I've just wasted two evenings of my life, evenings I could have spent improving my mind, with a book that's so bad that I'm mourning the trees it took to create it. Bad books are nothing new for me: I seem to come across them all the time. Just recently, I was in the English-book section of a local bookstore and picked up an 800-page sci-fi novel that only cost €5. I should have known it was crap, and it certainly was: a sort of space-opera of the sort I'd thought perished with A.E. van Vogt, bane of my sci-fi-reading teenage years.
But this was different. It came in a package my producer at Fresh Air had sent with a book I'd asked her to find me for a possible piece. She thought this one might interest me, and I thank her for that. Her instincts were certainly right, but it left me in despair.
It's called Machers and Rockers: Chess Records and the Business of Rock and Roll, and it's by Rich Cohen, whose book on Jewish gangsters, Tough Jews, I read a few years ago and liked. On the back are encomia from Larry King (a friend of Cohen's father) and Jann Wenner (Cohen's employer). And it's certainly a great idea. Phil and Leonard Chess were certainly tough Jews, immigrants from Poland (where their name was Cyzsz) who landed in Chicago, got into first the liquor business and then the nightclub business on the black South Side, and were smart enough to realize that there was money to be made with the music the schvartzes they served made. Once they got rolling, they lucked into Muddy Waters, who was in the ascendant as king of the Chicago blues, and, through him, they found others, such as Sonny Boy Williamson (Rice Miller), Howlin' Wolf, Little Walter, Willie Dixon, John Brim, Koko Taylor, Jimmy Rogers, and many others. Then, a guitarist recommended by Muddy showed up at their door, a 19-year-old kid named Chuck Berry, and they suddenly found themselves helping to invent rock and roll. In this, as it developed, they sowed the seeds of their own destruction, although they had no way of knowing it at the time; as Cohen points out, they were only trying to make a buck, which is what they had always been trying to do.
There's a reason why Jews were so prominent in the independent record business after World War II, and the Chess brothers epitomize that reason: Jews were still marginal to America, and so, as they had in Hollywood, they found niches in marginal businesses. A lot of them worked in the black sections of America's cities, and they had something of a knowledge of what the black people who lived there wanted. Plus, making records was a business that, while high-risk, had a potentially high payoff, especially if you indulged in the time-honored tradition of stiffing your artists, a practice hardly limited to Jews: just ask Don Robey, or John Dolphin, or Jack Lauderdale, all black label owners (Duke/Peacock, Made In Hollywood/Dolphin, and Swingtime, respectively), all notorious ripoffs, if not outright gangsters. Like the junk business or the rag trade their fathers had plied, selling music to black people was a job no "respectable" person -- read WASP -- wanted.
Phil and Leonard became millionaires, and Chess second only to Atlantic in revenues as an indie. It's a compelling story, and it's been told in a book called Spinning Blues Into Gold, by Nadine Cohodas, a book I've never even seen.
Machers and Rockers is published by W.W. Norton's Atlas Books subsidiary in a series called Enterprise, which apparently profiles businesses: there's also a book on Ted Turner by Ken Auletta, and Tim Parks has one coming on the Medicis, which ought to be fun. So this isn't one of those quickie cut-and-paste operations like litter the rock-book landscape.
With a lineup that incudes Auletta and Parks, though, you'd think there was an editor who would take this stuff seriously, which is one reason this book is so appalling. Oh, sure, it starts off fine, with a chapter entitled "Today You Are A Man, Get Me a Drink," in which Cohen, in full gonzo mode, imagines the Bar Mitzvah of Marshall Chess, Leonard's son, and heir apparent to the label and all its workings. I know people who are still jealous of Marshall for having had the Flamingoes sing at his Bar Mitzvah. Hell, I'm jealous, and I'm not even Jewish! Cohen does a fine job of presenting the mix of people who were there: old Jews from the traditional life, particularly the merchants who ran shops on Maxwell Street on the South Side, where a flea-market flourished on weekends and young blues guys in search of a break would set up and entertain the shoppers. Then other folks from the record industry: DJs, distributors, competing label guys. And, behind them, the black folks who worked at Chess; not just the musicians, but people who ran the mail room and the packing room and pressed the records. It's a nice introduction for someone who doesn't know the business.
And, right there on page 17, five pages in, is the first mistake: Hy Weiss is identified as the founder of Bang Records, which didn't even exist in 1955, when Marshall Chess became a man in the eyes of his congregation. When it did exist, nearly a decade later, it was named for the initials of the four men who set it up: Bert Berns, Ahmet Ertegun, Neshui Ertegun and Gerald Wexler. Weiss, as any record collector could have told you, ran Old Town, New York's legendary doo-wop label. And yeah, he was probably there.
It doesn't get better. Cohen's so in love with the way he writes -- and he ought to be, it's a lot of fun, the voice of a classic tummler of the post-Lenny Bruce era spritzing on Jews and schvartzes and any other poor schmuck who gets in the way, reveling in the sleazy details of the record business -- that he's not overly concerned with either chronology or facts. The chronology is a judgement call: I would have found the story more dramatic if he'd unfolded it in its classic arc, the rags-to-riches one, ending with the Chess brothers millionaires but cheated out of their legacy, and Leonard's dramatic death: one more outrage foisted on him by the company that he'd sold the label to made him apoplectic, he jumped into his Cadillac and zoomed off, only to have a massive coronary and plow into a couple of parked cars.
But, like I said, that's a judgement call. The facts are a more serious problem. It's not just Hy Weiss: at one point Cohen lists the artists who were on Chess, and I've got news for him. Chess had a serious roster of talent, one which produced an amazing body of work: I have a 13-CD set here commemorating Chess' 50th anniversary and there's no fat. But Rich, Clarence "Gatemouth" Brown was the rock on which Don Robey founded his empire: he never recorded for Chess. Yes, the Moonglows were on Chess, but no, Ben E. King, lead singer for the Drifters who later went solo, wasn't their lead singer. That was Harvey Fuqua, who mentored Marvin Gaye. I certainly wouldn't call Dale Hawkins a "crooner," nor would I use that word for primitive country bluesmen like Joe Hill Louis or Dr. Isaiah Ross, neither of whom recorded for Chess. Neither did another of your "crooners," Rufus Thomas, and certainly Bobby "Blue" Bland never did, although there you at least got the "crooner" part right. A key player at Chess was a former boxer and all-round utility musician named Elias McDaniel, who later recorded under the name Bo Diddley, and you managed to spell both of those names wrong. And, later on? GRT did make tape, true, but the cassette wasn't their invention: that was Phillips in Holland.
These are the sorts of mistakes that might be made by an enthusiast in conversation, or written in a fanzine by a teenager, but when a contributing editor of Rolling Stone enshrines them between hard covers, we expect them to be true. And nor have I cherry-picked a couple of howlers; every couple of pages a factual error or statement based on a faulty interpretation of data or an assertion of fact that can't be backed up appears.
And this pisses me off. Sure, some of you must be thinking. You're pissed off because you didn't get to write this book. And you're partially right: I bet Rich Cohen doesn't wake up at night with anxiety attacks because he's months and months behind in his rent, and I bet when he pitches ideas to magazines, they at least answer him. I bet the advance on this book would have paid off my back rent and paid off the people who have been kind enough to loan me money to fix my teeth and keep the electricity on. I know for a fact that Rich Cohen has an agent, and I bet that agent doesn't scoff at his ideas.
So yeah, I'm jealous that someone can take one part good idea, three parts padding, and two parts bullshit and get it published.
But there's also this: there just isn't that much space for books like this in the marketplace. Because of hackwork cut-and-paste jobs like the Brits churn out by the boxcar-full, it's harder and harder for serious books on popular music to get printed. Hell, it's harder and harder for books, period, to get printed. But at least the cut-and-pastes tend to be published by a couple of publishers, and the marketplace recognizes them as such. This is Norton, who also published The Rose and the Briar, a collection edited by Greil Marcus and Sean Willentz that came out last fall and has yet to be reviewed in the New York Times or the New York Review of Books and which has actual good writing and solid research (hey, there's a picture of Frankie, as in Frankie and Johnny!) by actual serious writers including me, goddammit! And they're publishing what purports to be a serious (if offhandedly written, not that I have any problem with that) look at an American cultural and business phenomenon, but reads like something written in a week with no more expenditure than a hefty bill at Starbuck's to keep the head of steam going.
Okay, I'm done. Just another day in the life of a writer. Maybe the other book is better.
Wednesday, March 02, 2005
Monday, February 28, 2005
Last Crumbs Of February
Just a couple of things to note here. The first is a rather nasty little send-off to Hunter Thompson by the San Francisco Chronicle's executive foreign and national editor, A.S. Ross. Thing is, much of what he says is right, and it got a lot of people on the Well all upset today because they felt it wasn't respectful. I don't think that's the problem at all. Like Sidney Zion's piece in the New York Daily News, it's a sort of knee-jerk dismissal of Thompson made from a carefully-crafted one-sided view of him. Zion just maunders, and his piece is easily dismissed. Ross', on the other hand, backs up his case with evidence, and damning evidence it is, too: Thompson at his most self-parodic.
He's also got quotes from a veteran of the times: John Burks, now head of San Francisco State University's journalism department, was the managing editor of Rolling Stone when I worked there. He was at least as responsible for hiring me as Jann Wenner was. He managed the fine pack of journalists he'd helped assemble, and turned them into a crack news team; I've always thought of John as my journalism school. One thing many of the people on this team (not me: I was in charge of record reviews and some industry news, for the most part) did was assemble a number of articles for which the magazine won the Columbia Journalism Award in 1971. Not one member of that group of journalists, including Burks, was still employed by Rolling Stone on the day Wenner accepted the award. As far as I know, he was never thanked or acknowledged. This may or may not figure into the quotes Burks gave Ross.
But finally, what's most glaringly missing from Ross's sour eulogy is compassion. I've joked that the only thing that's kept me from killing myself is the sure knowledge that my obit in the New York Times would be headed "Ed Ward, Rock Critic," and that's a fate worse than death. In other words, I know what it's like to get trapped by a situation you've created, whether inadvertently (as in my case) or not (as in Thompson's). I still have some control over this: I'm pretty obscure, so I may yet be able to write some things I'll be proud of. Thompson, on the other hand, created a monster. Sometimes we just don't have as much control over these things as we'd like, and the bigger the monster, the harder it is to wrestle it to the ground and make it cry uncle.
Ross probably has never had this problem. Maybe he never will. But that shouldn't make him dismissive of those who've struggled with it and lost.
***
On a much lighter note, the Pope of mope sends along an article about burritos in Berlin. I've walked past this place numerous times, but the thing that's kept me from going in is that they don't use refried beans in the burritos! That's inconceivable to me. As someone who's been eating the things since discovering Burrito King (2109 W. Sunset Blvd., Los Angeles) in the 1970s and then seeing them perfected at San Francisco taquerias like Taqueria La Cumbre (Valencia between 15th and 16th) this is complete heresy. On the other hand, the lack of Mexican food in this town is severe (never mind the "Mexican" or "Tex Mex" places whose idea of "Mexican" food runs from Buffalo wings to paella to the abomination the Germans call "Chile Con Carne" with nary a taco nor an enchilada, let alone a chille relleno or tamale, in sight), and I'm sure I'm going to be pulled in some day on nostalgia alone. Will I then echo the Pope's judgement? "I ate at Dolores once," he writes. "You could taste the earnestness. But not the hot sauce."
Big surprise, that.
***
And in closing, let me say how shocked I was to learn that Billy Idol had put in an appearance at White Trash Fast Food. I'm well aware that my neighborhood contains drug addicts, alcoholics (lotsa them), probably more than a few wife-beaters, sexual deviants, and psychos. But Billy Idol??
Ewwww.
He's also got quotes from a veteran of the times: John Burks, now head of San Francisco State University's journalism department, was the managing editor of Rolling Stone when I worked there. He was at least as responsible for hiring me as Jann Wenner was. He managed the fine pack of journalists he'd helped assemble, and turned them into a crack news team; I've always thought of John as my journalism school. One thing many of the people on this team (not me: I was in charge of record reviews and some industry news, for the most part) did was assemble a number of articles for which the magazine won the Columbia Journalism Award in 1971. Not one member of that group of journalists, including Burks, was still employed by Rolling Stone on the day Wenner accepted the award. As far as I know, he was never thanked or acknowledged. This may or may not figure into the quotes Burks gave Ross.
But finally, what's most glaringly missing from Ross's sour eulogy is compassion. I've joked that the only thing that's kept me from killing myself is the sure knowledge that my obit in the New York Times would be headed "Ed Ward, Rock Critic," and that's a fate worse than death. In other words, I know what it's like to get trapped by a situation you've created, whether inadvertently (as in my case) or not (as in Thompson's). I still have some control over this: I'm pretty obscure, so I may yet be able to write some things I'll be proud of. Thompson, on the other hand, created a monster. Sometimes we just don't have as much control over these things as we'd like, and the bigger the monster, the harder it is to wrestle it to the ground and make it cry uncle.
Ross probably has never had this problem. Maybe he never will. But that shouldn't make him dismissive of those who've struggled with it and lost.
***
On a much lighter note, the Pope of mope sends along an article about burritos in Berlin. I've walked past this place numerous times, but the thing that's kept me from going in is that they don't use refried beans in the burritos! That's inconceivable to me. As someone who's been eating the things since discovering Burrito King (2109 W. Sunset Blvd., Los Angeles) in the 1970s and then seeing them perfected at San Francisco taquerias like Taqueria La Cumbre (Valencia between 15th and 16th) this is complete heresy. On the other hand, the lack of Mexican food in this town is severe (never mind the "Mexican" or "Tex Mex" places whose idea of "Mexican" food runs from Buffalo wings to paella to the abomination the Germans call "Chile Con Carne" with nary a taco nor an enchilada, let alone a chille relleno or tamale, in sight), and I'm sure I'm going to be pulled in some day on nostalgia alone. Will I then echo the Pope's judgement? "I ate at Dolores once," he writes. "You could taste the earnestness. But not the hot sauce."
Big surprise, that.
***
And in closing, let me say how shocked I was to learn that Billy Idol had put in an appearance at White Trash Fast Food. I'm well aware that my neighborhood contains drug addicts, alcoholics (lotsa them), probably more than a few wife-beaters, sexual deviants, and psychos. But Billy Idol??
Ewwww.
Saturday, February 26, 2005
Even More Crumbs
February drags on, reminding me once again why it's such a hard month here. Currently, we're caught up in what seems to be an endless snow-slush-freeze-rain-snow cycle. The Eskimos' having 47 words for snow may be a canard, but it's rather surprising, given the immense variety of the crap that pours from the heavens here, that the Germans don't have a bunch of them.
Thing is, it can make walking very difficult because the sidewalks don't get cleared a lot of places, and you never know when the fresh layer of powder conceals a slippery re-frozen bunch of slush underneath it. Of course, a lot of places strew cinders to assure traction, which is nice, but you wind up bringing them back into the house on your shoes and the rug gets gritty overnight.
And, as if to prove that the photo-period thing is a myth, it's still slightly light at 6pm these days. Two weeks, and I'll be in Texas. Not that I'm, you know, counting.
***
One of my readers has pointed me to a very nice piece she's written in Salon, an interview with Hitler's last living bodyguard. If you want the famous "banality of evil," you need go no further. He's living in Rudow, which is the end-station of one of the subway lines here. I always wondered what was in Rudow, and now I know one thing that is. Read it: it's pretty fascinating.
***
A comment posted here that Podewil may be starting up again in April was very welcome news. Whether the organization will be based again in the building on Klosterstr. I don't know: it's in the middle of a bunch of court buildings, and I know the courts system has been trying to grab the Podewil building to stick its functionaries in ever since the government moved here from Bonn. They also tried to get the Haus der Kulturen der Welt, which seems to have beaten them back for the moment, but we'll see what happens. Meanwhile, I've signed back up for their newsletter, so if anything interesting happens, I'll let you know.
***
Yesterday, Lucian Truscott IV had a rather dull little tribute to Hunter S. Thompson in the New York Times, in which he commented that his correspondence with HST back in the late '60s seemed completely concerned with money. This hardly surprises me. The nature of a freelance writer's life is that you're always worried about money. People never pay on time, often have to be cajoled out of just a few bucks, and the bills always seem to come faster than the checks. In fact, I just got another letter from my kind landlord reminding me that I'm now nine months behind in the rent, something I'd hoped to avoid with some of the work I've been doing, but of course I'm still sitting here waiting to get paid. There's some potentially good news on the horizon, though, which could not only pay all of this off but make a significant contribution towards getting me out of here. Nothing definite, nothing signed, no date as of yet, but enough that I didn't feel the dull stab of panic when the letter arrived. I still have to pay the electric and phone companies before I leave, and I'm not quite sure how I'm going to do that, but who knows? Stranger things have happened.
***
Seeing Wally, the guy who runs White Trash Fast Food, the club/restaurant on the corner by my house, while I was in the supermarket just now, reminded me of a story I'd wanted to post here. I've given them a hard time for their relentlessly ironic beating to death of what they call "white trash" culture, and what I call working-class American culture, and their inability to discriminate between poor people and "white trash," whatever that is, but Wally scored some points a month or two back when he was buzzing around the club and someone tapped him on the shoulder. "Are you Wally?" said a familiar voice, and there stood Mick Jagger. "I hear this is the coolest club in town," he said. "Oh yeah?" said Wally. "So how'd you get in?"
Good question, and a fine illustration of the futility and stupidity of being cool.
Thing is, it can make walking very difficult because the sidewalks don't get cleared a lot of places, and you never know when the fresh layer of powder conceals a slippery re-frozen bunch of slush underneath it. Of course, a lot of places strew cinders to assure traction, which is nice, but you wind up bringing them back into the house on your shoes and the rug gets gritty overnight.
And, as if to prove that the photo-period thing is a myth, it's still slightly light at 6pm these days. Two weeks, and I'll be in Texas. Not that I'm, you know, counting.
***
One of my readers has pointed me to a very nice piece she's written in Salon, an interview with Hitler's last living bodyguard. If you want the famous "banality of evil," you need go no further. He's living in Rudow, which is the end-station of one of the subway lines here. I always wondered what was in Rudow, and now I know one thing that is. Read it: it's pretty fascinating.
***
A comment posted here that Podewil may be starting up again in April was very welcome news. Whether the organization will be based again in the building on Klosterstr. I don't know: it's in the middle of a bunch of court buildings, and I know the courts system has been trying to grab the Podewil building to stick its functionaries in ever since the government moved here from Bonn. They also tried to get the Haus der Kulturen der Welt, which seems to have beaten them back for the moment, but we'll see what happens. Meanwhile, I've signed back up for their newsletter, so if anything interesting happens, I'll let you know.
***
Yesterday, Lucian Truscott IV had a rather dull little tribute to Hunter S. Thompson in the New York Times, in which he commented that his correspondence with HST back in the late '60s seemed completely concerned with money. This hardly surprises me. The nature of a freelance writer's life is that you're always worried about money. People never pay on time, often have to be cajoled out of just a few bucks, and the bills always seem to come faster than the checks. In fact, I just got another letter from my kind landlord reminding me that I'm now nine months behind in the rent, something I'd hoped to avoid with some of the work I've been doing, but of course I'm still sitting here waiting to get paid. There's some potentially good news on the horizon, though, which could not only pay all of this off but make a significant contribution towards getting me out of here. Nothing definite, nothing signed, no date as of yet, but enough that I didn't feel the dull stab of panic when the letter arrived. I still have to pay the electric and phone companies before I leave, and I'm not quite sure how I'm going to do that, but who knows? Stranger things have happened.
***
Seeing Wally, the guy who runs White Trash Fast Food, the club/restaurant on the corner by my house, while I was in the supermarket just now, reminded me of a story I'd wanted to post here. I've given them a hard time for their relentlessly ironic beating to death of what they call "white trash" culture, and what I call working-class American culture, and their inability to discriminate between poor people and "white trash," whatever that is, but Wally scored some points a month or two back when he was buzzing around the club and someone tapped him on the shoulder. "Are you Wally?" said a familiar voice, and there stood Mick Jagger. "I hear this is the coolest club in town," he said. "Oh yeah?" said Wally. "So how'd you get in?"
Good question, and a fine illustration of the futility and stupidity of being cool.
Thursday, February 24, 2005
A Taxing Woman
Today I had a visit from the tax folks. This was not a surprise. I've been getting, and not opening, letters from them for a couple of years. No, it's not the income tax folks. It's the TV tax.
This is an aspect of life in Europe that surprises a lot of Americans. Every radio-operated device you buy requires that you register it with an agency which regulates public broadcasting, after which you are asked to pay a tax on each device. For me, it was one radio and one television, and the levy was €35 every two months.
This money goes into a central account in Cologne, and is then disbursed into the various local, regional, and national public stations. Once upon a time, that's all there were here: commercial TV was only beginning to come into the larger cities when I first came here in 1988, and I believe (but don't take this as gospel) that commercial radio came even later. And, like the way NPR and PBS used to be in the States, it ensured a certain level of broadcast quality, and gave the stations money to do all manner of creative things. Karlheinz Stockhausen's early career was bankrolled by the regional radio station in Cologne, and most major cities had a radio symphony orchestra subsidized by this tax. Television stations had the budget to produce superb news shows and documentaries, and to acquire films to show, uninterrupted by commercials. One of my favorite memories was the all-garlic meal Les Blank cooked one night for a guy from WDR, who wanted to lease the rights to a couple of Les' films for a short while. Les figured to get him stoned on garlic (which actually has a tranquillizing effect when eaten in large quantity) and then hit him up for enough money that he could finish his work-in-progress, which became Garlic Is As Good As Ten Mothers. It worked.
In principle, I support this fee, of course (as if you couldn't tell from the preceding paragraph). If the U.S. had a similar program, PBS wouldn't have to prostitute itself to every corporate pimp with a dollar, and NPR could not only commission new works from deserving American composers, but the very show I work for, Fresh Air, would have enough money to pay me the high fees I so richly deserve. But I suppose the Republicans would screw this up the way they screw everything up, cutting off funds to stations that use foul language like "condom" or "breast" and declaring Rapture-oriented programming to be in the vital public interest.
But there's another aspect to the fee that I like less. I didn't know about it until a guy showed up at the door one day, showing identification from SFB, the local public station. I was puzzled. They owed me money for some work I'd done, but I didn't expect them to show up to pay me. It wasn't until he spoke that I realized what was up: "You have a television?" he asked. "A radio?" Uhhh, yes, I said. "Sign this." And there was a form that said, from that moment on, that I was registered with one radio and one TV at my house. The bills started coming immediately. Now, I'd been caught because I live on the ground floor, and the guy had seen the TV through my window. But they also patrol the streets with specially-outfitted vans, plainclothes, and scan people's apartments. Hmmm, two TVs playing in this place. Check the list: are they registered? And if not, they can fine you. I got off easily. (Worse, although I haven't seen this in Germany for what may be obvious reasons, but in other countries, they run ads on TV portraying people who aren't in compliance as criminals. I saw a Dutch ad one night where the cops came and took "Daddy" away while his kids watched, and the last shot was a tearful young boy asking "Why didn't he obey?" I asked my friends where the pot was, since I assumed this was a drug bust, but they told me it was just another heavy-handed pay your TV tax ad. Brutal!)
Anyway, I was caught, I wasn't hauled off, wasn't fined, and I paid the tax like a good German. But in the summer of 2003, not long after my financial catastrophe hit, my TV died. It was okay: I never used it to watch television. I've never been a big TV watcher, and I'd been renting videos and watching them on it. But one night as a friend and I were waiting for the commercials on a videotape to end the picture tube just winked out. Ah, well. Small loss.
But there was something I didn't know. Just as you have to register your devices (anmelden), you have to un-register (abmelden) them as well. And I didn't abmeld. And the fees just kept piling up. Now, paying these fees slipped right down to the bottom of my list of priorities: I didn't have the devices, and I didn't have the money. And I didn't know how to abmeld, either.
So I've been caught again. The dancer came over the other day, lured by my offering to buy her a bowl of ramen at the spiffy new totally authentic ramen and yakisoba joint, Makoto, over on Alte Schönhauser Str. 13 (not a paid commercial, but damn sure a recommendation), and helped me fill out an Abmeldungsformular and write a letter to the local TV authorities. Then, as we prepared to go out for some good hot soup, she helped me sneak the corpse of the TV out into the alley, where it vanished in a matter of hours.
When the tax lady came this morning, she was exasperated in a friendly way by my clueless-foreigner act (which is how they expect you to behave anyway), asked me some questions as she filled out a form ("Do you own a house?" she asked with a grin. "Do I have to tell you about my castle in the Loire Valley now?" I asked. "No, that's in France," she said and kept writing), and said (I think: she had a really, really thick Berlinisch accent, which can be impenetrable) that she'd see if there were some way I could pay off the €386.49 I owe twenty Euros at a time.
It could be worse. I once visited a couple in England the day they finally solved a huge problem with their cats, who'd not only been getting their asses kicked when they ventured outdoors, but were attracting other cats who'd come in the cat door, kick their asses some more, and then eat up all the cat-food. The guy in this couple, like me a total gadget-head, had found a door that worked in conjunction with radio-controllers mounted on cat collars. He'd spent quite a lot on it, took out the old cat-door, and installed the new one. The gal had gotten the collars on the cats, and so now it was time for a cup of tea and reading the manual.
"Oh, no," he wailed. "We've just bought two low-powered transmitters and have to add them to the telly fee!"
No cats, no television. No money, either, but that's only temporary.
This is an aspect of life in Europe that surprises a lot of Americans. Every radio-operated device you buy requires that you register it with an agency which regulates public broadcasting, after which you are asked to pay a tax on each device. For me, it was one radio and one television, and the levy was €35 every two months.
This money goes into a central account in Cologne, and is then disbursed into the various local, regional, and national public stations. Once upon a time, that's all there were here: commercial TV was only beginning to come into the larger cities when I first came here in 1988, and I believe (but don't take this as gospel) that commercial radio came even later. And, like the way NPR and PBS used to be in the States, it ensured a certain level of broadcast quality, and gave the stations money to do all manner of creative things. Karlheinz Stockhausen's early career was bankrolled by the regional radio station in Cologne, and most major cities had a radio symphony orchestra subsidized by this tax. Television stations had the budget to produce superb news shows and documentaries, and to acquire films to show, uninterrupted by commercials. One of my favorite memories was the all-garlic meal Les Blank cooked one night for a guy from WDR, who wanted to lease the rights to a couple of Les' films for a short while. Les figured to get him stoned on garlic (which actually has a tranquillizing effect when eaten in large quantity) and then hit him up for enough money that he could finish his work-in-progress, which became Garlic Is As Good As Ten Mothers. It worked.
In principle, I support this fee, of course (as if you couldn't tell from the preceding paragraph). If the U.S. had a similar program, PBS wouldn't have to prostitute itself to every corporate pimp with a dollar, and NPR could not only commission new works from deserving American composers, but the very show I work for, Fresh Air, would have enough money to pay me the high fees I so richly deserve. But I suppose the Republicans would screw this up the way they screw everything up, cutting off funds to stations that use foul language like "condom" or "breast" and declaring Rapture-oriented programming to be in the vital public interest.
But there's another aspect to the fee that I like less. I didn't know about it until a guy showed up at the door one day, showing identification from SFB, the local public station. I was puzzled. They owed me money for some work I'd done, but I didn't expect them to show up to pay me. It wasn't until he spoke that I realized what was up: "You have a television?" he asked. "A radio?" Uhhh, yes, I said. "Sign this." And there was a form that said, from that moment on, that I was registered with one radio and one TV at my house. The bills started coming immediately. Now, I'd been caught because I live on the ground floor, and the guy had seen the TV through my window. But they also patrol the streets with specially-outfitted vans, plainclothes, and scan people's apartments. Hmmm, two TVs playing in this place. Check the list: are they registered? And if not, they can fine you. I got off easily. (Worse, although I haven't seen this in Germany for what may be obvious reasons, but in other countries, they run ads on TV portraying people who aren't in compliance as criminals. I saw a Dutch ad one night where the cops came and took "Daddy" away while his kids watched, and the last shot was a tearful young boy asking "Why didn't he obey?" I asked my friends where the pot was, since I assumed this was a drug bust, but they told me it was just another heavy-handed pay your TV tax ad. Brutal!)
Anyway, I was caught, I wasn't hauled off, wasn't fined, and I paid the tax like a good German. But in the summer of 2003, not long after my financial catastrophe hit, my TV died. It was okay: I never used it to watch television. I've never been a big TV watcher, and I'd been renting videos and watching them on it. But one night as a friend and I were waiting for the commercials on a videotape to end the picture tube just winked out. Ah, well. Small loss.
But there was something I didn't know. Just as you have to register your devices (anmelden), you have to un-register (abmelden) them as well. And I didn't abmeld. And the fees just kept piling up. Now, paying these fees slipped right down to the bottom of my list of priorities: I didn't have the devices, and I didn't have the money. And I didn't know how to abmeld, either.
So I've been caught again. The dancer came over the other day, lured by my offering to buy her a bowl of ramen at the spiffy new totally authentic ramen and yakisoba joint, Makoto, over on Alte Schönhauser Str. 13 (not a paid commercial, but damn sure a recommendation), and helped me fill out an Abmeldungsformular and write a letter to the local TV authorities. Then, as we prepared to go out for some good hot soup, she helped me sneak the corpse of the TV out into the alley, where it vanished in a matter of hours.
When the tax lady came this morning, she was exasperated in a friendly way by my clueless-foreigner act (which is how they expect you to behave anyway), asked me some questions as she filled out a form ("Do you own a house?" she asked with a grin. "Do I have to tell you about my castle in the Loire Valley now?" I asked. "No, that's in France," she said and kept writing), and said (I think: she had a really, really thick Berlinisch accent, which can be impenetrable) that she'd see if there were some way I could pay off the €386.49 I owe twenty Euros at a time.
It could be worse. I once visited a couple in England the day they finally solved a huge problem with their cats, who'd not only been getting their asses kicked when they ventured outdoors, but were attracting other cats who'd come in the cat door, kick their asses some more, and then eat up all the cat-food. The guy in this couple, like me a total gadget-head, had found a door that worked in conjunction with radio-controllers mounted on cat collars. He'd spent quite a lot on it, took out the old cat-door, and installed the new one. The gal had gotten the collars on the cats, and so now it was time for a cup of tea and reading the manual.
"Oh, no," he wailed. "We've just bought two low-powered transmitters and have to add them to the telly fee!"
No cats, no television. No money, either, but that's only temporary.
Wednesday, February 23, 2005
HST
Boy, talk about having enough!
No, I didn't know him. I may have been introduced to him once; those days are a blur for a number of reasons. But a couple of people have asked for my take on him now, and I'll give it.
The arrival of Hunter Thompson at Rolling Stone came right about at my departure. Six months after the hiring spree which had included me, I think editor/publisher Jann Wenner was doing a number of things, most notably changing the magazine around and cutting back on stuff. One thing he cut back was Earth Times, an "ecology magazine" he'd started soon after we'd moved from above the print-shop at 746 Brannan and into our new office building at 635 3rd St. Jon Carroll had been overseeing it, and he was now back on the Rolling Stone side of things, but people were still getting fired. Rumors spread through the office, always a hotbed of gossip, and Jann saw fit to call a meeting in the reception area (the conference room wasn't finished yet). "I just want you to know that rumors here have gotten out of hand. Yes, we've had to make some changes here, but no, there will be no more people let off."
Twenty-four hours later, Carroll was fired.
Jon Landau came in from Boston and hunkered in Wenner's palatial office with him for a couple of days. The rumor mill said he was after my job, which would explain why he told me he was going to have it. John Burks, our mainstay managing editor, was fired, a terrible blow to morale. I was 21 years old, and had no idea what was happening, or what I'd do. To put it mildly, I was scared, but the magazine still had to come out. Wenner was on a tear, impossible to talk to, secretive and barricaded in his office.
One day I remember he'd gone into the (finally finished) conference room to interview someone. Who was it? Some weird guy with a Beatle wig, they said. Scary guy. He'd left strict orders that he wasn't to be disturbed, but at some point I had something he absolutely had to have, so I asked his secretary, Gretchen Horton, what to do. "Take it in there," she advised. "It'll be okay." So I knocked on the door, opened it when I heard Wenner bark "What?" and handed him the copy. Sure enough, there was a guy smoking cigarettes through an FDR-like cigarette holder, hair looking weird (the wig had come askew), wearing blue-tinted glasses. I handed Jann the stuff, he thanked me, and I left.
This isn't the time or place to tell the now-famous story of my firing, but it happened very shortly afterwards, and I had a pretty hard nervous breakdown, which I tended at some friends' farm in Elmira, Oregon. A strange artist known as Mr. Peanut showed up at one point, a guy who was living with a friend of mine in L.A., and I caught a ride back down to San Francisco with him. At loose ends, I got pretty paranoid, and developed a strong hatred for Rolling Stone and everything associated with it.
That's why, when they began serializing Fear & Loathing in Las Vegas, I pretty much ignored it. Not that I was unaware of Thompson's work: I'd read him in Ramparts and its successor/competitor Scanlan's, and I'd also read Hell's Angels when I was still in college. The straight journalism pieces he did I rather admired, because it was of the same first-person, edgy style and voice that I, along with dozens of others of my colleagues, was trying to evolve. (Someone mailed me an early piece of mine from Creem last year, and I cringed when I read it; I wasn't imitating Thompson, but I was imitating myself). I thought Fear and Loathing was awful, self-indulgent twaddle (and boy, having committed enough of it myself, I thought I knew from twaddle), and I was pissed off that Jann's pursuit of celebrities had resulted in his giving Thompson the licence to waste space with it in the magazine.
I still have no desire to read it, and I loathed the film they made of it, but once Thompson started covering the Presidential election in 1972, I enjoyed reading his dispatches. But there was no doubt about it: he was getting weirder. Particularly after the articles were collated into a book and he retreated to Aspen and ran for sheriff, I began to get tired of him.
So, I suspect, did he. Certainly he did over the next decade. He became a cartoon character in Garry Trudeau's Doonesbury. Interestingly, the Doonesbury home page today has this HST quote: "A lot of people want to grow up to be firemen and President. But nobody wants to grow up to be a cartoon character." Trudeau has often said that Uncle Duke wasn't literally Thompson, and I'm sure Thompson knew it, but as Thompson's writing came harder, he hit the lecture trail and, well, acted like a cartoon character. He'd take the podium with a bottle of Wild Turkey in his hand and rant and rave about whatever came to mind, collect his fee, and split. He'd be swarmed by admirers, usually young men with nascent substance-abuse problems and literary/journalistic aspirations, and hang out with them -- or not -- and eventually go on to the next gig. I felt embarrassed for him, because I thought he could probably still do good work if he could bat the demons, and the preppie leeches, back.
I also had cause to think about this because I'd been good friends with Lester Bangs, whose legend is similar to, but somewhat different than Thompson's. I recently read John Morthland's fine collection of Lester's work, Mainlines, Blood Feasts, and Bad Taste and was amazed at how much passion was in Lester's writing, and how much thought he put into what masqueraded as spontaneous composition. Had Lester lived another ten or twenty years, he might well have found himself a celebrity, and although writer's block had never been a problem of his (or mine, for that matter), he could be pretty easily seduced into partying. Would he have wound up a caricature of himself?
Would Thompson ever find the thread again? I wondered from time to time. Because what he suffered from was an addiction, the same one performers suffer from, the desire for adulation and exposure in a field where that mostly comes quietly and passively. It's easy enough to say he should have turned his back on it, but let's face it, most of us have never been in that position, and who's to judge just how easy that might have been?
I certainly know what it's like being depressed when you look at the ruins of your career, and wondering if it's possible to put it back together, and, if so, if it's worth it. Fortunately, I've never had a fascination with guns, or with living in solitude, or with chemically enhancing myself past the boundaries of good sense, although I understand its attraction. So perhaps I have an insight into what happened there the other day.
Or not. Frankly, in the end it's not as important as the work he left, and it's none of my -- or your -- business. I hope he's found peace and that he's happy, and if his sad end serves as a sober-up call for some of the idiots who thought the liquor and the pills were what made the writing, then it's not entirely tragic.
What is tragic, though, is that if a similarly distinctive and unusual voice appeared on the scene today, the world of print would have no place for it. Long articles are long gone, replaced by bite-sized chunks for the ADD generation. Magazines don't take risks because they don't want to offend and lose advertisers, and anyway, they're making little enough money, so they depend on staff writers to do the whole book. Freelancers don't have a chance, even established ones. Nope, a Hunter Thompson today would be tempted to put the gun to his head before his name ever appeared in print. And that's a tragedy which needs attending to, I'd say.
No, I didn't know him. I may have been introduced to him once; those days are a blur for a number of reasons. But a couple of people have asked for my take on him now, and I'll give it.
The arrival of Hunter Thompson at Rolling Stone came right about at my departure. Six months after the hiring spree which had included me, I think editor/publisher Jann Wenner was doing a number of things, most notably changing the magazine around and cutting back on stuff. One thing he cut back was Earth Times, an "ecology magazine" he'd started soon after we'd moved from above the print-shop at 746 Brannan and into our new office building at 635 3rd St. Jon Carroll had been overseeing it, and he was now back on the Rolling Stone side of things, but people were still getting fired. Rumors spread through the office, always a hotbed of gossip, and Jann saw fit to call a meeting in the reception area (the conference room wasn't finished yet). "I just want you to know that rumors here have gotten out of hand. Yes, we've had to make some changes here, but no, there will be no more people let off."
Twenty-four hours later, Carroll was fired.
Jon Landau came in from Boston and hunkered in Wenner's palatial office with him for a couple of days. The rumor mill said he was after my job, which would explain why he told me he was going to have it. John Burks, our mainstay managing editor, was fired, a terrible blow to morale. I was 21 years old, and had no idea what was happening, or what I'd do. To put it mildly, I was scared, but the magazine still had to come out. Wenner was on a tear, impossible to talk to, secretive and barricaded in his office.
One day I remember he'd gone into the (finally finished) conference room to interview someone. Who was it? Some weird guy with a Beatle wig, they said. Scary guy. He'd left strict orders that he wasn't to be disturbed, but at some point I had something he absolutely had to have, so I asked his secretary, Gretchen Horton, what to do. "Take it in there," she advised. "It'll be okay." So I knocked on the door, opened it when I heard Wenner bark "What?" and handed him the copy. Sure enough, there was a guy smoking cigarettes through an FDR-like cigarette holder, hair looking weird (the wig had come askew), wearing blue-tinted glasses. I handed Jann the stuff, he thanked me, and I left.
This isn't the time or place to tell the now-famous story of my firing, but it happened very shortly afterwards, and I had a pretty hard nervous breakdown, which I tended at some friends' farm in Elmira, Oregon. A strange artist known as Mr. Peanut showed up at one point, a guy who was living with a friend of mine in L.A., and I caught a ride back down to San Francisco with him. At loose ends, I got pretty paranoid, and developed a strong hatred for Rolling Stone and everything associated with it.
That's why, when they began serializing Fear & Loathing in Las Vegas, I pretty much ignored it. Not that I was unaware of Thompson's work: I'd read him in Ramparts and its successor/competitor Scanlan's, and I'd also read Hell's Angels when I was still in college. The straight journalism pieces he did I rather admired, because it was of the same first-person, edgy style and voice that I, along with dozens of others of my colleagues, was trying to evolve. (Someone mailed me an early piece of mine from Creem last year, and I cringed when I read it; I wasn't imitating Thompson, but I was imitating myself). I thought Fear and Loathing was awful, self-indulgent twaddle (and boy, having committed enough of it myself, I thought I knew from twaddle), and I was pissed off that Jann's pursuit of celebrities had resulted in his giving Thompson the licence to waste space with it in the magazine.
I still have no desire to read it, and I loathed the film they made of it, but once Thompson started covering the Presidential election in 1972, I enjoyed reading his dispatches. But there was no doubt about it: he was getting weirder. Particularly after the articles were collated into a book and he retreated to Aspen and ran for sheriff, I began to get tired of him.
So, I suspect, did he. Certainly he did over the next decade. He became a cartoon character in Garry Trudeau's Doonesbury. Interestingly, the Doonesbury home page today has this HST quote: "A lot of people want to grow up to be firemen and President. But nobody wants to grow up to be a cartoon character." Trudeau has often said that Uncle Duke wasn't literally Thompson, and I'm sure Thompson knew it, but as Thompson's writing came harder, he hit the lecture trail and, well, acted like a cartoon character. He'd take the podium with a bottle of Wild Turkey in his hand and rant and rave about whatever came to mind, collect his fee, and split. He'd be swarmed by admirers, usually young men with nascent substance-abuse problems and literary/journalistic aspirations, and hang out with them -- or not -- and eventually go on to the next gig. I felt embarrassed for him, because I thought he could probably still do good work if he could bat the demons, and the preppie leeches, back.
I also had cause to think about this because I'd been good friends with Lester Bangs, whose legend is similar to, but somewhat different than Thompson's. I recently read John Morthland's fine collection of Lester's work, Mainlines, Blood Feasts, and Bad Taste and was amazed at how much passion was in Lester's writing, and how much thought he put into what masqueraded as spontaneous composition. Had Lester lived another ten or twenty years, he might well have found himself a celebrity, and although writer's block had never been a problem of his (or mine, for that matter), he could be pretty easily seduced into partying. Would he have wound up a caricature of himself?
Would Thompson ever find the thread again? I wondered from time to time. Because what he suffered from was an addiction, the same one performers suffer from, the desire for adulation and exposure in a field where that mostly comes quietly and passively. It's easy enough to say he should have turned his back on it, but let's face it, most of us have never been in that position, and who's to judge just how easy that might have been?
I certainly know what it's like being depressed when you look at the ruins of your career, and wondering if it's possible to put it back together, and, if so, if it's worth it. Fortunately, I've never had a fascination with guns, or with living in solitude, or with chemically enhancing myself past the boundaries of good sense, although I understand its attraction. So perhaps I have an insight into what happened there the other day.
Or not. Frankly, in the end it's not as important as the work he left, and it's none of my -- or your -- business. I hope he's found peace and that he's happy, and if his sad end serves as a sober-up call for some of the idiots who thought the liquor and the pills were what made the writing, then it's not entirely tragic.
What is tragic, though, is that if a similarly distinctive and unusual voice appeared on the scene today, the world of print would have no place for it. Long articles are long gone, replaced by bite-sized chunks for the ADD generation. Magazines don't take risks because they don't want to offend and lose advertisers, and anyway, they're making little enough money, so they depend on staff writers to do the whole book. Freelancers don't have a chance, even established ones. Nope, a Hunter Thompson today would be tempted to put the gun to his head before his name ever appeared in print. And that's a tragedy which needs attending to, I'd say.
Tuesday, February 22, 2005
February
I don't know about that T.S. Eliot guy, but for me, February has always been the cruellest month. Nor am I alone in making this observation: I tossed off the comment in an e-mail to a friend in the States and she wrote back that she'd already heard it twice that week, both times from writers. Maybe it's the unfairness of paying the same rent for 28 days that you pay for months where you get 30 or 31 days for your money or something.
Last Monday, I opened the roll-down shutters to a landscape of white and had a surge of good feeling. Finding that odd, I tried to figure it out (I was still half-asleep, after all) and the phrase "snow day" came into my head, a relic of childhood when too much snow would close the schools. This was probably due to having been in touch with my sister about the death of the last of our aunts the week before, but it didn't take long for the feeling to go away. It was gone before I'd finished my coffee, in fact.
February in Berlin seems endless, and this is odd. After all, scientists say that Seasonal Affect Disorder is linked to photo-period, the amount of daylight in a given 24-hour period, and yet in December, when it started getting dark at around 3:35, I was still in a pretty good mood most of the time. It may have been dark a lot, and it was certainly cold, but the mood wasn't oppressive. Even January seemed pretty okay.
February, though, isn't.
Nor is it just me: this is the time of year when people get really down. I check in with friends and find them weary and depressed. One friend has just suffered a serious meltdown, and a couple of others are missing in action. You get worried when stuff like that happens. You get worried about yourself: I found I was sleeping nine hours or more each night these past couple of weeks, which is one of the symptoms of actual clinical depression. Why get up?
I spent a lot of yesterday in transit or just walking around, due to a couple of things I had to do, and it came to me clearly, the source of the February malaise: I've had enough. It was right around freezing, the ground had patches of ice and snow, the wind blew so that there was no sense of warmth anywhere, my nose was running, and the sky was a dirty white color not unlike that of the snow. From time to time, some sort of moisture would blow in my face, and although it didn't stick on the ground, it was unwelcome.
"I've had enough." For me, right now, that means I've had enough cold, enough dull light, enough wind, enough crappy weather. What worries me is that some people just think they've had enough, period. There's a sense of needing to move on, of wanting stuff to happen that just doesn't seem to be happening, and just the same, you can't seem to make it happen.
I'm luckier than most. In a little over two weeks, I'll be headed to Texas for a couple of weeks, participating in South By Southwest in Austin, where at the best it'll be sunny and warm and at worst humid and thundery. A nice break, because when I get back it'll still be February here, the superficial name-change to March notwithstanding. Not so for most folks here, though. And I've got to say, just taking possession of the documents for my plane ticket, my hotel reservation, my registration for the conference, has energized me, given me something to hang on to as these days of February grind on. Because make no mistake about it: it's not the photo-period at all. The days have gotten longer; it doesn't get dark until 5-ish these days.
That doesn't make it any better. Just longer.
Berlin is at the same latitude, I once figured out, as Edmonton, Alberta. (For comparison, New York is a little bit south of Barcelona). No wonder people here will gather at outdoor cafes, still wearing thick coats, as soon as the sunshine gets a bit more prevalent around the end of March. No wonder you can't open a film here in the summertime: nobody will go see it, because they'd rather be outdoors as long as they can. This is what the concept of the beer garden is all about.
This all seems unimaginably far in the future. It feels that way every year. Right now, yeah, I've had enough. But very fortunately, enough is not yet too much. In a week, February will be wearing its March name. I'll be counting the days until I get on that plane.
Last Monday, I opened the roll-down shutters to a landscape of white and had a surge of good feeling. Finding that odd, I tried to figure it out (I was still half-asleep, after all) and the phrase "snow day" came into my head, a relic of childhood when too much snow would close the schools. This was probably due to having been in touch with my sister about the death of the last of our aunts the week before, but it didn't take long for the feeling to go away. It was gone before I'd finished my coffee, in fact.
February in Berlin seems endless, and this is odd. After all, scientists say that Seasonal Affect Disorder is linked to photo-period, the amount of daylight in a given 24-hour period, and yet in December, when it started getting dark at around 3:35, I was still in a pretty good mood most of the time. It may have been dark a lot, and it was certainly cold, but the mood wasn't oppressive. Even January seemed pretty okay.
February, though, isn't.
Nor is it just me: this is the time of year when people get really down. I check in with friends and find them weary and depressed. One friend has just suffered a serious meltdown, and a couple of others are missing in action. You get worried when stuff like that happens. You get worried about yourself: I found I was sleeping nine hours or more each night these past couple of weeks, which is one of the symptoms of actual clinical depression. Why get up?
I spent a lot of yesterday in transit or just walking around, due to a couple of things I had to do, and it came to me clearly, the source of the February malaise: I've had enough. It was right around freezing, the ground had patches of ice and snow, the wind blew so that there was no sense of warmth anywhere, my nose was running, and the sky was a dirty white color not unlike that of the snow. From time to time, some sort of moisture would blow in my face, and although it didn't stick on the ground, it was unwelcome.
"I've had enough." For me, right now, that means I've had enough cold, enough dull light, enough wind, enough crappy weather. What worries me is that some people just think they've had enough, period. There's a sense of needing to move on, of wanting stuff to happen that just doesn't seem to be happening, and just the same, you can't seem to make it happen.
I'm luckier than most. In a little over two weeks, I'll be headed to Texas for a couple of weeks, participating in South By Southwest in Austin, where at the best it'll be sunny and warm and at worst humid and thundery. A nice break, because when I get back it'll still be February here, the superficial name-change to March notwithstanding. Not so for most folks here, though. And I've got to say, just taking possession of the documents for my plane ticket, my hotel reservation, my registration for the conference, has energized me, given me something to hang on to as these days of February grind on. Because make no mistake about it: it's not the photo-period at all. The days have gotten longer; it doesn't get dark until 5-ish these days.
That doesn't make it any better. Just longer.
Berlin is at the same latitude, I once figured out, as Edmonton, Alberta. (For comparison, New York is a little bit south of Barcelona). No wonder people here will gather at outdoor cafes, still wearing thick coats, as soon as the sunshine gets a bit more prevalent around the end of March. No wonder you can't open a film here in the summertime: nobody will go see it, because they'd rather be outdoors as long as they can. This is what the concept of the beer garden is all about.
This all seems unimaginably far in the future. It feels that way every year. Right now, yeah, I've had enough. But very fortunately, enough is not yet too much. In a week, February will be wearing its March name. I'll be counting the days until I get on that plane.
Thursday, February 17, 2005
Kulchah
I expect the e-mail box to start filling up with pointers to today's New York Times story about the cultural renaissance in Berlin, a story which must have been kicking around for ten years, from the looks of it, and updated with a couple of details by its author, Alan Riding, sometime this week. [Note: I have changed this link so it won't expire, so don't freak when you see it's the Herald Tribune instead.]
There's very little in the story which is outright incorrect, mind you. Sure, he posits my neighborhood, Mitte, as the art center of the city, when the fact is that rising rents here have forced most artists and other culture types first to Prenzlauer Berg, then to Friedrichshain, in search of affordable housing. But there are facts, and there are facts, and the article is deceptive.
It's only on the article's second page (as measured on the website; those of you reading the dead-tree version have another measurement) that things get weird, when, after discussing the problems of reunification with what's become almost journalistic boilerplate, and talking about the crisis in the symphonies and particularly the opera houses and how they've been dealt with (one hesitates to say "solved") he moves on to the world of visual arts.
It is, as Riding notes, a Good Thing that the city's once-divided museum collections have been assembled under one roof, and that the resulting mass of objects will soon be rationalized in an oh-so-Prussian way by being divided between the various new and old buildings which exist to house them. By the end of the decade, if all goes well, we should be able to visit specific eras of art history in different museums dedicated to those eras. It's also good that the Neue Nationalgalerie will be turned into a venue for temporary exhibitions, since the building is a mess: originally designed by Mies van der Rohe as a building which would house Bacardi's main rum-producing facility in Cuba, the plans were bought by the city of Berlin and jiggered into an art museum. As an art museum, it makes a great corporate headquarters cum distillery: the impressive ground floor is an empty cavern, and one can only hang art downstairs. Wasted space in a museum is not a Good Thing.
I'm less convinced by Riding's paean to the new visual arts. He lauds the Hamburger Bahnhof, the old train station converted into a contemporary art museum, and, while it's a great space for shows, it's rarely on my list of must-see places, even though it's about a ten-minute walk from my house. The reason? The shows there suck. And while the blame for this may rest at least partially on the shoulders of its curators, the main impediment to anything worthwhile showing there is the fact that, like most other cultural institutions here, the museum is broke. The last show I went to there was called Face Up!, supposedly a survey of hot young artists from Australia, but if this is the state of Australian art, I recommend the Australian government subsidize immigration by artists, because currently they don't have any. What was a travesty like this doing in Berlin? The whole thing was paid for by Australian cultural foundations and the government. It didn't cost Berlin anything.
It's true, as Riding says, that there are galleries all over the place, particularly in the east: there's still a city subsidy for anyone who wants to open a cultural space in the east, and initially, this led to the establishment of a red-hot gallery district in the Scheunenviertel, the triangle more or less bounded by Oranienburger Str., Torstr., and Rosenthaler Str. Ten years ago, a friend who was monitoring the situation warned me never to sign a lease in the Scheunenviertel without having it looked at very, very carefully by a lawyer, and would that the majority of these galleries had listened: one by one, the truly excellent ones, the ones who truly cared about showing innovative, interesting work (and, thus, weren't either a rich man's folly or a money laundry) closed up and moved, victims of sudden and brutal rent increases. Of my favorite galleries from that period, only Barbara Blickensdorff is left, although I'm happy to see Hannes Nowak's DNA across the street (and happy to see him quoted in the Times, savvy media dude that he is). Nowak, I think, is there because of the settlement of his dispute with the city, which forced both his amazing Aktionsgallerie (a great hangout in the old days: a rockin' bar upstairs, and an anything-can-happen gallery in the basement; DNA stands for Die Neue Aktionsgallerie) and his equally fascinating Mori Ogai Gallerie (in an apartment upstairs once occupied by the revered Japanese translator of Goethe and Hoffmann -- revered by Japanese, that is, since no one else has ever heard of him) out of the building they occupied.
But there's something Riding misses in the story. If, as he says (and I'm not going to dispute this as hotly as I might), Berlin has become a magnet for young artists because it's cheap and open, I'm here to tell you that artists don't just do art and go to sleep. They want a scene, a place they can get together, clubs, events, hangouts. The city of Berlin pretty much systematically eradicated the ones in my neighborhood one by one. The Aktionsgallerie scene was only one of them. Berlin/Tokyo went. The Glowing Pickle, Spätverkauf, and Schmalzwald were hounded out of business. A half-dozen other dives whose names I've either forgotten or never knew vanished. Maybe similar things exist in Friedrichshain these days, but that's an awful long ways to go.
And what about the case of Podewil? This center for avant-garde music and art set up in an 18th Century townhouse over behind Alexanderplatz under the inspired direction of a woman named Elke Moltrecht. In just a few years, she turned it into a place that had musicians around the world fighting each other to get programmed in the various festivals she put on. But Podewil kept getting starved by the Berlin Kultursenat in order to feed redundant opera houses and keep the Hamburger Bahnhof from shutting down. At one point Moltrecht announced that they'd have to leave the house, but Podewil would remain as an institution, curating events and festivals. But in December, they died. Podewil, as far as I can determine, is no more. One of Berlin's signature outposts of the avant-garde has been shut down. And, as much as the grungy art-spaces like Berlin/Tokyo, with which it often shared musicians, Podewil was a place where you'd see the artists and gallerists who were putting Berlin on Alan Riding's map.
Berlin is famously €40 billion in the hole, and I loved the quote Riding has towards the top of his article: "'I think culture is the only real force for renewal that Berlin has for the next 50 to 100 years,' said Barbara Kisseler, the city's under secretary for culture.' At the moment, we have more problems than we need. But these are only financial problems, not problems that cannot be resolved.'" Waitaminnit, lady: the next 50 to 100 years??? The only real force for renewal?
Yikes. But...it really is that bad. And there's no money to put where their mouths are, either. Last one outta here turn out the light, okay?
There's very little in the story which is outright incorrect, mind you. Sure, he posits my neighborhood, Mitte, as the art center of the city, when the fact is that rising rents here have forced most artists and other culture types first to Prenzlauer Berg, then to Friedrichshain, in search of affordable housing. But there are facts, and there are facts, and the article is deceptive.
It's only on the article's second page (as measured on the website; those of you reading the dead-tree version have another measurement) that things get weird, when, after discussing the problems of reunification with what's become almost journalistic boilerplate, and talking about the crisis in the symphonies and particularly the opera houses and how they've been dealt with (one hesitates to say "solved") he moves on to the world of visual arts.
It is, as Riding notes, a Good Thing that the city's once-divided museum collections have been assembled under one roof, and that the resulting mass of objects will soon be rationalized in an oh-so-Prussian way by being divided between the various new and old buildings which exist to house them. By the end of the decade, if all goes well, we should be able to visit specific eras of art history in different museums dedicated to those eras. It's also good that the Neue Nationalgalerie will be turned into a venue for temporary exhibitions, since the building is a mess: originally designed by Mies van der Rohe as a building which would house Bacardi's main rum-producing facility in Cuba, the plans were bought by the city of Berlin and jiggered into an art museum. As an art museum, it makes a great corporate headquarters cum distillery: the impressive ground floor is an empty cavern, and one can only hang art downstairs. Wasted space in a museum is not a Good Thing.
I'm less convinced by Riding's paean to the new visual arts. He lauds the Hamburger Bahnhof, the old train station converted into a contemporary art museum, and, while it's a great space for shows, it's rarely on my list of must-see places, even though it's about a ten-minute walk from my house. The reason? The shows there suck. And while the blame for this may rest at least partially on the shoulders of its curators, the main impediment to anything worthwhile showing there is the fact that, like most other cultural institutions here, the museum is broke. The last show I went to there was called Face Up!, supposedly a survey of hot young artists from Australia, but if this is the state of Australian art, I recommend the Australian government subsidize immigration by artists, because currently they don't have any. What was a travesty like this doing in Berlin? The whole thing was paid for by Australian cultural foundations and the government. It didn't cost Berlin anything.
It's true, as Riding says, that there are galleries all over the place, particularly in the east: there's still a city subsidy for anyone who wants to open a cultural space in the east, and initially, this led to the establishment of a red-hot gallery district in the Scheunenviertel, the triangle more or less bounded by Oranienburger Str., Torstr., and Rosenthaler Str. Ten years ago, a friend who was monitoring the situation warned me never to sign a lease in the Scheunenviertel without having it looked at very, very carefully by a lawyer, and would that the majority of these galleries had listened: one by one, the truly excellent ones, the ones who truly cared about showing innovative, interesting work (and, thus, weren't either a rich man's folly or a money laundry) closed up and moved, victims of sudden and brutal rent increases. Of my favorite galleries from that period, only Barbara Blickensdorff is left, although I'm happy to see Hannes Nowak's DNA across the street (and happy to see him quoted in the Times, savvy media dude that he is). Nowak, I think, is there because of the settlement of his dispute with the city, which forced both his amazing Aktionsgallerie (a great hangout in the old days: a rockin' bar upstairs, and an anything-can-happen gallery in the basement; DNA stands for Die Neue Aktionsgallerie) and his equally fascinating Mori Ogai Gallerie (in an apartment upstairs once occupied by the revered Japanese translator of Goethe and Hoffmann -- revered by Japanese, that is, since no one else has ever heard of him) out of the building they occupied.
But there's something Riding misses in the story. If, as he says (and I'm not going to dispute this as hotly as I might), Berlin has become a magnet for young artists because it's cheap and open, I'm here to tell you that artists don't just do art and go to sleep. They want a scene, a place they can get together, clubs, events, hangouts. The city of Berlin pretty much systematically eradicated the ones in my neighborhood one by one. The Aktionsgallerie scene was only one of them. Berlin/Tokyo went. The Glowing Pickle, Spätverkauf, and Schmalzwald were hounded out of business. A half-dozen other dives whose names I've either forgotten or never knew vanished. Maybe similar things exist in Friedrichshain these days, but that's an awful long ways to go.
And what about the case of Podewil? This center for avant-garde music and art set up in an 18th Century townhouse over behind Alexanderplatz under the inspired direction of a woman named Elke Moltrecht. In just a few years, she turned it into a place that had musicians around the world fighting each other to get programmed in the various festivals she put on. But Podewil kept getting starved by the Berlin Kultursenat in order to feed redundant opera houses and keep the Hamburger Bahnhof from shutting down. At one point Moltrecht announced that they'd have to leave the house, but Podewil would remain as an institution, curating events and festivals. But in December, they died. Podewil, as far as I can determine, is no more. One of Berlin's signature outposts of the avant-garde has been shut down. And, as much as the grungy art-spaces like Berlin/Tokyo, with which it often shared musicians, Podewil was a place where you'd see the artists and gallerists who were putting Berlin on Alan Riding's map.
Berlin is famously €40 billion in the hole, and I loved the quote Riding has towards the top of his article: "'I think culture is the only real force for renewal that Berlin has for the next 50 to 100 years,' said Barbara Kisseler, the city's under secretary for culture.' At the moment, we have more problems than we need. But these are only financial problems, not problems that cannot be resolved.'" Waitaminnit, lady: the next 50 to 100 years??? The only real force for renewal?
Yikes. But...it really is that bad. And there's no money to put where their mouths are, either. Last one outta here turn out the light, okay?
Wednesday, February 09, 2005
Last Pix From The Trip
Time to move on to this blog's real purpose: saying terrible things about Berlin. And I will, I promise!
But just because I know people always like audio-visual aids to long print presentations, here are the last three Montpellier pictures I'm going to post until I go back. The next pictures you see here will either be Berlin graffiti or...well, that would be telling, but I got a good 'un saved up that won't get done until it warms up just a tiny bit more.
This is the Arc de Triomphe I mentioned. I've got my back to the great view. And the wind.
Antigone, looking towards the Polygone. This only hints at the fascist vibe, and the reproductions of famous classical statues are a fairly nice touch. Elsewhere, there are grotesquely out-of-proportion columns set into buildings that are really creepy.
The Comédie. No idea who the dude in the foreground is, but he seemed convinced I was taking his picture. But you can imagine a sea of tables in the summertime out in front of that huge building in the background.
For more pix, take the virtual tour here, which doesn't have half as nice photos as mine, in my opinion. The Polygone entrance can be seen in the Tourism Office panorama, but I wish the view from the top of the Arc de Triomphe was 360 degrees. Ah, well.
But just because I know people always like audio-visual aids to long print presentations, here are the last three Montpellier pictures I'm going to post until I go back. The next pictures you see here will either be Berlin graffiti or...well, that would be telling, but I got a good 'un saved up that won't get done until it warms up just a tiny bit more.
This is the Arc de Triomphe I mentioned. I've got my back to the great view. And the wind.
Antigone, looking towards the Polygone. This only hints at the fascist vibe, and the reproductions of famous classical statues are a fairly nice touch. Elsewhere, there are grotesquely out-of-proportion columns set into buildings that are really creepy.
The Comédie. No idea who the dude in the foreground is, but he seemed convinced I was taking his picture. But you can imagine a sea of tables in the summertime out in front of that huge building in the background.
For more pix, take the virtual tour here, which doesn't have half as nice photos as mine, in my opinion. The Polygone entrance can be seen in the Tourism Office panorama, but I wish the view from the top of the Arc de Triomphe was 360 degrees. Ah, well.
Some Words About France
I realized the other day that although I've posted some nice pretty pictures of Montpellier, I haven't written anything here about what the city's like. So to avoid dozens of repetitive e-mails, here's what I like and don't like about the city, and other assorted thoughts.
I was very lucky to be introduced to CC, a professor of English at Montpellier University, by a mutual friend, and even more lucky to be invited to stay in his house, a huge sprawling apartment in a 16th Century hôtel, a word the French use to indicate a mansion in a city. There are lots of these in Montpellier which have been carved up into apartments, and naturally this is what I've got my sights set on for my own future home.
CC proved to be a great guide, meeting me at the train station and walking me back to his house, pointing out things here and there as we walked. He had to go teach an afternoon class, but I had no problems with roaming around the city by myself, because that's how I learn places, and it's one of my favorite things to do, the single thing (besides the money) that I miss from doing stories for the Wall Street Journal Europe.
As he explained, the inner city, the old part, is called the "escutcheon," because it's shaped roughly like a shield or the template for a coat of arms. At one point, this was the part of the city ringed by the city wall, bits of which still exist. Obviously, the city escaped these bounds long ago, so some of the outlying areas aren't so bad, either. But the centre ville, of which I've posted photos, is magical.
It's also very hard to get an apartment in, although reading the signs in the windows of real estate places proved that it's hardly impossible. The cost of an apartment there is about 30% higher than in Berlin, but some of the other costs are less, most notably telecom charges, which are the lowest in Europe, or so he said: €30 a month gets you a telephone, cable, and DSL. The reason the centre ville looks pretty uniform is that much of it was burned during the military campaign against the Cathars, religious breakaways who dominated the Languedoc region of France, of which Montpellier, because of its ancient university, was the intellectual center.
In many ways, it's just a typical French city: loads of bakeries, a central covered market with local produce, and, on the periphery of the escutcheon, a couple of very nice parks. There's a huge square called the Comédie, which ends at one of the city's opera houses, and which looks to be a very attractive site for cafe sitting when it's not below zero outside. But the Comédie curves around and funnels into a street which takes you to the Polygone, a huge shopping mall. I like having the thing there: it's not obtrusive (its most notable building is a weird pyramid-like one which turns out to be a huge bookstore), but it houses everything from the Gap to Galeries Lafayette to Inno, a supermarket that almost had me in tears, it was so loaded with good stuff.
If you go out the back of the Polygone, you're in Montpellier's most controversial district, Antigone. Frankly, I had a weird shock of recognition, because this almost brand-new development looked eerily like Berlin's own Frankfurter Allee, where the Russians replaced the bombed-out buildings with astonishing Stalinist apartment buildings to show their dedication to the new society they were building. (Its former name was Marx-Lenin-Allee, and it makes a great stroll, especially during August's annual Bierfest). Antigone, though, is supposed to be ironic, according to the architect. Other people use the word "fascist." The good thing about Antigone is that it's close to the centre ville, not to mention the fact that not too many people want to live there, so it's relatively easy to find an apartment. The bad thing is, it ends at the river, and the river floods.
Off on the other end of the escutcheon, Montpellier has its own Arc de Triomphe, which has pictures of Louis XIV, I believe, crushing the nasty Germans and Austrians. Through it is another park, which ends at a long, long aqueduct in the Roman style (but 19th Century) that brings water from somewhere far away to Montpellier's many fountains, which fountains were encrusted in ice while I was there. Looks like a nice park: Montpellier is, as its name implies, up on a hill (mont), and the park looks off into the distance from atop that hill, with the whole north end of the city visible, not to mention some mountains way in the distance. If the wind hadn't been so cold I could have stood there for a while looking at it, but it's pretty exposed up there, so I scurried back to the shelter of the old buildings.
There were a bunch of random things to see, and I'm sure I missed a lot of them, but it had been ages since I'd seen anyplace that looked like this (since I went to Italy about 15 years ago, to be exact), and I confess to being seduced into a tourist-like state. The icy weather did save me from taking too many photographs, though. In the time it took me to whip out the camera and turn it on pain was coursing through my fingers.
In the end, the story seems to be this: there are about a quarter-million people living there, and 90,000 of them are students or connected to the University, which means, among other things, according to CC, that the only time you have a decent shot at an apartment is during the six weeks school is out in July and August. I talked to people in the city's two English-language bookstores, and one word that came up repeatedly was "provincial." I had to assure them that Berlin was provincial in its own way, although I realize that Montpellier doesn't have three world-class museums and an internationally famous film festival. On the other hand, I almost never do anything around the film festiva, and I only hit these museums four or five times a year, if that. (Montpellier also has a very good museum, I'm told, but it's being renovated head to toe and won't re-open until next year). But the population is a fraction of Berlin's, and I can see that as being good and bad.
The city, though, is served by two discount airlines, Ryanair and Buzz, and there's TGV (fast train) service virtually nonstop to Paris, which takes three hours and 15 minutes and isn't all that expensive. It's also easy enough to get to Marseille, Nice, or Barcelona. It's clean, as cities go, and I'm told that when the wind isn't blowing out of the Alps in the wintertime the climate is very, very nice: it gets up into the upper 80s in the summertime, but the houses are built for that, and the Mediterranean isn't too far away.
There is, however, something I can't allow myself to forget: it has always been my contention that you move to somewhere because there's something there for you, not away from someplace because you don't like it. I have yet to find the thing to move to. As it is, I only know one person in this place, and I've only seen a fraction of it. I have an idea for a project I might be able to mount there, but I have no idea if I could get any help, if there would be funding, or even if it isn't a bit presumptuous for a newcomer to jump right into something like that. When I moved to Berlin, I had a job waiting, starting the day after I landed, which was good for three months. I don't believe there's any such thing possible in Montpellier, and wouldn't know where to go about looking for it if there was. On the other hand, when I decided to move to Berlin, I didn't have a clue how I was going to do it, or what I'd do when I got there. Much like I am now, in other words.
Clearly, more research is necessary, both here and there. I'm not sure how I'm going to do it, but the question is moot for the time being, since my next trip will be to Texas in a month, and I'll be there for a couple of weeks. Maybe around mid-May, though, answers to some of these questions will have begun to come into focus. One thing's pretty certain, though: with the state of American media as it is, it's unlikely I'll be able to raise the funds doing what I've been doing for a living for the past 40 years. That in itself is frightening, but there's no current demand for writing about places and events beyond the U.S. borders, so introverted has the country become since 9/11, and what little space there is in magazines wants short, dumb articles for the most part.
Two things are absolutely certain, though: this is a challenge, and I'm up for it.
I was very lucky to be introduced to CC, a professor of English at Montpellier University, by a mutual friend, and even more lucky to be invited to stay in his house, a huge sprawling apartment in a 16th Century hôtel, a word the French use to indicate a mansion in a city. There are lots of these in Montpellier which have been carved up into apartments, and naturally this is what I've got my sights set on for my own future home.
CC proved to be a great guide, meeting me at the train station and walking me back to his house, pointing out things here and there as we walked. He had to go teach an afternoon class, but I had no problems with roaming around the city by myself, because that's how I learn places, and it's one of my favorite things to do, the single thing (besides the money) that I miss from doing stories for the Wall Street Journal Europe.
As he explained, the inner city, the old part, is called the "escutcheon," because it's shaped roughly like a shield or the template for a coat of arms. At one point, this was the part of the city ringed by the city wall, bits of which still exist. Obviously, the city escaped these bounds long ago, so some of the outlying areas aren't so bad, either. But the centre ville, of which I've posted photos, is magical.
It's also very hard to get an apartment in, although reading the signs in the windows of real estate places proved that it's hardly impossible. The cost of an apartment there is about 30% higher than in Berlin, but some of the other costs are less, most notably telecom charges, which are the lowest in Europe, or so he said: €30 a month gets you a telephone, cable, and DSL. The reason the centre ville looks pretty uniform is that much of it was burned during the military campaign against the Cathars, religious breakaways who dominated the Languedoc region of France, of which Montpellier, because of its ancient university, was the intellectual center.
In many ways, it's just a typical French city: loads of bakeries, a central covered market with local produce, and, on the periphery of the escutcheon, a couple of very nice parks. There's a huge square called the Comédie, which ends at one of the city's opera houses, and which looks to be a very attractive site for cafe sitting when it's not below zero outside. But the Comédie curves around and funnels into a street which takes you to the Polygone, a huge shopping mall. I like having the thing there: it's not obtrusive (its most notable building is a weird pyramid-like one which turns out to be a huge bookstore), but it houses everything from the Gap to Galeries Lafayette to Inno, a supermarket that almost had me in tears, it was so loaded with good stuff.
If you go out the back of the Polygone, you're in Montpellier's most controversial district, Antigone. Frankly, I had a weird shock of recognition, because this almost brand-new development looked eerily like Berlin's own Frankfurter Allee, where the Russians replaced the bombed-out buildings with astonishing Stalinist apartment buildings to show their dedication to the new society they were building. (Its former name was Marx-Lenin-Allee, and it makes a great stroll, especially during August's annual Bierfest). Antigone, though, is supposed to be ironic, according to the architect. Other people use the word "fascist." The good thing about Antigone is that it's close to the centre ville, not to mention the fact that not too many people want to live there, so it's relatively easy to find an apartment. The bad thing is, it ends at the river, and the river floods.
Off on the other end of the escutcheon, Montpellier has its own Arc de Triomphe, which has pictures of Louis XIV, I believe, crushing the nasty Germans and Austrians. Through it is another park, which ends at a long, long aqueduct in the Roman style (but 19th Century) that brings water from somewhere far away to Montpellier's many fountains, which fountains were encrusted in ice while I was there. Looks like a nice park: Montpellier is, as its name implies, up on a hill (mont), and the park looks off into the distance from atop that hill, with the whole north end of the city visible, not to mention some mountains way in the distance. If the wind hadn't been so cold I could have stood there for a while looking at it, but it's pretty exposed up there, so I scurried back to the shelter of the old buildings.
There were a bunch of random things to see, and I'm sure I missed a lot of them, but it had been ages since I'd seen anyplace that looked like this (since I went to Italy about 15 years ago, to be exact), and I confess to being seduced into a tourist-like state. The icy weather did save me from taking too many photographs, though. In the time it took me to whip out the camera and turn it on pain was coursing through my fingers.
In the end, the story seems to be this: there are about a quarter-million people living there, and 90,000 of them are students or connected to the University, which means, among other things, according to CC, that the only time you have a decent shot at an apartment is during the six weeks school is out in July and August. I talked to people in the city's two English-language bookstores, and one word that came up repeatedly was "provincial." I had to assure them that Berlin was provincial in its own way, although I realize that Montpellier doesn't have three world-class museums and an internationally famous film festival. On the other hand, I almost never do anything around the film festiva, and I only hit these museums four or five times a year, if that. (Montpellier also has a very good museum, I'm told, but it's being renovated head to toe and won't re-open until next year). But the population is a fraction of Berlin's, and I can see that as being good and bad.
The city, though, is served by two discount airlines, Ryanair and Buzz, and there's TGV (fast train) service virtually nonstop to Paris, which takes three hours and 15 minutes and isn't all that expensive. It's also easy enough to get to Marseille, Nice, or Barcelona. It's clean, as cities go, and I'm told that when the wind isn't blowing out of the Alps in the wintertime the climate is very, very nice: it gets up into the upper 80s in the summertime, but the houses are built for that, and the Mediterranean isn't too far away.
There is, however, something I can't allow myself to forget: it has always been my contention that you move to somewhere because there's something there for you, not away from someplace because you don't like it. I have yet to find the thing to move to. As it is, I only know one person in this place, and I've only seen a fraction of it. I have an idea for a project I might be able to mount there, but I have no idea if I could get any help, if there would be funding, or even if it isn't a bit presumptuous for a newcomer to jump right into something like that. When I moved to Berlin, I had a job waiting, starting the day after I landed, which was good for three months. I don't believe there's any such thing possible in Montpellier, and wouldn't know where to go about looking for it if there was. On the other hand, when I decided to move to Berlin, I didn't have a clue how I was going to do it, or what I'd do when I got there. Much like I am now, in other words.
Clearly, more research is necessary, both here and there. I'm not sure how I'm going to do it, but the question is moot for the time being, since my next trip will be to Texas in a month, and I'll be there for a couple of weeks. Maybe around mid-May, though, answers to some of these questions will have begun to come into focus. One thing's pretty certain, though: with the state of American media as it is, it's unlikely I'll be able to raise the funds doing what I've been doing for a living for the past 40 years. That in itself is frightening, but there's no current demand for writing about places and events beyond the U.S. borders, so introverted has the country become since 9/11, and what little space there is in magazines wants short, dumb articles for the most part.
Two things are absolutely certain, though: this is a challenge, and I'm up for it.
Sunday, February 06, 2005
Crumbs And Catchup
Lord, it's been a while since I checked in here. I wish I had a better excuse than the one I have: I had a difficult project to do this week and I did it, after which there were chores to do and an important meeting yesterday at breakfast-time. Just not interesting enough to write about.
A couple of people wrote me to question my figure of €30,000 to move to Montpellier, and there were enough doubters that I sat down and re-counted. Actually, that first figure I just pulled out of the air, but once I actually started adding up my current debts and inventing some fanciful figures for this as-yet unfound apartment (three months rent, deposits for the telephone and utilities, possible purchase of a couple of appliances, since it's not unthinkable that there wouldn't even be a stove in the place when I rented it), it began to appear that I could do it for a little over half that. The main thing is I want three months' living expenses in the bank to make up for the work I won't be doing or getting during the transition.
That's the part of what I do that I found the hardest to learn. In the days before e-mail and the ease with which computers deal with magazine layout and design and printing, there was the Three Month Rule: I could be sitting pretty today, but not have any work. This meant that in three months, I wouldn't have any income, so I had to plan for that the best I could. Things have speeded up these days. Not only can you get a magazine out quicker, but e-mail has eliminated the week-in-the-mail (and maybe it'll get lost) factor with the stuff you write.
But operating on the tiny margin I currently operate on, that sort of insurance is important to a move like this. In fact, as I write this, I'm a bit anxious because I don't have any pending work. I like to work. And it's not just the money.
Although I gotta admit: money's nice, too.
***
The saga with Deutsche Bahn finally reached its ignominious end this week as a letter appeared in the mail in response to my last one. "Dear Mister Ward," it began, "thank you for giving us the opportunity to explain the happened difference in the pricing for your travels Berlin - Paris and back. Deutsche Bahn offers ist costumers [sic!] special prices." They then went on to say that there are a limited number of cheap tickets and they'd been sold out by the time I reserved. Of course, they failed to address the fact that they never bothered to explain this or offer an alternative.
Stapled to the letter was a document resembling a train ticket which was headed "Kulanzgutschein." Gutschein, I knew, meant coupon, but what was Kulanz? Guilt? My dictionary rather stumbled on this one, defining it as "obligingness, accommodatingness, generousness, fairness," only the last of which I recognize as an English word. "Kulanzleistung," the next word in the column, is defined as "gesture of good will," so I get the idea. Anyway, for the next year, I have a €20 coupon to use against a ticket.
Not exactly the kind of solution I was hoping for, but hey, it's a Kulanzleistung.
***
I had another run-in with German officialdom this week, too. I'd been corresponding with a friend in New Jersey about the horrible state of travel magazines, the fact that there isn't a travel magazine published in America that meets the needs of any of the travellers I know. Basically, these days you have varying degrees of travel porn, led by Conde Nast Traveller's "Paris on $3500 a day" mentality and descending to various flavors of "how to find the Eiffel Tower during your one day in Paris" kinds of articles. In short, they all seem to be about travel as conspicuous consumption and not about travel as a learning experience, a way to connect with history, or a way to have an in-depth experience of another culture.
As it happens, she and I are of two different, but hardly incompatible, schools of thought. She's a backpacker and adventure traveller, while I believe that human beings have been endowed with the intellectual and technological wherewithal to invent comfortable hotels, good food, and flush toilets. Don't think for a minute that I didn't enjoy reading about her latest adventure, nor that I wasn't almost as upset as she was that the book she proposed to write afterwards was pretty much dismissed out of hand by the agents (let alone the publishers) she submitted it to.
Anyway, this dialog reached the point where she threw a couple of magazines into an envelope and mailed them to me so I'd have some idea of some of the things she was talking about. Now, you'd think this would be the sort of thing that'd slide right through customs: a couple of back issues of magazines, both of which had obviously been read. Nope: I got a notice from the postal customs bureau that I was to present myself to them within seven days of their receipt of this mysterious package (which turned out to have been clearly labelled as to its contents on the little green sticker) to explain what it was. Further, I was to bring duplicate copies of any order form so they could see how much I'd paid for it, and, if said forms were not in German, I was to bring an authorized translation.
Now, I deal with this crap all the time. I frequently get promo copies of CDs because of my radio and journalism work. As often as not, they just come directly to me. Sometimes they get opened by an inspector, who then tapes the package shut and sends it on.
I hate going to postal customs because it's 20 minutes away, way the hell down by the building from which RIAS (Radio In Allied Sector) used to broadcast. Once you're in the building, time stops. To say these people are in no hurry to deal with you is an understatement. It took me 40 minutes to get called on.
You'd think that after 11 years they'd recognize me, but no. Or, rather, they keep it quiet. The boss, in fact, once waited on me when I had a package of CDs to explain, back when I had a radio show three times a week, and, after looking at the CDs, said "I listen to your show. I like it." And let me go.
Anyway, this time a far meaner guy threw the package down on the counter and barked "What is it?" Old magazines, I think, I replied, noting silently that it had already been opened and sealed. "Open it!" So I did. See? Old magazines. "You realize that when we call you here you have to come in," he said, fixing me with a steely gaze. "You can go."
And no, I don't think this aspect of things is going to be different in France. Small-minded civil servants are a fact of life everywhere, and in societies like we have in Europe, where a job with them is a guaranteed lifetime sinecure, where no amount of incompetence can get you fired, this is the way these people act.
Not too much different from Deutsche Bahn, when you get right down to it.
A couple of people wrote me to question my figure of €30,000 to move to Montpellier, and there were enough doubters that I sat down and re-counted. Actually, that first figure I just pulled out of the air, but once I actually started adding up my current debts and inventing some fanciful figures for this as-yet unfound apartment (three months rent, deposits for the telephone and utilities, possible purchase of a couple of appliances, since it's not unthinkable that there wouldn't even be a stove in the place when I rented it), it began to appear that I could do it for a little over half that. The main thing is I want three months' living expenses in the bank to make up for the work I won't be doing or getting during the transition.
That's the part of what I do that I found the hardest to learn. In the days before e-mail and the ease with which computers deal with magazine layout and design and printing, there was the Three Month Rule: I could be sitting pretty today, but not have any work. This meant that in three months, I wouldn't have any income, so I had to plan for that the best I could. Things have speeded up these days. Not only can you get a magazine out quicker, but e-mail has eliminated the week-in-the-mail (and maybe it'll get lost) factor with the stuff you write.
But operating on the tiny margin I currently operate on, that sort of insurance is important to a move like this. In fact, as I write this, I'm a bit anxious because I don't have any pending work. I like to work. And it's not just the money.
Although I gotta admit: money's nice, too.
***
The saga with Deutsche Bahn finally reached its ignominious end this week as a letter appeared in the mail in response to my last one. "Dear Mister Ward," it began, "thank you for giving us the opportunity to explain the happened difference in the pricing for your travels Berlin - Paris and back. Deutsche Bahn offers ist costumers [sic!] special prices." They then went on to say that there are a limited number of cheap tickets and they'd been sold out by the time I reserved. Of course, they failed to address the fact that they never bothered to explain this or offer an alternative.
Stapled to the letter was a document resembling a train ticket which was headed "Kulanzgutschein." Gutschein, I knew, meant coupon, but what was Kulanz? Guilt? My dictionary rather stumbled on this one, defining it as "obligingness, accommodatingness, generousness, fairness," only the last of which I recognize as an English word. "Kulanzleistung," the next word in the column, is defined as "gesture of good will," so I get the idea. Anyway, for the next year, I have a €20 coupon to use against a ticket.
Not exactly the kind of solution I was hoping for, but hey, it's a Kulanzleistung.
***
I had another run-in with German officialdom this week, too. I'd been corresponding with a friend in New Jersey about the horrible state of travel magazines, the fact that there isn't a travel magazine published in America that meets the needs of any of the travellers I know. Basically, these days you have varying degrees of travel porn, led by Conde Nast Traveller's "Paris on $3500 a day" mentality and descending to various flavors of "how to find the Eiffel Tower during your one day in Paris" kinds of articles. In short, they all seem to be about travel as conspicuous consumption and not about travel as a learning experience, a way to connect with history, or a way to have an in-depth experience of another culture.
As it happens, she and I are of two different, but hardly incompatible, schools of thought. She's a backpacker and adventure traveller, while I believe that human beings have been endowed with the intellectual and technological wherewithal to invent comfortable hotels, good food, and flush toilets. Don't think for a minute that I didn't enjoy reading about her latest adventure, nor that I wasn't almost as upset as she was that the book she proposed to write afterwards was pretty much dismissed out of hand by the agents (let alone the publishers) she submitted it to.
Anyway, this dialog reached the point where she threw a couple of magazines into an envelope and mailed them to me so I'd have some idea of some of the things she was talking about. Now, you'd think this would be the sort of thing that'd slide right through customs: a couple of back issues of magazines, both of which had obviously been read. Nope: I got a notice from the postal customs bureau that I was to present myself to them within seven days of their receipt of this mysterious package (which turned out to have been clearly labelled as to its contents on the little green sticker) to explain what it was. Further, I was to bring duplicate copies of any order form so they could see how much I'd paid for it, and, if said forms were not in German, I was to bring an authorized translation.
Now, I deal with this crap all the time. I frequently get promo copies of CDs because of my radio and journalism work. As often as not, they just come directly to me. Sometimes they get opened by an inspector, who then tapes the package shut and sends it on.
I hate going to postal customs because it's 20 minutes away, way the hell down by the building from which RIAS (Radio In Allied Sector) used to broadcast. Once you're in the building, time stops. To say these people are in no hurry to deal with you is an understatement. It took me 40 minutes to get called on.
You'd think that after 11 years they'd recognize me, but no. Or, rather, they keep it quiet. The boss, in fact, once waited on me when I had a package of CDs to explain, back when I had a radio show three times a week, and, after looking at the CDs, said "I listen to your show. I like it." And let me go.
Anyway, this time a far meaner guy threw the package down on the counter and barked "What is it?" Old magazines, I think, I replied, noting silently that it had already been opened and sealed. "Open it!" So I did. See? Old magazines. "You realize that when we call you here you have to come in," he said, fixing me with a steely gaze. "You can go."
And no, I don't think this aspect of things is going to be different in France. Small-minded civil servants are a fact of life everywhere, and in societies like we have in Europe, where a job with them is a guaranteed lifetime sinecure, where no amount of incompetence can get you fired, this is the way these people act.
Not too much different from Deutsche Bahn, when you get right down to it.
Tuesday, February 01, 2005
A Few More Pix
I'm on a horrendous deadline at the moment, but I prepared three more pictures to put up here, so I will.
Just a street. Nothin' special.
That's actually a medium-steep downhill grade there, but I liked the little house at the bottom.
Again, nothing special. These corner shrines are found in all of Europe's Catholic countries, but I didn't see many of them in Montpellier.
Okay, back to work.
Just a street. Nothin' special.
That's actually a medium-steep downhill grade there, but I liked the little house at the bottom.
Again, nothing special. These corner shrines are found in all of Europe's Catholic countries, but I didn't see many of them in Montpellier.
Okay, back to work.
Monday, January 31, 2005
Green Week Again!
About the only thing I regretted about my trip to France last week was that I might miss Green Week. Green Week (aka the Grüne Woche) is a Berlin institution that's been around since just after the War, a trade show for the grocery and gastronomy businesses which is also open to the public. It's a beloved event, because there are still people around who remember that it was possible to go there and get a free glass of milk and free samples of various kinds of food they might not see in their local stores -- at least not yet.
Today, it's another thing entirely. They've added on a gardening trade show, a pet trade show, a houseplant trade show, and a trade show for people who have Kleingartenkolonien, the little patches of land on which you can put a small shed or cottage and plant a garden. But the food show remains the heart of the thing, and the exhibitors come from around the world to show off stuff they think Germans might want to buy. In addition, the federal government puts up a huge exhibition in a hall where each German state shows off its regional specialties. Guess where most of the eating takes place.
In a way, it's wonderful: I've gone nearly every year I've been here, and come back with stuff I've loved. At one point, it was possible to get Tunisian olive oil, which is the best in the world: lots of the "Italian Extra Virgin" olive oil you buy is actually grown in Tunisia, but is packaged in Italy, where a legal loophole allows them to call it Italian. Unfortunately, the guy who was selling that stopped participating in the Tunisian stand, and I miss him: the stuff was not only good, it was phenomenally cheap. Then, a couple of years ago, I discovered Wattwurm, a company which makes long, skinny sausages that look like the shore-worms that swarm on the beaches here. The Wattwurm sausages didn't interest me as much as their Knobi-Knackers, which work just fine as Cajun sausages. Not as good as my old pal LeJeune makes in Eunice, but good enough. Some friends discovered Estonian mustard, which must be the most eye-watering mustard around. Then, the Estonians stopped selling it, although they'd put a tiny dab on your plate if you ordered one of their grilled sausages. You could get sharp cheddar at the Irish stand, a product notably missing here. And there were often other things that showed up, like the Finnish "sauna ham" we found one year, which was amazing -- and which never appeared again.
But in another way, it's depressing. It was particularly interesting to compare this year's with what I found just lying around in Montpellier's supermarkets, which were far more international than this year's Green Week. There's no getting around it: Green Week follows the Darwinian rules of capitalism: if people don't want it, they can't sell it. If they can't sell it, it doesn't get offered again.
It's also depressing because, as I've written before in an article a number of years ago, it shows how the Germans tend to reduce everything to a Pfanne of one sort or another. Pfanne means "pan," of course, but in practice, it means a gluey mass of stuff steaming in what looks to be an oversized wok. You have your Chinapfanne, your Asiapfanne, your Pilzpfanne, at every street fair, Christmas market, and in many snack bars. At Green Week, it gets ridiculous. There was a Kangaruhpfanne at the Australian stand, several other Pfanne at the Israeli stand, and variations of the Asiapfanne at the Thai, Korean, and Vietnamese stands. By reducing national cuisines to easily-understood stereotypes that Germans can accept, all of that cultural difference which other societies actually find interesting gets smoothed over. No wonder there are so many Thai sushi joints in Berlin!
And, because small nations can't afford to keep coming back if the Germans don't buy their stuff, real finds have become increasingly rare. Large nations, too, stop coming out of what must be frustration. The Americans once were represented by a doughnut maker, Samuel Adams beer, and some German wholesaler shilling for cheap California wine. (What was really cool was that the organizers invariably set them next to the Iranian stand, so dark looks shot back and forth over the figs and pistachios, the doughnuts and hot dogs). They were nowhere to be seen this year, although the Iranians had not only pistachos, but saffron. Japan, too, was missing, probably because they gave up trying to prove that Japanese people eat things other than sushi. South America was mostly missing, as was Africa (I once bought some coffee from Dahomey, I think it was, which was so good I found myself wishing I'd bought more).
So yesterday's visit was the shortest I'd ever made. I had some goals, but I was also on the lookout for bargains, since it was the last day of the event. I did manage a huge chunk of Parmigiano Reggiano, lots of Wattwurm Knobi-Knackers, a salami soaked in Barolo wine (this goes very nicely on pizza), and a tube of Estonian mustard after two years of their refusing to sell me any. I don't know what was different this year: I just asked nicely and they said yes. I got a tin of paprika from Szeged, where my friend Ray lives, and it had a little cookbook tied to it. (I just hope this isn't the stuff with the aflatoxins in it that was in the news just after last year's harvest). I also scored a nice bumper sticker from the Ukranian election, a big orange flag behind a picture of a father and son and the word TAK! in big blue letters. Nice historical souvenir.
But three hours later, I was walking back to the subway. No Irish stand this year, so no cheddar. No Tunisian guy (the Tunisians mostly sell incense and handcrafts), no surprises at all. Of course, what's on view isn't the real story: behind the scenes, as at any trade show, the attendees are talking to German grocery chains and food wholesalers and restaurant purveyors and setting up the deals that'll show up on the German food scene over the next few months. Free samples vanished years ago, so I was hungry at the appropriate time later in the day, and I wasn't interested in drinking until I got sick, which is probably the most notable non-professional activity at Green Week. It was okay, but not nearly as good as the one I attended 11 years ago, or even five years ago.
But you know what? I'll go next year if I'm here.
Today, it's another thing entirely. They've added on a gardening trade show, a pet trade show, a houseplant trade show, and a trade show for people who have Kleingartenkolonien, the little patches of land on which you can put a small shed or cottage and plant a garden. But the food show remains the heart of the thing, and the exhibitors come from around the world to show off stuff they think Germans might want to buy. In addition, the federal government puts up a huge exhibition in a hall where each German state shows off its regional specialties. Guess where most of the eating takes place.
In a way, it's wonderful: I've gone nearly every year I've been here, and come back with stuff I've loved. At one point, it was possible to get Tunisian olive oil, which is the best in the world: lots of the "Italian Extra Virgin" olive oil you buy is actually grown in Tunisia, but is packaged in Italy, where a legal loophole allows them to call it Italian. Unfortunately, the guy who was selling that stopped participating in the Tunisian stand, and I miss him: the stuff was not only good, it was phenomenally cheap. Then, a couple of years ago, I discovered Wattwurm, a company which makes long, skinny sausages that look like the shore-worms that swarm on the beaches here. The Wattwurm sausages didn't interest me as much as their Knobi-Knackers, which work just fine as Cajun sausages. Not as good as my old pal LeJeune makes in Eunice, but good enough. Some friends discovered Estonian mustard, which must be the most eye-watering mustard around. Then, the Estonians stopped selling it, although they'd put a tiny dab on your plate if you ordered one of their grilled sausages. You could get sharp cheddar at the Irish stand, a product notably missing here. And there were often other things that showed up, like the Finnish "sauna ham" we found one year, which was amazing -- and which never appeared again.
But in another way, it's depressing. It was particularly interesting to compare this year's with what I found just lying around in Montpellier's supermarkets, which were far more international than this year's Green Week. There's no getting around it: Green Week follows the Darwinian rules of capitalism: if people don't want it, they can't sell it. If they can't sell it, it doesn't get offered again.
It's also depressing because, as I've written before in an article a number of years ago, it shows how the Germans tend to reduce everything to a Pfanne of one sort or another. Pfanne means "pan," of course, but in practice, it means a gluey mass of stuff steaming in what looks to be an oversized wok. You have your Chinapfanne, your Asiapfanne, your Pilzpfanne, at every street fair, Christmas market, and in many snack bars. At Green Week, it gets ridiculous. There was a Kangaruhpfanne at the Australian stand, several other Pfanne at the Israeli stand, and variations of the Asiapfanne at the Thai, Korean, and Vietnamese stands. By reducing national cuisines to easily-understood stereotypes that Germans can accept, all of that cultural difference which other societies actually find interesting gets smoothed over. No wonder there are so many Thai sushi joints in Berlin!
And, because small nations can't afford to keep coming back if the Germans don't buy their stuff, real finds have become increasingly rare. Large nations, too, stop coming out of what must be frustration. The Americans once were represented by a doughnut maker, Samuel Adams beer, and some German wholesaler shilling for cheap California wine. (What was really cool was that the organizers invariably set them next to the Iranian stand, so dark looks shot back and forth over the figs and pistachios, the doughnuts and hot dogs). They were nowhere to be seen this year, although the Iranians had not only pistachos, but saffron. Japan, too, was missing, probably because they gave up trying to prove that Japanese people eat things other than sushi. South America was mostly missing, as was Africa (I once bought some coffee from Dahomey, I think it was, which was so good I found myself wishing I'd bought more).
So yesterday's visit was the shortest I'd ever made. I had some goals, but I was also on the lookout for bargains, since it was the last day of the event. I did manage a huge chunk of Parmigiano Reggiano, lots of Wattwurm Knobi-Knackers, a salami soaked in Barolo wine (this goes very nicely on pizza), and a tube of Estonian mustard after two years of their refusing to sell me any. I don't know what was different this year: I just asked nicely and they said yes. I got a tin of paprika from Szeged, where my friend Ray lives, and it had a little cookbook tied to it. (I just hope this isn't the stuff with the aflatoxins in it that was in the news just after last year's harvest). I also scored a nice bumper sticker from the Ukranian election, a big orange flag behind a picture of a father and son and the word TAK! in big blue letters. Nice historical souvenir.
But three hours later, I was walking back to the subway. No Irish stand this year, so no cheddar. No Tunisian guy (the Tunisians mostly sell incense and handcrafts), no surprises at all. Of course, what's on view isn't the real story: behind the scenes, as at any trade show, the attendees are talking to German grocery chains and food wholesalers and restaurant purveyors and setting up the deals that'll show up on the German food scene over the next few months. Free samples vanished years ago, so I was hungry at the appropriate time later in the day, and I wasn't interested in drinking until I got sick, which is probably the most notable non-professional activity at Green Week. It was okay, but not nearly as good as the one I attended 11 years ago, or even five years ago.
But you know what? I'll go next year if I'm here.
Saturday, January 29, 2005
A Goal
Yes, it was 22 degrees Fahrenheit. Yes, the wind was blowing out of the Alps at about 30 miles an hour, so the wind-chill was ridiculous. But the sun was shining, and I'll tell you one thing: Montpellier is beautiful. For some reason, I kept taking pictures of alleyways.
This won't be easy. It's going to take a minimum of €30,000, I'd say. I have no idea where I'm going to come up with that kind of money, but I'm going to try. Because from the way it looks to the way people act to the access to other places, this is the Europe I want to live in. Forever? I doubt it. Or maybe. Hell, I may be as irritated with Montpellier after 11 years as I am with Berlin. But it's less crowded than Paris, less expensive (although rents are about 20% higher than they are here and apartments are hard to come by when school's in session: half the population, almost, are students), and less visited by tourists. Not that I have anything against tourists, because I just was one for two and a half days. Of course, it's also less visited by various cultural attractions -- bands, museum shows -- and has a much smaller population. "Provincial" was the word one guy used. Of course, he owns an English-language bookstore there, and was shocked to hear we didn't have any in Berlin. Yeah, I know from provincial. And his was one of two I visited.
I'm still sorting through impressions and so on, but I did want to get a couple of pictures up because people have been asking for them.
More later. Meanwhile, here's another alley.
Sunday, January 23, 2005
Ban The Bahn
I fired off a letter to Deutsche Bahn this morning before I packed for tomorrow's early-morning trip to Paris, using their service as far as Cologne. Here's what I wrote:
Dear Deutsche Bahn:
Thank you for your quick reply.
I should have known that, in typical German fashion, this incident would be made to be my fault. After all, it’s a byword of doing business here that the customer is always wrong.
I should never have expected that a Deutsche Bahn employee would volunteer the information that taking another train would allow me to save money. After all, that would be helpful, and who has time for that?
Nor should I have expected guidance from your website, which could easily have pointed out this fact. And I suppose I shouldn’t have expected you to address my question as to why anyone would buy a ticket from a website which doesn’t tell its customers how much a ticket costs. It’s too much to ask from a company which has no competition.
I will almost certainly be required to go back to Paris a couple of times this year, and for that I will fly. I don’t particularly like flying, but at least I can find out how much my ticket costs, and I haven’t been discourteously dismissed by any of the airlines yet.
Kundenfreundlich is a German word. You might like to contemplate it. My English-language readers may not know it as such, but I have no problem teaching it to them.
You have lost a customer. And I don’t think you really care.
+++++++
We'll see if there's a reply. My guess is there won't be; that foreigners don't really count with them. This is more than just an idle guess; of the Big Three services, Deutsche Post, Deutsche Telekom, and Deutsche Bahn, only the latter is still semi-attached to the government, and it hopes to go public with its stock later this year or earlier next year. I can tell you from personal experience that Deutsche Post's service improved humongously when it went private and snuggled up with DHL (in fact, the yellow mail trucks are now DHL trucks), and, although I haven't had much contact with them in the last few months (and that's a good thing), my friend the dancer insists that they've become easier to deal with of late. But when they were still under the shadow of being arms of the government, with employees who could never be fired, with workforces up to 20% redundant as a result, they treated their customers with contempt, their foreign customers like contemptable retarded people. The thing is, most Germans took it, and the rest took it for granted that their institutions hated them. They didn't expect any better. But that's another rant, for another day.
Right now, I have to throw a couple of things in a suitcase and get out of here at an obscene hour in the morning. The camera's going with me, and I'll be back late Friday night. Stay tuned.
Dear Deutsche Bahn:
Thank you for your quick reply.
I should have known that, in typical German fashion, this incident would be made to be my fault. After all, it’s a byword of doing business here that the customer is always wrong.
I should never have expected that a Deutsche Bahn employee would volunteer the information that taking another train would allow me to save money. After all, that would be helpful, and who has time for that?
Nor should I have expected guidance from your website, which could easily have pointed out this fact. And I suppose I shouldn’t have expected you to address my question as to why anyone would buy a ticket from a website which doesn’t tell its customers how much a ticket costs. It’s too much to ask from a company which has no competition.
I will almost certainly be required to go back to Paris a couple of times this year, and for that I will fly. I don’t particularly like flying, but at least I can find out how much my ticket costs, and I haven’t been discourteously dismissed by any of the airlines yet.
Kundenfreundlich is a German word. You might like to contemplate it. My English-language readers may not know it as such, but I have no problem teaching it to them.
You have lost a customer. And I don’t think you really care.
+++++++
We'll see if there's a reply. My guess is there won't be; that foreigners don't really count with them. This is more than just an idle guess; of the Big Three services, Deutsche Post, Deutsche Telekom, and Deutsche Bahn, only the latter is still semi-attached to the government, and it hopes to go public with its stock later this year or earlier next year. I can tell you from personal experience that Deutsche Post's service improved humongously when it went private and snuggled up with DHL (in fact, the yellow mail trucks are now DHL trucks), and, although I haven't had much contact with them in the last few months (and that's a good thing), my friend the dancer insists that they've become easier to deal with of late. But when they were still under the shadow of being arms of the government, with employees who could never be fired, with workforces up to 20% redundant as a result, they treated their customers with contempt, their foreign customers like contemptable retarded people. The thing is, most Germans took it, and the rest took it for granted that their institutions hated them. They didn't expect any better. But that's another rant, for another day.
Right now, I have to throw a couple of things in a suitcase and get out of here at an obscene hour in the morning. The camera's going with me, and I'll be back late Friday night. Stay tuned.
Friday, January 21, 2005
Customer Service, German Style
When last we looked, our hero had discovered that he had been charged a whopping $400 for a round-trip ticket to Paris, despite having a 25% discount card and a further discount for international travel originating in Germany. Shocked, he wrote a letter to Deutsche Bahn's customer service division, who then suggested he copy the tickets and mail the copies to them for inspection. This he did.
Well, the reply came today, and it's not pretty.
"Based on our conditions of sale our employees compile the needed documents most carefully and our customers are obligated to prove the bought tickets accuracy," it says, setting up the classic "customer is always wrong" defense. "In case there has been a mistake it can be corrected immediately. No complaint can be accepted later." Can you believe that? But it gets better.
After informing me that I can go stand on line again and cash the German end of the tickets in (the others are non-refundable), it continues:
"Because Sparpreis tickets are only possible for the same return route, you have gotten Normalpreis tickets by using the route to Brussels and further with Thalys to Paris Nord. The return will be from Köln to Berlin with Deutsche Bahn. Thalys and Deutsche Bahn tarifs are separate and not always available at the same time. That is why our cleark has offered you that ticket for your requested travel."
Of course, the "cleark" could have pointed this out to me, but she didn't. She's a drone, and expected to behave like a drone. Note that this was presented as being completely my choice, although I was never presented with enough information to alter my decision. The customer is, as always, wrong.
There's a nice kicker, too: "We would be pleased if you would continue to prefer the ecologically friendly travelling by train and wish you pleasant trips on board of our trains." Play on guilt! That always works!
Well, I'm an ecologically and otherwise friendly guy, but I've just been screwed. Next time I have to go to Paris, EasyJet gets my business.
They also never addressed another issue: I fake-booked a ticket on this same route on the website and got as far as where I'd push the button to pay for it. No price was ever mentioned, yet they asked me to okay it so they could mail me the tickets. I asked them what customer in their right mind would buy something for which no price was quoted. They ignored that question.
If you think this is fun, you ought to try to reason with Deutsche Telekom some time.
Meanwhile, beware of doing business with Deutsche Bahn.
Well, the reply came today, and it's not pretty.
"Based on our conditions of sale our employees compile the needed documents most carefully and our customers are obligated to prove the bought tickets accuracy," it says, setting up the classic "customer is always wrong" defense. "In case there has been a mistake it can be corrected immediately. No complaint can be accepted later." Can you believe that? But it gets better.
After informing me that I can go stand on line again and cash the German end of the tickets in (the others are non-refundable), it continues:
"Because Sparpreis tickets are only possible for the same return route, you have gotten Normalpreis tickets by using the route to Brussels and further with Thalys to Paris Nord. The return will be from Köln to Berlin with Deutsche Bahn. Thalys and Deutsche Bahn tarifs are separate and not always available at the same time. That is why our cleark has offered you that ticket for your requested travel."
Of course, the "cleark" could have pointed this out to me, but she didn't. She's a drone, and expected to behave like a drone. Note that this was presented as being completely my choice, although I was never presented with enough information to alter my decision. The customer is, as always, wrong.
There's a nice kicker, too: "We would be pleased if you would continue to prefer the ecologically friendly travelling by train and wish you pleasant trips on board of our trains." Play on guilt! That always works!
Well, I'm an ecologically and otherwise friendly guy, but I've just been screwed. Next time I have to go to Paris, EasyJet gets my business.
They also never addressed another issue: I fake-booked a ticket on this same route on the website and got as far as where I'd push the button to pay for it. No price was ever mentioned, yet they asked me to okay it so they could mail me the tickets. I asked them what customer in their right mind would buy something for which no price was quoted. They ignored that question.
If you think this is fun, you ought to try to reason with Deutsche Telekom some time.
Meanwhile, beware of doing business with Deutsche Bahn.
Wednesday, January 19, 2005
Another Nekkid Lady
I've been wanting to post some more shots of the graffiti around here, but I've fallen woefully behind in both processing the pix and figuring out which of them to put up. Meanwhile, my favorite graffiti artist, Nike, has been doing some wonderful work. There are two more I"ve been meaning to shoot (plus another one on Kastanienallee which is a true dud), but this one appeared very close to my house, and it's everything I like about her work: a kind of primitivism which nonetheless gets some really subtle observation about the woman's body just right -- and some wrong, as witness the hands here. I hope this shows up -- that picture of Rosenthaler Platz yesterday is a true mess, isn't it? -- and I'll try to shoot the others before too long.
Tuesday, January 18, 2005
The Burden Of History: Jews And Cattle
Hey, Berlinophiles! Recognize this place?
That's right: it's fabulous Rosenthaler Platz, looking north from the traffic island in the middle of its south side. We see Brunnenstr. stretching to the north, and Weinbergsweg, familiar to those of you who've stayed at Berlin's best hostel/cheap hotel the Circus, which is just visible as a yellowish building on the far right. Running right to left is Torstr. I've been walking around there for eleven years and some, because starting in January '94, I worked not too far away on Linienstr. I've lived near it for eight years, and walk through it on the average of five or six times a week.
So how come I never knew until recently that it once played an absolutely crucial part in Berlin's -- Germany's -- history?
But it did. A few months ago, I read an amazing book, The Pity Of It All, a history of the Jews in Germany by Amos Elon. Although there's a fascinating chapter at the beginning about the first Jews to come to Germany (I was blown away to learn that there were Jews in Cologne before there were Germans, but, since it was a city artificially created by the Romans -- Colonia -- as a colonial outpost, and doubtless included Jews from the Roman Empire, it makes sense), the book really starts in 1743, when a 14-year-old boy left his home in Dessau and came to Berlin to study.
At the time, Berlin still had its medieval city wall, which stretched along what is now Torstr. and it was studded with gates where armed guards took note of who came and went in the name of security. We're all familiar with the Brandenburg Gate, and just down Torstr. from me in the other direction is Oranienburger Tor, where a gate stood until the 19th Century. "Tor," in fact, means "gate," but except for a few which are memorialized by subway stops these days -- Schlesischises Tor, Hallesches Tor -- only the one which appears on German coinage is still standing.
So imagine my surprise to read the opening words of Elon's book: "In the fall in 1743, a fourteen-year-old boy entered Berlin at the Rosenthaler Tor, the only gate in the city wall through which Jews (and cattle) were allowed to pass. The boy had arrived from his hometown of Dessau, some one hundred miles away in the small independent principality of Dessau-Anhalt. For five or six days he had walked through the hilly countryside to reach the Prussian capital."
The boy, we learn in the next paragraph, was Moses Mendelssohn, one of the preeminent figures in modern Judaism, the philosopher who managed to show his fellow Jews that the ideals of the Enlightenment were compatible with Jewish thought. He fought for tolerance for the Jews in Berlin and won it, albeit grudgingly in some quarters. He founded the first secular, co-ed school for Jewish children, translated important Jewish texts into German, and is rightly revered as one of Germany's greatest thinkers. The revolution he started is the subject of Elon's book, and it is arguable that the history of the Jews in Germany is the history of Berlin, since Berlin was the Jews' central German city, and, as Germany unified into a single country, a place where Jewish artists, writers, businessmen, and politicians were increasingly prominent and powerful.
(Incidentally, Mendelssohn did almost too good a job: his children mostly converted, adding the name "Bertholdy" to his to show connections to a Gentile in the family tree, and his grandchildren Felix and Fanny became famous musicians -- Felix even writing Christian church music and conducting the famous revival of Bach's B-Minor Mass in Leipzig.)
So where do you suppose the Rosenthaler Tor, gateway for cattle and Jews was? Duhh.
And why did I have to wait until 2004, which is when I read this book, to discover that this place where several streets come together in my neighborhood held the gate where a man whose school is near me, whose family's banking business virtually built a whole street near me, and whose grave is just a few blocks from my house, came to this city?
Berlin has a very odd attitude towards its own history, I think. There is no lack of signs and monuments to the bad things that happened here. The city has allowed an artist from another city to come here and install his "Klopfensteine" (stumbling blocks), small golden squares hammered into the cobblestones in front of various buildings giving the names of the Jews who had lived there and were deported, the dates of their births and deaths. Berlin is building a mammoth memorial to the murdered Jews of Europe near the Brandenburg Gate. Wittenbergplatz has its list of concentration camps hanging outside the subway station. Nollendorfplatz has its bronze monument to the homosexuals murdered in the camps. Just next to the park where Mendelssohn's grave is, formerly the first Jewish cemetery in Berlin, there's a monument to the Jews who were collected in a building which used to stand there, an old-age home run by the Jewish community, and then deported to the camps. East Berlin is studded with small plaques memorializing Communists -- many, but not all of them, Jewish -- who were arrested and disappeared during the Nazi era.
So why isn't there a sign telling us where a very good thing happened to Berlin's Jews?
Because, as you turn Elon's pages, you realize that lots of good things happened to Jews in Berlin, despite waxing and waning periods of anti-Semitism (incidentally, Elon and several others I've read trace the origins of classic anti-Semitism to France, not Germany). Jews wrote poetry, ran salons (in the case of many notable women), filled the orchestras, made revolution, advanced science. Yes, the story has a sad ending, and that's why Elon named his book The Pity Of It All, but I guarantee anyone reading it will be uplifted and inspired.
A solution to this is near at hand, in Paris. If you've walked around Paris, you've undoubtedly noticed these shield-shaped plaques on buildings, headed "L'Histoire du Paris." There are plenty of them, and if you're just randomly walking around Paris, you can be surprised by chancing upon a gem. I was walking down a street there once because my map said it was the quickest way to get from A to B, and there was a very ornate building in the middle of the block. Thanks to the shield, I discovered it was once the city's central market for buying and selling horses, and that everything from dray-horses to fine purebreds were sold there.
The thing about these Parisian shields is they don't take up a whole lot of room, they're succinctly written (indeed, some of them don't make sense without a certain amount of context), and there are a hell of a lot of them. Berlin could do the same thing, but I suspect it never will.
So that's why I was at Rosenthaler Platz today, risking life and limb to get that shot. Just imagine young Moses walking down Brunnenstr. to the gate, nervous at the interrogation he was about to undergo (Jews without money were turned away, and pedlars were forbidden), eager to meet the rabbi who was sponsoring his education.
But there's something about this city which squirms when positive, uplifting, or optimistic stories are brought up. No, it says, I prefer to shoulder the Burden Of History. It's my fate, my duty.
Well, it's not mine.
That's right: it's fabulous Rosenthaler Platz, looking north from the traffic island in the middle of its south side. We see Brunnenstr. stretching to the north, and Weinbergsweg, familiar to those of you who've stayed at Berlin's best hostel/cheap hotel the Circus, which is just visible as a yellowish building on the far right. Running right to left is Torstr. I've been walking around there for eleven years and some, because starting in January '94, I worked not too far away on Linienstr. I've lived near it for eight years, and walk through it on the average of five or six times a week.
So how come I never knew until recently that it once played an absolutely crucial part in Berlin's -- Germany's -- history?
But it did. A few months ago, I read an amazing book, The Pity Of It All, a history of the Jews in Germany by Amos Elon. Although there's a fascinating chapter at the beginning about the first Jews to come to Germany (I was blown away to learn that there were Jews in Cologne before there were Germans, but, since it was a city artificially created by the Romans -- Colonia -- as a colonial outpost, and doubtless included Jews from the Roman Empire, it makes sense), the book really starts in 1743, when a 14-year-old boy left his home in Dessau and came to Berlin to study.
At the time, Berlin still had its medieval city wall, which stretched along what is now Torstr. and it was studded with gates where armed guards took note of who came and went in the name of security. We're all familiar with the Brandenburg Gate, and just down Torstr. from me in the other direction is Oranienburger Tor, where a gate stood until the 19th Century. "Tor," in fact, means "gate," but except for a few which are memorialized by subway stops these days -- Schlesischises Tor, Hallesches Tor -- only the one which appears on German coinage is still standing.
So imagine my surprise to read the opening words of Elon's book: "In the fall in 1743, a fourteen-year-old boy entered Berlin at the Rosenthaler Tor, the only gate in the city wall through which Jews (and cattle) were allowed to pass. The boy had arrived from his hometown of Dessau, some one hundred miles away in the small independent principality of Dessau-Anhalt. For five or six days he had walked through the hilly countryside to reach the Prussian capital."
The boy, we learn in the next paragraph, was Moses Mendelssohn, one of the preeminent figures in modern Judaism, the philosopher who managed to show his fellow Jews that the ideals of the Enlightenment were compatible with Jewish thought. He fought for tolerance for the Jews in Berlin and won it, albeit grudgingly in some quarters. He founded the first secular, co-ed school for Jewish children, translated important Jewish texts into German, and is rightly revered as one of Germany's greatest thinkers. The revolution he started is the subject of Elon's book, and it is arguable that the history of the Jews in Germany is the history of Berlin, since Berlin was the Jews' central German city, and, as Germany unified into a single country, a place where Jewish artists, writers, businessmen, and politicians were increasingly prominent and powerful.
(Incidentally, Mendelssohn did almost too good a job: his children mostly converted, adding the name "Bertholdy" to his to show connections to a Gentile in the family tree, and his grandchildren Felix and Fanny became famous musicians -- Felix even writing Christian church music and conducting the famous revival of Bach's B-Minor Mass in Leipzig.)
So where do you suppose the Rosenthaler Tor, gateway for cattle and Jews was? Duhh.
And why did I have to wait until 2004, which is when I read this book, to discover that this place where several streets come together in my neighborhood held the gate where a man whose school is near me, whose family's banking business virtually built a whole street near me, and whose grave is just a few blocks from my house, came to this city?
Berlin has a very odd attitude towards its own history, I think. There is no lack of signs and monuments to the bad things that happened here. The city has allowed an artist from another city to come here and install his "Klopfensteine" (stumbling blocks), small golden squares hammered into the cobblestones in front of various buildings giving the names of the Jews who had lived there and were deported, the dates of their births and deaths. Berlin is building a mammoth memorial to the murdered Jews of Europe near the Brandenburg Gate. Wittenbergplatz has its list of concentration camps hanging outside the subway station. Nollendorfplatz has its bronze monument to the homosexuals murdered in the camps. Just next to the park where Mendelssohn's grave is, formerly the first Jewish cemetery in Berlin, there's a monument to the Jews who were collected in a building which used to stand there, an old-age home run by the Jewish community, and then deported to the camps. East Berlin is studded with small plaques memorializing Communists -- many, but not all of them, Jewish -- who were arrested and disappeared during the Nazi era.
So why isn't there a sign telling us where a very good thing happened to Berlin's Jews?
Because, as you turn Elon's pages, you realize that lots of good things happened to Jews in Berlin, despite waxing and waning periods of anti-Semitism (incidentally, Elon and several others I've read trace the origins of classic anti-Semitism to France, not Germany). Jews wrote poetry, ran salons (in the case of many notable women), filled the orchestras, made revolution, advanced science. Yes, the story has a sad ending, and that's why Elon named his book The Pity Of It All, but I guarantee anyone reading it will be uplifted and inspired.
A solution to this is near at hand, in Paris. If you've walked around Paris, you've undoubtedly noticed these shield-shaped plaques on buildings, headed "L'Histoire du Paris." There are plenty of them, and if you're just randomly walking around Paris, you can be surprised by chancing upon a gem. I was walking down a street there once because my map said it was the quickest way to get from A to B, and there was a very ornate building in the middle of the block. Thanks to the shield, I discovered it was once the city's central market for buying and selling horses, and that everything from dray-horses to fine purebreds were sold there.
The thing about these Parisian shields is they don't take up a whole lot of room, they're succinctly written (indeed, some of them don't make sense without a certain amount of context), and there are a hell of a lot of them. Berlin could do the same thing, but I suspect it never will.
So that's why I was at Rosenthaler Platz today, risking life and limb to get that shot. Just imagine young Moses walking down Brunnenstr. to the gate, nervous at the interrogation he was about to undergo (Jews without money were turned away, and pedlars were forbidden), eager to meet the rabbi who was sponsoring his education.
But there's something about this city which squirms when positive, uplifting, or optimistic stories are brought up. No, it says, I prefer to shoulder the Burden Of History. It's my fate, my duty.
Well, it's not mine.
Thursday, January 13, 2005
Sauerkraut (Lunch Portion)
Been doing a lot of running around, both on the Net and on my feet, this week, trying to set up this trip to Montpellier on the 24th. On Monday, I walked down to Friedrichstr. station to buy the Berlin-Paris ticket, and as I walked into the so-called "service center," I noted that there were about 15 people in line. In the 20 minutes it took me to get to the head of the line, that number increased to 27. As always, there were four counters, but you'll never find all four open at the same time.
Anyway, I drew an old woman who seemed to be the epitome of German civil service: bored, slow, and inefficient. Hearing that I wanted to go to Paris, she disappeared into the back room for a while and came out with a huge loose-leaf book that she spent a long time consulting. It took her 25 minutes to write up my ticket, and the woman next to her handled seven customers while she fiddled.
Since I was two weeks out from the trip, I figured I'd be saving some money, especially since I have a 25% off Bahn Card with Rail Plus, a mysterious add-on that's supposed to save money in other countries on trips booked from Germany. She took my credit card, and I swear I heard her say €119 as the price, which seemed low, but not worth bothering to check. It wasn't until I got home that I looked at the receipt and saw that it was €319. That's over $400.
I was on a couple of deadlines, but I took to the Internet as soon as I could. Deutsche Bahn has a very weird interface, and it took me a couple of days to figure out how to order an imaginary ticket to Paris and back, only to get to the very last step, at which point I was going to abort, and discover that they would take my credit card and mail me a ticket -- but were forbidden to tell me how much that ticket cost!
Someone suggested I do it in reverse, so I went to the French railroad site and ordered a ticket to Berlin. This, with no discounts, cost €163. That did it: I'd paid too much.
So this afternoon I walked back down to Friedrichstr. and stood in line for another twenty minutes (but with fewer people, because this time there were even fewer windows open) and watched a young woman ahead of me completely lose it, screaming about how she was missing work and why couldn't they staff this place right, and, when they finally opened another window, breaking down in huge sobs while the guy at the desk waited impassively for her to stop.
When I finally got to the window, I explained that I was pretty sure I'd been overcharged. The woman looked at my ticket, and expressed concern, then fiddled with the computer for a few minutes. Then she disappeared into the back room, and came out again. "Sorry, it all looks correct." Really? With the discounts and everything? "It is correct." The last time I went it was a hundred Euros cheaper. "Well, you probably were taking advantage of a sale or something. This is correct." This is very expensive, I told her. Next time I guess I'll have to fly. She shrugged her shoulders.
Now, I knew she wouldn't care if I liked what she had to say or not. I'm used to that in Germany: the customer is always wrong, and, moreover, is a pain in the butt. But she offered no advice ("If you took a later train..." or something) and offered no explanation. Her job was to get me to go away.
And, having searched the great Mobissimo, I've found that even at this late date, I could book a flight on EasyJet for €209.98 that's both later in the day and cheaper.
And next time I will, most likely. But I've been looking forward to the long journey for too long, looking forward to reading a stack of magazines that have piled up, watching the scenery -- such as it is -- out the window, and listening to some CDs of radio shows David Gans sent me (no, they are not Grateful Dead shows!). Is that worth a hundred Euros? No, but it's worth a hundred Euros not to have to go back down to Friedrichstr., stand on line yet again, cancel the ticket, wait for the cancellation to show up on the card, and then pray that EasyJet still has a fare that cheap. I have my entire passage to Montpellier in my hand, I have an e-mail from the guy whose house I'm staying with that gives me directions ("When leaving the station, take the large avenue (lined with palm trees and where the streetcar runs) up to the main square..." Whoa! Palm trees?), and I have a week to do liner notes for the forthcoming Best of Son Volt CD for Rhino and maybe one or two other things before I go.
Sometimes you just learn your lesson and cut your losses.
Anyway, I drew an old woman who seemed to be the epitome of German civil service: bored, slow, and inefficient. Hearing that I wanted to go to Paris, she disappeared into the back room for a while and came out with a huge loose-leaf book that she spent a long time consulting. It took her 25 minutes to write up my ticket, and the woman next to her handled seven customers while she fiddled.
Since I was two weeks out from the trip, I figured I'd be saving some money, especially since I have a 25% off Bahn Card with Rail Plus, a mysterious add-on that's supposed to save money in other countries on trips booked from Germany. She took my credit card, and I swear I heard her say €119 as the price, which seemed low, but not worth bothering to check. It wasn't until I got home that I looked at the receipt and saw that it was €319. That's over $400.
I was on a couple of deadlines, but I took to the Internet as soon as I could. Deutsche Bahn has a very weird interface, and it took me a couple of days to figure out how to order an imaginary ticket to Paris and back, only to get to the very last step, at which point I was going to abort, and discover that they would take my credit card and mail me a ticket -- but were forbidden to tell me how much that ticket cost!
Someone suggested I do it in reverse, so I went to the French railroad site and ordered a ticket to Berlin. This, with no discounts, cost €163. That did it: I'd paid too much.
So this afternoon I walked back down to Friedrichstr. and stood in line for another twenty minutes (but with fewer people, because this time there were even fewer windows open) and watched a young woman ahead of me completely lose it, screaming about how she was missing work and why couldn't they staff this place right, and, when they finally opened another window, breaking down in huge sobs while the guy at the desk waited impassively for her to stop.
When I finally got to the window, I explained that I was pretty sure I'd been overcharged. The woman looked at my ticket, and expressed concern, then fiddled with the computer for a few minutes. Then she disappeared into the back room, and came out again. "Sorry, it all looks correct." Really? With the discounts and everything? "It is correct." The last time I went it was a hundred Euros cheaper. "Well, you probably were taking advantage of a sale or something. This is correct." This is very expensive, I told her. Next time I guess I'll have to fly. She shrugged her shoulders.
Now, I knew she wouldn't care if I liked what she had to say or not. I'm used to that in Germany: the customer is always wrong, and, moreover, is a pain in the butt. But she offered no advice ("If you took a later train..." or something) and offered no explanation. Her job was to get me to go away.
And, having searched the great Mobissimo, I've found that even at this late date, I could book a flight on EasyJet for €209.98 that's both later in the day and cheaper.
And next time I will, most likely. But I've been looking forward to the long journey for too long, looking forward to reading a stack of magazines that have piled up, watching the scenery -- such as it is -- out the window, and listening to some CDs of radio shows David Gans sent me (no, they are not Grateful Dead shows!). Is that worth a hundred Euros? No, but it's worth a hundred Euros not to have to go back down to Friedrichstr., stand on line yet again, cancel the ticket, wait for the cancellation to show up on the card, and then pray that EasyJet still has a fare that cheap. I have my entire passage to Montpellier in my hand, I have an e-mail from the guy whose house I'm staying with that gives me directions ("When leaving the station, take the large avenue (lined with palm trees and where the streetcar runs) up to the main square..." Whoa! Palm trees?), and I have a week to do liner notes for the forthcoming Best of Son Volt CD for Rhino and maybe one or two other things before I go.
Sometimes you just learn your lesson and cut your losses.
Hit Me With Music
After a satisfying week of work and a somewhat less satisfying day buying my ticket from Berlin to Paris and back, I went over to Blaise's house last night because his landlord's girlfriend was having some people over, and, since they're interesting folks, I figured it'd be a good evening.
It was: I showed Blaise how to cook my famous hamburger curry (not one of those yellow curries, but a weird dish, allegedly Burmese, although it isn't, that was the first thing I learned to cook, and is closer to chili), and he showed me some of his latest paintings, which have amazing color and textural things going on in them and make me think he's definitely on to something these days.
We then went over to Rainer and Rike's apartment, and Blaise was given the job of making Buñuel Martinis. Not being much of a martini maven, I'm not sure what made these different, unless it was the touch of Angostura bitters, but they were real good. A few of Rike's filmmaking colleagues were over and as the evening progressed, we talked about a whole range of things. Rainer gave me an impassioned speech about how he's astonished that he can stay in one place and watch the drama of the world, and how the Internet (something most Germans have only recently discovered) gave him access to a huge range of things that he'd always hoped to be able to know, all for free. At one point I recommended he check out the Worldchanging blog as an example of what the medium he calls "der vay vay vay" (which is how you say www in German) has to offer. (I recommend it to you, too, of course).
Then we ranged on to other things, Rike put on Eno's
Another Green World
and Rainer said his two musical heroes were Frank Zappa and Brian Eno, so I told him the story about the day Brian Eno came to my house in Calfornia to do an interview but had laryngitis and spent the time nibbling nasturtium leaves, which caused him to roar with laughter (well, there's a lot more to it than I just let on). Eventually, we were all pretty toasted, and I noticed it was 2:15 and remembered I had a FedEx package coming today. Well, you know the rule: if I'd gone to bed at midnight, the package wouldn't have come til four in the afternoon, but if I went to bed at 3am, it'd be here at 7, right? So I said my good-byes and left.
Blaise told me there was a taxi stand down by the hospital nearby, and although there were taxis on the street, I wasn't 100% sure where I was in relation to my house, so I figured that would be the best place to go. It was only two blocks, so it wouldn't have made much difference one way or the other. Sure enough, after a bracing, frosty walk the lights of the taxis appeared. There was one in front, and the driver had two other people in his car -- probably other drivers he was chatting with, I thought.
As I walked up on it, I saw he was Turkish, and so were the other guys. He saw me, said something, and the other two started to leave. I got up to the taxi just as they got out, and I panicked. Both were holding heavy sticks, with a knob at one end. Baseball bats! Something was definitely wrong. Not much baseball gets played in Berlin, but a lot of baseball bats get sold, mostly to young hooligans on the right and left who find them most useful in skull-cracking. But what were Turks doing with them?
Nothing, as it turned out, because by now the taxi driver was out, and he had a violin in his hands and was rushing to the trunk to stow it. The baseball bats suddenly turned into very odd flutes, with a ceramic or plastic knob facilitating blowing into one end, and I'd say they were dilsiz kavals, although one might have been a dilli kaval or a ney. Clearly, I'd interrupted a jam-session. So I turned to the two kaval players and said "I'm American, so I know nothing about Turkish music. Are those flutes?" The guys said no, they were (something). "That's real interesting," I said, lamely. "Our friend plays the fiddle," one of them said, "and if you want to learn more about Turkish music, I suggest you get in his cab and talk to him. Have a good evening."
The driver was much younger than the two guys who'd been jamming with him, and got very uptight when I asked him whether he played Turkish music. "I'm studying the violin," he said, "and I love all kinds of music. I play Turkish music, yes, but I also play jazz. And my great idol is Paganini." Ah, I said, but we don't know what he really sounded like. "People said he was the devil," the driver said, "so he had the power to entrance people who heard him. That's what I want to do." On the stereo was a Turkish violin player, very emotional, with a synthesizer set to sound like a kanun accompanying him, and I asked if it was a santur. "No, santur is Iranian instrument," the driver said. "This is more like what the Germans call a zither, a kanun." The violinist we were listening to, he said, was the greatest violinist in Turkey, and had been his teacher. Then he asked me if I'd ever heard of Chiat Askin. "Is he Turkish?" I asked. "Syrian Kurdish!" the driver snapped back, but he added that he, too, was a great musician.
It was about then that I realized I wasn't quite sure where we were, but the meter was still pretty low, and the driver asked me why I was so interested. I told him I was a music journalist and wrote about all kinds of music, but, being American, I didn't know much about Turkish music because there aren't many Turks in America. (Whenever I remind the guys at the Döner Kebap stand in front of my house about this fact, their eyes fill with dollar signs; I wouldn't be the least surprised if one of them eventually heads to the States to turn people on to this staple of German lunchtime). He had a hard time believing this, and went back to praising Paganini. That was when I snapped to the fact that, being a young guy, he didn't want me to think that just because he was hanging around with two old men who played shepherds' instruments, he was "country." And confirmation came very shortly, just as Alexanderplatz swing into view (whew!).
"Uhhh, I haven't been driving very long. This is my third day," he said. "No problem, I know just where we are and how to get back to my house from here." He sighed with relief. In fact, I'd say he hadn't even been in the country very long, but he did sort of know how to drive (or perhaps he drove like they do in Turkey, ie, even worse than Germans), and we got back to the house safely.
As I paid him, I gave him a big tip. "Young music students need to eat, too," I said. "You bet," he said, and drove away.
It was: I showed Blaise how to cook my famous hamburger curry (not one of those yellow curries, but a weird dish, allegedly Burmese, although it isn't, that was the first thing I learned to cook, and is closer to chili), and he showed me some of his latest paintings, which have amazing color and textural things going on in them and make me think he's definitely on to something these days.
We then went over to Rainer and Rike's apartment, and Blaise was given the job of making Buñuel Martinis. Not being much of a martini maven, I'm not sure what made these different, unless it was the touch of Angostura bitters, but they were real good. A few of Rike's filmmaking colleagues were over and as the evening progressed, we talked about a whole range of things. Rainer gave me an impassioned speech about how he's astonished that he can stay in one place and watch the drama of the world, and how the Internet (something most Germans have only recently discovered) gave him access to a huge range of things that he'd always hoped to be able to know, all for free. At one point I recommended he check out the Worldchanging blog as an example of what the medium he calls "der vay vay vay" (which is how you say www in German) has to offer. (I recommend it to you, too, of course).
Then we ranged on to other things, Rike put on Eno's
and Rainer said his two musical heroes were Frank Zappa and Brian Eno, so I told him the story about the day Brian Eno came to my house in Calfornia to do an interview but had laryngitis and spent the time nibbling nasturtium leaves, which caused him to roar with laughter (well, there's a lot more to it than I just let on). Eventually, we were all pretty toasted, and I noticed it was 2:15 and remembered I had a FedEx package coming today. Well, you know the rule: if I'd gone to bed at midnight, the package wouldn't have come til four in the afternoon, but if I went to bed at 3am, it'd be here at 7, right? So I said my good-byes and left.
Blaise told me there was a taxi stand down by the hospital nearby, and although there were taxis on the street, I wasn't 100% sure where I was in relation to my house, so I figured that would be the best place to go. It was only two blocks, so it wouldn't have made much difference one way or the other. Sure enough, after a bracing, frosty walk the lights of the taxis appeared. There was one in front, and the driver had two other people in his car -- probably other drivers he was chatting with, I thought.
As I walked up on it, I saw he was Turkish, and so were the other guys. He saw me, said something, and the other two started to leave. I got up to the taxi just as they got out, and I panicked. Both were holding heavy sticks, with a knob at one end. Baseball bats! Something was definitely wrong. Not much baseball gets played in Berlin, but a lot of baseball bats get sold, mostly to young hooligans on the right and left who find them most useful in skull-cracking. But what were Turks doing with them?
Nothing, as it turned out, because by now the taxi driver was out, and he had a violin in his hands and was rushing to the trunk to stow it. The baseball bats suddenly turned into very odd flutes, with a ceramic or plastic knob facilitating blowing into one end, and I'd say they were dilsiz kavals, although one might have been a dilli kaval or a ney. Clearly, I'd interrupted a jam-session. So I turned to the two kaval players and said "I'm American, so I know nothing about Turkish music. Are those flutes?" The guys said no, they were (something). "That's real interesting," I said, lamely. "Our friend plays the fiddle," one of them said, "and if you want to learn more about Turkish music, I suggest you get in his cab and talk to him. Have a good evening."
The driver was much younger than the two guys who'd been jamming with him, and got very uptight when I asked him whether he played Turkish music. "I'm studying the violin," he said, "and I love all kinds of music. I play Turkish music, yes, but I also play jazz. And my great idol is Paganini." Ah, I said, but we don't know what he really sounded like. "People said he was the devil," the driver said, "so he had the power to entrance people who heard him. That's what I want to do." On the stereo was a Turkish violin player, very emotional, with a synthesizer set to sound like a kanun accompanying him, and I asked if it was a santur. "No, santur is Iranian instrument," the driver said. "This is more like what the Germans call a zither, a kanun." The violinist we were listening to, he said, was the greatest violinist in Turkey, and had been his teacher. Then he asked me if I'd ever heard of Chiat Askin. "Is he Turkish?" I asked. "Syrian Kurdish!" the driver snapped back, but he added that he, too, was a great musician.
It was about then that I realized I wasn't quite sure where we were, but the meter was still pretty low, and the driver asked me why I was so interested. I told him I was a music journalist and wrote about all kinds of music, but, being American, I didn't know much about Turkish music because there aren't many Turks in America. (Whenever I remind the guys at the Döner Kebap stand in front of my house about this fact, their eyes fill with dollar signs; I wouldn't be the least surprised if one of them eventually heads to the States to turn people on to this staple of German lunchtime). He had a hard time believing this, and went back to praising Paganini. That was when I snapped to the fact that, being a young guy, he didn't want me to think that just because he was hanging around with two old men who played shepherds' instruments, he was "country." And confirmation came very shortly, just as Alexanderplatz swing into view (whew!).
"Uhhh, I haven't been driving very long. This is my third day," he said. "No problem, I know just where we are and how to get back to my house from here." He sighed with relief. In fact, I'd say he hadn't even been in the country very long, but he did sort of know how to drive (or perhaps he drove like they do in Turkey, ie, even worse than Germans), and we got back to the house safely.
As I paid him, I gave him a big tip. "Young music students need to eat, too," I said. "You bet," he said, and drove away.
Sunday, January 09, 2005
Placemarker
Wow, has it actually been a week since I posted anything here? Sorry: there are, after all, people who read this -- a couple of hundred, from the statistics I get -- and I apologize to one and all.
The excuse I offer, however, is the best one possible; work has been coming in like crazy, and I'm bashing it out as fast as I can. There's rent to pay, bills to pay, groceries to buy...I'm living like a human being again.
And I'm planning my trip to France at the end of the month. I'll be taking the train to Paris on the 24th, staying overnight and meeting some friends from the Well for dinner, and taking the train to Montpellier (check the nifty webcam there, and click on "Visites Virtuelles" here) the next morning. A friend-of-a-friend, who teaches English and American Studies at the university there, has kindly offered me his teenage daughter's room while she visits her mother in Paris, so I won't even have to get a hotel room, and I intend to spend Tuesday, Wednesday, and Thursday researching such dull stuff as the neighborhoods, the rents, the cost of living, cultural and social resources, and the like; fantasizing that I'm actually moving and taking down numbers to crunch.
I'm pretty sure those numbers will be daunting, at least as far as my current projected income is concerned, but the place is totally an abstraction to me and it's absolutely necessary to gather some reality-based information at this point. I'm sure I'll be discouraged in some ways, and encouraged in others, but the aim is to consider how I might fit into the life of a new place, and I've got to do it.
As I've said (probably even said here), just getting out of town tends to jump-start my brain, and it could well be that this trip does nothing but shake up the fragments of stuff lying around doing nothing and rearrange them in new and more useful ways which might well lead to my coming up with an idea that could wind up financing a move, or at least bring me closer to making one. I had one scare this week when the author of a not very good book asked me if I'd help him do some revisions for the paperback edition -- which were due tomorrow -- and I offered to do it for $15,000, based on an insubstantial rumor about the advance he'd gotten and the fact that several major sections would have to be rewritten from the ground up. He gulped and said no, but I have to be ready for the possibility that a similar project could come along at any moment.
I've also been busy with some business for SXSW '05, which is coming up in just a few weeks, and which I'll be attending. Last year's was a total disaster for me, but it was also the first time I pulled the handle on it and it came up all lemons; this year's could be completely different. I'll be warier of preppies with rock magazines that don't pay their bills, and editors of big magazines who get off on making promises they have no intention of keeping. I'd love to take a side trip to San Francisco and/or New York and/or Montreal, too, but I think keeping the ambitions modest and keeping focused might be a better idea.
Anyway, postings here might be quite sporadic over the next couple of weeks, although I do have one or two pieces I want to write and photograph that I just haven't had time to do. Stay tuned, and I'll be back just as quickly as I can.
The excuse I offer, however, is the best one possible; work has been coming in like crazy, and I'm bashing it out as fast as I can. There's rent to pay, bills to pay, groceries to buy...I'm living like a human being again.
And I'm planning my trip to France at the end of the month. I'll be taking the train to Paris on the 24th, staying overnight and meeting some friends from the Well for dinner, and taking the train to Montpellier (check the nifty webcam there, and click on "Visites Virtuelles" here) the next morning. A friend-of-a-friend, who teaches English and American Studies at the university there, has kindly offered me his teenage daughter's room while she visits her mother in Paris, so I won't even have to get a hotel room, and I intend to spend Tuesday, Wednesday, and Thursday researching such dull stuff as the neighborhoods, the rents, the cost of living, cultural and social resources, and the like; fantasizing that I'm actually moving and taking down numbers to crunch.
I'm pretty sure those numbers will be daunting, at least as far as my current projected income is concerned, but the place is totally an abstraction to me and it's absolutely necessary to gather some reality-based information at this point. I'm sure I'll be discouraged in some ways, and encouraged in others, but the aim is to consider how I might fit into the life of a new place, and I've got to do it.
As I've said (probably even said here), just getting out of town tends to jump-start my brain, and it could well be that this trip does nothing but shake up the fragments of stuff lying around doing nothing and rearrange them in new and more useful ways which might well lead to my coming up with an idea that could wind up financing a move, or at least bring me closer to making one. I had one scare this week when the author of a not very good book asked me if I'd help him do some revisions for the paperback edition -- which were due tomorrow -- and I offered to do it for $15,000, based on an insubstantial rumor about the advance he'd gotten and the fact that several major sections would have to be rewritten from the ground up. He gulped and said no, but I have to be ready for the possibility that a similar project could come along at any moment.
I've also been busy with some business for SXSW '05, which is coming up in just a few weeks, and which I'll be attending. Last year's was a total disaster for me, but it was also the first time I pulled the handle on it and it came up all lemons; this year's could be completely different. I'll be warier of preppies with rock magazines that don't pay their bills, and editors of big magazines who get off on making promises they have no intention of keeping. I'd love to take a side trip to San Francisco and/or New York and/or Montreal, too, but I think keeping the ambitions modest and keeping focused might be a better idea.
Anyway, postings here might be quite sporadic over the next couple of weeks, although I do have one or two pieces I want to write and photograph that I just haven't had time to do. Stay tuned, and I'll be back just as quickly as I can.
Sunday, January 02, 2005
Aftermath
Ahh, I was going to post some pictures of the post-Silvester mess, wasn't I? Well, I didn't. I did go out for a walk with an eye towards finding some particularly awful scene of destruction, and I did it early enough -- 1 pm -- that it would have been pretty much in its natural state, but it had sort of drizzled all night, which had the combined effect of muting some of the revelry (once the church bells stopped at about 1:30, I went straight to sleep, which is unusual for December 31) and of turning what remains there were into a reddish-brown mush: evocative, but not really photographable. The mush is from the sawdust used to pack the firecrackers and help with the explosion, and it was a good quarter-inch deep in front of a couple of buildings; my boots left footprints in it. The Thai-Indonesian restaurant at the end of Torstr. by Chausseestr. showed the remains of what looked like a thousand firecrackers, almost certainly the staff's doing -- they're pretty wild and crazy folks. And there was the usual complement of shattered bottles and kids excitedly picking through the rubble in search of unexploded things they could go off and explode. But...not exactly a great photograph lurking in there. Not that I'm close to being even a good photographer.
Then I had the idea of summing up the year, which I'm coming to think of as perhaps the worst I've lived through, both personally and professionally -- not to mention the despair I felt watching my native country choose to isolate itself from the rest of the world even further. But the whole idea of rehashing a doomed romance with a woman who turned out to be an alcoholic (I've seen her twice in recent weeks, staggering down the street; it's hard to retain any animosity against someone so clearly ill); the promise I felt coming back from my annual visit to Texas with the hope burning within me that the editor who'd taken me to lunch and promised to help me make contacts at a some important magazines would, as he said, be in touch in a couple of weeks, only to never hear back from him after repeated e-mailing, and then, much later, to discover he makes a habit of doing this to writers for reasons only he can comprehend, and never follows through; finally touching down this summer when I found myself collecting bottles in vacant lots to return for 8 Euro-cents apiece at the supermarket, counting and re-counting the change in my pocket, living on biscuits and tap-water. Who'd want to re-live that? Who'd want to read about it? Most importantly, what could anybody do about it? It's over. The important thing is not to let it happen again. I'd still like a girlfriend, and lord knows I need those magazine contacts, because I'm overflowing with ideas, and I'm ready to write them up, and I could actually erase the six months' back rent I still owe my landlord with just one article in the right place. (Well, I could if the dollar doesn't fall much more than it already has. But that I can't control.)
But that's for the days ahead. Right now, my plans are modest. I have a number of small articles to write, and I'm going to write them. If the magazines which owe me money pay me (and they will) and the money comes in on time (and I suspect it will), I'm going to take off the last week of this month and visit Montpellier, the place to which, for no particular specific reason, I've been thinking about moving. I'll meet some friends in Paris coming and going, and spend three days walking around the city fantasizing that I'm shopping, looking for an apartment, and figuring out where I am. There's no way I can actually move, of course, not with things as they are. But, just as one article could wipe out my debt to my landlord, three could put me ahead of the game. A book project could give me the money to leave Berlin. And, as I discovered both times I left here last year -- Texas in March and Austria in September -- something about travel loosens up my brain and brings ideas bubbling up. True, I should probably give this money to my landlord instead, but I'm gambling with the only capital I have -- my own talent -- that this will ultimately pay off.
I mean, it beats playing the lottery.
But then, I've been doing that, too. The odds are about the same.
Then I had the idea of summing up the year, which I'm coming to think of as perhaps the worst I've lived through, both personally and professionally -- not to mention the despair I felt watching my native country choose to isolate itself from the rest of the world even further. But the whole idea of rehashing a doomed romance with a woman who turned out to be an alcoholic (I've seen her twice in recent weeks, staggering down the street; it's hard to retain any animosity against someone so clearly ill); the promise I felt coming back from my annual visit to Texas with the hope burning within me that the editor who'd taken me to lunch and promised to help me make contacts at a some important magazines would, as he said, be in touch in a couple of weeks, only to never hear back from him after repeated e-mailing, and then, much later, to discover he makes a habit of doing this to writers for reasons only he can comprehend, and never follows through; finally touching down this summer when I found myself collecting bottles in vacant lots to return for 8 Euro-cents apiece at the supermarket, counting and re-counting the change in my pocket, living on biscuits and tap-water. Who'd want to re-live that? Who'd want to read about it? Most importantly, what could anybody do about it? It's over. The important thing is not to let it happen again. I'd still like a girlfriend, and lord knows I need those magazine contacts, because I'm overflowing with ideas, and I'm ready to write them up, and I could actually erase the six months' back rent I still owe my landlord with just one article in the right place. (Well, I could if the dollar doesn't fall much more than it already has. But that I can't control.)
But that's for the days ahead. Right now, my plans are modest. I have a number of small articles to write, and I'm going to write them. If the magazines which owe me money pay me (and they will) and the money comes in on time (and I suspect it will), I'm going to take off the last week of this month and visit Montpellier, the place to which, for no particular specific reason, I've been thinking about moving. I'll meet some friends in Paris coming and going, and spend three days walking around the city fantasizing that I'm shopping, looking for an apartment, and figuring out where I am. There's no way I can actually move, of course, not with things as they are. But, just as one article could wipe out my debt to my landlord, three could put me ahead of the game. A book project could give me the money to leave Berlin. And, as I discovered both times I left here last year -- Texas in March and Austria in September -- something about travel loosens up my brain and brings ideas bubbling up. True, I should probably give this money to my landlord instead, but I'm gambling with the only capital I have -- my own talent -- that this will ultimately pay off.
I mean, it beats playing the lottery.
But then, I've been doing that, too. The odds are about the same.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)