Apartment Quest Berlin: A Few Bits Of Advice

A couple of weeks ago, a reader of this blog contacted me about finding an apartment here. His girlfriend has a grant, he's coming with her, they're going to live here until next summer. So far, so straightforward. They want to live in the east, naturally, since it's Hip! Edgy! Berlin! and to tell the truth, if I were in the same position, I would, too. This narrows down the possibilities, because apartments are slightly harder to find on this side of town, but not by very much.

It occurs to me that there may be one or two of you out there in blog-reading land who are entertaining similar fantasies, and so I thought I'd take a few minutes to say some things that people here would find incredibly obvious and elementary, but might be less so especially to residents of the U.S. So, in no particular order:

* In Europe, the first floor is the second floor. In other words, you have the ground floor, and above it the first floor, then the second floor, and so on. It took me a couple of years to internalize this.

* What you're renting is a box. It is empty, although the chances are the kitchen will have a stove and a very rudimentary refrigerator of the type Americans call "dorm-size" because it can just accommodate a six-pack and what's left of last night's pizza. (It should also be noted that American pizzas are bigger than European ones). Oh, and there'll be a toilet and a shower and/or bath in the bathroom. Everything else, you're going to have to provide yourself. There are no closets. You'll have to buy a clothes cabinet to hang your clothes in. That wire sticking out of the ceiling? You'll turn off the electricity at the fuse-box and install a light fixture and a ceiling lamp, if you want one. Otherwise, you can get floor lamps like I did. You'll provide your own rugs or do without. In other words, a lot of the stuff that's already there in an American apartment rental isn't in a European one.

* The electricity may be on, and the heat almost certainly will be. If you're very, very lucky you'll have a gas stove and the gas will also be on. The cable for the TV will also be on. You'll need to get all of this stuff in your name immediately. The telephone will not be on, and after prostrating yourself to Satan, ie, Deutsche Telekom, you'll wait a couple of weeks for that, which may be one reason so many people have given up on land-lines here. Also: check to see if the rent is "warm" or "cold." If it's the latter, the utility bills aren't included. Also check what the "Nebenskosten," the yearly maintenance fees, for cleaning the stairwells and other services, come to.

* You can't get a bank account without an address. You can't get an address without a bank account, unless you find a landlord who doesn't want money. These people are usually identified by a thin glowing toroid hovering several inches above their heads, I'm told. Having had my first address given to me free, I never had to wrestle with this, so I can't advise you here.

* The absolute best way to find an apartment used to be -- and may still be -- to head down to Zoo Station on a Saturday night and offer sexual services to...wait a minute, I mean pick up a copy of the Berliner Morgenpost's Sunday edition when it arrives from the printer. Throw out all of it except the Immobilien pages, find the area of town you want to move to, and start trying to figure out the abbreviations. Don't worry about calling the numbers you find at any time of night or day; nobody else does, and do you want to miss the apartment of a lifetime? And don't worry about the person renting the apartment speaking English. You can be assured they don't.

* You will notice that some -- most -- ads contain the word "Makler." This means broker, and it also means that you'll be parting with at least one month's rent for the honor of renting from this person. Often the Makler conducts a "Besichtigung," which is a cattle-call for all the people who have called expressing interest in the same apartment. Walking down the streets of Berlin on a Friday night, you sometimes come to these groups of people, gathered into clumps of two or three, each clump eyeing the other clumps suspiciously, the odd single person looking paranoid. These people are all competing for the same place, and the wily Makler, who is showing up late to show it to them, almost certainly has two or three other apartments in the building for those who want to strike deals or have lost out on the (invariably bargain-priced, to provoke an on-the-spot auction and attract the suckers who'll bid on the other available apartments) place that's been advertised. The way to avoid Maklers is to look for the word "privat." That way you're dealing with the owner directly.

* Another couple of words to look out for are "Untermieter" and "Nachmieter." An Untermieter is a sub-letter, and subletting is a very popular activity in a place which, the 100,000-plus vacancies currently on the market notwithstanding, still remembers the days when it could take, conservatively speaking, a year to find an apartment. You'd get a place. You'd meet a girl. You'd move in with her or she'd move in with you. One of you sublets the unused apartment. That's how I -- and many other people I knew -- got their first apartments here. A word of caution, though: make sure the sublet is legal. Many rental contracts specifically forbid subletting, which doesn't stop most people, because for the most part nobody concerned cares as long as the rent is paid. Nor does this stop people from offering sublets which are illegal and not telling the poor renter. One more strip of paper goes on the mailbox, which is already collecting mail for a half-dozen past tenants, you add "bei So-and-So" to your address and it's cool. Unless, as happened to me, your mailman is a stickler for rules, his ponytail and John Lennon glasses being just a disguise for a rigid, rules-for-their-own-sake kinda guy. The eviction notice comes quickly and is enforced by various police. But hey, that's the kind of thing that only happens to me.

* Now, a Nachmieter is something else entirely, and it's a much friendlier situation. If you can't serve out your lease, you may offer it to someone else. Of course, the landlord has to approve, but because this is Germany, it has to be complicated. By law, you have to offer the lease to three people, of which the landlord will pick one. This is the only way the lease can be transferred. I happen to be the Nachmieter in the apartment I've been in here for almost ten years, and the way we handled the situation was this. The woman who lived here before me had inherited a pile of money and bought a gorgeous house elsewhere in the city as a tax dodge. She put an ad in the Morgenpost -- see above -- for a Nachmieter and I called her. Turned out she knew who I was because she worked for an American wire service here and she decided the landlord would like me, so she arranged for two of her friends who had no intention of moving out of their own apartments to apply before me. Then I met with the landlord, and the next thing you know I was out of my postman-informer situation and in here. Just remember: applying for Nachmieter status doesn't mean you'll get it. But it does mean the rent won't go up as a result of your moving in.

* Furniture is the least of your worries, which is why I find it bizarre that the folks I referred to at the start of this post are insisting on renting a furnished apartment. Who wants to be responsible for someone else's furniture? Who wants to live with what someone else finds attractive? But those considerations pale against the fact that there aren't any furnished apartments anywhere you'd want to live in this city. People throw out nearly-new furniture every day in Berlin -- I'm currently eyeing a nice clothes-cupboard one of my neighbors has out, although I'm not sure if it's for the taking or not, but it'd make a nice replacement for the falling-apart one I have in the bedroom. People give away furniture in the classifieds and on Craigslist. People sell beautiful pieces of antique furniture for fifty bucks. In large part, this is because people are getting the hell out of here. But you can also buy an apartment's worth of new furniture at Ikea and they'll deliver it for a flat fee of €40. There's no reason to rent a furnished apartment in Berlin.

* Remember, too, that apartments are small. You may see ads for big ones, but there are restrictions a lot of the time on how few people are allowed to live in an apartment. If you're a single person, you may or may not be allowed a huge place. Best to check with the owner and see what the restrictions are. I have a couple of friends who bought an apartment and have a ghost roommate because the two of them wouldn't have been allowed to own the place by themselves. (And no, they can't have a baby because they're both guys. Although, come to think of it, they could adopt).

I'd advise against moving here period, but I know that's not going to stop anyone who'd heard the Hip! Edgy! chant of the media and the perfectly real statistic that it's by far the cheapest city in Western Europe to live in. Mind you, you get what you pay for, but it takes a while to realize that.

And finally, no. I don't know of any four-room, sunny, parquet-floor, quiet apartments in Prenzlauer Berg for around €400 warm, so don't ask.

A Few More Thoughts On Service

When last we saw the saga of my laptop, I'd rescued it from drug-addled service personnel who refused to touch it and made another call to Apple, who assured me that if I'd pay the labor (€100) they'd buy the logic board (€500).

Naturally, I had to wait until I had that kind of change, so it wasn't until today that I could try the next on the list of service places on Apple's very short list. It took me a while to find them (but boy am I collecting odd corners of town), and when I did, the whole transaction was very short. The guy snapped open the laptop, read the serial number, and handed the machine back to me. "No," was what he said. Unlike at the last place, nobody spoke English, but I figured out that he'd not found the serial number on some website, and, thus, no claim to the contrary would let him accept the thing for repair.

"Typical," I said. "Yes, typical Apple," the guy said. "No, typical German," I said, and stomped out.

Some 40 minutes on hold after I'd walked home from the shop later, I talked to a guy at Apple who was astonished to find that the first time I'd called, the guy had mis-typed the serial number. He was so embarrassed that his boss called me back to say that Apple would eat the labor, too.

But there's an underlying problem here. Why would I walk into a place and say Apple had agreed to repair my computer if it wasn't true? It's all too easy to disprove, as I found out. The guy checks, and the number's not there. But I insisted to him that I had case numbers and incident numbers that proved I was right. Nope: didn't want to look at them.

When I related this to the guy at Apple, he said -- as I thought he would -- "They have a number they can call, and they should call that number." This was such a simple screw-up that it could have been spotted. Apple had my name, my serial number (except for one figure of it), and all the rest. But it would have been too much trouble.

Here's the deal with service in Germany. Anyone who's in the position to fix something has been through a training program. Doesn't matter if it's your car, your washing-machine, or your computer. They're certified, and have framed certificates to prove it. This means they're better than you are, because if you knew how to fix it you wouldn't bring it to someone else, you'd fix it yourself, wouldn't you? This means, to the service guy, that he's inherently better than you, at least in one area, and he's going to let you know that. Because he's German, he also believes there's only one way to do something, and that's the way he's been taught. You couldn't possibly know enough about it to have an alternative suggestion.

This Grand Magus mindset is what kept Deutsche Telekom from offering real internet service to its customers for years, until they realized, too late, that a lot of those customers had read stuff in magazines and knew at least as much as Deutsche Telekom did, and they wanted on, goddammit. That mindset is why my ID that gets me hooked up to their broadband service is 36 letters and numbers long and the password that goes with it is 128. I'm not supposed to know that it's just as likely I could be ed at t-online with "puffball" as a password.

Plus, of course, there's the "customer is always wrong" mindset which goes with any retail or service business in this country. Just by walking in the door, you're disrupting the pleasant tedium of the day. Life without you would be so much easier, so much calmer, so much more enjoyable. Enough days without you and there's the holy grail of retirement. That, not helping people, not providing a service, is what labor is for.

Just remember that if you ever need to get anything done in Germany.

Another Year, Another PopKomm

Right from the start, it gave signs of German efficiency. The e-mail alerting me to my registration was addressed "Dear Ward," and my badge, when printed out, noted I was from AUS, which I presume means Australia. Fortunately, I was in no danger of being mistaken for an Australian, since pretty much 100% of my time was spent at the SXSW stand, answering bone-headed questions to deflect them from the management folks, who had actual important business to transact.

Once I had my badge, I was also given a wristband, which I assumed was for entry into showcases. Since I had no intention whatever of subjecting myself to the barrage of mediocrity that is Euro-rock, I slipped it into my back pocket. Nope. Came the first day, I wasn't allowed into the hall until the sweet, innocent-looking girl at the door had attached it. Sweet and innocent-looking she may have been, but clearly her day-job is bondage; over the next three days, unable to take it off, I developed a mild skin rash, and it got slimy when I showered. Not to mention the pain.

As always, there was a bag, and as always, it was devoid of goodies with any use, unless you consider an orange-flavored Chupa Chups lollipop to have a use. It did have a schedule of events, but this year, no book of registrants. It had been replaced by a Windows-only CD-ROM, showing how technologically sophisticated PopKomm had gotten. Two minutes inside the right computer and you've got a very nicely filtered list of people to spam to. I can't wait.

Did I mention the bone-headed questions? Ah, yes, I see I did. Here's my favorite. A giant of a guy in an appalling jacket walks up, and announces "I am Rossiyan boblisher. I look for boblishing bartners." Then he stares at me. "You are interested?" Well, I explain, we're not publishers, we're an event. "Ewent," he says. "You are not interested in Rossiya." No, I said patiently, we're like PopKomm, only larger, older, and in Texas. "Taixes," he says. You could come and find partners at our event, because we have a trade-show like this, and lots and lots of people in the music business from all over the world come -- not many from Russia, so you have a big advantage. He has this stunned-deer expression on his face. "So. You are not interested in Rossiya." Whatever, dude. He takes a brochure and walks away.

Which I wish he hadn't done. The charming folks at British Airways had lost the suitcase full of brochures, sales information, photographs, banners, and all the other stuff we were supposed to have at the stand. Our Festival Director spent lots of time on the phone trying to get them to give him some idea of when it would arrive. It was on "the next flight" from Tuesday evening until Friday morning, when it actually arrived. Too bad we were planning to be out of there by 4 that afternoon. So we were a little short of information, graphics, and the like, for the uninitiated, the vast majority of whom, thank whatever deities look over such things, were a great deal smarter than our Russian friend.

One great thing about this year's SXSW stand is that now all submissions of music for the music festival are done online. You go to the SXSW website, upload your music samples, your press kit, your application, pay your fees, and that's it. Given the amount of trash we've thrown away on previous Fridays, it was a sheer joy to say "We don't want your CDs." I came back with exactly one, from a gorgeous Norwegian woman whose artists, the Festival Director assured me, were the best-kept secret in Scandinavia. We shall see. He had also urged a CD on me last year by Deerhoof, a band with out-of-tune instruments and girlfriend vocals (the vocalist is in the band because she's someone's girlfriend -- thanks, Tim, for coining this term so many years ago, and too bad it never caught on) that was excruciating.

So most of the time I was just standing there -- PopKomm's trade show isn't the best-attended on earth, and it's far smaller than it was when the event was in Cologne, I think -- watching the passing parade, thin as it was. In my head, I was writing a fashion critique, because these days there's so little originality in the music for sale at events like this that how its vendors and creators represent themselves is more interesting.

The worst fashion trend of the year -- and it's not limited to PopKomm at all -- is the faux-Americanoid t-shirt, pre-washed and pre-distressed so that the silk-screen's already flaking off when you buy it, pretending to be from some camp, tavern, gas station, bowling alley, or something in the '60s or '70s. What's annoying about them is that there's always a detail fudged, so there won't be a lawsuit, and that makes the damn thing scream fake. Fortunately, as the weather cools, these won't be practical to wear as outer garments. I blame Abercrombie-Fitch, who I think started this stupid trend.

Not that there weren't a couple of clever t-shirts there. By a couple, I mean just that: one guy ran by with a shirt saying "Hangover" in perfect Heinecken script, while another guy, who looked like a German lawyer, had one saying "Malt Whiskey" in script that exactly mimicked Walt Disney's signature.

But for the most part, the participants were drab. Tattoos...lord, where to start with the tattoos? If you have expensive tattoos, you don't expose them to the sun because they fade and the outlines blur and you wind up with a couple thousand bucks' worth of blotch. And if you're going to invest that much money in tattoos, for heaven's sake have a plan. When you walk around with your arms and legs (and, presumably, other regions you're not showing us) covered wtih a patchwork of different styles and artists' work, you're what the tattoo artists call (not, mind you, to your face) a potato. And there were a lot of potatoes walking around.

Standing around like I was doing, you get to watch people's faces, their attention to what's around them. Sometimes you want to yell at them. Hey, you! Listen, dude, you guys have walked past here three times, and I've got to tell you, your girlfriend is a lot smarter and a lot harder than you are. In five years, she's going to be on her way to a big-time law career and you're going to be sitting in a bar going "Ummm, what happened?" And you, lady: listen, I'm not a pedophile, but is your 13-year-old daughter -- the one you had when you were 35 -- sitting at home naked? Because clearly you're wearing her clothing. Yes, it's that obvious. Go home and change and people might take you seriously. And while we're on the subject, sir, you're German, not Afro-American, and yet you've got several hundred dollars' worth of hip-hop clothing on. This is something you're ill-advised to do as your 30s wear on, let alone at your age, which I estimate to be over 45. Plus, you're German. You just look stupid in them. Go home and change into some floor-length pants. And much as I don't get the shaved-head look, well in evidence at PopKomm, of course, the short hair with a tiny rat-tail in the back is about as silly as you can get.

I only got to wander around the trade-fair once, and wasn't terribly impressed. But then, I wasn't in the market for much that was going on. One really bright spot was seeing a guy I knew when he'd just given up his gig driving a bus in East Berlin and who is now a huge star in the dance-music world, Paul van Dyk. Not only did he remember me, he even brought his wife by and introduced her. There are a few nice folks in this business. Plus, he's now got a real interesting business going, something called Vonyc, a "radio and download station for advanced electronic music," which he demonstrated to me. I'll have to listen -- the business model is smart, but for me the music's the thing -- but I've always admired Paul's work, even though I long became too old to get into the clubs where he performs himself.

The thing is, I don't pretend I'm doing anything but selling a product some friends of mine make. I'm not chasing a lost youth or "getting down with the kids" or any of that. There comes a time when you have to define your relationship to pop music, and an awful lot of Peter Pans seem to be wandering around the music business at events like PopKomm. It was, in short, more than a little depressing. But I did my job: I kept the numbskulls from the crew, chatted with some old friends I only see at events like this, and, Friday night, joined everyone at my favorite Italian restaurant for a typically fantastic meal, and at the end of the evening said good-bye to the folks as they got into a cab. PopKomm was over until next year, although next year, if I'm living in France as I desperately hope I will be, I may not be there.

A Couple Of Words On What I Like Best About PopKomm At The Moment

It's over.

That Time Again

I may very well be absent here until Saturday, because PopKomm is here again, and as I type I'm waiting to hear from the SXSW crew to show up so we can head over to the ICC and start building up our stand. Since I'm the guy who gets to stand there and explain that no, we're not a record company; no, we don't want your CD just at the moment; no we can't book your band, while the other folks are doing business, I'll be out of pocket until the circus leaves town on Saturday. Meanwhile Berlin's clubs are filled to bursting with bands -- the only time of the year this happens, actually; hell, you'd think there was a music scene here if this was the only time you ever showed up in this city -- and I will, most likely, see exactly none of them.

But you can bet I'll post a PopKomm post-mortem.

A Very Short Tale Of Love In Berlin

This story was recalled during the course of a correspondence I had yesterday, and I thought it might be worth repeating, if only to explain how a magnificent specimen such as myself has managed to remain single during the majority of my 13-year stretch here.

An old friend told me this story. There was this couple she knew, they'd been together for years. One Sunday, the woman walks in and says she's found another guy and she's leaving. The man is devastated. Wrecked. His life has been shattered. But she's as good as her word: Monday morning she's packed and a cab's waiting outside.

Naturally, after all those years of living together, you don't get everything in a quick pack like that, so she had to call him later Monday and ask him if he'd mind looking for this and that. Did it again Tuesday night, too, another few things she'd forgotten. He could just put them in a box and call a cab to deliver it. And here was her new address.

So this guy's dealing with the fact that not only is this woman out of his life and enjoying herself just a couple of U-Bahn stops away, the very thought of which makes him miserable, but she's calling him every day. Mail needs to be forwarded: did the stuff from the insurance company come? Don't forget to water the plants in the kitchen; you were never very good at that, but I'd hate to see them die, and there's no room for them here.

Friday she calls and...invites him over to dinner on Saturday night.

He went.

My friend pre-emptively protested that this story was true, but by the time I heard it I already knew it had to be.

The Indian Summer Crumber

I cannot believe how wonderful it is outside, so I'm going to keep today's miscellanea short, and then head out to buy some coffee, which you can actually buy on Sundays. I still miss the Malongo boutique at Galleries Lafayette, but the quick-and-dirty solution is one bag of Starbuck's Gold Coast Blend and one of Balzac's House Blend mixed together. Not what I'd make if I had access to a decent selection of varietals, but hey, this is World City Berlin, and there's no place to buy 'em.

***
First off, a couple of technical notes. With Marie's help from far-off New Jersey, I managed to learn how to make various adjustments in the blog, and will be adding several new blog-links in the near future. I also learned how to modify my statistics thingy there at the bottom of the page and now I can see how people get here and where they go afterwards. This is totally useless information, for the most part, but I hope to use it to dazzle potential publishers for my book when I head to New York in about a month.

***

The Pope is back in town. No, not the guy who put his beslippered foot in his mouth in re Islam the other day, but the Pope of Mope, Berlin's unluckiest guy. Only a couple of days after returning here, he managed to get his arm broken by a gang of bicycle theives who operate around the Kaffee Burger on Torstr., ripping off the bikes of the hip and trendy while they're inside doing whatever it is hip and trendy people do. It's his belief that these guys operate out of the Döner Kebap place on the corner, the one that was a sort of DDR-moderne-themed bar that never made it, Luxe. Since I refuse to ride a bike -- I'd much rather walk -- and since Kaffee Burger's walking distance for me, and since I'm not hip and trendy, and the one time I was at Kaffee Burger I had to leave almost immediately to find a couple of molecules of oxygen, I'm just passing this along for the edification and delectation of such of my readers who might bike down there, emerge mildly intoxicated, and find themselves suddenly at the mercy of the Nachtbus.

It's also worth noting that the poor Pope is the first person I've known or heard of among my circle of friends and acquaintences, male or female, who has been the victim of physical assault in the 13 years I've been in Berlin. That's what I mean by unlucky, but it's also a fairly remarkable statement for a city of this size over that amount of time.

***

He also passed on yet another Hip! Edgy! Berlin! story, this one from the New York Observer, whatever that is. I actually sat down with this Galapagos guy for two hours and tried to let him know what happens when foreigners come here and try to start businesses, but from the looks of this article, he must have thought I was a crank. That said, he really, really needs to learn something about this city, because besides the insanity of trying to start a business here, he was looking in districts like Neukölln (yes, David Bowie named a song after it; big deal, it's a ghetto) and Hohenschönhausen, where nobody but nobody would go. As a friend who's put on events in the latter part of town observed, people from West Berlin refuse to ride trams (why? But I believe her) and nobody's going to spend close to an hour getting someplace they can't get in and out of, especially late at night. Hell, the tram to my neighborhood from the LSD District in Prenzlauer Berg (that's Lychner, Schönhauser, Danziger, the border streets to the district where every third person seems to be an American) shuts down at midnight.

But he's in love. He came here for a couple of weeks, let various trust-fund artists walk him through their favorite Szene-kneipen, and now he thinks he knows Berlin. I've seen this movie before. I know he doesn't have very deep pockets, so I wish him luck.

***

Bike thieves are one thing, terrorist plots are another. One of the local tabloids the other day had a screamer headline: the Berlin Police had disrupted a terrorist plot to kill thousands of people at ... a Nena concert! This was presumably the concert I saw advertised at the Hauptbahnhof, which would be behind the station on the banks of the Spree river. According to the tabloid, a ship filled with explosives would come down the river and go off, killing all aboard and loads of concert-goers, and, presumably Nena und Band.

This is why I love the tabloids. I couldn't make this stuff up if I tried.

But they can. And do. I heard a great story once about a freelancer who lucked into an interview with one of Germany's biggest idols, Tina Turner. Realizing he had an exclusive, he sold it to the highest bidder, the national tabloid Bild. They read it, didn't think it was too terribly exciting, and made up their own interview and signed his name to it. Tina Turner read it, flipped out, and sued. Bild coolly informed her that the writer wasn't on staff, but was a freelancer, so they couldn't take responsibility. So she sued him. He is no longer a journalist. Which, on some days, I consider a happy ending to the story, except for the lawyer's fees.

***

Thanks to the opening of the TeaRoom Berlin, to which I'll post a link if they ever get their website up, I'm in Prenzlauer Berg more often than usual, and the other day, walking down Metzer Str. towards Kollwitzstr., I saw green spiny things on the sidewalk, and, because I'm that kind of person, I gave one a kick. A bunch of little nuts flew out of it, and I realized that this wasn't a chestnut (which are all over the place), but, rather hazlenuts. I looked them up when I got home and sure enough, they come packed four to the pod. It just never occurred to me that they'd grow wild, but then I realized that that's stupid: there are those ubiquitous chestnuts, after all, and my friend Natalie once worked with a woman who had a couple of walnut trees. Once I made it known that I had uses for walnuts, I wound up with five or ten kilos of them.

So yes: Berlin is nut country. Especially in the fall. And the advent of another fall was the message those little hazelnuts were sending.

Which reminds me: time to go buy that coffee before it cools off out there.

Hair-Raising Question

Now listen all you people, especially you girls

As Marvin Gaye calls the congregation to order, I have a very serious question for the ladies out there, particularly the German ladies, but really nationality is secondary to gender here, because I need some information only you can provide me with.

Right. Take a look at the gentleman below, whose picture is tied to every single lamppost in my neighborhood, since he's running for some local office on the CDU ticket. Never mind that he hasn't a chance in hell, just check out the picture.



Now, just what is your reaction to him as a sex object?

a) "Ohhhh, I am so consumed by lust!"
b) "Dang, he makes that ugly guy over to the right on this blog look like Paul Newman."
c) "Enh. I'm a lesbian."

If you answered c you're encouraged to stick around and contribute to the theoretical discussion, especially if you're Belledame222 or of a similarly cranky disposition.

But if you answered a, I have a question.

Huh?

Now, actually, what's weird about this particular photo is that if you look at it closely, you'll see he's actually just cut his hair way short, and it's greying. But on the campaign photos -- and I've looked carefully -- he's been Photoshopped to a skin-smooth shave. And the reason for this is obvious: to increase his appeal, to glamorize his image. Plus, there's a threat involved, because the other posters he's put up in the past couple of days don't have his image on them, but, instead, three promises: More work, more art, more children. The "more work" is what every politician's offering in a city with 20% unemployment, and the "more art" implies he'll loosen the purse-strings for the starving cultural budget here, but I'm really worried about that last one. Is he planning to do this all by himself? And if so, is this why he's presenting himself looking like this, Photoshop or no?

From what I've been able to tell, this particular concept of male beauty is indigenous to Germany. I'm not talking about skinheads; they have their own costume, their own rituals, their own look. No, I'm talking about professional men, artists, intellectuals, people in or aspiring to the higher economic and social reaches. I've noticed this for years around here. And does it work? Boy, does it ever: you go to some event, look around for the most beautiful woman there, and dollars to doughnuts she'll soon float into the orbit of a suit with a pink knob on top of it and just go all limp.

Now, okay, there's a certain amount of jealousy at work here. I was doomed from the beginning. My dad and every one of his brothers was hit by male pattern baldness, and, starting in my late 20s just like the textbooks say, so was I. I have this fantasy of discovering our ancestral home in Devonshire, where we settled as Normans and changed from Oeuvrards to Wards, walking into the pub, and having it go quiet as they do when an outsider walks in, and dozens of similar hairlines all craning around to see who the intruder is. Naturally, the minute I take off my hat, they're all eager to know who I am.

But the thing is, I don't think my hair looks bad. Well, it does now; I'm in need of a haircut, and I'll get one as soon as I visit the States next month. But in general, given my genes, I like to think it makes me look distinguished, maybe even smart, like the hair evaporated due to the intensity of the thought occurring directly underneath it. And then there's that belief among African-American women that it's proof of extra virility (not completely a legend, since testosterone does play a part in balding, which is why you see so very few naturally bald women).

Still: do you suppose it would help my utterly moribund social life if I just took a razor to what little remains? I mean, I could buy a black scarf and a yellow sweater and go out on Halloween as a #2 pencil. Were I to do the Mr. Clean (Mr. Proper here in Germany), would the fräuleins flock around, all seeking to know my mystery? Would I be able to stand looking in a mirror, though, without feeling queasy?

I really don't know. It's possibly the most unfathomable of all the German cultural mysteries, and one I'll probably never solve. But I do know this: the image this politician immediately brought to my mind: the Martian Popping Thing.



Can I get a wi-iit-ness?

Thanks, Marvin.

How I Got The Posters

I've been trying to sell off my old Avalon Ballroom posters for a year and a half. I don't really want to see them go, of course, but part of being broke is hacking off pieces of your flesh and offering them to the highest bidder. Anyway, my pal Nels, who's a laywer as well as a poster artist, is a member of a poster-collectors' club, and he's undertaken to make the sales for me. The rarer items went pretty quickly, but then things got stuck. He's offering them still, via Craigslist and maybe even eBay, and with a big meeting of the poster club coming up, he asked me to write an article for their newsletter about how I came to get them.

I knocked it off this afternoon, and thought, hey, I should stick this on the blog. So I will.

Naturally, if I were writing this for a more "serious" outlet, I'd flesh out the story much more, drop a few more names maybe, contextualize a lot of stuff, and so on. But for now, here's what I did. Many years ago, in a far distant land...

***

In December, 1966, I was an 18-year-old Antioch college student, on their work-study program, finishing up a job in the Christmas card department of the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York in the week between Christmas and New Year's. I'd decided to delay my return to school and try to find another job because I'd recently acquired a girlfriend with a fascinating family, and wanted to explore all the cool stuff I was discovering both in her circle and in and around New York City.

But Christmas cards are seasonal, and the job was about to end until next season. My "assistant" was a painter several years older than me, and we'd gotten to be good friends. Meanwhile, my girlfriend wanted to see Judy Collins, who was about to play Town Hall, so I went to buy some tickets to celebrate the end of my employment. The painter thought that as long as I was going to be in town, he'd cook dinner for us, after which we could go see the show. It was already shaping up to be a fine evening when I got to the box office and found a woman I'd worked with a couple of years earlier behind the glass. She was delighted to see me, we talked for a while, and then she sold me some up-close tickets in the press section for the price of a couple of bottom-of-the-line nosebleed seats.

No surprise that it turned out to be a memorable evening, then, but not in the way I'd expected. The dinner was great, some hash was smoked, and we caught a cab downtown to the show. Manhattan in winter was like a movie, and then we were in the concert hall, about six rows from the stage. Tom Rush opened the show, and captivated everyone with a song by some songwriter he'd just discovered named Joni Mitchell, as well as his usual repertoire. The lights came up, and I became aware of a nervous, skinny guy behind me urgently looking around the crowd. He had a manila envelope with a stack of mimeographed magazines in it, and I realized I'd just read about him in Howard Smith's column in the Village Voice, where Smith had started the item by saying "Behind a door in the Village, an 18-year-old ego burns."

"Hey," I said to the guy, "Are you Paul Williams?" "Yeah, why do you want to know?" "Oh, I read about you in the Voice and I thought this Crawdaddy! magazine idea sounded interesting." He stared at me. "You want one?" I took it. "I have something you might like to look at," I continued. "My girlfriend's father got ahold of galleys for a book Bob Dylan has written, which Macmillan's going to publish this spring." He glared at me. "If Bob Dylan had a book coming out, I'd know about it!" he snapped. "Well, he does, and she's got the galleys." "I really do," she said. "It's called Tarantula. You ought to believe him." Paul snatched back the copy of the magazine, with Howlin' Wolf's photograph on the cover, and scrawled an address on 6th Avenue. "Come see me with it. I'm there most of the time."

My Lower East Side apartment had been robbed, and although they got nothing of value (some dirty laundry an ex-roommate wanted me to mail to him, a typewriter that I hated), it was a power move, the neighborhood amphetamine junkies serving notice that they were in our territory. Realizing this, I'd moved out, back to my parents' house in suburban New York. On weekends (my girlfriend was still in high school) I'd go to Princeton to visit her and her family, who seemed to understand what I was up to better than my own family. I was looking for another job, because I had to have one in order not to go back to college -- I was still protected by the 2-S student draft deferment -- and so the Monday after the concert, I took the precious envelope with the Tarantula galleys in it, schlepped to a couple of employment agencies and took typing tests and filled out forms, and then showed up at the Crawdaddy! offices about 3 in the afternoon.

The offices were in a building over a Greek diner (now a pizza place) right at the entrance to the W. 4th Street subway on 6th Avenue, on the second floor in a tiny apartment whose bathtub was filled with bundled magazines. Two IBM Executive electric typewriters stood on a table. Paul snatched the envelope from my hands, sat down and started reading. Another guy, with curly hair, introduced himself as Tim Jurgens, and we talked while Paul read. Finally he looked up and said "I can't believe it! It's the real thing! You have to let me borrow this." "Sorry," I said, "it's not mine to lend." "But you've got to! I've got to show this to Paul Rothschild!" Now, there was a name I recognized: he produced records for Elektra, the legendary folk label which had, among others, Tom Rush and Judy Collins. "Look, here's what I'll do. Let me have this overnight and I'll go to Elektra and make a copy. Then you can take it back to New Jersey. Call your girlfriend and ask her if it's okay." So I did. She was nervous, but if it was just overnight, it was okay. Anyway, we'd both read it (or, rather, she'd read all of it and I'd read bits -- she'd also read Finnegan's Wake, so gibberish was second nature to her) and agreed it was pretty lame. Suddenly Paul had another idea. "Can you type?" Sure I could type: that's all I'd been doing at the employment agencies, so I said so. "Whaddya think, Tim?" Tim shrugged. I had a job.

A month later, we'd moved the office upstairs after putting out the first New York-based issue of Crawdaddy!, with a cover designed by my girlfriend's famous graphic designer dad and an excerpt from an unpublished book by some madman named Richard Meltzer. (The graphic designer, after reading it, took it to his friend Dick Higgins, who had a small avant-garde press in New York, and suddenly Richard had a book out). The new offices were a lot more spacious, having previously been the showroom and offices of Fretted Instruments, the folk instrument shop and instruction studio. I worked there during the week, and spent my weekends in Princeton with my new family.

One day, my girlfriend's father asked me if I'd like to go to San Francisco. "Sure!" I said. Paul had been there the previous year, and he couldn't stop talking about it. "That's good. You're a college student, but you're not in college, so you're free to travel on the half-price fares. I want you to meet some people." So I wound up one afternoon at a cocktail party on the Upper East Side in a multi-story house with a Louise Nevelson sculpture in the living room talking to people who were involved with a magazine called Aspen. Aspen was a little different: it came in a box. Each article was on a different kind of paper, or done as a little book, or as a poster. My girlfriend's father was art-directing the next issue, and they wanted a story about the hippies in San Francisco. I was introduced to a short, dark guy named Steve Schapiro, who worked for Life magazine. He was going to be the photographer. I was handed an envelope with a phenomenal amount of money -- $175, round-trip airfare at half-price -- to get me to San Francisco. I bought a ticket.

The day I was going to leave, I was wrestling my suitcase out of the office when the door to the apartment next door opened up. We didn't really know who lived there, although Paul said it smelled like an opium den (like he should've talked about dope-smells!), but this guy looked amiable enough. "Hi," he said. "I'm Travis. Where ya off to?" "San Francisco." "Got a place to stay?" Damn, I hadn't thought about that, I'd been so eager to go. "Hey, that's okay. Can you remember an address? 1836 Pine. It's the old Dog house. I'm sure they can find you somewhere. It's early out there right now, but I'll call 'em later, and when you land, just take a cab to 1836 Pine."

So I did, and entered an alternate dimension. I hadn't quite understood what Travis had said, but these, indeed, were the folks who had founded the Family Dog, with which I was already familiar. Luria Castell was the earth mother, and there was another woman, a singer, named Lin Hughes, who played her 12-string guitar a lot. There was a resident astrologer/magician, and various other people who came and went. One resident was a guy from Detroit named Larry Miller, who wasn't around. I slept in his bed, in a closet. The group in the house, who called themselves the Mystic Research Foundation, had split with Chet Helms, who still operated the Family Dog, which they'd founded together. There didn't seem to be much bad blood between them, although there were dark mutterings about "selling out" and "going commercial," but mostly everyone seemed concerned about the new society they were building, the groovy possibilities ahead, and they were most gracious about introducing me around as the guy from the magazine in New York who was writing about them.

Naturally, rock politics being what they are, I was introduced to Chet Helms -- but not to that spawn of Satan Bill Graham, who was trying to ruin everything for everyone, although it had to be admitted his dances were pretty cool, too. And so, after interviewing the Cohen brothers at the Psychedelic Shop, and the editor of the San Francisco Oracle, and a couple of Diggers (who of course denied being Diggers), I went to the offices of the Family Dog and talked to Helms, who spoke in a voice so quiet it was hard to believe he was in such an important position. At the end of our talk, he asked me if I liked posters. Sure, I told him, and, after signing me up on the mailing list for post cards announcing each week's dance (and signing up my girlfriend, too -- why not?), he gave me one of each of the posters up to that date. I rolled them up, put them in a tube, and, I believe, checked them with my luggage when I flew back.

I have a lot of memories about that visit: watching (and recording on the newfangled cartridge tape recorder -- cassettes, they were called -- that someone had given me to use) Big Brother and the Holding Company with Janis Joplin from the vantage point of the light-show booth at the Avalon; meeting her a couple of days later as I walked with Luria down Haight Streeet, and Janis being so happy I'd liked her that she jumped out of the car and kissed me on my cheek; becoming so entranced by San Francisco that I vowed I'd move there some day; buying a koto-like stringed instrument from China called a cheng for practically nothing at Cost Plus; flying back impatient to tell Paul all about it -- and, of course, to tell my girlfriend about the new society that we'd be bringing our kids up in some day.

Of course, there were disappointments ahead. For one thing, the Aspen people dragged their feet, and my long article got reduced to a couple of quotes from Alan Cohen on a poster of an abstract photo Steve Schapiro had shot at the Avalon, an evening that had clearly made a deep impression on him. For another, nobody could stand my Janis Joplin recordings -- she didn't sound like anything on the radio! Most immediately and worst of all, I got back to the Crawdaddy! offices late at night after the cross-country flight to find some woman I'd never seen working there who initially refused to let me stay in my own bed, but relented on the grounds that she'd have to ask Paul -- who had gone on the road somewhere -- who I was, and if I wasn't who I said I was she'd call the cops. I quit the next day, and got ready to go back to school.

But man, with that roll of posters, my dorm room was going to be the coolest one on campus!

Computer Followup

Oh, and in that last post I made reference to picking up my computer. The guy called early enough this morning (after having been given explicit instructions not to call before 11: I do business with America, so I get to stay up late and sleep late) that I wasn't sure what he was saying, other than I could go pick it up. Fine, I thought; that was fast enough. Maybe I judged them too harshly.

Nope. I had to walk down there this time (the U-Bahn which services that part of town is down until Dec. 21), but I didn't mind because it was a very nice day and I didn't have anything else to do. When I got there, though, I was right back where I'd started. "My computer's ready?" I said. "Ready," said a guy, "but not repaired." Huh? "Your case number doesn't exist. You can't expect us to repair it for free, can you, and we need authorization from Apple." I thought I'd gone over this on the phone with them the day after I'd dropped it off. The guy was angry. "Don't leave with that until you initial this form which says we didn't repair it," he warned me. Then he delivered a tirade in German that was much too fast for me to follow. He glared at me with his steel-grey eyes and I suddenly noticed the pupils were like pin-points. I was getting the creeps.

The form initialed, I walked home. Only an hour each way, but I was now shaking with anger, so I called Apple's hotline again.

The guy there was completely shocked by my story, especially when I told him about the guy who'd called my machine "shit."

I now have another place to take it, although it's going to cost me €100, which isn't particularly good news, since I don't have €100 and can't say when I'll have that to spare, and I'm trying to get to New York in mid-October for a couple of important meetings.

But I have the computer back, and I have complete instructions for getting the repair done.

OmniLab, however, is being de-listed by Apple as a recommended repair shop. I'll take my victories where I can get 'em.

The S Word And The Hoodies

You can always tell when the CDU (the Christian Democratic Union, currently, if barely, the ruling party, who might also be called "the conservatives") are getting their butts beaten. They haul out the S word: Sicherheit. It means "security" or "safety."

We've got a mayoralty race happening at the moment -- elections are a little later this month -- and our current mayor, SPD's Klaus Wowereit, is heavily favored to win. "Wowi," as he's known in the City Which Always Nicknames, is handsome, gay, and doing a pretty good job. (Possibly the only thing Berlin and Paris have in common is having a gay mayor). The CDU, therefore, has to scare up some votes. And I do mean scare.

Walking down to collect my as-yet-unrepaired computer from the trolls at OmniLab today, I passed two huge billboards showing the CDU's desperation. One shows their mayoral candidate, a prissy-looking fellow, in his official campaign photo, on half the billboard, while the other half shows a sepia photo of two old folks sitting in a park while a woman coos at her baby in a baby-carriage next to them. SICHERHEIT FUR BERLIN it says. The other is worse: an old lady, in shadow, but backlit by a more powerful streetlight than exists in real life, the better so we can see her thick glasses, white hair, and shopping bag, is walking along, while two guys in hoodies*, faces unseen, follow her. ROT-ROT SCHAU WEG, it screams: "Red-Red turns a blind eye." (The reference is to the SPD/PDS coalition ruling the city council, the PDS being the reformed communists, sort of).

This reminded me instantly of the election which brought Gerhard Schröder (SPD) to power, but which Helmut Kohl (CDU) clearly felt he had heaven's mandate to win. An impossibly handsome male model in a policeman's uniform had his hand on an old lady's shoulder, his gaze adoringly on her frail form, while she looked accusingly into the camera. SICHERHEIT! SICHERHEIT! SICHERHEIT! was the caption, courtesy of the CDU. I made some inquiries, and sure enough, the polls had turned.

The hoodies poster particularly annoyed me because of an unrelated -- well, maybe unrelated -- ad campaign I've seen of late, this one by Philip Morris GmbH, the German division of the American tobacco company. It shows a guy in a fur-lined hooded jacket offering Marlboros from inside his jacket. Red letters scream, "Billig, weil geschmuggelt? NEIN! Billig, weil gefälscht!" ("Cheap because they're smuggled? NO! Cheap because they're counterfeited!")

Now, in a way, this is something which needs to be brought to the attention of a nation which smokes like the proverbial chimney, because, as the pamphlet I picked up at the shop across the street points out, these cigarettes are made from substandard tobaccos, and aren't regulated for the amount of tar, nicotine, carbon monoxide, lead, cadmium, and arsenic in them. It warns against buying cigarettes from street-sellers, at flea and street markets, on the internet, and around border areas (since a lot of counterfeits are made in Russia and sent through Poland).

But there's something disquieting about the cover shot, the guy with the hood. His moustache, for one. You can't see his eyes, but he looks...vaguely Vietnamese. Or South Asian, anyway. But this isn't our pal, funny old Chinky the Chinaman. This is the face of Organized Crime.

There was a time when Vietnamese street-smugglers selling cigarettes were all over Berlin. You'd see a guy standing around, staring at a pack of cigarettes in his hand as if he were wondering what in the world it was. But if you approached him, he could sell you a pack or a carton or two of counterfeits. A friend who bought a pack once while I was with him lit up and immediately made an awful noise and tossed the freshly-lit cigarette to the ground. "Learned my lesson," he said. The box, though, was impeccably made.

Enforcement was downright weird. I once answered my doorbell to find a gigantic woman there holding up a laminated card. "Do you have any cigarettes?" she asked. As a matter of fact, I did. "Please show them to me." I did. She pointed at the tax stamp pasted over the top. "Always look for the Bundesadler," she said, pointing at the stylized eagle which is Germany's symbol. "Good day." I've often wondered what she would have done if I'd had counterfeits. Deported me?

My second encounter with enforcement was even stranger and much worse. There was a mob of Vietnamese which operated by the exit to the U-Bahn at Friedrichstr. station by the Tränenpalast. There was a lawn by the exit (which lasted until the begging punks and their huge dogs took it over, turning it to desert), and two thick bushes grew there. One Vietnamese guy would be hanging out, and he was pretty obviously the guy to talk to. If he got an order, he'd bark something in Vietnamese and a woman, hiding behind the bushes, would haul out a plastic bag, find what the customer had ordered, and run it over to the man. Money would change hands, and that would be that.

One day, I was walking by, and all of a sudden a bunch of guys boiled out of the underground entrance, surrounded the Vietnamese guy, and started beating the crap out of him. A woman yelled "What are you doing?" and one guy showed her a police ID. "We're arresting a criminal," he said. "But do you have to use so much violence?" she yelled at him. At which point he knocked her to the ground. At that point I decided to get as far away from this scene as possible, since I had no ID at all on me, which is against the law.

Not long thereafter 35,000 Vietnamese were repatriated from Berlin after a gun-battle in a dormitory used by cigarette dealers in the Marzahn district. This was described as a crime-abatement program, since the Russian Mob was alleged to have been involved in the cigarette business, using the Vietnamese as front-persons. The Vietnamese had been here since DDR days, brought in as "guest workers" from "friendly socialist nations," the same as the Angolans and the Cubans, and, like them, scapegoated by unemployed East Germans the moment unification happened.

The Philip Morris leaflet shows a picture of the right way to buy cigarettes: a nice white guy pointing to a wall of cigarettes in what looks like a gas station shop, while the nice white lady reaches for his brand. Given that I haven't seen a Vietnamese selling cigarettes in at least five years, even in the darkest east, I'm just a bit disturbed by this leaflet's insinuations. I support the campaign, obviously, given my friend's experience. But I can deplore the method, just as I do with the CDU.

*(Interesting historical note: while hooded sweatshirts are called "hoodies," for obvious reasons, in America, here they're called Kapuziner, Capuchins, after the hooded monastic order)

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Service Is Not A German Word

Part one: American Service

The other night, realizing that I had not a single thing in the house to read, I remembered that a friend of mine had sent me the draft of a book he was writing and it was on my laptop. I had guiltily not dipped into it, mostly because I spend too much time in front of screens as it is, and I'm sort of addicted to paper. But this was sort of an emergency.

So I fired up the laptop and started reading. About 60 pages in, I was way past hooked: the (true) story of a bunch of wannabe playboy gangsters in Austin, selling dope, running whores, and robbing banks is my idea of a good read. Suddenly the screen started flashing like a strobe light. When it stopped, everything was frozen. I rebooted.

Five minutes later, it happened again. And then it happened again. And then it wouldn't start up at all. Damn, I was really into the book, but I wasn't going to read any more.

The next morning I posted the symptoms in the Well's Macintosh conference and within minutes, as usual, someone said "It sounds like a canonic instance of this." And I read the webpage, and was happy to see that it did, indeed, sound like that. Plus, I could get it repaired for free. My friend Karen recommended the Apple Hotline, and gave me the number.

So I called, got a young Berliner homesick for Mitte, but working in Cork, Ireland, where Apple's European headquarters is. We went back and forth, he hit some keys, went off to confer with his superiors, and came back to tell me that he wasn't sure my machine was covered under this program, but they'd authorized the free repair anyway. "Just take it to any of our service centers and they'll have the information for charging us back for the repair right at hand." He then did a search for whatever one was nearest me and came up with something I'd never heard of, Omnilab, which he swore was at the corner of Invalidenstr. and Chausseestr. I go there all the time, and had never seen it, but that doesn't mean it's not there. He gave me the address, Körnerstr., and wished me good luck. I thanked him profusely.

Körnerstr. didn't exactly turn out to be in the back yard, but the post zones here are misleading. I would have headed down there right away, but it was 5:06, and I know all about the German Work Ethic, so I decided to wait til the next day. Today.

Part two: German Service

I was a bit apprehensive as I left the house, because according to the map, Omnilab was near two U-Bahn stations which were perhaps going to be affected by construction from now until Christmas. There had been notices about this in the U-Bahn on Sunday, saying I should read the posters, but...no posters, of course. I mean, the construction was only going to start on Monday morning, so why should they post them before then?

Sure enough, I had to get off at Potsdamer Platz and get on a bus, but I missed the part of the announcement saying where the bus was and realized, as I left the station, that it wasn't a very big walk. It was nice enough, given that it was grey and cold (we've had our six weeks of summer, I guess), so I thought, hey, I'll walk.

And I did. Potsdamer Str. is, once you cross the canal, about as depressing as West Berlin gets, but I made one nice discovery: a restaurant on Lützowstr., called Maultaschen Manufaktur. I may complain about German food (and I will again in a minute), but Maultaschen, the huge ravioli of Swabia, are one of my favorite things. This place, which is next door to Berlin's sleaziest old-time hipster bar, Kumpelnest 3000, has something like ten varieties available at all times. That's got to be worth investigating.

Half a block on, there was Körnerstr., too, and I found the building easily enough. It was very badly maintained, dirty, and scrawled with graffiti, but what else is new? There was a sign: Omnilab was on the 4th floor, and there was even an elevator. On the 4th floor, there was, indeed, a door marked Omnilab, and a bell to ring. Which I did. And nothing happened. I rang it again. Again, nothing. There was a sign taped to the door, which said that goods delivery and mail should be taken to the 5th floor, so I hiked up. There was an open door, and a lot of trash tossed around. I walked into a large warehouse-like room, and there were three people smoking cigarettes down at one end. "What are you doing here?" one of them challenged me. "I have a repair for you." "Well, what are you doing here, then," she shot back. "Repairs are on the 3rd floor." "There's no sign anywhere which says that," I told her, for all the good it'd do. "Well, that's where it is. Now get out of here."

So I walked down two flights of stairs and found a door propped open by a can. I walked in and found myself at a bar. Three guys were sitting around it smoking. "What do you want?" one of them said. "I have a repair for you," I said again. "George!" he hollered. "Repair!"

Nothing happened. Finally, a young woman got up from her desk and motioned me over. "What have you got here?" she asked. "A repair. Apple recommended this place," I said. "I have a case number you're supposed to look up and it will tell you everything." She ignored that and called up a repair blank on her computer. I gave her my name, address, phone number (she was amazed I didn't have a cell phone number -- I do, but I never use the damn thing), and the case number. She then spent some time trying to open the laptop up from the wrong end. I showed her how to do it, but told her it would make no sense to start it up because it was dead. Some guy wandered over, smoking, and looked at it. "What's this all about?" he asked. I told him this was a repair under the Logic Board Repair program. "This machine's a piece of shit, you know," he said. "You should get another one." And he walked off.

Finally, the woman printed out the repair order and I left the machine with her. I'll probably never see it again. Doesn't matter; it doesn't work anyway.

***

Now, right about now, I can see Olivier, my reclusive neighbor, regular reader, and that rarissimus of aves, a Germanophilic Frenchman, sitting down to send me an e-mail which says "What makes you think this would be any different in France?" Since he actually knows something about the place, I always take his comments very seriously: what if France is worse than here? But I do have an answer: I don't expect it to be better when it comes to things like bureaucracy, service (although certainly there's better service in restaurants), or public utilities. But to suffer these problems in a place where the food is better, the weather is better, and the general attitude of the populace is better would, I believe, make all the difference in the world.

Soft Opening

Just a quick post to say that my friend Susan, after years of struggling against the odds (she's a foreigner, she's a woman), has finally opened her business, TeaRoom Berlin. Once all the pieces are in place, it ought to take its place as one of the city's hot spots: the theme is China and England, two of the world's leading tea cultures, so she'll have authentic British pastries and authentic Chinese dim sum, as well as many kinds of tea, including bubble tea (heretofore unknown here as far as she can determine), and a modest bar serving, among other things, the latest hot drink the marteani.

Right now, though, she's only in the first stages, although things will be different in a week. Tomorrow, Saturday, there'll be a "soft opening," starting at around 7, with some freebies and some non-freebies, and, she hopes, lots of interesting people. To that end, I'm extending an invitation to readers of BerlinBites to show up and mingle, since I'm planning to be there. Tell your friends and come say hi.

TeaRoom Berlin is on Marienburger Str. right off Prenzlauer Allee, on the left hand side of the street next to the Japanese restaurant. See you there!

Sommerloch '06, Part 7

I've been hearing rumors that the summer is over, and certainly it's cooled down here over the past week, but I'm not giving up yet. I do, however, think that the heat-spell we've had is over, but there'll be a few more nice patches before the nasty weather-as-usual closes in on us again.

One thing that I've been wondering about is whether the hot weather did any good for this year's German fad: flavored beers. This thing just appeared out of nowhere; all of a sudden there's a whole refrigerator full of the stuff at the supermarket, and billboards everywhere. Becks led the way, with Becks Chilled Orange and Level Seven Energy Beer, flavored with lemon grass and guarana. It being Becks, the beer which can induce a headache just from my looking at it, I haven't tried either. Not to be outdone, Warsteiner, which, last I checked, was Germany's second-best-selling beer (at least it's drinkable), has a whole raft of horrible mixtures, from Alt-Cola (Altbier is a West German specialty), to Hi-Light (low-calorie beer) and regular Warsteiners in Cola, Lemon, and Orange flavors. Someone else introduced something called Green Lemon (incidentally, these names are all in English, which means they're being marketed to young folks), which was lime-flavored. (Technically, they're right, incidentally: unless you are lucky enough to live somewhere you can get "key" or "Mexican" limes, you're getting "Persian" limes, which are a species of lemon and don't really taste like real limes. They are, however, large, and much easier to squeeze and this should show you what I'm talking about.)

It's enough to make you want the Reinheitsgebot back. Well, almost.

With this sudden glut of products (some of which existed quietly in the past, mostly in the hands of small breweries) I now wonder if we're about to see the tabloid press worrying about the health of Germany's children. The so-called alcopops, sweet alcoholic fizzy drinks like Smirnoff Ice and the various Bacardi Breezers, have been available here for some time, yet I've never seen anything here comparable to the group of 13-year-olds I encountered once on the London Underground drinking some hideous blue alcopop and getting pretty obviously snockered. Maybe it's that, as with sex, the German educational system has a sane attitude towards alcohol and is actually able to deliver the message.

As for me, whenever I see one of these hideous things, I Just Say No.

***

Too good to pass up, yet the mass of sauerkraut which invades my brain every time I contemplate commenting on it prevents me from doing so: the BBC reports that the German birth-rate is the lowest in Europe. Insert your own sauerkraut about dating Germans here.

***

As for news of the neighborhood, we've suffered a loss these past few weeks. I'm sure I've made reference to Bistro Tor, the Döner Kebap place on Torstr. near my house, home of one of Berlin's best kebaps, and, for my money, the best because it's a half-stumble from my doorstep. I'm not crazy about Döner, which is the Turkish name for the ubiquitous meat-on-a-stick-served-in-bread dish that the Greeks know as gyros and the Lebanese and Palestinians call shawarma. (Incidentally, there's enough tension in that part of the world at the moment and I'd just like to emphasize that Döner, gyros, and shawarma are, indeed, separate items, not different names for the same item). It's too filling for a mid-day snack, but not enough for dinner, and too many of them are just soaked in MSG, to which I'm pretty reactive.

That said, the Bistro Tor guys do a good one (although there's MSG in the meat, and unless you dissuade them, they'll add additional "salt" to it which also contains MSG), and, in fact, one of the great meals I've had here was a take-out from them. I was working at JazzRadio, and it was some kind of holiday, perhaps New Year's Day, and I'd been unable to make dinner. I came back from my shift at 11, starving, and saw that the lights were on at Bistro Tor. Ah, I thought: Döner for dinner! But I got there and the place was jammed and there was a sign on the door: Private Party. At a Döner Kebap stand! Fortunately, one of the guys saw me and waved me inside. "This is a party to thank all the construction workers who've patronized us all during the year," he told me. "We made a special kebap for this, and I think you'll agree it's the best you've ever had. Would you like me to make one for you? To go?" I said yes, and he went to a foil-lined tray in the middle of the room which was laden with bits of meat. "Just meat. No sauce, no salad, just meat. But you don't need salad or meat with this!" He was right; I only regret that I was so hungry that I gobbled it down when I got home without taking any notes, mental or otherwise. All I can remember is how good it was. And that it cost over twice what their normal kebap did.

Anyway, a few weeks ago, a friend from Austin was visiting, and he was also hanging out with a childhood friend of his from San Antonio. They were at my house and said they were hungry, so I pointed them to Bistro Tor, where the Austin guy had already been once. (The other guy lives in Düsseldorf, so presumably he'd had a kebap once or twice himself). So they went over there, had lunch, and came back. We hung out and talked for a while, and then they left. Some hours later, I left the house and noticed something unusual: Bistro Tor was closed. Over the next couple of days, a dumpster appeared out front, and filled up several times with plaster and so on, as if the walls were being destroyed inside. Then the dumpster went away, and the little storefront next door sprouted a pizzeria. Late last week, a couple of young Turkish guys were messing around with the Bistro Tor sign, and then it vanished. The window, in which the guys wielded their long, razor-sharp knives, was coated with an opaque material. And it's been almost a month, and we are still without kebaps.

This, incidentally, is something in the nature of an emergency. From what I could tell, at least half the people in my building got their evening meal there -- every day! Not maybe the healthiest meal on earth, but it's gotta be better than the other staple of the evening, which I think maybe 50% of my neighbors consume, frozen pizza. There are two other Dönerias on Torstr., one of which is so sleazy I wouldn't think of going there. Well, actually, I did once many years ago and it was unspeakably vile, but what made me steer clear of it was one evening when I was coming home about 4am, and there were a couple of guys out front of it. One wore an expensive suit and was carrying an attache case and wearing sunglasses, the other was on his knees, babbling fast in Turkish, while the other guy kicked him in the mouth, and, when he fell over, in the ribs. I crossed the street. The other place is in the other direction, and seems to be a hangout for children. It also doesn't seem very clean.

I was hoping some day to document the construction of a Döner at Bistro Tor by one of the guys, taking photos every step of the way, and publish it here. I still hope I can. I just hope those two Texans didn't murder the business.

Although I have to wonder: what was the last kebap like?

Important Technical Update

As you may have noticed (if you're lucky, or if you're one of those people who stares at the URL as a page loads) the address of this blog has changed.

You might want to change your bookmarks.

The blog: http://berlinbites.blogspot.com/

The new syndication feed is http://berlinbites.blogspot.com/rss/berlinbites.xml

This frees up space on jonl's server, something he's been wanting to do for a while. I'd like to thank him, not only for forcing me to do this in the first place all those years ago, but for being so very patient in explaining stuff to me, and, more importantly, implementing twiddly changes now and again.

Okay, now back to the Sommerloch, which has a little while yet to run...

Sommerloch '06, Part 6: Mauer im Herzen

Sunday came, and with it another painful anniversary. Not, I hasten to add, painful for me, for a change. But it was the 45th anniversary of the construction of the Berlin Wall. A friend of mine was here with a high-school group that evening, staying in Kreuzberg, and he remembers waking up in the pension where the group was lodged and looking out the window to see a wall that hadn't been there when he'd gone to sleep. That's really how fast it went up.

It being Sunday, I had, of course, forgotten one grocery item crucial to my evening meal, which meant a trip to a major train station. With Friedrichstr. torn up to the point of near-unnavigability, I decided to go to the Hauptbahnhof instead. This meant walking down Invalidenstr. and over the Sandkrugbrücke, a painfully ordinary bridge over the river, but one which had only been rebuilt since unification, since it was a border. And there, on the western side of the bridge, was a monument I'd seen before, to someone who'd been shot by border guards trying to escape East Germany after the wall had been erected. Days after, in fact. The little monument, which resembles a gravestone, says he was the first person shot trying to escape, which conflicts with my own understanding that the first person shot was on Bernauer Str., near Gartenstr. In both cases, the story was the same: the escapee managed to get into no-man's-land, was shot by East German guards, and bled to death slowly as Western observers looked on. They were powerless to do anything: stepping into the no-man's-land would be tantamount to invading another country, and they had no jurisdiction over the space between the walls. (Yes, there were, in most places, two walls running parallel, with this area between them).

But on Sunday, there was something extra besides the little gravestone and the quadralingual glass historical marker (German, and each of the Allies' languages): there was a wreath with a black ribbon tied around it, the ribbon printed with gold letters. Almost before my eyes could focus on them, I knew what this was: a gift from the Checkpoint Charlie Museum. I've written earlier about the crosses the woman who runs the museum erected on property she'd leased near the museum to commemorate the people who died fleeing East Germany, and her battle to keep them up even after the lease ran out and the bank that owned the site wanted to build on it. She's obsessed, and her obsession is with reminding people that the old East German regime killed people.

This is a scab not worth picking, in my opinion. Lots of people have stood trial over the things they did back then, and lots of them have gone to jail. Others have had their lives ruined by decisions they made out of pure human weakness. And, although it's so obvious it barely seems worth writing, as bad as some of the things the old regime did were, they pale in comparison to what the regime before that did, and, as Günter Grass has proven this week, there are still plenty of people agonizing over that time, even when their choice was to join the army or be shot -- not much of a choice for a 17-year-old.

And perfectly innocent East Germans are still suffering, even though some of them may not realize it. The east still gets the worst food in its stores, it's still got the worst unemployment in Western Europe, and, worst of all, it still gets snubbed by the vast majority of West Germans who resent having to pay for the creation of a whole new political and social life for people who speak the same language they do and, in many cases, to whom they are related by blood. This attitude is called "Mauer im Kopf," the "Wall in the head."

What the Checkpoint Charlie dame has is worse: Mauer im Herzen, a Wall in the heart. She'll never forget, never forgive, never stop trumpeting her gospel of guilt. That's all Germans need, more guilt.

Do yourself a favor. When people come to Berlin, it's hard to avoid going to Checkpoint Charlie just to see the damn thing, I agree. And I agree you should go there. But don't go in the museum. Don't let yourself be battered over the head by this harpy's propaganda. Instead, head to the actual, government-run Documentation Center on Bernauer Str., where the facts are presented a lot more clearly and without emotion or an ultra-right-wing political agenda to cloud the picture. Enough people have already suffered because of this thing, and not just the ones who were caught and killed or jailed. There's a famous picture of a border guard hopping over the barbed wire towards freedom in the West. He made it. He also shot and killed himself a few years ago. Who knows what was going on there? A great honking concrete wall may not trumpet the fact, but there's nuance to this story. Don't let Germany's ultra-right wing convince you otherwise.

Boycott the Checkpoint Charlie Museum.

Sommerloch '06, Part 5

Yesterday came and went, the anniversary I was desperately hoping to avoid.

I've now been in Berlin 13 years. As I was panicking the night before, I quickly did some math, and realized I'd been in Austin 13 years and 10 months, so I'm still hoping to be out of here before that exact anniversary rolls around.

Why am I still here? I realize I haven't mentioned the actual reason. Last June, which is to say June '05, I heard that an old colleague from my newspaper days was now a literary agent, and started corresponding with her. We quickly decided that I should whip together a book proposal based on this blog and my stay here in general, a memoir of expatriation, a narrative of the post-unification years in Berlin, and an inquiry into the whole expat mindset in general. This proposal whisked back and forth in cyberspace, and as last year drew to a close, I started formulating a plan: the book would be sold early this year, and I'd have the advance in time to start looking at rentals in Montpellier when the students left at the start of this summer. So as this year started, I began making plans, putting inquiries in various places for apartments, and so on.

There was one problem. The agent kept disappearing, sometimes for over a month. I assumed she was doing her job, and I was quite happy with the way the proposal was taking shape, confident that after the next revision it'd be ready to take to New York and sell. But these absences started to disturb me. At any rate, in March when I went to SXSW, we had a good meeting, and she was sure it'd just be a little while before it was sold. Not as quickly as I'd hoped, but I was content.

Only one snag remained. She was working with another agent, learning the business, and he wanted to see the proposal. Okay, I thought, fine. So she sent it to him. And there was a resounding silence. Finally, he sent it back with comments. Very strange comments. For one, he wanted the first-person out of the whole book. What? That made no sense at all. Couldn't we just forget that and get the damn book on the market?

Well, no. She finally confessed that she wasn't actually an agent, and couldn't do anything without his okay. In other words, last summer she'd misrepresented herself to me and I'd been laboring under a misapprehension that wasn't my fault.

So I fired her.

Really, I had no choice; I don't know whether her boss was drunk, whether he had no interest whatever in the book idea, or what, but there was no way I could do what he wanted.

And I was left with a pretty good book proposal and no way to sell it. Which caused me to get pretty depressed; I was clearly going to miss the summer recess at the university in Montpellier, and, unless I found some money pretty quickly, I wasn't going to be able to move at all this summer. Plus, I was now firmly committed to doing this book and had no idea what to do next.

I was rescued by the PEN International conference here in early June, and by a friend who'd just sold a book for a good chunk of dough. The first brought me into contact with a bunch of writers, who heard my story and were sympathetic. I told them I only knew one person in the publishing business, and mentioned her name. "But she's now [incredibly responsible job] at [incredibly major publisher]," one of the authors said. "You should just send it to her directly and see what happens." So I contacted her, and she politely agreed to look at it, noting, however, that she'd be gone until after July 4 on vacation.

This gave me a month to go over the proposal and make it exactly what I wanted it to be instead of what someone else thought it should be. I'm happier now than I've ever been before with it, and sent it off on July 6. Meanwhile, I asked my friend if his agent was taking new clients, and wrote the guy, who said sure, he'd look at something by me. So it went off to him, too, around the same time.

And that's where the story ends for the moment. I've heard nothing since, although, given the glacial pace at which publishing works, that's hardly surprising. So I'm waiting.

I'm not happy about this, but what can I do? I'm thousands of miles away from the American publishing scene, barely publishing at all, sending out article ideas to magazine editors who don't answer queries. None of the magazines I do write for pay very much, certainly not enough to pay the rent each month without a lot of effort.

The only thing that keeps me going is the hope that this situation will change soon, that I can get a decent advance and finish the book, and pay off the debts I owe and still have enough left over to put down a deposit on a new place to live in a new city in a new country. The minute I get that far, students or no students, I'm off to talk to real estate agents in Montpellier and to rouse some of my contacts there to see what they know about places for rent.

Until then, I'm stuck.

***

Achtung, Deutsche Telekom!

In case you hadn't noticed the World Cup is long gone from our city and our country. Yet your hideous pink football design remains on the Fehrnsehturm in Alexanderplatz, a blot on the city's skyline. The championship has been awarded to Italy. Thus, you have only two choices here:

* Remove the pink pentagons and restore the tower to its silvery glory, or
* Re-do it as a giant polpettone (meatball) dripping with sauce and dusted with Parmesan cheese.

Thank you very much, although yes, I know, it's not your policy to listen to your customers.

***

An end to evil? I was asking myself that earlier this week after the doorbell rang shortly after 10pm. I was making dinner at the time, and so I wasn't much interested in receiving guests, most of whom would know that this was when I usually eat. So I did a rare thing and picked up the intercom. A very young woman's voice was at the other end, talking quickly and none too well, but I understood a couple of words, and buzzed her in.

Soon, my front doorbell rang, and there stood a teenager, between 14 and 16, I'd say. She had on a punky t-shirt and a leather jacket, and I think she must have had on braces because the words hissed a lot as they tumbled out of her mouth. "I'm wondering if you've seen my grandpa," she said, "Herr Böse. We were supposed to go out today and he's not answering his telephone and he's not answering his doorbell and..." I told her there wasn't much I could do, that I wasn't the Hausmeister, and that the Hausmeister lived across the courtyard. "I guess there's nothing for me to do but to call the police," she said. I apologized for not being able to be more helpful, and went and finished making the meal. As I was putting the dishes in the sink afterwards, I saw a commotion in the courtyard, and a fat cop was standing by my window. He knocked on it, and asked if I could help them find the Hausmeister, and I said sure. I went to put some shoes on.

Now, the big mystery here was this: who exactly was Herr Böse? I am generally here during the daytime, and so I've taken in packages for pretty much all my neighbors in this building, the other half of my building, and the building next door. Not a one of them could possibly have been the grandfather of a teenager -- or a grandparent at all. There was one guy, a skinny fellow whose hair was either as badly styled as it could be or else a horrible wig, who drenches himself in cologne and goes out a couple of times a day to get food or a newspaper. If he was wearing a wig, he might be old enough. If I had had a kid at 20, and my kid had had a kid at 20, I could just be old enough myself.

Anyway, things were complicated by the fact that I can never remember the Hausmeister's name and the fact that it wasn't on the doorbells. His wife/girlfriend's name, though, was, as well as a scrawled note next to the buzzer which said "Haus W," which stood for "Hauswart," the DDR equivalent. The cops thanked me and I went back inside.

Now, I'm not one of those people who stands at the window and snoops, unlike a lot of people in this country. But there was a commotion, including people trooping up and down the stairs, radios going, an ambulance siren turning into the street, and, best of all a whoomp! Whoomp! WHOOMP! like someone trying to break down a door. (Having once locked myself out of this apartment and having had to call a locksmith, I'm extremely pleased with the security afforded by the doors in this apartment, since the poor locksmith, without a skeleton key, spent nearly an hour getting my door open). Then there was more noise on the stairs, more radios, and a lot of pounding upstairs.

And that was it.

All I know is that Herr Böse's name is still on the mailbox and the guy with the bad hair said hi to me yesterday as we were checking our mail at about the same time.

Still: two encounters with the police in one year is two more than I've had since I've been here. At least this time I didn't get a ticket.

Sommerloch '06, Part 4

It's election season again, with a mayoralty race both for the whole city and for each separate borough (Bezirk) thereof. This means that some of the most hideous faces in the entire country are peering down at us from lampposts, each assuring us of their deep commitment to the city and its future. The one word which everyone seems to be using is "konsequent," which sent me to the dictionary, since there are loads of words in German that don't mean what they'd seem to mean in English (my favorite being "Konkurrenz," which means competition). Sure enough, it means "consistent." Now I'm trying to see any race for any office in America being hyped by placards announcing the candidate's "consistency" in so many words. And failing.

The other lesson these posters teach us is how Photoshop can be misused. The CDU candidate, in particular, needs a new art director. Or a new face.

***

I walked into a Butter Lindner shop the other day and had two shocks. The first was paying €3.50 for a prosciutto sandwich, approximately twice what one would cost at the superb Marcann's in my neighborhood, but I keep forgetting that Butter Lindner is a very high-dollar chain and that it served me right for being so damn hungry right at that moment. But the second shock was that, in the manner of Starbucks and all the other coffee establishments, Butter Lindner was selling CDs called Swing With Jazz Radio 101.9.

On closer scrutiny, this proved to be exactly what I thought it was: a quasi-bootleg featuring out-of-copyright performances gathered by some firm which does this sort of thing. Sleazy but cheap, which fit the sponsor. It was the first indication I'd had in some time that Jazz Radio 101.9 was still functioning. But sure enough, it seems to have a website and everything.

Actually, a German asked me about this a few weeks ago when I was talking about having had a show there for a number of years. "Did Jazz Radio actually once play jazz?" he asked, dumfounded. Well, yes, it did. And it also was a class act, started by Wilhelmina Steyling, a crusading Dutch woman who had a vision of a network of jazz stations all over Europe. It also saved my life.

I was starving to death, having discovered how little American media wanted in the way of stories from Berlin that didn't involve Nazis or Jews, but I was also doing a little writing for the local English-language magazine Checkpoint, and hanging out in their offices because my apartment was so small that it felt good to get out of it. There was an ad salesman there named Michael, and one day I was at home when he called. "A Dutch woman has started a jazz radio station here," he said, "and she wants an English-language DJ who knows about jazz. Interested?" Does it pay? "Sure." I'm interested.

So I went down to meet Wilhelmina, and she was doing her Dragon Lady act. Not friendly, not unfriendly, but not inclined to suffer fools. She asked me to put together two two-hour shows on paper that would show what I would play, one for the jazz show she wanted done, and one for a blues show for Monday evening that I'd suggested. I cobbled the lists together and handed them in, and then heard nothing. Hardly surprising; it sounded like a longshot.

Michael called a few days later just to chat. At the end of the conversation, I said how it was too bad I hadn't gotten the job. "What do you mean?" he said. "You start Tuesday night. You'd better get down here quick." Since it was Monday afternoon, he had a point. So I rocketed down to the storefront they'd rented near Savignyplatz and checked it out, which wasn't very difficult, except for figuring out the difference between CDs and vinyl.

In the early days, the station was on AM only. AM frequencies are fairly easy to get because nobody here listens to them. We naturally didn't have an advertising budget, so we had to figure out how to let people know we existed. We'd sponsor events, and I think we managed to get an ad or two in Checkpoint, but it was rough. When it came time to apply for an FM frequency, of which there are very few in this city, we got lucky: we were in the finals, and our competitors were a Turkish cultural group and the tax-supported state church. Which didn't bode well, but someone decided that the church had enough publicity and maybe so did the Turks, so we got our frequency and never looked back.

When I finally get around to writing this book (which is to say when I finally sell the idea to a publisher) I'll have lots of reminiscences about Jazz Radio and those who sailed with her. But for my purposes here, the best part of it was, we got paid. And that sudden rise in my fortunes allowed me to be solvent enough so that when the Wall Street Journal Europe asked me to be their arts and culture correspondent for this area of the world, I could afford the train tickets until they got around to paying me back. I could take a date out to dinner if I wanted. And when I had to move, I had the money.

And I have to say, my little blues show really evolved into something. Blue Monday, as it was called, eventually had a following of 25,000 listeners on a Monday night. It (and the jazz show) also gave me the time to listen to music I hadn't paid as much attention to as I'd wanted, and, thanks in large part to the vast number of killer soul reissues coming out of England, I was discovering and rediscovering some great, great music.

One thing I don't understand about capitalism is how someone can force you to sell a business and you're powerless to resist. So I can't say why Wilhelmina had to take on, as a partner, a rather dissolute English guy, wealthy, son of a member of the House of Lords, and utterly incompetent. I guess it was because, in the great German tradition, none of our advertisers bothered to pay us in the first two years. (The theory here is that if the little company you're burning goes out of business, you don't have to pay your bills, so you can help them by not paying them in the first place. A lawsuit takes three or four years to get heard here anyway.) But why she had to sell out completely to him I don't understand. I do know that it wasn't what she wanted, it was what she had to do. I also know that the first interaction he had with me was propositioning me, which I found rather bizarre.

Once he'd acquired the station outright, things began to go to hell. All manner of "improvements" started happening, but the worst was Ed Stout. Stout was a pear-shaped individual from New Jersey who was supposedly a radio consultant, and he took it upon himself to totally re-jigger Jazz Radio. Expensive speakers were brought in to do day-long seminars on how to be a DJ, seminars that I didn't attend, since I figured my numbers were good enough to show that I knew what I was doing. Rules for the other DJs began to appear: no chat, no naming the individual musicians on a track, no nothing but title, artist, and constant repetition of the station's name. Oh, and you also had to play exactly what the computer told you to play.

I was worried. Since I knew a couple of legitimate radio consultants, both here and in America, I asked them if they knew this guy. Nobody'd ever heard of him. "It sounds like he's ruining your station," one of them said. My worries came to an end in March 2000, after six years at the station. I came back from SXSW -- a trip I took each year, and dutifully informed my bosses about weeks in advance -- with my suitcase bulging with stuff I was going to play, including some sacred steel recordings for the next day's Easter gospel show. If I'd had my mail held, I would have walked into the station and discovered someone else doing my shift. But there was a letter with Jazz Radio letterhead sitting on my pile, so I opened it up and discovered I'd been fired for "inexplicable absences."

I also found out, in the days to come, that all the other DJs who did their own programming had been fired, and that the receptionist was instructed to tell any of my listeners who called that I'd quit, nobody knew why, and they were as shocked as anybody.

So it was with a certain amount of satisfaction that I witnessed the station's rapid decline, its move out of the luxurious headquarters it had built, the sale of its record library which it had meticulously built up, and, the crowning ignominy, its inability to pay the GEMA license (similar to ASCAP and BMI in the States) that would allow it to play copyrighted material. Jazz Radio became a series of CD jukeboxes loaded with non-GEMA CDs and 50-plus-year-old music, a computer, and a closet in the former Schultheiss Brewery in Kreuzberg.

And truly, I hadn't given them a thought in years until I went into Butter Lindner to buy a sandwich. It was a good sandwich, but I think I'll stay out of there for a while. I miss Blue Monday about as much as I miss anything I've ever done, and I wish I could do it again. I wish I'd saved some recordings of the show so that if I ever get the chance to present the idea to a satellite broadcaster or just some small local station I can show them just how wonderful it could be when it was good.

And I don't like getting so stirred up again because it just reminds me of my belief that no matter how well you might do something in this city, someone's just dying to tear it down.

***

Cheers to Bowleserised for alerting me to the existence of the 50th anniversary edition of M.F.K. Fisher's The Art of Eating, which I started reading last night. It's a lot like eating a box of very, very good chocolates, so you can't go too fast, but I did find the following last night and thought it was apropos to explaining the great culinary tradition I find myself living amidst.

"Frederick the Great used to make his own coffee, with much to-do and fuss. For water he used champagne. Then, to make the flavour stronger, he stirred in powdered mustard."

This from a chapter in Serve It Forth entitled "Pity the Blind in Palate." She maintains that that might have been his problem. Not me. I live here.

Sommerloch '06, Part 3

Linienstr., a block from my house, has been undergoing some sort of awful renovation for most of the year. The street is impassable, several businesses have closed during the day because the dust and dirt flying through the air makes customers stay away, pedestrians get diverted from one side of the street to the other almost randomly (and you have to watch when making the crossing that one or another Berliner driver, made psychotic from the heat, doesn't aim at you and try to run you down), and the whole thing is a ghastly mess.

That's why it was very cheering to walk along it on Sunday, when someone did this:









The perpetrators of this outrage against Berlin's mandatory impassability and ugliness may be spied in the next to last photo, two young Japanese folks with a tripod camera. I know they weren't just photographing it because the woman had a large straw basket with her which contained a few more tulips. I didn't even bother to check whether the tulips, all absolutely perfect, were real. If so, this was one expensive art project.

Needless to say, it was all destroyed first thing Monday morning.

***

While I was shooting that, I decided to shoot the graffiti mural going up on the wall by my building. There's more to it now -- a green head with a very sad expression on it has been sprayed between the two monsters, on the ground -- but more sure isn't better. I do like the way it invokes the Wall, but my heart sinks every time I come home and see the aggressive ugliness and lack of content in this thing. The artists -- there seem to be two or three -- sport horrendous blotchy "tribal" tattoos, which should have been a clue to someone that they lack all esthetic sense. But I guess I'll have to live with this until I move -- or until some other taggers come along to spray their critiques.