guys and the audience cheer and then groan. After ten failures the boy starts cursing, loud enough to produce an echo from the Gemä lde Galerie Walls. Fuck you. He’s not English-speaking, though. He and the others speak a kind of German that I can catch only snippets of: part dialect, part skater talk, part English cursing (which may be part of skater talk). Youthese.

Then finally, at a moment like any other, the boy jumps on his board and rises like a skylark, curving in the air. The board lands beneath him with a kerclank, and he lands on it, sways backward for a moment, lurches, catches his balance, and then, fully in control, cruises like a motorboat into the applauding ranks of the film crew. The guyson the roof beside the stairs and the audience on the sidelines pick up the cheering and clapping, which echoes from the walls of the Gemä lde Galerie.

Then the whole thing is over. The shoot is in the can. Everyone packs their cameras back into their low-tech packs, folds their expensive-looking tripods as if they were camping stools, chats a bit and then leaves in small clusters. They tuck their boards, which are fiercely decorated with graffiti-style designs, under their arms and walk off toward the Matthäus Church nearby, where the life of a Lutheran minister who resisted the Nazis and died in the camps is being memorialized in a historical display. The bell of the reconstituted church tolls on the quarter hour. Potsdamer Platz, the fiercely branded,