The Missing Link

When I stuck a teaser in my post of a couple of days ago for yesterday's anniversary post, I promised an amusing link to go with it. And no, the picture of Öoby Döbi with hair was not it.

What it was was this article, which the Pope dug up from who knows where. It's an inadvertantly revealing look at a lot of the places I knew early in my Berlin experience, although the article was published a year before I'd ever set foot here. One reason I was so familiar with these places is that both the guy I rented from and his girlfriend and the Times Berlin bureau were on Grolmanstr., so it was natural to go to dinner at Florian (which was still good the last time I was there), or to grab a drink at one of the bars, although the most picturesque, Zwiebelfisch, I wasn't introduced to for some years, because you really should go in there for the first time with a regular -- it's that kind of place. Another place I didn't get to until much later was the last-named, Galerie Bremer, where I went with some of my colleagues at Jazz Radio, back when we were all getting along. I doubt it still exists in the same form, but what an unusual -- and perfectly West Berlinisch -- place!

Anyway, there's hip! edgy! Berlin from twenty years ago. Oh, how times have changed. Not for the better or worse. Just changed.

Requiem For Mickey D

Saturday night I was invited to dinner at the dancer's house, way down in Tempelhof, and after the thunderstorms cleared, I started walking. It's only about three miles, and economics dictated shank's mare. This meant walking over to Friedrichstr. and then walking the entire length of the street, which is usually fascinating, because after Checkpoint Charlie it turns into a fairly tawdry, largely Turkish/Arab neighborhood, a part of Berlin the tourists don't see. That culminates in a really seedy housing project at Hallesches Tor, after which you cross over onto Mehringdamm, and into the old Kreuzberg 61.

Anyway, I'd no sooner started out than I got a rude shock. The McDonald's on Friedrichstr. was gone. A sign for some GastroImmo firm announced it was for rent.

Although I'd never patronized the place, the McDonald's was a landmark. Visitors coming to my place via the U-Bahn would always get the same instructions: "Okay, take the U-Bahn to Oranienburger Tor station" -- and then I'd have to spell Oranienburger, of course, down to the last letter, as if there were lots of similar stations on the line -- "and walk in the direction the train was moving and go up the stairs. Okay, now, look left and you'll see a McDonald's, so you know you're in the right place. But you walk right, towards the pizza place..."

That pizza place had been a Burger King, locked in the usual corporate war against McDonald's, but it probably lost the battle because the word got out that its upstairs bathrooms were ideal places to shoot up, and the local junkies took full advantage. (This came to light, pardon the pun, when it was announced that they'd installed black light in the bathrooms, which supposedly made it very difficult to shoot up. Why this was supposed to be so I can't say.) Then it was dozens of other things before falling into the hands of the pizza guys. But McDonald's was always buzzing. It always is in Europe: no other symbol of what makes American pop culture so desirable seems to come close. Maybe if someone would take the time and trouble to learn how to make a good hamburger on this continent this wouldn't be the case.

(Oh, and this is the place to mention that the place with the great hamburgers I wrote about some time ago, Hazelwood, on Choriner Str., has lost the chef who designed the menu, taken a swift turn towards the Deutsch, and is no longer hamburger heaven in Berlin. The chef says she's going to have another project soon, and meanwhile your indefatigable BerlinBites team is investigating several rumors of better burgers. Stay tuned.)

The thing I noticed about McDonald's is that it's a status symbol for teenagers. A Big Mac is a good deal more expensive than a Döner Kebap (€3.70 versus around €2), and that, along with your fashionable clothing, helps identify you and your posse as the cool kids you are. In Europe, that's who McDonald's seemed to be marketing to, too: in America, it seems to be younger kids, but here, the promotions were all about hit CD compilations and iTunes downloads.

So, is this changing? Or is all the construction in the immediate vicinity driving customers away? Why did McDonald's close at what would seem to me to be a perfect location -- especially given that it had traffic all the time? Did one too many Germans see Supersize Me? Do they even supersize in German McDonald's?

I mean, other than having a familiar place vanish, it's no big deal for me: I haven't eaten at McDonald's since the '70s, when one opened up on Market Street in San Francisco, the first non-freestanding McDonald's in America. At the time, I was writing for a brand new magazine called Mother Jones, whose offices were immediately above, and whose elevator was one of the slowest I've encountered outside the Communist world. (Soviet elevators are a whole 'nother tirade.) The exhaust from the McDonald's fries leaked into the vestibule, where you waited and waited for the elevator to make its mammoth three-story descent, and a certain amount of the grill odor did, too. It was like standing in the middle of a Big Mac and fries, and, like the doughnut bakery that vented directly into two (unusable) rooms in an apartment I rented in college, the smell permeated my memory to such an extent that I can taste McDonald's fries (or doughnuts) just by closing my eyes and concentrating for a couple of seconds. Plus, of course, until I moved here, there were always much better burgers to be had when I wanted them.

This leaves the pizza place, Dada Falafel (run by Iraqi refugees from Saddam), and, of course, the great YumMee bánh mi sandwich joint (now serving pho!) as the only fast-food alternatives in that vicinity. But it doesn't make the mystery of why McDonald's would vanish overnight from such a plum location any clearer.

Jim's Mistake

In 1970, I lived in Sausalito, which is the town that's at the other end of the Golden Gate Bridge. Despite what the town is now, back then there were still little enclaves of funk, and my apartment, needless to say, was one of them. It was set on a steep hill, so that although it was technically a basement, there was still a nice view of Richardson Bay, the fishing fleet (yes, there was still a fishing fleet), and Mt. Tamalpais.

One person I'd always inevitably get to know would be my mailman, because back then I was inundated with free records, and, less frequently, books. The records would come sometimes in outrageous boxes with promo trinkets in them, the books were always heavy, and so there was always a lot of mail at my house. At one point, my mailman was a jolly young guy with wire-framed glasses, who seemed too smart to be in this for a career -- you saw a lot of folks like that working in the Post Office in those days. This one's name was Jim, and sometimes he'd stop to chat for a moment. Nice guy.

But one day he showed up and announced that he was quitting. "Yup. I've saved up enough money and me and my girlfriend are going to do something we've always wanted to do: go to Africa." Now, this was a surprise, especially since Jim was white (and I presumed his girlfriend was, too). There was something of a vogue for middle-class black Americans to visit Africa back then, but you didn't get many white tourists from the States. It was also a surprise because I'd gotten a book in the mail called Bright Continent, by Susan Blumenthal, an American woman who'd done the same thing and published a guidebook to sub-Saharan Africa. Remember, this was in the days before Lonely Planet and so on -- it was 1974 or so, and books like this just didn't exist. I'd taken a look in it and gotten hooked; it was not only useful as a guide, but it was fun to read.

So I mentioned this to Jim, and he said sure, he'd love to look at it. "Take it with you," I suggested. "Bring it back when you get back."

And he did. It remains one of my treasures: beat up, bookmarked with odd bus tickets and harissa-can labels, annotated with corrections and amplifications. I've never been to sub-Saharan (or super-Saharan, for that matter) Africa, but I've got a book that has.

I'm not sure what happened next, but I lost track of Jim and eventually moved to Texas.

Fast forward.

Last year, I heard from Jim again. He'd found this blog, and was bemoaning the fact that he'd been in Berlin some months earlier, and hadn't known I was here. He was in Portland, Oregon now, selling real estate and hoping to find something else to do, but loving Oregon and hoping I could visit. Well, that was sort of out of the question, but it sure was good to hear from him, and yes, it was too bad that he hadn't known I was here. But, I said in my e-mail back to him, I had a friend in Eugene, Oregon, who constantly fantasized about moving to Portland but didn't seem to be doing anything about it. Not only that, I figured Jim would like this guy and maybe he could kick his butt gently enough so that he'd move and realize his dream while putting a couple of bucks in Jim's pocket.

And that's just what happened: Brett and his wife Carole had dinner with Jim one evening when they were in town for some musical event and Jim wound up showing them a place that they wound up buying. Everybody's happy: Brett's doing a lot more good work and is much happier being out of the decaying hippie/university surroundings he was in, Carole's doing fine with her artwork and other innumerable projects, and Jim's got a couple of people he likes to hang out with.

I like happy endings, myself, but there's more. To thank me for sending him customers, Jim sent me a gift. It's a €200 gift certificate redeemable at the restaurant Quarré or the "gourmet restaurant" Lorenz Adlon at the Hotel Adlon. It expires on April 19 and cannot be renewed.

And when I saw it, my heart sank. I knew he meant well, and yet the Adlon pretty much represents a huge hunk of what I don't like about this city. It's got a horrible reputation as a place to stay: I once helped an editor for Conde Nast Traveller research a story on Berlin, and he was staying there, went for a walk, and was refused re-entry because he wasn't wearing a jacket. He finally convinced the doorman to accompany him to the front desk, where they conceded that he was, indeed, a guest. Then there was the young African woman who was fired for wearing her hair in an "unconventional" style, albeit one traditional to her people -- and hardly outrageous. The stories go on and on; the high-end travellers I know avoid the place.

The idea that I could get into one of their restaurants without a jacket and tie, too, is ludicrous. That's not the way I dresss, nor is it the way you have to dress in most restaurants here. One nice thing about Berlin is that, outside of government circles, anyway, it's very informal. I don't want to eat where the Bonners eat anyway, so they can have their jackets and ties.

Jim was, understandably, distressed that I was upset by this gift. Why, he said, he'd been to the Adlon and it didn't seem like that kind of place. And couldn't I borrow a jacket and tie? (Answer: no. From whom? Nobody I know has one either!)

I've tried not thinking about this for a while, but it occurred to me recently that the clock was ticking on this gift, so I took it down the other day and saw the date. I honestly don't know what to do. I don't think they check ID when you cash it in, so maybe I should sell it. But I don't know anyone who'd want to buy it, either. Should I hit Craigslist? Just let it expire quietly in its folder here by my desk? It's only eight days away.

Some day, I hope, I'll visit Portland. I also hope I'll have enough money to take Jim out to dinner and explain the cultural nuance behind all of this. Meanwhile, I've got a white elephant with a Quadriga on it making me feel guilty.

Crumbs From Behind The Wall

First, I would like to make extra sure that readers of this blog realize that it has nothing to do with the dining-out column by the same name in the wretched Ex-Berliner magazine. It's really not even worth wasting electrons on those people and their amazingly myopic view of Berlin's anglophone communities, but it probably is worth highlighting their astonishing lack of originality.

Those who are interested in my dining-out experiences here should a) wait until I can afford doing it again and then b) check over at Dishola, the Austin-based experiment in restaurant blogging or whatever it is. I'm the official Berlin Editor over there, and I've really got to get some stuff up about Toca Rouge and that ramen place on Neue Schönhauser and a couple of other places I'm thinking would appeal to their readership.

* * *

As promised some time ago, a new work by Nike, this one on Brunnenstr. near the park. Is this an hommage to Gaugin, or...?



* * *

I'm headed to Texas and California via Paris for a couple of weeks, starting in a week, and walked over to Hauptbahnhof recently to buy my ticket to Paris and see if I could get beaned by a piece of falling steel so I could sue Deutsche Bahn and get myself free tickets for life. I did manage to accomplish one of those goals, but it was the one that cost me money, not the one that cost them money. Whatever: I'm leaving this place for a while, and that always feels good unless I'm headed to someplace even worse like Frankfurt/Main.

At any rate, I was amused by a rather ambitious currywurst budde over there which calls itself Berliner-Curry.de. Around the name are listed cities: New York, Dubai, Paris, and so on. Interesting; an entrepreneur actually attempting to franchise Berlin currywurst around the world? That actually could be a winner (although not in Dubai unless the sausages were beef). Naturally, as soon as I got home I hit the URL, and was disappointed, as you no doubt will be. It is emblematically Berlinish, though, to hop on a trend without really understanding it. I remember years ago when a new office supply company opened here in Mitte calling itself Papyrus.com. Naturally, they hadn't registered the URL, and didn't even have a website. But that dot-com stuff was trendy, right?

* * *

One thing you can always say about Berlin is it's a really safe city. Violent crime here is almost unknown in most places, and I've only been burgled once, which was pretty much my landlord's fault. But that's not to say there isn't an undercurrent of anger here which blossoms forth every now and again in unpleasant ways. Currently, the trend seems to be throwing paving stones (easily dug out of the sandy soil here with a pen knife) through windows. Just in the past couple of days, I've seen smashed windows at the hookah bar on Chausseestr. and Tieckstr. (although this is probably just the tip of a larger story involving the huge number of these places and shops to supply them which have sprung up virtually overnight: do people really enjoy sitting around sipping sweet tea and smoking perfumed tobacco if they're not Arabs?), at the huge SAP software company building on the corner of Rosenthaler Str. and Gipsstr. (where you can see the place they dug the stones right in front of the building), and at the former Beate Uhse porn shop on Rosenthaler Str. This last suddenly sprouted some weird art-like installation in the windows almost within minutes of the Uhse folks pulling out, and it was apparently part of some viral marketing scheme by one of the game box companies -- I've lost track of Playstations and Nintendos and so on, but one of them has put up fake street art, opened a fake art gallery on Torstr., and now this. Not only did the windows go, the bricks were still there when I walked past, and someone was filming it.

I have to admit, I understand how street artists can get irked by this sort of thing, because the paper art with the URL was just bad enough that it stood out as fake. It was as annoying as the ad campaign for the new Toyota auto which has -- and I'm not exaggerating here -- taken up about 95% of all advertising space in this city for most of this week, and which will, if there's any justice, disappear tomorrow when the car is actually introduced. The Toyota campaign is yet another one which presupposes the utter stupidity of the consumer, the "Hey dumbass, buy this" attitude that's at the basis of so much German advertising, as opposed to the "You're clever enough to want this" approach the Brits pioneered and the Americans eventually figured out. Trouble is, there aren't enough paving stones to take this one out.

* * *

Yes, I know Berlin is changing, but... One night not very long ago, I was walking down Invalidenstr. and there was cheesy pink light streaming off a ginormous disco ball inside the staid walls of the old DDR post office. A couple of weeks later, I saw that Volkswagen was staging an event there. Now, when I first moved here, that was my local post office, and I've (naturally, because it's what one does at the post office in Germany) stood in lines there many a day, admiring the strange metal sculpture on the polished marble walls. After Deutsche Post went private and the post office moved into a MacPaper outlet (I am not making this up, for those of you who don't live here), the building was empty for a long, long time. But apparently it's been rescued by a club which will give the lie to all those reports of hip! edgy! Berlin! Ladies and gentlemen, I give you Bangaluu! (Warning: cheezy handbag house music when you click the link). Opening a branch of this -- or even an imitation of it -- would soon empty Friedrichshain of hipsters, and the flights back to Williamsburg would be packed. I kept clicking links on that site out of sick fascination. And to think it's right next door to where, many many years ago in the Paleolithic Era, the Technics Club was...

* * *

And finally, the pictures to explain the headline. Some months ago, I posted a picture of some graffiti "artists" spray-painting the wall of the building next to me, which I have to walk past on my way to my front door. I thought they were done -- surely it couldn't get any more hideous than that -- but they kept working at it until there were all sorts of horrible details: a little green head of some depressed-looking guy, a woman-robot...who knows what they thought they were doing? But they signed it and left their phone numbers, in case anyone else wanted their house desecrated.

Then, as I guess artistic collaborations do on occasion, this one went south, and one of the "artists" came back and obliterated his former partner's work and re-did it to his own liking. Not only that, he also went to work on the wall next door to it, so now we have a diptych with the theme of the Berlin Wall. Now, just why someone would want to spray-paint a new Wall, I cannot tell you. In fact, besides the eyesore factor, the depression this horrible set of murals sets off in me every time I have to see it (which is, of course, every day) is hard to even verbalize. What is the point of this? Who on earth would pay someone to do it? And just in case you think I'm making this up, here's the wall closest to the street:



And here's the wall on the rear building:



There's only one solution I can think of. The original Berlin Wall attracted graffiti artists from around the world. Not just the collection who did the stretch known as the East Side Gallery (which was all post-Wall anyway), but Keith Haring over by the Gropius-Bau, and the French guy who did all those heads that wound up in Wings of Desire on that stretch in Kreuzberg. So maybe Nike can come and stick a nude or two up on this "Wall" and make it that much less depressing to look at.

I still liked our wall better when it had a big billboard on it featuring the Puhdys shilling for Berliner Pilsner.