Palina in Wonderland

Palina Rojinski got put in a house with Joko and Klaas for MTV Home, basically tasked with keeping two TV personalities from disappearing entirely into their own egos. The show was the kind of premise that makes sense for exactly one season before everyone gets bored. She was there to document it, which meant she was also there to watch two men be endlessly fascinated with themselves.

She’d come to Berlin from St. Petersburg when she was six. She talked about having two cities inside her: the gray, brutal St. Petersburg with its classical music and kitsch, and then Berlin with its looseness and street art and all the bullet holes still visible in the buildings. That’s the kind of thing people say, but she actually seemed to mean it, to have thought about what each city had done to her.

What I latched onto was the music. She followed it. That’s how she ended up in clubs like Scala, where the good stuff was playing—Rye Rye, Metronomy, Zombie Zombie. And then Scala closed, like Bar 25, like all the clubs in Berlin. She was already living in the past tense.

Her taste was all over: UK Funky, Booty Bass, Crunk, Buraka Som Sistema, Little Boots, Fake Blood. And also Nouvelle Vague singing romantic chansons, which somehow fit with the rest. Not the safe choices; the actual listens of someone paying attention.

The same with clothes. She didn’t buy based on what was in. She’d find something weird and strange and wait for the moment to pair it with something else equally strange, and then suddenly you’d see the logic. That’s someone who thinks about how things go together, not someone who reads fashion blogs. That matters. That’s taste.

By the time anyone was reading this, MTV Home was already winding down. Scala was already closed. Palina stuck around in TV, but that specific thing—documenting chaos while following music into clubs that wouldn’t last the season—was already nostalgic before it finished happening.