I learned so much watching this after a long day of museum-going in Berlin, lying in Mark’s lap and feeling sad when they weren’t getting along and happy when they were enjoying working together. It’s incredibly slow moving—you can see why it’s the off-cuts—but also the most I’ve ever felt like I was really in the room in a documentary, just swept up in the feeling of those spaces and those people, shot expansively and simply enough to include me. John and Paul singing “Two of Us” through clenched teeth while making googly eyes at each other is one of my favourite things to happen on television.
Definitely Thriving by Kerry Clare is a novel about a young woman named Clemence who leaves her marriage, moves across the country to her hometown and lives alone for the first time—I think ever, though I read the book a few weeks ago now—and tries to figure out what she wants her life to be. Clemence is wry and funny and deeply bookish, and bent on sucking the marrow out of this new phase—she carefully considers her choice of meal, of reading, of work, and of friends and in doing so, constructs a new life and reconstructs herself. It’s a light-hearted and yet quiet novel—why aren’t there more of these? Clemence talks to her friends, tries to get work, wonders about which men she should flirt with, and how, goes to family events, semi-adopts a cat. I was ready to move into her dreamy attic treehouse. There’s quite a cast of characters—one of my major complaints about rom-coms, a genre this book fits into if we have to fit it somewhere—is that the characters seem so lonely, but that is NOT a problem for Clemence. She has two old friends, parents and sisters and inlaws and niblings, a landlady and neighbours, a boss and a couple crushes—the book feels full and lively, like life. Best character HANDS DOWN is Toby, one crush, who only reads Restoration Drama, is allergic to everything, doesn’t like entanglements and never feels he should try to seem less weird than he is to make anyone else comfortable—and he doesn’t think Clemence ought to either. He’s an ICON and an inspiration and spends most of the book bleeding or with hives or otherwise swollen and I LOVE HIM and think we can all learn a lot from Toby.
