It’s Berlin Gallery Weekend, when openings blossom throughout the city like stinking linden trees and the town parades itself to visitors like the naïve girl from the provinces who vamps through the market square in her tacky “best.” This weekend, many weary, Sekt-filled opening goers will do just that and end up at Janus a.k.a : ) : , the recurring party that, for nearly a year now, has carved out a solid place within Berlin’s art-related, non-Berghain nighttime diversions. “This really was what Berlin was like ‘back in the day’,” says a compatriot to me at a recent fog-machine filled Janus event, “when we’d just put speakers on the floor and someone would DJ and we’d do whatever.” Janus has consistently hosted acts like House of Ladosha, DJ Sliink, Total Freedom, Venus X, and Aids-3d, and the clientele - a mix of artists and well-informed teens – has been refreshingly mixed and upbeat. (Wolfgang Tillmans, for one, was sighted lurking around when Mykky Blanco performed). It’s never polite to describe a party to those who weren’t present, and in any case Janus is a future-thinking deity: this Friday they’ll host their “Year Of The Snake” party, featuring DJ Hvad, Why Be, and M.E.S.H., an event that will inevitably turn into the unofficial after-after party for umpteen Berlin Gallery Weekend events.  Fittingly, below a post on their event page on Facebook – a 4chan image of a toddler whose mermaid-like body is the end of an anaconda – Janus wrote: Gallery Weekend Special: If you can prove you’re a Gallerist, you get in FREE*. The joke being that most of the gallerists will have already gone home by then, leaving only the most die hard of art world folks. (Pablo Larios)