The formatting of these Facebook events demanded an end time, and 3 am was often selected, but the truth was it was usually when the sun, or rather, the gray Berlin haze of morning found its way through the bar’s window. Or, more precisely, when the ecstasy wore off or the last euro was spent. Or when the night got so tiresome, everyone decided to call it. That is to say, there was no format. The language of these event posts is spiked with time-specific nuance, liable to incite cringe. They are a sample of the post-internet era, in which artists were dipping into the visual slop of the moment, particularly a revival of ASCII, which enabled images to be rendered in text; a woman carved from a series of letters and numbers was at that time revelatory. They range from invites for the hanging of artworks above the bar, to birthday parties, to deinstalls of said artworks, karaoke nights, and DJ sets. Like peanuts in a plastic cup, these nights were standard bar fare, things that would be happening no matter what over a beer, but the event-ification through the echo chamber of Facebook turned them into something else—they became public, and catalogued. And suddenly it became everyone’s birthday. Everyone’s artwork. Everyone’s invitation to sing on top of the bar.

Also published here are a few pieces of printed ephemera that we saved from the bar. Some menus are trampled over, covered in muck, a monoprint of the tiled walkway behind the bar. Proof that it happened.

Running throughout the zine are short recollections by Simon Denny, Times Bar’s first customer (whose euro bill was taped above the till to commemorate the exchange)—artworks, nights, and conversations mis-remembered.

Calla Henkel and Max Pitegoff